Providing a Pattern

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are now in a time of year when students will begin graduating from school. I am now an old professor. I’ve come a long way personally from the backwoods of Oklahoma to my life here among the shimmering spires of southeast Kansas.  

Life’s been good to me so far.

The question arises: Have I learned anything?

I mean, not from a book, but from life.

What advice would I give to a younger self?  What would I tell my kids and grandkids if they actually listened to me?

I’ve made lists before. Longish lists.  Tongue firmly in cheek for the most part.  But more seriously, I have one thing I would like to suggest.

Take up a discipline.

I don’t mean a career.  I mean take up a practice that you do on a regular basis--every day, every week--and keep at it.

Take it seriously.  By this, I mean to keep at it.

It doesn’t have to be something that is hard.  In fact, if it is too hard you won’t keep it up.  It is better to start with something that is easy.

Like going to church.

You get up in the morning; you put on some nice clothes; you go and sit for an hour; you come home.

Easy.

Even if you don’t believe in God; even if you don’t listen to the music; even if you don’t listen to the scripture being read; even if you don’t pray; the discipline of this will organize your week.  It will mark your time.

And, while I am at it, another discipline you can practice is prayer.

Set a time every day and pray.  Again, you don’t even have to believe in God.  Think about the people in your life and think about the good things you would like to happen to them. 

It doesn’t cost a dime. No one has to know about it: it’s better if they don’t. In particular, pray for the people who annoy you. Every day, as a discipline.

Or you could exercise.  This might be the best entry point to the practice of a disciple for young people. Daily exercise.

You know me. I love walking.  Every day that weather permits. Mostly around my neighborhood, but lately I’ve been doing an orbit around the Kansas Technology Center. The weather has just been so nice.  At lunchtime, I throw a sandwich down my throat and then I walk to the KTC and back. No dogs and very little traffic to dodge.  If it’s convenient for you, you should try it.

I kind of tipped my hand when I said it was a good entry point for young people because here’s the thing: Once you’ve instituted one discipline, it is easier to institute another.

If you go to church every week, you can piggyback something else on that: calling your mother; calling a sick friend; mowing the lawn for an elderly neighbor.

If you pray every day, you can tack on reading a chapter from the Bible or the Koran or Ayn Rand (shudder).

Once you learn to institute a discipline, you can try out different things.  Learn a language? Learn woodworking (be careful!)?  Associate with groups of people who are interested in the same thing.

You can change yourself; you can connect with others.

It’s best to learn this when you are young so that you can benefit from it your whole life.

Here is the tragedy.  I am pretty sure no young person--or at least so few as to be statistically insignificant--ever started a disciple because they were told it would be a good idea.  Those who do do so because they see others doing it.

Those who are interested in sports in school have a leg up, as it were.  But because of structural constraints, there is a bottleneck there.

So this is to you old guys who read my column. If you want a young person who is near and dear to you to take up a discipline, take up one yourself.

Go to church; pray; exercise; read; make sawdust from one by threes.  And try not to be a bore about it. Provide a pattern for the young ones to see and have in their minds.

They might remember it and follow it when you are gone.

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. )

Math to the Nines

By Bobby Neal Winters

Teaching mathematics is treacherous. First off, people will walk up to you and tell you to your face that they hate mathematics.  

And they are proud.

There is constant pressure to change the way mathematics is taught in order to make it easier, but when you do, you will inevitably get pushback because you are teaching it in a way the parents weren’t taught, and they are made to feel stupid because they can’t help their children.

This is a shame because mathematics is useful, beautiful, and fun.

Let’s play a game.  If you have a pencil and paper handy, pick them up.  Let’s take two 2-digit numbers (any number of digits will work, but let’s start off simple) say 57 and 38.  

Look at the smaller of the two numbers (in this case 38).  Look at it digit by digit.  See what it takes to build up each of the digits to 9.  In this case, 6 + 3 = 9 and 1 + 8 = 9.  Take the 6 and the 1 and make a new number: 61. (61 is called the nines complement of 38 because 61 + 38 = 99.)

Now take the 57 and add it to the 61.  This is 118.  In this game, we want to remain within the world of 2-digit numbers, so that extra 1 out in the hundreds place has got to go.  To get rid of it, add it to the 8 on the other end.  This gives us 19.

Okay, what do we do with that 19?  Well, 19 + 38 is 57.  So it looks like by adding 61 to 57 and adding the extra 1 to the back, I’ve subtracted 38 from 57.  

Maybe I was just lucky.  Let’s try that again.  Let’s take 91 and 63.  Let’s turn the 63 into 36 because 3 + 6 = 9 and 6 + 3 =9. Now add 36 to 91.  This gives us 127, but adding the 1 at the front to the 7 at the back gives us 28.  Now 63 + 28 = 91.  So, yes, 91 - 63 = 28.

This is called the nines complement method of subtraction.  

Catch me with pen and paper sometime and buy me an oatmeal cookie, and I will show you why it works.  You might not understand my explanation, but at least I’ll get a cookie out of it.

There are many different kinds of people in this world. It takes all kinds of people to make the world work.  One kind will think this is kind of neat.  They will want to just play around with it and show people how to do it on napkins at cocktail parties.

Another kind will wonder what it’s good for. Some of these will get nasty and start saying things like this are what’s wrong with education in this country. Our math teachers are teaching all of these new-fangled ways to subtract when we should just teach the old fashioned way that I was taught...

I think I have that recorded on an old 45 vinyl record somewhere;  maybe on vellum; maybe pressed into clay with cuneiform.

As for the nines complement method of subtraction, it was used at least as far back as the 1600s.  Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, invented a mechanical device to add, and it could use the nines complement method to subtract.  There were also mechanical devices in the 1800s and the early 1900s that did this.

So this isn’t new-fangled math.

And it doesn’t depend on working in base 10.  By changing what needs to be changed, it can work with any base.

This came in handy when they invented digital computers. In computers, numbers are encoded in base two. In a computer’s central processing unit, there is a cluster of transistors that is wired together in such a way that allows them to perform addition.  There are literally (and I know what that word means) thousands of transistors devoted just to adding two numbers.

To say the wiring is “complicated” is to stretch that word about as far as it can go.  I suppose they could’ve come up with some other way to wire up transistors to subtract, but somebody, undoubtedly said, “Hey, you know that the nines complement method of subtraction they use on mechanical calculators doesn’t depend on base 10. We can use it in base two as well.”  (Actually he said, “Base two too,” and giggled.)

So they used what is known as ones complement to do subtraction and knocked off work to have a beer or seven.

Anyway, I think this stuff is fun and beautiful and useful.

The End.

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. )

 Straight, Square, and Strong

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am the kind that likes to create a parable, and then when the reader least expects it, do a zig and get to my point.  Please bear with me.

I share some of my carpentry projects on my Facebook page.  I like the medium for sharing in the sense that if you don’t want to look at it, you can just scroll past it.  It’s like writing in that way: If you don’t like it, just skip it.  This appeals to me because I don’t like imposing myself on anyone.  I’ve been cornered too many times by bores; it is a burden we good listeners bear. 

Anyway, I’ve just finished a small chest of drawers.  It is one foot cubed in size.  I put the knobs on it yesterday.  It is the second such chest that I’ve built.  I’d documented the first on Facebook as well. The pictures looked nice. Everyone praised it, but then they would: my friends are nice.  

But I knew that it wasn’t as good in real life as it looked in the pictures.  Angles are tricky things.  You can photograph something that is crooked from the right perspective, and it will look straight.  That happened in this instance.  I had to tell people I was a better photographer than I was a carpenter, but that isn’t really true either.  Sometimes accidents help us.

Looking at what went wrong the first time, I set about to correct it. To make a long story short--and remember what I said about having been cornered by bores in my time--I figured out a better way to go about my cabinet making.

In building something--a cabinet for example--there is what you see and what you don’t see. There is the final look you want at the end on the outside, but there is the structure that actually holds everything together on the inside.

You want the outside to be pretty, to be visually appealing, to reflect well on you and your skill at the craft.  At the same time, you want the interior structure to be straight, square, and strong.  And you want it designed in such a way that you can assemble it without undue stress.  (This last is particularly important if you have taken up the craft for the specific purpose of stress release.)

Given the above, I decided to make my interior structure something that was mostly invisible.  Each drawer would sit on a frame that I would make using halflaps.  I would then join these frames to vertical supports with edgelaps. Then at the end, I would cover it with side panels.

Previously I had used the side panels as structural elements and everything had gone awry at the final gluing. 

So, I did all that.  I used one-by-threes from home depot for the inside.  I ripped them down the middle to make the vertical supports. The wood for the interior frame didn’t cost much more than 10 dollars. I used my saw and my chisel, and I glued it all up.  It was straight, square, and strong.  

But it wasn’t particularly pretty. Here we get into an interesting area that is one of continual struggle for me.  What I had just built would have functioned just fine to hold some drawers to put my tools in. (This is what we weekend carpenters do: We buy tools to make things to put our tools in. Don’t laugh. It works for us.) But it would’ve been ugly.  We have built-in expectations of what a chest of drawers should look like.

Because of this, I took what I’d built that was straight, square and strong, and I put side panels on it.  The side panels cost at least as much as the wood for the inside structure, but they were there for purely cosmetic purposes.

However--and if there is any lesson from this it’s coming now--they were much easier to put on after I got a good straight, square, and strong interior support.

This provides a point of departure to discuss a number of things.  I’ve had occasion over the last 16 years in my job in the Dean’s office, to talk to a lot of students who were in trouble.  What I learned there is that if you want to be successful in school, in work, in the world, begin by having strong stable support at home. Put differently: Be straight, square, and strong on the inside, and it’s easier to keep things in order on the outside.

This is in harmony with what I’ve learned as a teacher. If you want to do a good job teaching a class, you need to know what you are teaching.  You will know it better as you teach it, but you have to begin as a learner. To show someone how to be a lifelong learner--and if we don’t do that at the university, then what the hell are we there for--we must ourselves be lifelong learners.  We must be straight, square, and strong on the inside before we can model that for our students on the outside.

To do any of this, we don't rely on what others tell us. They only see what we let them see. We’ve got to look at ourselves honestly, using objective measures.

And if we don’t do it right the first time, we start over.  Maybe more than once.

Okay, I am going to let you go there. I see I’ve had you cornered for too long.

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. 

Making Memories in the Workshop

 Making Memories in the Workshop

By Bobby Neal Winters

My youngest grandson brought me an old piece of wood from a picket fence yesterday and asked me to make him a sword.  (He asked me to make him a Minecraft sword, and I am not sure what that is, but I didn’t let on.)

As it was from a picket fence, it already had a point on one end, so there was not much work to be done there.  It had, however, been in someone’s fence for a long time. (I didn’t ask its provenance; sometimes 5-year-olds are a little hazy on the rules, and grandpas don’t necessarily ask a lot of questions.) 

The wood was old. It was beginning to flake off in places. I said, “Yes, I will make you a sword.”

I went to my workshop.

Unbidden, they (he and his big brother) followed me.  They followed me at a distance.  I’d had time to get the sword into my wood vise, I turned and there they were, looking over my shoulder.

I’d clamped the wood in my vise because I was going to plane it.

Planes have been a mystery to me until recently.  My Grandpa Byrd had had planes.  He was a carpenter, so, yeah.  But I’d never really touched one, and I didn’t really know what they were good for.

What they are good for is planing wood. To set them (tune them is the phrase used) so that they take thin, thin shavings of wood from whatever board you are planing.  The wood is to come off in thin, translucent curls. The floor of one’s shop should be forever covered in such curls.

So there I was with the wood clamped in the vise and with my two grandsons peering over my shoulder.  I began to plane.

I’d just tuned my plane last week, so the wood was coming off in nice, translucent shavings.  First, they were dull because the wood had been so stained by rain, sun, and weather in general, but then slowly they became brighter. The curls became brighter and a subtle scent began to enter my nostrils: Cedar.  This was a cedar picket from someone’s picket fence.  (Where did that little scoundrel get it? I don’t have a fence with that type of picket in it.)

The wood itself became shiny, red, and beautifully textured.

I turned it from one side to the next as the grandsons looked on, occasionally taking breaks to play with curls of cedar and mess around in my sawdust. (The youngest, in particular, loves sawdust.  His grandmother and mother think it's annoying; to me it looks like opportunity.)

After a few minutes of planing, I extricated the sword from the vise, and handed it to my grandson with some warnings:

“Do not poke anybody with it, do not hit anything with it, and whatever you do, don’t poke it in a cat’s butthole.”

I’m hoping that the last one didn’t give him any ideas.

This took ten minutes.  I don’t know if the boys will remember it, but I sure will.  If they do remember it, it will be worth the thousands of dollars I’ve put into my workshop in tools and time

Heck, it was worth it anyway.

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. )

 Pegs, planes, dados, and half laps

By Bobby Neal Winters

Writing is like carpentry; carpentry is like writing; and writing about carpentry just seems right to me.  Please indulge me for a while as I do just that.

Planes are useful tools.  You can do a variety of things with them that I am only beginning to learn, but one of those things is very important: Erase your mistakes.

I’ve been working on a small chest of drawers recently.  By small I mean one foot by one foot by one foot.  I’ve done two such recently.  For the first, I put it together with wooden dowel pegs. This went incredibly well until the last step, the final glue up.

When I came to glue the sides on, the geometry of the small cabinet was such that I couldn’t get the dowel pegs to match the holes I’d drilled for them.  With effort, I got it all to come together, but it was slightly askew.

I was careful enough in my photography, that the folks on Facebook didn’t notice--or at least were kind enough not to say.  But I noticed.  

The cabinet is functional, but it’s off. And it bugs me.  It’s good enough to put my tools in, but I can do better.

I wake up early, long before I get up. I think about things.  I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could improve my cabinet.

And it came to me: The problem was with the dowel pegs.  They are quite useful things, but I was using them in the wrong way. Instead of using dowel pegs or screws or brads or nails (shudder) or pocket screws, I decided to go old school and used dados and half-laps.

For those of you who think I’ve just started speaking another language, I have: the language of old-school joinery.  A dado is a groove you cut in a board that goes across the grain.  A half-lap is a joint where you cut halfway through two boards and then join the two together.  

Doing my joinery this way helped me to get the gluing to line up correctly at the last step.

I came out, looked at my beautiful creation, and noticed a gap. I sucked in breath through my teeth.  

The problem wasn’t so much the gap, but that pieces of my framing had come out of line.  This happens in gluing.  You clamp it all together straight, you let the glue dry, but as the glue dries, it contracts and things move.

This is where a plane comes in. (Remember, a plane is a useful tool.)

I took a plane, and I started shaving down everything that was out of line.  This is an incredibly satisfying process.  The worktable and the floor became covered with shavings, but the frame became straight before my eyes.

It is beautiful, and awaits some polyurethane finish as I write this.

There were times when I tried to never repeat what I wrote about.  I didn’t want to bore the reader.  Well, that was misguided in a number of ways.  

The first of which was the arrogant assumption that the reader has so little to do that they remember what I write from one week to the next.  

The second was the arrogant assumption that I’d said all that could be said, in the best way it could be said, or that I was even right about the thing the first time.

Readers are busy people.  They are smart, so they remember a lot, but they don’t remember everything.  Fairly frequently, I am given a compliment on that wonderful column I wrote about X, when I actually didn’t write a column about X. When this happens, I thank the person for the compliment, and thank God for his grace. A person saying something nice to you feels good even if you don’t deserve it.

I began to allow myself to revisit topics.  Maybe I’d gotten it all wrong the first time.  Maybe I learned something new about the topic.  Maybe I’d learned better writing techniques and could approach the topic in a better way.

There are tools in writing just as there are tools in woodworking.  Rewriting an essay is like taking a plane to the frame of a cabinet.  After you’ve written something but before it goes to print, you need to go in and smooth things out.  This involves taking out the words that don’t belong there; adding in some connective supports.

When you send it off to publication, well, it’s done. There doesn’t seem to be an analog for a plane in writing that works after you’ve hit print.  You just have to revisit your topic and eat a little crow, sometimes. Make a new cabinet, as it were.  

But it feels so good when the second one is better.

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. )

Heard it in a Love Song

 Heard it in a Love Song

By Bobby Neal Winters

I like Southern Rock: Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers, and the Marshall Tucker Band. I’ve known them from my youth. I was listening to Marshall Tucker’s “Heard it in a Love Song” the other day, and it occurred to me that this is the same song as “Free Bird” and “Ramblin’ Man.” 

For those of you who are not familiar with “Heard it in a Love Song,” it is written from the point of view of a man who is singing to a woman he is in the process of leaving.  He’s explaining to her that it’s not her fault; it’s just the way he is; he’s leaving her; and that’s okay.

The inference she’s supposed to draw is that since he’s being upfront about all this, he’s still a good person.

Heard it in a love song

Heard it in a love song

Heard it in a love song

Can't be wrong

In Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” the writer is more focused on his own character than the needs and feelings of the woman whom he is leaving. It’s all his fault, and he must leave because that is who he is:

But, if I stay here with you, girl

Things just couldn't be the same

'Cause, I'm as free as a bird now

And this bird you cannot change

The Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man” makes it clearer.  He was just born this way:

Lord, I was born a ramblin' man

Tryin' to make a livin' and doin' the best I can

And when it's time for leavin', I hope you'll understand

That I was born a ramblin' man

Lest I be remiss, these songs all hearken back to the classic by Looking Glass, 

The sailor said, "Brandy, you're a fine girl What a good wife you would be 

But my life, my love, and my lady is the sea"

There is a point of view that would say that the women who choose these men don’t really want a long-lasting relationship themselves.  They like the bad boys; they choose someone who is going to leave them eventually because they get bored too.  There might be some merit to that, but I will leave it to a woman or to a man braver than me to expand upon.

One could just choose to take the protagonist at face value: He’s just a roamer.  It’s the way he is.  While he has feelings for the woman he’s leaving, there is something he’s wrestling with within himself that is just forcing him to move on down the line.

Yeah.Right.

While a twentysomething might believe that, at sixty it’s difficult to get all that out with a straight face.

In the movie Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. II, Starlord meets his father, the aptly named Ego.  Ego explains to his son, using the lyrics of “Brandy (you’re a fine girl)” that men like them were just different. They couldn’t be tied down. They were too important to be committed to just one woman.

Kurt Russell’s  interpretation of that character and use of the song as illustration, caused me to interpret that song in a new light.

The troubadour, far from being honest with his romantic partner, is being manipulative. (You have no idea how hard it was not to day “a manipulative bastard” there.  Oops, I slipped.) He’s trying to put his girlfriend on the wrong foot, trying to make himself look good, trying to make her think she’s just not sophisticated enough.

Men, this is really not a good look for us.  But let’s continue.

Age does bring knowledge.  

I’ve seen men who’ve used women in such ways over their lives grow old and die alone.

But I’ve also seen men who’ve roamed from woman to woman, discover that they can change, settle down, maybe raise a family.  They discover there is comfort in the sameness of a long-term relationship that more than counterbalances whatever joy is found in the novelty of a continual string of new relationships.

The Free Birds, the Ramblin’ Men, the Sailors, those who heard it in a love song are missing the boat.

Lynyrd Skynyrd got it write in “Simple Man”:

You'll find a woman, yeah, and you'll find love

And don't forget son there is someone up above

And be a simple kind of man

I heard it in a love song; can’t be wrong.

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. )