Thought versus emotion

Here is an experiment in the telepatch. I am attempting to write liner notes for my almost-complete album (tentatively titled "Thought versus emotion"). I can't think of anything I'm interested in writing that others would care to read. So, I just started writing, with the result below. Reactions?

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In Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" he starts by asking, "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" In our historic 2008 election, Barack Obama said, ".. children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." The truth is, a white youth with a book also stands accused, or at least they did when I was in school. I was called "four-eyes" because I had glasses, and "professor" because I was smart. How many people have you heard say, "I was never any good at math" to the smallest demand on their numeracy, and everyone smiles and laughs! My personal favorite is having someone hand me the check at a restaurant, saying, "You were a math major" .. as if math were years of study of how to figure 20%. (It's not.) I am saying we don't think, and our society says it's okay to not think, by now encourages us not to think. What we do is feel.

Feeling is cool, feeling is gangsta, feeling is great. Movies make you feel, music makes you feel, advertisements, and definitely politicians make you feel. Liberal politicos simply "raise awareness" of issues, as if being aware of soul-killing tragedy #837 is as good as doing something about it. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh or the mercifully banished Sarah Palin do the same (though they don't call it that), inciting their followers to rants and bigotry through feeling. I am claiming, then, that reason is good and under attack, while feeling is used for ill but widely admired.

However, it's easy to tell the opposite. How many good ideas died quietly because something should be studied more carefully? Many talk of "death by committee", but there is also "analysis paralysis" at the individual level. (I know something about that.) Feeling bursts through barriers. It focuses our attention, makes us respond "without
thinking" as they say. Feeling is a call to action. You don't think alive, you feel alive.

So where does music lie in this spectrum? The media and common wisdom describe it easily as feeling. Great artists are always quoted in emotional terms, and often judged that way as well. However, anyone who has actually studied music or performed it should recognize the power of thought. Technique is often gained through rigorous repetition, but also through painstaking, compulsive analysis of physicality. Even deeper, the reason that music evokes feeling is often a combination of intuitive understanding of what universally makes people respond, and a knowledge or mastery of the underlying vocabulary of a particular musical discipline. Jazz sounds like jazz, punk sounds like punk, because the performers have picked up the right accent for that music.

And what of the ultimate challenge, to create your own vocabulary, or at least your own dialect, of a musical language, one that makes logical sense and inspires great feeling? Well, wouldn't that be something.

The bright side of the credit crisis?

When I bought my house five years ago, for various reasons, I got an adjustable rate mortgage. I am easily a prime borrower, and was able to make a substantial down payment, so I didn't get one of the crazy negative-amortization-ninja-ARMs you heard so much about last summer, but it's an ARM nonetheless. Last year I started thinking about refinancing into a fixed rate mortgage. I'd eye interest rates from time to time, but never pulled the trigger.

As a result, I was happy to see a piece of mail from my lender the other day. I gleefully tore it open to find that my mortgage payment has gone down $130/month. My mortgage is tied to the 1-year t-bill, which due to the credit crisis is at historically low levels. When my mortgage reset, the interest rate actually went down, lowering my payment.

Next year at this time I may not be so happy about my situation. I'm still looking to refinance, but 30-year rates aren't great right now, at least compared to where they were last summer, so I'm holding off. The are many scenarios where long-term rates will rise significantly higher, so my position remains somewhat precarious.

That said, for now I'm happy to report that the credit crunch isn't all doom and gloom.

Improv Everywhere and the power of collaboration

I've recently been working a proposal for an innovation program at work. Today, I met with one of my peers to discuss it and he suggested adding an element of competition to the program as a means to drive quality and interest.

I recoiled at the suggestion. My reaction was something like "Competition is such a cheap way to drive people, the value created through collaboration is much more interesting." I was thinking of the work of Improv Everywhere, a group I first heard about on This American Life. Their original No Pants stunt is now an annual event in New York City.

When I got home, I set about reviewing the work they've posted on their site, and I ran across a couple of "missions" that made me so happy I wanted to cry. First, "Rob!" in which they turn a significant part of a baseball stadium into willing collaborators. And second, "Best Game Ever," in which the participants in little league baseball game are gifted with what may well recall as one of the best days of their lives.

More collaboration, less competition. Truly a goal worth striving for.

Tomatoes and canning

M and I recently read "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver for a book club, and we were inspired to try the canned tomato sauce recipe therein.

We started out by canning a ha'bushel of tomatoes into 7 quarts of Kingsolver tomato sauce. "Canning" for historical reasons means putting something into glass jars in a sterile way, and boiling them so that you don't die of botulism. Kingsolver emphasizes that it's important to preserve the acidity of the recipe, so you're not supposed to mess with it. This turned out to be about 7 hours all told given our equipment, i.e. 1 hour per quart of sauce, i.e. a pain in the ass.

However, the farmer's market tempted us into more tomatoes, so we canned another bushel of tomatoes into 17 quarts of ..well, canned tomatoes, using a Fannie Farmer recipe which was basically tomatoes and salt.

More temptation pulled us into another ha'bushel, but this time we decided to make S's uncle's sauce. Since we didn't know if it is canning-safe, we've been eating some and freezing some. It is awesome. We've made two 4-quart recipes. A lot of water boils off, and it turns into 3 quarts or so. It's so good!

All told, we've probably cooked more than 100 pounds of tomatoes in the past 4-6 weeks. (A ha'bushel is ~25 pounds.) If you're not, you should really be buying farmer's market tomatoes, you lazy Seattle alcoholics. (j/k?)

Embarassed of my Minnesota heritage

JR and I proudly wear the badge of our former Minnesota citizenship out here in Seattle. Or rather we did, until Michele Bachmann started spouting off.

It's pretty tough to convince our West Coast friends that Minnesota isn't a bunch of poorly-educated, ill-informed hicks when Michele keeps spouting her verbal diarrhea. Can you remaining Minnesotans please get this neanderthal out of office?

Tax evader appears to have no grip on reality

Did I mention following this tax evader's story? He seems not in touch with reality.

DF

rlwrap, a geek's friend

Have you ever used a UNIX command-line utility that doesn't have filename completion? Painful, isn't it? Someone clever produced a wrapper to add filename completion. Here's the example for gnuplot:

$ rlwrap -c -a gnuplot
...
gnuplot> plot "

now hitting tab at that spot (the double-quote) gives you file options. Yay!

DF