The kitchen. About 9:00 AM. Pancakes are being prepared.
Spouse #1: I know you don't share my interest in science, but I just want to tell you that my BM this morning weighted exactly one pound, abstracting from any measurement errors.
Spouse #2: Listen. I was a science major. That is not science. That is obsessive self absorption.
Spouse #1: I used the before and after body weight method of calculation.
Spouse #2: Get out of here!
**************************************
When I was in my twenties, a time when people who had established relationships in college were getting married, I heard the story of a guy who, a certain time after his wedding was in the bathroom, when in came his wife who sat down on the toilet and relieved herself. The husband told this tale with the remark that that was when he knew the honeymoon was over.
The connection between these two stories is the absence of embarrassment associated with what is rather private speech and action. People say and do things in front of a spouse that they would never say or do in front of anyone else. How long does it take to reach this level of candor and shamelessness? Does it ever get to 100%? As I ponder the question I can think of two things that I have not shared with Beth. Will I at some future time? I don't expect either to come up and I don't expect to bring them up.
I guess the title should have been, What Won't You Talk About After 40 Years?
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Plumbing Error # 96
.
The digits comprising the numbers 10 through 99 when contemplated not as values, but merely as paired lines offer a variety of implied or suggested ideas. Consider the number 10 in which one half is a line that is straight from one end to the other while the other half follows a continuously curving course that has no end at all. The two lines are polar extremes, but as they are linked in a single number, they bring to mind the Asian idea of yin and yang, opposites contained in one whole. All the coupled twin digits, 22, 33, 44, etc. but especially the parallel ones of eleven, suggest symmetry and teamwork among equals. The set of circles that form the number 88 makes what in all the other two digit numbers is a duet, into a quartet and congers thoughts of common sets of four such as the points of the compass or a very good poker hand. To a degree they also accomplish the curious effect of making a square out of circles. Both 52 and 25 have a certain contrariness to their two component parts, being similar shapes in inverted juxtaposition. The reader who chose to dally further in this line of thinking would no doubt find other examples, but I will quit by pointing out the lovely harmony, even intimacy suggested by the number 69. The two parts nearly embrace. (More so in fonts other than this.) The author is aware that his observation in this case is not original. Be that as it may, there it is, the most harmonious of the double digit numbers. Transpose the digits and the feeling is reversed. Harmony becomes discord and affection, disdain. In the number 96 something is awry, not as it should be. It is no doubt from this discordance that plumbing error number 96 takes its name.
Plumbing error number 96 is that mistake in which the plumber connects the hot water line to the cold water fixtures and the cold water line to the hot water fixtures. The author knows not if any reader will ever commit plumbing error number 96, but he herewith provides a pictorial solution to the problem, just in case. He happened to have the picture in his camera.
The digits comprising the numbers 10 through 99 when contemplated not as values, but merely as paired lines offer a variety of implied or suggested ideas. Consider the number 10 in which one half is a line that is straight from one end to the other while the other half follows a continuously curving course that has no end at all. The two lines are polar extremes, but as they are linked in a single number, they bring to mind the Asian idea of yin and yang, opposites contained in one whole. All the coupled twin digits, 22, 33, 44, etc. but especially the parallel ones of eleven, suggest symmetry and teamwork among equals. The set of circles that form the number 88 makes what in all the other two digit numbers is a duet, into a quartet and congers thoughts of common sets of four such as the points of the compass or a very good poker hand. To a degree they also accomplish the curious effect of making a square out of circles. Both 52 and 25 have a certain contrariness to their two component parts, being similar shapes in inverted juxtaposition. The reader who chose to dally further in this line of thinking would no doubt find other examples, but I will quit by pointing out the lovely harmony, even intimacy suggested by the number 69. The two parts nearly embrace. (More so in fonts other than this.) The author is aware that his observation in this case is not original. Be that as it may, there it is, the most harmonious of the double digit numbers. Transpose the digits and the feeling is reversed. Harmony becomes discord and affection, disdain. In the number 96 something is awry, not as it should be. It is no doubt from this discordance that plumbing error number 96 takes its name.
Plumbing error number 96 is that mistake in which the plumber connects the hot water line to the cold water fixtures and the cold water line to the hot water fixtures. The author knows not if any reader will ever commit plumbing error number 96, but he herewith provides a pictorial solution to the problem, just in case. He happened to have the picture in his camera.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Working To Perfection
As Monsieur Voltaire so sweetly and succinctly pointed out, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Fortunately in some fields of work perfection is not required. The extreme example is hitting a baseball. There are people earning a million dollars a year for hitting a ball and if they manage to do it successfully on 30% of their times at bat, they are stars. It would seem that, averaged over the full profession, civil trial lawyers must succeed only about 50% of the time, as for every winner, there is a loser. I believe psychiatrists do pretty well financially, though I’m not sure I ever heard of anyone being cured of anything by his shrink. I find a lot of comedians are just not that funny and people are allowed to write on blogspot for free without limit, even if no one ever tunes in to see what they have to say. Need I mention weather forecasting? Computers? Software? Web sites? How about financial advising where I suspect practitioners earn more for producing less benefits than even baseball players. Yes, I think there is a fair amount of imperfection going around.
Still, probably in most fields of work a pretty high level of performance is expected. Clothes that shrink, shoes that blister, cars that stall, are taken back. A portion of the lawyers mentioned above practice their trade on behalf of dissatisfied medical patients. (A neighbor recently told me that when he went in to get a knee replacement his wife wrapped a piece of tape around each leg. On one was written the word doctor. On the other she wrote lawyer. When the doc saw it he went and got his camera and took a picture.) Double entry bookkeeping is a system in which every transaction requires two notations which when summed up over all the transactions for all the accounting period, must balance out. Failure to do so indicates that some error has been made and it must be hunted down and corrected. In bookkeeping perfection is the standard. Which brings us at last to plumbing.
The job of the plumber is water control; the nice clean water coming in and the sour nasty water going out. The place of the sweet water is within a system of pipes that brings it to the point of use. It is supposed to stay within the pipes until it reaches its time and place of use at some sink or toilet. It is not to slip away prematurely. The plumber makes that happen. The route of the pipes from the single line that enters the house to the various points of water use is circuitous, maybe even tortured. The line undulates and bifurcates and copulates (couples) and includes gates (valves). In the case of copper pipe, at each such turn and coupling and division the ends of two pipes are soldered to a fitting that holds the pieces together. Here again we have a case where perfection is required. It does not do to have most of the joints water tight. They must all be so. 100%. Working conditions are not always ideal. Sometimes the fitting to be soldered is in close proximity to a flammable object like a floor joist, or some wiring. Sometimes it is impossible to see the back side of the piece the plumber is working on and he must work by Braille. Sometimes the work space is cramped and it is hard to point the torch or hold the solder in the right spot. And finally the required perfection is complicated by the fact that there is no way to check the individual joints until the whole system is connected and the water turned on.
The lazy optimist does not make a good plumber. The lazy person never wants to do more than the minimal required and the optimist tends to think that what has been done has been done right. He melts on a little solder and assumes that’s good. When he thinks he’s finished he doesn’t double check to be sure he actually did every joint or that he actually connected the hot water source to the hot water faucets and not say, to the toilet or back yard spigot. He just turns on the water. No, the lazy optimist is not well suited to plumbing. He should stick to blogging. But the stubborn, cheap, lazy optimist would never call a plumber. Plumbing is not that hard.
Still, probably in most fields of work a pretty high level of performance is expected. Clothes that shrink, shoes that blister, cars that stall, are taken back. A portion of the lawyers mentioned above practice their trade on behalf of dissatisfied medical patients. (A neighbor recently told me that when he went in to get a knee replacement his wife wrapped a piece of tape around each leg. On one was written the word doctor. On the other she wrote lawyer. When the doc saw it he went and got his camera and took a picture.) Double entry bookkeeping is a system in which every transaction requires two notations which when summed up over all the transactions for all the accounting period, must balance out. Failure to do so indicates that some error has been made and it must be hunted down and corrected. In bookkeeping perfection is the standard. Which brings us at last to plumbing.
The job of the plumber is water control; the nice clean water coming in and the sour nasty water going out. The place of the sweet water is within a system of pipes that brings it to the point of use. It is supposed to stay within the pipes until it reaches its time and place of use at some sink or toilet. It is not to slip away prematurely. The plumber makes that happen. The route of the pipes from the single line that enters the house to the various points of water use is circuitous, maybe even tortured. The line undulates and bifurcates and copulates (couples) and includes gates (valves). In the case of copper pipe, at each such turn and coupling and division the ends of two pipes are soldered to a fitting that holds the pieces together. Here again we have a case where perfection is required. It does not do to have most of the joints water tight. They must all be so. 100%. Working conditions are not always ideal. Sometimes the fitting to be soldered is in close proximity to a flammable object like a floor joist, or some wiring. Sometimes it is impossible to see the back side of the piece the plumber is working on and he must work by Braille. Sometimes the work space is cramped and it is hard to point the torch or hold the solder in the right spot. And finally the required perfection is complicated by the fact that there is no way to check the individual joints until the whole system is connected and the water turned on.
The lazy optimist does not make a good plumber. The lazy person never wants to do more than the minimal required and the optimist tends to think that what has been done has been done right. He melts on a little solder and assumes that’s good. When he thinks he’s finished he doesn’t double check to be sure he actually did every joint or that he actually connected the hot water source to the hot water faucets and not say, to the toilet or back yard spigot. He just turns on the water. No, the lazy optimist is not well suited to plumbing. He should stick to blogging. But the stubborn, cheap, lazy optimist would never call a plumber. Plumbing is not that hard.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Luck: what you get that you don't really deserve
Good:
Take mine for example. I have had three pieces of luck so good that it was all I needed to have a very nice life. One was the house that Beth and I bought in 1970. It was pretty run down and the neighborhood was such that the insurance companies would not have provided coverage were they not required to do so by the State. When a few years later all over the country people began to appreciate the advantages of city living and the gentrification of urban neighborhoods took hold, in Seattle that phenomenon began on our very block. After just a few years what we thought of as a temporary abode became a modestly valuable middle class residence. As well as sheltering us in quite a nice way for forty years, it has facilitated some great living experiences away from Seattle by earning rental income and several times serving as trading stock. This house also fostered the development of some of our most cherished friendships. I regard this as mostly a lucky purchase because if it had been based on some superior wisdom or vision we would have bought a lot more houses on this block as they were selling for $65,000, $75,000 and $80,000 over the years. Another piece of life shaping good luck was being born in the late 30's, about eight years ahead of the baby boom. This timing has kept me out of any wars, ahead of a booming demand for places at college and then in the housing market, and yet allowed me to enjoy the benefits of Novocaine, (and more recently Percocet), the Internet, cell phones, etc. I've lived my adult life during a great age for middle class Americans. But of course my best luck by far was marrying Beth. It was luck in the sense that at the time I proposed I had not even the shadow of an idea of the ways in which she would improve my life. I didn't know what my life was to be so how could I have foreseen the ways that she would make it possible? Specifically what she had was a psychoclogical fortitude and practical adaptability sufficient to remain married to a guy who in his late 30's decided that it wouldn't really be necessary for anyone in the family to work full time. In those days being the wife of a stay-at-home dad was not only a financial challenge, but a social one. The term stay-home-dad did not exist, but the term dead beat was well known. Men who didn't shoulder the task of providing financial support for the family, didn't get to have a family. It was her psychological strength and remarkable adaptability that allowed me to live the off beat, self indulgent way that I have.
Bad:
It seems to me that serious bad luck comes mostly in the form or financial troubles of some sort and health issues, including accidents. There is no end to the stories of awful misfortune that have befallen people. I thought of recounting one such tale at this point, but it's not really necessary. We all know plenty of tragic stories. We even know them from within the body of our own family and friends. But I can't resist a little taxonomy of bad fortune. There is death. Worse is death with pain. Worse still, death with pain, at a young age. Worse still, all this happening to your own child before your eyes. But even that is not the worst we can imagine. Suppose all that were to happen and you actually had some kind of role, some error of commission or omission that contributed. Most of the misfortune that one suffers is not the worst imaginable. Usually it is not too hard to think of someone else who has suffered worse. My real thought here in this post is a musing on the chance of avoiding serious bad luck throughout one's life.
If you live to something like the age of 80 there are about four generations that might matter. Your parents, yourself and your spouse, your children and your grandchildren. If it is your family's way to stop at two, then there would be about ten people whose misfortunes, if they are serious, might really mar your life. With the myriad of bad things that can and do befall people: illness, financial ruin, addiction, accidents, and so forth, I think it is the very unusual person who manages to get through 80 years without some personal taste of tragedy. Hardly anyone really.
Take mine for example. I have had three pieces of luck so good that it was all I needed to have a very nice life. One was the house that Beth and I bought in 1970. It was pretty run down and the neighborhood was such that the insurance companies would not have provided coverage were they not required to do so by the State. When a few years later all over the country people began to appreciate the advantages of city living and the gentrification of urban neighborhoods took hold, in Seattle that phenomenon began on our very block. After just a few years what we thought of as a temporary abode became a modestly valuable middle class residence. As well as sheltering us in quite a nice way for forty years, it has facilitated some great living experiences away from Seattle by earning rental income and several times serving as trading stock. This house also fostered the development of some of our most cherished friendships. I regard this as mostly a lucky purchase because if it had been based on some superior wisdom or vision we would have bought a lot more houses on this block as they were selling for $65,000, $75,000 and $80,000 over the years. Another piece of life shaping good luck was being born in the late 30's, about eight years ahead of the baby boom. This timing has kept me out of any wars, ahead of a booming demand for places at college and then in the housing market, and yet allowed me to enjoy the benefits of Novocaine, (and more recently Percocet), the Internet, cell phones, etc. I've lived my adult life during a great age for middle class Americans. But of course my best luck by far was marrying Beth. It was luck in the sense that at the time I proposed I had not even the shadow of an idea of the ways in which she would improve my life. I didn't know what my life was to be so how could I have foreseen the ways that she would make it possible? Specifically what she had was a psychoclogical fortitude and practical adaptability sufficient to remain married to a guy who in his late 30's decided that it wouldn't really be necessary for anyone in the family to work full time. In those days being the wife of a stay-at-home dad was not only a financial challenge, but a social one. The term stay-home-dad did not exist, but the term dead beat was well known. Men who didn't shoulder the task of providing financial support for the family, didn't get to have a family. It was her psychological strength and remarkable adaptability that allowed me to live the off beat, self indulgent way that I have.
Bad:
It seems to me that serious bad luck comes mostly in the form or financial troubles of some sort and health issues, including accidents. There is no end to the stories of awful misfortune that have befallen people. I thought of recounting one such tale at this point, but it's not really necessary. We all know plenty of tragic stories. We even know them from within the body of our own family and friends. But I can't resist a little taxonomy of bad fortune. There is death. Worse is death with pain. Worse still, death with pain, at a young age. Worse still, all this happening to your own child before your eyes. But even that is not the worst we can imagine. Suppose all that were to happen and you actually had some kind of role, some error of commission or omission that contributed. Most of the misfortune that one suffers is not the worst imaginable. Usually it is not too hard to think of someone else who has suffered worse. My real thought here in this post is a musing on the chance of avoiding serious bad luck throughout one's life.
If you live to something like the age of 80 there are about four generations that might matter. Your parents, yourself and your spouse, your children and your grandchildren. If it is your family's way to stop at two, then there would be about ten people whose misfortunes, if they are serious, might really mar your life. With the myriad of bad things that can and do befall people: illness, financial ruin, addiction, accidents, and so forth, I think it is the very unusual person who manages to get through 80 years without some personal taste of tragedy. Hardly anyone really.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
A Fight I'm Glad to Miss
It’s good to be smart, right? There’s no down side is there? There’s a down side to being taller. On average tall people don’t live as long. It takes more resources to sustain a tall person. As a species we’d probably be better off if we were all a foot shorter. But if everyone were somewhat smarter, wouldn't that be unambiguously good? I think so. Even for the people who are already pretty smart. It’s probably true for our dogs as well. I can’t think of any downside to having the dog population be smarter. Cows, I don’t know. Maybe cows should just be left as they are. And as for rats, we certainly don’t want them to be any smarter. They’re too smart as it is.
How long do you think it will be before those pretty smart people who are messing around in the human gene pool will be able to make new off spring smarter? A hundred years? That doesn’t seem implausible to me. Isn’t that a direct extension of having the capability to fix the genes that predispose people to cancer or sickle cell anemia or many other genetically linked maladies? Once we can alter our genes to make us more healthy, won't we be close to being able to make ourselves smarter, or stronger, or blonder or whatever? To return to a very old allegory I think we have already reached out and plucked the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, (you could think of that as the age of enlightenment), and we are steadily moving that fruit in the direction of our lips. Once we have learned how to remake our species according to our own likes and dislikes, then we will truly be God-like, whether that God be real or simply supposed by many people to be real.
For a couple of decades there have been stories about the angst of parents feeling that the path to an Ivy League education now begins at preschool. Miss the correct feeder preschool and kiss that Harvard education goodbye. Imagine the fight there is going to be over deciding whose kids get to be born really smart. Of course there will be plenty of God fearing folk in this country who will oppose such genetic manipulation, but once the Chinese have the capability, then the national defense argument for us to do it too will be pretty forceful. Will we have a market based solution? Will the opportunity to have smarter kids be something one can or must buy? Can human society work if everyone is a genius?
Let’s suppose my grand children will be breeding in 30 to 40 years. I don’t think it will be their problem, but the fight may have begun in their lifetimes.
I'm sorry great great grand children for what you are in for, but at least you won't have to worry about getting cancer.
How long do you think it will be before those pretty smart people who are messing around in the human gene pool will be able to make new off spring smarter? A hundred years? That doesn’t seem implausible to me. Isn’t that a direct extension of having the capability to fix the genes that predispose people to cancer or sickle cell anemia or many other genetically linked maladies? Once we can alter our genes to make us more healthy, won't we be close to being able to make ourselves smarter, or stronger, or blonder or whatever? To return to a very old allegory I think we have already reached out and plucked the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, (you could think of that as the age of enlightenment), and we are steadily moving that fruit in the direction of our lips. Once we have learned how to remake our species according to our own likes and dislikes, then we will truly be God-like, whether that God be real or simply supposed by many people to be real.
For a couple of decades there have been stories about the angst of parents feeling that the path to an Ivy League education now begins at preschool. Miss the correct feeder preschool and kiss that Harvard education goodbye. Imagine the fight there is going to be over deciding whose kids get to be born really smart. Of course there will be plenty of God fearing folk in this country who will oppose such genetic manipulation, but once the Chinese have the capability, then the national defense argument for us to do it too will be pretty forceful. Will we have a market based solution? Will the opportunity to have smarter kids be something one can or must buy? Can human society work if everyone is a genius?
Let’s suppose my grand children will be breeding in 30 to 40 years. I don’t think it will be their problem, but the fight may have begun in their lifetimes.
I'm sorry great great grand children for what you are in for, but at least you won't have to worry about getting cancer.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Thoughts In Anticipation of the Arrival of Guests
Hardwood floors are just so great. No matter how much you sweep and vacuum and push your swiffer around and around, there is always a little bit of detritus left. It is there to keep you humble.
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