OPTICAL ILLUSION

1.  Click on the above image to enlarge.
2.  Stare at the red dot for 30 seconds ~ maintain focus.
3.  Shift your gaze to a white wall or other blank space.

What do you see?

(Normally when we stare at a photo-positive image for this exercise, our eye and brain reverse it to a photo-negative afterimage when we look away.  Since this image is already a photo-negative, you should see the original photo-positive when you move your eyes away.)

SSHHH

I have a thing for peace and quiet.  I seek it, I cultivate it, and at times I insist upon it.

I live in an apartment complex made up of efficiency apartments sandwiched together, with neighbors on both sides and above.  Many of the residents are university students, so during the seven years I've lived here, neighbors have come and gone.  Each time someone moves in, they bring their particular noise habits (e.g., music, heavy footfalls, loud conversation, slamming cabinet doors) with them.  Sometimes I get lucky ~ a new neighbor enjoys quiet as much as I do (and extends equal courtesy to those who live beyond our shared, thin walls.

More often, new residents choose to ignore the apartment management's rules of conduct, apparently feeling entitled to play music at disturbing levels during quiet hours, or to party loudly when others are trying to sleep or simply read a book.  Thus it falls upon me (apparently one of the few quieter residents assertive enough to object) to knock on the oblivious person's door and explain that he/she is disrupting my life, and the lives of everyone else who lives there.

I'm always soft-spoken and courteous, but also clear and insistent.  Sometimes one visit is enough ~ the person graciously apologizes, problem solved.  More often, I'm met with indifference or hostility.  Thus when a second offense occurs, I feel no qualms about calling the police with a noise complaint ~ and will do so thereafter every time I'm disturbed by that person.  There's the further avenue of filing an official noise complaint with the apartment manager.  A letter in the mail from the manager is usually sufficient to get the attention of even the most obtuse tenant.

Inconsiderate noise isn't limited to where I live.  How often have we been subjected to overly-loud cell phone conversations in public places ~ theaters, airplanes, stores, even public libraries?  How often have we had to endure the tinny cacophony of music emanating from the ear buds of someone's iPod?  (And just think, if the music is that loud to us, what kind of ear drum damage is being inflicted on the wearer?)

And don't even get me started on barking dogs and screaming children.  I realize that ultimately the fault rests with the owner/parent.  Still.

It has been documented that with our plethora of gadgets and the explosion in our numbers, it is becoming more and more difficult to find privacy and quiet.  Even more sadly, we are adjusting our expectations to accommodate the uproar, rather than insisting that the uproar be muted.

I know I'm not alone in feeling this way.  In fact, I was delighted to discover Tim Kreider's article entitled The Quiet Ones in today's NYTimes.  Consider this exerpt, and you'll understand ~

"Ever since I quit hanging out in Baltimore dive bars, the only place where I still regularly find myself in hostile confrontations with my fellow man is Amtrak's Quiet Car.  The Quiet Car, in case you don't know, is usually the first car in Amtrak's coach section, right behind business class.  Loud talking is forbidden there ~ any conversations are to be conducted in whispers.  Cellphones off ~ music and movies on headphones only.  There are little signs hanging from the ceiling of the aisle that explain this, along with a finger-to-lips icon.  The conductor usually makes an announcement explaining the protocol.  Nevertheless I often see people who are ignorant of the Quiet Car's rules take out their cellphones to resume their endless conversation, only to get a polite but stern talking-to from a fellow passenger.

" .... In a 2006 interview David Foster Wallace said, 'it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore.'  Stores and restaurants have their ubiquitous Muzak or satellite radio.  Bars have anywhere between 1 and 17 TVs blaring Fox and soccer. Ads and 30-second news cycles play on screens in cabs, elevators, and restrooms.  Even some libraries, whose professional shushers were once celebrated in cartoon and sitcom, now have music and special segregated areas designated for 'quiet study', which is what a library used to be.

" .... People are louder, too.  They complain at length and in detail about their divorces or gallbladders a foot away from you in restaurants.  A dreaded Amtrak type is the passenger who commences prattling on her cellphone the instant she sits down and doesn't hang up until she gets to her stop, unable to bear an undistracted instant of her own company.  People practice rap lyrics on the bus or the subway, barking doggerel along with their iPods as though they were alone in the shower.  Respecting shared public space is becoming as quaintly archaic as tipping your hat to a lady, now that the concept of public space is nearly as extinct as hats, and ladies.

" .... It's a pathology that seems increasingly common, I suspect in part because people now spend so much time in the solipsist's paradise of the Internet that they carry its illusion of invisible (and inaudible) omniscience back with them into the real world.

" .... Those of us who despise this tendency don't have a voice, or a side, let alone anything like a lobby.  There are anti-noise-pollution groups, but they can fight only limited skirmishes over local nuisances ~ the war is lost.  It's impossible to be heard when your whole position is quiet now that all public discourse has become a shouting match.  Being an advocate of quiet in our society is as quixotic and ridiculous as being an advocate of beauty or human life or any other unmonetizable commodity.

"And so the volume has incrementally risen, the imbecilic din encroaching on one place after another ~ mass transit, waiting rooms, theaters, museums, the library ~ until this last bastion of civility and calm, the Quiet Car, has become the battlefield where we quiet ones, our backs forced to the wall, finally hold our ground.  The Quiet Car is the Thermopylae, the Masada, the Fort McHenry of quiet ~ which is why the regulars are so quick with prepared reproaches, more than ready to make a Whole Big Thing out of it, and why, when the outsiders invariably sit down and start in with their autonomic blather, they often find themselves surrounded by a shockingly hostile mob of professors, old ladies, and four-eyes who look ready to take it outside.

" .... We're a tribe, we quiet ones, we readers and thinkers and letter writers, we daydreamers and gazers out of windows.  We are a civil people, courteous to excess, who disdain displays of anger as childish and embarrassing.  But the Quiet Car is our territory, the last reservation to which we've been driven.  And we can be pushed too far.  Our message to the barbarians who would barge into our haven with their chatter and blatting gadgets like so many bulldozers is ~

THE RAIN FOREST IN YOUR BELLY BUTTON

Each of us is an ecosystem.  In fact, each of us is an entire planet of ecosystems.  Most of us are familiar with the symbiotic relationships we have with the millions of tiny creatures who live in our gut ~ bacteria which help us digest our food and process waste, in return for enough fuel to live and reproduce.  But we also host intricate communities of microorganisms in the most unlikely places ~ our eyelashes, our armpits.

I recall in the lab portion of a biology class at the University of Arizona, seeing a series of petri dishes, each containing a substrate of nutritive agar on which had been swiped Q-tip samples taken from everyday surfaces, to demonstrate the vigorous micro-biodiversity living all around us.  Here was a dish containing multicolored molds from the hallway water fountain.  Another was the new home of mildew and fungus sampled from the lab doorknob.  Perhaps the most memorable was a flourishing colony of ... something ... labeled "Susie's kiss".  Some brave coed had consented to place her lips against the uncontaminated agar, and the result was a gray furry township in the shape of, well, a kiss.

During this same time, I was privileged to attend a guest lecture by Dr. Lynn Margulis, during which she expanded upon her theory of the symbiotic origin of eukaryotic organelles in particular, endosymbiotic theory in general, and her contributions to the more massive Gaia hypothesis.  She would have felt right at home discussing a human being as an assembly of component communities of microbes.

I was reminded of all this when I happened upon an article in National Geographic News online.  What began as a lab researcher's lark became a full-blown study on the inhabitant of the human navel.  Yes, whether you have an outie or an innie, your belly button is home to dozens of bacterial species.

"From 60 belly buttons, the team found 2,368 bacterial species, 1,458 of which may be new to science.  Some belly buttons harbored as few as 29 species, and some as many as 107, although most had around 67 species.  92 percent of the bacteria types showed up on fewer than 10 percent of subjects ~ in fact, most of the time they appeared in only a single subject.

"One science writer, for instance, apparently harbored a bacterium that had previously been found only in soil from Japan ~ where he has never been.  Another, more fragrant individual, who hadn't washed in several years, hosted two species of so-called extremophile bacteria that basically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents.

"Despite the diversity, themes emerged.  Even though not a single strain showed up in [all subjects], eight species were present in more than 70 percent of the subjects.  And whenever these species appeared, they did so in huge numbers.  That makes the belly button a lot like rain forests.  In any given forest, the spectrum of flora might vary, but an ecologist can count on a certain few dominant tree types."

All of which is fertile ground for fantasy.  Imagine a children's book in which a kid is shrunk to microbe size, and finds him/herself having to survive in his/her own belly button!  Personally I find it charming to imagine my navel populated by tiny jungles, jaguars, anacondas, macaws, and aboriginal tribes.  Kinda gives a whole new meaning to navel-gazing.

Who lives in your belly button?

TIME IS FLEETING

With age has come the awareness that I experience certain time intervals differently from the awareness of my youth.  In childhood and early adulthood, hours, days, weeks, months, and years each had a prescribed duration.  Now, subjectively, it feels like an hour has passed, but the clock testifies that it is four hours later.  Days pass by in a blur, my mind's camera focused on the spot past which railroad cars are speeding by.  Is it Friday again, already?

Getting older is not for sissies.  Besides the physical infirmities, there are the memories of blunders one wishes it were possible to go back and correct.  Increasingly, I know before it happens what someone is going to say or do ~ simply because I've been here before.  Yet trying to explain my cumulative experience and perspective to a young person is whistling into the wind.  I was that way too, once.

All of which makes me more curious about what lies on the other side of death.  I don't have a religious or new age belief in heaven, an afterlife, or reincarnation.  Yet something in me senses that there is .... something.  When I find out, I'll be sure to let you know.

PASSWORD GUIDE

Cybersecurity writer Nicole Perlroth has a list of suggestions for devising passwords that will discourage hackers.  Her NYTimes article acknowledges that "Chances are, most people will get hacked at some point in their lifetime. All it takes is clicking on one malicious link or attachment.  The best they can do is delay the inevitable by avoiding suspicious links, even from friends, and manage their passwords.  Unfortunately, good password hygiene is like flossing ~ you know it's important, but it takes effort.  How do you possibly come up with different, hard-to-crack passwords for every single news, social network, e-commerce, banking, corporate and e-mail account and still remember them all?"

To answer that question, Perlroth consulted with two experts ~ a former hacker turned security tech officer, and a cryptographer.  Here is a summary of their ideas ~

• Forget the dictionary ~ hackers often test passwords from a dictionary.  Your password should not appear there.
• Never use the same password twice ~ once a hacker cracks your password at one site, she/he will see if it works at other sites on your computer.
• Come up with a passphrase ~ longer is better, preferably 14 characters or more.  Rather than use recognizable words strung together, choose a phrase from a song, movie quote, or poem, then use only the first letter or two from each phrase word to construct your passphrase.
• Or just jam on your keyboard ~ randomly hit letters and numbers, inserting the odd Shift and Alt strike.  Then copy the result into a text file stored on an encrypted, password-protected USB drive.  You won't have to remember the random set ~ you can access it on the USB.
• Store your passwords securely ~ which means not in your inbox or on your desktop.  Store your password file on an encrypted USB drive.  Alternatively, simply write your password file on a piece of paper (or better yet, write password hints) kept in your wallet.
• A password manager?  Maybe ~ some password protection software allows you to store usernames and passwords in one place.  Professionals avoid this approach, for two reasons ~ the software still lives in your computer, and if your computer is stolen, your goose is cooked.  Secondly, even protection cryptography can be hacked.
• Ignore (or sidestep) security questions ~ the limited set of answers to generic questions like "what is your favorite color?", or "what is your mother's maiden name?", can be found online.  Hackers can use the information to reset your password and access your account.  Better to enter a password hint that has nothing to do with the security quuestion itself.  For example, if the security question asks for the city in which you were born, establish a non sequitur response such as the phrase "your first pet's name".
• Use different browsers ~ "Pick one browser for 'promiscuous' browsing ~ online forums, news sites, blogs ~ anything you don't consider important.  When you're online banking or checking e-mail, fire up a secondary Web browser, then shut it down.  That way, if your browser catches an infection when you accidentally stumble on an X-rated sited, your bank account is not necessarily compromised.  As for which browser to use for which activities, a study last year by Accuvant Labs of Web browsers ~ including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer ~ found that Chrome was the least susceptible to attacks."
• Share cautiously ~ whenever possible, do not register for online accounts using your real e-mail address.  Instead use 'throw-away' e-mail addresses like those offered by 10minutemail.com .  Once users register and confirm an online account, the false e-mail address self-destructs.

There's an old cautionary warning to the effect that you should say or do nothing that you wouldn't want to see as a headline in the NYTimes.  Similarly, recognizing that you will almost certainly be hacked (and probably already have been), don't record anything personal online that you don't want falling into the wrong hands.

WILD SEX

Here's a shout-out to my friend Dr. Carin Bondar, who is hosting a soon-to-be-released series called "Wild Sex" ~ i.e., eye-popping intimate encounters in the animal kingdom.  Here is the trailer for the series, which will be streamed at the web TV site EarthTouch.  I know from my own studies over the years that we humans are far from being the most athletic, well-endowed, or kinkiest performers among our fellow species.  This should be fun!

SCIENCE AND STANDARDS

The flip side of yesterday's post, "Science and Play", is that as students playfully explore science, primary and high school teachers and schools are required to operate with certain well-formulated goals for learning.  Anna Kuchment writes in Scientific American that "Standards are the foundation upon which educators build curricula, write textbooks and train teachers ~ they often take the form of a list of facts and skills that students must master at each grade level.  Each state is free to form its own standards, and numerous studies have found that high standards are a first step on the road to high student achievement.  'A majority of the states' standards remain mediocre to awful', write the authors [ of a new report on state science standards across the United States].  Only one state, California, plus the District of Columbia, earned straight A's.  (Note ~ click on the map above to more clearly view the science standards grade earned by each state.)

" .... What exactly is going wrong?  The study's lead authors identified four main factors ~ an undermining of evolution, vague goals, not enough guidance for teachers on how to integrate the history of science and the concept of scientific inquiry into their lessons, and not enough math instruction.

" .... A bit of good news.  At least 26 states have signed on to an effort to write new, common 'Next Generation Science Standards' that will be more rigorous and specific than what many states currently have on the books.  To read more about that effort, visit nextgenscience.org or achieve.org, or read the document upon which the standards will be based here."

Given that the science standards of most states are rated "mediocre to awful", and given that students from those states with well-developed standards enjoy an advantage over others in gaining a decent university education and entering chosen careers, it makes sense to me that all schools in the nation should adhere to a national set of standards in all subjects, particularly in math and science.  I can hear legions of conservative thinkers howl in protest, arguing that we need local control over local education.  I submit that with the advent of the Internet, in a global economy and a global community, local education no longer exists.  For the sake of our children, and their children, we desperately need national standards which are competitive with those of the best schools around the globe.  Local control has failed miserably.

I'm not the only one who thinks so.  Check out this Animated Open Letter to President Obama on the State of Science Education.  (It addresses physics, but could equally apply to all the sciences.)  An exerpt ~ "The United States ~ a country with 5,000 nuclear weapons, home of the first atomic clock, and creator of the Global Positioning Sytem.  Chances are, if you just took regular American high school physics, you don't know one iota about the science behind these things .... That's because high school physics students across most of America are not required to learn about pretty much any physical phenomena discovered or explained more recently than 1865.  Yes, 1865.  That's the year the Civil War ended, and well over a decade before Albert Einstein was even born.  Do you know what can happen in 150 years?  A lot."

This 4 minute piece is typical of the brief, upbeat videos from MinutePhysics ~ witty, informative, and fun.  Science and play.  Sound familiar?

SCIENCE AND PLAY

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences are stunningly original and penetrating resources.  The website is the jumping-off point for hundreds, perhaps thousands of individual talks on every topic under the sun, and some that are not.  Just click on any of the tabs at the top of the home page, and start exploring.

For starters, I warmly invite you to spend 15 minutes watching and listening to Beau Lotto as he captivates his audience in Science Is For Everyone, Kids Included.  He is animated, funny, and brimming with insights into how we learn science.  Play is a key component of the best science learning, because the two share certain traits.  They ~

• celebrate uncertainty
• adapt to change
• are open to possibility
• are cooperative
• are propelled by intrinsic motivation (the behavior is its own reward)

I dare you to watch his presentation without smiling, and without a light bulb of recognition illuminating over your own head.  Enjoy.

VETERANS DAY 2012

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, was declared between the Allied nations and Germany in the First World War, then known as "the Great War".  Commemorated as Armistice Day beginning the following year, November 11th became a legal federal holiday in the United States in 1938.  In the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, Armistice Day became Veterans Day, a holiday dedicated to American veterans of all wars.

Veterans Day coincides with Remembrance Day in British Commonwealth nations.  Remembrance Day's intent is similar to America's Memorial Day in the month of May ~ to pay tribute to those who have died in military service.  Both Remembrance Day and Memorial Day are commemorated by the wearing of red remembrance poppies (see image above).  The use of the poppy was inspired by the World War I poem In Flanders Fields, whose opening lines refer to the many poppies that were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up earth of soldiers' graves in Flanders, an area that overlaps parts of France and Belgium.

Veterans Day is distinguished from Memorial Day in that it honors all those who, past and present, have served in the military, whether or not they died in the line of duty.

I am a veteran of the Vietnam War.  I served in country from March 1968 to March 1969.  My Army base camp was located at one apex of the Iron Triangle.  As a highly trained radioteletype operator with a Secret security clearance and access to sensitive cryptographic equipment, I spent part of my tour in base camp, and part in the field, attached to a mobile artillery battery of 155mm self-propelled howitzers.  I spent time at fire support bases (FSBs) in the Mekong Delta, Cholon (the Chinese suburb of Saigon), Cu Chi, Tay Ninh, and near the Parrot's Beak of neighboring Cambodia.

Time at base camp was safer (relatively).  The military base at Phu Loi included several military units and an airfield, and was surrounded by a perimeter defense of armed bunkers, trip flares, mines, and barbed wire.  Nevertheless, we experienced rocket and mortar attacks there.

Time in the field was much more dangerous.  Fire support bases were essentially populated by our artillery battery, and if we were lucky an infantry detachment.  Perimeter defense was rudimentary ~ ranging from fortified foxholes to nothing at all.  In the field, whether dug in at an FSB or in convoy to our next assigned location, we were the targets of rockets, mortars, and probes by enemy infantry.  As a communications operator, I had a bounty on my head and thus was a favored target for snipers as well.  Thankfully I was never hit.

I returned home physically unscathed, but psychologically unbalanced by the PTSD which afflicts nearly all combat veterans.  My symptoms were not at debilitating as they were for many, but they were (and remain) bad enough.  Being around anyone, even a police officer, carrying a firearm puts me on edge.  Sudden loud noises cause my heart to stop.  I have to insulate myself from the sights and sounds of 4th of July celebrations ~ they bring back too many memories.

Yet I am highly functional, for which I am grateful.  I'm also grateful to all those men and women with whom I share the language of the military experience ~ my fellow veterans.  Each of us has a story to tell, though we often are only comfortable sharing it with other veterans.  If you haven't been there, you don't speak the language, you don't comprehend the same set of experiences.  I don't say that in a condescending manner.  It is simple truth.  I truly wish that more people did grasp how the military changes you ~ it trains you (sometimes brutally), it places you in fight-or-flight situations, it expects you to take human life.  You may be exposed to gruesome scenes out of unimaginable nightmares, moments which etch themselves permanently into your psyche.

And it also introduces you to cultural diversity, the common bond of sharing the risk of death, and a journey in which you discover reservoirs of resilience and strength you never knew you possessed.  The bond spans generations, and is shared by former adversaries.  Just as I weep whenever I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, so would I weep if I could visit the Normandy cemeteries near the D-Day landing beaches, or a memorial to the Vietnamese soldiers who once wished my death.

John McCutcheon's ballad "Christmas in the Trenches" (based on a real event during World War I) sums it up ~ on each end of the rifle, we're the same.

WHO AND WHY ~ THE 2012 ELECTION

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on the presidential election's results (by electoral college votes and by the popular vote), here is a visual on the distribution (click to enlarge) ~

It is an interesting exercise to compare the more liberal (blue) states and the more conservative (red) states with another map, this one showing the locations of the nation's top universities overlaid on the voting map ~

There does seem to be a correlation between education and how residents vote.  One might argue that even in those conservative states with a top university, the university town may be a liberal enclave within the state.  One example is Tucson, Arizona.

It is also evocative to compare the voting map with a map of the slave and free states as they existed in 1852 (courtesy of my friend Bill) ~

The boundaries are not precise, since so much land existed as a U.S. territory rather than a U.S. state, but you can see a clear resemblance in the northeast, midwest, and west coast.

So what am I suggesting ~ that conservatives tend to be less well-educated?  That they are racist rednecks harking back to the days of slavery?  Well, yes, in sweeping general terms.  There are, of course, well-educated conservative individuals, and conservative individuals whose attitude toward race is moderate, perhaps even progressive.  But taken as a group, yes, those xenophobic links exist.

As I entered adulthood, I had virtually no life experience with races other than whites.  I'd grown up in lily-white north central Montana, and my first two years of college were at Washington State University, overall an institution populated mostly by whites.  It took two events to broaden my horizons and shape my preference for diversity.  The first was entering the Army for two years.  In 1967 there was a disproportionate number of young black and Latino men in the military, thanks to the culling effect of the draft ~ it was easier for economically-advantaged young white men to obtain a student deferment or a posting in the National Guard, thus avoiding active duty.  I was surrounded by racial diversity, and I was fascinated, and made friends.

The second event was my moving to southern Arizona in 1969, after leaving the military.  The city of Tucson is a healthy mix of white, black, and Latino residents, and here too, I thrived.  My contact with, and understanding of, other cultures widened even more when I became a student at the University of Arizona in Tucson.  There my classmates were often from other nations, other traditions and cultures by which I felt enriched.

It is a truism I've witnessed over and over, that even the most bigoted person can shed his/her prejudice when a friendship is formed with someone from the "other" group.  The transformation doesn't usually happen overnight.  It takes time to rethink assumptions, to cast aside the bonds of old thinking.  But the results are breathtaking.  From the military, from my education, from my travels, from my contacts on social media, I enjoy friendships with people all over the country, all over the world.  What could be finer?

VIAGRA FOR WOMEN

At the blogsite io9, George Dvorsky recently reported that "A clinical trial is about to get underway in Australia, Canada, and other parts of the world to test a new female 'sex-drive' drug that would increase the libido of women suffering from 'female orgasmic disorder'.  Called Tefina, it is a testosterone gel that is sprayed up the nose about an hour before a sexual encounter.  The developers say the drug could boost female sexual arousal and satisfaction."

The article goes on to say that "surveys indicate that 30 percent of women cannot climax during intercourse.  For many women, this inability translates into sexual activity becoming a chore or a duty instead of a shared positive experience .... Differences in sexual satisfaction in a relationship commonly lead to the development of substantial tension within the relationship.

"Clearly, women need to be mindful of their reasons for taking a drug like Tefina while remaining wary of corporate intrusions in the bedroom.  But some of the arguments against its development and use sound nothing short of paternalistic (whether they come from a man or a woman).  It also sounds condescending ~ as if women don't understand their own sexuality and how to manage it .... Ultimately, when it comes to a female Viagra or a male contraceptive, it's about personal choice and a person's right to have access to these technologies.  Assuming they're safe and effective, we can decide for ourselves how to best use them."

Male erectile dysfunction and its treatment, the drug Viagra, have received so much attention in recent years that it's surprising that it has taken this long to examine the female counterpart.  After all, a legitimate physiological need exists, which translates to a lucrative market for treatment.  There may be some women who hesitate to inhale a hormone mist ~ those women should consult with their physician or perhaps a therapist for objective information and encouragement.

There may also be some women who hesitate over the seeming artificiality of "planning" one's sexual encounters, and inhaling the mist an hour beforehand.  Speaking as a male who has used viagra for several years, I offer reassurance that it's really no big deal.  If anything, when a couple gets that mutual gleam in their eye and decides its time for the sublime intimacy of a romp in bed, the delay adds a rather delicious anticipation.

The primary difference seems to be that when a man uses Viagra, his sexual performance and enjoyment are enhanced by up to four hours, but the drug inhibits reaching orgasm.  For a woman, Tefina's intent is explicitly to heighten arousal and orgasm.  For individuals or couples who, by reason of age or other condition experience a less-than-satisfying sex life, one or both drugs could open up new horizons of bliss.

THE VOTE

(I've been absent for nearly a week, taking a physical and psychological breather.  Now I have returned ~ aren't you glad?)

The 2012 presidential election results are all but complete, after a slight delay in tabulating results in (where else?) Florida.  Here are the final tallies ~

Electoral college

• 332 electoral votes - Barack Obama (D)
• 206 electoral votes - Mitt Romney (R)

Popular vote

• 61,140,279 votes - Barack Obama (D)
• 58,148,398 votes - Mitt Romney (R)

The above figures are courtesy of Huffington Post's election results, which includes a breakdown by state.

President Obama's strongest support came from blacks, Asians, Latinos, women, and younger voters.  Mr. Romney's strongest support came from whites, especially white men.

Joel Benenson comments in the NYTimes that there was more than demographics at play in Obama's re-election.  An exerpt ~ "The president's victory was a triumph of vision, not of demographics.  He won because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in.  A nation that makes the investments we need to strengthen and grow the middle class.  A nation with a fair tax system, and affordable and excellent education for all its citizens.  A nation that believes that we are more prosperous when we recognize that we are all in it together.

" ....Two key data points illustrate why Americans were always far more open to President Obama's message and accomplishments than commentators assumed.  By a three to one margin (74 percent to 23 percent), voters said that what the country faced since 2008 was an 'extraordinary crisis more severe than we have seen in decades', as opposed to 'a typical recession that the country has every several years'.  At the same time, a clear majority, 57 percent, believed that the problems we faced after the crisis were 'too severe for anyone to fix in a single term', while only 4 in 10 voters believed another president would have been able to do more than Mr. Obama to get the economy moving in the past four years.

" .... Moreover, Mr. Obama's strength on the economy was not about 'empathy', as many experts asserted.  Rather, for average working-class and middle-class Americans who have believed for nearly a decade that the economic system in American has fallen out of balance for people like them, the president's personal story and policies engendered trust because they connected with voters' lives, aspirations, and beliefs about what it would take to create the future they wanted.  That trust was the central economic test in this election."

I would suggest that both demographics and values played a role in the outcome.  It is undeniable that the Republican party has become increasingly out of touch with the evolving makeup of the electorate.  Their reliance on the white male vote (especially wealthy white males), giving short shrift and sometimes even insult to women and minorities, proved to be their undoing, at least in the presidential race.  The tectonic shift in who votes, and why, appears to have eluded moderate Republicans, and appears to be an entirely foreign language to more radical conservatives.  Unless they can manage to enter the 21st century, Republican risk becoming obsolete and irrelevant.

There is, of course, more at stake than the economy.  I've pointed out several times the utter absence of a meaningful discussion of the environment and climate change.  Ironically, it was a symptom of climate change in the form of Hurricane Sandy which may have sealed Obama's win in the final days before the election, allowing him not only to appear appropriately presidential during the crisis response, but also to demonstrate his genuine caring as he listened to and consoled the storm's victims ~ harking back to Bill Clinton's genuine ability to empathize with any listener.

So now the players are back in Washington, with a number of new congressional faces (notably women), but essentially the same party balance of power.  There will be tremendous pressure to find ways to break the ideological gridlock which has paralyzed the Capitol during much of Obama's first term ~ a gridlock perpetrated publicly and proudly by Republicans intent on seeing the nation's first black president fail.  The voters made it clear that we have no patience for such foolishness.  The question is, will they listen?

A NOVEL / NOVELLA IDEA

I came across a piece by Ian McEwan in The Atlantic, entitled Some Thoughts on the Novella.  McEwan's love for this literary form is adamant ~ "I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.  It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated, ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his better days).  And this child is the means by which many first know our greatest writers.

" .... [a novella is] long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter ~ the architecture of the novella is one of its immediate pleasures .... To sit with a novella is analogous to watching a play or a longish movie."

Let's backtrack, and roughly define the prose forms being described ~

• short story ~ under 7,500 words, or under 37.5 pages
• novelette ~ between 7,500 and 17,500 words, or 37.5 and 87.5 pages 
• novella ~ between 17,500 and 40,000 words, or 87.5 and 200 pages
• novel ~ over 40,000 words, or over 200 pages

By convention in the submission of manuscripts, at a standard font size and double-spaced, there are on average 200 words per page.  The above word counts are an approximation, with latitude allowed for interpretation by the writer/editor/critic.

McEwan takes issue with those who look upon prose which is less than a novel in length as being an indication of the author's inadequacy.  He likens the novella to shorter pieces in classical music ~ "Composers, including those of the highest rank, have never had such problems of scale.  Who doubts the greatness of Beethoven's piano sonatas and string quartets or of Schubert's songs? Some, like me, prefer them to the symphonies of either man.  Who could harden his heart against the intimate drama of Mozart's G minor trio, or not lose himself in the Goldberg variations or not stand in awe of the D minor Chaconne played on a lonesome violin?"

Point well taken.  When it comes to classical music, I'm partial to all forms.  But while there are novellas which do possess me, somehow I remain most interested in the epic depiction of life to be found in novels.  There is so much more room for character development, for stroking in the colors and textures, the sounds and landscapes, of one or many environments ~ and the changes in all those qualities over time.

Some writers overdo a good thing, of course.  300-400 pages is a good length for a novel.  600 pages or more suggests that further editing might be profitably employed.  My own novel (which perished when my laptop's hard drive died) was a modest 50,000 words, or 250 pages.  The next one will be longer.

There are those in writing classes who suggest that it's best to start small (short story) and work up.  Perhaps.  But short stories fail to engage me.  They're too much like an overheard snippet of conversation ~ not long enough to give a sense of setting, depth, nuance.  IMHO.

Coincidentally, McEwan likens a novella to a movie screenplay (about 20,000 words).  I've noticed that after over four years of Netflix movie rentals, I gravitate more and more toward long-running, multi-disk dramatic TV or cable series which run for years.  A regular movie is fine too, but the series (the good ones) are more like real life ~ the characters grow and change, new elements are introduced, and one develops a feeling of kinship with their lives.  Not unlike reading a novel.

So, Sir Ian, we'll have to respectfully agree to disagree.  And I remain open to persuasion.

VINDICATION

Some days, it is sweet to read the headlines.  From the NYTimes ~ Bloomberg Endorses Obama, Citing Climate Change ~ "In a surprise announcement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Thursday that Hurricane Sandy had reshaped his thinking about the presidential campaign and that as a result he was endorsing President Obama.

"Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent in his third term leading New York City, has been sharply critical of both Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and Mitt Romney, the president's Republican rival, saying that both men had failed to candidly confront the problems afflicting the nation.  But he said he had decided over the past several days that Mr. Obama was the best candidate to tackle the global climate change that the mayor believes contributed to the violent storm, which took the lives of at least 38 New Yorkers and caused billions of dollars in damage.

"The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast ~ in lost lives, lost homes and lost business ~ brought the stakes of next Tuesday's presidential election into sharp relief," Mr. Bloomberg wrote in an editorial for Bloomberg View.

" 'Our climate is changing,' he wrote.  'And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be ~ given the devastation it is wreaking ~ should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.'  "

Ya think?  The astute reader will note that often (most recently in yesterday's post), I have been one of a handful of voices in the wilderness trying to call attention to the fact that we have already crossed a number of environmental thresholds, and continue to do so, with deleterious effects on natural habitat and the survival of other species.  Our homocentric attitude toward other life forms and Earth's resources (believing that they exist for us to use/abuse as we see fit), is self-deluding and ultimately self-destructive.

We humans tend to behave responsibly only in reaction to crisis.  Few among us think and behave proactively, considering the potential consequences before making choices, and even then being willing to alter our views as new data emerges.  It is a delicious (and perhaps hopeful) irony that both NJ Governor Chris Christie (a Republican, pictured above with President Obama ~ click to enlarge) and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg have praised Obama's swift emergency response.  The irony is doubled when you consider that Republican candidate Mitt Romney, in typical foot-in-mouth fashion, actually called for defunding FEMA and turning the federal government's role in disaster response over to the states ~ a laughable proposition at best, an insult to every citizen's intelligence at worst.

(Bloomberg had a few choice observations about Romney, too ~ "In the past he has taken sensible positions on immigration, illegal guns, abortion rights and health care ~ but he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the very health care model he signed into law in Massachussetts.")

So yes, of course there is an essential, irreplaceable role for a strong federal government, paid for by a fair distribution of taxes.  And of course Hurricane Sandy is a wake-up call on climate change, and not the first to appear.  Extreme weather, the die-off of the world's coral reefs, massive wildfires, rising global temperatures, shifts in oceanic currents, the rapid disappearance of the polar ice pack and the world's glaciers and coastal ice sheets in Antarctica ~ these are all symptoms of climate change, and there is worse to come.  Had all the governments of the world heeded the warnings of climate scientists thirty years ago regarding greenhouse gases and rapid deforestation and the destruction of entire ecosystems, we might ... might ... have avoided a few thresholds.  Even if, overnight, the world's population were to immediately halt carbon dioxide emissions and other forms of pollution (not to mention cutting our population to one-tenth its present numbers), too many local and global processes are already in motion.  It takes time to slow, then reverse, the momentum of such massive systems.  We are out of time.

Now we must deal with the consequences.

TWO HURRICANES

Unless you've been living under a rock, you're aware of the damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy over the past several days.  From the Caribbean, Sandy veered north-northeast, paralleling the U.S. coastline until it encountered a strong high pressure system which, in conjunction with the alignment of the jet stream, forced the hurricane's path to the west.    Sandy ravaged the mid-Atlantic states ~ the DelMarVa Peninsula, eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York City, Long Island, and Connecticut.  A record storm surge sent floodwaters far inland, flooding NYC traffic tunnels and the subway system, knocking out power, and forcing the cancellation of AMTRAK trains, and many thousands of airline flights from major airports.

Here you will find a collection of 285 images of the storm's effect, courtesy of The Weather Channel.

In spite of the hyperbole being heaped upon Sandy's size and strength, as hurricanes go, the storm wasn't really monumental.  It just happened to make landfall at the most densely populated stretch of coastline on the eastern seaboard.  At least 70 million people live within a 200-mile radius of NYC.  So the effect on human lives was magnified tremendously.

In Charleston, SC, I experienced a much more powerful hurricane in September 1989 ~ Hurricane Hugo.  Hugo's tracked so precisely that the center of the hurricane's eye passed over the Charleston suburb of Mount Pleasant, where I lived.  My then-wife and I had evacuated inland, and upon our return three days later, the damage we encountered was heart-breaking.  Large beachfront houses were either demolished or carried off their foundations, coming to rest hundred of yards away.  The storm surge demolished a bridge connecting the mainland to the barrier islands, and scattered fishing and pleasure boats far inland.  Thankfully our house was spared all but superficial damage.

But here is the central difference (in my mind) between Sandy and Hugo.  Where Sandy's impact was on humans, Hugo's was on the natural world.  A huge swath of the Francis Marion National Forest was flattened, all the downed trees pointing away from the wind.  I spend the following year working for the US Forest Service, doing habitat restoration for the endangered Red-Cockaded Woodpecker.  But that's another story.

If a storm of Hugo's compact ferocity had hit New York City, the damage could have been orders of magnitude more severe.  To give you an idea why I say that, consider the following ~

• Sandy was a large-diameter storm, 1000 miles wide.  Hugo was perhaps half that size.
• Sandy's winds barely qualified it as a hurricane ~ 70 mph with gusts to 90 mph.  Hugo's winds were more intense ~ 140 mph with gusts to 160 mph.
• Sandy's storm surge never exceeded 14 feet.  Hugo's topped 20 feet.
• The overland speed of Sandy was relatively slow, meaning that the storm had more time to dump rain as it passed, contributing to flooding.  Hugo's overland speed was faster, meaning that while it, too, caused flooding, the wind damage was significantly more severe.

So while residents in the region up- and down-coast from New York City have bragging rights for many billions of dollars of damage from high winds and flooding, and the interruption of millions of human lives, their plight might have been much worse if Sandy had resembled Hugo.  I am in no way being flip when I suggest that New Yorkers got off easier than they might think.  If Sandy had been Hugo, the width of the hurricane's path would have been narrower, but the intensity of the damage done would have been correspondingly greater.

Having survived without electricity for several weeks after Hugo, and having helped with the clean-up, I'm confident that the people of PA, NJ, and NY will rebound, especially with the assistance of repair crews from all across the nation.  Some subway trains are already running, several of the major airports are already back in scaled-down service, and power will be restored quickly, precisely because so many people are affected.  

Taking a longer view, climatologists have long warned us that one effect of global warming is more frequent, more severe tropical storms.  There's one factor which may intensify this trend even further ~ the melting of the polar ice caps.  Global weather is a complex, interwoven web of events ~ some atmospheric, some oceanic, some terrestrial.  Here is one writer for Scientific American who proposes a direct link between climate change and Hurricane Sandy. And here is another writer on video, proposing that we must view Sandy as a wake-up call.  

These views and voices are not new to me.  In the 1980s as I pursued my degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, many scientists and scholars were issuing warnings about incipient global warming due to greenhouse gases, about the degradation of wild habitat and the extinction of many species, and about the deleterious effects of human overpopulation.  Guess what, folks ~ the future is here.

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS ...

(click image to enlarge)

A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE

Small actions can have consequences all out of proportion to their size.  Sometimes this is intentional, more often it is not.  Even the way we use language generates ripples of effect ~ someone hears a meaning that we did not intend.  This is especially true for speakers of English, a jumbled language rooted in German, Latin, and Greek, and borrowing freely from French, Spanish, Old Norse ~ any language spoken by those who have traveled to our shores, or by those natives who were here to greet the newcomers.

Our miscommunication is compounded when we use language in a lazy manner ~ for instance, when we take grammatical shortcuts, or when we compress a sentence into a phrase, a phrase into a word.  This shorthand may be convenient, but it invites misunderstanding.

I was reminded of the gap between intent and effect as I read an article on evolution that sported a title to hook the reader ~ 'Bird Mimic' Dinosaur Hints That Wings Evolved for Show, Not Flight.  Even scientists, who (along with mathematicians) should use language with scrupulous care, lapse into shorthand when speaking with other scientists.  Alas, the shorthand seeps through to a wider audience which may not grasp the fuller meaning, a situation ripe for misinterpretation.

The article's title is a variant on one of the most common and egregious examples of misleading shorthand.  If you make a statement such as "wings evolved for show", or "lungs evolved so that animals could live on land", the reader may be forgiven for hearing intent, when in fact all that can be confidently stated is effect.  Science assumes no prime mover, no outside intelligence which is making choices.  Quite the opposite.  Over evolutionary time, it has been demonstrated many times that morphological changes occur by chance.  Millions of chances, in fact.  Genetic mutation, genetic drift, or fortuitous changes in the environment happen in a random fashion.  The organism or species didn't sit up one day and think "Hmm, I think I'll evolve longer fangs to give me an edge in the hunt."  Rather, (usually in small increments, but sometimes in larger ones) subtle mistakes in copying the genetic code result in a change in anatomy or physiology (structure or function).  If the effect enhances the organism's ability to survive and reproduce, the errant gene will be passed on to the next generation.  Far more often, the effect hinders survival, and vanishes from the gene pool.  Those successful "mistakes", if they spread throughout the population, become the new norm.  Thus, gradually, do gill-breathers evolve into lung-breathers, and dinosaurs evolve into birds.  Evolution takes time, but time is present in abundance.  If you look around at all the organisms living on Earth, those are the genetic successes.  They are far, far outnumbered by the genetic failures, which are no longer with us.

Further, it is quite common in evolutionary history for an organism to develop a physical feature or a behavior which serves one purpose (a mating display enhanced by feathers), and over generations to observe that feature prove useful for another purpose (flying).  

In the context of evolution, the linguistic distinction I've been describing is important.  When a professor or science writer says something like "giraffes evolved long necks to be able to reach foliage growing higher from the ground", he/she is using shorthand.  The more accurate description would sound something like "over time, some giraffes evolved longer necks as a result of a cascading series of genetic mutations, which had the fortunate effect of allowing them to reach foliage growing higher from the ground.  The longer-necked giraffes thus had a feeding advantage over their shorter-necked kin, who eventually died out."  Given that even lay people refer to evolutionary change sometimes, and scientists much more often, one can understand how handy it is to resort to shorthand.  Professional journals would be long and cumbersome if we didn't all agree on the assumption that "X evolved to accomplish Y" is really a shortened version of "X survived because it happened to acquire Y trait through mutation".  

The key slippery term is that modest and ambiguous word "to".  If I say, "I'm going out to get groceries", that's a legitimate statement of intent, with a legitimate agent to perform it ~ me.  Unfortunately, intent is what some readers and listeners assume when they come across a statement like "plants evolved flowers to enhance their reproductive success and expand the number of ecological niches they could inhabit".  That is not a statement of intent.  It is a shorthand statement of effect. It is critical to understand the distinction.  

CURSIVE NO MORE

Among my many online news resources are the NYTimes and the Washington Post, along with a wide assortment of websites devoted to science, and of course a suite of PBS sites.  One of the Post articles left me in mild shock ~ in it, Gene Weingarten mourns the fate of cursive writing.  " .... during the past 20 years or so, schools have been de-emphasizing the skill.  Many school districts are adopting something called the Common Core Curriculum, which eliminates cursive outright.  The theory is that cursive is obsolete.  Apparently most writing ~ including class notes ~ is being done on laptops.

" .... if we lose the ability to write in cursive, we will soon lose the ability to read in cursive, meaning that, say, the original U.S. Constitution will become indecipherable as a palimpsest, understandable only by experts in ancient runes who will be free to put all sorts of unintended 'spin' on it.  (The Second Amendment protects calligraphers?  Well, if you say so.)

"But the strongest argument is the obvious one ~ speed.  Sure, with skilled typists, laptops are fast, but we're not all skilled typists, and there will inevitably be circumstances where we must rely on pen and paper.  Why relinquish speed?"

I'm torn in several directions.  First, and in my mind most compelling, is that as we learn more skills, we increase the number of neural connections, enhancing not only our knowledge but also our ability to learn.  It is a fact that our lives (especially the lives of younger people) center more on computer keyboards than on pieces of paper.  All the more reason to retain and reinforce handwriting skills.  We need mental diversity.

I learned to type in high school, and then honed my skills by several orders of magnitude as a radioteletype operator in the Army.  My fastest recorded typing speed with no errors was 85 words per minute.  Throughout my life I've relied on typing, both at home and at work, so that even today, with age-stiffened fingers, I can manage 60 words per minute, error-free.  Typing has served me well, and continues to do so at this very instant, as I compose these words.

Coincidentally, in a sense I also learned to write in high school.  Like others of my generation, I'd learned both to print and to write in cursive since earliest grade school.  But in high school my cursive writing really took off, by virtue of a 500-mile post office romance with a girl I'd met at summer music camp.  For two years we exchanged long (10-20 pages), fervent, and frequent letters.  Our romance only lasted about two weeks after our arrival at the same university, but by then I was in the habit of writing in torrents.  My parents to this day are grateful for the long, newsy letters I wrote to them at regular intervals.

As I've grown older, my cursive style has become more of a scrawl, and out of pity for the reader I often revert to printing.  But I cannot imagine never having learned cursive at all.

There's also this to consider ~ handwriting analysis may reveal certain elemental traits in our personalities.  That claim is not without controversy, but to some degree I believe it.  This should not be confused with an indicator of intelligence.  One can barely read the chicken scratch of some of the most brilliant people I know (medical doctors are notorious), and some of the dullest people write with a beautiful hand.  Then there's the entertainment value in parsing out the sheer variety of cursive styles.  The pinnacle, the gold standard, the sine qua non of writing, whether printed or in cursive, rests with those who are skilled at calligraphy.  My most recent relationship was with a woman who had created her own calligraphic font, and it was the finest of fine art.

So the world is changing, and for the most part, we change with it.  No more buggy whips, military cavalry, and very few vinyl LP records.  We no longer speak in Chaucerian Middle English, thank the gods. I nevertheless feel that we are doing our children a disservice by depriving them of a communication option as simple and useful as cursive writing.  After all, when I'm gone, who will be able to read all those old love letters?

LEARNING THROUGH GAMING

Twenty years ago, I worked as a teacher and counselor at a private residential school in suburban Philadelphia.  The students ~ 40 girls and 20 boys ~ had all been removed from their homes by the judicial system because they were being emotionally, physically and/or sexually abused.  The age range was roughly 13-18.  All the kids had been diagnosed as SED, or severely emotionally disturbed.  I thought that attaching a clinical label was unfortunate, adding a certain stigma to their already difficult lives.  But all systems appear to need a set of shorthand terms, even if doing so makes diagnosis too easy at times.

I loved my kids.  It didn't matter that each had his/her own struggles, or that most were on daily psychotropic medications and seeing a professional therapist regularly.  In my classroom they were just Kevin or Wanda or Sean or Markisha.  Each student had good days and bad days, and some classroom days were more eventful than others, as one or more students acted out their distress.  Lesson plans were always tentative at best.  But the atmosphere was fertile with a blend of curiosity, boredom, friction, and creative thinking.

I discovered quickly that even though I was an authority figure, rapport was quicker and deeper if I openly expressed the affection and respect I felt, even as I was maintaining some semblance of order.  In fact, my core guideline for my students was that they themselves show affection and respect ~ and if affection wasn't always possible, respect was still required.  Very seldom did they let me, or each other, or themselves, down.

I taught math, algebra, biology, and environmental studies.  It was useful to incorporate other disciplines into our classwork, using and reinforcing what they were learning in history, English, government.  (Our school was small and non-profit, so we had no classes in the arts or music, something I deeply regret.)  It was equally useful to make learning fun.  We regularly learned or reviewed material using competitions and games.  My best friend and fellow teacher Tony was also a huge fan of gaming as a learning tool.  Ours were often the loudest classrooms, but it was a good kind of loud ~ young minds discovering, building, questioning.

Here's an example ~ each Friday featured recreation activities in the afternoon for those who had earned them during the week with good behavior and grades.  It would have been fruitless to try to teach a serious class in the morning, so I always substituted a game that reinforced our learning.  One of our favorites was an adaptation of Jeopardy! ~ I'd created my own game board using half-envelopes containing 3x5 card clues for each category level.  I crafted the topics and individual questions to reflect what the students had been exposed to in their classes, as well as topics and questions from contemporary life, and some that were just plain silly.  Each class had 12-15 students, ideal for two or three teams.  As MC, I got to ask each question, allowing 5 seconds for conferring within each team.  Then on my "Go!", a member from each team would race to the blackboard to write their answer.  The first correct (and accurately spelled) scrawled answer earned a point for that team, with prizes in the form of snacks awarded at the end of the period.

The mix of cooperation and competition fired intense concentration, and enhanced memory retention.  I probably had more fun than the students did.  We had lots of other game variations ~ not limited to Fridays.

Now, twenty years later, the notion of making learning fun, specifically including gaming, has gained wider acceptance.  It makes sense.  "You can't understand something unless you've gone through the process of building it", whether it is a grammatically correct sentence, the solution to a math equation, the structure of the human skeletal system, or the re-enactment (using models) of a decisive military battle in history.  That is why labs and field trips are so important in physics, chemistry, biology, and the other sciences.  (I was notorious for the number of field trips I proposed, as was Tony.)

Just today, a Scientific American article recounted how children in an isolated Ethiopian village were given "boxes containing more than a dozen tablet computers loaded with books, games and other apps ~ in English .... No instructions were given to the village children regarding what was in the boxes or what to do with them.  The villagers have no reading or writing skills, nor have many of them ever seen so much as a written word .... within four minutes the village children had opened the boxes and learned how to turn on the tablets.  Within a few months they had learned the A-B-Cs and were singing the alphabet song in English.

" .... The key to learning, the [project panelists] agreed, is to engage children rather than simply talk at them.  And one of the most effective ways of doing this is through play .... learning [is] a process of hands-on construction and reconstruction rather than simply information transfer .... Games create a need to know.  You find things out as you progress toward your goal."

If Ethiopian children using apps in English could make such progress, think of the learning revolution waiting to happen if every child on Earth had his/her own notebook computer.  Given the sophistication of learning programs, not to mention being connected to the world's library, each child would be introduced to horizons without limit.

It's also a shame that gaming isn't practiced more in the adult world ~ say, while training new employees or as an incentive to workplace performance.  In this respect we have much to learn from our own children.  Thanks to Andrea Kuszewski for the SA article link.

RIVERDANCE

I was reminded of  Riverdance by a Facebook friend, and could not resist once more immersing myself in the driving rhythms and pulsing harmonies of traditional Irish stepdancing.  No commentary or questioning the universe today.  Instead, here is the entire hour and 35 minute performance by the original dance company, headed by Michael Flatley and Jean Butler.  The venue is Radio City Music Hall in New York City, during their 1966 tour.  For a shorter exposure which will still send chills down your spine, here is the four minute finale.  Saints perserve us!