You should’ve seen it in color

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’m into woodturning now as I go ever deeper down the rabbit hole of woodwork.  I’ve learned it from YouTube and the world of hard knocks.  This is not necessarily something I would recommend to everyone. You need to be a responsible adult; have some disposable income; be far enough into your life that if you are severely crippled by an injury your family can go on.

But it is an interesting experience.  

For example, the folks who teach woodturning on YouTube aren’t there because they are articulate.  Some of them are, don’t get me wrong.  My point is that they were woodturners first. Their focus is toward the wood.  They know how to do things with it. They understand what is happening with the wood. Having the language to communicate that to someone else is a different matter entirely.

Some of them are very loquacious. Very.  You’d hate to be caught with them between you and a bathroom. But there is a continuum of folks who talk less and less all the way down to some you just show their hands, their lathes, and the wood turning, either in silence or music in the background.

Sometimes those silent ones work, but having a word now and then would be helpful.

Having the words to communicate is a key thing. Getting meaning into those words is another.  This is hard to do, so let me come into it sideways.

One of the songs that the Algorithm brings me is “In Color”, written by James Otto, Jamey Johnson, and Lee Thomas Miller, and sung by Jamey Johnson.  For those of you who haven’t heard it, I do suggest that you get out on the old Internet and find it, but a bit of it goes like this:

If it looks like we were scared to death//

Like a couple of kids just tryna save each other//

You should've seen it in color//

A picture's worth a thousand words//

But you can't see what those shades of gray keep covered//

You should've seen it in color

This is only the chorus, but if you have the right experience base, it will tell you more than 1000 philosophers typing on 1000 typewriters for 1000 years.  No offense to philosophers here; they would be the first to say so.

For those of us of a certain age who’ve sat by our elders looking at old black and white photos this takes us back in time. The symbols conveyed in the photograph can connect with the base of common shared experience and help us to remember them with such force as to evoke emotion.

I’ve not made it through the song with dry eyes yet.

The songwriters do some amazing things here.  They convey that these black and white photographs do carry a message.  But, while pointing out that the deficiency of the media, i.e. it’s only black and white, they use this as a metaphor to illustrate that any form of communication will fall short of actual experience. “You should’ve seen it in color,” does not mean that a colored photograph would be better.  It means you need to live through it.

Saint Paul said that “we see through a glass, darkly.”  Some scientists say we don’t see at all, but they are writing philosophical checks they can’t cash.  What they mean is seeing is different than we thought it was.  

Light comes into our eyes and activates receptors.  Some of these are rods: They manifest as seeing black and white. Others are cones: They manifest as seeing in color.  There are three different types of cones, so every color we see is a combination of three basic colors.  What our brain interprets as color is just a combination of the electrochemical signals that the eye sends through the optic nerve.  There would be those who say because of this that there is really no such thing as color.

You can see why not many scientists could make a living writing country songs, but why Saint Paul probably could.

I know a bit of what Saint Paul meant when he wrote that.  Every day that I live and experience the world, I know a little more.  This is not to belittle, not to poo-poo the work of scientists. Far from it.  Nor do I mean to deprecate the value of words.

But we absolutely cannot overvalue experience nor shared experience.

That's the story of my life // Right there in black and white.

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.

Hindsight Smells like Regret

 Hindsight Smells like Regret

By Bobby Neal Winters

I went out to my truck one morning--which was parked parallel facing east as it almost always is when I’m home--and I looked west down the street.  About fifty feet away, there was in the middle of the street an armadillo perfectly balanced on his back facing up.

This was an armadillo in mint condition.  He was perfect, every scale in place.  

The only thing wrong with him was that he was dead.

Standing to his side, getting ready for a meal, was a crow.  The crow had not yet breached the carcass.  He just stood there.

There were many things I could’ve done, should’ve done at that point, most of which I will get into later. What I did do was take a picture and post it to Facebook.  I put up some witty remark about the crow having knocked out the armadillo. 

I thought it was funny.

Then I just drove off.

What happened over the next several weeks could be classified in a number of ways.  The game theoretic way would be “The Tragedy of the Commons”; the religious way would be “Sins of Omission”; the psychological way would be “the Bystander Effect.”

Take your pick.

When an armadillo is killed on a country road, it really doesn’t last too long.  First of all, there would be more than just a crow there to belly-up to the bar.  There would be buzzards, coyotes, and all sorts of other critters, and there would be a lot more of them.

In town--even though we do have a wide variety of fauna wandering around within our city limits--there aren’t quite as many animals hanging around.  In addition, those who are hanging around aren’t here because they like to feed on the road.  Natural selection has taken those out of the system.  

In the country, on a country road, there would be faster traffic that would not take the time to dodge the armadillo and would grind it to bits.  This would allow the bacteria and the rain to dispose of the organic remains in relatively short order.

Neither of these things happened.

What I should’ve done--instead of taking the damned picture and making the witty remark on Facebook--was to stop; turn around; go to my workshop; get a trash bag and a shovel; put the armadillo into the bag; put the bag into the trash bin.

But I didn’t have that plan worked-out in my head.

This armadillo was not on my property.  He was not even directly in front of my house.

I thought that maybe a Policeman would drive by and take care of it.  They often do nice things like that.

I thought that one of my neighbors who was nearer to it would do something. Sometimes that happens.

I thought nature would deal with it in the manner described above.

And, clearly as I am writing this, none of that happened.

What did happen was much slower.

The only living creatures numerous enough and willing enough to deal with the corpse were bacteria.  The bacteria feasted, but slowly.  

You can always count on bacteria.

But bacteria exact a price.

Whenever I mowed--and I mowed several times during this time period--the stench was thick in the air.

Thick.

And while there wasn’t enough traffic driving over the armadillo to grind it away, there was enough to break it apart and spread it.  I purposefully left in the last “it” there. Pronouns are blunt, but I don’t want to make this too sharp.

Some of you might have had the thought that we’ve gotten a lot of rain this spring and that would help.  I thought that.  

No.

There is only a certain amount of sin that rain will wash away, at least quickly.

Everytime I smelled “it” was a reminder. Everytime the stench breached my nostrils and my gorge rose was a reminder that I could’ve fixed this in less than five minutes with hardly any effort. 

I can still smell it.  Maybe only in my head.  But it smells like regret.

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.

 Broken Halos

By Bobby Neal Winters

I grew up as a Southern Baptist; I am currently a United Methodist. Once, very, very many years ago. In another decade, in another century, I was having a discussion with a Methodist pastor. I forget the context, I forget the topic being discussed.  That pastor, at that time, made the remark that Southern Baptist theology encouraged co-dependence.

I was a lot younger then.  I passed in on to my Baptist brother who, in turn, passed it on to his pastor.

Among themselves they agreed it was accurate and took it as a complement.

If I were teaching an upper-level class right now, I would assign the students to write an essay, a chapter, or perhaps an encyclopedia on those three paragraphs.  As I am not, let me expand a little.

Lately, I’ve found myself in conversations with people who’d recently made difficult decisions. Even though the decisions were made and were irreversible, they were feeling just a tinge of guilt.

I looked them in the eye and said these words, “You have to take care of yourself first.”

In isolation, without context, that sounds harsh and even Machiavellian. I didn’t mean it that way.  Let me unpack that.

When you are on a commercial jet, and the flight attendants are taking you through their spiel about how to buckle your safety belt and other things that could provide a filter for natural selection, they do say something helpful.

“In the unlikely event the oxygen mask drops down, put on your own first before assisting others.”

It doesn’t take all that long to lose consciousness, but it takes about 3 minutes or so to die. Get your mask on, and then you can help other people.

If you help someone with their mask before you get your own on, even if you are successful, they--a small child for instance--might not be able to help you. You die; they live with the regret of not being able to save that adult who saved them.

Now, there are people to whom the idea to help others first would not have occurred.  There are people who would pull their seatmate’s oxygen mask out of the ceiling and smile at them behind the mask. 

This advice is not for them.

This advice is for the people that Chris Stapelton is singing about in “Broken Halos”:

Seen my share of broken halos //

Folded wings that used to fly //

They've all gone wherever they go //

Broken halos that used to shine.

Stapelton, having seen the world through the dim light of honkey tonks, is aware of a type of person who helps without boundaries, who works without a safety net, who doesn’t necessarily put on their own mask before helping someone else with theirs. 

He imagines them as angels.

And it's beautiful.

One is tempted to imagine the angels as breaking their halos during the course of helping, of folding up their wings out of burnout, and this does happen.

But there is another point of view. 

Another Methodist pastor, on another day in that other decade, that other century, told me about a Roman Catholic Priest by the name of Henri Nouwen.  Nouwen wrote a somewhat famous book with the title “The Wounded Healer.”

If you get on the internet and search for quotes--which I encourage you to do--you may find this one that gels the idea I am trying to get at: “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”

Maybe the angels can help because their halos are broken.  Maybe they’ve ceased their flying because you can’t help from way up there.

Burnout is a problem.  Helping can devolve into codependency. You can get your halo broken.

You can also decide to try to understand.

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.

 Sins of Omission

By Bobby Neal Winters

I have lunch with my best friend on a regular basis.  He was waxing philosophical--which is a state he shares in common with me--and suggested I write about sins of omission.  

“Sins of commission are things we do when we are young and are more able; sins of omission are more common to the old.”

And he is right.  I don’t think I can add to that. When we are young, our bodies might lead easily into actions which aren’t so easy later on. Those of you who are wise are free to put some meat on those bones, as it were.

I do think we can have some sins of omission when we are young though. 

Let me slowly work my way into that subject like a vine into a potting shed...

Summer break has begun. I am not teaching summer school.  Rather, I am working on a list of honey does (doos, dues, dews?). The main honey-do is the residing of our potting shed.

We’ve had our potting shed for nigh on to three decades.  It has served us well during that extended period of benign neglect.  It has kept our mowers dry, and our tools out of the weather.

It was well-designed; it was well built.

It was NOT well-maintained.

Here’s the story.

While our yard doesn’t not produce vegetables well--anything that we grow on purpose is in a raised bed with dirt we buy at the store--it is amazingly capable at producing weeds.  Among these weeds are numerous plants that will produce vines if given half a chance.

Over the course of three decades, vines have gradually encroached on the potting shed.  They’ve snaked their sneaky little--and sometimes not so little--tendrils through imperceptible gaps between boards into the shed.  They have attached themselves to the siding of the shed, rooting their way into the wood, digesting it.

Vines have been eating my shed, consuming it, trying to remove it from the face of the earth, trying to reduce it to its constituent atoms.

Bad vines! Bad!

Being off this summer, without a paid assignment, I’ve been assigned the duties of 1) Reclaiming our shed from nature; 2) Repairing the damage that has occurred; 3) Putting in modifications to keep this from happening again...at least during the course of our lives. 

This has been, shall we say, educational to me.  

As I do the repair work, I am doing carpentry. Those of you who frequent this space may be aware of the fact that I am an avocational woodworker. Your minds may have blurred the distinction between carpentry and woodworking. 

Let me repair that.

Woodworking, as I practice it avocationally, is using mostly traditional tools to learn traditional practices to make small, sometimes useful, sometimes pretty, objects out of wood.

By way of contrast carpentry is actual hard work.

A few hours of carpentry--two or three--can make me ready to take an old man’s nap.  

This is not hyperbole. 

While carpentry is hard work, it allows for periods of light philosophical contemplation in the same way woodwork does.

For example, the following thoughts occurred to me. 

If I had done a better job of keeping the vines away, I wouldn’t have to be cutting them from the siding right now.  

If I had put gravel around the base of this shed when I had a young man’s body, I wouldn’t have to be horsing those bags of gravel around with my old man’s body.

If I had painted the shed, say, every ten years, I would’ve been ahead of the game, and I wouldn’t have to be putting new siding on now.

Building is creative; creation is enjoyable. 

Maintenance is hard.

My major sins of omission in my youth are failures in maintenance. 

I confess them and try to excuse them, because they were done out of ignorance.  I didn’t know any better.  I didn’t think about how relentless vines are.  I didn’t think about them eating my potting shed.

But now I know.

And now I have to fix it because failure to do so would be less forgivable than actions not taken because of the ignorance of youth.

Just thinking about it, and I already need a nap.

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 Love Song of B. N. Winters

 The Love Song of B. N. Winters

By Bobby Neal Winters

As we get older, living in the world, seeing the way of things, learning some uncomfortable truths, our eyes begin to open.

When the big picture, the capital “T” Truth clicks into place, there is a desire to explain it to someone else.  To explain it to someone so that they don’t have to learn it the same hard way that you did.  You want to tell your children and your grandchildren.

But there is a catch. 

A big one.

They won’t understand.  They don’t have the language.  And I don’t mean they don’t have the words.  The words are there, but the words are not connected to the same experiences.  It’s like in the old movie “Crocodile Dundee.”  

“That’s not a knife.  This is a knife.”

There has to be a moment of experiential enlightenment, a gestalt.

As I go walking through life, I can find myself understanding more of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  (I think T. S. Eliot would appreciate that.  Maybe that is what he intended.)

Do I dare//

Disturb the universe?//

In a minute there is time//

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

I know what that means now.

Poetry sometimes serves as a map to the world, but unless you go out into that world its symbols will remain meaningless to you.  Even if the map has a helpful key down in the corner, you will never know what a river is until you’ve seen one.

Elliot’s poem is about aging at the very least.  I know this because I and all of my friends are aging. The scenes from the poem I can first see in my older friends and later in myself. One way to put this is that I find myself inhabiting the poem.

Literature, poetry, and history can provide a map for us.  But contact with reality provides meaning.  We find meaning in the text to the extent we can inhabit it.

Consider Jesus and His Disciples.

Jesus and His Disciples studied the scriptures. Indeed they were immersed in it. They didn’t have a Bible the way we understand it.  They didn’t have many books at all.  They had scrolls.  Or, more precisely, they had access to scrolls.

Some of these scrolls were similar to what we would call history; some were collections of rules; some were stories; some were poetry.  

Some were collections of prophecy.

This last part is interesting. Jesus and his Disciples seem to have been steeped in the books of prophecy. Peter quoted from Joel in the book of Acts, for example, but he and Jesus' other Disciples were also into Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. 

In Daniel, there is a section wherein is featured a series of terrifying beasts. These beasts are described in symbolic dream-language.  These can be and have been interpreted as a series of empires that had ruled over that part of the world, extracting income from it and oppressing the people there.  

There is value in using the image of “beasts” rather than simply saying “empires” because this image transcends time. We are now in a time where there are forces, where there are industries, where there are entities that transcend mere nations or empires: Drug cartels; human traffickers; HMOs.  Those who view human beings as a means of profit and nothing else.

Yep, “beasts” works fine.

The passage about beasts is followed by a vision: “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”

Jesus identified himself with this “Son of Man” and referred to himself in that way. He was a son of man, a human being whose kingdom treated people in a humanly (humanely, kindly), not a beastly, way. Jesus inhabited the prophecy: He gave it life; he gave it meaning.

Jesus created an organization which exists in opposition to the worldly kingdoms that seek to oppress the people.  He called it the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.  His early disciples called it “The Way.” 

We call it the Church.

It exists; it is real; we can see it; we can feel it.  There may be one near you.

I am inhabiting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It’s against my will but gives me meaning. You are inhabiting your own story. Make it a happy one.

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.

 Abraham and Ramanajan

By Bobby Neal Winters

About a year ago, I taught a Bible Study on the book of Genesis. I did a survey of some of my favorite stories from that book--from any book. One night after our meeting one of the participants asked a question.  It was so honest, so simple, and I had never thought to ask.

What was Abraham’s religion?

This is not an exact restating of the question, so I will ask for forgiveness, but I think in answering it fully I will answer the original question and probably more.

The short answer: He didn’t have one.

This might be a surprise.  You might expect Judaism as an answer.  If a Rabbi or a Jew who cares disagrees with me, I would yield.  Saying who is or is not a Jew is not my business.

But until that happens, let me continue. For most of what I have to say, it won’t matter.

Abraham didn’t have a place of worship.  He didn’t have a priest he could go to.  He didn’t have a holy book.  Heck, he was going to be a central character in the Bible, the holy book of Judaism and Christianity.

It was just him and God.  God would stop by and have a talk with him every once in a while.

That sounds great, right? Just you and God.

It sounds like a lot of people I’ve met: “It’s just me and God” or, alternately, “Just me and Jesus.”

I’m open-minded enough to give these people a listen.  The power of the Holy Spirit is strong.  God will deal with each person not on my terms but on His terms.

That having been said, to claim a one on one relationship with God is not something to be done lightly.

To say what I want to say now, let me put on my hat as math teacher. There was a time when there were no math teachers.  There was a time when there were just people and the numbers. Well, the numbers and the geometric diagrams.  People just wrestled with the math and figured it out for themselves.  After a while, people wrote things down so that it could be shared at a distance and through the passage of time.  If you have to figure out that XXV times XXV is DCXXV a few times, you write it down and pass it on.

People save this sort of stuff; they recopy it when it gets a bit ragged; then they pass it on when they die.  Not that they have much choice.  You don’t get to take anything with you, not even math books. Darn it.

As time passes, the practice of mathematics arises. You don’t have to figure it out all by yourself. You don’t even have to figure it out yourself with the aid of books.  You have people who’ve struggled through it before to help you learn it yourself.

You have God’s Gift of math teachers.

Do you want to learn math yourself, with just you and the numbers?

Well, you can.  It’s been done.  There was this gentleman from India by the name of Ramanajan who taught himself math on his own.

Well, sort of.

He had some teaching from others.  He had some books.  But, by and large, he taught himself to be a mathematician from nothing.  Like so many before him, he died at an early age. Like so many before him, he died from tuberculosis. (What is it with tuberculosis and geniuses?)  

Mathematicians are still going through his notebooks more than a century after his death and getting discoveries from them.

So, yeah, you can do it on your own.

But--and I want you to pay attention to this part--you know what Ramanajan did?  Even after having done it all on his own, this transcendental genius reached out to the mathematical community.

This was much to the benefit of the mathematical community to be sure, but--the other side of the coin--had he not he would have died in obscurity without anyone ever having heard of him.

One might consider the notion that our relationship with God and God’s Creation is like our struggle with numbers and geometry. You can struggle with it on your own; you can reach out and use the ancient collected writings as your guide; you can go to the bookstore (or the library--let’s not forget the library) for help in your struggle.

Or you can seek out the help of others who’ve been through the struggle themselves, those who are part of a practice that goes back thousands of years.

There you will meet people who--I hope--teach you that two plus two is four. It’s not three, and it’s darn sure not five. It’s four.

Good luck on your journey.

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.

As Good as I Once Was

 As Good as I Once Was

By Bobby Neal Winters

I mowed for the third time this week. It was a good mow, a satisfying mow, one of those mows that keeps you coming back.

These days, I spread the mowing of my lawn over three days.  We have the lawn at our house, which has a moderately large lot.  In addition, we have a lot next door.  I do the front yard of the two houses one day; I do the backyard of our house the next chance I get; finally, when weather permits, I do the backyard of the lot next door.

It organizes my life during the summer: It is good to have purpose.

As I look back on my life, I remember there was a time when I could’ve mowed it all in one day. There was a time when I did indeed mow most of it in one day.  Then the time came when after doing it in one day, I sat down in my recliner and became one with it, a cartoon cloud of Zs floating above my head.

Pacing the mowing came as my answer to the reality of being older. For me, mowing is a way to measure the aging process. 

Unfortunately, there are other measures.

When I was in graduate school, I used to get up in the morning early enough to eat breakfast and teach a class at 7:30am.  I would then take my classes, study, and stay up studying until 10pm.

The next day it would all repeat again.

Ah, those were the days.  But I graduated, got a real job, and time passed.

By the time my middle daughter was in algebra, she learned that it was useless to ask me for help after 8pm.

These days I try not to do even elementary arithmetic too late in the day.

Early in the day, I can still do as much as I ever did.  Indeed, I think because of experience and broadened insight, I can do more. I understand more; I can think more clearly; I can boil a problem down to its essentials.  I can do more on the back of a Home Depot receipt than my younger self could’ve done on a yellow pad.

But as the clock ticks forward on the day, my energy level goes down.  I become like an LED operating on a battery that has been drained: the light blinks more and more erratically until it flickers out entirely, the voltage having fallen below the LED’s threshold. 

As is so often the case, I find my situation summed up nicely by a line from country music.  The late, great poet Toby Keith put it this way:

I’m not as good as I once was, but I am as good once as I ever was.

Salacious interpretations aside, of course. 

I’d been having trouble with plantars fasciitis. The pain in my right heel was excruciating whenever I first got up to walk. I was afraid that I would have to give up walking and working in my shop.  Switching to Skechers and generally babying my feet has taken care of it, but in the meantime--rightly or wrongly--I thought that the way I stood at my lathe might be contributing to my problem.  

To fix this, I made myself a new lathe stand.  This took six 8-foot two-by-sixes.  Think about that. It was heavy.  I glued together pieces first, but after I joined all of the pieces together, I couldn’t lift it.  Luckily for me, my daughter and her fiance came to visit, so I asked him to help. I thought I’d get one end and he’d get the other, but while I was busy sweeping up a spot of floor to put it on, he put it under one arm and carried it over.

I am okay with that.  My body has “matured” enough that it can’t perform such feats of strength; my ego has matured enough to appreciate another man’s strength.

He’ll be able to open those pickle jars when the time comes.

He is in the spring of his life, just as we are in the spring of the year.  The days are pleasant now, with the cool mornings and the warm afternoons.  The smell of freshly mown grass is in the air.

But the days on the calendar will soon begin to whip by like in one of those passing time sequences in the old movies.  It will be summer, then fall, and then winter again.

Let’s enjoy it now.  Let’s enjoy every day.

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.

 All Alone in the Dark Forest

By Bobby Neal Winters

If there is intelligent life in the universe, where is it?

I’ll make the easy joke and then get on to business: It sure isn’t here.

That out of the way, the question is known as the Fermi Paradox.  It is attributed to the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi who believed that if there was other intelligent life in the universe, then it would have had enough time to begin spreading and would have arrived at Earth by now.

This makes the assumption that we aren’t one of the first intelligent species to arise, and that is fair. In science they try not to assume that there is anything special about us.  This strikes me as unnecessarily limiting, but let’s proceed.

My YouTube feed is filled with videos regarding the Fermi Paradox.  It looms large in my life.  It’s everywhere.  There seems to be a cottage industry among YouTube creators who make content about the Fermi Paradox.  Hairs are split and then sliced thinner and thinner. Content is recirculated.

And I eat it up.

There are a number of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. The one I am going to name now is called the Dark Forest solution.

This comes to mind because I’ve just finished a novel by Cixin Liu called “The Dark Forest.”  It is the second book in his trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past.  The first was “The Three-Body Problem.”  I liked the first book enough to read the second, but I waited because it exhausted me.  The second is even better, but I will need to rest again before I tackle the third, “Death’s End.”

Returning to the Fermi Paradox, what the Dark Forest Solution says is that an intelligent race in the universe needs to act like an unarmed person who is alone in a dark forest which might have predators hunting within it.  You don’t want to make any noise; you don’t want to light your flashlight; you don’t want to do anything to attract attention.

For an intelligent race in the universe, this means that you don’t want to do anything that shows the universe that you are intelligent.

Well.  I can’t say what we look like from stellar distances, but up close we are hiding our intelligence just fine.

All kidding aside, on one hand this looks like a pretty good argument.  It was good enough to carry the novel by that name.  On the other hand, I’ve heard convincing scientific arguments that you can’t really hide an intelligent civilization for very long.  It has to do with the products of industry and so forth.  But that gets technical really quick.  If you are interested, I suggest you go to YouTube and search “Isaac Arthur Fermi Paradox” and be prepared to spend some time.

I’ve settled down to the opinion that intelligent life is very rare.  Scientists say that life arose on earth at the very first moment it was possible for it to do so. Taking that at face value, this means that either (1) it is very easy for life to arise or (2) it arose somewhere else and arrived here beginning to grow when it was possible to.

Given either of these alternatives, it took billions of years to get from life arising to the so-called homo sapiens, man the wise.  That means that however easy life is, intelligence is hard.

We are looking out on the universe with ever more sophisticated equipment--the latest being the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)--and we are seeing no signs of intelligence. There is one indication of possible life, which they will argue about for years and years and years, but we’ve not seen the markers of intelligent life.

This argues that it’s rare.  Maybe so rare that we are it.

Given the pictures of the universe that the JWST is sending us, where untold billions of galaxies are in an area of the sky that can be hidden behind a grain of sand. Within that picture, our galaxy--not our sun, our galaxy--looks like a mote of dust in a sunbeam. 

That is absolutely terrifying.  

The Dark Forest Solution to the Fermi Hypothesis aside, there are those who’ve been looking for extraterrestrial intelligence to be the “adult in the room.” There are those who use extraterrestrial intelligence as a replacement for God.  They keep saying, “There must be life elsewhere, and some of it must be intelligent.”

Or we could be all alone in a dark forest.

It strikes me that the human race was once all alone in the dark forest.  We learned to build fires and soon taught any predators who came near to be afraid themselves.

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.

 Woodturning and the Great Divide

By Bobby Neal Winters

I think it was late March, and I think it was just before spring break. I should’ve noted the date more carefully because history was a-being made, as they say.  I’ll be marking the time of my life from that trip.

I made a trip to the Grizzly Store in Springfield, Missouri.

Words won’t adequately describe it, so I won’t even try.  Let me just say that if you are someone who enjoys the practice of woodworking in any of its manifestations, then this store is a place for you.  It is to woodworking stores as Buc-ee’s is to quick-stop gas stations: The quintessence has been distilled, concentrated, and put into a water tower to the point of overflowing.

Can I compare it to Rocklers? Can I compare it to Woodcraft? Both are fine places. You might as well compare a campfire to a supernova, an M&M to the planet Jupiter made entirely of fudge.

I bought a new lathe there, and then took my wife to Buc-ee’s for lunch.  We should’ve done it the other way around because she insisted on sitting in the truck with the lathe while I fetched us a bit of brisket on a bun.  Not that I think that anyone is going to tuck a 100-pound lathe under their arm and make a run for it, but you never know.

I’ve been on a journey through the World of Wood-Working and only relatively recently have I found myself in the area of wood-turning, the Land of the Lathe.

Before coming into the Land of the Lathe, I discovered that the World of Wood-Working has many surprising divides in it, many borders that are reinforced with land mines and concertina wire.

There is the division between hand tools and power tools, for instance. There are purists on both sides of the divide.  There are those on the hand tool side that will rip boards by hand, eschewing the much more convenient table saw; they will mill up all of their boards by hand, using hand planes and the like instead of planers.  

On the power tool side, there are those, by way of contrast, who will use power tools even for those tasks that are more easily done by hand.  They will use a router to chamfer their edges when a hand plane would do the job better and more safely.

Can you imagine?

For most of us woodworkers, this boundary is like the border between Brazil and Paraguay at Ciudad del Este: As porous as all get out; folks are running back and forth and nobody is checking your passport.

And let’s not even talk about the “pocket hole” divide. Talk about land mines and concertina wire.

And each of these comes with its own hierarchy of practice.

While I do have some strong opinions on each of these, let me just ask in a child-like way, can’t we all just get along?

While I do try to straddle the fence, I do like doing as much with hand tools as can be done easily and well, but once you take up the lathe, you can’t be a hand tool purist anymore.  You are in the middle of downtown power tools.

(I say that, but there are those purists who build and use human-powered lathes. My hat is off to you, but I will give you a little distance because you are--and I mean this in the kindest possible way--crazy.)

The big divide in the world of woodturning, the Land of the Lathe, is that between gouges made of high speed steel and those that are tipped with carbide.

Your project is on your lathe turning at anywhere from 300 to 3000 revolutions per minute and you have your gouge pressed to the wood, creating sawdust at a rate that you’d never believed possible before doing it yourself.  

This works great until the gouge gets dull, but then something needs to be done.

If you use high speed steel, you need to take it over to your slow speed bench grinder and sharpen it.  By way of contrast, if you have a carbide tipped gouge, you can get away with loosening a screw, turning your tip a quarter turn, and then tightening the screw.  I should say, you can do that four times before you have to plop down twenty dollars for a new tip. While you can sharpen a carbide tip, I get the impression that most people don’t.

In case you are wondering, I’ve got both types. The carbide tips are easier to use, but you can’t do as much with them.  I am trying to learn how to use high speed steel, but there is something to be learned there.

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.

 Ye Shall Know the Truth

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are in a very confused and chaotic time. There is a lot of information and a lot more “information.”  I was about to write “but you can’t make a pattern out of it,” but, hell, you can make dozens of patterns out of it. Mutually contradictory ones. It’s all over the place.

Maybe I am just not ready to understand. 

You would think that being clear and forthright would be the best way to communicate, but there are some things you can’t just say to people outright. 

They are not ready to hear.  

After my Rotary trip to Russia, I explained in plain terms what it was like to a man who had certain preconceptions that he couldn’t overcome.  I could tell by his facial expressions that he was writing me off as an “ugly American” so I stopped talking to him about it.

Communication to those who are unprepared, or negatively prepared in his case, is sometimes so difficult as to be futile. Or worse. Sometimes people lash out.  Sometimes they will use what you say against you.

I am in a Bible Study that is going through the Gospel of Luke right now. Jesus taught in parables and then explained to his disciples what the parables meant.

They asked him why?

He quoted from the Book of Isaiah saying: “though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.”

The truths he was sharing were meant for the in-group, the group of people that was on his side. Others might eventually pick up on it, but only after they had studied him so much they would almost be a part of the in-group anyway.  Indeed, the final insight might actually bring them in.

The process of being prepared to learn the truth can often be difficult.  It is so intertwined with the process of growing-up as to almost be inseparable from it.  This is because the truth is often unpleasant.  When it’s too bitter for our unprepared palate, we reject it.

I can hear my own voice in my head saying, “Oh, Dad, that’s not true.”

He’d just turn away.

Years, nay decades, have passed, and not only do I understand what he was saying, I know he was right, and that maybe that was only the half of it.

We ignore truths that we are not prepared for. We ignore truths that don’t fit our DisneyLand idea of reality.  We sip at the bitter medicine and spit it out, or sniff at it and don’t taste it at all.

In skillful hands, this can be used to transmit more than one message at the same time. A potent medicine can be hidden inside a sugary liquid.

I watched a movie last night.

No, I actually watched two movies. They were on at the same time, on the same screen, starring the same actors.  They were saying the same dialog, but one was there for you to pick up on the surface and the other was in the background and very subtly told.

By great writing and understated acting.

The movie was “The Family Way” with Haley Mills, but don’t dismiss this as being for kids.  While the surface story can be followed by teenagers the deep story requires you to bring something with you. It’s given in small pieces spread throughout the so-called main plot. You know those codes hidden in a book where you pick out the first letter of the word and it spells out a message.

It’s like that.

In the current tempest, I try to do more listening than talking. I am looking for pieces to the puzzle.  I am trying to make sense of it all.  Trying to put together pieces of the puzzle.

Nothing yet.

Maybe there is no puzzle.  Maybe this is just a descent into chaos.

Or maybe the Descent into Chaos is the puzzle and I just don’t want to see it.

That could be.

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.

 Vaccines in the Post-Truth World

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am going to talk about vaccines. Put a pin in that for a moment.

We are living in a troubling chaotic time. 

And I am getting old. I’ve been blessed to not to have lived in such turbulent times as did my father and his father, but I ain’t dead yet, so I’ve still got a chance.

Yea me.

Anyway, I am writing about vaccines because I was scrolling through Facebook when I came upon some posts by some people whom I know to be intelligent who were posting about vaccines as if they were pure poison.

This disturbs me.

Let’s talk about vaccines. 

We like bright, straight lines in human knowledge but often the truth is fractal. The science of vaccines is one of the places where the truth is fractal.

Vaccines have saved a lot of lives. A lot. We don’t have smallpox anymore; we’ve almost whipped polio. Almost. My buddies in Rotary and I are working on it.

In the course of writing this article, I got out of my comfort zone in terms of scientific knowledge, so I contacted a couple of experts in the field.  They are smart people because I can tell that they are; that’s my superpower.  They are not in the pay of big pharma; I can tell because they don’t drive Mercedes-Benzes.

What I distill from them is the following:

Not all vaccines are the same, but each has a lot of scientific research behind it.  The research is complicated enough that most people simply won’t understand the details.   Regardless of their efficacy, vaccines do have side effects.  Some of them have more and/or worse side effects than others. Medical judgment has to be applied in their use.  For example, the rabies vaccine is very painful, as I understand, but if you are bitten by an infected animal and don’t take it you will die an incredibly painful death.  The side-effects of the treatment have to be weighed against the benefits and vice verse. This is true for every vaccine. Though not every vaccine is so extreme.

I can tell you from personal experience that the shingles vaccine has some unpleasant side effects.  I felt like I had the flu.  Every joint in my body ached.  However, everyone who has had the shingles said, “Yeah, I know, take the shot anyway.”

The devil lies in whose judgment do you trust? 

I trust the folks that I talked to for the reasons that I said. They also say the COVID vaccine did stall the pandemic; there is little doubt of this.  Is it possible that they have been misled by disinformation from those who seek to manipulate the system for their own benefit?  I will admit that is possible if those who are against vaccines will admit the same.

My father lived in a time when there was still smallpox in the world.  We vaccinated everyone for it, and now it is gone.  There was polio abroad in the world during their time as well, and now it is almost entirely gone. Those are two cases where vaccines were exceptionally effective.  By way of contrast, we still have to vaccinate for flu every year.  It will probably be with us forever.

We live in an age that has no memory of the past. If it didn’t happen to us, it’s gone.  We are not only ignorant, we are proud of being ignorant.

And we’ve been given the “gift” of social media so that now we are free to destroy truth at an unprecedented pace.  

My poor old brain is a whirlwind of country songs and bits of the Bible.

In the whirlwind turns this from the 3rd chapter of James’ Epistle: “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”

You always knew where you stood with James. What would he say about Facebook?

The point I want to draw from this is that once we say something out loud in front of the crowd our egos make us stand by it.  “I was wrong” is harder to say than “Honey, I’ve been kissing the superglue.”

And as we post and repost who is pulling on the bits in our mouths?

This argues for either developing the humility to admit when you are wrong or to developing the ability to just keep your mouth shut.

I’ll be sitting over here holding my breath while the people of the world do that.

I know two things. The first is that this column will not have changed anyone’s mind.  Those against vaccination will steadfastly remain against vaccination.  The second is that I will continue to be vaccinated when my doctor tells me I should.

Welcome to the post-truth world.

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.

 Seminole Wind

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was out on my walk today listening to music. John Anderson’s song “Seminole Wind” came up on my playlist.

So blow, blow Seminole wind,//

Blow like you're never gonna blow again.//

I'm calling to you like a long lost friend //

But I know who you are.

I wondered to myself whether this was cultural appropriation.

Cultural appropriation. I’ve learned a lot of new phrases.  Cultural appropriation; colonization; ethnic cleansing.

I hear these. I think about them. I try to do it with a fair mind.  I try to reflect.

That word reflect is a good one.  I try to mentally look in the mirror and see if any of that reflects back on me.

As many of you might know, I am from Oklahoma.  Oklahoma is a Choctaw word that means “red people.” It is one way the indigenous people referred to themselves.  The indigenous people were a part of our lives in that part of the country in the way they aren’t here in Kansas.

We (my brother and I) grew up learning about the “Civilized Tribes”--a label that is not necessarily embraced by those to whom it refers--like frogs learn about water. They were simply a part of the world we lived in.  We learned to name the tribes in this order: Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole.  The sports teams in the town of Seminole, Oklahoma, had a cheer that went: “Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Seminole can’t be beat.”

But, as I said, they don’t necessarily embrace the name “Civilized Tribes.”  One commonality they do have is they were removed forcibly from their land in the eastern part of the United States. They weren’t hurting anyone, they weren’t threatening anyone.  They were on land that could be used to raise cotton on; cotton prices were good; they were removed so others could take their land and--with the aid of slave-labor--grow cotton.

There was money to be made from the cotton, money to be made from the slaves. So they were moved to Oklahoma on what has come to be known as the “Trail of Tears.”  I am not quite sure that this necessarily meets the requirements to be called “Ethnic Cleansing,”  but it sure smells the same.

This was done by Andrew Jackson against the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States.  Jackson is famously quoted as saying, “The Court has made its decision, now let them enforce it.”

They couldn’t; it wasn’t; an atrocity was committed.

They lost their homes in Mississippi, Alabama, and the Carolinas.  They had to go to Oklahoma. Whatever the merits of the Great State of Oklahoma, it would be traumatizing to be forcefully moved from anywhere to anywhere else. 

Home is home.

We can’t even use the excuse we were Christianizing them.

One reason tribes of the Trail of Tears were referred to as “Civilized” is that they were already Christians, Baptists and Methodists for the most part. And I say Christian, but many of the missionaries marveled at how readily the indigenous peoples took to Christianity.  Read this as they were better Christians than the Christians the Europeans knew.  One can still see this in how they take care of their people using that casino money.

The Trail of Tears is one of our country’s sins.  Just one.

It’s a sin.  But it’s a sin that some of us (many of us; most of us?) have profited from.

How do we deal with this?  At church on a weekly basis, I stand with the rest of my church and confess to a litany of sins and the minister says, “In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.”

Do we as a country need to confess to a litany of sins and beg forgiveness in this way?

Not this way. But in some way.

We need to study our history through a clear lens, not rosy, not dark.  We need to recognize where we erred, but we also need to recognize that sometimes all of the choices available are bad ones.

My way is to write about it. If some of you didn’t know about the Trail of Tears, you do now.  The United States--WE--broke our own laws.  Can we make up for it? I seriously doubt it. But we can remember it:

So blow, blow Seminole wind,

Blow like you're never gonna blow again.

I'm calling to you like a long lost friend

But I know who you are.

And blow, blow from the Okeechobee,

All the way up to Micanopy.

Blow across the home of the Seminole,

The alligators and the gar.

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.

Incoherent, Nonsensical Ranting from a Conspiracy Theory Might’ve Been

Incoherent, Nonsensical Ranting from a Conspiracy Theory Might’ve Been

By Bobby Neal Winters

There are times when I think I wasted my time getting a PhD when I may have been born to be a conspiracy theorist.  (I think a lot of people at universities have made that mistake, but let me struggle to stick to the topic.)

I am surrounded by people from both ends of the political spectrum and all colors in between.  I don’t like to waste time arguing. (And it is a waste most of the time because hardly anyone changes their mind; most don’t even modify their argument.  They just charge on mouthing the same talking points.)

One thing I’ve heard over and over, is the statement that Trump is stupid.  I am open-minded enough to periodically entertain the notion that might be true, but--speaking to those who say this--that is a very dangerous thing to think about your political enemy.  Perhaps they want you to think they are stupid; perhaps there are things they have to say to placate their base; perhaps they are operating with constraints you can’t see; perhaps their agenda is not what you think it is.

These are all possibilities that should at least be entertained. Entertain those from time to time, while I periodically think that maybe Trump is stupid.  Given what comes out of his mouth sometimes, it’s hard not to.  But let’s continue.

Among those many colors of the spectrum I’m surrounded by, there are two individuals who’ve said independently of each other: Don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does.

What follows is my analysis coming from doing just that.  There are people who pay far more attention to this than I do; there are people who are far smarter than I am; there are people who know more about politics than I do.  What follows is my analysis of what is happening, it’s not necessarily what I want to happen or what I think ought to happen.

In other words, don’t shoot the messenger, especially when he is admittedly a would-be conspiracy theorist.

In that which follows, I am going to use the word hegemon. The internet defines a hegemon as “a dominant leader, country, or group that exercises significant influence or authority over others.”  The United States is the current world hegemon, and we have been since WWII.  Before that it was Great Britain; before that it was the Netherlands; before that it was Spain; before that it was Portugal.

There are perks to being a hegemon.  It helps you make money.  Indeed, if you do it right, it helps everyone make money.  A world hegemon acts like a world policeman.  They take care of the international spaces that don’t belong to anyone--like the oceans, for example--and keep the malefactors from malefacting.  On the oceans, they keep the pirates from running wild. That is why in all of those old pirate movies, it was always the British who were coming after the pirates.

We are now the ones taking care of the pirates.  That’s us.  We have a magnificent navy that dominates the oceans.  I think it is probably the best that the world has ever seen, but I don’t have data to back that up.  Since I am just on a conspiracy theoretic rant, I shouldn’t worry about it, but there  you go.

We similarly maintain a strong military. 

This is very expensive.  It is a huge part of our budget every year, and maintaining it has added to our huge national debt.  I hate to name the number because it might be even bigger than that, but anyway it’s so big that even if I wrote it down, it would be difficult to understand in a meaningful way.

We are spending a lot of money on being the world’s hegemon.  At the same time, many of the countries we are protecting and whose trade we are protecting have used their money not on the military, but on healthcare and education for their people.

All of this said, the actions that are being taken look like they will ultimately take us out of the position of being the world’s hegemon.

I would like it if the citizens of the US were the healthiest, best educated people in the world.  What could possibly be wrong with that?

Ah, but there’s the rub.  It’s like in a western when the old sheriff steps down.  Who is going to be the new sheriff?

China?

Ask India, Japan, and South Korea what they think about that.

There was a time between WWI--which basically gutted Great Britain--and WWII--after which the US took over--when the world effectively didn’t have a hegemon.  That period was marked by the rise of Fascism and Communism.  Hitler and Mussilini; Stalin and Mao.

Maybe my analysis is wrong.  I am just a conspiracy theorist could’ve been, after all.

But this is what I’ve been thinking about.

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 Sound of Silence

By Bobby Neal Winters

I was walking down the Watco Rail Trail today near where it meets Broadway when the Youtube music algorithm brought me Disturbed's cover of “The Sound of Silence.”

It’s always been a haunting song. While there are some surface interpretations to it, I’ve always felt there was more there.  Just as Bob Dylan was prophetic in many of his songs, I think Paul Simon was playing that role when he wrote this one. 

Not long after hearing the lyric

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls//

And tenement halls

I was walking down Broadway and read the graffiti-style mural that read: “Your music is in you.”

This is an example of what Carl Jung called synchronicity.  I can’t actually define synchronicity. I’m not that smart, for sure. But I know an example of it when I see one.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about words and numbers.  There are folks--both English majors and Math majors--who like to draw a line, a very dark and thick line, between words and numbers.

I believe that is a mistake, a really, really big mistake.

Numbers are words.

This came to me when I was watching one of my grandsons learning to count.  He was laying out potato chips on the dining room table counting, “One, two, three, four,...” and continued to do so, saying a word every time he put down a potato chip.

It occurred to me that the only thing that would stop him was when he ran out of the names that he knew for the numbers. (Or ran out of potato chips, but it was a pretty big bag.)

In American English, at least the nontechnical part, we run out of names for numbers at about a trillion.  Well, let me make that more precise: most educated people start struggling to think of names for numbers at one trillion (1,000,000,000,000). There are names beyond that: quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion. And you can go a lot farther, but it gets complicated and the vast majority of humans aren’t going to know and don’t want to know.

Some of you might be old enough to remember the folks back in 2012 who were all worried that the world was going to come to an end because the Mayan Calendar ended in the year 2012.  My understanding--and the person I think I learned this from has an office next door to mine--the truth of the matter was the Mayans simply didn’t have words for the numbers in their calendar beyond that date.

But let me get on with my rant. 

Numbers are words. Since there are more numbers than we know how to pronounce, there are words we have no way to say. Words that are forever silent.

Truths that can never be uttered.

The poets, the prophets, and the mathematicians stretch themselves to try to pass on these silent truths, but the struggle is in vain so much of the time.

The math lecture is slept through.

The prophet is ignored.

The words of the poet go unsung.

They echo in the sound of silence, as it were.

That doesn’t mean that the truth dies. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get passed along.

It means the truth is not passed from mouth to ear. It must go from heart to heart.

The truth doesn’t die.

And while it can always be spoken, it can never be silenced. For certain, what can’t be spoken most certainly can’t be silenced.

Because your music is in you. It always was and always will be. It will echo in the sound of silence.

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.

 Jesus, God, the Bible, and all that

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am a teacher.  My style of teaching requires that I learn something myself first through experience and then I pass it on.  There are some things that I can’t pass on in the classroom because (a) I teach math and (b) I teach in a state institution. If you don’t want to learn about religion right now, I recommend our excellent sports page to you. Well, that might be a religion too, but you know what I mean.

Traditional Christian teaching understands God as the Mystic Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  We believe that Jesus was God.  In particular, we believe he was fully God and fully Human.

This has been a point of contention.  Blood has been shed; ink has been spilled; hot air has been expended.

It’s been a big deal.

All my life I have believed, and I still believe. It was the way I was raised, the way I was educated.  But now as I grow older, grow more dispassionate, I find that the nature of my belief has been odd.

What do I mean?  I mean that I’ve had no difficulty seeing Jesus as God.  My difficulty has been seeing him as a human being.  I think that is something that I need to correct.

We are told in the Gospel of John that no one has seen God.  One might assume that he’s talking about his readers because there are scriptural references to Adam walking with God in the Garden and to Moses seeing God however obscurely.  But it’s safe to assume none of John’s readers were among those selected few.  

John goes on to explain that we see God through Jesus: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.”

As I said, I am well aware that there is disagreement on this. There are whole religions of very fine people who disagree with my tradition on this. I am not here to argue about it.  I am a math teacher: I don’t argue, I just explain why you are wrong.  My purpose is to start with this line from John’s gospel and go from there.

Most of the people I’ve met have an idea of God.  And here I will add even the atheists, nay, especially the atheists.  

The atheists have an idea of God. They are definite.  It is clear to them. They have done more study on it than you or me or almost any clergyman that I know. They take their disbelief in God very seriously.

They disbelieve in God, and when I’ve listened to their idea of God, I find I don’t believe in that God either. This is a statement that is by no means unique to me.

But don’t let me wander too far. My point here is not to try to change an atheist’s mind. God forbid. (It’s a joke; lighten up.) My point is that even atheists have some idea of God, and I think most people do.

Whether or not God exists, there is a natural tendency for people to believe. I’ve read articles that have stated that there is a part of the brain that is wired for holy experiences.  I’ve seen that used in arguments for the non-existence of God.  The same people don’t use eyes in arguments for non-existence of the sun, but there I go again wandering off again; it is not my point.

We have a natural tendency to believe in God.  But we have competing notions of what God is.

In the Bible, we have a record of one tradition’s experience of wrestling with God and/or that tradition’s notion of Him. (I’m using the traditional pronouns here. Make a drinking game of it, and let it roll over you.)  

Those in my tradition, use Jesus as a lens on the Bible (“the writings” as the authors of the New Testament referred to their scripture).  Through Jesus, the Human, his life and deeds, they came to an understanding of God.

Through that lens, those who knew him, those who were closest to him, wrote such things as “God is Love.”

We see God in the acts of Jesus: Acts of healing; acts of teaching; acts of expelling demons; acts of feeding the multitude.

Acts of loving kindness. 

Jesus is a lens that magnifies the picture of God that was given in the Old Testament.

So there you go.  There will be those who disagree. 

That’s okay.

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.

 What Do You Know?

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been told in the past, and I pass it along from time to time, that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

We can only learn something, we can only know something, when we are ready.

What do I know now?  One thing.

I am happy.

Given all that is wrong in the world at this point, that might be a surprising or even a disappointing statement. Be either surprised or disappointed as it gives you pleasure.

But I am happy.

There is scientific research that says--much to the surprise, or perhaps, disappointment of some--older people are happier.  So it could just be that my happiness is a consequence of statistics. I am open to that. 

But I’ve got my own reasons.

I am back in the classroom full time after an absence of many years.  Okay, truth be told, I never quit teaching, but teaching one or two classes a semester is not the same as teaching four classes and the teaching thereof being your raison d’etre. 

It’s not so much the teaching per se as being back at my calling.  I am doing what I was put on this earth to do.

The happiness comes from a combination of that and having become old enough to realize that.

Perhaps at a more basic level happiness comes from wanting to do what you are doing, not doing what you want.  Feel free to go back into that sentence with a compass, a sextant, and a notepad and explore it a while.

As I look back at previous times, I see myself as doing something, but resenting that I wasn’t doing something else. I wasn’t trying to find the joy in the task at hand, but simply wishing it would be over.

I will admit that there are some activities that are objectively unpleasant.  What I am talking about is, lecturing in class, but wishing I was preparing a lesson; preparing a lesson, but wishing I was doing research; doing research but wishing I was spending time with my family; spending time with my family, but wishing I was reading.

And so on.

With the passage of time comes, perhaps, an appreciation of activities for being themselves.

Okay, I don’t like to grade papers.  If I said I did, they would stick me in a straight-jacket and drag me away by my heels.

And rightly so.

But I’ve learned the art of owning the grading of papers as part of my chosen profession.

I think that is part of the happiness that comes with aging: the knowing of oneself.

There are certain mysteries that we are presented with in the course of our lives.  At least there have been for me.  These are things I think about in the night, both as I lay awake, but also in my dreams.

These are mysteries which I am at the boundaries of my intelligence even to think about.  They are mysteries that stretch me.

Recently, I’ve been waking up during the night, and saying, “That’s it. I understand now.  I could explain it to someone.”

The thing to do would be to get up, go to my computer, and write those thoughts down.  Share my pearls with you.

Instead, I roll back over and drift off again.

The answers--and even the questions that evoked the answers--are gone by the morning.  The only thing left is the feeling that I’ve encountered the Transcendent in the night and it has escaped.

An artifact of my happiness, and perhaps the cause of it, is that I am okay with that. I’ve mapped the Abyss; I’ve plumbed its depths; I’ve witnessed the battle of Gog and Magog; and I have let it go.

And I’m okay with having let it go, because I am happy.

Or am I happy because I am now able to let it go.

Perhaps the solution that can only be grasped in the darkness of the wee hours is best left in the darkness of the wee hours.

Knowledge comes to us when we are ready to receive it.  That is something I know from my calling as a teacher.  

The knowledge that has come to be now is that I am happy.

I suppose I was ready for that.

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.

Turning Bois D'arc

 Turning Bois D’Arc

By Bobby Neal Winters

My people call it Bois D’Arc.  Folks around here tend to call it Hedge.  There are some refined educated folks who call it Osage Orange, and they are welcome to do so.  

It is a free country.

But my people call it Bois D’Arc and pronounce it bow dark.  That is an example of a genuine folk etymology which is to say that knowing what something is influences the way you pronounce it.  You see, my people know that Indians (Native Americans, Indigenous people; pick one that makes you happy and push on) made bows from the wonderful wood of this tree.  

The French knew it too.  That’s why they called it bois d’arc.  But the bois is pronounced bwah and means “wood” and the d’arc means “of the bow.”  So it all makes sense and the folk who I call my people just don’t want anyone to forget that connection.  

It’s about history; it’s about reality.

I got a piece of bois d’arc from my brother some time back.  I want to say a year ago Thanksgiving. It might’ve been longer than that, but if so not too much.

I used some of it to make some woodworking mallets, but I still had some left.  I’d cut it from one of my brother’s trees. It’s about 3 or 4 inches through and it still has the bark on it.  

The Bois D’Arc is not a pretty tree.  Indeed, one might say without too much fear of contradiction that it’s ugly.  It’s got thorns on its limbs.  

It bears a fruit that not many animals find attractive, no matter how hungry they might be. The internet tells me that only the seeds are really edible and that the latex that permeates the fruit can irritate your skin.

But it is tough.  

It will grow in poor soil, in inhospitable places.

It is defiant. 

Yesterday, I took a piece of what my brother gave me and turned it on the lathe.

It is hard.

Very hard.

I had my doubts that I would be able to do much with it until I got past the bark, past the dry part of the wood.  When I got down to the wet part, the part that was still “green,” it turned easier.

I called it green, of course, just because it hadn’t dried out yet.  The wood beneath the bark was actually yellow, a beautiful, beautiful yellow.

I am just starting with the lathe, so I don’t know how to make much.  So far what I’ve done is make squarish objects into cylinders. Those things and a lot of saw dust.

But I’d seen a Russian guy on Youtube making whistles.

And I thought, “Hmm, whistles.”

That’s what grandpas do.

I made a couple from other wood: one from cedar and one from pine.

I thought to make one from bois d’arc.  The wood of my people.  The wood that exemplifies my people.

I turned it between centers to knock the bark off and to make it round.  I then stuck one end in a chuck while still having the other end held secure.  

I began taking off wood to take it down to the size of a whistle.

The yellow just got deeper and more beautiful.  But it’s still as hard as iron inside.

I was able to drill a hole down the axis without too much trouble, but cutting a wedge from the side with a chisel to make the whistle was just about as much as I could do.

With all the bark removed, it is revealed to be beautiful on the inside, but it’s still hard, still unrelenting, still something you don’t really want to mess with if you don’t have to.

The wood of my people.  

It is right.

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.

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.