It’s bugging me in a good way.

But here’s the story.

Let’s say you watch John Timmons’s video perusals. Of course, a first viewing will produce an interpretation or reaction, whatever it may be.

Then read my response to it in the form of Grandfather’s Favorite Spot.

Then go back and view John Timmons’s video again. The idea is that the interpretation of the video will be permanently altered because of the fiction and the viewer can never have their original interpretation back. The video is permanently changed, even if the viewer discounts the second work. (An opposing issue would seem to be “forgetting.”)

The same phenomenon is at work in the following example:

Let’s say a viewer encounters Carianne Mack Garside’s watercolor called progress.

Then the viewer encounter a re-contexting of it in poetic form. This poem, for example. This will happen if one purchases the 2008 book which places the context for these works in juxtaposition.

If the viewer goes back to the painting after having read the poem, the interpretive context is “permanently” altered. I observed and thought about this during the gallery show of the 2008 work. Blake opens his Experience poems with a pointer to the notion, thus the theme of innocence and experience is baked into the concept.

Hear the voice of the Bard,
Who present, past, and future, sees;

I’m not making an argument for the degree to which the original interpretation is changed. But that original experience is lost forever. It may not be profound and in some cases it won’t matter all that much to world affairs, as when a person on the lot finds a better car than the one they first saw and might have purchased. But I am seeking a name for the phenomenon.

This summer I have a few projects. Some are trivial. Prep for Fall teaching, bone up some programming. Other things not so much. In May I decided to learn how to play the guitar. And 100 Days is pulsing like the desert sun. I’m, therefore, writing at mediaplay, where the summer work is stored.

Today, boosted by this film by John Timmons and loads of images by other’s in the collaborative, I learned about an old man who lives in Osaka and whose father may or may not have died in the bomb blast at Nagasaki. He’s still with me. I see him holding his photograph. And I see the mother on the porch and hear the thinking of the fictional narrator, whose thought process is really my own.

This Osaka is perpetual. It is always present, like the El Paso I still remember from my last visit or the corridor of Park Street in Hartford. I wonder where the old man is now. I wonder what he’s eating. I wonder if his mother is alive.

The last couple of days have seen graduation to a new level of guitar playing. The funny part is that I go from beginner to a little more than beginner as I have thousands of hours left to go toward mastery of something I don’t really know much about. Luckily I have friends who do. I’ve learned a piece that weeks back I couldn’t even have attempted without a lot of pain and frustration. What’s amazing about all this is that I’ve re-connected with the thrill of just learning something new, something that I’ve always wanted to do but hadn’t had the time to consider seriously.

The brain is physically changing. And that’s thrilling. I often joke that I want to connect a program to my head that will teach me to do things. It’s a joke of course. The fun part would be missed. It’s totally thrilling to learn something new.

This whole enterprise is 1) a humbling experience. I used to play trumpet in high school. I was pretty good, moving to first chair in the marching band and jazz band at the ripe age of 14. We traveled to Mexico city in 1979 or 80, we won lots of awards in jazz. After high school I played in a band that did a few weddings and parties, playing Chicago-like music. But tennis, computers, and a novel drew me then and I lost interest in gigs, music, and lugging around equipment. So, I must start from scratch. The first order of business was to strengthen both hands, toughen the tips of my left hand fingers to withstand razor sharp acoustic strings, and start training my brain to recognize left and right hand relationships. It’s like I’ve hit the first grade again, struggling to make sound.

After three weeks, I can pluck Clair de Lune, play a nursery rhyme (barely–I think it’s Pop Goes the Weasel), and strum a few cords. Barring’s getting easier and I have lots of interesting warmups. I know how to read notes and patterns but I haven’t yet passed my first set of self-imposed quizzes. I won’t move to brighter things until I have those basics done, though I do read ahead into the book.

2) I have that learning anxiety that everyone feels when facing the unknown: will I be able to master basics and thus move on to things more advanced, like varied accompaniment? The first impasse has been proper plucking technique, which is a brain knotter. When the player goes from first to third string with annulas and index respectfully, the player experiences one of those cognitive surprises, as in “how does one do that without going mad?” But when the movement grew easier, typically on the second day, then easier on the third day, I felt that elation people feel when what seemed impossible one day is now possible. When does a person know they learned something?

In the fiction writing (which is different from verbal storytelling), this feeling of elation may take years to experience as the ability to compress an image (or understand the arc) is one of those sneaky things. It’s important to know what sort of a learner one is. I’m an obsessive, so when I want to learn something, that particular skill will become the sole object. This is true of software, programming, gardening, wine, cooking, and Beowulf the work, which drives my wife crazy, as during the learning of something, such as “the shop saw” or some particular character in a new novel, I have a hard time “listening” to what she had to say five minutes ago. The problem is, there’s always something to learn next. The guitar should keep me going for years, as the “objective” is to learn flamenco and some tunes my wife may be able to sing a long to when we’re sitting about the fire pit (which I need to learn how to build, too).

3) As a dedicated generalist, it’s hard to always keep focused on one thing at a time, as the world is loaded with “too much to learn and too many distractions” which may tends to greed, glossing, over-confidence, and the adulteration of expertise. So, I’m forcing myself to repeat repeat repeat in an effort to fight dilution and the urge to learn a cool progression before I really know what I’m doing.

The person at the head (of course, this metaphor is misleading) of a classroom should always be reminded what challenges feel and sound like and how failing over and over again tests ambition. I feel like I’m back in the first or second grade, plinking my way through a few trivial sounds. But I also feel that sounding out the C chord to a degree better than the day before is really explosive and that moving smoothly from C to G7 is actually possible. Wow, the little things.

We can also do this with a new electrical grid and new energy forms. That’s said, then.

The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the origin of the universe—allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected using the methods of science. Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.

This either misrepresents the accommodationist view or generalizes to a degree that the point is lost. Can “a group” seek to do something in the sense that Singham suggest. Maybe. But the position seems to me to be somewhat difficult to understand. Accommodationism as an ism is, bluntly speaking, a matter of attitude perhaps.

The question I ask is: so what?

Singham has a point to make:

Why have organizations like the National Academy of Sciences sided with the accommodationists even though there is no imperative to take a position? After all, it would be perfectly acceptable to simply advocate for good science and stay out of this particular fray.

One has to suspect that tactical considerations are at play here. The majority of Americans subscribe to some form of faith tradition. Some scientists may fear that if science is viewed as antithetical to religion, then even moderate believers may turn away from science and join the fundamentalists.

I doubt the last conclusion. Do people think that science is antithetical to religion? And what does that mean? Let’s say that I have a question that calls for experiment: how big is the solar system or is the solar system expanding? When does science become antithetical to religion in a real sense in this case?

“Reverse engineering a biological visual system—a system with hundreds of millions of processing units—and building an artificial system that works the same way is a daunting task,” says Cox. “It is not enough to simply assemble together a huge amount of computing power. We have to figure out how to put all the parts together so that they can do what our brains can do.”

“While studying the brain has yielded critical information about how the brain is wired, we currently don’t have enough information to build a computer system that works like the brain does,” adds Pinto. “Even if we take all of the clues that we have available from experimental neuroscience, there is still an enormous range of possible models for us to explore.”

From my point of view the United States is suffering two crises: a learning crisis and a governance crisis. The learning crises is described as a growing disconnect between higher and secondary education, the measurable lack of critical thinking skills of incoming freshman classes, and the amount of resources in education systems, which the current budget won’t really change. The second crises has to do with how we govern ourselves and the belief wall, where every issue and subject is viewed through the ideological glass. This crises is a long one. What’s the significant difference between the Conservative Coalitions now and for Roosevelt? Witness the current gripe on the right on the subject of the CRU Hack. The list of ergo propter hocks is astounding. The best writing on this is still Orwell. When a Congress person can claim miming a baby as grand appeal in the commons, the governance crises shines through in all its ironic illumination. What was it that Twain said about how fast lies can run?

Budgets are lots of things. They are expressions of value. They are also expressions of the future, as every budget will reflect the language of the next. I write this to suggest that the defense vs education budget is a statement of value in the marketplace of ideas and to also suggest that such a budget signals the root of several other problems not directly tied to line items.

In economic terms, things these days are overvalued, which is bad news for homeowners and solar cell makers. A computer’s value, for example, can be assessed by how it’s used and by its potential. Even the stingiest laptop can create what only a movie studio could do years ago. Laptops have lots of “potential” value that goes beyond their “market” value. The value of a thing is tied to the value of its potential, which, is, of course, difficult to turn into data, as good carpenters and surgeons know. We can, to extend the notion, re-conceptualize the value of a college degree to include the amount of effort students and faculty put into gaining learning vs. market vs. system costs. People who waste their time making minimum effort cost the public system more. If it’s a top dollar school, what is fifty thousand dollars of student effort even for best and brightest? If the answer is a grade, then individual grades are now worth $5,000 (and Shadegg would have received an F in public speaking class). But is the significance of learning tied somehow to the cost of lighting and the physical plant? Yes and No. The best answer is No.

Conclusion: Does the United States value education by investing and vesting in it? Not in my opinion. While most people agree that public education is a “need” we don’t really put the money behind it. But every politician will still claim the “need” and “value” of a college education. If you turned them around, however, they would be secretly tapping the keys to their cell phones and updating their Twitter accounts to assure their publics that they will never raise their taxes.

I often ask the question: what does an automobile really cost? This is tough as we would need to assess the value of things that aren’t cars but could be used to make them, from petroleum to the cost of electricity at a given time. Here’s another way of asking the question: what is the value in not making cars? Well, we saw how the bailout responded to that question. What, therefore, would be the value of not providing excellent learning opportunities for adults? What would be the answer to that? More money for defense, I assume.

I have some solutions to the learning crises but the governance crises would see them as anarchical. One item would be to base-line teaching pay at 60K starting but at the same time make education schools very difficult to enter. (My students and I came to the conclusion the other day that to raise pass rates all an institution has to do is triple tuition rates. It’s the same idea but with a different context.) The other incentive is to eliminate grading systems and move to performance measures described in narrative terms. Not A but “this is what this person did and can do,” given that forklift operators know how to drive forklifts and surgeons typically don’t slice into that 30% percent of the brain that they missed on the exam. This method would make learning transfer easier to understand grade to grade as it would involve answering the question why does grade 9 come before grade 10 in ways other than the obvious. There’s a fairly deep elitism in this proposition, but I don’t mind taking the heat for that.

1. Why would Obama risk support?
2. What is the meaning of the right wing response?
3. What does the loss mean in the context of America’s standing in the world?

None of this makes much sense in logical terms. In Connecticut, I wonder what I might about know about the credibility of Chicago’s bid? Or even Rio’s? All of this I would leave to the judgement criteria of the Committee, as I would know very little about how to determine why it does or doesn’t make sense.

Today, Rep John Boehner issues this statement:

Instead of coming to their senses, Democrats are pressing ahead with, among other costly proposals, a national energy tax and a government takeover of health care. Make no mistake, these initiatives would destroy jobs and place additional burdens on working families and small businesses.

We have some knowledge about how complicated opinion is. It’s also pretty clear that the above is crass distortion, as, by definition, a public option is not a government takeover and that to suggest “regulation” as a takeover principle would be to suggest that the government has already taken over bottling and tobacco companies. In addition, there’s also the charge that Democrats are “senseless” and that counter-positions are a “mistake.” Yet, earlier in the statement, Boehner asks that Democrats act in a more bipartisan fashion, which may be impossible to do if one is “senseless,” meaning unable to feel or irrational. I’ve argued before that the language of politics is a language of irony, meaning that what Boehner says out loud suggests an opposite truth, value, or imperative.

It doesn’t take that much work–a few seconds–to wave rhetorical illogic away.

I find a lot of interesting reading in the subjects Cities, Environment, Politics, et cetera.  But storing bookmarks in any of these areas randomly can create lists that, weeks later, make little sense.  Tinderbox may be a better method of storing reading materials as I can use prototypes and agents for visual meaning and as intuitive expression.  What I’m finding inconvenient in the size of my laptop screen for dragging things around.

Considering length hasn’t been much of an issue, as the internal questions about plot and character have taken precedence. Day to day writing prohibits length, but the upper parameter of length hasn’t been much more than a thousand. The longest story is The Champion at 1203 words. At 238, The Children works out as the shortest. Average length works out to about 650.