500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
We’re going to go a little engineer-geeky this week. If you’re feeling lightheaded or dizzy at the thought of a tech talk, you can go in the back yard and play with a squirrel. I’ll let you know when this is over.
It sort of snuck up on us, but it’s obvious by now that the Internet has reinvented writing. I do more writing now than I’ve done in years, and it’s not just writing articles and blogs. Self-publishing and the empowerment it brings have created wonderful new ways to cultivate carpal tunnel syndrome. Even if you are merely tapping out 140-character Twitter posts, you’re doing it on your iPhone, iPad, Droid, on a computer, and you’re doing it a lot. While much of this creative explosion is drivel, much is also quality stuff. (Hey, former English majors: Let’s not pretend that all writing before the electronic age was great. At the time of the Industrial Revolution people were blasted off their asses on beer all day, so I think their creative output wasn’t, you know, at the Faulkner level.)
Get ready for the next communications revolution. It’s going to be in data visualization. Numbers cause a lot of people to fall into a stupor, particularly when you start talking about them. But show me numbers in a spiffy data viz, and I pay attention. There are great places to see this in action. Information is Beautiful, Flowing Data and Strange Maps are three sites worth watching. Even more amazing, you can do terrific data viz yourself with Tableau Public, an app that lets you drag-and-drop your Excel spreadsheet data into a field and home-brew a viz. I’ve been using Tableau Public a lot the past week and I’ve realized something about data viz. It’s going to drive social change.
If you take a look at gapminder.org, you will see mesmerizing, animated visualizations of vital data comparing the health of nations with the wealth of their citizens. It’s pretty dramatic to see the poorer countries simply getting left behind. In another visualization it’s shocking to see that the “developing countries” aren’t developing much when it comes to helping their citizens live longer, healthier lives. At the Tableau Software site, contributors have made graphics showing Japanese earthquakes since 1900, graphics about which countries give the most aid and which receive it, and a national geography of diabetes – mapping diabetes through the US.
Images speak to us. When you think the average American consumes 45.3 pounds of sugar in a year it comes home when you visualize all that sugar in a frigging wheelbarrow. Information is Beautiful has a great viz showing the most common words in toy advertisements. Battle is huge, and so is power – but it won’t make much of an impression until you see the graphic.
Those of you who couldn’t deal with this tech talk, you can come in from the back yard and leave the squirrel alone now.
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500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I thought this week I would put my head in the lion’s mouth – or more accurately, into the tiger’s mouth – and add my voice to the chorus of cheers and jeers directed toward the Tiger Mother. For those of you who have been busy raising your children and not just reading about raising children, the Tiger Mother is Yale Law professor and menacingly Type-A personality Amy Chua. In her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, she writes of setting fire to her child’s stuffed animals, throwing a four-year-old’s handmade birthday card back in that child’s face because it wasn’t good enough for mommy, and making her kids watch tv clips of House Speaker John Boehner sobbing while he recalled his childhood. Actually, I made up the part about Boehner, but the rest, apparently, is dead true.
In interviews about her book, Chua has set fire (figuratively) to even more stuffed animals, justified parental brutality as only a lawyer could, inserted foot further into mouth, and sold more books. There’s been debate about Chinese-American parents and the demands they put upon their children. Far more revealing about human nature was Nicholas Kristof’s recent piece in the Times. He wrote that Chinese educators believe that too much discipline and a madness for testing are simply crushing creativity. You mean, it’s possible to listen to your teachers, ace your tests in school and grow up to become a bore, or worse, a banker? Happens.
Most parents get into the game with little or no practice. Sorry kids, but intellectually we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re all instinct and gut, and it works pretty well, because the relationship between parent and child is self-correcting. You act like an asshole to your kids, you get that back. If you pay attention, you can correct. The wheels come off, however, when parents, who are physically larger than children, start to bully them and take unfair advantage. That’s not nice, and that’s why the Tiger Mother Method seems wrong to me. Oh, I know she’s backlashing against the parent who says “good job” for even a bad job, and the kind of school sports where everybody gets a trophy even when they suck. That’s not real either and leads to, in Judith Warner’s words, “pathological ninnyishness in kids.”
We all have found ways to torture our children. We make them listen to the Beatles. We make them watch The Big Lebowski. We make them write things on paper. All monstrous demands and onerous tasks, but necessary. Well, maybe liking The Big Lebowski isn’t necessary, but the rest of it is, and the reason that’s good is that it helps the family, that societal microcosm, cooperate. When parents go wrong is the moment they force their experience on their children, believing without question that their traditions and past personal history will define their child’s future. That doesn’t work so well, and it seems that if you went to Yale, it can be especially bad.
Stuffed animal photo by Christopher Paretti via Creative Commons License.
Do you think we take toys seriously enough?
Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, points out that artists regularly need to get themselves toys. Creativity can be sparked by a new paint brush; a red coffee cup to drink out of; an especially creamy, thick pad of writing paper. It seems indulgent, and maybe it is.
But when we spend so much time typing things on machines and looking at screens that shape shift into editing rooms, chat rooms, dark rooms and light rooms, it’s nice to own something dependable.
I like a #1 grade soft pencil that lays down a thick blur, and a fountain pen that makes me write more slowly than I can think. I like a small pocket slate to write down scenes and show them to the camera before we roll.
My old friend Frank R. Wilson is working on an eBook version of his book, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture. Frank explains brilliantly how using our hands is a primary way we acquire language and become creative, and the information transmitted by the hands to the brain has contributed mightily to the development of human intelligence. Recently, Matthew Crawford has looked at how working with your hands tends to generate happiness and satisfaction. Elliot Washor, co-founder of Big Picture Learning, has written:
What do Legos, Etch-A-Sketch, the balloons in balloons you get at the zoo, and dare I say, The Shrinky Dink have in common? Famous scientists and inventors cited them all as the direct inspiration for their major scientific breakthroughs and discoveries. The manipulative quality and simplicity of these toys allowed scientists to feel the world and ground them in it.
We get smart in so many ways, only a few of which are measured by I.Q. tests. In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers he explains why Asian children can do addition in their heads more easily than American kids. As Gladwell has it, you ask an English-speaking kid to add 37 plus 22 in her head and she has to convert the words to numbers. Then it’s 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, and that adds up to 59. But because of the way their language is structured, an Asian child solves it this way: Add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two and the answer is five-tens-nine. “The necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence,” Gladwell writes.
Though it’s a bit of a jump to consider that I was never good at math because I didn’t learn it in Chinese, I have found that you can source creativity and intelligence in surprising ways. It’s embedded in your language. It comes from an old fountain pen or a red coffee cup.
Rhodia has a line of orange covered gridline pads. I may be only writing a mundane to-do list, but that pad makes me feel like a lofty-minded engineer designing a new society. I think I might have to get it.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
What are you looking for? People are searching Google for “oil spill in gulf of mexico.” St. Louis, MO is the world’s epicenter for people typing in “how to find a boyfriend.” The number one city searching for “sex” is Delhi, India. The number one city searching for “peace” – Edmonton, Canada.
I’m going to follow the high (Canadian) road and try some Google searches before hoisting a cold drink and paddling a kayak into the Labor Day sunset. Here are my results, not all of them real.
Normally this Google search returns an administration that is wrongheadedly driven to job generation by building more roads, more airports and increasing our dependency on fossil fuels. That’s my read on Laura Tyson’s recent New York Times op-ed piece.
But when I did this Google search, I got something that didn’t suck. My search returned a president who delivers on his promise to build a green infrastructure for America, with solar and wind power. His administration helps move us away from oil, cars and bad mortgages and into something smarter – new online technologies and training and a green economy.
This returns yoga studios that offer classes by donation, like YogaCo and Yogis Anonymous, in Santa Monica. You simply pay what you think the class is worth. Your class is not some recurring charge on your credit card, or a health-club membership, or some other obligation like changing the oil in your car. The health club, credit card model of yoga doesn’t teach us as much about ourselves. As Max Strom writes in A Life Worth Breathing, we can’t use the methods we commonly employ in business and commerce to learn about ourselves. It’s like using a hammer to brush your teeth. Money needs to change hands for yoga classes, but just in a different way.
This search returns links about Bruce Lipton, a biologist who is leading a re-examination of Darwinian evolutionary theory. He spoke at a great event that I attended this week. Bruce says that Darwin’s concept of evolution, the “survival of the fittest,” has led humanity into competition and war. He thinks evolution is really about “survival of the fittingest” – successful species are those that adapt, fit in with nature and play well with other species. If we understand this in time, and stop killing the planet, Mother Nature might not need to cast us out of her garden.
This returns a link to this video, which is coffee porn for the overcaffinated engineer mind. The search does not return any links to Starbucks, which has a good health plan for its employees but teaches them to make an indifferent espresso, a great tragedy for dopamine delivery.
My dream Google search returns news of Architecture for Humanity’s efforts to rebuild in Haiti, Black Entertainment Television’s financing of local housing materials manufacturing in Haiti, and World Shelters’ work here and abroad to put a roof over everyone’s head.
Eastern Nebraska. Huh. Always wanted to know that.
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500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
It might be the heat of this summer day, but do you notice those spectral beings? They look like adults, but they’re not. They are the twenty-somethings who float through college and then boomerang back to live at home, and fifty-somethings who have a mid-life crisis, then morph into Mustang owners who date teenagers. Delaying the onset of responsibility and the start of life is so common now, it’s hardly a trend; more like an epidemic. It can happen at any time, not just when you’re young. Life isn’t in drive so much; often the shifter gets punched into reverse and people are suddenly moving backwards.
First, a little compassion. According to an article by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine, the average 20 year old is going through a lot of changes. One third of 20-somethings change residence every year. Forty percent move back home with parents at least once. Many hold seven jobs through the decade between 20 and 30. That’s a lot of turmoil.
I had a lot of that in my 20s certainly, as my father will attest, but I never moved back home. That simply wasn’t done back then.We wanted to be out in the world, and yes, we held lots of jobs. I worked in restaurants with inflammable chefs and later, when I wrote cartoons, I worked with inflammable executive producers.
Life is supposed to be an old song that goes something like you grow up, go to school, start a career and a family and watch the sun set with a spouse who shares the journey. Everybody experiencing that lately? I didn’t think so.
I’m noticing that there’s no long and winding road. It’s more of a spiral, and it’s not spinning just the 20-somethings until they are dizzy. The dizziness is widespread. Marriages of decades implode and partners become single again. Whole sectors of the economy evaporate and people need to re-train. Natural disasters are taking away homes. Because of these changes from within and outside us, no matter what our age, we’re all adolescents again. Erik Erikson’s eight-stage model of development might turn out to be an infinite-stage model. As had been said before, we’re living life in the first draft.
“The first draft of anything is shit.” – Ernest Hemingway
Have another glass of wine, Papa, and chill. I prefer what Elmore Leonard has to say.
“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard
It would be great to live in drive all the time, never having to shift into reverse, and it would be great to skip a few boring parts, like Elmore Leonard does in his novels. But life’s first draft turns out to be a pretty bumpy rehearsal for a (hopefully, soon to come) master performance. Surprisingly, for me, I’m feeling for those parents who aren’t encouraging their kids to grow up right away. Some of those parents regret punching the accelerator and rocketing into marriage-career-family-mortgage so soon themselves.
I’ve been trying some breathing exercises lately (called pranayama by the yogis) and some meditation, too, and finding that instead of relentlessly punching the accelerator, a pause now and again has helped me move forward with even more purposeful energy.
Photo by joiseyshowaa via Creative Commons License
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