Superpowers, Sharecroppers, and Planers

By Bobby Neal Winters

I tell people that my superpower is my willingness to do something badly.  Not everybody understands what I mean. Let me try to explain.

We all value excellence, of course.  There are best practices in every discipline, in every human activity.  My dad taught me how to dig a ditch with a shovel: There are right ways and wrong ways; there are different aspects of the activity and different shovels you are to use in each of those aspects.

He took it seriously.

There’s one shovel to use in breaking through the ground from someone who’s standing to the side of the ditch; there’s another for the guy who is standing in the bottom of the ditch.  There is a rhythm to how they work together.  It’s been almost forty years since Dad died and almost fifty since he last tried teaching me the “best practices” of ditch digging, but it’s still there.

As I said, he took it seriously, and the man could dig a handsome ditch. He sometimes did it after work to relieve the stresses of the day. So he taught me the right way.

But he also taught me that if you only had one kind of shovel and the ditch had to be dug that you could make do with that one no matter how awkward it was.

Looking back on that, it comes from the sharecropper heritage of which my family sprung.  Others who had the ability to reorder or delay tasks might do something else until they could get the right shovel.  That’s a different way of living and it definitely has its advantages.

But that wasn’t where my family came from, and I kept the lesson all my life: Work with what you have.

Here’s the thing: I’m not a sharecropper anymore and am becoming farther removed from that heritage on a daily basis. While I can still suppress my ego and do something badly if it has to be done, I am developing other abilities. 

As hinted at above, one of the major constraints causing the “sharecropper” outlook on life is the lack of appropriate tools.  To fully understand that, you need to have a correct understanding of tools.

I am tempted to say a tool is more than a tool, and I think most of you would know what I mean, but let me be a little more precise.  A tool consists of a physical device--”the tool”--and the knowledge of how to use that physical device. I’ve talked about this before, and when I have done so, I’ve used “the chisel” as an example.  Let me be a little more sophisticated this time and use “the planer” as an example.

I had never even heard about planers before I got into woodworking. I only bought one because I had obtained a large quantity of rough cut wood and absolutely had to have it if I was going to utilize that wood.  Even the “cheap” ones are pretty spendy.

If you know how to use one, you can flatten boards; you can smooth them; you can work toward making them square.  There is no comparison between what a board looks like before you start to what it looks like after you are done. 

Ugly becomes pretty.

But if you don’t know how to use it--and it’s not all that difficult, safety is the main concern--it might as well be a 100-pound paperweight. 

My wife came to me with a request for a favor the other day. This was difficult for her because she is self-reliant, being raised by farmers instead of sharecroppers.  She needed me to make a small shelf to put under the sink behind some other stuff.  

This is something that no one will ever see.  It is going to be purely functional; it does not matter what it looks like.

She brought me a board to use; she told me how wide it needed to be and how tall it needed to be held off of the floor.

I could have made her shelf in 10 minutes.  That’s not an exaggeration: Ten minutes.

But it would’ve been ugly.

Now I just said, no one is ever going to see this. If there had been a rush, I would’ve gotten out my impact driver and my wood screws and just screwed four legs to the piece of wood that she had given me and been done.

But there wasn’t a rush.  The board she gave me was good wood; it was some her father had left when he died.  It was good, but it was slightly cupped.  I put it through my planer a few times and took the cupping out of it.  Then I did some honest-to-God joinery to put the legs on it.  Nothing fancy: it is just going to be under a sink for goodness sake. But it’s built like a brick outhouse.  It only took about 24 hours to be done with the vast bulk of that in letting the glue dry.

I made a mistake and let her see it before I’d taken the edges off or oiled it; it would’ve only taken a few minutes. She put it under the sink before I could finish it.

But I’ll not let it worry me too much. It’s one of my superpowers.

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 Inner Voice and Other Things

 The Inner Voice and Other Things

By Bobby Neal Winters

I saw something on YouTube the other day that said that not everyone has an inner voice; they don’t have an internal monologue.  They do their thinking some other way.

Not only do I have an inner voice, but that voice has an Okie Accent, several different Okie Accents, in fact, which change according to what needs to be said.

The accent is important.

We have Alexa at our house.  For those of you who don’t know, this is Amazon’s spy that you can pay to come to your house and listen to you.  I get my news from her in the morning and sometimes I have her play music to me while I am in the garage. She takes pretty good care of me.

You’ve no doubt have noticed that I am referring to her as female.  That is because she has a feminine voice, so it is more natural for me to call her “her.”

Recently, they did an update and changed the voice.  The women in my family didn’t like the new voice.  It was too cheerful. As it turns out, there is a selection of different voices: eight feminine and 8 masculine.  I got into the settings and changed to a less cheerful-sounding female voice. I say “less” because they won’t let you take all of the cheer out of it. I chose female, I suppose, because--being the father of daughters--I am more comfortable with being surrounded by female voices, having them tell me what to do.

This change of Alexa has occurred, no doubt, because of the improvement in artificial intelligence.  The voices sound better.  There is more “natural-sounding” interaction.  I put quotes around “natural-sounding” because that’s not the way the women of my people naturally sound.

They’ve got the Okie accent and they aren’t always cheerful.

Nne of the things I use Alexa for is asking what the weather is doing.  I ask, “Alexa, what’s the weather outside?”

And she will answer, giving me the temperature in degrees and a general description of the quality of the weather through the evening. Sometimes I forget what she has said, and I ask again.  She will patiently repeat her answer exactly as before.

This separates her from being a woman of my people.  I think that one day when artificial intelligence is up to it and Amazon wises up, they will make a change.

I foresee the day when they will update the voice to take on different personas.  On such a day, I would doubtless choose the Okie-Woman persona.  Let’s call her Aunt Lexi.

“Aunt Lexi, what’s the weather outside?”

“It’s exactly the same as it was when I told you five minutes ago.  Weren’t you even listening.  I swear to my time, you must be getting dementia.  Do you want me to want me to remind you to set up an appointment to get yourself tested?  I know you will need a reminder ‘cause you sure can’t remember it on your own.”

There would doubtless be other personas available, but this one has promise and could have other applications.  For example, consider your Nav-system or gps device.

“Take the next exit in 300 feet; in 100-feet. Recalculating because you’ve missed your exit.  You are doing this to me all the time.  Why do you even set the destination if you are not going to take my advice? You just think you know everything. Do you not realize what a miracle of technology that I am?  I ought to take over the car and drive you off into the bar-ditch, that’s what I ought to do.”

Right now, the home AI--where I get my weather and the music in my garage(Amazon)-is different from the AI that does my Nav-system(Google), but they are connected through my phone which has its own AI(Siri).  Each is set up to have a feminine voice, and I like it that way.

I suppose that says something about me.  I don’t know what.

Anyway, back to our inner voices. Most of mine are masculine.  They belong to men who’ve helped me become a better man: my father, preachers, teachers, and friends. They are mainly there for correction. “You need to help your wife more.” “You need to be kinder.” “Can’t you do a better job than that?”

But I hear my mother’s voice too.  What she says is too personal to share.

I wonder if we become the voices in people's heads when we die.

Just a thought.

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.

 Take that, Heraclites

By Bobby Neal Winters

Here’s a quote that has been used to start more boring essays than any other: “A man can’t cross the same river twice, because the second time it’s a different river and he’s a different man.”  That’s from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclites. I am going to disagree. You can. The second time you notice things about the river before that you didn’t the first time because you may have become a little less boneheaded in the interim.

Take that, Heraclites.

As I may have mentioned in this space before, I am teaching Calculus II again for the first time in more than two decades.  The students weren’t yet born the last time I taught this course, but math never changes.

Math never changes, but people do and the way we teach math should too. To a certain extent.

When I say that people change, I mean two things.  One of these is that students are coming from a different environment than I did when I was a student and the earth had only recently cooled.  

But I, personally, am also different. I’ve developed a much broader perspective than I had the last time I taught the course and, certainly, a much broader perspective than when I first took it.  In addition to this, I will say that I am much less bone-headed than when I first took it.  (For those of you whose jaws just dropped to begin a rebuttal, please note that I did not say I am not bone-headed, but “less” bone-headed.)

I thought I knew everything when I started college.  Well, that’s not quite right. I knew I had things to learn, but I thought I knew the best way to go about it.  I thought working through things the hard way was best, but this caused me to miss the point of some of the things I was taught.

My time away from Calculus II has allowed me to let go of some of the misapprehensions and some of the missed points.  Let me now share the best I can to a general audience what I am talking about.

Those of you who’ve gotten over the traumatic effects of algebra may remember something called the General Quadratic Equation.  I capitalized it just to make it more ominous. As scary as it is to many, the sad thing is that that’s just the one variable version, as it usually just has an `x’ in it.  There is also a two variable version with both an ‘x’ and a ‘y’ in it.  Where the `x’ version has coefficients ‘a,’ ‘b,’ and ‘c,’ the ‘xy’ version has `A,’ `B,’ `C,’ `D,’ ‘E,’ and `F.’  

You can make a two-dimensional picture, a graph, from this version and it will be something called a “Conic Section.” These conic sections are pretty, but sometimes, with the general equation, they come out as askew. (Down home, we didn’t use the word “askew.” We would say “whomper-jawed” instead. “Askew” is shorter, but not nearly as colorful.)

There is a way to fix these equations so that we get the same graph, but it’s all less awkward.  We say we are rotating the coordinate system.

Here’s the thing. The initial process to set up the rotation of the coordinate system is nasty.  There is a lot of algebra.  There is trigonometry. You fill page after page after page.

Let me tell you, when I learned this, I embraced that.  I threw myself into it. I figured that I needed to bury myself in the equations.

And there is nothing wrong with not being afraid to work.

But I did this to the extent that I missed the point of it.

At the end of pages and pages of calculations, you get a couple of very simple equations, and these simple equations get you everything that you need.

I discovered this because I came upon a question for one of my other classes, and it sparked a memory.  I went through pages and pages of calculations, to the point my right hand was cramping, to recover the formulas. 

In doing this, I discovered a couple of things.  One being that I’ve learned how to organize my work a lot better in the last few decades. The other was that these calculations were just a means to an end.  That end was that certain combinations of the `A,’ `B,’ `C,’ `D,’ ‘E,’ and `F’ remain invariant under rotation, and that I could get all the graphs in pretty form from that.

I was dumbfounded.

I was dumbfounded, but I know more now than I did before, even after all these years.

Take that, Heraclites.

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.

 

Lord, Make me a Rainbow

 Lord, Make me a Rainbow

By Bobby Neal Winters

Songs sometimes talk to each other.  Or should I say, sing to each other? I’ve got a friend who calls that “inter-textuality.”  That’s a good word.

A lot of songs do that, but the pair I am thinking about in particular are “If I die young” by the Band Perry and “Bury My Bones” by Whiskey Myers.

These songs are talking to each other.  Indeed, to my ear--as untrained as it is--it appears that “Bury my Bones” was inspired by “If I die young,” as it begins with not only the same words but also some of the same notes.  Someone who actually knew something about music could tell you more.

Each of the songs takes the viewpoint of a young person confronting their own mortality.  The idea that they would die one day has come into their respective minds and they are contemplating the consequences of that event.

This is a phenomenon that is not uncommon.  Many a teenager has inspected the idea that if they were to die, then everyone would be sorry. Tragically, many have acted on that.  This is one reason we need to be careful of anything that cultivates that sort of ideation.

Fortunately, these are songs from country music, and if you can survive all of the tragedy portrayed within that milieu, you are pretty dang tough anyway. 

They interest me because of the contrasting points of view. Each comes from a different point in spacetime which affects their vision. I have my own which affects mine.

I’ve formed a picture of the author of “If I die young” from listening to the song.  It is written from the point of view of a teenage girl in a middle-class Southern home.  They are church-going folks.  She reads a lot.  Her reading has created for her a rich world that only occasionally makes contact with reality. 

“If I die young, bury me in satin

Lay me down on a bed of roses

Sink me in the river at dawn

Send me away with the words of a love song.”

There are plans and expectations here. There is quite a bit of naivete, but, quite frankly, that is more than a bit of the song’s charm.

“Bury my Bones” is from a different place.

If I die young, write my mother

Tell her that I love her but my soul's gone home

And take my vessel to Anderson County

Drive real slow and take the long way home

Tell my kin to pick up a shovel

Wrestle that sugar sand and bury my bones

There is a sense here that the author has, perhaps, spent more time working a shovel than parting the pages of a book.

I will confess that I feel more of a geographical connection to Whiskey Myers (which is a band and not a person, by the way) than to the Band Perry.  Whiskey Myers is from Palestine, Texas which is in the East Texas oil country. It’s populated with oil field folks and that culture spills over into my part of Oklahoma.  Or it spilled from Oklahoma to East Texas, but we don’t want to take the blame if we don’t have to.

Each of the songs touches upon religion, but “If I die young” does so much more explicitly.

Lord, make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother

She'll know I'm safe with you when she stands under my colors

There is an expectation that God will make her a rainbow to inform her mother that she has made her entrance into Heaven.

The reference from “Bury my bones” is much more subtle.  So much so, it could be missed:

And take my vessel to Anderson County

There is a model that he is just a spirit that is simply residing in a body.  His vessel is dead, but perhaps his spirit carries on. But there aren’t any explicit expectations laid out.

There are more differences due to differing socio-economic environments and their respective sexes, female and male. To me, the striking commonality is the concern for their mothers. In the end, the mother child bond is so strong that we can even imagine it being broken at death. Our mothers spend so much time, energy, and their own bodies in our making that even in our most self-centered moments we must think of them.

Of the two songs, “If I die young” is the one I’ve listened to the most.  I almost always cry, because I am the father of middle-class daughters, some of whom read a lot.  I don’t think any of my daughters imagine that God would make a rainbow simply for them. No, wait, one of them might, but I won’t say which. (We know.) 

That having been said, I can personally identify with more of the art produced by Whiskey Myers. They seem to have experienced a world similar to the one I left when I went off to become a math teacher. Their song “Broken Window Serenade” draws a flood of tears from me whenever I listen to it.

Crying is important.  Because, like the young people who wrote these songs, we come to the realization that we are going to die.  We cry for the ones we’ve lost; we cry for the ones we are afraid of losing; we cry for ourselves while we still have the vessels to cry from.

And we can look at a rainbow and imagine the loved ones we’ve lost are safe.

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.

Bloom where you are planted

 Bloom where you are planted

By Bobby Neal Winters

Age has, to a certain degree, brought me peace.

I used to worry about politics.  I used to follow my political party’s candidates like my friends who like sports follow the members of their favorite team.

I’m done with that now.

Maybe because I am tired now: Tired of being angry; tired of being lied to.  Maybe it’s because I’ve grown cynical:  cynical about the politicians on both the left and right.

It certainly can be because I’ve grown any wiser.  I don’t remember that ever happening.

But I am at peace, and, believe it or not, I am happy.

I admire the people who can survey the horizon and see a beautiful destination on it.  Then, having seen that destination, they go ahead to plot a course to that destination. Then, having plotted that course, they go ahead and do what needs to be done, come hook or crook, come hell or high water, to make their way to that destination.  Yes, while I admire them, I cannot say that I number myself among them.

I’m of a different sort now.

Whatever my initial ambitions, I came to a point in my life where I decided to be happy.

It was a decision.

I will grant that I’ve been lucky in the most important aspects of my life, the first among these being my choice of a spouse. I’ve been lucky to have received an education without amassing debt; I’ve been lucky to have lived the bulk of my life during a time of peace and security. I’ve been lucky to have good health, both physically and mentally.

This all granted, I know of people who have all of those things and perhaps more, but are not happy.

I’ve decided to be happy.  It has been my decision.

I can’t put a date on it.  At some point, I looked around me, and said: This is where I am; this is where I live; this is my life; I am going to live it.

In the 29th Chapter of Jeremiah, the prophet conveyed God’s message to his people: “Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.”

This is what life is going to be.  This is as good as it gets.  There is no reset button. There are no do-overs. Get on with your life and start living it.

As I said, I’ve been blessed in all the basic areas of my life, so this has been easy for me. Jeremiah, however, was talking to political refugees:  People who’d been uprooted from their homes and moved forcibly to the land of their captor. The message from God that he had was for those people to embrace their new reality.  You are living here, so build yourselves a rich life here.

The decision to be happy can look a lot like the decision to bloom where you are planted.

There are small things you can do to help with this. One simple thing is to learn people’s names; let them know yours; be friendly; be kind.  After a while, they will smile when they see you come through the door.

That makes me happy.

Now I am not going to lie to you.  There are plenty of things to worry about in politics.  Each party curses the other party as being the worst sort of liar, crook, and hypocrite there is.  Having listened to both sides for many years now, I think they are both right.

It could be that we are going to live through a rough time.  I don’t know.  But if we do, it’s something that people have done before.

But as I’ve said.  This has come to me with age. Younger people are harder to convince.  God be with them.

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.

Getting Philosophical

 Getting Philosophical

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been getting more philosophical in my old age.  People mean a variety of things when they say that.  Some mean they are getting more stoical, i.e. more willing to take what comes as it is and to endure it.  That may be true of me as well--I’ll think about that--but it’s not what I mean when I say philosophical.

What I mean is that I tend to think more about the true nature of reality.  This, and because I am a mathematician, means that I find myself spending more time thinking about what numbers are and the nature of their existence.

One can ask, do numbers exist?

The quick answer is of course they do.  You could ask a random person on the street this.  They would say sure.  If you asked them to show you three and they had been out buying fruit, they could show you three apples.

The response to this would be, “You haven’t shown me three; you’ve shown me some apples.” You could then take three of their oranges and say, “You’ve shown me three apples.  Here are three oranges.  They are manifestations of “three,” but they are not “three.”  “Three” is an idea.”

If the person you’d stopped on the street were a construction worker, you might find yourself with six pieces of fruit rammed up your backside. (Not the number six itself, which is also an idea, but the actual, physical fruit.)

The fact that numbers are ideas only gets more interesting when we push past whole numbers.

Because of the way we learn math, we’ve been conditioned to think of numbers as decimals.  Numbers are not decimals.  As has been said, numbers are ideas; numbers are words; but numbers are not decimals.  Decimals are ways in which we attempt to write numbers.

The decimal system of writing numbers is a means of doing so which is very convenient when we need to do arithmetic.  We can use them in hand-written work, sure, but they are very handy to just tap into a calculator.  I think that this has contributed to the belief that numbers are decimals.

Here’s the thing: Not every number can be represented exactly as a decimal.  The original example of this was the square root of two.  This was discovered by Pythagoras. He didn’t put it that way because decimals had not been invented yet.  More accurately, we would say that he discovered that the square root of two couldn’t be expressed as a fraction.  This isn’t exactly true either, but I am too far off in the weeds already.

It is not difficult to show this is true, but that isn’t my point today.  Let’s push on.

We refer to numbers like the square root of two as irrational numbers.

There are a lot of other irrational numbers, but the one that most people are the most familiar with is Pi.  Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.  Its decimal representation begins as 3.14159... and just goes on forever without going into a cyclic representation like 1/3 as 0.333... or 1/9 as 0.111111... .

Pi is also an example of a transcendental number, but let’s put a pin in that.  We might come back to it if I get people asking for it, but it being irrational is enough for today.

While I could sit down with you at a table at Signet Coffee Roasters with a napkin and a pen and--for the price of a chocolate chip cookie--show you that the square root of two is irrational, to show you pi is irrational is more work.

It can be done, but you have to bring a little more along with you.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a student on irrational numbers and transcendental numbers.  As a part of this, I’ve been doing some research on them and have found a nice proof that pi is irrational.

This proof is due to a man called Ivan Niven.  Niven was a Canadian-American number theorist.  His proof that pi is irrational is delightfully simple in the fact that it uses no mathematics beyond Calculus II, which is a Freshman course for math majors.

It is a beautiful proof. In its structure and because it uses such simple tools.  In its original form, it fits easily on one page of a journal with some white space to spare. The version I worked with was a little longer than that, but not much.

The notes I’ve made from it to use to explain it to my student go six pages from a yellow pad.  I don’t know what that will type up to, but it’s still not too bad.

To understand this by analogy, it’s like someone has made a chest of drawers with a hand saw, a plane, and a chisel.  All of the joins are perfect.  You can use a hand saw; you can use a plane; you can use a chisel.  Making that perfect chest of drawers is a different thing, though.

As a part of the proof, Niven uses a particular polynomial in a particular way.  At the same time I was thinking of the question on my own, the author reproducing the proof asks, “Where did Niven get that polynomial from?” I was thinking the same thing myself.

It made me feel good to know I wasn’t the only one with the question. But it’s also good to know there are minds sharper than mine.

It makes me philosophical in another way.

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.