What is the Right Word?

 What is the Right Word?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am trying to find the right word for something.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t say a word.

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

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

The student didn’t like me after that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Invisible Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We showed ‘em, all right.

But I digress.

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

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

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

If anything.

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

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

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

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

The present only toucheth thee://

But Och! I backward cast my e’e,//

          On prospects drear!//

An’ forward tho’ I canna see,//

          I guess an’ fear!//

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had something they wanted.  

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

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

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

But some remained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fishermen, tax collectors, and tent-makers.

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

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

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

A Discourse on Joinery

 A Discourse on Joinery

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

Or thereabouts.

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

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

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

This is a frame.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes rather badly.

The answer is more clamps.

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

Close.  Not there. Close.

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

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

And I do have another solution.

I build frames. 

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

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

And I am getting more patient.

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

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

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

Like I said, I am getting more patient.

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

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

Carrots, Sticks, Students, and Cedar

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

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

He never gets the carrot. 

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

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

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

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

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

It’s bigger.

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

The biology comes in with the cedar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given patience and skill, we can make something beautiful.  

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

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

 Percy, Tyson, and Pepe La Pew

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

You don’t mess with physics.

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

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

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

No.

Much the reverse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose we all are.

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

 The Three-Body Problem

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

It’s made me think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is not a shortage of villains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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