Homo Stupidus: Our Present, Former Or Future Selves?
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
- Charles Mackay, Scottish author, poet, songwriter (1814-1889)
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?
- Kelvin Throop III, fictional science fiction character
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian economist (1908-2006)
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein, physicist and genius (1879-1955)
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.
- Ancient Zen saying
Quite different quotations. Quite different authors from quite different parts of the world and very different periods of time. Yet in the final analysis their messages bear great similarities.
The scientific name for our species, homo sapiens ("thinking man": the 's' at the end is for both the singular and the plural of this term), was devised by men who think. A large majority of us have no idea of the term's meaning. Most could care less what it means. Why? Because they do not burden themselves with such inconveniences as thinking.
Any thinking required to be done in their lives is done for them and provided by television, advertising, their employers, their parents or spouses, sometimes their children.
Those who define our species think. Even they can't be trusted however. With rare exceptions they all consider humans the most intelligent species on the planet. None have considered who devised the rules for the evaluation, whether the "winners" might be biased in their own favour, or whether the definition applied to every one of their species or just to a limited few. None consulted any other species for their opinions on the matter. They couldn't because we can't communicate with any of them.
We consider any other species of living thing that cannot speak our kind of language to be inferior, despite the fact that we cannot communicate with more than a couple other species ourselves and only with them in a very basic and inadequate manner. For 50 years we have been searching for extra-terrestrial intelligent beings, yet even SETI scientists believe that most beings more intelligent than ourselves would avoid us once they learned a bit about us.
We consider ourselves the epitome of development of living beings, despite that fact that most humans are capable of doing virtually nothing that any other animal on earth can do. Other than eat, poop and reproduce. Or that any plant can do, as every green plant creates oxygen we use to survive. Until very recently, with genetic engineering and nanotechnology, we created nothing, we only transformed what already existed.
In North America, barely six percent of us read more than three books per year. And that's generous because most people who don't read won't admit it to researchers. Many of the people who do read several books a year read on topics related to their occupations or about vocations they aspire to enter one day. Check the records of any public library to see how few people actually check out books they can read free, how many books the "readers" check out and what kinds of books they read. With the exception of students and others doing research papers, most nonfiction books collect dust on library shelves. Nonfiction means learning something new, whereas fiction allows readers to escape into other lives and places. For many of us, studying something new is verboten once we leave school.
In most countries that hold democratic elections, barely half of eligible voters cast ballots, often less. Exceptions include votes on hot button issues, elections where voters want to get rid of the old guard and constituencies where voting is compulsory. Why so few votes cast when everyone enjoys this right? In many cases people who do not vote claim that "They're all the same" or "It won't make any difference anyway." Ask those people what names they would expect to see on the ballots and what the candidates stand for and you rarely get an answer that makes sense.
Those of us who vote elect governments based on promises, usually promises of prosperity and more jobs. Both of these are extremely difficult for government to do and impossible to do without raising taxes, which voters don't like. Even though we know our government will never keep their promises, we continue to hope and vote accordingly.
The more "progressive" the democracy, the more debt load individual free citizens carry. In many cases, people pay twice the price of a big ticket item they buy due to interest rates on money they borrowed to buy it. A shocking number of people owe debts to credit card companies they cannot possibly ever repay because they can barely afford the minimum monthly payment.
But they look good. They drive the right cars. They live in the right neighbourhoods and belong to the right organizations.
Unless you work in your own home, look around you on the way to work and think about what is going on in the heads of the people making the same daily trek you are. Spend a bit of time watching people in the supermarket where you shop to see if what they are doing makes sense to you. Seriously, but take your time because stupid behaviour doesn't happen quickly. Watch people drive around the parking lot in a mall looking for the closest entrance, then walk for hours when they get inside. Compare what you see to what you would observe when watching an ant colony or a bee hive before you decide which species is the smartest.
Listen to conversations of people around you, no matter where they may take place. See how many of them involve any subject other than the weather or something they saw or could see on television. The most popular television stations in North America are the weather channels. Yet it's rare to see someone with an umbrella on a rainy day and common to see people with light shoes and no hats walking on snowy sidewalks in blowing weather.
Think about the people you have met over the past month. Have any of them asked you even one question that was not work related that would help them to learn something new? Intelligent thinking people ask questions.
That's the way it is today. What was it like in the past? Many people tend to believe that the world they live in is getting worse as they get older. It's not. They simply have not studied history enough to know that people were just as stupid, as violent, as careless and as ignorant of what they should know about life in the past as they are today. In fact, likely mores so than today. At least today we have more education worldwide to give us a basis on which to think.
Do conditions today predict anything for the future? In the past diseases and wars kept population levels down. Both of these factors are more limited today than at any time in the past. China, with the largest population in the world, limiting its population indicates that it will change its own future. If other countries take their future survival and health seriously--few do at present--the world may reach sustainable and manageable levels of population, pollution and resource management. Odds are that a massive die-off of people, perhaps related somehow to a failure of electronic technology on a global scale causing stock market crashes, less likely due to disease, will cause us to come together as nation members of one world community to take it's future seriously.
A massive shock of some sort is necessary to bring people around to thinking of the future in global terms rather than of their own present desires and pleasures. As uncontrolled as our world is at present, the shock is a certainty though its nature is in doubt.
Until that shock happens, we don't have enough "thinking men" among us to effect real and lasting change. The shock might come from our atmosphere and our water. As we debate global warming and climate change--who cares if the global temperature rises by half a degree in 50 years?--our industries continue to pour thousands of poisons into our air and our water. While we call them "greenhouse gases." That's the air we breathe and the water that keeps us alive. Darwin's claim that the most adaptable will survive crises will be tested. Check out the kinds of poisons industries are subjecting us and our children to.
Can we teach more of our people to think? Ask the teachers. They are the ones saddled with the impossible task of teaching children to think while working under such hobbling conditions most teachers could never make it happen. Our education systems are designed to produce consumers and employees, and they do it well. Ask any child why he or she should stay in school and get a good education and the answer will almost always be "to get a good job." Never "to have a better life." Jobs mean income to buy stuff our industries produce.
Real change can only happen in schools and homes. Real change in homes will be tough because we do not teach young people what they need to know to be good parents.
Education is the answer. Now, do you remember the question?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to effect real change in homes and schools so their children will be able to adapt to what life will throw at them in the future.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Friday, July 02, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
The Driver Behind You May Be Unconscious
The Driver Behind You May Be Unconscious
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
- Bruce Barton, American author, advertising executive, politician (1886-1967)
Almost all of us believe that something inside us is superior to the circumstances of our lives. It's what keeps us sane and away from killing each other. Not so many of us accomplish something splendid. The reason may be a disconnect between what we are capable of and what we believe we are capable of.
Hold that thought for a moment while we check out that driver behind you.
Have you ever fumbled with your car radio or to take something out of your glovebox or even had a conversation with someone in the car you were driving and suddenly realized that you had absolutely no memory of driving the past few minutes? Technically you were unconscious while driving.
Unconscious? Doesn't that mean in a coma or dead, or at least asleep? Yes, but not exclusively. To be conscious means to be fully aware of your surroundings. As you were obviously not fully aware of your surroundings while you drove in our example, you could not have been conscious. So what were you?
Social science has given up on the idea formerly called the "subconscious." Mostly because there is no evidence for it. One dictionary describes "unconscious" as "that part of the mind wherein psychic activity takes place of which the person is unaware." In this example you were aware of your radio search or your glovebox search or your conversation. But you were also aware in some very different sense--psychically--of your driving.
Could you be driving "mechanically" as some used to say young adults did after a few years of driving experience? Let's put it this way, would you be comfortable driving on a highway at full speed surrounded by people who were driving only "mechanically"? The ugly truth is that many of us do. That guy behind you may indeed be driving mechanically, or unconsciously, meaning that he may not be able to apply his full attention to any emergency that may arise (such as you having to come to a sudden stop because a dog wandered onto the highway).
You dream with your unconscious mind. When you dream many of the functions of your brain you normally consider part of your waking life are shut down. The frontal lobes, for example, those brain parts that allow you to distinguish between right and wrong and that keep you on "an even keel" when you are awake, don't function. That's why dreams can be crazy sometimes, because the brain's normal control mechanisms are shut down when you are asleep.
Science doesn't know for certain why we need sleep, though recent research suggests it help us to review our activities of the previous day so we can embed them in longer term memory--that is, we need sleep to consolidate our daytime learning. You, very likely, do not know how you managed to pilot your car down the road without being aware of what you were doing while searching for a different radio station. But you are certain you weren't asleep. But were you conscious?
Any activity of the brain that does not involve the full application of all critical brain functions is an activity you do while, technically, unconscious. While unconscious your body may be in bed resting or in a hospital room in a coma. It may also be doing--indeed parts of your brain may be doing--something other than that of which you are fully aware.
What do you think when you hear an argument in a murder case that the defendant was not fully aware of what he was doing when he killed his wife? If you are involved in a collision while you are technically unconscious, the investigating police officer will consider you just as liable. We all assume that we do everything consciously. Science says otherwise, though we all hope that part of science doesn't take the stand in a court case.
Murder cases and car collisions are extreme cases. Most of our lives are lived away from extremes. Yet people sometimes do little things they may not be aware of--things that annoy you greatly or that inconvenience you--without being fully aware (conscious) of what they are doing. You don't want them imprisoned for their faults because then you would have to be behind bars for doing similar things. So, what to do?
The human brain and consciousness are, as you can see, subjects that bear much more study. We understand very little about them. Yet they govern our lives, and the brains and consciousness of others impact our lives, every day. As much as they mean to us and as much as they affect our lives, we know almost nothing about them.
We accept that we are all imperfect beings. Now you have a clue why that is. It may not solve any mysteries for you but it may help you to understand why people do or say things that simply don't seem right or in character for them, things that seem out of place.
As with many human behaviours it's best to ignore the extremes because they do not represent who these people are. Who they are when they are fully conscious. They, in turn, can be expected to forgive your extremes of behaviour.
But, just in case, if the driver behind you seems distracted, maybe you should pull over and let him or her pass before something happens you may find messy and uncomfortable. You can still drive fully conscious.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know how their children can develop socially and emotionally in concert with their intellectual and physical development.
Learn more at http://billallin.c/om
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.
- Bruce Barton, American author, advertising executive, politician (1886-1967)
Almost all of us believe that something inside us is superior to the circumstances of our lives. It's what keeps us sane and away from killing each other. Not so many of us accomplish something splendid. The reason may be a disconnect between what we are capable of and what we believe we are capable of.
Hold that thought for a moment while we check out that driver behind you.
Have you ever fumbled with your car radio or to take something out of your glovebox or even had a conversation with someone in the car you were driving and suddenly realized that you had absolutely no memory of driving the past few minutes? Technically you were unconscious while driving.
Unconscious? Doesn't that mean in a coma or dead, or at least asleep? Yes, but not exclusively. To be conscious means to be fully aware of your surroundings. As you were obviously not fully aware of your surroundings while you drove in our example, you could not have been conscious. So what were you?
Social science has given up on the idea formerly called the "subconscious." Mostly because there is no evidence for it. One dictionary describes "unconscious" as "that part of the mind wherein psychic activity takes place of which the person is unaware." In this example you were aware of your radio search or your glovebox search or your conversation. But you were also aware in some very different sense--psychically--of your driving.
Could you be driving "mechanically" as some used to say young adults did after a few years of driving experience? Let's put it this way, would you be comfortable driving on a highway at full speed surrounded by people who were driving only "mechanically"? The ugly truth is that many of us do. That guy behind you may indeed be driving mechanically, or unconsciously, meaning that he may not be able to apply his full attention to any emergency that may arise (such as you having to come to a sudden stop because a dog wandered onto the highway).
You dream with your unconscious mind. When you dream many of the functions of your brain you normally consider part of your waking life are shut down. The frontal lobes, for example, those brain parts that allow you to distinguish between right and wrong and that keep you on "an even keel" when you are awake, don't function. That's why dreams can be crazy sometimes, because the brain's normal control mechanisms are shut down when you are asleep.
Science doesn't know for certain why we need sleep, though recent research suggests it help us to review our activities of the previous day so we can embed them in longer term memory--that is, we need sleep to consolidate our daytime learning. You, very likely, do not know how you managed to pilot your car down the road without being aware of what you were doing while searching for a different radio station. But you are certain you weren't asleep. But were you conscious?
Any activity of the brain that does not involve the full application of all critical brain functions is an activity you do while, technically, unconscious. While unconscious your body may be in bed resting or in a hospital room in a coma. It may also be doing--indeed parts of your brain may be doing--something other than that of which you are fully aware.
What do you think when you hear an argument in a murder case that the defendant was not fully aware of what he was doing when he killed his wife? If you are involved in a collision while you are technically unconscious, the investigating police officer will consider you just as liable. We all assume that we do everything consciously. Science says otherwise, though we all hope that part of science doesn't take the stand in a court case.
Murder cases and car collisions are extreme cases. Most of our lives are lived away from extremes. Yet people sometimes do little things they may not be aware of--things that annoy you greatly or that inconvenience you--without being fully aware (conscious) of what they are doing. You don't want them imprisoned for their faults because then you would have to be behind bars for doing similar things. So, what to do?
The human brain and consciousness are, as you can see, subjects that bear much more study. We understand very little about them. Yet they govern our lives, and the brains and consciousness of others impact our lives, every day. As much as they mean to us and as much as they affect our lives, we know almost nothing about them.
We accept that we are all imperfect beings. Now you have a clue why that is. It may not solve any mysteries for you but it may help you to understand why people do or say things that simply don't seem right or in character for them, things that seem out of place.
As with many human behaviours it's best to ignore the extremes because they do not represent who these people are. Who they are when they are fully conscious. They, in turn, can be expected to forgive your extremes of behaviour.
But, just in case, if the driver behind you seems distracted, maybe you should pull over and let him or her pass before something happens you may find messy and uncomfortable. You can still drive fully conscious.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know how their children can develop socially and emotionally in concert with their intellectual and physical development.
Learn more at http://billallin.c/om
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Stop It, Lazy Selfish Greedy Bastards!
Stop It, Lazy Selfish Greedy Bastards!
"I love humanity. It's people I hate."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet and playwright (1892-1950) [also quoted in the Peanuts comic strip]
Farmers learn stuff that's down to earth. As I immerse myself in the deeply troublesome and awkward project of converting a lifelong city boy to struggling survival farmer (small variety, 8 acres), that has become my favourite saying--the "down to earth" one.
Before I continue with this article I must convey an important life lesson. There are two types of people: those who always put their own best interests first and those who frequently and comfortably put the best interests of others, individuals or groups or whole communities or societies, ahead of their own.
That may be the most important life lesson I have ever learned. It explains a huge amount about human behaviour. Personally, as a member of the latter group, it means that I can disregard any ideas of friendship or overtures of relationship of any kind with members of the former group.
Is that classification too harsh? Perhaps I can make it easier to understand by suggesting the behaviour of house cats as representative of what I will call the selfish group. If you have carefully observed the behaviour of cats, bells should begin to ring in your head now. Cats are the ultimate self-interested pets. Nature has programmed them to be survivors by putting themselves first.
That's not to say that cat owners are selfish or self-interested. On the contrary, they tend to be more altruistic kind of people. Dogs, on the other hand, better represent the altruistic group--again, that's not necessarily true of their owners. Dogs in the wild survive as individuals in an interdependent relationship with the pack. As the saying goes, dogs have owners while cats have staff.
People tend to behave much like one or the other of these two groups. No, I don't mean that they eat with their faces in bowls, let's leave that now.
Where I live, in eastern Canada, people with European heritage have lived for hundreds of years (First Nations people for over 3000 years in the oldest continuously occupied community in the New World). Only in recent decades has garbage been collected. Before that people took their trash to a dump, burned it or left it in a remote area of a field. Today I removed the last remnants of a burn barrel where previous (and oh so primitive) humanoids had tossed stuff that could never possibly burn.
Why would they put non-burnables in a burn barrel? Because they expected to move before they would have to deal with the consequences of their laziness. Much the same reasoning some people use when they toss beer bottles or cans out the windows of their cars as they drive down a road late at night rather than returning them to a recycling depot (the get their deposit back) at some later time.
My wife and I want to create a small farm that grows vegetables. You could call it a hobby farm except we don't plan to sell our veggies. We want to donate them to local foodbanks and shelters. Farming requires machines, ours needed a tractor with a plow. Lacking funding from a generous government or chemical manufacturer, we bought a used tractor, a classic model made in 1948. It worked beautifully, except the clutch would not disengage, which is decidedly awkward if you want to change gears.
For weeks I asked around but nobody knew how to adjust that clutch--"Take it to Bremner's (a local tractor dealer with an excellent reputation), they can fix any tractor problem." One day recently a man who usually functions with an oxygen hose at his nose (he didn't even get out of his car) stopped by our house as his wife left a fish her husband caught in one of his healthier moments. Even at our first meeting when it came out about my not being able to adjust the tractor clutch he offered to do it for me.
A few days later, without the oxygen, he hauled his 350 pound frame under the tractor, thrashed around for about an hour and came out with the clutch adjusted, something others had been unable to do. Despite needing his oxygen again, he stayed for tea then made his way home for pure O2. He wouldn't hear of taking a penny for his trouble. He was happy to help.
Everywhere you look you will find what some call the givers and the takers. Both may be easy enough to like until you need something, at which time the takers will vanish. Their lives are driven by self-interest, which is to say, greed.
The selfish ones are so easy to see around us that without evaluating life carefully you might get the impression that almost everyone is greedy and selfish. They aren't. The generous and altruistic people don't advertise themselves. They just are. The selfish ones make the news.
Believe it or not, despite the huge media efforts by industries to make us all into selfish, accumulative, consumer workaholics, more people today than ever before in history are giving to others, thinking of others, putting the best interests of others and the world ahead of their own. That's how civilization grows. That's how humanity progresses. That's how our planet will survive. We can't expect industries or the selfish to think of the welfare of everyone else.
Humanity could do with more selfless ones among us. People can change. What might help is if you are an altruistic person who is happy make this known to a selfish person who is unhappy. Selfish people are all basically unhappy, they seek thrills and gratification as substitutes for real happiness. It never makes them happy because they can never get enough. Greed is addictive.
Spread the word. Happiness is addictive as well. The more you give to the happiness and welfare of others, the happier you are. No one knows why. It seems, somehow, to be built into our genetic code to have the ability to be selfless while we retain the basic instinct to be greedy.
If we really want to beat nature, we can do it by helping each other. No other animal on the planet has the potential to do that the way we do. Birds and mammals are known to be nurturing and some are altruistic, but none can rise above what nature provided the way people can.
That's the only kind of defeating of nature that is win-win. That's the real potential of humanity.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow healthy and strong in all developmental streams, not just a limited few.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
"I love humanity. It's people I hate."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet and playwright (1892-1950) [also quoted in the Peanuts comic strip]
Farmers learn stuff that's down to earth. As I immerse myself in the deeply troublesome and awkward project of converting a lifelong city boy to struggling survival farmer (small variety, 8 acres), that has become my favourite saying--the "down to earth" one.
Before I continue with this article I must convey an important life lesson. There are two types of people: those who always put their own best interests first and those who frequently and comfortably put the best interests of others, individuals or groups or whole communities or societies, ahead of their own.
That may be the most important life lesson I have ever learned. It explains a huge amount about human behaviour. Personally, as a member of the latter group, it means that I can disregard any ideas of friendship or overtures of relationship of any kind with members of the former group.
Is that classification too harsh? Perhaps I can make it easier to understand by suggesting the behaviour of house cats as representative of what I will call the selfish group. If you have carefully observed the behaviour of cats, bells should begin to ring in your head now. Cats are the ultimate self-interested pets. Nature has programmed them to be survivors by putting themselves first.
That's not to say that cat owners are selfish or self-interested. On the contrary, they tend to be more altruistic kind of people. Dogs, on the other hand, better represent the altruistic group--again, that's not necessarily true of their owners. Dogs in the wild survive as individuals in an interdependent relationship with the pack. As the saying goes, dogs have owners while cats have staff.
People tend to behave much like one or the other of these two groups. No, I don't mean that they eat with their faces in bowls, let's leave that now.
Where I live, in eastern Canada, people with European heritage have lived for hundreds of years (First Nations people for over 3000 years in the oldest continuously occupied community in the New World). Only in recent decades has garbage been collected. Before that people took their trash to a dump, burned it or left it in a remote area of a field. Today I removed the last remnants of a burn barrel where previous (and oh so primitive) humanoids had tossed stuff that could never possibly burn.
Why would they put non-burnables in a burn barrel? Because they expected to move before they would have to deal with the consequences of their laziness. Much the same reasoning some people use when they toss beer bottles or cans out the windows of their cars as they drive down a road late at night rather than returning them to a recycling depot (the get their deposit back) at some later time.
My wife and I want to create a small farm that grows vegetables. You could call it a hobby farm except we don't plan to sell our veggies. We want to donate them to local foodbanks and shelters. Farming requires machines, ours needed a tractor with a plow. Lacking funding from a generous government or chemical manufacturer, we bought a used tractor, a classic model made in 1948. It worked beautifully, except the clutch would not disengage, which is decidedly awkward if you want to change gears.
For weeks I asked around but nobody knew how to adjust that clutch--"Take it to Bremner's (a local tractor dealer with an excellent reputation), they can fix any tractor problem." One day recently a man who usually functions with an oxygen hose at his nose (he didn't even get out of his car) stopped by our house as his wife left a fish her husband caught in one of his healthier moments. Even at our first meeting when it came out about my not being able to adjust the tractor clutch he offered to do it for me.
A few days later, without the oxygen, he hauled his 350 pound frame under the tractor, thrashed around for about an hour and came out with the clutch adjusted, something others had been unable to do. Despite needing his oxygen again, he stayed for tea then made his way home for pure O2. He wouldn't hear of taking a penny for his trouble. He was happy to help.
Everywhere you look you will find what some call the givers and the takers. Both may be easy enough to like until you need something, at which time the takers will vanish. Their lives are driven by self-interest, which is to say, greed.
The selfish ones are so easy to see around us that without evaluating life carefully you might get the impression that almost everyone is greedy and selfish. They aren't. The generous and altruistic people don't advertise themselves. They just are. The selfish ones make the news.
Believe it or not, despite the huge media efforts by industries to make us all into selfish, accumulative, consumer workaholics, more people today than ever before in history are giving to others, thinking of others, putting the best interests of others and the world ahead of their own. That's how civilization grows. That's how humanity progresses. That's how our planet will survive. We can't expect industries or the selfish to think of the welfare of everyone else.
Humanity could do with more selfless ones among us. People can change. What might help is if you are an altruistic person who is happy make this known to a selfish person who is unhappy. Selfish people are all basically unhappy, they seek thrills and gratification as substitutes for real happiness. It never makes them happy because they can never get enough. Greed is addictive.
Spread the word. Happiness is addictive as well. The more you give to the happiness and welfare of others, the happier you are. No one knows why. It seems, somehow, to be built into our genetic code to have the ability to be selfless while we retain the basic instinct to be greedy.
If we really want to beat nature, we can do it by helping each other. No other animal on the planet has the potential to do that the way we do. Birds and mammals are known to be nurturing and some are altruistic, but none can rise above what nature provided the way people can.
That's the only kind of defeating of nature that is win-win. That's the real potential of humanity.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow healthy and strong in all developmental streams, not just a limited few.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Who Is That Person In The Mirror?
Who Is That Person In The Mirror?
The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.
- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, American self-help author, writer, speaker (b. 1940)
Wayne Dyer ranks among the top few advocates of the "Change your mind, change your life" school of thought about life. I have admired his thinking for many years, though I have stayed away from his so-called New Age thinking about spirituality.
Yet I can't avoid the attraction of this quote, though he may have intended something different than what I take from it. I grant that if you look at life positively, life looks positive, you will feel positive about life. I grant that with few exceptions the media try to make our world look much worse than it is by using the Shock and Awe strategy to secure listeners, viewers and readers. But there is more to this quote than that.
When I look in the mirror I don't really see me. What I see is a right-left-reversed image of what others see when they look at me. Yet others see what they want to see when they look at me anyway, not necessarily the real me. The real me doesn't show up--has no way of making itself that "public"--either in the mirror or to others.
When I look in the mirror I see only the vessel I use as my travelling companion. Crippled at birth but recovered enough to walk and run close enough to what other kids could do to look "normal." Brain damaged at birth (breech, no blood to the brain for too long) but managed to reroute enough neural pathways over the succeeding decades to get by.
The man in the mirror had much to overcome. He received no nurturing, no teaching, nothing most of us expect from parents for the critical first six years of life. When he "went public" at age six, a feral child newly exposed to peers who had grown and learned in normal ways, it was as if he had just be born. At six years, this little fellow unknowingly had walls created around him intellectually, socially, emotionally and physically as his age peers grew while he just got a bit taller. He had, in effect, a deep well to climb out of if he were to survive in a world that cared no more about him than his parents had.
Some time during high school he learned to read, though he remained functionally illiterate until past age 44. He got a girlfriend whom he eventually married and with whom he had two children. Co-supporting his young family he secured a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in education--all the while still functionally illiterate, never having read a single book all the way through.
Why do I write about myself in the third person? I can't see any of that in the mirror. People I meet can't see any of that. In fact, I am no longer that person because I have changed so much.
In the process of climbing out of that pit, I got into habits of learning and improving myself I have retained throughout my life. When most people slowed down from learning at a rapid rate as they got older, I sped up because I could and didn't know there was an unwritten rule that you could stop when you wanted as an adult.
My father and mother knew virtually nothing about parenting. They taught me everything they knew about parenting. I used that little bit of learning about parenting to fail badly raising my own children. When my first wife left our family, I hurt. When she later died and my children decided they no longer found me of any value, I made up my mind to learn why. I knew it would be hard and it was. I knew much learning would be required and it was. What I didn't know along the way was that I would surpass what most other adults knew about parenting only to find myself blazing new ground, beating a path for those to follow.
I went from a know-nothing who could do little physically, had no skills and could only follow the lead of others to someone who takes the lead himself. That wasn't easy. Knowing nothing has its own problems, but leaders always have enemies who don't want to see others succeed where they can't or don't care to go.
I changed dramatically as a person. None of that change shows in the mirror. My life changed because I made up my mind that knowing more than most people about how children grow and develop meant little if I didn't spread the word. I kept climbing because leaders can be seen and heard better from greater heights.
I became someone much greater than I could ever have imagined as a child or as a young adult. I know that person better than the child or the young adult I used to be. I know that person intimately. I like him. None of that shows in the mirror.
Today the man in the mirror and I tolerate each other. The real me pays little attention to the mirror man because he isn't like me and he has changed only by aging. The real me changed by growing, spiritually, emotionally, socially, intellectually. The real me is still a motor moron because I depend so heavily on the man in the mirror and he is still that barely recovered cripple with a sometimes dysfunctional brain.
How much attention should we pay to the person in our mirror? That person does absolutely nothing to help us. He or she gets older and insists upon demonstrating the effects of that aging in the mirror daily. The person in the mirror never gets better, only older.
Pity the person who cares deeply about the image they see in the mirror. That image will inevitably change, but never for the better. The person who identifies closely with the image in the mirror is destined to eventually be both old and stupid. The person in the mirror never gets smarter either.
There is a saying: Aging is inevitable, getting old is voluntary. I don't care for that saying. I prefer to think that the person in the mirror gets older while I keep getting better.
I do get better. So should you. If you haven't already decided to get better, you can make the decision and act on it today. Simply making the decision makes you better. Knowing that you need to learn in order to get better, and that no matter how much money you earn and spend won't help, is a big leap forward in your quest to get better.
If you make the decision to get better before you reach the end of this article, you will already be better for it. Wow! Congratulations.
But hurry because....
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook of epic importance but easy to read on the subject of child development and learning and of parenting.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.
- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, American self-help author, writer, speaker (b. 1940)
Wayne Dyer ranks among the top few advocates of the "Change your mind, change your life" school of thought about life. I have admired his thinking for many years, though I have stayed away from his so-called New Age thinking about spirituality.
Yet I can't avoid the attraction of this quote, though he may have intended something different than what I take from it. I grant that if you look at life positively, life looks positive, you will feel positive about life. I grant that with few exceptions the media try to make our world look much worse than it is by using the Shock and Awe strategy to secure listeners, viewers and readers. But there is more to this quote than that.
When I look in the mirror I don't really see me. What I see is a right-left-reversed image of what others see when they look at me. Yet others see what they want to see when they look at me anyway, not necessarily the real me. The real me doesn't show up--has no way of making itself that "public"--either in the mirror or to others.
When I look in the mirror I see only the vessel I use as my travelling companion. Crippled at birth but recovered enough to walk and run close enough to what other kids could do to look "normal." Brain damaged at birth (breech, no blood to the brain for too long) but managed to reroute enough neural pathways over the succeeding decades to get by.
The man in the mirror had much to overcome. He received no nurturing, no teaching, nothing most of us expect from parents for the critical first six years of life. When he "went public" at age six, a feral child newly exposed to peers who had grown and learned in normal ways, it was as if he had just be born. At six years, this little fellow unknowingly had walls created around him intellectually, socially, emotionally and physically as his age peers grew while he just got a bit taller. He had, in effect, a deep well to climb out of if he were to survive in a world that cared no more about him than his parents had.
Some time during high school he learned to read, though he remained functionally illiterate until past age 44. He got a girlfriend whom he eventually married and with whom he had two children. Co-supporting his young family he secured a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in education--all the while still functionally illiterate, never having read a single book all the way through.
Why do I write about myself in the third person? I can't see any of that in the mirror. People I meet can't see any of that. In fact, I am no longer that person because I have changed so much.
In the process of climbing out of that pit, I got into habits of learning and improving myself I have retained throughout my life. When most people slowed down from learning at a rapid rate as they got older, I sped up because I could and didn't know there was an unwritten rule that you could stop when you wanted as an adult.
My father and mother knew virtually nothing about parenting. They taught me everything they knew about parenting. I used that little bit of learning about parenting to fail badly raising my own children. When my first wife left our family, I hurt. When she later died and my children decided they no longer found me of any value, I made up my mind to learn why. I knew it would be hard and it was. I knew much learning would be required and it was. What I didn't know along the way was that I would surpass what most other adults knew about parenting only to find myself blazing new ground, beating a path for those to follow.
I went from a know-nothing who could do little physically, had no skills and could only follow the lead of others to someone who takes the lead himself. That wasn't easy. Knowing nothing has its own problems, but leaders always have enemies who don't want to see others succeed where they can't or don't care to go.
I changed dramatically as a person. None of that change shows in the mirror. My life changed because I made up my mind that knowing more than most people about how children grow and develop meant little if I didn't spread the word. I kept climbing because leaders can be seen and heard better from greater heights.
I became someone much greater than I could ever have imagined as a child or as a young adult. I know that person better than the child or the young adult I used to be. I know that person intimately. I like him. None of that shows in the mirror.
Today the man in the mirror and I tolerate each other. The real me pays little attention to the mirror man because he isn't like me and he has changed only by aging. The real me changed by growing, spiritually, emotionally, socially, intellectually. The real me is still a motor moron because I depend so heavily on the man in the mirror and he is still that barely recovered cripple with a sometimes dysfunctional brain.
How much attention should we pay to the person in our mirror? That person does absolutely nothing to help us. He or she gets older and insists upon demonstrating the effects of that aging in the mirror daily. The person in the mirror never gets better, only older.
Pity the person who cares deeply about the image they see in the mirror. That image will inevitably change, but never for the better. The person who identifies closely with the image in the mirror is destined to eventually be both old and stupid. The person in the mirror never gets smarter either.
There is a saying: Aging is inevitable, getting old is voluntary. I don't care for that saying. I prefer to think that the person in the mirror gets older while I keep getting better.
I do get better. So should you. If you haven't already decided to get better, you can make the decision and act on it today. Simply making the decision makes you better. Knowing that you need to learn in order to get better, and that no matter how much money you earn and spend won't help, is a big leap forward in your quest to get better.
If you make the decision to get better before you reach the end of this article, you will already be better for it. Wow! Congratulations.
But hurry because....
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook of epic importance but easy to read on the subject of child development and learning and of parenting.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Your Momma Should Have Known
Your Momma Should Have Known
"Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes...The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work."
- Carl Zimmer
Nothing against your mother. The point is that your mother and everyone's mother should have been taught what you are about to learn, before you were born. The news is recent, but the information itself has been around since the beginning of our existence.
Caution: What you are about to learn may change what you think about life and how you understand the sometimes mysterious behaviour of others. You won't be asked to convert to any way of thinking. It will simply help you to understand.
Human behaviour, or human nature if you will, may present the greatest mystery and challenge anyone has ever faced. For examples, men ask "What do women want?" while women wonder "What makes men tick?" Neither is a huge mystery, it's just that we haven't taught each other what a few of us already know.
The study you will read about could not have been conducted on humans. At least not on living ones. You will soon understand why. It was conducted on rats. And on the brains of people who had recently died, some from suicide. Just to make it more enticing, love has a great deal to do with it.
In humans, love is a mystery. The word has more definitions than just about any other in the Oxford English Dictionary. The problem is that we can't get a handle on exactly what love is. Yet, in our own lives, we tend to quantify love. We don't measure love as such. We measure loving touch.
In general, we touch those we love more than those we don't love. When the romance of the early months of a new relationship filled with lots of loving touch fades and the touching reduces to little or nothing, we say that love was lost. People leave legal relationships seeking more and better love, but what they really seek is more loving touch. We tend to equate touch with love. We measure how much others love us by the amount they want to share loving touch with us.
Not so easy to test in a science lab. Especially when ethics intervenes when we want to prove that people change for the negative when they lack sufficient touch of others. Many labs have turned to rats as substitutes. The similarities between us and rats in these tests may make you uncomfortable, but they are real.
In one family of rats the mother was allowed to lick the fur of her babies, often and extensively. In another, the mother hardly licked her babies at all. As adults, the two groups of rats turn out very different. In the neglected group, the rats were easily startled by unexpected noises, they were reluctant to explore new places and their bodies produced lots of hormone when they experienced stress.
The licked and loved rats were not easily startled, showed great curiosity in exploring new places in their environment. And they "did not suffer surges of stress hormones," according to Carl Zimmer.
They did not suffer surges of stress hormones. I do. Like many others, I lack the gene that should cause my adrenal gland to produce a hormone that neutralizes the effects of epinephrin (commonly known as adrenalin), the chemical produced by the adrenal gland to prepare us for action in times of sudden stress, known as the fight or flight response. In other words, when my body senses stress, I not only get the surge of adrenalin but it hangs around in my bloodstream for hours, even for days.
Why do some people suffer severely from stress--even to the point of thinking about or actually committing suicide--while others seem able to handle stress with relative ease? The rats in the experiment above and in hundreds of other labs may show us the answer. The rats--and at least some of us--may not be able to handle stress as well as others because our brains and bodies are not prepared for what amounts to prolonged chemical warfare on us. Self-induced chemical warfare.
Two families of molecules control when our genes turn on and off, which ones and for how long. One, the methyl group, essentially plugs the path for genes to express themselves by producing proteins. The other, coiling proteins, wraps our DNA into spools so tight the genes can't become active. If either is too successful or lacking, something can happen with gene expression (or may be prevented from happening) that will affect our health and even our lives.
Our experiences can rewrite these two, collectively called the epigenetic code. Most of the writing or behaviour patterning is done before we are born. However, strong experiences after we are born--even extraordinarily strong experiences as adults--can rewrite the code.
Differences between the brain of the licked rats and the neglected ones were found in the hippocampus. The glucocorticoid receptor gene--the one that controls how long adrenalin stays in the bloodstream--for example, was capped off by methyl groups in the neglected rats and they had fewer receptors than the licked rats. Thus the neglected rats had fewer ways to stop adrenalin from doing its thing when it was no longer needed. They were permanently stressed out.
Neurobiologist Michael Meaney, of McGill University, and colleagues followed his rat studies by studying the brains of people who had recently died. Twelve had committed suicide and had suffered abuse as children, 12 had committed suicide but had not suffered abuse and the final 12 had died of natural causes. The suicide people who had suffered abuse had cortisol receptors capped by methyl groups and had fewer receptors, as they had found with the rats. Abuse in childhood had caused them to be permanently stressed as adults.
Another group studied suicide victims and people who died natural deaths and found methyl groups blocking the gene that produces the protein BDNF in the Wernicke area of the brains of the suicides. Environmental influences--everything after birth, including human interaction--can also affect adults.
Neuroscientist Eric Nestler, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, examined the brains of mice that had been put through so much stress in conflicts with other mice that they were depressed. He found differences in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved with the brain's reward system and helps to set values on things based on the pleasure derived from them. He found the DNA in that part wound tightly with coiling proteins. Nestler's group found the same kinds of epigenetic changes in the brains of depressed humans who had recently died.
Brain changes caused by coiling proteins and methyl groups should be able to be reversed, once we learn how. Nestler injected HDAC inhibitors into the nucleus accumbens parts of the brains of depressed mice to loosen the coils of DNA. Ten days later the mice were less hesitant about approaching other mice and other signs of depression were absent.
These studies suggest that previously intractable human troubles such as depression, suicide and a wide range of problems associated with constant stress (including those that impact the immune system) may be correctable. More study is needed and testing on humans will be tricky, maybe even risky at first.
Any change to the brain is risky. But it may be do-able. Medical science is still in the very early stages of learning about our most complex and sophisticated organ.
Soon taking a DNA sample of a newborn baby will be routine. The sample will be examined for variations from expected norms so the child can have a genetic adjustment made and avoid genetic problems and weaknesses that are an unfortunate part of life today.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children right from birth. This book shows us how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: The Brain, by Carl Zimmer, Discover, June 2010]
"Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes...The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work."
- Carl Zimmer
Nothing against your mother. The point is that your mother and everyone's mother should have been taught what you are about to learn, before you were born. The news is recent, but the information itself has been around since the beginning of our existence.
Caution: What you are about to learn may change what you think about life and how you understand the sometimes mysterious behaviour of others. You won't be asked to convert to any way of thinking. It will simply help you to understand.
Human behaviour, or human nature if you will, may present the greatest mystery and challenge anyone has ever faced. For examples, men ask "What do women want?" while women wonder "What makes men tick?" Neither is a huge mystery, it's just that we haven't taught each other what a few of us already know.
The study you will read about could not have been conducted on humans. At least not on living ones. You will soon understand why. It was conducted on rats. And on the brains of people who had recently died, some from suicide. Just to make it more enticing, love has a great deal to do with it.
In humans, love is a mystery. The word has more definitions than just about any other in the Oxford English Dictionary. The problem is that we can't get a handle on exactly what love is. Yet, in our own lives, we tend to quantify love. We don't measure love as such. We measure loving touch.
In general, we touch those we love more than those we don't love. When the romance of the early months of a new relationship filled with lots of loving touch fades and the touching reduces to little or nothing, we say that love was lost. People leave legal relationships seeking more and better love, but what they really seek is more loving touch. We tend to equate touch with love. We measure how much others love us by the amount they want to share loving touch with us.
Not so easy to test in a science lab. Especially when ethics intervenes when we want to prove that people change for the negative when they lack sufficient touch of others. Many labs have turned to rats as substitutes. The similarities between us and rats in these tests may make you uncomfortable, but they are real.
In one family of rats the mother was allowed to lick the fur of her babies, often and extensively. In another, the mother hardly licked her babies at all. As adults, the two groups of rats turn out very different. In the neglected group, the rats were easily startled by unexpected noises, they were reluctant to explore new places and their bodies produced lots of hormone when they experienced stress.
The licked and loved rats were not easily startled, showed great curiosity in exploring new places in their environment. And they "did not suffer surges of stress hormones," according to Carl Zimmer.
They did not suffer surges of stress hormones. I do. Like many others, I lack the gene that should cause my adrenal gland to produce a hormone that neutralizes the effects of epinephrin (commonly known as adrenalin), the chemical produced by the adrenal gland to prepare us for action in times of sudden stress, known as the fight or flight response. In other words, when my body senses stress, I not only get the surge of adrenalin but it hangs around in my bloodstream for hours, even for days.
Why do some people suffer severely from stress--even to the point of thinking about or actually committing suicide--while others seem able to handle stress with relative ease? The rats in the experiment above and in hundreds of other labs may show us the answer. The rats--and at least some of us--may not be able to handle stress as well as others because our brains and bodies are not prepared for what amounts to prolonged chemical warfare on us. Self-induced chemical warfare.
Two families of molecules control when our genes turn on and off, which ones and for how long. One, the methyl group, essentially plugs the path for genes to express themselves by producing proteins. The other, coiling proteins, wraps our DNA into spools so tight the genes can't become active. If either is too successful or lacking, something can happen with gene expression (or may be prevented from happening) that will affect our health and even our lives.
Our experiences can rewrite these two, collectively called the epigenetic code. Most of the writing or behaviour patterning is done before we are born. However, strong experiences after we are born--even extraordinarily strong experiences as adults--can rewrite the code.
Differences between the brain of the licked rats and the neglected ones were found in the hippocampus. The glucocorticoid receptor gene--the one that controls how long adrenalin stays in the bloodstream--for example, was capped off by methyl groups in the neglected rats and they had fewer receptors than the licked rats. Thus the neglected rats had fewer ways to stop adrenalin from doing its thing when it was no longer needed. They were permanently stressed out.
Neurobiologist Michael Meaney, of McGill University, and colleagues followed his rat studies by studying the brains of people who had recently died. Twelve had committed suicide and had suffered abuse as children, 12 had committed suicide but had not suffered abuse and the final 12 had died of natural causes. The suicide people who had suffered abuse had cortisol receptors capped by methyl groups and had fewer receptors, as they had found with the rats. Abuse in childhood had caused them to be permanently stressed as adults.
Another group studied suicide victims and people who died natural deaths and found methyl groups blocking the gene that produces the protein BDNF in the Wernicke area of the brains of the suicides. Environmental influences--everything after birth, including human interaction--can also affect adults.
Neuroscientist Eric Nestler, of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, examined the brains of mice that had been put through so much stress in conflicts with other mice that they were depressed. He found differences in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is involved with the brain's reward system and helps to set values on things based on the pleasure derived from them. He found the DNA in that part wound tightly with coiling proteins. Nestler's group found the same kinds of epigenetic changes in the brains of depressed humans who had recently died.
Brain changes caused by coiling proteins and methyl groups should be able to be reversed, once we learn how. Nestler injected HDAC inhibitors into the nucleus accumbens parts of the brains of depressed mice to loosen the coils of DNA. Ten days later the mice were less hesitant about approaching other mice and other signs of depression were absent.
These studies suggest that previously intractable human troubles such as depression, suicide and a wide range of problems associated with constant stress (including those that impact the immune system) may be correctable. More study is needed and testing on humans will be tricky, maybe even risky at first.
Any change to the brain is risky. But it may be do-able. Medical science is still in the very early stages of learning about our most complex and sophisticated organ.
Soon taking a DNA sample of a newborn baby will be routine. The sample will be examined for variations from expected norms so the child can have a genetic adjustment made and avoid genetic problems and weaknesses that are an unfortunate part of life today.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow healthy children right from birth. This book shows us how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: The Brain, by Carl Zimmer, Discover, June 2010]
Monday, June 07, 2010
It's About Time: What You Don't Know But Should
It's About Time: What You Don't Know But Should
Humans invented the concept of time. It didn't exist, in the way we know time, before we came along. No other creatures on the planet have the same concept of time as we do. Or, if it did exist, who would know?
Is time real or imaginary? Einstein considered it real, counted it as a component of what he called the fourth dimension, space-time. Space-time figured prominently in projections based on his theory of relativity.
But so did gravity and some physicists (albeit far from a majority) wonder now if gravity is everything Einstein says it is. For example, where is all that Dark Matter that supposedly comprises far more of the universe than the matter we can detect? For that matter (excuse the pun, I couldn't resist), where is all the "real" matter that should exist but we're having difficulty finding since we became aware of the Big Bang and developed big telescopes? University of Maryland astronomer Stacy McGaugh's study shows that many galaxies have much less matter than should be there to account for their gravitational pull.
If gravity is not what Einstein said it is, then that messes up our concept of time. So does the average U.S. city commuter really lose 38 hours a year to traffic delays or is that just imagined? The answer (you're not going to like this, I didn't) is that most of what we believe about our lives is based on how we perceive it (what we imagine it to be) more than on reality. (Okay, I wouldn't have time to explain that even if I could.)
After nearly a century of using Daylight Saving Time (DST), we still aren't sure why we use it. Benjamin Franklin introduced it as a joke. He said that if we got up an hour earlier each morning we could get an hour's more work done in daylight and save candles in the evening. The U.K. adopted DST in 1917, most of the rest of the world followed. (Personally, I can't see sleeping through daylight in the early morning hours in summer when that's often the best time to work outside. The mosquitoes in our area agree.)
Daylight Saving Time accounts for a drop in electricity use. The U.S. Department of Energy claims power demand drops by 0.5 percent during DST, saving three million barrels of oil in the U.S. alone.
By the way, it's not Daylight Savings Time. It's Saving. Savings is an account you have at the bank. That is, you would if you had any money to keep in it.
One study watched how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked and mail clerks spoke and concluded that the fastest paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo and New York. (As an aside, I have often wondered if rats are insulted when we refer to the fast paced life of humans in cities as the Rat Race. If so, they had better get over it because half the population of the world lives in cities today, most in big cities.)
The psychologist who did that study found the slowest paced cities were Shreveport, Sacramento and Los Angeles. (Nothing in the report about the pace of life of rats in those cities.)
Back in the old days one second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. (We'll pause here while you fetch your calculator if you like.) A second can still be defined that way, but it will be a longer second. The friction of tides as a result of gravity by the sun and moon slow earth's travel, lengthening our day by three milliseconds each century. (Feel free to think of it as "mutual attraction" not gravity if my previous statements made you uncomfortable with that word.)
Let's put that into perspective. In the time of the dinosaurs the day was only 23 of our hours long. (You don't suppose they had a dinosaur version of Rodent Race that caused the dinos to die off.)
Speaking of things that slow earth's rotation, even the weather can do it. El Niño winds can cause earth's rotation to slow by a fraction of a millisecond over just 24 hours.
Technology can do better than that. In 1972 atomic clocks in more than 50 countries were made the final authority on matters of time. They're so accurate that they lose about a second in 31.7 million years. But in 31.7 million years our day will be a half hour longer, so won't all our atomic clocks be wrong?
Actually, no. To keep the clocks in synch with earth's rotation we now add a "leap second" every few years. The most recent leap second was added this past New Year's Eve. (I thought 2009 seemed longer for some reason.)
One clock does even better than the network of atomic clocks. The clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado, measures the vibrations of a single atom of Mercury and is accurate to less than one second of loss in one billion years. (Who knew an atom of mercury could shiver that long?)
We think of timekeeping as standard now. In fact we call it Standard Time. Until the age of trains that had to meet set schedules in the 1800s, every village had its own version of standard time. They used solar noon in their respective areas. As odd as it seems now, a few watches were made in those days of confused standard times for trains that kept track of two times, one the local standard time and the other "railway time."
The U.K. adopted Standard Time first through an act of Parliament. The U.S. came on board on November 18, 1883. Some people speculate that the adoption of Standard Time may have prompted Einstein to think about how space and time might be united in his theory of relativity.
Einstein said that gravity affects the passage of time. So a passenger in an airplane, flying where gravity is weaker, would age a few nanoseconds more than a person who kept his feet on the ground.
Quantum theory claims that the shortest possible period of time (known as Planck time after the German physicist whose work began the whole study of quantum theory) is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.
Most scientists today believe that time as we know it began with the Big Bang, created with the rest of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. If you care, stay tuned because that belief could change any time now.
Will time ever end? Three Spanish scientists claim it will. They say our expanding universe is not really expanding at all. Rather time is slowing down, making it seem to us as if the universe is expanding. According to their calculations, time will eventually stop, at which point everything we know will stop as well. (I was going to calculate when that would be, but I don't have time.)
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to develop all aspects of their lives at the right time.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: Discover, March 2009]
Humans invented the concept of time. It didn't exist, in the way we know time, before we came along. No other creatures on the planet have the same concept of time as we do. Or, if it did exist, who would know?
Is time real or imaginary? Einstein considered it real, counted it as a component of what he called the fourth dimension, space-time. Space-time figured prominently in projections based on his theory of relativity.
But so did gravity and some physicists (albeit far from a majority) wonder now if gravity is everything Einstein says it is. For example, where is all that Dark Matter that supposedly comprises far more of the universe than the matter we can detect? For that matter (excuse the pun, I couldn't resist), where is all the "real" matter that should exist but we're having difficulty finding since we became aware of the Big Bang and developed big telescopes? University of Maryland astronomer Stacy McGaugh's study shows that many galaxies have much less matter than should be there to account for their gravitational pull.
If gravity is not what Einstein said it is, then that messes up our concept of time. So does the average U.S. city commuter really lose 38 hours a year to traffic delays or is that just imagined? The answer (you're not going to like this, I didn't) is that most of what we believe about our lives is based on how we perceive it (what we imagine it to be) more than on reality. (Okay, I wouldn't have time to explain that even if I could.)
After nearly a century of using Daylight Saving Time (DST), we still aren't sure why we use it. Benjamin Franklin introduced it as a joke. He said that if we got up an hour earlier each morning we could get an hour's more work done in daylight and save candles in the evening. The U.K. adopted DST in 1917, most of the rest of the world followed. (Personally, I can't see sleeping through daylight in the early morning hours in summer when that's often the best time to work outside. The mosquitoes in our area agree.)
Daylight Saving Time accounts for a drop in electricity use. The U.S. Department of Energy claims power demand drops by 0.5 percent during DST, saving three million barrels of oil in the U.S. alone.
By the way, it's not Daylight Savings Time. It's Saving. Savings is an account you have at the bank. That is, you would if you had any money to keep in it.
One study watched how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked and mail clerks spoke and concluded that the fastest paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo and New York. (As an aside, I have often wondered if rats are insulted when we refer to the fast paced life of humans in cities as the Rat Race. If so, they had better get over it because half the population of the world lives in cities today, most in big cities.)
The psychologist who did that study found the slowest paced cities were Shreveport, Sacramento and Los Angeles. (Nothing in the report about the pace of life of rats in those cities.)
Back in the old days one second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. (We'll pause here while you fetch your calculator if you like.) A second can still be defined that way, but it will be a longer second. The friction of tides as a result of gravity by the sun and moon slow earth's travel, lengthening our day by three milliseconds each century. (Feel free to think of it as "mutual attraction" not gravity if my previous statements made you uncomfortable with that word.)
Let's put that into perspective. In the time of the dinosaurs the day was only 23 of our hours long. (You don't suppose they had a dinosaur version of Rodent Race that caused the dinos to die off.)
Speaking of things that slow earth's rotation, even the weather can do it. El Niño winds can cause earth's rotation to slow by a fraction of a millisecond over just 24 hours.
Technology can do better than that. In 1972 atomic clocks in more than 50 countries were made the final authority on matters of time. They're so accurate that they lose about a second in 31.7 million years. But in 31.7 million years our day will be a half hour longer, so won't all our atomic clocks be wrong?
Actually, no. To keep the clocks in synch with earth's rotation we now add a "leap second" every few years. The most recent leap second was added this past New Year's Eve. (I thought 2009 seemed longer for some reason.)
One clock does even better than the network of atomic clocks. The clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colorado, measures the vibrations of a single atom of Mercury and is accurate to less than one second of loss in one billion years. (Who knew an atom of mercury could shiver that long?)
We think of timekeeping as standard now. In fact we call it Standard Time. Until the age of trains that had to meet set schedules in the 1800s, every village had its own version of standard time. They used solar noon in their respective areas. As odd as it seems now, a few watches were made in those days of confused standard times for trains that kept track of two times, one the local standard time and the other "railway time."
The U.K. adopted Standard Time first through an act of Parliament. The U.S. came on board on November 18, 1883. Some people speculate that the adoption of Standard Time may have prompted Einstein to think about how space and time might be united in his theory of relativity.
Einstein said that gravity affects the passage of time. So a passenger in an airplane, flying where gravity is weaker, would age a few nanoseconds more than a person who kept his feet on the ground.
Quantum theory claims that the shortest possible period of time (known as Planck time after the German physicist whose work began the whole study of quantum theory) is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.
Most scientists today believe that time as we know it began with the Big Bang, created with the rest of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. If you care, stay tuned because that belief could change any time now.
Will time ever end? Three Spanish scientists claim it will. They say our expanding universe is not really expanding at all. Rather time is slowing down, making it seem to us as if the universe is expanding. According to their calculations, time will eventually stop, at which point everything we know will stop as well. (I was going to calculate when that would be, but I don't have time.)
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to develop all aspects of their lives at the right time.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
[Primary source: Discover, March 2009]
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Have We Created Societies of Social Welfare Bums?
Have We Created Societies of Social Welfare Bums?
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
What do love and jealousy have to do with welfare? A great deal, as you will learn. First let me note that the two paragraphs that comprise the quote come from different sources by Heinlein.
Let's lead off with a big idea, though one you should find comfort with. We have people for whom someone or some people other than themselves takes priority over their own best interests. And we have people who, when all distractions are stripped away, have their own best interests of primary importance.
Doesn't everyone give importance to their own best interests? Of course, it's how we survive. Doesn't everyone have to put the interests of others ahead of their own sometimes? Yes, but in the case of our self-first group, putting the interests of others ahead of their own may indeed be in their own bests interests. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take the example of a highly paid executive who makes a sizable donation to charity right before the end of income tax season. By no small coincidence the amount of the donation happens to lower his income below a threshold, putting him into a lower tax bracket. In the end he is money in pocket and he receives acclaim for his donations. Is that bad? No, most of us would do it if we could. But that person can't claim to have the best interests of others ahead of his own if he will benefit financially from the donation. His own wallet counts first.
Now let's take the example of a parent who loads his adolescent son with electronic toys and gadgetry, so much so that the boy spends much of his time at home alone playing with the games. Admirable, huh? Except when you realize that the parent has thereby relieved himself of the parental obligation of interacting with the child, of teaching life lessons to the child while conveying the benefits of a close relationship between parent and child. That's what parents are supposed to do, what they have done throughout human history. The parent avoids that. That puts his own interests ahead of those of his son, no matter how he appeases his conscience by telling himself how good a father he was to give his son so much, more than he had as a child.
Another example, this time from the other group, might be the businessman who takes time out of his work week to mentor school kids--or even one child--so that the children have examples of good role models other than their own parent(s). Many other adults belong to service organizations in their communities where they volunteer many hours each year to benefit certain groups or individuals with needs they can't otherwise meet. They help, others benefit.
We have one group who loves themselves first, another who loves others more. You likely know many of each type. You may even have friends of both types. "Love" may be a strong word for people for whom love is, essentially, a business arrangement.
To put this into clearer perspective, let's take an extreme example of a life crisis. Let's say a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or tornado destroys one or more distribution centres for electricity in your area. It will take weeks, maybe months, before power is restored to your home and every other home, business, factory, recreation hall and other gathering place within 500 kilometres of where you live.
At crisis times, we all need allies. It's the time when everyone should pull together. In this scenario, which group of people would you rather have as your allies, the self-interested ones or the ones who willingly share and think of others before themselves?
That's easy to answer, you may say. Choose the group who will help you most. That extreme example was only to give perspective. Life is filled with all kinds of situations of a less critical nature in which we could use help from others. You might have a flat tire on the freeway and your cell phone battery is dead. If someone were to stop to help you, which group would you expect the helper to come from?
Some people can't make it in life. For many reasons, they have fallen into a pit of problems from which they can't extract themselves. They lose their job, can't pay their mortgage, get hassled by credit card companies, and so on. No matter what they do, they can't manage to put their ducks in line.
We have welfare (also known as social assistance) to help them. But for how long? If they do not have the necessary work skills, attitude and work ethic to get and hold a job, it could be years before they can pay their way in life again, if ever. Somehow they didn't get what they needed while they were in school, including life skills that could help them to survive in times of crisis.
They often live in the poorest quality of housing, maybe it reeks of the urine of past occupants or harbours cockroaches or has plumbing that works only sporadically. Or all of the aforementioned. It's not pleasant to be inside, especially in summer, so they sit outside with their beverage of choice, often beer.
That's where they are when some people see them and complain that "we pay our taxes so these people can sit around home all day and drink beer." Have you ever heard one of those complainers express a desire to change places with those welfare "whores" they despise? If life is so easy for welfare recipients, why would more people not want to change places with them?
We have many people in our society who, for a variety of reasons (none of them pleasant), must spend many years in prison. The prisons allow the inmates to work, for which they receive a little money (a dollar a day, for example) they can use to buy small treats for themselves. They often have access to libraries and classes to upgrade their education. And they can watch television.
Setting aside the discussion of the mood we might expect prisoners to be in (remember, they must associate with staff members who are outsiders to them) if we kept them confined full time in mind-numbing violence-inducing cells, we have people who condemn prisons for being places of luxury. "It's a great life and we pay for it!" Have you ever heard one person who seriously would trade places with a prisoner for any given period of time? Of course not. They know life is not luxurious or comfy in prison, no matter what they say.
Some people want to help those confined to prisons. Some want to help those who are stuck on welfare because they can't figure out how to dig themselves out of it. Some want to throw a lifeline to people who have lost their jobs or whose homes have been lost to fire. Or people whose life mates have walked out, leaving them alone enough to want to end their lives. Or people of an age they should retire because their health is not so good, but they can't because they have lost their life savings to some scam or stock market downturn.
They are the helpers. They are the "liberals" who want to "help out every freeloader who can't be bothered to work enough to earn a proper living." Even though not one of the self-first complainers would ever offer to change places with a person with a problem, they condemn those who would help. Because helping others does not help themselves and they are always more important than any others.
Those helpers are the ones you want as allies in a crisis. Ironically, the helpers will, in a crisis, help even the most self-interested lamers.
Returning now to our opening quote from Heinlein about love and jealousy, does it become obvious to you which group of people are likely to become jealous and which more apt to love others?
If you have a mate who is jealous, now you know why. That mate is not someone who would lay down their life for you in an emergency, no matter if you would for them or not.
Study your friends, workmates and neighbours and you will see which are the selfish ones and which the generous helpers. Some love themselves first and foremost, some love others more.
Remember, you will eventually have a crisis in your own life. Cultivate the helpers now so that they will support you when you need them. That's what friends do, though they serve much different functions most of the time.
The old saying goes: to make a friend you need first to be a friend. If you want to have a helping kind of person as a friend, you will need to make friendly gestures to that person first if they are not already your friend.
In other words, help someone else now who needs your help. That person needs a friend now and will be your friend later when you need him or her. Maybe. The ones who become friends will far outweigh in benefits to you those who take what you give and forget about you.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to raise their children to be helpers, to be able to make friends, to be self sufficient yet comfortable with interdependence.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.. Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love the greater the jealousy.
A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
- Robert Heinlein, American writer (1907-1988)
What do love and jealousy have to do with welfare? A great deal, as you will learn. First let me note that the two paragraphs that comprise the quote come from different sources by Heinlein.
Let's lead off with a big idea, though one you should find comfort with. We have people for whom someone or some people other than themselves takes priority over their own best interests. And we have people who, when all distractions are stripped away, have their own best interests of primary importance.
Doesn't everyone give importance to their own best interests? Of course, it's how we survive. Doesn't everyone have to put the interests of others ahead of their own sometimes? Yes, but in the case of our self-first group, putting the interests of others ahead of their own may indeed be in their own bests interests. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take the example of a highly paid executive who makes a sizable donation to charity right before the end of income tax season. By no small coincidence the amount of the donation happens to lower his income below a threshold, putting him into a lower tax bracket. In the end he is money in pocket and he receives acclaim for his donations. Is that bad? No, most of us would do it if we could. But that person can't claim to have the best interests of others ahead of his own if he will benefit financially from the donation. His own wallet counts first.
Now let's take the example of a parent who loads his adolescent son with electronic toys and gadgetry, so much so that the boy spends much of his time at home alone playing with the games. Admirable, huh? Except when you realize that the parent has thereby relieved himself of the parental obligation of interacting with the child, of teaching life lessons to the child while conveying the benefits of a close relationship between parent and child. That's what parents are supposed to do, what they have done throughout human history. The parent avoids that. That puts his own interests ahead of those of his son, no matter how he appeases his conscience by telling himself how good a father he was to give his son so much, more than he had as a child.
Another example, this time from the other group, might be the businessman who takes time out of his work week to mentor school kids--or even one child--so that the children have examples of good role models other than their own parent(s). Many other adults belong to service organizations in their communities where they volunteer many hours each year to benefit certain groups or individuals with needs they can't otherwise meet. They help, others benefit.
We have one group who loves themselves first, another who loves others more. You likely know many of each type. You may even have friends of both types. "Love" may be a strong word for people for whom love is, essentially, a business arrangement.
To put this into clearer perspective, let's take an extreme example of a life crisis. Let's say a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or tornado destroys one or more distribution centres for electricity in your area. It will take weeks, maybe months, before power is restored to your home and every other home, business, factory, recreation hall and other gathering place within 500 kilometres of where you live.
At crisis times, we all need allies. It's the time when everyone should pull together. In this scenario, which group of people would you rather have as your allies, the self-interested ones or the ones who willingly share and think of others before themselves?
That's easy to answer, you may say. Choose the group who will help you most. That extreme example was only to give perspective. Life is filled with all kinds of situations of a less critical nature in which we could use help from others. You might have a flat tire on the freeway and your cell phone battery is dead. If someone were to stop to help you, which group would you expect the helper to come from?
Some people can't make it in life. For many reasons, they have fallen into a pit of problems from which they can't extract themselves. They lose their job, can't pay their mortgage, get hassled by credit card companies, and so on. No matter what they do, they can't manage to put their ducks in line.
We have welfare (also known as social assistance) to help them. But for how long? If they do not have the necessary work skills, attitude and work ethic to get and hold a job, it could be years before they can pay their way in life again, if ever. Somehow they didn't get what they needed while they were in school, including life skills that could help them to survive in times of crisis.
They often live in the poorest quality of housing, maybe it reeks of the urine of past occupants or harbours cockroaches or has plumbing that works only sporadically. Or all of the aforementioned. It's not pleasant to be inside, especially in summer, so they sit outside with their beverage of choice, often beer.
That's where they are when some people see them and complain that "we pay our taxes so these people can sit around home all day and drink beer." Have you ever heard one of those complainers express a desire to change places with those welfare "whores" they despise? If life is so easy for welfare recipients, why would more people not want to change places with them?
We have many people in our society who, for a variety of reasons (none of them pleasant), must spend many years in prison. The prisons allow the inmates to work, for which they receive a little money (a dollar a day, for example) they can use to buy small treats for themselves. They often have access to libraries and classes to upgrade their education. And they can watch television.
Setting aside the discussion of the mood we might expect prisoners to be in (remember, they must associate with staff members who are outsiders to them) if we kept them confined full time in mind-numbing violence-inducing cells, we have people who condemn prisons for being places of luxury. "It's a great life and we pay for it!" Have you ever heard one person who seriously would trade places with a prisoner for any given period of time? Of course not. They know life is not luxurious or comfy in prison, no matter what they say.
Some people want to help those confined to prisons. Some want to help those who are stuck on welfare because they can't figure out how to dig themselves out of it. Some want to throw a lifeline to people who have lost their jobs or whose homes have been lost to fire. Or people whose life mates have walked out, leaving them alone enough to want to end their lives. Or people of an age they should retire because their health is not so good, but they can't because they have lost their life savings to some scam or stock market downturn.
They are the helpers. They are the "liberals" who want to "help out every freeloader who can't be bothered to work enough to earn a proper living." Even though not one of the self-first complainers would ever offer to change places with a person with a problem, they condemn those who would help. Because helping others does not help themselves and they are always more important than any others.
Those helpers are the ones you want as allies in a crisis. Ironically, the helpers will, in a crisis, help even the most self-interested lamers.
Returning now to our opening quote from Heinlein about love and jealousy, does it become obvious to you which group of people are likely to become jealous and which more apt to love others?
If you have a mate who is jealous, now you know why. That mate is not someone who would lay down their life for you in an emergency, no matter if you would for them or not.
Study your friends, workmates and neighbours and you will see which are the selfish ones and which the generous helpers. Some love themselves first and foremost, some love others more.
Remember, you will eventually have a crisis in your own life. Cultivate the helpers now so that they will support you when you need them. That's what friends do, though they serve much different functions most of the time.
The old saying goes: to make a friend you need first to be a friend. If you want to have a helping kind of person as a friend, you will need to make friendly gestures to that person first if they are not already your friend.
In other words, help someone else now who needs your help. That person needs a friend now and will be your friend later when you need him or her. Maybe. The ones who become friends will far outweigh in benefits to you those who take what you give and forget about you.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to raise their children to be helpers, to be able to make friends, to be self sufficient yet comfortable with interdependence.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Robert Heinlein: un-American Rebel With A Cause
Robert Heinlein: un-American Rebel With A Cause
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein, American science-fiction author (1907-1988)
That's outrageous! Why, look at what our experts have done for us.
Our expert chemists have created chemical fertilizers and pesticides to put on our agricultural crops so megafarming agribusinesses can produce lots more food than our ancestors ever dreamed of. And diseases and weaknesses such as diabetes, allergies and heart disease at rates never previously imagined because our bodies can't cope with the chemical attacks over long periods of time. (Tests are usually over three years, seldom longer, as if nothing could affect our health over a long period of time.)
Other expert chemists, medical specialists, have developed drugs to rescue us from the ravages of those chemicals, which have also made their way into our air (over half a million kinds) and our drinking water (over 300,000 kinds).
Our expert medical doctors happily prescribe those drugs for the rest of our lives so we can stay on our feet and work harder than our ancestors ever dreamed. And, so they won't forget what to prescribe, many of them accept reminder gifts from the pharmaceutical companies. A comfortable arrangement for the experts.
Our business specialists, MBAs tucked neatly in safe locations, figure out how to manufacture things to make our lives easier. Our communications specialists devise ways to sell those products to us through advertising, making us believe we need stuff we seldom use. The facts that our lives are not easier, that we have more stress than any previous generation, take more drugs than any previous generation and buy so much we don't need that we have to have yard sales and to give other stuff to "needy" people in neighbouring countries is never mentioned, so we forget. (Donations by Americans are often sold in Canada, and vice versa, a fact seldom noted publicly.)
Our expert architects design skyscrapers so well that most people who have to work in them have their health compromised. Sick building syndrome--no one knows how it will affect our length of life--stands as a hallmark of modern architectural progress.
Our legal specialists are so good at defending bad guys with cash to spread around that few go to prison and the ones who do have short stays. Our lawyers have reputations worse than used car salesmen of the old days. Their accounting specialists advise them how to Hoover every available dollar from ordinary folks who know so little of the skills of relationships they don't know how to stay married, so little about money management that more cash goes out than comes in for too many people and so little about getting along with neighbours that whole television courtroom series have cropped up to document the conflicts and allow the rest of us to be voyeurs.
Our specialists have made us the great Western World are persuaded those who are not part of it envy to such extremes that some of them want to murder us because of it.
We are, in short, the epitome of progress. We have our specialists to thank.
Let's take a moment to consider the parts of their lives that our experts and specialists don't want us to think about. Would you expect to see one of them changing a flat tire? No, because they have roadside assistance insurance. Or is it because they have no idea how to change a tire? Or because they fear getting their hands dirty. Ask one.
Most pay little attention to their diet until they are diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, have a stroke or are told point blank by their doctors that they are obese or dangerously overweight such that their lives are at risk. They know little about nutrition, what their bodies need to stay healthy.
Most have no idea how to fix their own computers, even how to keep dust out of them, and many don't even keep their security programs up to date. They don't change the oil in their own cars because they don't know how. They can't change a washer in a leaky tap/faucet. They have to call a plumber when their toilet plugs up because they have no idea how to use a plunger (or how to avoid plugging the toilet in the first place).
They don't plant their own gardens where they can grow pesticide-free and chemical-free veggies and fruit because they "don't have time." In fact, most don't have any idea how to tend a garden.
On the other hand, a high school dropout may know how to do all of these things and hundreds more. Does this make the dropout more fit for life in the 21st century than the highly educated person? Not necessarily. But maybe.
Consider this possibility. Something happens that causes the power to go out in your part of the world and you learn that it will be out for a whole year or more. Would you rather have the high school dropout who has had to survive by the seat of his pants for many years as an ally or one of the experts or specialists mentioned earlier in this article?
Of course you assume that such a thing will never happen, even though a terrorist bomb could accomplish it. The 30 million people of the US state of California believe their state will never sink into the Pacific either, even though scientists have been warning it would happen for years from a split of earth's tectonic plates along the San Andreas fault. Many Americans are unaware that what is known as a super volcano is brewing under Yellowstone Park, even though a blow that would darken the skies of the world possibly for years is overdue. These things can happen. Eventually one will. Some call it Armageddon, but it's really just nature in action.
Am I suggesting that high school and post secondary education is worthless or counter productive? Not at all. What is needed is a change of focus in our elementary and high schools. We need to teach children life skills, not stuff they know they will never need or use. How much do you remember or use of what you learned in high school? Would you have willing traded much of it for some of the life skills you have learned by experience since then?
Adolescents and young adults have trouble in high school often because they see how useless what they are forced to learn is and will be to them in the future. They know they need to learn life lessons--that desire to learn is instinctive--but they don't know what those lessons are or how to get them. They rebel. They drop out. They take drugs or alcohol, get tattoos, listen to music that could destroy their hearing, and so on. Eventually, most of them learn the lessons they need, get back on track and become upstanding citizens. But not quickly enough. Those lessons often come the hard way, by making mistake after mistake and learning from them. A few don't make it.
As radical as Robert Heinlein's suggestion in our opening quote seemed when you first read it, it makes more sense now. We have time to teach these life lessons and more. We simply need to eliminate what was better suited for 18th century schools than it is for today's world. In the 18th century kids learned life lessons at home. Today's kids can't learn them at home because many of their parents don't know the life lessons themselves to teach. With both parents working to earn enough to buy the fun things of life as well as what we believe are necessities, we need someone to teach the life lessons that used to be taught at home.
They aren't being taught at school today because the curriculum is too crowded with other (often unnecessary) stuff. They aren't being taught at home. And our young people experience more problems at school and outside of it than any previous generation.
This is a simple connect-the-dots problem and solution. By the way, I still don't know how to set a bone, but I can do most of the rest of what Heinlein suggested. It took me six decades of life to learn these lessons. I should have been able to learn them in school, before I needed them. You too.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to understand guidebook (with a threatening sounding title) for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to manage their lives. It includes specific lessons.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein, American science-fiction author (1907-1988)
That's outrageous! Why, look at what our experts have done for us.
Our expert chemists have created chemical fertilizers and pesticides to put on our agricultural crops so megafarming agribusinesses can produce lots more food than our ancestors ever dreamed of. And diseases and weaknesses such as diabetes, allergies and heart disease at rates never previously imagined because our bodies can't cope with the chemical attacks over long periods of time. (Tests are usually over three years, seldom longer, as if nothing could affect our health over a long period of time.)
Other expert chemists, medical specialists, have developed drugs to rescue us from the ravages of those chemicals, which have also made their way into our air (over half a million kinds) and our drinking water (over 300,000 kinds).
Our expert medical doctors happily prescribe those drugs for the rest of our lives so we can stay on our feet and work harder than our ancestors ever dreamed. And, so they won't forget what to prescribe, many of them accept reminder gifts from the pharmaceutical companies. A comfortable arrangement for the experts.
Our business specialists, MBAs tucked neatly in safe locations, figure out how to manufacture things to make our lives easier. Our communications specialists devise ways to sell those products to us through advertising, making us believe we need stuff we seldom use. The facts that our lives are not easier, that we have more stress than any previous generation, take more drugs than any previous generation and buy so much we don't need that we have to have yard sales and to give other stuff to "needy" people in neighbouring countries is never mentioned, so we forget. (Donations by Americans are often sold in Canada, and vice versa, a fact seldom noted publicly.)
Our expert architects design skyscrapers so well that most people who have to work in them have their health compromised. Sick building syndrome--no one knows how it will affect our length of life--stands as a hallmark of modern architectural progress.
Our legal specialists are so good at defending bad guys with cash to spread around that few go to prison and the ones who do have short stays. Our lawyers have reputations worse than used car salesmen of the old days. Their accounting specialists advise them how to Hoover every available dollar from ordinary folks who know so little of the skills of relationships they don't know how to stay married, so little about money management that more cash goes out than comes in for too many people and so little about getting along with neighbours that whole television courtroom series have cropped up to document the conflicts and allow the rest of us to be voyeurs.
Our specialists have made us the great Western World are persuaded those who are not part of it envy to such extremes that some of them want to murder us because of it.
We are, in short, the epitome of progress. We have our specialists to thank.
Let's take a moment to consider the parts of their lives that our experts and specialists don't want us to think about. Would you expect to see one of them changing a flat tire? No, because they have roadside assistance insurance. Or is it because they have no idea how to change a tire? Or because they fear getting their hands dirty. Ask one.
Most pay little attention to their diet until they are diagnosed with diabetes, heart disease, have a stroke or are told point blank by their doctors that they are obese or dangerously overweight such that their lives are at risk. They know little about nutrition, what their bodies need to stay healthy.
Most have no idea how to fix their own computers, even how to keep dust out of them, and many don't even keep their security programs up to date. They don't change the oil in their own cars because they don't know how. They can't change a washer in a leaky tap/faucet. They have to call a plumber when their toilet plugs up because they have no idea how to use a plunger (or how to avoid plugging the toilet in the first place).
They don't plant their own gardens where they can grow pesticide-free and chemical-free veggies and fruit because they "don't have time." In fact, most don't have any idea how to tend a garden.
On the other hand, a high school dropout may know how to do all of these things and hundreds more. Does this make the dropout more fit for life in the 21st century than the highly educated person? Not necessarily. But maybe.
Consider this possibility. Something happens that causes the power to go out in your part of the world and you learn that it will be out for a whole year or more. Would you rather have the high school dropout who has had to survive by the seat of his pants for many years as an ally or one of the experts or specialists mentioned earlier in this article?
Of course you assume that such a thing will never happen, even though a terrorist bomb could accomplish it. The 30 million people of the US state of California believe their state will never sink into the Pacific either, even though scientists have been warning it would happen for years from a split of earth's tectonic plates along the San Andreas fault. Many Americans are unaware that what is known as a super volcano is brewing under Yellowstone Park, even though a blow that would darken the skies of the world possibly for years is overdue. These things can happen. Eventually one will. Some call it Armageddon, but it's really just nature in action.
Am I suggesting that high school and post secondary education is worthless or counter productive? Not at all. What is needed is a change of focus in our elementary and high schools. We need to teach children life skills, not stuff they know they will never need or use. How much do you remember or use of what you learned in high school? Would you have willing traded much of it for some of the life skills you have learned by experience since then?
Adolescents and young adults have trouble in high school often because they see how useless what they are forced to learn is and will be to them in the future. They know they need to learn life lessons--that desire to learn is instinctive--but they don't know what those lessons are or how to get them. They rebel. They drop out. They take drugs or alcohol, get tattoos, listen to music that could destroy their hearing, and so on. Eventually, most of them learn the lessons they need, get back on track and become upstanding citizens. But not quickly enough. Those lessons often come the hard way, by making mistake after mistake and learning from them. A few don't make it.
As radical as Robert Heinlein's suggestion in our opening quote seemed when you first read it, it makes more sense now. We have time to teach these life lessons and more. We simply need to eliminate what was better suited for 18th century schools than it is for today's world. In the 18th century kids learned life lessons at home. Today's kids can't learn them at home because many of their parents don't know the life lessons themselves to teach. With both parents working to earn enough to buy the fun things of life as well as what we believe are necessities, we need someone to teach the life lessons that used to be taught at home.
They aren't being taught at school today because the curriculum is too crowded with other (often unnecessary) stuff. They aren't being taught at home. And our young people experience more problems at school and outside of it than any previous generation.
This is a simple connect-the-dots problem and solution. By the way, I still don't know how to set a bone, but I can do most of the rest of what Heinlein suggested. It took me six decades of life to learn these lessons. I should have been able to learn them in school, before I needed them. You too.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to understand guidebook (with a threatening sounding title) for parents and teachers who want to grow children who know how to manage their lives. It includes specific lessons.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Phascinating Phacts about Photons
Phascinating Phacts about Photons (well, light)
My gambol into alliteration ends with that dreadful series of fricatives, which I found too tempting to resist.
When a scientist talks about photons, he means light. Photons are the massless particles that move between something you see and your eyes, so that your eyes can send messages to your brain, allowing you to have the sense of sight. Photons are the part of the whole process of sight that is outside your body. It's a sophisticated process and the photons part no less so than the things that happen inside your head.
Photons have no mass, yet they are particles. That, alone, is counterintuitive. The mystery doesn't end there. Photons have been around since shortly after the Big Bang. We don't know about their goings on until about 500,000 years after the Big Bang because before that they weren't visible. Did they exist and were held in by unimaginably huge gravity, greater than any black hole? Unknown. We do know that photons only floated freely after that initial period.
That's why astronomers and cosmologists say they can't see back to the dawn of existence as we know it, as photons--if they existed--couldn't escape during that first half million years. Without photons coming to meet our eyes, we can't see.
Photons, being light, travel at the speed of light (186,282.4 miles per hour, 298.051.84 kilometres per hour). No surprise there. But did they, if they existed right after the Big Bang, travel at faster than the speed of light, as other known particles did during that mysterious early period of our universe? Unknown. Travelling faster than the speed of light flies in the face of Einstein's proof that nothing can travel faster than light. Or is it just particles without mass that can do that? Unknown, likely, still strange. Lots of speculation, no evidence to date.
Photons travelling through space don't actually travel at the speed of light. They travel a bit slower, possibly because they must travel through dark energy or dark matter. Oh, don't go there, it's too messy to think about. Photons only travel at the speed of light in a vacuum.
Photons also originate deep in the core of our sun. The early universe photons still hang around, causing "snow" on the screen of a badly tuned television screen and static on a radio that is not tuned to a station. Collectively they form what science calls the cosmic microwave background.
Unlike the exotic neutrinos that stop or slow for almost nothing (thousands can pass through your body every second while doing no damage), photons actually slow down when travelling through something less dense than space. In diamonds they tend to bounce around back and forth among the carbon atoms before finding their way out. This lends diamonds their sparkle. Photons travel through diamonds at a pondering 77,500 miles per second (124,000 kilometres per second).
Eyeglasses and contacts enable people to have their vision corrected because light bends when it moves from air to glass or plastic. Thus the lenses focus light the eyeballs cannot.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought that our eyes shoot out rays of light so we can see. I suspect that story may have been twisted over the years because someone of Plato's brilliance would realize that we couldn't see unless those rays bounced back to our eyes. Good story, but likely a perverted folk tale.
However, our bodies do glow beyond what pregnant women are said to give off when a new baby is expected. Especially from our lips and cheeks, we glow from bioluminescence, like all living things. We glow most in the afternoon. The glow may have something to do with chemical reactions in molecular fragments called free radicals.
In the deep ocean, below 1500 feet, at least 90 percent of the animals have the option of glowing through bioluminescence. Some do it to attract mates, others to find prey or other food.
Second World War aviators were known to find darkened ships by the bioluminescence of their wakes. Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, as a pilot back in 1954, found his way back to his own aircraft carrier using this method.
Europe will ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012 because they are inefficient. They convert only 10 percent of the power they use into light. The rest becomes heat, which apparently European legislators find unwanted. Their replacements, compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB), are much more efficient in terms of creating light. But they remain controversial in situations where they are closer than 18 inches (45 cm) to a person's head--such as on a bedside table--because they give off a small amount of radiation.
When LED bulbs become more commercially viable they will likely take over dominance in the market because they give off no radiation and are even more efficient than CFBs. And they last a very long time.
A 100-watt incandescent bulb in an Easy-Bake oven can raise the temperature inside to 325 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to bake a cake. Maybe European legislators don't eat Easy-Bake cakes either.
Though light lacks mass, as a form of particle it can push when it strikes something. Late in 2010 the Planetary Society will launch Lightsail-1, a space vehicle designed to use photon power to push it along. Theory says that while photons push and nothing else pushes back (we don't know yet about dark energy and dark matter), a ship could reach interplanetary speed in two years. Stopping without power when such a ship reaches another planet or even back at earth could be a problem.
Our moon is moving farther away from earth at the rate of 1.5 inches (3.3 cm) per year. We know that because scientists continue to bounce light off mirrors left on the moon back in the Apollo days.
In the electromagnetic spectrum that stretches from radio to gamma waves, visible light makes up less than one ten-billionth of the spectrum. Goldfish can see infrared, which we can't. Bees, birds and lizards can see ultraviolet, which is just beyond the other end of the spectrum we can see.
The word "photography" was coined by astronomer John Herschel, who discovered infrared. "Photography" means "writing with light."
At the equinoxes, vernal and autumnal (they occur simultaneously, depending on whether you live north of south of the equator) everyone on the planet has equal numbers of minutes of daylight and darkness in a 24 hour period.
The aurora borealis (the northern version) and aurora australis (southern) light up the night sky when solar wind particles excite atoms in the upper atmosphere. Oxygen shines as green while nitrogen glows blue and red. Now you can watch with awe and amazement and actually know what you are seeing in the night sky.
To the Inuit (living in northern Canada and Greenland--their enemies the Algonquians called them Eskimos, "eaters of raw flesh" but that name is no longer used) believe that the aurora borealis is the spirits of their dead ancestors hovering to keep them safe. At least that's the myth. In the developed world, myths are thought to be fantasies believed by simple people. In fact, true myths are life lessons told in story form, surrounded by fictitious stories to make them more memorable to young people who hear them.
People in the developed world pay little attention to myths and don't find time to teach life lessons to their children. Look around you to see the results. Myths have a valid purpose, but it's not to perpetuate fantastic stories. Now you too can see the light.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to read book parents and teachers can use to teach life lessons to their children.
Learn more about the book and the worldwide TIA project at http://billallin.com/
My gambol into alliteration ends with that dreadful series of fricatives, which I found too tempting to resist.
When a scientist talks about photons, he means light. Photons are the massless particles that move between something you see and your eyes, so that your eyes can send messages to your brain, allowing you to have the sense of sight. Photons are the part of the whole process of sight that is outside your body. It's a sophisticated process and the photons part no less so than the things that happen inside your head.
Photons have no mass, yet they are particles. That, alone, is counterintuitive. The mystery doesn't end there. Photons have been around since shortly after the Big Bang. We don't know about their goings on until about 500,000 years after the Big Bang because before that they weren't visible. Did they exist and were held in by unimaginably huge gravity, greater than any black hole? Unknown. We do know that photons only floated freely after that initial period.
That's why astronomers and cosmologists say they can't see back to the dawn of existence as we know it, as photons--if they existed--couldn't escape during that first half million years. Without photons coming to meet our eyes, we can't see.
Photons, being light, travel at the speed of light (186,282.4 miles per hour, 298.051.84 kilometres per hour). No surprise there. But did they, if they existed right after the Big Bang, travel at faster than the speed of light, as other known particles did during that mysterious early period of our universe? Unknown. Travelling faster than the speed of light flies in the face of Einstein's proof that nothing can travel faster than light. Or is it just particles without mass that can do that? Unknown, likely, still strange. Lots of speculation, no evidence to date.
Photons travelling through space don't actually travel at the speed of light. They travel a bit slower, possibly because they must travel through dark energy or dark matter. Oh, don't go there, it's too messy to think about. Photons only travel at the speed of light in a vacuum.
Photons also originate deep in the core of our sun. The early universe photons still hang around, causing "snow" on the screen of a badly tuned television screen and static on a radio that is not tuned to a station. Collectively they form what science calls the cosmic microwave background.
Unlike the exotic neutrinos that stop or slow for almost nothing (thousands can pass through your body every second while doing no damage), photons actually slow down when travelling through something less dense than space. In diamonds they tend to bounce around back and forth among the carbon atoms before finding their way out. This lends diamonds their sparkle. Photons travel through diamonds at a pondering 77,500 miles per second (124,000 kilometres per second).
Eyeglasses and contacts enable people to have their vision corrected because light bends when it moves from air to glass or plastic. Thus the lenses focus light the eyeballs cannot.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought that our eyes shoot out rays of light so we can see. I suspect that story may have been twisted over the years because someone of Plato's brilliance would realize that we couldn't see unless those rays bounced back to our eyes. Good story, but likely a perverted folk tale.
However, our bodies do glow beyond what pregnant women are said to give off when a new baby is expected. Especially from our lips and cheeks, we glow from bioluminescence, like all living things. We glow most in the afternoon. The glow may have something to do with chemical reactions in molecular fragments called free radicals.
In the deep ocean, below 1500 feet, at least 90 percent of the animals have the option of glowing through bioluminescence. Some do it to attract mates, others to find prey or other food.
Second World War aviators were known to find darkened ships by the bioluminescence of their wakes. Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, as a pilot back in 1954, found his way back to his own aircraft carrier using this method.
Europe will ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012 because they are inefficient. They convert only 10 percent of the power they use into light. The rest becomes heat, which apparently European legislators find unwanted. Their replacements, compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB), are much more efficient in terms of creating light. But they remain controversial in situations where they are closer than 18 inches (45 cm) to a person's head--such as on a bedside table--because they give off a small amount of radiation.
When LED bulbs become more commercially viable they will likely take over dominance in the market because they give off no radiation and are even more efficient than CFBs. And they last a very long time.
A 100-watt incandescent bulb in an Easy-Bake oven can raise the temperature inside to 325 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to bake a cake. Maybe European legislators don't eat Easy-Bake cakes either.
Though light lacks mass, as a form of particle it can push when it strikes something. Late in 2010 the Planetary Society will launch Lightsail-1, a space vehicle designed to use photon power to push it along. Theory says that while photons push and nothing else pushes back (we don't know yet about dark energy and dark matter), a ship could reach interplanetary speed in two years. Stopping without power when such a ship reaches another planet or even back at earth could be a problem.
Our moon is moving farther away from earth at the rate of 1.5 inches (3.3 cm) per year. We know that because scientists continue to bounce light off mirrors left on the moon back in the Apollo days.
In the electromagnetic spectrum that stretches from radio to gamma waves, visible light makes up less than one ten-billionth of the spectrum. Goldfish can see infrared, which we can't. Bees, birds and lizards can see ultraviolet, which is just beyond the other end of the spectrum we can see.
The word "photography" was coined by astronomer John Herschel, who discovered infrared. "Photography" means "writing with light."
At the equinoxes, vernal and autumnal (they occur simultaneously, depending on whether you live north of south of the equator) everyone on the planet has equal numbers of minutes of daylight and darkness in a 24 hour period.
The aurora borealis (the northern version) and aurora australis (southern) light up the night sky when solar wind particles excite atoms in the upper atmosphere. Oxygen shines as green while nitrogen glows blue and red. Now you can watch with awe and amazement and actually know what you are seeing in the night sky.
To the Inuit (living in northern Canada and Greenland--their enemies the Algonquians called them Eskimos, "eaters of raw flesh" but that name is no longer used) believe that the aurora borealis is the spirits of their dead ancestors hovering to keep them safe. At least that's the myth. In the developed world, myths are thought to be fantasies believed by simple people. In fact, true myths are life lessons told in story form, surrounded by fictitious stories to make them more memorable to young people who hear them.
People in the developed world pay little attention to myths and don't find time to teach life lessons to their children. Look around you to see the results. Myths have a valid purpose, but it's not to perpetuate fantastic stories. Now you too can see the light.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to read book parents and teachers can use to teach life lessons to their children.
Learn more about the book and the worldwide TIA project at http://billallin.com/
Sunday, May 23, 2010
The Genocide Canada Wants to Hide
The Genocide Canada Wants to Hide
If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people.
- Chief Seattle, Suquamish chief, the statement commonly believed to have been part of a speech delivered in 1851
The English and French in what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador did not buy the island of Newfoundland from the Beothuk Indians. They chose instead to slaughter them. Some stories claim that white men hunted the Beothuk for sport. Others say that the French brought Mi'kmaq Indians to the island from Nova Scotia to kill the Beothuk. Either way, the last surviving Beothuk, Shanawdithit, died in 1829, driving to extinction that last member of a tribe of native people whose skin colour reportedly gave the native people of North America the label "Redskins."
That is the way the English wrote their history of Newfoundland. Of course they blamed someone other than themselves for driving to extinction a tribe of gentle people who likely migrated from mainland Labrador when Jesus walked the earth.
No doubt genocide was involved. But did the Beothuk really go extinct? In a way, they didn't, any more than the Aztecs of Mexico whose descendants live in the Yucatan and Central America today. Mi'kmaq were not imported to Newfoundland, as history states. They cohabited the island, likely for centuries, with the Beothuk. They intermarried.
Only today are the Mi'kmaq of Newfoundland being recognized by the Canadian government as actually existing as a cultural group. History books said they had left the island. History stated clearly, and this was taught in Canadian schools for years, that once the last Beothuk died no more Indians (known as First Nations in Canada) lived on Newfoundland island.
History was wrong. History was written, as most history was, by the conquerors. However, a few people who lived on Newfoundland taught their children that they were in fact Mi'kmaq people, not descendants of English settlers. Most Newfoundlanders who have Beothuk and Mi'kmaq blood in their veins grew up believing that their parents were white people. to their grandparents, it was a safer way to survive. Only a small number knew the truth.
While many Francophones in Canada still hate "the English" for stealing their land, neither regrets the extinction of the Beothuk or (likely) the deaths of many of the Mi'kmaq. These native peoples had no concept of land ownership when the Europeans arrived in the 1500s. They believed, as Chief Seattle said, that "We are part of the earth and it is part of us." They believed that the earth owned them, not the other way around. The Europeans had guns and a lust for power.
First Nations people in Canada today have problems, in many cases, but their heritage survives, some of their languages are taught in native schools and their history--the real history--is taught to every child. Not just their history and heritage, but their values survive. Though their numbers are small compared to the whole Canadian population, they are having a remarkable influence, on the Canadian government, on the Canadian people, even on people in other parts of the world.
If we want what we believe to survive our passing, we must teach our children. If we want the world to be a better place and we know how to do it, we must teach the lessons to our children.
Believe it or not, the world is a much better and safer place today than it was when I was born, during the Second World War. That change happened because good people cared. They taught their values to their children. The renegade thinkers of the past have grandchildren who share the same values but are now considered mainstream.
Chief Seattle was a great teacher, but he was not unique. He was determined to teach his values to everyone. He began by teaching the children of his tribe.
It was my turn to teach you. Now it's your turn. Go and teach your children, no matter what their ages.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children with more important life objectives than to be good employees and consumers. The book gives not only reasons, it gives the lessons as well.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people.
- Chief Seattle, Suquamish chief, the statement commonly believed to have been part of a speech delivered in 1851
The English and French in what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador did not buy the island of Newfoundland from the Beothuk Indians. They chose instead to slaughter them. Some stories claim that white men hunted the Beothuk for sport. Others say that the French brought Mi'kmaq Indians to the island from Nova Scotia to kill the Beothuk. Either way, the last surviving Beothuk, Shanawdithit, died in 1829, driving to extinction that last member of a tribe of native people whose skin colour reportedly gave the native people of North America the label "Redskins."
That is the way the English wrote their history of Newfoundland. Of course they blamed someone other than themselves for driving to extinction a tribe of gentle people who likely migrated from mainland Labrador when Jesus walked the earth.
No doubt genocide was involved. But did the Beothuk really go extinct? In a way, they didn't, any more than the Aztecs of Mexico whose descendants live in the Yucatan and Central America today. Mi'kmaq were not imported to Newfoundland, as history states. They cohabited the island, likely for centuries, with the Beothuk. They intermarried.
Only today are the Mi'kmaq of Newfoundland being recognized by the Canadian government as actually existing as a cultural group. History books said they had left the island. History stated clearly, and this was taught in Canadian schools for years, that once the last Beothuk died no more Indians (known as First Nations in Canada) lived on Newfoundland island.
History was wrong. History was written, as most history was, by the conquerors. However, a few people who lived on Newfoundland taught their children that they were in fact Mi'kmaq people, not descendants of English settlers. Most Newfoundlanders who have Beothuk and Mi'kmaq blood in their veins grew up believing that their parents were white people. to their grandparents, it was a safer way to survive. Only a small number knew the truth.
While many Francophones in Canada still hate "the English" for stealing their land, neither regrets the extinction of the Beothuk or (likely) the deaths of many of the Mi'kmaq. These native peoples had no concept of land ownership when the Europeans arrived in the 1500s. They believed, as Chief Seattle said, that "We are part of the earth and it is part of us." They believed that the earth owned them, not the other way around. The Europeans had guns and a lust for power.
First Nations people in Canada today have problems, in many cases, but their heritage survives, some of their languages are taught in native schools and their history--the real history--is taught to every child. Not just their history and heritage, but their values survive. Though their numbers are small compared to the whole Canadian population, they are having a remarkable influence, on the Canadian government, on the Canadian people, even on people in other parts of the world.
If we want what we believe to survive our passing, we must teach our children. If we want the world to be a better place and we know how to do it, we must teach the lessons to our children.
Believe it or not, the world is a much better and safer place today than it was when I was born, during the Second World War. That change happened because good people cared. They taught their values to their children. The renegade thinkers of the past have grandchildren who share the same values but are now considered mainstream.
Chief Seattle was a great teacher, but he was not unique. He was determined to teach his values to everyone. He began by teaching the children of his tribe.
It was my turn to teach you. Now it's your turn. Go and teach your children, no matter what their ages.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children with more important life objectives than to be good employees and consumers. The book gives not only reasons, it gives the lessons as well.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Blind In My Mind's Eye
Blind In My Mind's Eye
"All the exams the scientists gave [study subject] MX confirmed his claim that he was missing his mind's eye."
"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about MX is that he did not need years to develop this new skill [of routing visual information through other brain parts than the mind's eye in order to develop an intellectual concept to replace the mind's eye images he lacked]...Perhaps his blind imagination was always available to him, ready to be used."
- Carl Zimmer, Discover, March 2010
"In your mind's eye..." has been spoken to me only a few times in my life, but I have read it on several occasions.
Unlike MX, who lost his familiar and much appreciated mind's eye suddenly at the age of 65, I never had one. Rather, it might be more accurate to say that my mind's eye is nearly blind.
Do a little experiment with me. Picture in your mind, one at a time, each of the following:
(1) the face of your mother;
(2) the face of your spouse (if this is not appropriate, the face of your father or one particular friend);
(3) your favourite pet in your life (if this is not appropriate, the face of your doctor).
Were you able to bring those faces up as you read them? I can't. When I try it's as if I have a blind spot where the face should be, yet I can get a general idea (not clear) of what I would see with my periphery vision if I were looking at these people with my real eyes.
As I write this my wife is on a different floor of the same house as I am sitting in, yet I cannot picture her face in my head, in my mind's eye. I could pick her out of a crowd of thousands of real people, yet I have no image of her face in my head.
Though my dreams have people in them, I can't recognize any of them. They have no faces to me. I dream in thoughts, not in images. I may have the odd image flash through my dream, but it's nothing like a movie.
Moreover, when I have wakened I can't remember my dreams. Even when I wake up knowing that I have just been dreaming, I have only experienced remembering what I dreamed about a dozen times in my life.
If you can do these things as part of our experiment, you have an active mind's eye.
Who cares? Science now knows that when you sleep you consolidate and fix in your brain your experiences of the previous day. Which experiences you choose to review while asleep determine which you can draw upon easily the following day or days.
When you studied, as a student, during the days before an exam, you created an easily accessible place you could get to if that information were requested on the exam. You created those quick-access locations in your sleep on the days following when you studied.
But...study? What's that? What does it mean? I honestly don't know. It did me no good to study before exams because by the time I had the exam booklet in front of me I had forgotten what I studied. Even when I sat with my notes in front of me, studying meant little because I couldn't remember what I had read a few minutes after reading it.
That bit of consolidating and fixating of recently read material for later retrieval may well be one of the functions of the mind's eye. It's not used just when you are asleep, as our little experiment showed.
The great sculptor Michelangelo, when asked why he pounded so hard on a large rock, allegedly responded "Young boy, there is an angel inside of this rock and I am setting him free." Michelangelo could see David inside the rock. I would only ever see rock.
As a child I dreaded those rare occasions when we had art class. Art class always meant painting, where a large blank piece of paper was placed in front of me. While my classmates happily created their masterpieces, I continued to see only blank paper. No image ever came to mind that I could transfer onto the paper.
An image would have had to be in my mind's eye. It wasn't there. Ever.
Study subject MX lost his mind's eye at age 65. Before that he used to lie down in bed before going to sleep and review the events of his day, like watching a filmstrip or movie clips. When he lost that ability, he quickly adapted by using other parts of his brain to accomplish formerly mind's eye tasks.
I never had a mind's eye. Yet I always felt the need to create in my mind, something, so I could make sense of my world. MX had a mind's eye, lost it, then used other means to compensate.
People who have all the physical connections for sight, yet are blind, often have what is called blindsight or blindimagination. Though blind, many can navigate their way through a room crowded with furniture, for example. Do we all have blindsight or blindimagination ability but not use it? Or do we use it in ways we have not yet discovered?
The researchers who studied MX, Adam Zeman, a neurologist at Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England, and cognitive scientist Sergio Della Sala, of the University of Edinburgh, continue to study how the brain manages visual information. In this field of study, it's still early days.
My experiences, those of MX and the studies of Zeman and Della Sala clearly demonstrate that children need to be offered a variety of learning styles because of the differences in their ways of learning. In education, a one-size-fits-all style of teaching means some children will miss out. Innocent and unknowing children will be blamed for being at fault for not learning as they should. Some schools address the need for different learning styles, most do not.
I couldn't even count on all my fingers the number of times "not working to his potential" appeared on my report cards, nor the number of times my mother was told in parent-teacher interviews that I was lazy. The schools I attended as a child had ways to assess my intellectual potential, but lacked the means to put it to use.
To my teachers I was lazy. Except in physical education where I was also weak and uncoordinated, which somehow also got to be my fault. The role me lack of a working mind's eye played in any of this will not be known for some time.
Suffice to say, I managed to work around the detours to reaching my intellectual potential, though many years after completing my formal education. I still can't throw a baseball straight or walk a balance beam without falling, even when cold sober and in the best of health. Maybe the brain can only adapt around one detour and has to choose which will take top priority.
At age 67 I am no longer called lazy. However, some people still don't appreciate why I sometimes can't follow simple spoken instructions or written directions. I have solved some of the most profound mysteries of life, yet I still can't find Waldo.
No one today wants to teach a man who is smart enough to have found evidence of what God really is and what the afterlife means. He's scary. Yet no one wants to teach a man who is so dumb he can't put together a child's puzzle. They are the same man, same brain, different abilities.
My education continues to be based on my own initiative. As a student, I am still a dunce, an oaf who is "too lazy to learn." Other adults, many of them, may not have the motivation I had to learn. So they don't. You meet these people in stores, or driving the streets with you, or at voting stations.
When people have trouble learning because what they need to know is presented in ways they can't understand, many just give up. Teachers need to recognize learning differences before that happens to their students. More importantly, teachers need to be trained on how to recognize the needs their students have for different learning styles. They have to understand and have the skills before they can put them to use on their students.
Before the kids drop out of school, and sometimes out of socially accepted behaviour.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a fancy sounding title for a book of ideas and solutions everyone can understand and teachers and parents can use.
Learn more about the book and the TIA project at http://billallin.com/
"All the exams the scientists gave [study subject] MX confirmed his claim that he was missing his mind's eye."
"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about MX is that he did not need years to develop this new skill [of routing visual information through other brain parts than the mind's eye in order to develop an intellectual concept to replace the mind's eye images he lacked]...Perhaps his blind imagination was always available to him, ready to be used."
- Carl Zimmer, Discover, March 2010
"In your mind's eye..." has been spoken to me only a few times in my life, but I have read it on several occasions.
Unlike MX, who lost his familiar and much appreciated mind's eye suddenly at the age of 65, I never had one. Rather, it might be more accurate to say that my mind's eye is nearly blind.
Do a little experiment with me. Picture in your mind, one at a time, each of the following:
(1) the face of your mother;
(2) the face of your spouse (if this is not appropriate, the face of your father or one particular friend);
(3) your favourite pet in your life (if this is not appropriate, the face of your doctor).
Were you able to bring those faces up as you read them? I can't. When I try it's as if I have a blind spot where the face should be, yet I can get a general idea (not clear) of what I would see with my periphery vision if I were looking at these people with my real eyes.
As I write this my wife is on a different floor of the same house as I am sitting in, yet I cannot picture her face in my head, in my mind's eye. I could pick her out of a crowd of thousands of real people, yet I have no image of her face in my head.
Though my dreams have people in them, I can't recognize any of them. They have no faces to me. I dream in thoughts, not in images. I may have the odd image flash through my dream, but it's nothing like a movie.
Moreover, when I have wakened I can't remember my dreams. Even when I wake up knowing that I have just been dreaming, I have only experienced remembering what I dreamed about a dozen times in my life.
If you can do these things as part of our experiment, you have an active mind's eye.
Who cares? Science now knows that when you sleep you consolidate and fix in your brain your experiences of the previous day. Which experiences you choose to review while asleep determine which you can draw upon easily the following day or days.
When you studied, as a student, during the days before an exam, you created an easily accessible place you could get to if that information were requested on the exam. You created those quick-access locations in your sleep on the days following when you studied.
But...study? What's that? What does it mean? I honestly don't know. It did me no good to study before exams because by the time I had the exam booklet in front of me I had forgotten what I studied. Even when I sat with my notes in front of me, studying meant little because I couldn't remember what I had read a few minutes after reading it.
That bit of consolidating and fixating of recently read material for later retrieval may well be one of the functions of the mind's eye. It's not used just when you are asleep, as our little experiment showed.
The great sculptor Michelangelo, when asked why he pounded so hard on a large rock, allegedly responded "Young boy, there is an angel inside of this rock and I am setting him free." Michelangelo could see David inside the rock. I would only ever see rock.
As a child I dreaded those rare occasions when we had art class. Art class always meant painting, where a large blank piece of paper was placed in front of me. While my classmates happily created their masterpieces, I continued to see only blank paper. No image ever came to mind that I could transfer onto the paper.
An image would have had to be in my mind's eye. It wasn't there. Ever.
Study subject MX lost his mind's eye at age 65. Before that he used to lie down in bed before going to sleep and review the events of his day, like watching a filmstrip or movie clips. When he lost that ability, he quickly adapted by using other parts of his brain to accomplish formerly mind's eye tasks.
I never had a mind's eye. Yet I always felt the need to create in my mind, something, so I could make sense of my world. MX had a mind's eye, lost it, then used other means to compensate.
People who have all the physical connections for sight, yet are blind, often have what is called blindsight or blindimagination. Though blind, many can navigate their way through a room crowded with furniture, for example. Do we all have blindsight or blindimagination ability but not use it? Or do we use it in ways we have not yet discovered?
The researchers who studied MX, Adam Zeman, a neurologist at Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, England, and cognitive scientist Sergio Della Sala, of the University of Edinburgh, continue to study how the brain manages visual information. In this field of study, it's still early days.
My experiences, those of MX and the studies of Zeman and Della Sala clearly demonstrate that children need to be offered a variety of learning styles because of the differences in their ways of learning. In education, a one-size-fits-all style of teaching means some children will miss out. Innocent and unknowing children will be blamed for being at fault for not learning as they should. Some schools address the need for different learning styles, most do not.
I couldn't even count on all my fingers the number of times "not working to his potential" appeared on my report cards, nor the number of times my mother was told in parent-teacher interviews that I was lazy. The schools I attended as a child had ways to assess my intellectual potential, but lacked the means to put it to use.
To my teachers I was lazy. Except in physical education where I was also weak and uncoordinated, which somehow also got to be my fault. The role me lack of a working mind's eye played in any of this will not be known for some time.
Suffice to say, I managed to work around the detours to reaching my intellectual potential, though many years after completing my formal education. I still can't throw a baseball straight or walk a balance beam without falling, even when cold sober and in the best of health. Maybe the brain can only adapt around one detour and has to choose which will take top priority.
At age 67 I am no longer called lazy. However, some people still don't appreciate why I sometimes can't follow simple spoken instructions or written directions. I have solved some of the most profound mysteries of life, yet I still can't find Waldo.
No one today wants to teach a man who is smart enough to have found evidence of what God really is and what the afterlife means. He's scary. Yet no one wants to teach a man who is so dumb he can't put together a child's puzzle. They are the same man, same brain, different abilities.
My education continues to be based on my own initiative. As a student, I am still a dunce, an oaf who is "too lazy to learn." Other adults, many of them, may not have the motivation I had to learn. So they don't. You meet these people in stores, or driving the streets with you, or at voting stations.
When people have trouble learning because what they need to know is presented in ways they can't understand, many just give up. Teachers need to recognize learning differences before that happens to their students. More importantly, teachers need to be trained on how to recognize the needs their students have for different learning styles. They have to understand and have the skills before they can put them to use on their students.
Before the kids drop out of school, and sometimes out of socially accepted behaviour.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a fancy sounding title for a book of ideas and solutions everyone can understand and teachers and parents can use.
Learn more about the book and the TIA project at http://billallin.com/
Monday, March 15, 2010
One Step Back from the Edge
One Step Back from the Edge
A person should not have to learn the most important lessons about life from experience. Most of them can be taught, if we know enough to teach them to our children.
Not knowing those lessons, not knowing how to cope with the adversities that life throws at every one of us, means we must suffer pain. Not just the pain of each tragedy, but also the pain associated with the stress of having a severe problem (or a bunch of them) and not knowing what to do about it.
My sister didn't know. She smoked herself to death from cancer at age 54, never understanding why she had to live alone, on welfare, never having anyone she could trust or depend on. Never having a friend in her life. Never having any happiness in her marriage because she didn't know how. Never being able to hold a job because she didn't realize employers need skills and employees who can get along with each other.
Her children don't know. Her daughter, my niece, at one time displeased with me because I told her about lies her mother had told about her and about me, suggested that I should kill myself. Her son, my nephew, joined an extreme religious cult where he feels loved and respected.
No doubt my father chose a remote rural area to rent the apartment above a general store when I was a baby because he didn't want his family to suffer the indignities he had suffered as a child. He and my mother didn't know that children learn from each other by playing together. I rarely saw any other children and never played with one until I was nearly six years old.
My parents understood that parenting consisted of providing food, shelter and clothing to their children. And punishing them when they did something wrong. It never occurred to them to teach a child what the child needs to know to avoid getting into trouble. My parents didn't teach their children anything. Except how to eat with a knife and fork and how to use toilet paper.
My mother, who never worked a day after she got pregnant with me, eventually needed to hire a cleaning lady once a week because she couldn't keep up with dusting, cleaning and laundry. No one knew why. Chronic fatigue syndrome, now recognized as a widespread problem, was just called laziness in those days. My mother never talked about it.
The same way she never talked about why she chased me around our house at couple of times when I was 10, brandishing a broom and threatening to kill me if she caught me. I hadn't a clue about why she was angry. But I didn't let her catch me either. I couldn't spell "menopause" let alone understand what it meant. All I knew was her words.
My father, a naturally clever man who never managed to pass grade nine, found considerable success in business. He became an alcoholic because he had no idea how to cope with the stresses associated with his business success.
He adopted the advice of someone he worked with as a young man. It was: Never learn how to do something if you don't want to do that thing. My father disliked working with his hands. One of his employees, a mechanic, bought him a simple screwdriver one day because he thought my father should be able to tighten a screw himself. My father never taught me any skills. He didn't have any mechanical skills or interest in learning to do things with his hands. He never used the screwdriver either.
My father's father had a thriving florist business until the First World War destroyed it. My father was five years old when his father committed suicide.
Suicide is not genetic, but it tends to run in families. I didn't want to become an alcoholic or to kill myself, though I knew no coping skills because I had never been taught any. By anyone. Lacking coping skills, I now know, is the leading cause of alcoholism, suicide and many other severe problems.
As I knew nothing about being a father, in fact I was afraid of little children, I avoided having much to do with my own children when they were young. Their mother raised them through those first few critically important years of their lives. She taught them everything they knew. They became everything she was.
She believed that success at work was more important that success as a parent. She believed that money was the sign of success. That's what the society we lived in taught. She left our kids with me when they were about ten years old and went out to be successful as a school principal and a savvy investor. She had money, a great car and an impressive house. She had taught those values to our children.
She died of cancer at age 44, having spent her last year alone, at home, rarely receiving a visitor. Neither her children nor her business friends had anything more to gain from her, so they abandoned her. When she died, our daughter didn't even hold a funeral because she thought no one would come.
After their mother died, our children decided they wanted nothing more to do with me. They wanted money and I didn't have much. I didn't believe that money was the most important thing in life. They thought I was stupid. My daughter told her children--whom I was never allowed to see--that all their grandparents were dead. Only one was.
Sitting on a loading dock on a break from my first summer job at age 15, I overheard two men talking. One said to the other, "I never have conversations with young people under age 25. They never know enough to talk about." As I thought about that, I realized that he was right.
I had no skills or hobbies. I had learned nothing from books or newspapers. In fact, I could barely read. I didn't have friends I could learn from. My teachers repeatedly told my parents I was lazy. It never occurred to them that I couldn't read. It never occurred to them that I had a learning problem caused by restriction of blood flow to my brain at birth--I was born breech. I can think as well as anyone, but I do it slower and my capacity to learn at any one time is more limited than most.
I have a very mild form of cerebral palsy, undiagnosed until recently, as a result of that birth problem. When I went to school, every kid was either good, a trouble maker or lazy. My teachers had little trouble placing me in that third category. In reality, life in schools is little better for kids with problems today. "Special needs" is a category for kids with severe and fairly easily recognized problems.
I passed through high school without ever reading a book all the way through. I received a certificate after a three year course at college without ever having read a book all the way through. I passed through teachers college without having read a book all the way through.
I went to York University, in Toronto, and received my B.A. without ever reading a book all the way through. I received a Master of Education degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, without ever having read a book all the way through.
That's survival. That shows how a person can learn to cope with challenges and problems if they learn how in time.
I also taught elementary school for 17 years, around the same period I was taking university courses. A few times the children I taught were reading books for reading assignments that I had not read myself. I was functionally illiterate. I didn't know that because no one had told me.
In fact, I was functionally illiterate until after I left teaching and had started my own business with my wife.
Although I had written long papers in my university and post graduate courses, most of what I wrote had come straight out of my head, not from books. I discovered how to snatch quotes from relevant texts without actually reading those books. I only started to learn how to write something that people other than professors would find interesting in the late 1990s.
In 2005, my book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems was published. A social problem is any problem that is experienced by enough people in a community that it becomes a community problem. Like drugs, violence, addictions and so on.
I found solutions to problems most people believe are unsolvable, consequences of the way life is in the 21st Century. How? Because I wasn't tied to what others had written in books. Books by so-called experts who told how tragic social problems are but offered nothing in the way of solutions.
The solutions begin at home. They begin when each child is born. They begin when a child is taught what he or she needs to know, when they need to know it.
That begins when young adults know about children and how they develop. It begins when adolescents and young adults learn the skills of parenting.
That's the message I want to take to the world.
Here's one comment written a few days ago by a member of one of my internet groups, directed to me:
"During all these years as, member of the group had the I privilege evidence that you are extremely cultured and have an excellent text.
With you I learned an enormity of things. And reading your mensages I know sail that for all the areas of the knowledge."
That was written by a friend in Brazil, one I know as Maita. "Maita" in Portuguese, means "little mother."
Maita's real name is Maria Alice Baptista de Oliveira. That's Dr. Oliveira, a pediatrician with decades of experience at bringing babies into the world and teaching mothers how to look after them.
Maita is one of many people, some of whom are medical doctors, some professors, people in every field of life including factory workers, who live on six continents, who believe that there is a better way to raise children than most of us have been using over the past few thousands of generations.
It's a complex world we live in. A complex world creates complex problems. Those complex problems require solutions so complex they are unmanageable.
The only way to change anything is to prevent the problems from arising in the first place.
That's what Turning It Around is all about.
Until recently I have been experiencing stress--not at a controllable level but at a primal level beyond the control of my conscious brain--stress that has taken me to the edge of sanity and suicide. I have stepped back from that edge. I survived. Again.
Stress can be the cause of many physical diseases and organ failures. But it's also an effect. Stress results when a person lacks the emotional resources to cope with problems in their life. Knowledge about stress and the coping skills needed to avoid it are teachable. Teaching them is easy, cheap and would not meet any resistance because it helps whole communities.
I want to teach people the skills they need to cope with problems that seem insurmountable, that seem beyond their control. That begins with teaching children, right after they are born.
That's who I am. That's what I do. If you want to help spread the word, you are welcome to join us. It doesn't cost anything. All you have to do is talk to people. It's that easy. But nothing will change until we get enough people talking to each other about this.
Lots of people are talking about this, but it's a big world with lots of problems.
As adults we don't necessarily always learn from our experience. Some of us make the same mistakes over and over, causing ourselves and others around us a great deal of grief. However, life lessons we learned as children usually stay with us and shape our lives.
Teaching children what they need to know about life and coping with it are as important as learning to read and do arithmetic. We need to teach the children. They want to learn. They want to know about life.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what children need and when they need it, rather than what adults believe children should be forced to learn.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
A person should not have to learn the most important lessons about life from experience. Most of them can be taught, if we know enough to teach them to our children.
Not knowing those lessons, not knowing how to cope with the adversities that life throws at every one of us, means we must suffer pain. Not just the pain of each tragedy, but also the pain associated with the stress of having a severe problem (or a bunch of them) and not knowing what to do about it.
My sister didn't know. She smoked herself to death from cancer at age 54, never understanding why she had to live alone, on welfare, never having anyone she could trust or depend on. Never having a friend in her life. Never having any happiness in her marriage because she didn't know how. Never being able to hold a job because she didn't realize employers need skills and employees who can get along with each other.
Her children don't know. Her daughter, my niece, at one time displeased with me because I told her about lies her mother had told about her and about me, suggested that I should kill myself. Her son, my nephew, joined an extreme religious cult where he feels loved and respected.
No doubt my father chose a remote rural area to rent the apartment above a general store when I was a baby because he didn't want his family to suffer the indignities he had suffered as a child. He and my mother didn't know that children learn from each other by playing together. I rarely saw any other children and never played with one until I was nearly six years old.
My parents understood that parenting consisted of providing food, shelter and clothing to their children. And punishing them when they did something wrong. It never occurred to them to teach a child what the child needs to know to avoid getting into trouble. My parents didn't teach their children anything. Except how to eat with a knife and fork and how to use toilet paper.
My mother, who never worked a day after she got pregnant with me, eventually needed to hire a cleaning lady once a week because she couldn't keep up with dusting, cleaning and laundry. No one knew why. Chronic fatigue syndrome, now recognized as a widespread problem, was just called laziness in those days. My mother never talked about it.
The same way she never talked about why she chased me around our house at couple of times when I was 10, brandishing a broom and threatening to kill me if she caught me. I hadn't a clue about why she was angry. But I didn't let her catch me either. I couldn't spell "menopause" let alone understand what it meant. All I knew was her words.
My father, a naturally clever man who never managed to pass grade nine, found considerable success in business. He became an alcoholic because he had no idea how to cope with the stresses associated with his business success.
He adopted the advice of someone he worked with as a young man. It was: Never learn how to do something if you don't want to do that thing. My father disliked working with his hands. One of his employees, a mechanic, bought him a simple screwdriver one day because he thought my father should be able to tighten a screw himself. My father never taught me any skills. He didn't have any mechanical skills or interest in learning to do things with his hands. He never used the screwdriver either.
My father's father had a thriving florist business until the First World War destroyed it. My father was five years old when his father committed suicide.
Suicide is not genetic, but it tends to run in families. I didn't want to become an alcoholic or to kill myself, though I knew no coping skills because I had never been taught any. By anyone. Lacking coping skills, I now know, is the leading cause of alcoholism, suicide and many other severe problems.
As I knew nothing about being a father, in fact I was afraid of little children, I avoided having much to do with my own children when they were young. Their mother raised them through those first few critically important years of their lives. She taught them everything they knew. They became everything she was.
She believed that success at work was more important that success as a parent. She believed that money was the sign of success. That's what the society we lived in taught. She left our kids with me when they were about ten years old and went out to be successful as a school principal and a savvy investor. She had money, a great car and an impressive house. She had taught those values to our children.
She died of cancer at age 44, having spent her last year alone, at home, rarely receiving a visitor. Neither her children nor her business friends had anything more to gain from her, so they abandoned her. When she died, our daughter didn't even hold a funeral because she thought no one would come.
After their mother died, our children decided they wanted nothing more to do with me. They wanted money and I didn't have much. I didn't believe that money was the most important thing in life. They thought I was stupid. My daughter told her children--whom I was never allowed to see--that all their grandparents were dead. Only one was.
Sitting on a loading dock on a break from my first summer job at age 15, I overheard two men talking. One said to the other, "I never have conversations with young people under age 25. They never know enough to talk about." As I thought about that, I realized that he was right.
I had no skills or hobbies. I had learned nothing from books or newspapers. In fact, I could barely read. I didn't have friends I could learn from. My teachers repeatedly told my parents I was lazy. It never occurred to them that I couldn't read. It never occurred to them that I had a learning problem caused by restriction of blood flow to my brain at birth--I was born breech. I can think as well as anyone, but I do it slower and my capacity to learn at any one time is more limited than most.
I have a very mild form of cerebral palsy, undiagnosed until recently, as a result of that birth problem. When I went to school, every kid was either good, a trouble maker or lazy. My teachers had little trouble placing me in that third category. In reality, life in schools is little better for kids with problems today. "Special needs" is a category for kids with severe and fairly easily recognized problems.
I passed through high school without ever reading a book all the way through. I received a certificate after a three year course at college without ever having read a book all the way through. I passed through teachers college without having read a book all the way through.
I went to York University, in Toronto, and received my B.A. without ever reading a book all the way through. I received a Master of Education degree from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, without ever having read a book all the way through.
That's survival. That shows how a person can learn to cope with challenges and problems if they learn how in time.
I also taught elementary school for 17 years, around the same period I was taking university courses. A few times the children I taught were reading books for reading assignments that I had not read myself. I was functionally illiterate. I didn't know that because no one had told me.
In fact, I was functionally illiterate until after I left teaching and had started my own business with my wife.
Although I had written long papers in my university and post graduate courses, most of what I wrote had come straight out of my head, not from books. I discovered how to snatch quotes from relevant texts without actually reading those books. I only started to learn how to write something that people other than professors would find interesting in the late 1990s.
In 2005, my book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems was published. A social problem is any problem that is experienced by enough people in a community that it becomes a community problem. Like drugs, violence, addictions and so on.
I found solutions to problems most people believe are unsolvable, consequences of the way life is in the 21st Century. How? Because I wasn't tied to what others had written in books. Books by so-called experts who told how tragic social problems are but offered nothing in the way of solutions.
The solutions begin at home. They begin when each child is born. They begin when a child is taught what he or she needs to know, when they need to know it.
That begins when young adults know about children and how they develop. It begins when adolescents and young adults learn the skills of parenting.
That's the message I want to take to the world.
Here's one comment written a few days ago by a member of one of my internet groups, directed to me:
"During all these years as, member of the group had the I privilege evidence that you are extremely cultured and have an excellent text.
With you I learned an enormity of things. And reading your mensages I know sail that for all the areas of the knowledge."
That was written by a friend in Brazil, one I know as Maita. "Maita" in Portuguese, means "little mother."
Maita's real name is Maria Alice Baptista de Oliveira. That's Dr. Oliveira, a pediatrician with decades of experience at bringing babies into the world and teaching mothers how to look after them.
Maita is one of many people, some of whom are medical doctors, some professors, people in every field of life including factory workers, who live on six continents, who believe that there is a better way to raise children than most of us have been using over the past few thousands of generations.
It's a complex world we live in. A complex world creates complex problems. Those complex problems require solutions so complex they are unmanageable.
The only way to change anything is to prevent the problems from arising in the first place.
That's what Turning It Around is all about.
Until recently I have been experiencing stress--not at a controllable level but at a primal level beyond the control of my conscious brain--stress that has taken me to the edge of sanity and suicide. I have stepped back from that edge. I survived. Again.
Stress can be the cause of many physical diseases and organ failures. But it's also an effect. Stress results when a person lacks the emotional resources to cope with problems in their life. Knowledge about stress and the coping skills needed to avoid it are teachable. Teaching them is easy, cheap and would not meet any resistance because it helps whole communities.
I want to teach people the skills they need to cope with problems that seem insurmountable, that seem beyond their control. That begins with teaching children, right after they are born.
That's who I am. That's what I do. If you want to help spread the word, you are welcome to join us. It doesn't cost anything. All you have to do is talk to people. It's that easy. But nothing will change until we get enough people talking to each other about this.
Lots of people are talking about this, but it's a big world with lots of problems.
As adults we don't necessarily always learn from our experience. Some of us make the same mistakes over and over, causing ourselves and others around us a great deal of grief. However, life lessons we learned as children usually stay with us and shape our lives.
Teaching children what they need to know about life and coping with it are as important as learning to read and do arithmetic. We need to teach the children. They want to learn. They want to know about life.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to know what children need and when they need it, rather than what adults believe children should be forced to learn.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Right Words At The Right Time
The Right Words At The Right Time
The best life lessons are a few words on the right subject, at the right time.
- Bill Allin, Canadian life coach and author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems
My now-deceased first wife was a far better teacher than I was. I was an educator.
What's the difference? A teacher teaches a prescribed curriculum, a manageable collection of facts and skills, testable and widely accepted as part of the general education of a child. An educator grows children.
I joined the profession because I admired her skill as a teacher. I learned later that her teaching skill was greatly helped by her knowledge, which she gained as a voracious reader. I was a non-reader at the time, in fact in today's terms I would be known as functionally illiterate.
On a break during a summer job I had in my sixteenth year of life, while sitting on a factory loading dock I overheard two older men talking in the yard below. One said "I never have conversations with young people. I find that until they are at least 25, they don't know enough to talk about."
Thinking about that I realized that I knew almost nothing. I had no skills that derived from hobbies or training from my parents. I couldn't claim to know much about any subject at all.
That prompted me to start learning on a grand scale. As I knew nothing about anything, I learned everything I could on every subject I could, be it on the radio or television, as a fly on the wall while meaningful conversations were taking place among older adults, or reading cereal boxes.
Thirty years later people were calling me a human encyclopedia. I finally knew something others could respect me for. Two decades after that, I am sharing some of that with you here.
One overheard snippet of conversation changed the direction of my life.
During my grade ten year, my geography teacher bought a new Volkswagen beetle, a new import to my native Canada. While casual conversations between teachers and students in those days were few, somehow I got into a casual debate with my teacher over the merits of the VW. Based on overheard conversations from others, I took the side claiming that the Beetle was junk.
To my shock, my teacher raised the issue of his new car in our next geography class and asked me to bring forth the points I had made the previous day and add more. What I knew was more rumour than fact. I had never ridden in a VW and had seen more of them advertised on television than on the roads around my neighbourhood.
While the classroom debate added nothing to the knowledge based of my classmates about Volkswagens, the experience made me realize that teaching can be more than conveyance of facts and mastering of skills.
That teacher tried to get a shy kid to speak up in a class situation by engaging a teacher in an unplanned debate in front of the whole class. I didn't lose the debate because my teacher wanted to give me an experience I had never had before, not to squash (albeit deservedly) the poorly founded opinion one of his weakest students held.
A year or so later, in a different high school, my all-business geometry teach went off-topic in class for some reason when the subject of drinking alcohol came up. He said "If I have to depend on an artificial stimulant to get enjoyment out of my life, then I had better rethink and reformulate my life so I can get more enjoyment out of living it."
After that I understood that many people willingly accept such a poor quality of life that they need alcohol or drugs or gambling or shopping sprees or any number of other addictive habits just to make them feel better about life for a short while.
Today, by what I have learned, by what I have read, experienced and thought about thoroughly, I feel so in touch with everything that exists that I can feel higher than any drunk or junk addict all day long. My high doesn't go away and it has no backlash sobering-up period.
In 1995, a couple of years after my long-divorced wife died and my children refused to see me or let me see my grandchildren, my daughter wrote me a letter in which she said "My two daughters are well and happy. I have told them that all their grandparents are dead and I don't want to upset them by having them learn otherwise."
To know that the children I helped raise I will never see again and my grandchildren will never know the wonderful experiences available to kids who know their grandparents set me on a quest to learn something new.
Why or how could a child ever come to feel that way about a parent? To me the effect was like losing your whole family in a fire, all at once, only it was worse knowing that they would all carry on their lives without me. I had something to give that was more valuable than money.
As an educator and sociologist, I had the skills to research how kids learn and develop. I learned more than most people could even imagine.
Mostly importantly, I learned that what children learn in the first six years of their lives molds the kind of people they will be for the rest of their lives. As I was a feral child who never had any toys or experiences with other children for my first six years, I was frightened of my own kids when they were little.
I thought "I'll be better with them when they are old and I can teach them stuff I know." Their mother taught them virtually everything they learned for the first six years of life of our children.
Lo and behold, our children grew to become like their mother, not like me. I'm not sad for me so much as I am sad for my children and grandchildren. My grandkids will grow to be like their mother as she grew to be like her own mother. It's how life works.
Today we have parents who are too busy to teach important life lessons to their kids. They react when the kids are bad, but they teach little when their kids need it.
Instead they give them video games and sit them in front of the television for entertainment. Think about that. Would you want a child to grow up believing that real people in their lives are just like the people they see on television? How twisted and perverse would that be?
Teaching critically important life lessons is relatively easy and fast. In most cases it's a matter of saying each one in a few sentences and allowing the kids to talk with the adult about the lesson.
If we don't teach positive life lessons, children grow to become like the people they see on television and in video games. Look around you and think about what kids in your community are doing with their lives. Sadly, this is one case where life imitates art.
We are all the worse for it.
We need to learn how and when to do the job of parenting well.
Broken people are hard to fix. Better to give them the knowledge and skills they need to prevent them from breaking.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children the right lessons at the right times in the right way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
The best life lessons are a few words on the right subject, at the right time.
- Bill Allin, Canadian life coach and author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems
My now-deceased first wife was a far better teacher than I was. I was an educator.
What's the difference? A teacher teaches a prescribed curriculum, a manageable collection of facts and skills, testable and widely accepted as part of the general education of a child. An educator grows children.
I joined the profession because I admired her skill as a teacher. I learned later that her teaching skill was greatly helped by her knowledge, which she gained as a voracious reader. I was a non-reader at the time, in fact in today's terms I would be known as functionally illiterate.
On a break during a summer job I had in my sixteenth year of life, while sitting on a factory loading dock I overheard two older men talking in the yard below. One said "I never have conversations with young people. I find that until they are at least 25, they don't know enough to talk about."
Thinking about that I realized that I knew almost nothing. I had no skills that derived from hobbies or training from my parents. I couldn't claim to know much about any subject at all.
That prompted me to start learning on a grand scale. As I knew nothing about anything, I learned everything I could on every subject I could, be it on the radio or television, as a fly on the wall while meaningful conversations were taking place among older adults, or reading cereal boxes.
Thirty years later people were calling me a human encyclopedia. I finally knew something others could respect me for. Two decades after that, I am sharing some of that with you here.
One overheard snippet of conversation changed the direction of my life.
During my grade ten year, my geography teacher bought a new Volkswagen beetle, a new import to my native Canada. While casual conversations between teachers and students in those days were few, somehow I got into a casual debate with my teacher over the merits of the VW. Based on overheard conversations from others, I took the side claiming that the Beetle was junk.
To my shock, my teacher raised the issue of his new car in our next geography class and asked me to bring forth the points I had made the previous day and add more. What I knew was more rumour than fact. I had never ridden in a VW and had seen more of them advertised on television than on the roads around my neighbourhood.
While the classroom debate added nothing to the knowledge based of my classmates about Volkswagens, the experience made me realize that teaching can be more than conveyance of facts and mastering of skills.
That teacher tried to get a shy kid to speak up in a class situation by engaging a teacher in an unplanned debate in front of the whole class. I didn't lose the debate because my teacher wanted to give me an experience I had never had before, not to squash (albeit deservedly) the poorly founded opinion one of his weakest students held.
A year or so later, in a different high school, my all-business geometry teach went off-topic in class for some reason when the subject of drinking alcohol came up. He said "If I have to depend on an artificial stimulant to get enjoyment out of my life, then I had better rethink and reformulate my life so I can get more enjoyment out of living it."
After that I understood that many people willingly accept such a poor quality of life that they need alcohol or drugs or gambling or shopping sprees or any number of other addictive habits just to make them feel better about life for a short while.
Today, by what I have learned, by what I have read, experienced and thought about thoroughly, I feel so in touch with everything that exists that I can feel higher than any drunk or junk addict all day long. My high doesn't go away and it has no backlash sobering-up period.
In 1995, a couple of years after my long-divorced wife died and my children refused to see me or let me see my grandchildren, my daughter wrote me a letter in which she said "My two daughters are well and happy. I have told them that all their grandparents are dead and I don't want to upset them by having them learn otherwise."
To know that the children I helped raise I will never see again and my grandchildren will never know the wonderful experiences available to kids who know their grandparents set me on a quest to learn something new.
Why or how could a child ever come to feel that way about a parent? To me the effect was like losing your whole family in a fire, all at once, only it was worse knowing that they would all carry on their lives without me. I had something to give that was more valuable than money.
As an educator and sociologist, I had the skills to research how kids learn and develop. I learned more than most people could even imagine.
Mostly importantly, I learned that what children learn in the first six years of their lives molds the kind of people they will be for the rest of their lives. As I was a feral child who never had any toys or experiences with other children for my first six years, I was frightened of my own kids when they were little.
I thought "I'll be better with them when they are old and I can teach them stuff I know." Their mother taught them virtually everything they learned for the first six years of life of our children.
Lo and behold, our children grew to become like their mother, not like me. I'm not sad for me so much as I am sad for my children and grandchildren. My grandkids will grow to be like their mother as she grew to be like her own mother. It's how life works.
Today we have parents who are too busy to teach important life lessons to their kids. They react when the kids are bad, but they teach little when their kids need it.
Instead they give them video games and sit them in front of the television for entertainment. Think about that. Would you want a child to grow up believing that real people in their lives are just like the people they see on television? How twisted and perverse would that be?
Teaching critically important life lessons is relatively easy and fast. In most cases it's a matter of saying each one in a few sentences and allowing the kids to talk with the adult about the lesson.
If we don't teach positive life lessons, children grow to become like the people they see on television and in video games. Look around you and think about what kids in your community are doing with their lives. Sadly, this is one case where life imitates art.
We are all the worse for it.
We need to learn how and when to do the job of parenting well.
Broken people are hard to fix. Better to give them the knowledge and skills they need to prevent them from breaking.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children the right lessons at the right times in the right way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
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