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.