Life and Living and Science Fiction

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is all about life and living. That’s the beginning, the middle, and the end of it. That all became clearer to me when I began thinking about writing a science fiction novel.

I’ve been a fan of science fiction ever since I learned to read.  I am from the age where we were still feeling the ripples from Sputnik and hard science fiction was the main attraction for nerds like me.  When I started writing, I decided I’d like to turn my hand to it, and when I was a kid, I wrote some really horrible science fiction short stories.  They don’t exist any more.

But now, having lived long enough to maybe know something, I’ve been thinking about writing a novel and have been reading a lot of science fiction novels in order to prepare for this.  I’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy; I’ve read Iain M. Banks “Culture” books; I’ve read Adrian Tchaikovsky’s books; I’ve read Alistair Reynolds books; and, of course, The Expanse series.

All good. But...

They are good, but they get to a point where they use something akin to magic.  This is usually to circumvent the speed of light limit that would make travel between stars an affair that takes years.  The ones who keep the speed of light as a hard and fast speed limit then invoke something about freezing people while they travel through the depths of space.  That sounds plausible, but the truth of the matter is that if you can “wake someone up” after having frozen them for 20 years, you also have the power to raise the dead.

In addition, speeding a spaceship up to even a tiny fraction of the speed of light requires a tremendous amount of energy.  And when you get to where you are going, you have to slow down again.

All of this to say, I don’t find any of that plausible.

And I want to write something that is realistic.  Well, as realistic as it can be while still being science fiction.

All of this having been said, it brings me to an essay that Isaac Asimov wrote in 1960 which was titled “Stepping Stones to the Stars.”  It has been almost fifty years since I read it, but essentially he was saying we could gradually make our way outward to other stars through the Oort Cloud, which is a collection of icy bodies that surrounds our solar system.

In the setting that I am creating for this possible future novel, mankind would begin by setting up mining and industry on the moon.  We would then make space platforms for farming and other manufacture.  Then we would move out to the asteroid belt, out to the moons of Jupiter and the other outer planets, out to the Kuiper Belt, and out, as Asimov suggests, to the Oort cloud.

A key part of this that I brushed by pretty fast is the farming platforms.  Those will be key. And this is the part where I start talking about living and life.

Remember, it’s all about living and life.

Mankind cannot exist as a species in isolation.  We are part of a much larger, very tightly intertwined whole.  We are part of the tapestry of life.

So if we raise crops on space platforms, we will need the plants, of course.  But the plants will require soil.  Soil is not just rock, it has all sorts of organic matter in it.  Organic matter is a delicate way of saying poop.  For the poop you are going to need animals.  The animals will have their own particular needs.

All of this to say, you can’t just take up seeds to plant on a space platform.  You are going to have to take up a whole ecosystem.  You can’t just move Man into space: You have to move Life into space.

Space does not seem to be very friendly to life, at least not the sort of life we are used to having around us here on Earth.  Because of this, it seems to me, that if we ever really have a culture that does move into space, they will all have to be very mindful of Life.

It seems to me that they would all have to have a realization that it’s not just them.  Each individual is part of a larger, indivisible whole, that tapestry of life I was talking about.

But then I think no.

Because we are now living in space, but instead of a thin metal wall separating us from the vacuum of space, we have a thin layer of atmosphere.  Some do think about it, but most people just go on about our lives oblivious to the fact that we are dependent on other people, on other organisms, on systems and ecosystems that we simply take for granted.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about life and living and how it might manifest itself billions of miles away from the Sun, and how to set a story there.

Hope you are having a good summer.

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.

 Chisels and Philosophy

By Bobby Neal Winters

As those of you who follow this space know, I am now deep down the rabbit hole of woodworking.  So you can imagine how thrilled I was the other day when my grandson wanted to borrow one of my chisels.  I was thrilled, that is, right up until the point I discovered he wanted to use it to break open a geode.  

Now, one could, conceivably, use a wood chisel to break open a geode, but any woodworker reading that sentence just cringed. Wood chisels must be kept with sharpened, polished blades that can shave hair from your arm.  Such edges do not long survive repeated violent contact with stone.

Luckily the request was made over the phone because I myself visibly shuddered when I was asked.  I informed my daughter, through whom the request was conveyed, that it would be a sin to use a wood chisel in such a way. 

Different plans were made.

There are chisels for wood and chisels for stone. Who knows, there might be chisels that could be used for either, but not in my workshop.

Looking back on this, I ask myself why I had such a strong reaction?  Why would any serious woodworker have such a strong reaction.

Let us explore this.

There is a mysterious relationship between Man and the World. Man has a power. It is the power of creation with the Word.

A scalpel lying on a table is just a shiny object by itself.  If a caveman were to walk into the room, he might be attracted to it because it was shiny.  He might accidentally cut himself with it.  Given time, he might be able to use it as a weapon or even a tool.

A surgeon, by way of contrast, could immediately use it to save a life.

What is more, if there were no scalpel, the surgeon, having been educated, would be able to take a piece of metal to a machine shop and have a scalpel made to his personal specifications and then use it to save a life.

When I try to imagine how our ancestors invented the knife, my guess is that somebody came upon a piece of flint that had been broken in some manner and discovered that some pieces were sharp.  She discovered that the flint shard could be useful in cutting things into smaller pieces.  Eventually it was discovered that you could break the flint yourself and form it into more convenient shapes: knives, axes, spearheads, and chisels.

At some point they quit thinking about these things as being just sharp pieces of stone, and put specific names to them.  With the name came a lot more than just a label.  The name comes with the idea of how to use it and various levels of skill in various different traditions, changing with the particular user.

I guess what I mean to say is that the name of an object points in two directions: one is to the object and the other is to the practice of using the object. I’m loading a lot on the word practice there because there are a lot of ways of doing anything.

I find myself as a member of a woodworking tradition that makes use of the chisel.  Within that tradition, importance is given to the chisel being sharp.  There are those who use whetstones, those who use diamond stones, and even those who use sand paper. During the course of a project, if I find the edge of my chisel getting a little dull I will stop and take it over to the leather strop to burnish the edge a bit.

Those particulars aside, in this sense a chisel lives in the people who know how to use it as much--or more--than it exists in metal.  A chisel is a human thing.  I began this article saying I was happy when I thought my grandson wanted to come into the honorable brotherhood of chisel users but horrified when it was the wrong kind of chisel user.

Well.

Well, today I will be making a trip to Home Despot[sic].  While there, I think I will go over to check the price of the stone chisels. It might not hurt to have one around.  And if someone learns how to use one tool, it might lead to using another.

Who knows?

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.

 Three Rings

By Bobby Neal Winters

Man is a tool-making animal.  We have tools for everything.  We even have tools for contemplation.  Among those are the Borromean Rings.

For those of you who don’t know what the Borromean Rings are and would rather drive than look them up on Wikipedia, I suggest driving down Euclid Street on the block just west of Walnut.  That is where St. Peter’s Episcopal Church is.  

St. Peter’s is as lovely a little church as ever was.  It has two circular stained glass windows in the gables of its southern exposure.  The one on top features Borromean Rings.

They are a religious symbol, but they are also a mathematical object.  I’d never heard of them until I was working on my doctorate in topology and picking up a little knot theory as I went.  To be precise--and that’s what we mathematicians do--the Borream Rings are not a knot; they are a link.  They are a link, each component of which is an unknotted circle.  What makes them special to mathematicians is that no two of the circles are linked together.  It is only in their totality--with all three together--that they are linked.

As you might guess, it’s the last part that engages with religion. They are used as a symbol of the Triune God.  Each piece is a perfect circle which represents eternity.  The fact that the components don’t form a link when any piece is missing, symbolized the unity of the whole.

If you aren’t into church, you might be familiar with them from Ballantine Beer, which uses them as a symbol.  Ballantine Beer was bought by the Pabst Brewing Company and is still available.  So you can drink beer, get religion, and learn about math all at one time.

I’m thinking about the Borromean Rings now in connection with a woodworking project. I am making boxes.  And, of course, that is all any woodworker or carpenter does, but these are special boxes.  They are Bible Boxes.  The idea is that you make a box for someone to put their Bible into, a special Bible.  Maybe one that has been in the family for a long time and needs a bit of protection.

The Bible is a tool we use on our journey toward godliness. Even though we don’t worship the Bible--and we shouldn’t--we do revere it.  Reverence for an object requires mindfulness and taking care.

It occurs to me that I am using the word “Bible” in a couple of different ways here.  There is the Bible as the ancient collection of literature in the Christian Tradition, but there are specific copies of it.  You can’t put the first one in a box; indeed it has a long history of not being contained.  You can put the particular ones with memories and family histories in boxes.

In making my latest Bible Box, it occurred to me that I could decorate it appropriately.  I first had the idea of putting a cross on it--and I may eventually do this--but that seemed too simple.  I thought of maybe decorating the Cross a bit, fitting in INRI around the center.

But then I was inspired.

The Borromean Rings.  They were symbolic of the whole Bible, both Old and New Testaments.  They also had special mathematical meaning to me.  Wherever this box winds up, there will be that visible connection to the mathematician who made it.

Of course I’d never actually carved anything like that on a box before.  I’d put the first letters of my grandson’s first names on boxes I’d made for them, but this was a bit more complicated.

The first step in doing a carving like this on wood is realizing that there are ways to do it.  As a dedicated Okie, that is the first hurdle I always have to overcome. 

Given there is more than one way, you then need to pick one of them. (I follow the method of Mary May on YouTube.)  This requires special tools, yet another set of chisels.

Then you draw a picture of what you are going to carve on the wood you are using.  As these are circles, I used the dividers I have that help me to measure my dovetails to scratch the circles in the wood.

Then I started carving, after having sharpened my carving chisels.  You have to show them the proper reverence.

I actually carved three of them.  The second looked better than the first and the third looked good enough to use.

The box is almost done.  In fact, it could be called done now. I could plop an old bible from my mother-in-law’s family in it right now and be done.  There’s a little voice in my head that’s telling me to line it with velvet, so I reckon I’m going to have to do that.

Everything was easier when I was just making boxes to store my own stuff in.  This being reverent is hard.

While doing the Borromean Rings, I saw how I could do the Trefoil Knot, yet another symbol of the Trinity, so I’ve already started on that project.

I will say this: It has been a tool for contemplation.

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.

 Missing Submersibles and Mass Shootings

By Bobby Neal Winters

A few weeks ago, a small submersible vehicle went missing in the North Atlantic.  Aboard were a few people who were very rich, at least most of them.  At about the same time, a boat filled with migrant workers sank in the Mediterranean.

Guess which of these got the most intense coverage.

You don’t have to.  Even someone who pays as little attention to the news as I do couldn’t miss the coverage on the missing submersible.

There were many reasons for the asymmetric coverage of the two events.  One of these is that it is interesting when bad things happen to rich people.  Two camps separate out from the crowd immediately: Those to hate rich people and those who hold them in awe.

Another reason is that the missing sub had very dramatic connections such as cutting edge technology and the Titanic.  Had they been trapped on the bottom of the sea and rescued, one could imagine a movie.

But I think that the overriding reason it got more attention than the boat in the Mediterranean was the number of people.  We have the capacity to worry about a small group of people. Five or six people in a submersible; three people in an Apollo capsule; 30 men in a mine.

But Stalin was right about one thing: “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”

Once the number of people involved in a tragedy passes a certain threshold, we lose our ability to fully connect, to empathize.

When I thought about the folks in the submersible, I could imagine myself in there with them, being a part of that small group.  I could do this even though I am not rich--though to quote Dorothy Parker, I think I would be quite good at it. I could imagine myself being there because we humans are good at attaching ourselves to small groups.

To restate this, each of us can more easily see ourselves as a part of the story if the story has a particular character to it.  This is something that has been brought to bear on the problem of gun violence.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear: gun violence is a problem; mass shootings are a problem; school shootings are a tragic problem.  All of that said, the political movement to reduce gun violence is being structured in a way that makes use of the way we emote.

When there is a school shooting, it is inevitably accompanied by discussion of gun control versus Second Amendment Rights.  Discussing things is good.  It’s better when they are discussed intelligently.

In recent years, there have been between 40 thousand and 50 thousand people a year killed by guns in the United States.  

This is a problem.

Only about a 10th of those are people under the age of 19.  Don’t get me wrong.  Even one dead child is too many.  But school shootings are not where the bulk of the deaths are.

Of the 48 thousand gun killings in 2021, 26 thousand of them were suicides.

This is a problem.

Now we don’t hear much about this from the press on a case by case basis and for good reason: Suicide is catching.  People in the wrong frame of mind hear about a suicide and it gives them ideas.  They see how to make themselves a part of a story.  This is especially a problem with young people.

Instead, we have chosen to have our conversation on gun violence whenever a school shooting or another mass shooting happens.

And we do need to talk about this because it is a problem, but as with suicides, this gives some people who are in the wrong frame of mind a story they can put themselves into.  You get more school shootings.

Given the density of guns in this country, I would despair of ever reducing the number to a safer level.

But there is most definitely a problem. 

I am one to try to light a candle as opposed to cursing the darkness.  Let me offer two ideas.

The first one is gun safety education.  It should be required before licensing for gun ownership.  Having a license to have a gun should be viewed as being as normal as having one to drive a car.  And before you go all Second Amendment on me, it says “A Well-Regulated militia.”  Having a license based on taking a class like driver’s ed is a part of being well-regulated.

The second one is that we need to do more with mental healthcare.  We need to normalize counseling. Having a healthy mind will lead to having a healthier body too.  But more to my point, it would reduce the number of people who are in a frame of mind that would make them more liable to commit either suicide or a mass shooting.

I don’t look for either of these to happen anytime soon because the political parties are more interested in short-time fundraising than long-term solutions.

But that is just my opinion, of course.

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 Words of a Sad Country Song

By Bobby Neal Winters

Music has an amazing power to move your emotions.  In my case, country music can have a strong effect on me.

The other day one snuck up on me.  It was a song that is at least a decade old that I’d never heard before. “If I Die Young” by the Band Perry came on:

If I die young, bury me in satin,/

Lay me down on a bed of roses,/

Sink me in the river at dawn,/

Send me away to the words of a love song.

Suddenly there were tears running down my cheeks and I was wanting to hold all of my daughters close.  I wiped my face, and I felt better, and the thing is, I hadn’t even realized that I’d needed a catharsis.

You need to have a catharsis every once in a while.  You need to bleed the sadness off.  If you aren’t careful, you might wind up in your garage drinking whisky and cleaning your gun when “Cats in the Cradle” comes on.

I’ve got certain songs that I will use to evoke certain moods.  “If I Die Young” is now on my list for when I need to cry. It joins “Red Dirt Girl” by Emmylou Harris, which can reach into my chest through my ribs and squeeze my heart:

She loved her brother I remember back when/

He was fixin' up a '49 Indian/

He told her,? Little sister, gonna ride the wind/

Up around the moon and back again/

He never got farther than Vietnam/

I was standin' there with her/

When the telegram come for Lillian/

Now he's lyin' somewhere/

About a million miles from Meridian

I’ve noted that a large number of the songs on my sad list are by women. I wonder if this is because the female of the species is around us for our most vulnerable moment?  They are there for us when we are born. They are there for us when we die. They even teach us how to use the toilet.  In doing this, do they learn the pathway into our hearts or do we, by virtue of having experienced them in these intimate times, learn to trust them with our pain? 

Am I just generalizing my own experience?  Do I just like women? Or is this just a sampling bias?

One thing they seem to have in common beyond being female is that the songs they write tell a story.  They are good at it.

They are artists who paint with words.  In “Ode to Billy Joe” Bobbie Gentry wrote:

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas/

Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense,/

pass the biscuits please/

There's five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow/

And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow/

Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge/

And now Billie Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

I can see that. I’ve been at that table. I’ve passed those blackeyed peas.  I can smell the biscuits.  She puts me there; she makes me feel the pain; she convicts me of my sin.

To be sure, there are men who do this.  George Jones’ song “He Stopped Loving Her Today” (written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman) tells a story with amazing economy:

Kept some letters by his bed/

Dated 1962/

He had underlined in red /

Every single "I love you"/

I went to see him just today/

Oh but I didn't see no tears/

All dressed up to go away/

First time I'd seen him smile in years

But for every song like that, there’s one to match it that’s written by a woman.  And the women aren’t ashamed to be manipulative. Dolly Parton has exhibited this ability herself from time to time:

She was just a little girl, not more than six or seven/

But that night as they slept, the angels took them both to heaven/

God knew little Andy would be lonesome with her gone/

Now Sandy and her puppy dog won't ever be alone

It is easy to be cynical about this. Manipulating our emotions to sell a song, to make a dollar.  Catharsis for cash.  If so, I am okay with that, but then I don’t think there is anything wrong, per se, with sentimentality.

I’d mentioned George Jones above who owns “He Stopped Loving Her Today” by his interpretation.  To match this, Erinn Peet Lukes of the bluegrass band Thunder and Rain does a cover of Guns and Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine” that takes it to an entirely different place.  As she is a woman, someone, we--or at least I--have an easier time believing she’s singing about her own child.

As I’ve mentioned interpretation, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Patsy Cline. I don’t know whether she ever wrote a song or not, but she owns everyone she's ever sung.  

Anyway, I’ve been baptized in my own tears with the aid of these songs.  Even though I neither drink whiskey nor clean my guns in the garage, I should be safe for a while lest “Cat’s in the Cradle” should come on.

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.

 Stand by Your Man

By Bobby Neal Winters

“I don’t belong to any man.”

This is something a woman could say and receive universal applause. Or almost.  A man could say, “I don’t belong to any woman.” And people would just knit their eyebrows.  They would be confused as to why he would say it.

But belonging to someone is not bad if viewed correctly. That is, if you take care of the things that belong to you. 

I’ve been doing some “historical research.” I’ve changed up the music I’ve been listening to in the garage.  I’ve heard all of the classic rock from the 70s and 80s too many times.  There are only so many times you can hear “Takin’ care of business” without pulling your hair out.

So I decided to go farther back into my roots than classic rock. I’ve gone country.  I’ve been listening to country music from the 50s and 60s.

It opened a door to a different world.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve heard all of these songs before, but I hadn’t even hit puberty yet when I had. When I heard Earnest Tubb singing “Walkin’ the floor over you” I thought he was singing to a neighbor downstairs.

People will talk about all of the progress that has been made in art. Artists--writers, songwriters--can just say nasty things right out.  But that’s the thing about old country singers.  They said it all, but not in a way that the kids could understand.  You have to have a bit of mileage--mileage on a rough country road--before you could understand.

It’s been the women country singers of that era who have really opened my eyes.  They were doing some true art. I am thinking of Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Patsy Cline in particular.  They were all contemporaries of my mother. (I’ll not say anything more about Patsy, but you’ve got to mention her.)

One of the things my mom said that I can still hear in my own head as if it were coming into my ears was, “It’s a man’s world and don’t you think it’s not.”  And she wasn’t particularly happy about it.  However, if you are going to live in a man’s world, then having a man is an important step.

Tammy Wynette sang “Stand by your man.” There have been some who’ve taken a disparaging view of that song.  Hilary Clinton comes to mind, in particular, but let’s just leave that alone.  For me, listening to “Stand by your Man” in close proximity to Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City” and “You ain’t woman enough to take my man” provides a different perspective.

Tammy is not saying “Stand by your man” just because that is the right thing to do.  She’s saying it because, as a woman, that man is her asset.  He belongs to her.  Her well-being to a great degree is dependent upon him.  It is in her own best interest to stand by him and try to improve him.

Loretta’s songs bring home that she really has no illusions as to her husband’s virtues.  She is amply aware that her husband is flawed. Amply aware. Consider “Don’t come home a-drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind.”

But how dare another woman try to steal him.  Such as he is, he is hers. She has put in quite a bit of work improving him and how dare another woman presume to try to steal him now.

Tammy and Loretta provide a contrast. They were both propounding the same sentiment, but Tammy was ultimately married to five different men and Loretta only the one.  Was this because Tammy learned to spell “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”?  I don’t know.  

They walked their different roads, both of them going through the hills and hollers and neither of them paved.

The man-woman thing ain’t never been easy.  The idea of belonging to someone is something that chafes contemporary sensibilities. It needs to be rightly understood.  When someone belongs to us, we don’t control them: We take care of them.  We work for their betterment; we work for their good.  

Whether the country road is paved or not, it’s got to be a two-way street.

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 Journey

 The Journey

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is important to “clean house” occasionally.  I mean this literally and figuratively. We’ve got to stop, take stock, prioritize, and move on.  Long trips can give us an opportunity to do this.

I had the pleasure of being gone to Paraguay for three weeks and then coming back.  Three weeks is a long time to be gone from home.  If you want to travel light you have to put thought in how you pack. There are decisions that have to be made. Priorities set. I follow the maxim: “More underwear, fewer clothes.”

But then you pull yourself out of your home, the environment you’ve created for yourself.  There are things there that you use everyday that you don’t even think about because they are always there.  There are things you do everyday that you don’t even think about because you always do them.

So on a long journey, you stop everything. You shake off your habits--at least the nonportable ones.

Then you come back and it’s decision time: Which of these habits do I start again?

Almost the first thing I did on the very first morning I was back was to fry myself some eggs in my little cast iron skillet.  That was easy.  I’d missed it.

I also mowed my lawn that very first day back.  That was an easy decision too. When you can’t see your house from the street, it’s time to mow the lawn. 

Then there was the scary decision: Do I take up woodworking again?

Over the better part of the last year, I’ve been turning my garage into a workshop.  I’ve gone to a lot of time, trouble, and expense to create this workshop because of my woodworking habit.  I had established the habit of doing a little something in the shop everyday, but it had been pushed to the side for three long weeks.

When I came back, I had a choice: Take it up again or not?

Well, this isn’t meant to be suspenseful, so let me tell you now, I did.  I’d left a big project halfway finished, and I’ve gotten back into it.  I’ve also begun some smaller projects.

Woodworking is hard; it requires an investment of time and money; but it is something that I want to be a part of me in the long run. 

This process--leaving home, paring down, starting over--reminds me of the story of Noah’s Ark.

Noah, under God’s direction, packed only the bare essentials for what he needed: His family and enough animals to start life again when the trip was over.  Then everything was disrupted. He and his family were on a trip for 40 days and 40 nights, enough time to disrupt all their habits.

Then they started over.

Noah was a farmer, so he planted a vineyard. He made himself some wine and he got drunk.  Then something happened that has difficulty coming through translation. 

We are spared knowing the exact thing by changes in time, changes in custom, and perhaps the delicacy of transcriber or two.  Suffice it to say that even though God had flooded the world to start over again, there were still problems.

People can’t leave all their problems behind them because people are the problems.  I’ve heard this encapsulated in the phrase: Wherever you go, there you are.

But you can make an attempt to shape what the future will look like. I want to continue woodworking, and it looks like I will. 

I also have a couple of writing projects I want to work on. Returning to these has been more difficult for me.  Explaining why would take us too far afield, but suffice it to say that I am working on it for the same reason as the woodworking: I want it to be a part of who I am.

We are all on a journey through space and time.  We have a choice on what we take with us on this journey.  And wherever we go, there we will 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.

 What God put me here to do

By Bobby Neal Winters

Teaching is one of the strangest, most wonderful professions ever. Our job is to take something that we have and give it to others.  When we are done, not only will we still have what we gave away, but if we’ve done it well, we might just have more of it.

I’ve always liked to learn things.  I’ve always liked to share things with others.  This could mean I am a gossip; it could mean I am a journalist; it could mean I am a teacher. As I journeyed through that sentence, I came to the self-realization that I am--to a certain degree--all three of these things, but mostly, I think, a teacher.

It is in my opinion what God has put me on this world to do.

Since 2006, however, I’ve had additional duties. I’ve been working in university administration.  Originally, it was mainly helping students, but increasingly over the last few years, that has changed.

In 2017, I was given the responsibility of chairing a small department; in 2018 I was given an additional department, a bigger one; in 2020, the first small department was swapped for a larger one.

Every step I took along the way meant less teaching.  Less contact with students.  Ultimately most of the students I got to see were ones who were complaining about something.

There is a line in the parable of the prodigal son.  Jesus says of the prodigal son, “He came to himself.”

Late in the fall semester of 2022, I came to myself. I began to think, “This is not what God put me here to do.”

It was unconscious at first.  I was talking to one of my best teachers when I told her, “If anyone ever offers you the job of department chair, remember that God put you on this Earth to teach.”

I realized I was talking to myself.

There are chairs who teach, teach a lot, and teach well.  Don’t get me wrong.  

When I came to myself, I realized that, other than the moments I stole from the administrative work, I wasn’t really enjoying anything I did.

The fact that I turned 60 in October was also in the picture.  While as a mathematician I realize that the zero at the end is just an artifact of the base-ten system we use, you look at the center of the circle, and it is like staring into the abyss.

Are you using your talents? Are you building on a foundation? How much time do you have left?

So I made a decision to go back to teaching.

I’ve been around long enough to know that if I dropped dead right now they would replace me at work in a week, week-and-a-half tops, and maybe with someone who’d do it all better.  But they’d rather not have to, and I’ve enough consideration for my bosses that I don’t want to leave that abruptly, so I’m staying in administration one more year.

When that decision was made and when that decision was shared, my heart began to soar.  Doors that had been closed began to open; paths were revealed to me.  I didn’t actually have a dove descend from heaven to say anything, but I’ve gotten all the confirmation I need to know that I’ve made the correct decision.

So I have a year left on my sentence.

Actually, I just say that to make people laugh.  I’ve come to realize that my time in administration has been very educational. I know how the system works better now than I did 17 years ago.  As my position has shifted through those years, I’ve learned several new perspectives.  

I now know how to operate as a teacher more effectively.  I can help my students to find their way through the system more effectively, and I will be doing it while building on the foundation of my own discipline which I do love.

And to those who will listen I will share what I’ve learned on my journey to the degree that I am able.

In the meantime, you can find me in my office, marking days off of a calendar, looking forward to going back to what God put me here to do.

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.

By Choice

 By Choice

By Bobby Neal Winters

I told my Paraguayan Elementary Statistics Class.  My Russian snake vodka story.  While it has nothing to do with statistics, every once in a while it is good to let the young people know you weren’t always the old boring thing that you are now.  

Anyway, if you catch me sometime, I’ll be glad to tell you, but for my current purposes we only need the end: I am on my Rotary Group Study exchange to Russia in June of 2000 in the dacha of my host’s father.  His father was retired military and had a nice summer country house, aka dacha.

Earlier in the day, I’d had a toenail ripped from my foot, and I was sitting in the dacha’s living room.  The father had made sure I was taken care of.  My foot was propped up; I had a beer in one hand and a glass of vine in the other; and the father was showing me his rifle.  I’d praised the rifle, perhaps too effusively, perhaps too politely, because then the father got a gleam in his eye.  

He spoke to me through a translator:

“I have some medicine that I brought back from China,” he said. “It will cure your foot.”  Then because I’d told him I had three daughters. “After you take this, your wife will give you sons.”

He then brought out a large jar of vodka.  Vodka with the body of a snake suspended in it.  The vodka had leached enough pigment from the snake’s dark green body to render the vodka in the bottle a clear yellowish green color.

I took a look at it and prayed, “Jesus, if you get me out of this, I will never miss church again.”

At that point the father’s wife came in to call us to dinner.  I said, “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus.”

Then the mother spooned out the vodka into a shot glass. The father took the glass and put it in front of me.  

At this point in telling the story to my class, I stopped, looked at the young men in class, and asked, “What would you do?”

The answer came back almost immediately: “You’ve got to drink it.”

And I said, “I opened my esophagus as wide as I possibly could and threw the vodka down my throat.”

I woke up in the middle of the night and began to ponder the young man’s answer: You’ve got to drink it.

While everyone in the class understood, the sixty-year-old that I am now as opposed to the thirty-something of 23 years ago or the twenty-year-old from my class says: No, I chose to drink it. 

I’ve been meditating on the use of food in the Bible, in Genesis in particular. The serpent said, “Go ahead and the fruit; you aren’t going to die.” Eve did, then took some to her husband.  He chose to eat it.

Esau came in hungry from a hunt.  Jacob was making some stew.  Esau said, “Give me some of that stew. I am so hungry that I am about to die.” Jacob said, “Only if you give...your birthright...this day...to me.”

Esau wasn’t going to die; he was hungry.  He chose to sell his birthright.

During the famine in Egypt, the people first gave all their goods, then all their animals, and finally themselves to Pharaoh in exchange for food.  The Children of Israel sold their descendants into slavery for hundreds of years for food.

On the flip side of this, Satan tempted Jesus and Jesus chose not to eat.  He chose not to turn the stones into bread and ultimately the Cross.

The point is to say, I chose to drink the snake vodka.  I didn’t have to.  Ultimately, we have very few things we can choose: I can’t choose to live forever; I can’t choose to jump over the moon; I can’t choose to lift the Empire State Building.

I can choose what goes into my stomach.  That day 23 years ago, I chose to drink the snake vodka. The reasons? To make my host’s father happy for one thing, but I think on a deeper level it was to make a better story.

This was before I began to write, but even then I was a storyteller, and the stories I brought back from Russia were the first ones I had appear in the paper.  It was then that I got printer’s ink in my veins.

It has been an addiction, but I choose to do it.  It has made my life a better story, don’t you think?

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.

Of Time Machines and Airplanes

 Of Time Machines and Airplanes

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am in Paraguay teaching Elementary Statistics.

Hop into a time machine and go back almost 40 years. It would be 1984 or 1985.  My father was still alive. He only had a couple of years left, but we didn’t know that.

A group of my friends from graduate school went to an Oklahoma Academy of Science meeting that was being held at East Central University that year.  It was only a little further from there to my family’s home, so I took my friends to meet them.

We were modest working people.  Our house was small, but we owned it. My friends met my family, and my father was very impressed as to how nice they were, how well brought up, how well-presented. 

They were nice, they had been well brought up, but I knew then and I know better now that they weren’t perfect. Not that anything in particular was wrong with them, but they just weren’t perfect. No one is.

What I know now is that this was a meeting of classes, a place and time where boundaries came together.  My family was working class.  The people I was going to grad school with were middle class.  These are not the same.  Someone who knows something about sociology--which I do not--would know how to classify all the differences with great nuance.

For my part, I will stick to what I’ve seen as one who’s made the journey from working class to middle class.  All I know is what I’ve seen with my own eyes, interpreted through my own lens.

Fast forward four decades.  And I mean fast.

Now hop on a plane and fly 5000 miles south to Asuncion, Paraguay.  I’ve got to wonder what Dad would’ve made of it through his lens.  He’d been to Europe, both England and the Continent, with a group of close friends of his (about a million of them) in the early 1940s.  He and those friends made quite an impression on the place.

He was also an avid reader of National Geographic and daydreamed about visiting the Pampas of Argentina, which is not far from Paraguay.  It would be nice to see the places I’ve been reflected back through his eyes with the benefit of his insight.

I guess I am seeing that to a certain degree when I am interacting with my students.  They are polite, respectful, friendly, and kind.  They are sharp in their studies.  They not only study, but they know how to study.  They have been taught.  

They have been in private schools where the instruction has been in English for at least half the day from Kindergarten on up.

Now, as said above, they are not perfect. No one is.  Indeed, they may have faults that working class kids never dreamed of having because money and privilege open all sorts of doors, not all of them good. 

But one thing I’ve seen, and this is important, is that they are able to interact with authority figures with an ease and comfort that I could never have dreamed of at that age.

As I said, I am in Paraguay teaching Elementary Statistics.  Most of my students will be coming to the United States eventually in order to finish their education. I would like them to come to Pittsburg State because I believe the rest of our students can benefit by being around them.  

While a great deal of this is the value of being around students from another culture in the sense of being from another country, a lot of it is the value of being around students who’ve this level of people skill, who’ve been raised so as to be confident and at ease around authority.

Looking back, I realize I benefited from that myself with my middle-class friends from graduate school.

There are all sorts of poverty. The sort of not having much money comes to mind.  But there is a poverty of experience with reality.  For those of us who came from a rural environment, that’s a big thing.  You don’t meet many different kinds of people; you don’t see many different kinds of things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s TV; there’s the internet. 

It ain’t the same thing.

There is something to being there. There is something to seeing it with your own eyes.

Were I to have my own way, I would drag every student in the university down to Paraguay to see it with their own eyes.  I can’t.  Many can’t afford it financially, which is understandable; many would have a poverty of the spirit, which is a shame, but which can be fixed with time. 

But to bring a bit of Paraguay to Kansas, to Pittsburg, Kansas is something we can do.  To let our Kansas students meet the Paraguayans; to let our Paraguayan students meet the Kansans, it is a good thing.

I think my father would like it.  I think my father would like them.

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

Seeking Black Pepper and Cottage Cheese

 Seeking Black Pepper and Cottage Cheese

By Bobby Neal Winters

My wife and I have been seeking black pepper, pimienta negra in Spanish.  It’s been a hard thing.  We’ve been able to find the pepper corn easily enough, but pre ground black pepper is rather elusive.  Fear not, we have found it, but it has been a challenge.

We’ve decided to cook for ourselves a lot here in Paraguay.  It is a matter of having control of how much we eat.  As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I’ve lost a lot of weight recently, and I have absolutely no desire to gain it back.

For this reason, we are cooking for ourselves in the place we are staying. Well, lunch and dinner at least; breakfast is provided.

Food is basic to who we are, and it is a pathway through which trouble can enter our lives.  This is recognized in the Bible: The Serpent tempted Eve with the fruit of Knowledge of good and evil; Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage; the children of Israel sold themselves into slavery for need of food.  

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus is tempted by Satan to turn the stones into bread, but he does not. He shows that we can control our hunger. He later performs the miracle of turning a few baskets of bread and fish into enough to feed 5000, proving in a case where he was in control that he did have the ability to perform the miracle.

In spite of the lack of spice in Paraguayan cuisine, I do like it.  It has lots of meat, lots of protein, and they tend to eat in social situations.  One of my students says his family--and most families--has an asado (barbecue for lack of a better word) every weekend. It’s an event for the whole family.

Since my diet, I’ve been given a good book on nutrition by a friend of mine.  A good diet is not only about calories, it is about the type of food we put in our bodies.  It is an old cliche, we are what we eat.

In the Gospels, food is a frequent metaphor for something else: Spiritual Wisdom.  When Jesus answered Satan’s temptation, he said, “It is written: Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.”

Just as the food we eat with our mouths makes our bodies, the spiritual food that we take in through our eyes and our ears makes our spirit and eventually our soul.  I do distinguish between the spirit and the soul: the spirit is part of who we are; the soul is who we are.

If you listen, read, and look at things that encourage lust and greed, you will become licentious and greedy.  If you listen, read, and look at things that encourage generosity and kindness, you will become generous and kind.

If you want to encourage certain parts of yourself, you should feed them regularly.  The right things in the right portions.

Often these things are all around you.  We can find all of the meat and bread, fruits and vegetables that we want here.  Other things are more difficult to find, black pepper would be an example.  It is not a necessity, but it does help baked potatoes to go down more easily.

There are sometimes things that can’t be found, however.  We’ve not been able to find cottage cheese here for neither love nor money.  It is not a concept that exists.  They don’t see a reason for it.  The Paraguayans who were educated in the US did not develop a taste for it there, so it is not imported.

I will have to live without it until I come home.

As I press my metaphor, I would say that black pepper would represent a spiritual food that we don’t have to have, is not easy to come by, but we can have by putting out great effort.  This would be like in depth Bible Study.  Cottage cheese would be knowledge that we are just going to have to wait until God tells us directly. 

In the meantime, my wife and I have another week to spend in Paraguay before we come home to decadent pleasures of cottage cheese and mountains of black pepper at every turn.

Nos vemos pronto.

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.

 Going by Landmarks

By Bobby Neal Winters

The street that I am staying on while I’m in Paraguay is Legion Civil Extranjero.  Google translate makes this out to be Foreign Civil Legion.  This makes no sense to me, so I am going to simply believe it means Foreign Legion for no other reason than it just seems romantic.  (This street runs parallel to one called Senador Huey Long, named for the US Senator, who is either famous or infamous depending upon your point of view.) 

So I am staying on Foreign Legion Street in Asuncion, Paraguay. I don’t know the address or even that it has one.  The only thing I’ve seen is Legion Civil Extranjero casi de Las Palmeras.  “Casi” is Spanish for “almost” and Las Palmeras refers to the street that runs east-west just south of us; and we are “almost” on the corner.  

In a city of a million people, this might seem kind of imprecise, but I’ve given those coordinates to a cabbie downtown, and he got us there without a blink: 

“Nos gustaría a ir Legión Civil Extranjero casi de Las Palmeras, por favor.”  

“Si.”

And we arrived without adventure for the price of less than $5.

Walking can be an adventure.  Street signs are rare compared to the US, and you don’t always want to be checking the map on your phone because it’s never a good idea in any city to let strangers know that you don’t know where you are.

You learn to navigate by landmarks.

One of my favorite landmarks is El Colegio Las Almenas, which I had been mis-translating as “The German School,” but that is not correct.  The German School would be Colegio Aleman.  This is School of the Battlements.  When you look at their website, it appears to be an all girls school.

Regardless, it is my favorite landmark because it is at the corner of Legion Civil Extranjero and Dr. Toribio Pacheno.  I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the second street, and it is important.  Take it going to the east, and you will very shortly find yourself at a “Biggie” store.  You could think of “Biggie” as an upscale Dollar General Store which has a greater selection of food, or you could just think of it as an old-fashioned neighborhood market for the modern age.

Come down here and make up your own mind.

In the other direction, there is a restaurant called “O Gaucho.”  This is in Portuguese.  It can be translated roughly as, “The Cowboy.”

For those of you who know what a churrascaria is, it is a churrascaria.  For those of you who don’t know, a churrascaria is a meat restaurant.  I could call it a barbecue restaurant, but then we get into deep philosophical territory.  Does barbecue require sauce?  What is the quintessence of barbecue?  

There are those who charcoal a steak and call it a barbecue.  There are those who say barbecue can’t be beef. There are those who say it must have sauce, but the sauce can’t be sweet. (This reminds me of the distinction between homoousios and homoiousios in the arguments surrounding the Arian Heresy.)

So we flee the English language for the sake of avoiding religious arguments.  A churrascaria is a place where they have a buffet of side dishes, many of which are quite substantial, but the main attraction is that well-muscled young men come around to your table with skewers of meat that have been cooked over wood fires.  The meat is in various levels of doneness from medium-well to “put me back in the cow and I will live again.” 

There will be the occasional platter of chicken hearts and finally a dessert cart. 

All for about $25 a head.

Yes, Colegio Las Almenas is one of my favorite landmarks.

When you travel by landmarks, you have to be more tuned into your environment.  Traveling with a GPS nav-system makes you lazy, it makes you soft, you ignore your environment and take orders from a Godless machine.  You might as well be ruled by Skynet because you’ve turned over your freewill to a machine already. 

When you give up GPS and even give up street names, you pay attention to where the construction is, which yards have dogs, what the businesses are, where the sidewalks are good, where the new paint is. You tune-in to your environment. You are more alive than you ever have been.

They do have GPS here.  It does work.  Getting around by learning the neighborhood is a personal choice I’ve made.  I don’t know when I will pass this way again, if ever, and I want to soak up every moment.

Greetings from Paraguay. Dios te acompañe hasta que regresemos.

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. )

 Learn How to Swim

By Bobby Neal Winters

We are going through a time of change in higher education. Our enrollment is down.  This is true not only locally, but over the country.  There were 4 million fewer university students in the US in 2022 than there were in 2012.  That’s a 10 percent decline. At the same time, the baby boomers (like me) are getting older and in greater need of medical care.  This needs to come from doctors and nurses, who both need education.

And just so that my point is not missed, these people need to be smart.  They need to know how to do stuff.

At the same time, everybody needs to know how to work some kind of machine or other.  We need people who can fix those machines.  This greater need is happening at a time when the birth rate in the US is going down.

With this said, let it also be said that the US has never had enough people to do all the work it wants to do, but we found ways to deal with it.  More on this later.

Now, right here and right now, we have a release of artificial intelligence of a higher quality than has been available before.  While there has been the occasional clap of thunder and flash of lightning before, the release of  ChatGPT was the first big drop of rain, and since that time a few months ago, it’s been a toad-strangler as my old grand pappy would say.

As so happens at times of rapid change, there have been those who’ve looked at the heavy rain, proclaimed it a devastating flood, and have started seeking higher ground.  And to be fair, the potential for disaster, especially in individual cases, is huge.  Again, to quote from the First Book of Dylan: “You’d better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’.”

Before I mentioned that we’d never had enough people to do the work we wanted to do, but we’d found ways to deal with it.  One of those ways was immigration: African slaves to pick the tobacco and cotton; Irish and Chinese to build the railroads; Mexicans to pick the fruit; the brain drain on Europe after WWII; physicians and scientists from Asia.  But even that was not enough at times, so we have done a lot of mechanization:  Cotton gins and reapers; tractors and combines.

In all of these cases of mechanization, we’ve still needed people to do the work, but their reach has been extended by machines.

The recent developments in artificial intelligence are tools that can help extend the reach of our intellectual workers. And this has already been going on for years, for decades, but the rate of change has been so slow we’ve not noticed much.  Some of us remember times before word processors, before spreadsheets, before PowerPoint(good times!), and these tools extended the reach of those of us who work more with our words than our hands.

But this has been like a heavy dew or a light mist.

What’s happened since the release of ChatGPT has been more of a flood.

But ChatGPT is a tool.  It will extend the reach of writers, computer programmers, and educators to begin with

I am interested in all of these.  As a writer, I was curious, so I fed it in a few of my columns (it likes my writing by the way; I asked it) and had it write something on a particular topic in the same style. What it wrote sounded like me.  Maybe not the best version of me; I hope. But like me.  I don’t know if I will ever do anything with that but there are possibilities there.

My interest in programming comes from my job at the university.  I’ve been involved in rebooting our Computer Science program. We rebooted it because there is such a pressing need for computer scientists.  While I was initially worried that the fact that ChatGPT can write programs would hurt our major, I believe the reverse is the case.  There will be an even greater need for programmers, but they will need to be properly prepared.

Even a tool like a hammer is just a chunk of iron if you don’t know what to do with it.

As for education, this might wind up being the largest application of artificial intelligence. (It is hard for me to refrain from putting a joke about curving tests in, so there.)  There are numerous resources online. I’ve personally used them to teach myself a number of things.  Having some sort of guide would’ve saved many false starts. I’ve recently read a story where people are using ChatGPT to guide them.  I’ve got to think there is a way that we teachers can take this and leverage it to help extend our reach in the classroom.  I might leave this as something for the younger ones to figure out, though.

In closing, I’m reminded of an old joke from the 1950s or 60s, I think.  They had just programmed a very sophisticated computer, much more advanced than ever before.  They gave careful thought to the first question they would ask it.

They keyed in the question: “Is there a God?”  The tape turned; the relays clicked; the printer printed; they read the printout.

“There is now,” it said.

We are not there.  This is a tool, and if you are in some professions, you either need to learn how to use it or learn how to swim.

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 Rest of the Story

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been doing two things lately that have intersected in a surprising way.  

I’ve been involved in an online Bible Study where we’ve been going through a book called “When the Church Was Young” by Marcellino D’Ambrosio. I’ve learned about various historical events in the life of the early church including the Donatist Schism.  To make a long story short, the church was persecuted: some of the members of the church folded under the persecution, but wanted to come back later; the Donatists didn’t like that they were forgiven, so they split. 

I’ve also been listening to some country music from the 1960s in my workshop while doing my woodworking.  While doing this, I’ve noted a certain characteristic of most of the songwriters from that era.  They are lost and they know it.  They want to find their way back.

Combine these two, and I’ve had the Parable of the Prodigal Son on my mind. 

As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I grew up as a Southern Baptist, where the emphasis is on saving the lost.  

Not a bad mission statement, but it provides a lens through which every bit of scripture is viewed and if you only use that one lens some details can be obscured.

In any case, for years my view of the Parable of the Prodigal Son had been from the point of view of the prodigal: If you go home people will be happy. Your Father (God) will kill the fatted calf and there will be rejoicing.  And that is true, but the problem is that all of the preachers I’d ever heard stopped at that point.

There’s more.

There’s the stay at home brother. He sees a party going on and wonders what the hell is happening.  Dad, why are you throwing a party for that whore-mongering son of...yours? I’ve been here; I’ve done the right thing; I’ve worked every day for you while...you know what he’s been up to, eh?

I’ve got some insight here. My lot has been more like the stay at home brother’s.  I’ve not had a lot of practice doing the prodigal thing.  The prodigals go out, do their prodigal thing, and come back and everyone is just so happy to see them. 

That old green-eyed monster arises within us: Jealousy; anger; resentment.  It makes you think of another story about brothers: Cain and Abel.

As so often happens in the Bible, this is a retelling of that story. It happens again and again and again. The younger is favored over the older.  Here the younger prodigal is seemingly favorer over his older stay-at-home brother.

As we recall, Cain killed Abel and tried to cover it up, but God knew.  After God rejected Cain’s offering, He told Cain to not be downcast but to just try to do better.

In the parable, the Father has a similar talk with the older brother: “My son you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

The parable ends there.  We are not told whether the older brother ever comes around or not.  Does he embrace his brother?  Does he pretend to embrace his brother to stay in good stead with the father, but kick him out when the old man dies? Does he make continual references to his brother’s activities for the rest of his life?

Well, as this story has played out countless times over the ages, I think it is safe to say that all those things have happened.

This parable is rich. Jesus meant for it to be used in all stages of church life.  Those who are lost can find their way back. That’s right there; take it and put it in your pocket. God and all the angels in heaven rejoice, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But those people who never let their feet wander down the more...uh...interesting paths of life need a little help too.

It is less easy for them, less easy for us to see ourselves as needing help. We’ve never squandered our inheritance on prostitutes after all, and it sounds like it could be fun.

The prodigals know that whatever fun there is comes at a very high price: smoke-filled honky-tonks; lonesome Sunday morning sidewalks; D-I-V-O-R-C-E. 

We know how Jesus would want the story to end. The older brother embraces his younger brother with love; he listens to the reasons he came home; he realizes his secret envy of his brother was misplaced; he learns grace.

Let’s end there, with that hope.

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. 

 Providing a Pattern

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

Life’s been good to me so far.

The question arises: Have I learned anything?

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

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

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

Take up a discipline.

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

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

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

Like going to church.

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

Easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can change yourself; you can connect with others.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Math to the Nines

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

And they are proud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is called the nines complement method of subtraction.  

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

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

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

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

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

So this isn’t new-fangled math.

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

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

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

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

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

The End.

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

 Straight, Square, and Strong

By Bobby Neal Winters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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