Spirits Among Us

By Bobby Neal Winters
The address 709 West First belongs to the house next door.  There was a time when it was a rent house.  There is some natural law which states that no renter will ever leave a house better than he found it.  As a mathematician, I know where this series leads.  As the neighbor to 709, I’ve seen it.
A few years before he died, my father-in-law bought 709 for us and cleaned it up.  He deeded it over to Jean, and then proceeded to make it his hobby house. He set up barrels to catch rainwater from the roof.  He planted fruit trees in the front yard.  He made a workshop in the kitchen.  Then five years ago, he died.  
I know for a fact he’s dead.  I saw the body.  I drove his ashes in a Rubbermaid container to northern Indiana where they are buried.  I saw it with my own eyes.
Yet from time to time when I’ve been over there, I’ve felt his presence.  This is most often when I am doing something for Jean or one of the girls.  Once Jean had asked me to fix her book light.  It needed to be soldered, and I couldn’t find my soldering iron. I went over to 709, looked around, and couldn’t find it.  I’d given up.  Then I looked at a place I’d looked before.
There was a nice little fishing tackle box with the words “Soldering Iron” written on the top with a black Sharpie.  In it there was--as advertised--a soldering iron with solder.  What are the odds.
Today Lydia was working on a project.  She’d been on Pinterest and had found some plans for a bench.  A part of the project required stapling the upholstery on with Bostich Staples.  I’d gone over and found Jim’s old staple gun right away and brought it back.
We got started stapling away and, as luck would have it, we ran out of staples.  I went back over to 709 and looked around for a box of staples.  I pulled out drawers.  I looked everywhere staples should be.
Nothing.
I had despaired, but then I looked up. There on a shelf where I swear I’d just looked was a white plastic canister with the words “Bostich Staples” written on it in Jim’s hand with a black Sharpie, which is apparently the writing implement of choice for the spirit world.
I felt Jim’s presence today. I miss him.  I would like to talk politics with him, as I am becoming more alienated from both political parties everyday, just like he was.
His spirit is still among us and he likes to help me help our girls.

Winter’s Bone

By Bobby Neal Winters

Reason is a servant of the passions, but at certain times there are those who can put the passions aside to take care of business.  In the 2010 movie Winter’s Bone, Ree Dolly (played by Jennifer Lawrence) is one of those people who can set aside her passions and take care of business.

The business has been, of course, set for her by her passions.  In this case, it is the love she has for her family.  Ree’s father is a marijuana grower turned meth cook.  He’s been arrested but has bailed himself out and then disappeared.  The family--Ree, her younger brother and sister and mentally ill mother-- is running low on money.  They are gnawing on their last bone in the absence of the father.

Bad matters turn to worse when the bail bondsman arrives to tell Ree that her father put their whole place up for security on his bond.  At that point, Ree’s business is set out for her.  In order to keep her family from being put out on the street and scattered, she must either bring her father to stand trial or prove that he is dead.  This business puts her on a journey that--while not taking her out of the boundaries of her home county--takes her a great distance within herself.

Winter’s Bone is set in the Ozarks.  Those of us around Pittsburg, Kansas don’t have far to go far beyond our own city limits to know that this movie presents the real deal.  There are rusty cars up on blocks in the yard.  The neighborly women are fat.  I have a pet peeve of television shows portraying poor people as living in two-story, well-kept houses that are clean, have every appliance, and all of those appliances are new.  

Winter’s Bone does not fall into that trap. It tells Ree’s story and at the same time provides a window on a culture.  It is a culture that hunts and fishes; shoots and prays; plays the fiddle, guitar, and banjo.  And sometimes it makes whiskey and cooks methamphetamine.

That last part hurts me.  Rationally, I know that whiskey has killed more men over a longer time and over a greater geographical distribution than meth ever will. I know that more women were beaten senseless and worse by their drunken men than ever will be my meth-heads.  But there is something worse in my mind about meth.  Maybe it’s the snaggled teeth.  Maybe it’s the sores on their arms.  Maybe it’s the fact I have to jump through hoops to buy decongestant.  

I am trying to be careful to avoid spoilers.  Even though the movie is rich enough to provide enjoyment upon multiple viewing, it does have some surprises the first time through that I wouldn’t rob you of.  This doesn’t prevent me from highlighting a few points that it does get right.

In one scene, Ree is teaching her younger siblings how to shoot.  She takes her brother and sister out into the back yard with the twenty-two and lines up some bottles.

“Get down on your knees just like you are praying,” she says, and then goes on to instruct them in the niceties of aiming and squeezing the trigger.

In my mind, tt is no accident that Ree’s big dream for getting out of poverty is to join the army.  

Legal scholars, perhaps on both sides, may disagree with me here.  The second amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  Am I over-reaching here to believe that the founders had in mind a culture wherein there would be children taught to hunt from the moment they could hold a gun and that such a culture would provide a reservoir of people capable of carrying out the business of war?

In any case, I’ve have private conversations with army recruiters and have been told the Ozarks are prime ground for recruiting soldiers.  I’ve seen ‘em with my own eyes.

There is a scene in which Ree has been beaten for pursuing the search for her father too ardently.  She’s gathered in by her uncle and taken to be cared for.  They don’t take her to the emergency room of course.  If the thought even crossed their minds, the doctors there would’ve asked too many questions.  She’s taken home and cared for by the women-folk.

The neighbor-lady brings over some pain meds--there is no way that it’s not hydrocodone--and instructs her how to use it.  This is the way it’s done. Whenever someone does go to a doctor, they don’t necessarily use all of the prescription themselves.  They save it against the day they--or a neighbor--might need it.

I know that this is wrong.  I know you should flush it down the toilet or, better yet, take it to the hospital and let them get rid of it.  But I’ve seen my momma do it, just like the lady in the movie.

And by the way, the neighbor-lady has exactly the right shape for a neighbor lady.  She has successfully avoided the trap of anorexia.

In a journey like the one Ree is on, it is important to watch for what changes or what character trait is highlighted.  Here it is instructive to observe the bailbondsman. He is only in two scenes, but he provides a means for Ree to measure herself.  He is a mirror that shows her a reflection of herself.  At the end, what she sees is respect and this leads her to self-respect.

My final word is caution.  You should see this if you can take it.  There is violence, but not enough for me to discourage your seeing it.  The most disturbing scene is near the end and you don’t really see anything yourself. It’s worse.  By this time you are so bonded with Ree that you see it through her eyes.  For this reason, I’ve seen it twice but I’ve never shown it to my wife.  

Make up your own mind.

But they got it right.

Things I’ve Learned in Playing Civilization IV

By Bobby Neal Winters

Playing Civilization IV is a bad habit.  The reason for this is was put best by my student Nathaniel Smith who said, “It gives you a feeling of having accomplished something with your time when you really haven’t.”

I fell back into the habit recently before my surgery.  This is because another thing it gives you--at least on the lower difficulty settings-- is an illusion of control.  When you are headed into the unknown with no logical alternatives, feeling like you are in control is very comforting.

And it is a great way of killing--and I mean KILLING--time.

For those of you who don’t know, which is a great majority of the non-geek world--Civilization IV is the 4th iteration of a turn-based strategy game by Sid Meier. It has since been replaced by--you guessed it--Civilization V, but I’ve not yet made the move to the most recent version because it would require upgrading my computer and to do that I would have to admit addiction.  I can stop anytime I want to...really.

The idea behind the game is that you are the despot of a nomadic civilization that decides to put down roots and start building cities at 4000 AD.  Cities build units such as Warriors, Workers, Archers, and Settlers to name but a few.  In order to build a particular type of unit, your civilization requires knowledge and resources.

In my opinion it does a decent job of modelling reality.  While there are some choices than can be made in the acquisition of knowledge, some things still have to be learned in a certain order even when the connection might not be obvious.  For example, you have to know about machinery  before you know about astronomy.  Why? By the reasoning of the game, before you have astronomy, you have to have optics and before you have optics, you have to have machinery.  I am guessing that machinery precedes optics because machinery is necessary for the production of lenses.

It has also captured the fact that if you are doing one thing that means you are not doing something else, i.e. you have to make choices.  If you are spending time developing archery that means you are not spending your time developing agriculture.  If your city is building a unit of swordsmen, it is not making a group of workers.  There is room for multitasking in the building of units, but this must be accomplished by building more cities and assigning an independent task to each city.

The cities are basic to the game.  Cities are the modes of production.  In order to produce units, a city must have a population.  For a given city, more population leads to more production, but the given city’s production can be affected by a available resources, the health of the population, and the general happiness of the population.

There are other ways to win the game besides war, but one can’t ignore defense if there is any chance for any other sort of victory. Each of the civilizations in the game has its own values and the logical pursuit of those values might just lead to attacking you.  As a consequence of this, a player must be at least prepared to defend himself.  For the most part, the AIs (artificial intelligences) who are the other players will attack on a cost/benefit basis.  If the cost of attacking you is greater than the expected benefit, they will not--for the most part--attack.

I say this, but I say it with the caveat that there are some chains of reasoning that I’ve not  been able to recapture.  I’ve been across the Inland Sea from a Chinese Empire who, for some reason I can’t even guess, took it upon itself to march a huge army around the Inland Sea simply to destroy my peaceful, cultured, knowledge-loving country.  It was sad.

The game is in a very real sense about management. In playing, there is a some freedom in how hands-on one wants to be.  There are certain tasks one can simply leave to the AIs or that one can do oneself. For example, the Worker units can be put on Auto-improve city mode.  The advantage to this is that you won’t be bothered to make the decision whether to build a farm or a cottage with Montezuma is the in the process of trying to destroy your very essence. However, if you do this, you are stuck with the results.  The AIs don’t necessarily do things the way you would like.

To me it seems that the game does a good job in showing that decisions made and actions taken in the past can have long-term consequences.  The other civilizations remember how you treated them; some remember for a very long time.  The game also has a feature of producing Great People on a random basis under certain circumstances.  These people can be used in ways that will positively affect a city’s character for the remainder of the game.  I’ve seen this happen in real life.  There are things that are in place at my university that are here as a result of a Great Person coming through.  True, there are also things here because of a bad person coming through.  If Civilization IV captures that, it’s through city invasion or player incompetence.

I can’t say much more because quite frankly I am not that good of a player and I’ve not explored all of the nuances. It is a bad habit.  My time probably could have been used better, but it probably wouldn’t’ve been.  At least I’ve learned this much.

In the Cool of the Morning III: Bigfoot Among Us

By Bobby Neal Winters

Jean will tell you that I am a slave to routine.  When I am working, it is up at 6am; shave; shower; clothes; coffee and breakfast; then off to work.  In an attempt to get back to normal, I’ve been trying to mimic that routine.  This morning it was cooler than usual, however, so I remained in bed a bit longer than usual.  When I got up to turn on the water for my shower, I found the water handle on the shower was broken.  The downside of this was that I didn’t get my morning shower, but the upside is that I now have a problem to organize my day around.

This is important and good.

Yesterday, I spent the bulk of the morning being a Facebook DJ. Yesterday afternoon I spent six hours building a civilization in Civilization IV that I ultimately didn’t like.  It was all wasted time, but it was also a sign that I am becoming more energetic.  When you are energetic, you have to be doing SOMETHING, but it is important what that something should be.

For time not to be wasted, there should be a plan.

I talked to my big brother on the phone this morning.

One of the ways my brother spends his energy is in his bigfoot hobby.

It would be easy to make fun of it, but I have to honestly say that it’s no worse than some pure mathematics.  In the bigfoot crowd, the working proposition is that there is a large humanoid that inhabits the deep woods and wild places of this great country of ours.  Casts have been taken of large footprints; marginal film footage has been shot; audio has been recorded.

But no specimens, living or dead, have been provided.

The bits of evidence found have been woven into a narrative that includes American Indian Folktales.   It is all very impressive. There is a subculture out there that is big enough to market souvenirs to which is more than I can say for almost any branch of pure mathematics. “Almost” is just a wiggle-word there.

The subculture is so large that there is even debate whether Bigfoot is a part of the human species.  This with no actual specimen having been found.

It reminds me of a story about a mathematical dissertation from a doctoral student in a third-world country.  He was studying compact Banach spaces.  If you are not a mathematician, then you don’t see anything wrong with that.  A mathematical neophyte--who has heard the words but does not understand them--knows that Banach spaces are things that mathematicians study and that “compact” is an adjective that is often applied to spaces. No big whoop there.

However, a mathematician knows that there is exactly one compact Banach space and it is the set that contains the number zero.

The third-world math student did get his doctorate studying the number zero.

Scholarship is a practice.  What separates the good from the bad is a community that has standards.  In mathematics, where we spend a lot of time creating stories in our heads about abstract objects, the rule of thumb is to have at least one nontrivial object that fits the abstract axioms.  Sometimes the creation of such examples has given birth to areas of endeavor, i.e. the construction of non-simply connected homology spheres.

In some sense, the bigfoot crowd is in an extended period of looking for an example.

On the other hand, one could simply believe this goes on because it’s fun.  It gives folks a chance to go out into the woods, be with nature, and breathe fresh air.  It provides occasion to hoist a beer and tell a scary story. It gives an opportunity to put cool decals on your truck rear window behind the gun rack.

The only moral objection to any of this is the question of the best way to spend one’s time, and, golly, everyone needs a hobby.

For my part, I need a plan.  Today that plan is putting a handle on the shower.  I wonder if I can make that last all day.

In the Cool of the Morning II: The Year of the Cat

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was out again on the driveway this morning between 7 and 8.  Cup of coffee by my side and listening to my iPhone.  Al Stewart’s The Year of the Cat was this morning’s highlight. It was an interesting contrast to Take the Money and Run by the Steve Miller Band.   

I enjoy both songs, don’t get me wrong, but there is a difference in quality.  Take the Money and Run is fun and bouncy.  It doesn’t pause to make a decent rhyme; it doesn’t take the time to do much of anything.  It’s fun, but the best I can say about it is that it accomplishes a lot considering how little there is too it: “Ooh-ooh, take the money and run.”  That’s about it and it’s all on the surface.

I guess we all choose the level at which we will be snobs.  I’ve chosen mine quite low in music.  An ant will make distinctions that an elephant doesn’t while the elephant can see much more of the world on its own scale.

For my part, I like the songs that have a level beyond the surface that requires a key to see.  My favorite example of this is Hotel California.  

It is about cocaine.

That is the key.  There are multiple other readings and that is what makes it good, but once you know it is about cocaine to many doors are open to deny the meaning.

The Year of the Cat is about sex.  This isn’t a great secret, of course, but I am proud that I figured it out by myself.  The fact that millions of other figured it out long before me does not diminish my joy in making this discovery by one atom.  That knowledge provides a key that opens the doors necessary to understanding the song.

Before we go any further, I tell those of you who don’t know it that I am a prude.

But.

But there is something about the artful hiding of the sexual/subversive imagery that I enjoy.  Someone has encoded a message that is transparent to the experienced who’ve picked up the key, but which is hidden from the innocent.  There is something good in shielding the innocent for at least a while longer.  It is good to delay until the appropriate time the taking of those steps that can’t be untaken.

Along these lines, there is a qualitative difference between the work of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel--to pick only two--that lines up along this same continuum.  Springsteen is an artist; Joel is a hack.  There, I said it.

After the music, I called my brother and as he and I were talking, one of the family cats--Tyson--came in sight.  He’d caught--and killed by all appearances--a bird that he was carrying in his mouth.  He came up onto the porch and met Stars, who is another one of our cats and his arch-enemy.  Not wanting to risk losing his prize, I suppose, he hopped back down off the porch and went out onto the driveway.

There, on the driveway, he set to begin the final process of eating his prize.  This required opening his mouth, however.  It was at this point we learned that the bird was not dead; he was simply playing dead. Tyson’s mouth opened and the bird, not waiting one second longer, flew on out of sight.

Playing dead is an old trick, but it still works.  It is a small thing, but it made the difference between life and death for the bird.

Tyson, for his part, overcame his disappointment, hopped up beside me, and looked into my coffee cup for some consolation prize.  Finding none, he went off in search of other adventures.

The bird is gone.  For all I know, he has died from his wounds in the short time that has passed. But I believe he’s feeling better.  I believe he’s learned something about the ways of cats and of good, old-fashioned tricks and the worms will taste better than they ever have.

And enjoy sitting out on the driveway like never before.

In the Cool of the Morning

By Bobby Neal Winters

I sat out on the drive way this morning in my undershirt.  I had a cup of coffee in my hand and I was listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash do The Southern Cross on my iPhone.  I was in the shade and it was cool, but I looked at the sun play in the new leaves on the top of the oak Jean and I had planted. I followed it down and my eyes caught the peach tree she and I had planted to shade the hostas; it has grown enough that it now is now doing its job.  Behind the hostas were the milkweed plants.  Jean has hung strings from the gutters and is training the milkweeds to climb them.  This is for the monarch butterflies that will come through later in the year.

One week ago I was sitting at KU Medical center having washer-like objects called fiducials put on my head.  This was proceeding an MRI that would create a 3-dimensional map of my head.  The 3D map was so that they would be able to perform surgery to remove a tumor that had grown over the last few decades on my pituitary gland.

I was calm because this was my second run at it.  The week before they had attempted the surgery but had stopped because my blood pressure had jumped to 220/100, a new record for someone whose BP usually runs 125/80. My multidisciplinary team put their heads together, scratched their collective temple, and decided to reboot one week later. 

One suspect in the mix is a product known over the counter as Afrin.  The ENT (ear, nose, and throat) guys use it in surgery to control nasal bleeding.  The ENT guys were a part of my multidisciplinary team because pituitary surgery usually proceeds through the nose these days.  They put a tube up your nose, entering the sphenoid sinus and then crack into the sella turca (a bone shaped like a Turkish saddle—whatever the hell they are) on which the pituitary gland sits.

Afrin is shockingly dangerous stuff for something that available over the counter.  The guys, using their collective wisdom, switched to an older product that is not available over the counter but is very much familiar to us in story and song: cocaine.

Seriously. 

They used cocaine instead of Afrin, but they didn’t tell me this before surgery.  I needed to be calm when I went under, and I was. Calmer than I had been the week before when we did our trial run.

The week before, I went under as they were rolling me off to prep me.  They were making happy talk to me after they had put an “oxygen” mask over my face.  I awoke after having noted zero passage of time and hearing the words “We didn’t do your procedure.”

In spite of not having had my procedure done, they had inserted a catheter and they had shaved my belly.  If going in through the nose to get to a gland that hangs from the brain is confusing, then so is shaving a belly to the nth-degree.

They use a piece of abdominal fat to aid the healing process.  They had prepped my tummy in order to remove it.  Those of you who have seen me in person will remark to themselves that I have it to spare; everyone makes that joke.  When I started to make it to my surgeon, she pre-empted me, having heard it too many times.

In any case, a lot had been done to me that I had not noticed.  Time had passed in a darkness deeper than sleep.

It occurred to me that the happy talk I’d heard as I went under could’ve been the last words I’d heard on this earth.  The nothingness was absolutely total.

It was calming.

That one week later--on the day of the real surgery—I was calm. I knew that my BP could spike dangerously, but I also knew they were ready for it this time.  But even if not, I knew that if It happened, then I would never know.

My thoughts were all with my family.  My family is strong because my wife Jean is strong. She would, herself, be supported by our girls who she has raised to be strong and by her mother, the one who raised her.

But I lived.

My surgeon, a woman who is famously meticulous among the hospital staff, spent the afternoon plucking a tumor the size of a black-eyed pea out from the middle of my head. She would take a bit, the BP would rise; she’d let the BP go down and then take a little more.  It took hours to get the little son-of-a-bitch out.

When I awoke this time, they asked me how I felt and I knew the procedure had been done.  I told them I felt like I’d been punched in the nose and cut in the gut.  The two-inch incision where they’d taken the fat was on fire.  My nose throbbed.  They started putting the Vicodin (hydrocodone + acetomenaphine) to me and that made everything better.

We are now at surgery plus one week.  I’ve spent a good deal of time napping in a Vicodin-induced haze, but over the last couple of days I’ve been weaning myself off of it.  I will have plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead; that I know.

In the meantime, mornings like the one we had today are simply too rare. God is too good to us for us to ignore his grace.

As the Arrow Flies

By Bobby Neal Winters

There are things you do “for the children” that you are really doing for yourself.  The kids are an excuse.  They are small, but, somehow, that makes them easier to hide behind.

I’ve bought bows for Lydia and myself.

These are youth bows.  They are a step above a toy, but they are not yet a weapon.  I am waiting to see how we progress before I invest any more.  So far I’ve got less than a hundred dollars in it total: the bows were $20 a piece; a couple of extra arrows about $10; shooting gloves $12 a piece; arm protectors a total of $30.  

I also got a bail of hay to use as a target, but I am not counting that as an expense since we can use that for dog bedding next winter.

It is a fun activity and would have been a good activity to take up as a child, but I didn’t.  I wasn’t allowed to.  And I need to be fair here.  I don’t remember ever asking for a bow and arrow set.  I don’t remember it ever coming up.  I don’t remember being denied it or feeling deprived for not having a bow and arrow set.

What I have is a feeling of absolute certainty that it wouldn’t’ve been allowed because Dad would not have allowed it because he feared for the safety of his sons.  And he had reason.

Dad had grown up in what would be considered poverty today.  He went barefoot until the snow flew.  I’ve seen pictures of him in overalls that had the straps extended with cord.  He’d worked in the oil field and had seen accidents.  He’d gone to war and had seen bodies--friend and foe--laying dead and mangled.  He lost a five-year-old nephew to an accident.

His mind was filled with scenarios of disaster of every sort.

My childhood was filled with having pictures of great activities built up, but then shot down because these scenarios of disaster crowded them out of existence.

And I understand.  I’ve never been angry with Dad about this.  But it has had an effect.  As I grow older and gain more understanding of life and of myself--not separate activities by any means--I see the effect this has had on me.  It has caused a lack of self-confidence.  When a boy’s father shows this much trepidation, the boy begins to wonder whether his father is doubting him.  

You take fewer chances and you fail less, but failing, oddly enough, is important to the building of self-confidence.  You must fail before you learn that failure is not deadly, not your enemy.  Batman’s dad said it: You fall so that you may get back up!

So Lydia and I are learning to shoot a bow at the same time.  I am being born-again as it were.  You put lay the arrow on the bow and fit the string into the arrow’s knock. You pull back the string while aiming at the target, and you let the arrow fly.

And you miss the target.

So you shoot again.

And you miss again.

With each arrow flying, you tend to get closer.  

The string on the bow hurts your fingers, so you get a glove to wear.  The string slaps against your forearm, so you get an arm protector.

And you continue shooting.

Soon you hit the hay bail every time and your daughter does too.  There is time to think while you practice.  Will she remember this?  If she does will it be fondly?

The arrow flies again and strikes the target more closely than before.

You wonder if your father would approve.  You get the feeling he’s watching.

Your daughter shoots.  Her arrow is closer to the center of the bail than yours and you smile.  And you think maybe he’s smiling too.

Hush, Listen

By Bobby Neal Winters

In the beginning was the Word.

Nature has a language.

It’s a subtle language uttered in whispers; it is a coarse language uttered in screams.  It comes in not only through the ear, but also through the eye, the nose, the tongue, and the skin.  It is in a baby’s cry, a lover’s body, or a gust of wind.

We are surrounded.

Consider body language.  We use it all the time, but often we don’t take it in on a conscious level.  We walk away we impressions of things left unsaid.

In my job, I talk to a lot of students.  In groups, of course, but also on a one-to-one basis.  I interview students in order to help them to discern whether the major I advise is the correct route for them.  I’ve a lot of young people.  I sometimes think that I’ve learned how to tell someone is lying to me.  When I first took on the advisement job, I would go home at the end of some days exhausted and I didn’t know why because all I’d done all day was listen.

I eventually figured out that I wasn’t just listening with my ears; I was paying attention to a lot of body language.  The extent of this became clear to me when I was sent a student from another department who I was told had “no affect.”  I’ve never studied psychology, so I didn’t know what that meant.  When the student arrived, I learned.

I would say something and look in her face.  There was no response. I made a joke.  There was no response.  At the end of the interview, I was exhausted.  Everything I had tossed out, verbal and nonverbal, had been sucked into the black-hole of no affect.

It’s not just people who have body language.  I think that I could get most people to agree that our pets have body language.  When I take walks, I often come upon dogs who are not on leashes.  This is illegal, but it happens.  Most of the time, I can tell if the dog is going to be friendly.  I can speak a little dog body language.  I can speak enough cat to know when they want out.

At night the dogs speak to the trains who whistle going by and the fire trucks as they scream through the night.  They’re hungry for the conversation of the wild.

I am enough of a country boy to know that this works with cattle, horses, and some wild animals as well.  And why shouldn’t it.  We are a part of nature.  We were created or we evolved (try to explain the difference between those two) as a part of nature’s system.  It works.

As a part of nature, we are equipped to speak nature’s language, though we have insulated ourselves from it so much that we are no longer fluent in our mother tongue.

But it’s still there.  Women produce pheromones.  They’ve been shown to cause the monthly cycles of women in a group to synchronize.  Women’s bodies have secret conversations with each others for reasons long forgotten.

Consider the effect that the curves and nooks and dents and bumps on the bodies of the opposite sex have upon the physiology of our own bodies.  The heart quickens; our breathing changes; our thoughts perturbed from our day jobs.  Nature speaks and it has a task for us.

Some of us who grew up before the days of modern weather forecasting still know nature’s signs for rain and storm.  Nature speaks in a million languages and we’ve forgotten most of them.

An eye to the sky has been replaced by the numbers on a computer screen.  We can read the satellite picture, but it’s getting harder to feel the rain in our noses before it comes.

Charles Wesley penned, “O for a thousand tongues to sing.”  I would plead for us to have our ears back so we can hear what we are being told and for the quietness to hear it.

Naked Chimpanzees

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are naked chimpanzees that use cell phones.  Of course we are messed up.

The author of the second chapter of Genesis expressed the same sentiment, but many who read it from there will either dismiss it or misunderstand it.

Man is not happy.  We are dysfunctional.  We seek relief for our unhappiness in destructive ways: Methamphetamine; alcohol; drugs; promiscuous sex.  Are we having fun yet?  Are we happy?

We have alienated ourselves from our place in Nature.  And everything we try to do to make it better only makes it worse. And there is no going back.  

The Ancient Mind who scratched out Genesis said there was an angel with with a flaming sword there to keep us from going back. And I wonder.  I’ve seen the documentaries; I’ve read the books.  Stories about the primitive peoples in the jungle.  They don’t give them a survey with questions to answer on a one to five Likert scale to see how happy they are, but they don’t look comfortable.  They don’t have beds; they don’t have TVs; they don’t have toilets.  The angel can put away his flaming sword.

Religion spans the gap.  Religion is the holder of our collective memory.  Religion reminds us of where we started and where we’ve been.  Religion gives a look at where we’ve been so we can better tell where we are going.  It reminds us of exactly how far we’ve come from communion with God, from harmony with Nature.

Any good religion will at its roots be pagan.  And when I say pagan I am not talking about a bunch of crystal rubbers or potion makers.  I mean that religion must touch us where we meet with Nature: at the dinner-table; in the bed room.  

Something must die in order that we eat and we should thank God for its life.

The purpose of sex is to create new life, and we should be ever respectful of that.

The Christian Bible in the Book of Revelation predicts that when we reach our New Jerusalem we will again enjoy the direct presence of God.  No temple; no priests.  Does this vision mean we will again come to some sort of harmony?  I won’t say one way or the other because I simply don’t know.  I will say that I fear those who would try to bring it to being here and now out of their own vision.

Is it a vision of some afterlife?  We know very little about the afterlife.  The one certain thing being that there will be a point after which I am no longer alive.

I always upset myself when I try to rule the world.  I must roll back my concerns: love my neighbor as myself; love my God with all my heart.

Loving God entails loving the Truth and seeking it out.  Loving my neighbor also requires effort.  I do them both badly.

But then I am a naked chimpanzee with a cell phone.

Canadian Hockey and American Education

By Bobby Neal Winters

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success contains a marvelous case study on amateur hockey in Canada. The folks in Canada hold the game of hockey at a level of esteem that I find mystifying.  Apparently they put a stick in a kid’s hand by the time he’s big enough to hold it.  They really care.

A study was done in which it was found that virtually all of the players on the elite championship team were born in the few months of the year and players born at the end of the year are virtually missing.  The reason for this is that amateur hockey leagues in Canada have an age cut off date on January 1.  The kids who are born in January are a year more mature than those born in the same year but in December.  They get on the first team; they get more coaching; ultimately they get to play more.

This extra play, extra attention, better coaching pays off incrementally and over time it manifests in players from that latter half of the year simply disappearing.

Gladwell, who is Canadian and possibly hockey-crazy himself as a result, argues that if the system was organised differently--say with a second league of players born in the second half of the year--that Canada could half twice as many championship level hockey players.

This case study serves as a guiding example for the thrust of the book: American education could be approached differently to achieve better results.

In education, the dividing line isn’t January 1st; it’s social class.  The middle class have advantages that makes them more educable that the working class.  Children from middle class families are more entitled than those from working class families; they are much better at working within institutional systems.They come into their class by virtue of the good choices their forebears have made.  

Here I want to share some thoughts.  I come from a working class family.  I competed along the way with some of those middle class kids.  Hind sight being twenty-twenty, I can see where they had some know-how about some things that I didn’t.  I also see where I had a lot of help along the way from other people.  Now I find myself in a position where I’ve got some middle class kids of my own and I want them to have every advantage possible, but I also have a desire to give a hand in the way a hand was given me.

It is at this point when I am in danger of getting warm and fuzzy that I’d like to go back to Gladwell’s Canadian Hockey example.  In particular, I want to talk about the idea that you could make twice as many good hockey players if you had a league for the second half of the year.  You run into resource issues right off the bat because either you are going to need twice as many coaches or the coaches you do have are going to have to work twice as hard.  Good coaches are just as scarce as good players.

But this is Canada, so maybe they love chasing a damn a checker around on the ice enough to take out of their hides long enough to double their numbers and bring out a new generation of hockey players twice as numerous as all previous generations.

So what?

Even if you care for the game, this isn’t a guarantee of winning any more Olympic medals.  Quite frankly they may already have more than enough talent to dominate the sport.  There are only so many players that can be at the top.  Doubling that number doesn’t mean that they win more.  It means that more good players will be locked off the championship team.

In the mean time, unless there is care taken to insure high quality coaching, there is no guarantee that two leagues will produce better players.  Indeed, if the level of play is diluted the quality might go down.

Okay, let’s talk about education again.  I do think that it’s important.  It was my ticket to the middle class and I like it here.  The beds are soft; the cars are nice; and I don’t have as big a chance of losing fingers like my Grampa Sam did.

All of that having been said, we have to use our educational resources wisely.

There is a broad range of opinion on how to do this much of it quite heated.  There are people from both ends of the political spectrum who care very deeply.  Malcolm Gladwell tends toward the left, but I discovered that he and Thomas Sowell, who leans a bit toward the right, to be in a surprising amount of agreement.

Sowell addresses the topic of education in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  Without going into too deep of analysis, let me summarized by saying that they agree on the need for professionalism on the part of the teachers and hard work on the part of the students.  After that, agreement might be harder to come by.

I’ve don’t have enough insight into the heart of Man to know how to make students work harder in today’s culture, so let’s look at the other end.Good teachers are in just a short supply as good hockey coaches.   We need to take care of the ones we have and work to make new ones.  

It’s something to work on.

Attacking the Soldering Demon

Attacking the Soldering Demon

By Bobby Neal Winters

I may have mentioned in an earlier post that I have demons which have kept me from pursuing the world of electronics: the Demon of Lack-of-Self-Confidence; the Demon of Fear-of-Loss-Money.

Chief among my demons up until now has been the Soldering Demon.  I ran into this demon while trying to put together a kit for an RF-modulator for an ELF computer.  I had never soldered before, but I figured I would try.  The directions which came with the kit were as encouraging as they were racist and sexist: “These parts are usually assembled by teenage Mexican girls.”

I kid you not.

It turns out that the teenage Mexican girls out did me.  Instead of an RF-modulator I created a one-and-a-half by two-inch rectangle of lead or tin or what-the-hell-ever.  Money was tight in those days growing up, so this failure carried a huge load of guilt.

Time rolled forward and a tried to fight the demon by getting electronic kits for my older daughters.  The oldest one was game.  She could handle hot glue like a pro, and I figured it was just a small step from there to soldering.

Wrong.

We tried a telephone kit.  I figured that since she wanted a phone in her room that this would be an incentive.  We got started, but we couldn’t follow through.

The problem is that there is actually something to be learned.  There is a certain amount of patience, a certain amount of hand-eye coordination, and a certain amount of skill that only practice can bring.

Roll time forward again.

As a part of my continuing Zombie Apocalypse Crystal Radio quest, I came upon directions for a Three-Penny Radio. This takes the crystal radio one or two steps further by introducing amplification. The problem is that it required a bit of soldering, but this was turned into a virtue by making the soldering simple.

We did this late yesterday afternoon.  We’d put together a solar cell kit earlier and this had gone well.  I thought we could start on the Three-Penny Radio by just doing part of it, but Lydia wanted to push on.  This was a mistake because I hadn’t had a chance to look over the directions.  [The directions on the site are complete, but they’ve not been idiot-proofed as we shall see.]

We soldered it all together, stuck the earpiece in our ears, and nada. Nothing. Simon and Garfunkle’s Sound of Silence done for real.  It was then that Lydia exercised an amount of discretion that I didn’t have until just a few years ago.

“Let’s fix this later, Dad.”

So we put it away.

Went to bed last night, church this morning, ate lunch, and took a nap.

When I woke up, Lydia was gone.

I went to the table and compared what we’d done to the picture in the instructions.  The two were different.  

I then did what you do when you solder something incorrectly.  I un-soldered it and re-soldered it.  I put the battery in it, put the earpiece in my ear, and heard the beautiful sound of static.  With a little tuning, this was replaced by music.

I rock.

I am now waiting for Lydia to get back to receive her assessment.

The Invisible World

By Bobby Winters

While ignorance is not something we should be thankful for as a good in itself, I am glad there are so many things that have been saved for me to learn in adulthood so that I may better appreciate them.  Crystal radio now comes into that list.

I am even more fortunate in that I have a child learning with me so that I may have my pleasure amplified by feeling along with her.

I found plans for a crystal radio at this site. You may look up the details there.  My understanding of the construction of the device itself was increased when I realize it could be visualized in the following way.  The main part is a circle. (I suppose this could be what they refer to as a circuit, but I don’t want to use that technical term in a way that is nonstandard.)  The circle consists of the coil, the diode, and the earpiece.

I chose to use a crystal radio earpiece instead of modifying an old telephone hand set.  I might come to regret this in the case of a zombie apocalypse, but it’s a risk I am willing to take for the sake of simplicity.  Messing with the tiny wires in the phone cord was too much for my old eyes and my aging hands.  I might work it in at the next step.

I made my coil out of wire I had left-over from the radio fence I’d installed to keep Charlie in.  I had been uncertain about it.  So uncertain was I, that I made a second one out of magnet wire.  When I tried it out this afternoon, it wouldn’t work, so I had Lydia bring out the first one, and it worked!

The diode is the the final part of the circle.  It cost about a dollar to buy and about $5 to have shipped. Oi!

But you put these three pieces in a circle for the main part of the radio.

The you hook the coil to an antenna and another part of the circle to the ground wire.

Then you listen.

The sound was almost ghostly.  You might wonder whether it was there or not, but it is.

Then you realize you’ve made something that captures that invisible world around us, and your heart soars with joy.  You don’t have to be an engineer; you don’t have to be a scientist.  It’s just a little wire, an earpiece, and your diode...a rock on a wire.

I would like to remove the “store-bought” elements from this, in particular the diode and the earpiece.  I suppose thinking in terms of the zombie apocalypse is my standard.  Things that are re-purposed are okay.  Things that you could get by tearing up something else are okay.