Category Archives: Ramblings, ravings

Memorial Day, 2016

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His name was Conrad G. Tolladay, and he was my uncle, though I never met the man. He was also a second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps. Before today if you had told me his name I would have said, “Conrad who?” Nobody in the family used his first name, everyone called him Jimmy. I only found out about his “real” first name by searching the internet for a photo. That’s also how I learned that on January 17, 1945, flying a P-38 named “Oh Kay” over Burma, he was shot down and never seen again. He was 24 years old.

But that is the end of his story.

Jimmy’s story begins on the 18th of September, 1919, in Madera California. He was the first born son of George and Selma Tolladay, and by all accounts was a bit of a joker. On family gatherings his name came up often enough, but the stories about him were always colored with sadness. He was well loved, and deeply missed.

Jimmy was brave, fun-loving, and at times a little reckless. He was raised to be a cowboy on a working cattle ranch, like my father and my uncle. Among other things this meant he could ride hard and shoot straight; the perfect thing for a fledgling Army Air Corps in need of fighter pilots. He had just turned 22 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. He must have signed up for the service immediately afterwards, like a lot of other brave men and woman.

When I was a kid I used to always think that Uncle Jim would one day show up at our house full of epic stories of survival, telling us how he clawed his way out of the jungle to come back and be with his family. Now that I’m older I can see that he must have been very lonely in India, fighting an enemy he barely understood, for a country (China) he barely liked, in an airplane that was at times both thrilling and terrifying to fly.

Now, when I think of Jim, or any of the other 404,000 Americans who died for our country in that horrible war, I often wonder what they would have said if they had known what we have purchased with their sacrifice. Would they marvel at pro Football on color television sets? Would they stand up and cheer at the civil right movement, or would it fill them with anger and disdain? What would they think of rock and roll, the Vietnam War, or President Nixon’s criminal acts? Would they love Elvis, the Beatles? What would they think of the atomic bomb, or the British New Wave? Would they think the cost of their lives was too high a price for such trivial things, or would they be proud of what we have done with their payment?

Short of heaven, these things are lost to us, like their very lives. We’ll never know what they would think of the coming world because for them it stopped the day they stepped into their plane, or their ship, or their foxhole. All we have to carry their memories forward a few photographs, and family stories.

Thus it is fitting that one day a year we raise a flag and take the time to remember the price that they paid. These brave American souls paid a heavy price so that we can sit, sipping our coffees and browsing the internet. Try to remember in the coming days that your life, your livelihood, and your lifestyle are not free; they were paid for by somebody else, at a great personal cost.

Thank you Uncle Jimmy for your life, your stories, and your service.

An Open Letter to the California Employment Development Department

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The other day I had a conversation with an employee at the California Employment Development Department, which contrary to what the name implies is not strictly interested in developing employment. The reason we had the conversation was because a client of mine was being investigated to see if they had properly classified me as an independent contractor. The purpose of the call left me scratching my head. I’ve been working as an independent contractors since 1993. Why would it suddenly be different now?

Well, it turns out it is different now. Thanks to a law passed in 2011 (SB 459) the great state of California added new criteria for determining an independent contractor’s status, and as an added bonus included in the law fines for companies that knowingly misclassified employees as independent contractors. Hence the call from the EDD. The nice employee (I’m not being ironic here, the employee was pleasant on the phone and took great pains to help me understand the law, without ever leading me or telling me what to do. They are quite talented at their job.) lead me though a fairly informal interview and was careful to gather all the input I wanted to give. Finally the conversation ended, but I was left with an uneasy feeling as if I had forgotten something. I can’t be the only one here who remembers the right thing to say 20 minutes after the conversation has ended. After first writing my local state representatives asking for the Assemblymen and Senators who work on the appropriate committees, I sat around and thought about my position. The remaining paragraphs are the result of a weekend worth of pondering.

The name of the employee is intentionally omitted here, as any reference to their gender. Like I said, I found the employee talented and was obviously doing their job to the best of their abilities. In no way did I find fault with them or their actions. They don’t set the rules, our state legislature do that. If you have any complaints please take it up with them.

Dear NAME

I’m writing to you after our conversation the other day regarding COMPANY NAME. Over the weekend it occurred to me that I may have missed some points that could be pertinent to your investigation. I thought I would write in hopes of clarifying these points. Please excuse the length. I’ll try to keep this as quick as possible.

From our conversion I was left with the opinion that one of the defining characteristic of an employee (as opposed to an independent contractor) was whether the individual worked at  the office of the company and used their equipment. Since I often work at my clients offices and use their computers, I can see that this might be a determining characteristic. However, I feel like there is an important distinction here that may have been missed.

Most of my clients have dozens of computer stations set up around their offices. The computers are all similar if not identical in abilities, and all pretty much run the same software. They are as alike as the tech guys can maintain them.

Working on these computers will be a whole host of employees and freelancers, like myself. The value that each person brings to his or her computer is related to their knowledge and expertise. Broadly speaking, there are a few people who make about $15 per hour, a larger group that make around $50 per hour, and finally a few rare individuals who make over $100 per hour. When I say, “make” here I’m talking about what the individual directly charges the company, or the value they bring to the company. Because these people can move about the office, it’s quite common for a computer to have a $15/hour employee working on it one day, and a $50/per hour employee on it the next.

Now if a computer is on Monday making $15/hour for the company, but on Tuesday is making $50/hour, then it would not be accurate to say it is the computer that is bringing value to the company. Because the same computer should, if it was the source of the value, provide a similar value every day of the week. But it doesnt. In fact the computer’s value to the company varies in direct proportion to the person who is using it. That is to say the money the computer generates comes not from itself, but from its users. If they are all running the same software, and have very similar abilities, then the only difference must come from another source. That is, the users.

This is the nature of all work that is a craft; that is a type of work in which the individual “crafts” or creates an art piece. All craft is like this, be it sculpture, pottery, wood carving, or even the more abstract crafts like writing, playing guitar. Much like a potter making mugs on a potter’s wheel, or a sculptor carving images in stone, the value of the work comes directly from the value of the crafter, not from the tools. One would never praise a potter’s wheel for making finely crafted mugs, nor a chisel for carving excellent sculptures. No it is understood that the work comes from the hands of the wielder, not the tools. In the same way, one would never assume it is the computer doing the work of making quality advertising art. Like every other craft, it is the people wielding the tools that create the work, and create the value.

In this context, computers are not a source of value, they are an overhead cost, much like any other office expenses like air conditioning, desks & chairs, telephone systems, or copy machines. They may be a requirement to create the work, but they do not create the work themselves. They are no more important to the value of the work than the air conditioning system, or the type of paper in the copy machine.

So far, all of this is to argue that computers are merely office equipment, a point you likely already accept. It is this next point which I think bears greater scrutiny.

If it is true, as I have laid out above, that the greatest single value brought to any piece of craft stems from the individual doing the work, then it follows that the single greatest tool being applied to the craft resides inside the user. That is the say, the person doing the work is also the holder of the most important tools.

I know this might come across kind of crazy, so let me try to break this down for you. The worker in this context, the one doing the crafting, carries with them two essential things; their knowledge and their abilities. That is, they carry with them what they know, and what they do. These, I would contend, are the most significant differences between someone who does $15/hour work on a computer and one who does $100/hour work. The person doing the more valuable work, has more knowledge, more experience, and they have more tools. This is what I mean by tools. In this narrow context tools are ways of solving technical and artistic problems.

Some of these tools exists in the hands and the eyes of the user, but a vast majority of them reside entirely within their head.

If you think about it, this makes sense. Every computer I work on (and I work on a whole host of them) offers the exact same value when I am using them. This is because the value resides within my head. It’s not in a box I bring to the office, it’s not any special software I keep on a hard drive, it all resides within my head. Quite literally, every office I work at, I go there with my own tools. Not only are they my own tools, but they are the most significant tools in the entire process.

So when you ask if I work in my client’s offices, I will say yes. When you ask if I use their computers I will say yes, but the most important tool I use comes not from the client, or from their commuters but comes from myself. I literally am my most important tool. My head, my hands, and my eyes. It is from these things that my income flows, and nothing else.

So if the most significant tool is the one that resides in my head, then is it accurate to say I am an employee, and not an independent contractor? After all the most significant tool is not supplied by the company I work for, it is supplied by me. If I’m the one providing the most significant source of value, doesn’t that not make me independent?

The Importance of Crashing

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Over the holidays my mother was kind enough to gift me David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers. This week there was an opening in my “to be read” schedule and I picked it up. I got about half way through last night, far enough in that I got to and past the major event at Kitty Hawk in December of 1903 (the first powered flight of an airplane) and past the conclusion of their testing the next year of their second powered plane, this time flown in a large pasture just outside of Dayton, their home town. McCullough is a talented writer of history, he is wonderfully good at taking you into the details of a figure’s life–in this case the Wright Brothers–without bogging you down in them. So I now know about Wilbur and Orville Wright, their family and friends, and roughly how they went from successful bicycle manufacturers to become the first men to crack the problem of powered, heavier-than-air flight.

If you are a fan of history, or of airplanes–I happen to like both–than this book is more than sufficient to warrant your attention. However, this isn’t a book review, in the strictest sense, there are plenty of those to go around upon this book and/or this topic; this dear reader is something different. You see, as I read of the experiences of the Will and Orv, as they liked to be called, I was struck by something really remarkable: The famous Wright Brothers of historical fame crashed their planes a lot.

Their first glider, which they flew out at Kitty Hawk, NC, crashed and was rebuilt several times. By the time they were done testing with it that fall the glider was so abused and rebuilt that they gave it away, it was literally in pieces by then. Their second glider flew worst then the first one, at least until they rebuilt the wing, but it crashed and was rebuild several times afterwards. Their third glider crashed once so bad it took two weeks to rebuild, and it eventually crashed so often it was all but discarded. Even their famous Flyer, the first powered plane ever, crashed on its first major test flight, bending the propeller shafts so bad Wilber had to travel back to Dayton and have them rebuild. The reason why they didn’t make their historic 1903 until December was because they had so many crashes on the Flyer’s delicate frame that the plane could not get off the ground until then. Once it had flown, making three flights, each one successively longer than the last, it was picked up by the wind like a kite at the beach when they stopped for lunch and toppled over forcefully several times, almost injuring a man who was tangled in the rigging. The first powered airplane in the world came back to Dayton in pieces and was never flown again.

The Wright’s second powered plane was a slightly different design than the Flyer, and was test flown practically in their own back yard. But even this plane crashed so often that it needed constant repairs. By this time Wilber was keeping a diary, logging each flight, so we know for instance that they once went for three months with nothing but crash after crash on this airframe. When they learned to turn a plane around, they crashed. When they learned to launch it with their ingenious catapult, they crashed. When they learned to fly higher off the ground, they crashed. In fact, the place was so cantankerous, the flights so short, the crashes so often, that their friends and people from the press simply gave up all interest, thinking them mad men because their progress was so slow and so littered with repairs. By the time their third Flyer was constructed, the first truly reliable aircraft, the two brothers had done hundreds of flights with a health proportion of those ending in destruction. In short, the Wright Brothers were adept at the art by this point they could have been rightfully called the Kings of Crashing.

The reason for all this crashing is not unknown. To their credit the Wright Brothers knew going in that they were attempting to do two very difficult and interrelated tasks; they were trying to discover the laws of aerial mechanics, that is to discover how to design and build a plane than can repeatedly fly through the air, and they were also learning the art of flying such a plane, both at the same time. Neither of these things had ever been done before, in fact many of the leading scientists of their day proudly proclaimed that heavier-than-air flight was impossible for humans. So not only were they blazing two different trails into the unknown simultaneously, they were doing so with no certain knowledge of their success. There were no maps, no methods, and even the most learned men of their day were completely wrong in their theories, which the Wright Brothers discovered to their chagrin.

This is the nature of doing something truly new. It doesn’t matter if it is working at the leading edge of science, or something so prosaic as falling in love, once you step foot down the path that no one else has trod before, you enter the world of the unknown. And the unknown has a lot of pitfalls.

Now the point of all this is not to claim the Wright Brothers were losers. Obviously they became a household name for a reason, and it wasn’t for their many spectacular failures. In fact I’ll bet that up until you read the above you had no idea how often they crashed. Until I read McCullough’s book I certainly didn’t know, and I’m a serious history buff and n airplane buff. I guess if I had thought about it at all it would have been obvious. I mean, there’s no way to learn how to fly and what is flyable, without making a lot of errors. Anyone who has ever designed or learned to fly a radio controlled airplane can tell you that, and I’ve done both. It’s a process the is fraught with trial and error. If I had thought about it at all I just sort of assumed “they figured it out.”

Which leads me to another point: the people around you, what Christians call “the World”, they do not care about your crashes. To them, your crashes, no matter what the cause, are not all that important. What they want to see are your successes. Turn on any news channel and you can see hundreds of examples of people who have succeeded at something, rock stars, movie stars, lottery winners,and  CEOs of large corporations. What you will not see on the news are the many and spectacular failures, crashes, that each of us, all of the time, are doing. If you take the wrong exit off the freeway, it’s not going to be on the news. Neither will be dating a person not suited for you, or failing to miss your stop on the bus. Make a spectacular success and you might make the news, make a mistake and you won’t. Crashes it seems aren’t newsworthy, they’re not important, because they’re too common.

What it comes down to is this: like the Wright Brothers, each of us will find ourselves at some point powered by an inner passion. Maybe it’s to be an actor, a musician, or an artist; maybe it’s to be a wife, or a husband, a mother, or a father; maybe it’s to be a mechanic, or a theoretical physicist, a nurse, or a salesman. It doesn’t matter what the path is, only that it is new (at least to us) and it is difficult. To accomplish our goals we’re going to have to walk over new ground, we’re going to have to claim new metaphorical lands for our purposes, climb new mountains, seek out new ideas, and try on new opinions.

All of these attempts, of course, are going to be ripe for failure. There is an absolute certainty that we’re going to make mistakes, some of them quite large. We’re going to crash. Crash and crash hard. Perhaps even crash fatally. We risk injury and ridicule at every turn. We’re traveling into the unknown and the only truly known thing we can count on is that it will not come without a cost. Pain is certain. Crashes will happen.

Not only will they happen, but when they do we will have no control over them. Think about it, if we knew they were coming we would avoid them, right? The only thing we can control is how we react to them. A crash could mean you’re a terrible person and are never going to amount to anything, or it could mean you made a minor mistake and you need to correct for that. When the Wright Brothers crashed, they got right up, and immediately began repairing their plane. Oh they talked about the crash, believe me they did, but only from the point of view of discovering the problem so they could avoid it in the future. They were learning a difficult task, after all, and mistakes were bound to happen. They just didn’t think those mistakes were based on their own moral failings, nor did they think each crash was a sign that God didn’t approve of their direction. In short, they didn’t think the crashes they caused were a reflection of their own shortcomings. That idea seemed to have never entered their heads. They saw them for what they rightly were, small mistakes on the road to understanding. To them each crash was a way to discover a new problem and thus reduce their ignorance.

As we can learn from the Wright Brothers, crashes are not good indicators of failure, only the inevitable. The only way to truly fail is to either avoid crashes, or even worse to assume the cause of the crash is something other than what it is. Failure doesn’t come from crashes, failure comes from not learning what went wrong when you did crash. And you will crash my friend, indeed you will.

And not only will you crash, but when you do crash you will discover that no one cares. Friends, family, etc. not a one of them is going to be interested unless they are directly involved. Its interested to note that while the Wright Brothers were testing their second aircraft, just minutes away, a short trolly ride, from downtown Dayton, not a single reported from either major newspaper came out to investigate. The Wright Brothers didn’t hide what they were doing. They were flying in plain sight of a trolly line. It’s just that they crashed so much no one was interested. The man who finally broke their story, Amos Root, was an eccentric who had made himself a name by selling bee keeping equipment. The Wright’s first real exposure didn’t come from the press, didn’t come from their friends, it came from a newsletter called Gleanings in Bee Culture. Think that one through for a moment. The only reason Amos was able to write an accurate story about the Wright Brothers experiments was because he was patient enough to visit them several times until they could demostrate to him a reasonable success. In fact they first flight he saw was done by Orville because Wilbur has been in a wreck so bad he couldn’t fly for a month. Very few people are going to be patient with your crashing process. Hold on to those that are. They’re worth more than gold.

My advice to you my friend is to crash and crash often. Only its important to learn from your crashes, don’t make the same mistakes over and over. And remember, no one, except a very rare few, are going to care about your crashes. Ignore what others think or do. They’re not the one’s risking their neck in the crazy contraption that you are. Hell, they probably don’t have the first clue what you’re trying to do, so ignore them and focus on the task at hand.

Happy landings.

 

The thing about the Sequoias.

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IMG_4693_cropThe thing about the Sequoias, or why you cannot photograph the Sequoiadendron giganteum.

Recently my family and I spent a delightful few days of vacation in California’s gold country in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. While there we took a day trip up to Calaveras Big Trees State Park where we hiked the less visited South Grove trail. Thanks to some intense activism this grove of Giant Sequoias is entirely unlogged and remains largely in its wild state. It is, with the exception of the trail and a few signs, almost exactly like hiking in a virgin forrest. I’ve been lucky to spend a lot of time in the Sierras, but this grove is to my knowledge singular. What follows is my attempt to capture the experience of hiking the trail in words. I highly recommend you do not take me at my word, that you do not believe what I have written here. Rather I would prefer you hike the trail for yourself.
As you wander down the trail, the low woods, mostly dogwood and small pines, keep your horizons close. There are a large amounts of dead trees scattered about the forrest floor and plenty of new ones working their way up from the decaying material. The ferns and bushes dot the ground, but do not fully cover it. The whole effect is one of a forest that grows no more than three meters above the ground. It’s not unlike walking through a neighbor’s garden that has been left unattended for years until it’s shape has pushed past any human convention into a wonderful random jumble.
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No sooner than you seen this, you start to notice that this “garden” is underpinned by dark vertical columns. These are the mature pines, sugar pine and ponderosa mostly, with the occasional lodgepole pine added for splash. In about equal measure with these pines are the cedars which grow in clumps like nurseries with large parents overlooking tiny rivers of baby trees, most of them shorter than a man.
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So now your view becomes used to these columns shooting darkly upwards through the light green forest floor. As your eye traces their vertical lines upwards you notice they branch out at around three meters and point their way upwards in long thin triangles. The tops, some of them 200 feet or more above your head, can be seen only from a distance. But these are not unfamiliar trees. These are the taller more wild cousins of the Christmas trees that have been decorating our homes every winter for millennia. We know these trees, we live with them for a few weeks to a month every year. True they are quite a bit larger than the ones in ours houses, but they are essentially scaled up versions of what we know. Scaled up the way 100 tables at a wedding reception are not all that different from the single table you use at home. It is simply more of the same.
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But then, as you wind your way along the trail, you start to see still larger shapes looming out of the forest floor. At first they look like normal trees, but then as you approach them they start to get wider and wider until your mind is so startled by the impossibility of a tree at those dimensions that it forces you to pay attention. These are trees so large they trigger that part of our brain we use to warn us of an incoming threat. Trees that are so large they literally scare you into seeing them. You’ve now arrived at the Giant Sequoias.
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Approaching

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Closer still

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Getting bigger

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Holy Cow!

When you get up close to one, you notice a Giant Sequoia doesn’t look like the other trees. They stand like some weird alien creature that has been imported to the forest. They resemble the other pines pretty much the same way that an elephant covered in fur could be mistaken for a wolf.
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These trees are so large that you cannot fit them into a single photograph. They simply will not fit. If you shoot one up close all you get is a trunk. These shots look just like a regular tree only shot much closer. If you add a human in front for a sense of scale the tree takes on the appearance of an amusement park model. Its so large it looks more like architecture than nature. If you point your camera upwards then the top will be hidden behind the bottom branches (some of which are as large as entire trees nearby). If you step back far enough to capture the entire height then the sequoia resembles an ordinary large tree, reducing the apparent height of the huge pines around it to the size of seedlings. If you add humans to this shot they appear too distant for the eye to scale, or they’ll be so small as to not matter. Another pixel lost in a sea of pixels.
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No matter how far back you get or what lens you use, you cannot capture a Sequoia in a single shot. They are so large they can only be pieced together by the mind of the observer. Its about then that you discover they’re not as much a tree as they are living geology. To stand next to one as it extends upward into the heavens at that impossible height is to stand next to a million years. It’s not a thing. It’s too big for that. It’s a living metaphor. It’s a rock wall that lives and breathes. It is a battleship made of living wood, set adrift in a remote and arid sea.
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As you come across them on the trail, sometimes alone surrounded by a coterie of lesser trees, sometimes in dense clumps of two or three, you start to run out of superlatives. Each tree as it is revealed to you is so impossible that you simply run out of words. As with photography, these trees are so huge you cannot capture them language. They will not fit within a single sentence. And after a few tries you realize even whole paragraphs won’t do. Finally you get to the point were all you can do is stand at the base of such a tree and stare upwards in mute and lensless wonder. Every attempt you make to describe these trees will fail. They simply can not scale down to human size. Even a holiday as large as Christmas cannot contain them.
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No wonder the first white men who saw the Giant Sequoias were not believed. They had to cut one down to prove they existed, and then they tried to cut the rest down because trees that large are a threat. They’re too big. They don’t fit our mechanized world. They’re not just tremendously old, they are time itself. Many of them were born long before Jesus walked this earth, and they come from a race as ancient at the dinosaurs. You can beat against one with your fists a thousand times and they will not notice. They are too old, too indifferent. No wonder we chopped them down. These trees don’t know we exist. Nothing makes a white man’s blood boil faster than irrelevance.
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Finally, this is what you take with you as you walk out of the forest with a camera full of impossible photos that no one will believe; your irrelevance. You have gazed upon a thousand years. Everything you do in this life will be as nothing to these giant creatures. Short of destroying one, you will never gain their notice, and you will never find their approval even if you searched a thousand years. Such a thing does not exist. You are irrelevant. You are nothing. You are a part of the great and beautiful forest we call life, but you are not the biggest part, nor the most important.
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And in the end this is what the Giant Sequoia teaches us; our rightful place.

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Bad Writing Advice #1 On setting goals for your characters

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Rule #1 in a non-existent series of bad advice for writers.

When you (as a writer) introduce a character to a reader, it is like introducing them to a new friend. But that character won’t really become your reader’s friend until you give that character a goal. Once you give him or her a specific goal to direct their actions–they need to avenge their father, they need to kill a monstrous whale, or even they need to get home to their family–it is at that point that the reader will start to anticipate that character’s actions. And that is the point of stories. We live to anticipate.

For example: If you are playing a game of chess only a few minutes of your game time is taken up with the physical movements of the pieces. This is true even of a game that lasts for hours. The vast majority of your game consists of watching your opponent and anticipating both their moves and your own. And it is in this watching and predicting that we take our enjoyment. In short, the enjoyment of the game comes from the anticipation.
In the same way, a reader will enjoy your story as long as they can anticipate your character’s direction. It doesn’t matter if they anticipate wrongly (indeed there are many good reasons to mislead your reader) what matters is if they can. Objects and obstacles only enhance the experience of the reader. They love to see the impossible pulled off. But they need to know what to anticipate, and if you don’t provide that (in terms of a clearly defined goal for your characters), then you’ve failed.

 

The other time travel story

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I’ve been working recently on a time travel story. Its the one I finished last week, as least finished the first pass. (as I’ve discovered, the first pass is only the start of a story.)

So last night I had a dream in which I was telling someone about that story. And then I told them about the other time travel story I had written. The second one was completely different from the first; different protagonist, different plot, different everything except perhaps they both exist in the same fictional universe. It sounded really cool, better and shorter than the first one.

When I woke up this morning I realized I had yet to start on that second story. Probably because I hadn’t even thought it up yet. Even now all I can remember is that I thought it was really fun, and it featured a female protagonist. In my dream the story seemed completely familiar, exactly like any story I’ve written. I could tell right away it was one of “mine.” Only of course it has yet to be written.

So was it dream from the future? What do you think?

Being smart is not something you are, it’s something you do.

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I came up with this today and I’m posting it for prosperity.

I’ve often found most people assume that intelligence is a talent. That one is stuck being however smart they are (or however smart they think they are) and there is nothing they can do about it. Like intelligence is some crazy set amount, like a pile of rocks, and no matter what you do you can’t add or subtract from that pile.

The problem with this idea is it flies in the face of experience. All of us have met highly intelligent people who have done tremendously stupid things. Just like most of us have met  the intellectually challenged person who does some things very smartly.

So what gives? How can a smart person also do dumb things, and vice-versa? Well the short answer is intelligence is really a mark of potential, within a very narrow range. Its like a child born to very tall parents. Odds are when that child becomes an adult they will be tall as well, but its not a requirement. They can receive only short genes from their parents, they can experience a disease which reduces their height, there are all kinds of ways that they can be short. The point being great height, like great intelligence, is not set in stone.

But there’s another thing at play here, and that is the idea of doing as opposed to being. And that is the crux. What you do can be intelligent (or not) completely independent of how smart you are. Stepping in front of a speeding train is dumb (unless you happen to be Superman) while investing in your retirement is smart. You don’t need a PhD, or a certified membership in Mensa to know not to step in front of a train, likewise there’s no reason why an intellectually challenged person couldn’t put money into a retirement account.

But even more importantly, doing smart things offers a clear value to your life, whereas being smart only adds value when it’s applied. Doing smart is like investing early in your retirement, or not stepping in front of a train. Being smart is like being cute, or ugly, to tall, or short, or a redhead. In other words, it adds nothing to your life unless you’re around people who appreciate it.

Best of all, doing smart is something everyone can learn, and do. There is no limit to how smart you can do. You can go to school, learn another language, study patterns in nature (or people), create art, etc.  Doing smart only requires paying attention and asking smart questions. In contrast, there is a a very concrete and finite limit to how intelligent you are, and no amount of education or experience can change this. Being smart it turns out, is much more limiting.

When you make a mistake, and learn from it so you don’t do it again; that is doing smart. If you have a PhD and don’t learn from your mistakes, that is being smart. See the difference?

On Truth and rock bands

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Look how young they are.

Look how young they are.

Its true. Rush is the Best Band EVR!

This is what I was thinking yesterday when I was working in the garden, cleaning up after our trees were trimmed. You see I had been raking away when a neighbor vbehind our house yelled from the alley that he liked our yard. We chatted for a bit about this and that, you know, the kind of conversation you have with someone you don’t know well. Water-cooler topics like the weather and such. Then he said something so out of the blue that it really stopped me. We were talking about ISIS and the English guy they call Jihadi John who is their spokesman/executioner (talk about unique job titles), when my neighbor informed me that this John guy wasn’t even a Muslim.

What exactly do you say to someone after that? It was such a disconnect from reality that I wondered if my neighbor was mentally ill. The thing is, he said this to me with all the confidence in the world. As if this statement were true: Jihadi John is not a Muslim.

So when he drove off, I got to thinking. Not about whether Jihadi John is a Muslim or not, a topic that is not up for debate, but about the nature of truth. And more importantly, how relative truth is.

In English we banter words like “truth” around as if they were universal, and the concept of truth is central to faiths like Christianity. Truth in this sense means something like the bible is true. By that we mean true for everybody all the time. But we also toss around other kinds of true just as readily. We’ll say, “the President is wrong,” or on a more local level “the City Council has failed,” or even on the smallest of scales, “that girl likes you.” All of these things may be true, or not true, but they are spoken as if they are true. And here’s the kicker, from the point of view of the speaker, they may well be true. At least true in a limited sense.

Which brings me back to rock bands. When I say, “Rush is the Best Band EVR!” This is an actual “true” statement, at least to me. While this may be true, it is a very local kind of true, one that is specific to an individual or a small group. Not all things can be true like this, but when it comes to things like art, in which there is no definitive measure beyond one’s own preference, then opinion and truth are essentially one and the same.

Its when you get beyond the individual that this kind of truth runs into trouble. So while the statement, “Rush is the Best Band EVR,” is true to me, it is not true to my wife. She would probably say something like, “Led Zeppelin is the Best Band EVR.” Her statement would be just as true as mine, which is to say they are true only within the narrow confines of personal opinion. If we want to create a “truth” about bands that encompasses both of us, then we need to find a way to measure “Best Band EVR” beyond the realm of personal opinion.

So this is how we get to quantifiable truths. There are truths we can back up with numbers. For instance the band with the most number of songs on Billboard’s “Top 100 hits of all time” is the Bee Gees. So obviously they are the Best Band EVR! Except the band with the most number of “Top 10 singles” is the Beatles, so they are the Best Band EVR. Except the band with the “Most weeks with a song at number 1” is Boyz II Men, so they are the Best Band EVR.

As you can see, the “truth” is getting quite a workout here. All of the statements above are true, but they are true only within the very narrow range of their measure. While truth has gone from personal opinion to one of quantifiable fact, it is still a slave to whatever way we quantify it. So we’re past the personal, but still not universal.

So are there any universal truths (what a philosopher would call universality)? The answer is a definite maybe. For instance most people will tell you there’s a universal set of ethics, and perhaps one of the most universally adopted ethical points would be, “Thou shall not kill.” Ironically almost every country where practitioners of ethics reside, also has a standing army whose sole purpose is to kill others. Apparently killing is relative (the same is true for irony as well).

Okay if ethics are relative then how about something simple like gravity. Well it turns out that’s not so simple either. While the formula that determines gravitational attraction is in fact universal, that doesn’t mean gravitational pull is. If two people on different parts of the Earth were to jump out of a window from the 47th floor of a tall building, they would hit the ground at slightly different times. This is because the gravitational pull of our planet is not consistent over its surface. But we can be sure a fall from that height would certainly kill them, except when it doesn’t.

Okay, lets make it real real simple. 1 + 1 = 2. Surely this is universal. Right? Well it is, as long as your number system is anything but binary. In binary 1 + 1 = 10. “Yeah, but who uses binary anyway?” you say. Well every computer, EVR. Right now the number of computers in use (that is binary math users) is probably over 1.5 billion, which is less than the total number of decimal math users like us humans. But by 2025 or so, that number is going to change. In the not too distant future the number of binary math users will become the majority. So yeah, it is important. To them.

So apart from a few math formulas, almost nothing is universally true. Which is kind of a bummer, but that’s how universal truths tend to be. That is, unless you don’t ascribe to the quantifiers I’ve used to measure universal truth. In which case, its not a bummer. At least for you.

So later that same day, not long after my conversation with my neighbor, I ran across someone on Facebook who opined that the Great Society had lead to a group of people with entitlement mentality, and that socialism has never worked. I was tempted to correct him, after all anyone with a few minutes of time could pull up numbers off the internet which would stomp all over his statements. But then I realized what he said was the truth. Truth in a very localized meaning of the word. That is, truth as opinion. While I hold a different meaning of truth than he does, and could happily bring up many quantifiable ways to support “my” truth, I didn’t. You see, quite by accident I had inadvertently stumbled upon a universal truth: Once something has become a truth, you can’t untruth it.

When someone says, “Jihadi John is not a Muslim,” or, “Socialism has never worked,” or even, “There’s no way humans can cause global warming,” there is nothing you can say to sway this person. To them this is a truth. And while you may hold a different “truth” or even a truth that can be supported with numbers, it is still not going to make any difference. You can not replace someone else’s truth with your own. That’s not how it works. The only only way to change the “truth” for a person is for them to do so themselves.

Perhaps the only universal truth then is that each of us are the sole arbiters of true, but only to ourselves.