Romancing the Stone: on the joys of being an intern

I scored an internship with Rosetta Stone’s Endangered Language Program at their global headquarters in Harrisonburg, VA, instead of going to grad school this semester. It’s weirdly relaxing. I work full time and finished the 6-month research project that got me my master’s degree a couple of weeks after I got here, and it is still so, so much less stressful than going to class. The people here are precisely my vibe of crazy. It’s truly wonderful.

I designed my PhD from the beginning so that Rosetta Stone would hire me when I finish it, that or I’ll be able to write my own grants to do primary endangered language documentation with tribes that really need it – a choice I’ll make when I’m done, depending on how important paychecks are at that point in my life. Since Rosetta Stone makes software that teaches language, my degree is joint/double in Linguistics and Cognitive Science, focusing on user-centered pedagogical linguistic interface design – how to design language-teaching software specifically for a certain demographic (in my case, native communities; in Rosetta Stone's case, people who can afford it).

The thing is, I’m half-way through the PhD, but I’m a lot more than half-way to working for Rosetta Stone. And it’s fun here – terribly fun. The work is fascinating, since they’ve taught me to constructively critique the lessons as they design them. It means I play, all the time – I get paid to learn languages, and to think and watch very closely to catch aberrations they don’t want, that might make the game less efficient or less fun. It’s strange to me that working in industry is so fun, since I come from academia, where industry is generally considered rushed and stressful. Not remotely, man; not here… just more lucrative.

Controvertial Conclusions: to Abort or not to Abort?

My little brother Kelson has been asked to write an objective analysis of abortion for one of his 10th grade classes, very likely Language Arts, in response to a satirical essay by Somebody Schwigg around 1800 that said no we shouldn't abort them, we should give birth, feed them well for a year, skin them, use the meat to feed the hungry, and turn the skins into wallets and lampshades. Writing an unbiased, unemotional response to that sounded challenging. What follows is the email I wrote him to that end, my logic, and here's my conclusion: if you think the U.S. Legal System's assessment of the environment more closely reflects the Will of God (religion) or more perfectly maximizes the utalitarian benefit of the society in which it occurs (science) than does the assessment of the pregnant mother, then abortion should be illegal in all cases not approved of by the U.S. Legal System. If you think the mother's assessment does a better job, then abortion should be legal in all cases, point blank.

Here's why.
**
You said that guy's name was Schwigg? 1798 or something, eating babies?

Have you seen the Southpark where Cartman sells aborted fetuses so Superman can eat them and get Super again? Harvesting stem cells after fertilization is seen by the political right in this country (i.e. my father) as equivalent to skinning babies, eating them since the population needs it, and making (useful) wallets etc. with their skin. Not having read Schwigg's satire, I can't say from your description whether he suggested that stuff with enough sarcasm to put his stand as for or against abortion. My guess would be against -- but actually the first time I wrote that sentence I wrote for, so I'm not exactuly sure.

My personal stand -- which is irrelevant to your essay, but may provide enough food for thought for you to see a perspective sufficiently objective to include -- is that the difference between to Murder and to Kill lies not in the act of ending cellular respiration (though stem cell removal actually MUST preserve cellular 'aliveness' to work) but rather in the human-like or non-human-like nature of the thing whose life is being ended, in conjunction with the societal benefit of ending the life. Does a cat murder a mouse? No; in my opinion, a cat can only kill a mouse. Does a human murder a mouse? No; a mouse can only be killed. Does a human murder a human? Depends, in my opinion, on the intention of the person ending the life of another person. Capitol punishment stands any chance whatsoever of being morally admirable solely on the societal conviction that a person can be so morally fucked up that it is not murder to end their life; it is morally justifiable by the utalitarian benefit to society of the cessation of the criminal's presence. If the criminal is on death row for ending the life of another human (never a dog, a mouse, or a monkey) then some judge decided the ending of life was "manslaughter" or "murder" as opposed to "justifiable self-defense," which is legally known in Colorado as the Make My Day Law (which you can google for facts if you find it appropriate). One of the ten commandments is Do Not Murder; in the old testament God commanded the Israelites to attack a village and kill every man, woman and child; God cannot violate His own commandments. According to my father, Christianity (and Christians who've bothered to think about this) effectively conclude that God disapproves of murder, but condones "killing", at least when He approves (whatever the hell that means, usually defined functionally as agreeing with whatever extremist faction, of whatever religion, race, or political standing, is currently telling themselves they are doing the Will of God).

My personal faith is composed of evidence strong enough to tilt my logical conclusion one direction more than the other (codified as the professional pursuit of science). In the case of abortion, and in most other cases, the strongest piece of evidence for me is utalitarian value: which choice does the most good for the most different people in the most different ways. My understanding is that the joining of monocellular gametes (known as a sperm and an ovum, an egg) do not fit the definition of "human" until they have enough cerebral cortex to reflect neural activation that matches what science has identified as corresponding systematically to our subjective experience of "consciousness", so the harvesting of stem cells is not murder, and given that they can literally cure neurological disorders like Parkinsons, the utalitarian best choice is to harvest them, despite the fact that choosing not to harvest them would lead to the same blob of cellular tissue eventually developing enough brain matter to be conscious and therefore considered a human (a fetus). If the blob of cells has passed that line and has neural activation -- which is around the same time as a detectable heartbeat, I think, some time after the tail and the gills transform into lungs and a spinal cord -- then it falls into the same category as whether it is murder or not to execute a convicted serial murderer on deathrow: which choice most benefits the society in which the choice is being made? Most women who opt for abortions do so not only for their own wellbeing (which the Christian Right would consider selfish enough to qualify abortion as murder) but largely because they deeply believe that their environment or their own personal maturity are such that they would do a "bad job" mothering and the child would suffer. In my opinion, those women are choosing to protect their children by postponing reproduction -- which results in the survival only of those fetuses with a good chance of being emotionally healthy, societally productive, and possibly even loving, generous, and kind adults. Even Christian Right extremists most often agree that cases of rape, incest, and harm to the mother's life justify abortion -- they are also utalitarian, we just disagree about which path leads to the most societal benefit.

Conclusions: Fourier analysis and the World at Large

January 10th, 2009, Travel Diary

Plane #2, Sao Paulo a LAX

Brazil cultivates kindness like no other country I can remember being in. Every country has its specialty, it seems to me – the calming forests and beautiful waterfalls, the lush living gentleness, have fostered sensitivity and caring. In Germany the dark winters and cold weather have fostered efficiency in meeting needs; the cars go fast, the trains are sleek and smooth, the subways are calm, and the people are subdued and gentle. In France indulgence is unquestionably a virtue of highest regard – the food is delicious, the museums abound with history and talent, and the Moulin-rouge-style passion is both exquisite and infamous. Ghana celebrates the primal rhythms of human nature with music, dance, and clothing so colorful it seems to shine with joy – as does their passionate and joyful vibe of Christianity. Britain’s strong patriarchal heritage is evident not only in its history but in its profound respect for everyone’s right to enjoy the inheritance of all cultures – the British museum is gorgeous, and not only is it free, it’s the only museum I remember that lets you not only touch many precious relics but even photograph them all. Wales treasures the well-being of its populace over material appearances, as did their passionate druid ancestors whose culture of passion and poetry survives in jousting festivals and the annual Eistedfodd. Mexico specializes not only in family but in generosity as well; wedding celebrations are virtuallyt conflagrations of joyous affection, but those who provide the income are willing to leave the world they cherish for one they know full well is hostile to outsiders so they can find

Plane # - ?

**Peace.

Outside the window the world floats by, fluffy piles of cumulous clouds below, soft swaths of blue and grey stretching above. The sound of a movie whispers from the headphones of the passenger beside me; the screen of his seat, turned toward me since I lowered my windowshade when I saw him blocking the light with his hand, has subtitles in Japanese and English with a soundtrack in Brazilian. I love this airline, but as I awaken to the validity of my own truth it is becoming clearer that I love not only all ways of traveling but also all travelers, all destinations, and perhaps, at least in retrospect, all travels.

The truth is trippy, but the way is simple, and the light is the foundation of everything we can see and touch – but by no means is it the crux of who we are. From the cohesion of atomic particles to the amplification of electromagnetic power – from the peace in a child’s eyes to the tingling thrill of a deeply moving symphony, the energy that makes order from chaos follows the same fundamental principles: tension is cold, arousal is hot, and symmetry is the balance of it all. How could it not be? Science does describe the truth; belief does empower it; ignorance, or at least the willingness to relax and re-focus, does define what we perceive. The culture of our origin seeds our truth; the nature of our destination defines its trajectory; our willingness and abi8lity to change our perspectives shape our growth – but in the end the result is invariable: peace.

A child across the plane from me is screeching at a pitch whose frequency, whose wavelength, causes my stomach to tighten – but the child’s crying is not causing my discomfort. My brain is, not hers. My nervous system has been calibrated by the myriad details of my life to respond to the precise sound of her wailing with annoyance – tension, excessive activation, negative emotion – but if I breathe, relax, and pay attention to the tenor of the voice rather than the fist it curls in my stomach, the tension dissipates into compassion, the unpleasant arousal into sympathy, my own suffering into understanding. If I focus on the external stimulus instead of my internal reaction to it, her screeching melts into an emotion I empathize with very well: frustration. In the absence of words, her neuronal design clenches her throat with the same grip that dictates nearly all human interaction: she says what she feels, speaks her truth. If I focus on her emotion instead of mine, the exquisite tuning of the human perceptual systems correctly reinterprets my annoyance as her pain, not mine. Then my tension melts into sympathy, my clenching discomfort into understanding, my angry dislike of the dissonance into a very real compassion.

It is not the child’s crying that forces me to be uncomfortable, it is just my nervous system’s response to her absolutely honest, wholeheartedly innocent way of expressing her own reaction to her experience of the world. If I redirect my focus to her experience rather than mine, my brain responds by mirroring her suffering with a harmless trace of my own. Instead of tension, I tune in to the precise wavelength of her pain – and I feel in my gut that she is not suffering at all. She is frustrated that the world, her immediate environments, is not providing what she strongly feels she deserves to be given. There is dissonance between her desires and her immediate experience, but she is not suffering. If I allow my perception – or truly my own reaction to her perception – to override how innately I empathize with it, my emotion reflects hers rather than mirroring it. As soon as her mother’s behavior shows she is listening, shows the child’s mind that she is understood, she stops crying – the inequity of valence dissolves, her out-of-kilter emotion resolves into the peace of knowing she is understood, and she stops screeching (which she actually did about halfway through this sentence). Until her mother’s body really does come in line with the child’s nervous arousal – for as long as she hears frustration or anger in the mother’s voice instead of the helpless discomfort felt by the child herself – the dissonance will amplify, and whatever wavelength most provokes her mother’s system to respond with sympathy is the wavelength to which the baby’s voice will migrate. With enough arousal, a perfect mirror-mind will gravitate to sympathy. A mind springing from a non-mirror nervous system will respond with whatever emotion is triggered within it. So long as the person on the receiving end is focusing on the message rather than its source or its destination, arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (tension) will trigger mirror neurons in the listener’s brain to recreate the source intension: which is felt by the mother as the suffering it is, so the child’s mind perceives that it has been met with understanding. When the child’s arousal is met with the mother’s empathy, the dissonant wavelengths do what dissonant wavelengths do across the spectrum: they resolve into harmony, and the discomfort dissipates. Pain met with empathy resolves into peace; heat met with cold resolves into the temperature of its equilibrium; agitation joined to its exact opposing frequency returns to baseline. As soon as the mother shows the baby she understands – as soon as their perceptual systems come into harmony, the frustration ceases and both parties fall silent.

The only pain is in the message. Discomfort is the invariable response to discomfort, in exact and perfect ratio to the mismatch, the misunderstanding. Great passion m et with great gentleness resolve into flawless kindness. Passion met with poassion amplifies the nervous reaction until the dissonant wavelengths resolve, which they invariably do. A flat-line apathetic numbness looks exactly the same spectrally as does perfect harmony. They look like peace. They feel like understanding. They sound like they were exquisitely designed to get along. They were.

My annoyance at the squeal results directly from my focus on the endpoints rather than the message, the emotional correlate of the neural mismatch in activation; if I redirect my attention to the message itself, I naturally perceive and respond appropriately.

Pain results from focusing on the source, the speaker, or its destination, the listener. If we pay attention before we respond, we empathize, and we experience neither fear nor anger. If we focus on the message instead of our reaction, we have no biological option but understanding. Passion plus passion equals peace. Fourier analysis can clarify every misunderstanding.

Empathy manifests as widened eyes; so does attraction; so does what we call love. Fear triggers contraction of pupils; I suspect anger does the same. Pupils respond to pupils like mirrors; dilation evokes contraction until the pupils reflect each other perfectly, which is when we feel understood, when we feel safe, when we feel loved.

So why can’t we just get along? We can; we eventually have no choice. Eventually we see eye to eye, no matter how convoluted or intense the process may be. Fear and anger, joy and mourning, agony and empathy reflect each other so perfectly that they are literally predestined by physics to come to terms with each other. Pain, discomfort, is just misperception. Focus on the message and no damage can possibly be done.

Choices for the New Year

This new year finds me at the spiritual retreat of John of God, a very loving and gentle way to begin again. I would translate the poem below but it loses its... the resonance of its soul in translation. Suffice to say my trajectory is intentionally different this evening from what it was the night before, and my wish for you is that you also find the peace so pervasive here.

Cachoeira de espíritu
é la vida.
A luz de bondade brilla
tras as gotas des olhos.
O medo revolva nos espacios secretos,
fazendo vortexa de enojamento i desesperação.

Não eligo oscuridade.
Agora saio do crepusculo das dudas.
A minha alma se faz parte
de harmonia
entre a agua vital
i os ventos esperações.

Diamonds, Waterfalls, and sleeping with Santa

This blog has missed far more than I can update in one entry. Since the last entry in London in June, many adventures have befallen me, mostly colorful and intense, hosteling through Wales and then getting to know my loving, open-hearted new family while learning Arapaho up on Wind River Reservation. We got a new puppy and named him Baxter, then the semester's computer programming classes were very difficult and stressful. It ended up not mattering; my mother died, my wonderful irreplaceable mother died, and the world ground to a halt anyway. Or mine did.

But time keeps passing anyway. Two years ago my friend Sarah (Banana from our time in Ghana) and I planned to go to out of the country for at least a week together every two years until we're forty. The first place we planned on was Brazil, because my old friend Ricardo owns a house in a little town here, out in the middle of the country surrounded by green forests and waterfalls where diamondhunters and goldminers hunted treasure hundreds of years ago. I started saving then and the trip was scheduled for this Christmas -- so despite my mother's death and the economic straits with which we're all so familiar now, we went on this trip anyway. I flew out of DIA on Christmas Eve and passed the night sleeping high over the earth somewhere, no doubt ever so close to Santa. Now I write from my amply-stickered laptop in a cybercafe in the little town of Pirenopolis, 3 hours south of Brasilia, right smack in the middle of the country, in mystically beautiful cobblestone hide-away no other non-Brazilian tourists seem to have discovered. The entry that follows was written last night in my friend Ricardo's ancient little house. More to follow...

_

Outside my window dusk is falling on the moss-covered garden wall. Brazilian voices with prosody as rolling as the countryside filter through the house. Behind me on the half-lit cement floor, Banana is stretching slowly and silently. Today was perfect.

Her name is Luciana, I think, and she led us to a waterfall she loves here. The dark curls of her hair, her dark skin and her willowy movements embody the beauty these forests are famous for. She and her well-traveled friends Daniela and Luiz came over to Ricardo’s house to visit with Bianca, and within half an hour I was thrilled to hear them invite us to a chapoiera, a waterfall. We walked on slate stone sidewalks through the whole town, out to the Bom Fim barrio on the edge of a sea of green, rapt the entire time in conversation. Our new friends are around our age and of similar political and interpersonal mindset, very good at listening, mostly able to understand and speak English and very kind. We spent the whole day together, sliding through languages and musings alike.

After stopping for water (none for me) at Luciana’s house, we walked some 20 minutes down a paved road that ribboned over the hills, then turned off on an unpaved one with trees overhanging it and red dirt under broken white rock. A quarry stands in stark contrast to the forests some short ways outside of Pirenopolis, and it is obvious why this stone is popular: it glistens like water, shot throughout with sparkling flakes of metal that catch the sun in silver and gold. After we hiked through a vine-tangled stretch of jungle very reminiscent of Hawaii, the river to our right opened up into pools and waterfalls, framed in this same breathtaking rock. We all stripped down to our bathingsuits and waded into the flow since it was too shallow to jump in the part of the river where we were. After an hour of loafing about in the cool water and climbing the mossy boulders in the river, it began to rain steadily, and we turned to head home. The sun shone and the day was pleasantly warm; much of my body stings as I write, kissed into red by sunburn earned with my forgetfulness. They do sell sunscreen here, I just put off buying any until it was too late. Tomorrow.

Architecture, Art, and the Exhaustingly Endangered

The University of London's School for Oriental and African Studies, SOAS, has an Endangered Language Documentation Programme that funds linguists doing research on disappearing languages all over the globe. Oddly enough, it is this institution -- an English one centered on Asia and Africa -- that will fund our work on Arapaho, so they flew both me and my advisor Andy to London for a week of (brutally dense) training. It's a very encouraging way to start my PhD -- professionally funded international travel -- but until today my exposure to the country was limited to a conference room. The training in microphone techniques, linguistic documentation software, strategies of elicitation (getting people to say what you want in a natural way, which almost always means they can't realize you want them to say it) -- all that has been fascinating and invaluable, but since 15 linguists from around the world have 6 days to understand everything, the stress level and grumpiness has been getting difficult to stomach. Today was our one day off, but I'm staying three days extra to take a train to Wales and add an automatically validated Harry Potter (in Welsh) to my collection.
The day was wonderfully refreshing. I chose two spots to see, and to think about: St. Paul's Cathedral and the crypts below it, then the Tower of London (which is really more like a castle historically used as a prison complex). The rose garden around the cathedral was gorgeous; the wrought-iron spikes atop the boundary fence certainly looked like a sufficient deterrent. The cathedral was designed in the baroque (enormously ornate) style by a scientist named Christopher Wren. A raging fire ate up all of London in 1666, so at the age of 31 this brilliant fellow became an architect, and designed 52 churches so London could replace the many it had lost. It felt very much like a smaller version of the Notre Dame from the inside -- the sort of place where you find yourself whispering without meaning to.
From there I took one of those big red double-decker buses to Tower Hill, where the juxtaposition of architectural styles and the density of buildings really showcases London's urban history. In the lower part of the wall in this picture you can see the slits through which archers fended off those attackers foolish enough to get into the moat at the base of the wall; the upper right-most part of the old brick is mostly dark but with patches of lighter colors owing to reconstruction after bombings in WWII; then there's that obvious, weird, phallic glass bit so very impossible not to notice above it all. It seems as though the city multiplied in a desperately haphazard manner, densely filling every available inch with a building. The history of the fortress itself can best be described as shockingly violent; more than 100 people were publicly executed in front of eager crowds, some of whom were so madly thrilled to see beheadings that they crushed and injured each other in the process. Apparently the upper-class prisoners were treated to private executions instead, and kept in their prison towers with retinues of servants.
My last stop was the British Museum, which is truly a wonderful place. This beautiful art -- does one call that a statue? a sculpture? -- stands in their atrium, which is indisputably another work of art. The museum is free and allows you to take pictures, both of which are an incredible gift.
It houses what is to me, as a linguist, the absolute Holy Grail: the Rosetta Stone itself. It's a large dark hunk of rock (looks like marble) with the same law carved in three different languages, one after the other. The first language is Egyptian hieroglyphics, the second a long-dead script called Demotic, and the third Greek. This allowed historical linguists to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics, since by the time linguists came around, everyone who understood hieroglyphics was also long-dead.

Antiquity

There is a bell at the British Museum that is 100 times as old as I am. Not just 100 years old, which alone is sort of unfathomable in a practical sense (especially if you're Bigwig or Fiver), but 100 years for every 1 year of mine -- 3300 years old, shaped in the oldest bronzeworking culture of which the museum had evidence. Some time in the 13th century BC a metalworker in Southern China fashioned the large bell of hot metal, and since then it has slowly crept from deep brown to a mottled emerald green. Imagine what that man's creation has witnessed! Imagine that man himself; he lived before plastic, so he would have worn only things made from fiber, animal furs and wood -- in an age before grocery stores and doctors' offices, so he'd have been lucky to be as old as I am before the spirits took him. Long before bikes or cars, he would have seen only the land upon which he was born, perhaps several days' walking distance from it, equivalent to a person born in Boulder never seeing past the humanfarms of Westminster. Since there were no magazines or photographs when he lived, the only faces that could register as attractive or otherwise would be those with whom he actually interacted -- his sister, his mother, his cousins, his friends, his wife. With no television and no internet, the only lives he could compare to his own would be in his immediate environment: no one would have far more than him, no one far less.

What a different time that old bronze bell still breathes. How fleeting must seem the greatest, most epic of our tragedies and triumphs. A piece of metal crafted by hands like ours, by a mind like ours, in a world almost unthinkable to us -- that one man's work now rests behind glass in a museum that is visited by millions of people every month, reminding us that what we do may last. One man in an ancient village in Southwest China has set millions upon millions of others to thinking: maybe I too can make something with my time here that will outlast the millenia, change the world with my hands too in a way that will set millions upon millions to thinking...

Waterfalls, Old Shoes and Satisfaction

We hiked to two waterfalls. For the first one, we kayaked inland up Wailua River before hiking into the jungle. This is the same forest where Indiana Jones almost got stuck with darts at the very beginning of Raiders. It is easy to see why so many movies have been filmed here -- Kaua'i is covered with primeval forests, and they are both psychologically transporting and quite easy to get lost in. We did get lost on our way back -- only for 5 minutes, but they were my favorite 5 minutes. Our kayak matched the gorgeous blended colors of the most common flower in the trees -- and the Tevas I'm wearing are the same ones that took me through West Africa and down to southern Mexico. They belonged to Mom before me and are such good friends that taking them out of service would lessen the experience of travel. They're only a decade old; time to replace the velcro again and I'm sure they'll see me to another continent.

The second hike was much longer, took an entire day and involved no tour guide; definitely the more dramatic and satisfying of the two. We wore our bathingsuits and left the car at the end of the island's one big road. Brian is standing in front of the beach half way to the big falls, Hanakapi'ai. The cave with the breathtaking water is directly behind him in this shot. It was spooky -- the water was gorgeous as far as the sunlight reached, and then the cave was pitch black -- but the water continued through like a tunnel. You can sort of see it in this picture, but it was like swimming through a lava bubble -- floating on my back looking up at the black jagged angles of the ceiling, it was very easy to imagine the volcanic birth of the island. The edges seem so sharp, just barely weathered.
Very exciting -- enchanting, transporting, and now part of a memory already.

These beautiful columbine greeted us upon our return to our home, where after a day of confused exhaustion we are successfully recalibrating to life as normal. We will have been together 7 years as of tomorrow, 5/20/2008, and married 3 years as of 5/25. It was truly wonderful to dedicate a whole week to enjoying each other, with no obligations to distract us from that priority -- the greater challenge now is how to navigate work and life while maintaining the enjoyment of the connection.

Super dooper ultra fantastico -- no, really :o)

The last entry was two months ago -- with good reason. Since I last wrote, I made it into the CU Linguistics PhD program, signed up for the double PhD in Cognitive Science, and got a grant that pays my tuition for the next two years -- making a conversational database of Arapaho. The same grant is flying me to London in June to be trained in endangered language documentation at the University of London's School for Oriental and Asian Studies (oddly enough) -- my first international trip paid for by my career (which rocks). My first presentation at a professional linguistics conference was in April, and since then it's been a mad dash for May 9th, the last day of semester.

My semester ended ended a touch early because at 5am on May 9th Brian and I were waiting for the AB bus to DIA, to fly to Kaua'i, which is where we are now -- we finally are going on our honeymoon, and just in time for the 3rd anniversary of our elopement over lunch hour. Despite the enormous frustration of postponing the honeymoon for a dog surgery, a new air conditioner in a Colorado summer, a new clutch -- my new conclusion is that waiting 3 years after a wedding to celebrate intimacy via a week of utter relaxation may well be more productive (and certainly more... needed) 3 years late.

So there's what's going on, and here's what we've done so far:The view from our condo, compliments of our fantastic friend Nancy; a baby sea turtle swam right up to check me out while I snorkeled here yesterday.

We went snorkeling here, but Brian's feet and hands got cut up on the coral.

The ocean is amazingly meditative. This is the sunrise, right outside our condo, since the sun rises at 10am Colorado time.











Went snorkeling again down in Lihu'e, found some really... distinctive sunglasses.








And here's today, the Na Pali Coast where lots of movies were filmed. Spinner dolphins leaped in twisting arcs out of the bluest, clearest water I can remember seeing.

Reflections from the 42nd Mile Marker

My home is a silhouette of mountains.

They anchor my wanderings with constant orientation,

remind me gently in contours

that exactly where I am

is exactly where I am meant to be –

At the foot of Tolkeinite slopes of rock

while the rose-tinted blush of morning awakens stark against

the breath-taking depth of

Colorado sky.

Poem found in calligraphy practice papers

**If you're looking for Pi Memorization help, scroll down; it's below this post.

This poem was written long ago, pre-Finn, but was likely written with all thought given to its script rather than its content -- meaning it's not that substantial since the composer was rapt in the writing, practicing calligraphy. It was still pleasant to stumble across such a positive sentiment forgotten in the papers of my office this morning, however lacking in art it may be.

If it were but always so,
the whisper of summer in the trees
like 7th graders falling in love,

When the world is defined by
intensity and dizzying desire,

When the birds are so loud in the morning
that I wish through my dreams
that the window were open --

But somehow or other the
Earth is awakening in bloom and I
am set to aching by
the beauty of the Spring.

How to Memorize Your Own Pi by 3/14

Numerical associations: where to start and why to start there

The more associations you link with any single idea, the more neuronal pathways there are to activating its representation again – the more different stimuli will bring it to mind. The web provides a perfect analogy. If you have a webpage but there are no links to it from other websites, it can only be accessed by entering its actual address (or value) in the browser; if 10 friends have links to your page from theirs, 11 different web addresses can lead to it – so it’s a whole lot easier to find. In the same way, knowing the value of a number gives you one association with it, posts it as your primary webpage so to speak; people with a disorder called Cognitive Synesthesia perceive numbers as being inherently colored, so they have two links to the number, both the value itself (like 5) and the color they associate with it (like blue). There are 5 kids in my family, so for me the number 5 can trigger thoughts of childhood. Lots of numbers make you think of other things, just arbitrary associations common to all of us that we’ve learned because we’re in this culture:

• 666 – evil
• 911 – an emergency
• 9-eleven – the tragedy that occurred on that date
• 7-eleven – a convenience store

Other such associations are specific to what demographic you hang out with.

• 501 – Levi’s 501 Jeans (if you’re a child of the 80s)
• 10-four – old buddy (if you’re a trucker)
• to 86 something – to nix it, say no, I have no idea where this comes from
• 42 – the Answer (if you’re into Life, the Universe and Everything)
• 420 and 69 –very specific ideas entirely unrelated to the value of the numbers and generally not discussed in undergraduate classes (but understood by almost all undergraduates)

Unquestionably the best source for numbers with associations is your own life, though. Dates, ages, phone numbers present or past, zipcodes present or past – relevant to you or to anyone you know – those are all numbers with passive associations to ideas. All of the associations I have mentioned are passive because none of us ever said “the number 666 will from now on remind me of evil”. That would be an intentional, conscious, ‘explicit’ pairing, whereas passive associations are often unconscious or ‘implicit’, just made stronger by repetitive exposure. When two neuronal representations are activated at the same time, the connection between them grows stronger, so one representation ‘primes’ the activation of its match. That’s the premise underlying this whole game: the stronger the pairing between one idea and a second, the more quickly remembering that one will remind you of the second.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

That premise has a twin – the more representations that are linked, the easier it is to find any one of them. Different senses or “modalities” are a great way to create completely different links in your brain to the same representation. I have tried to recruit many regions of my brain to remember numbers instead of relying on the single strategy of semantic encoding (my term for putting meaning into numbers with idea association). Some of the other strategies are the following:

• visual (recruits occipital cortex): color-coding ‘chunks’ by the value of the first digit; using a fixed presentation of digits for visual context clues learning it by practicing on a spreadsheet;
• auditory (recruits temporal cortex): listening to my own voice repeating the sequence, listening to the same music starting at exactly the same place every time, pairing every number with a specific note and remembering the melody
• spatial (recruits cortex distributed across regions): Melissa Dawe invented the famous Pi Samba in which she stands on the 5 of a number pad and the steps of the dance correspond to the locations of the numbers around her, with special flair thrown in when digits repeat.
• kinetic/tactile (recruits motor and sensory cortex): just typing the numbers on a number pad (this is starting to work but I’m too slow at it for it to help much right now). The Pi Samba also recruits motor cortex for the movement to execute it, but the intermediate step of imagining where number keys would be in a hypothetical number pad makes the resulting representation in the motor cortex secondary to (so probably weaker than) the abstract spatial representation.

For me, semantic encoding is by far the strongest and easiest strategy, but I’ve always read a whole bunch, so stories come naturally in my head. If you’ve played the piano, the keypad method might encode more efficiently; if you do martial arts or dance, the Pi Samba might stick better; if you’re an artist, go with color or weird fonts.

I memorize Pi by first making my own passive associations explicit, so I have a conscious repertoire of numbers that stand for ideas, then bolstering that vocabulary with lots of intentional associations. Some numbers (like 75, the year I was born) refer to a noun (like me); some numbers (like 66) act like adjectives (30-66-47, me(30)-mad at (66)-my dad(47)), and a very few refer to verbs (to 86 something). Often a number like 82 will identify the time of my life that the next ideas refer to, like digits 121-130:

• 85 – happened around 1985 when I was 10
• 211 – my brother Jon, because the number that is really him (34) occurs right before 211 in digits 91-100
• 0555 – three 5’s is childhood, childhood, childhood. 0 just hangs on, no meaning
• 9 – great (trinity times trinity)

So 8521105559 means that around 1985 my brother Jon made my childhood better.

The next step is to reverse the passive association from number-to-idea and intentionally use the idea as a clue for the number. The hard part is relating the ideas triggered by the numbers in ways that make enough sense to remember. It is a very creative process. Once the original encoding is done, once I have ideas assigned to the numbers in such a way that each 10-digit chunk tells a story, then the continuous recall of the idea sequence becomes meditative – relaxing, centering. I cannot obsess about problems if I am concentrating fiercely on recreating the story from its trail of numerical clues.

Hints for Memorizing Pi

1. How you encode it highly effects how you can remember it. If you memorize it on a keyboard, you can recreate it on a keyboard, but saying it out of your head without a screen in front of you is an entirely different act.
2. Don’t repeat an error too many times. The more times you say the wrong thing, the more likely you are to say the same thing wrong next time.
3. Weirder stories work better. They have to make enough sense to remember, but the more vivid they are, the easier they stick.
4. Encode the minimum to recall the chunk. Only about 6 of every 10 numbers has a meaning in my own encoding – the rest of the digits just ‘hold on’ meaninglessly to a strongly-remembered number beside them.
5. Different strategies create links from different parts of your brain. Color, visual structure, sound, movement, saying the numbers out loud vs. in your head, even reciting with your eyes open or closed – every difference results in slightly different neuronal activation, which buys you a couple more clues.
6. Be creative in your associations so numbers can act like nouns, adjectives and verbs. If you remember the phone number of a childhood friend, that number could represent that era of your life, the personality characteristics of that friend, that friend themselves, the state you lived in when you knew them…
7. Keep a pocket Pi in your pocket. It’ll be there next time you find yourself thinking about something you don’t want to be thinking about, waiting for the bus or in line at the bank, and if you’re following a trail of numerical clues to your own story, you can’t bum out about other stuff. Meditation on the fly.

To make your own, write numbers with no punctuation:

___________ Current cell phone

___________ home phone,

___________ parent’s phone

___________ current friend’s phone

___________ first childhood phone # you remember

___________ SS#

___________ Own Birth Date

___________ mom’s birth date

___________ dad’s birth date

___________ sibling’s birth date

___________ friend’s birth date

___________ Current house #

___________ current zip code

___________ Year of HS graduation

___________ Favorite/childhood locker combo

___________ shoesize

___________ ideal weight

___________ worst grade ever in a class

___________ score of most memorable sporting event you played in or watched

___________ channel you watch most often on TV

___________ radio station you listen to most often

Freebies:

• #s w/ cultural meaning: 69, 420, 10-4, 911, 666, to 86 something, 007, 501 (Jeans), 42, 747 (plane), 13 (unlucky)

• Decades: 30’s depression, 40s war, 50s innocence, 60s political hippies, 70s pot hippies/cool music, 80s cheesy music/childhood memories, 90s DINKland/memories/dotcom explosion, 00s life after HS (college for me)

Now decide the string of numbers you want to encode. Try to find instances where 2 or 3 numbers occur in the same sequence from the numbers you wrote of your own ideas. Once you have three ideas, glue them together with a story. That’s it!

In case you have fun with this, I always through a Pi Party on 3/14 every year. No one has taken me up on my memorization challenge. By all means, keep my email, and come over to eat round/spherical/cylindrical things and hang out with interesting weird people at my house next March. Good luck!

3…

1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510

5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679

8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128

4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196

4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091

4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273

7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436

7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094

3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548

0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912

Does TV cause ADHD?

Since I really don't want to rewrite my PhD application, I've spent a little while researching ADHD and its connection to TV. Scientific American Mind's website does not charge to look at an article so I used their sources and searched the scientific literature on scholar.google.com using their names.

Here's what I learned: I was wrong.

Background: The first link below goes to the best article about background ADHD research, not pushing an opinion one way or the other on whether TV causes it. From that I learned that ADHD is overwhelmingly genetic -- well-controlled research shows that only 20% of cases are not genetically influenced, meaning only 1 out of 5 kids gets it purely from the environment. It's complicated (of course) because parents with genetic tendency toward ADHD themselves also make certain kinds of parenting errors -- bad boundaries, largely -- and they themselves have the same problems their children do, namely impulsivity and lack of emotional control. What surprised me: ADHD brains are physically smaller, they're missing brain tissue, in many different parts, not just one like I'd thought. ADHD kids don't have the option of obeying when they're asked to maintain focus or control impulses because they simply don't have as much brain to control 'executive function' or inhibition. Uppers like Ritalin allow what tissue they do have to light up and so they get the OPTION of exerting control over their behavior like normal kids have from the start. This background article also has a section on strategies you can use to help a kid take advantage of the choice to exert self-control even if he only has it for two seconds -- stuff like hanging STOP sign next to the dinner table and teaching the child to count to himself when he gets ramped. The good news: some ADHD brains get normal on their own. Sometimes not the whole brain is smaller, just a little of it, and the brain sort of gets back on track and heals itself by adolescence. Since neither of you guys have a family history of ADHD, since you guys put so much time into stimulating other parts of Lucian's development, and since he could be fascinated by a book with no pictures by the age of 3, I'd be surprised if his whole brain is affected -- but the descriptions of typical ADHD behavior might even resonate so much with you that they'll be comforting. This is a physical thing and there is a LOT of money being poured into solving it.

Whether TV causes it: It is nowhere near as solidly established as I'd thought, and it's still very controversial. The critical window is from birth to 3 or 4 years old -- during that time, every hour per day increases the likelihood of an attention disorder at age 7 by roughly 10%, using data from 1300+ kids (but self-report from their parents regarding how much time they watched tv, which means they probably watched more than they reported; that doesn't change the results too much since it would be true for parents who let their kids watch a lot of tv as well as parents who restrict it). A careful comparison of types of media shows that educational tv causes fewer problems (actually is less strongly correlated with them; I am biased because I believe the correlation is causal, sorry). This may be because the unnaturally fast and so hypnotic rate of image change in entertainment tv ramps up the nervous system's expectations for stimulation, and prevents stimulation from reaching normal levels in parts of the brain not involved in sensory processing.

But there's contrary evidence too; apparently how much tv a kid watches at age 5 does not correlate strongly with attentional disorder at age 6, and the debate between researchers is so vicious it's flat out funny. I was wrong because I thought the causality had been totally established -- like smoking causing cancer -- but actually it hasn't. The way the nervous system works and other evidence points that way, but it totally is not proven, and a lot of people get really up in arms about it. I suggest you read it for yourself, because I'm already pretty convinced, and I don't find the contrary evidence anywhere near as solid.

My conclusions: it's known for certain that an infant brain comes fully wired, overly wired, with neurons so messily connected in one big chunk that it's like white noise on an old tv -- every frequency is busy and the result is useless, just full-bore meaningless 'on'. Healthy brains actually develop by LOSING connections, not making them -- in order to get a symphony from solid white noise, you have to delete the extra clashing frequencies you don't want, and then what you do want is clear and meaningul. The brain maintains connections that get used; a child whose time is spent highly stimulated visually will keep those pathways very strong, but they will not need pathways unrelated to nervous system stimulation -- so lots of other connections will die that otherwise would not, and you get a kid with a smaller brain who has a very high requirement for external stimulation. This may not lead to ADHD, but high requirements for external stimulation lead to a host of other issues, namely boredom, which produces a tendency toward addiction, risky decisions and unacceptable social behavior. Here's what it does in an adult: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-science-of-boredom.

So: it isn't proven that tv causes ADHD, but it is highly correlated before age 3 or 4, and what is known about critical windows of development suggest that the nervous system can get rigged for stimulation in such a way that the investment in less tv now will pay off in a less bored child (and a less frustrated parent) later. If it means turning your infant's seat so he sees you instead of the TV, or working on keeping the tv off more overall, it sounds worth the effort to me.

My sources:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=informing-the-adhd-debate
Comprehensive review of research on ADHD

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tv-weakens-attention
Relationship of ADHD and infant TV exposure
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/113/4/708
The actual research that little article is based on; pretty technical, but the abstract and the introduction are mostly in English
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/120/5/986
What type of media seems to cause the problem (they compare violent, non-violent/non-educational, and educational)

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-science-of-boredom
What rapid-fire entertainment does to an adult: high stimulation requirements, boredom and addiction

After an hour of successful procrastination, I now have to have lunch and get to work.

Happy Hanging Things!

The subject -- Happy Hanging Things -- is the literal translation of 'Merry Christmas' in Arapaho. It's a fantastic reflection of what the non-indigenous religious celebrations really looked like from the perspective of Native Americans -- a rather less trumped-up version of what happens come December. This picture shows our stockings so traditionally hung, and it gives me the chance to tell you about my newest Harry Potter too -- in Arabic! It was given to me by Eleanor and Ray, who have added Qatar (near Kuwait) to my lifetime travel plans.

The three last snowfalls became the beginning of my winter Snow Slide project -- which so far reaches the upper level of my deck, but is not yet functional. It's strategically located in perpetual shade, so hopefully it will last until about June.

After my humongous shoveling project I flew to visit the Rectani, some good friends from my stint in Blacksburg. They live in Carlsbad, California -- this morning it was too hot to wear a flannel over my t-shirt when I took this rather uninteresting picture on the beach. Commercial air transportation is an awesome thing.

May your 2008 bring you all the peace -- or adventure -- you most enjoy.

It's snowing! beneeci'!

ben-nah-ah-chih -- Arapaho for 'it's snowing'. This picture is from two days ago, but right now the scene is very similar -- gloomy half-lit slate-gray sky, tiny flakes falling outside the window. I'm building a humongous snow slide on the back deck with the jittery overload of energy that results from never doing anything other than sitting in front of a computer screen moving squiggles around all day. As soon as I add the current snowfall to my slide-to-be heap, I'll post a pic of that too. Another several inches of very dry snow have fallen -- some of it fine, some fluffy, all magical somehow. The glory of snow days in elementary school must engrain such strong happy associations in our minds that even an extra hour of commute time doesn't sour the joy at the first sight of white through the blinds in the morning...

Momentum of Mediocrity

My stomach twists again at another decision to join the faceless
the maze of fences in my backyard --
the soccermom utopia of my neighborhood --
the constant disappointment that we can't afford some new unnecessary thing --

This is not what I believe in.
This is not what I work for.
This is not who I am.

When does the weight of compromise become too insidious to ignore?
When did I agree to a lifetime indentured to posessions I don't believe in?
How do I cancel that contract without losing the one who makes my life worthwhile at all?

I don't;
I swallow it again.
Leave the television on.
Leave.

Dahnsin

Dahnsin -- Ghanaian for dancing -- but the kind that requires (or exhales) continuous innovation, that seems more near abandonment of self than choreography. The last two hours I spent dahnsin to Zimbabwean music complements of Zivanai Masango, a very talented and bright-smiled singer and musician who lives in Boulder, a very good friend of a very good friend of mine (Banana, the also-brightly-smiling woman in the picture). It was the sort of music which can be resisted for only a finite period of time. It was in a coffeeshop on Pearl Street and the sweater that made perfect sense given the freezing temperatures around here became embarassingly drenched with sweat by the end of the night -- but I feel so alive, so entirely refreshed, that strangers thinking me on the verge of cardiac arrest seems but a small price to pay. Since it was at a coffeeshop I was not expecting to be swept up in such an exhilerating wave of energy and joyousness, not at 9pm on a Thursday night, but such is the magic of Zevenai's gift -- and Boulder's culture, in which giving oneself up to near-spiritual joy in complete public is not only acceptable, it's contageously encouraged.

Banana refers to it as Couple World -- the strange vortex of inertia that keeps people in a relationship (particularly a marriage, of which she is a veteran) at home every night when there is so much life to be lived on the other side of the comfortably closed door. My life practically reversed in that regard when Brian and I became a unit, since pre-him I spent most of my time amusing (some would say distracting) myself with the unending stimulation of caffeine, adventure, and the more incriminating common companions of both. Part of the Couple World Vortex stems from the contentment of knowing my warm sweet loving cuddly husband is waiting to hold me on the couch, which just has to be a good thing -- but given time, that part that can only breathe on a dance floor starts to strain against another night exactly like the one before and the one to follow.

I suppose the restlessness that has motivated so many interesting experiences is both an asset and a liability. For tonight -- that pulse of life, that exhileration -- Banana, Boulder, and the entrancing rhythms of Zivanai Masango overcame the intertia that keeps my spare time in a rerun, and I could not be more grateful.

hé'ih'iisíisíico'óótonéí3i

This one word means ´Somehow they had already caught sight of him.´I love the fact Arapaho can cram that many ideas into one single word. Here´s the breakdown:
hé'ih'iis-
indefinite past perfect tense indicating that the event happened once and was completed at some point in the distant past, and that the order of the word´s parts will be reversed from how the same idea would be said in common speech; this corresponds to ´had already´in the translation
-íis-
how; combined with the last part of the word, this makes it mean ´somehow´
-íico'óóton-
for something alive to discover something alive; this limits the options for the ending that can come next
-éí-
the more important living thing(s) is or are doing something to the less important living thing(s)
-3i
they; refers to the more important living thing(s), whether they are acting or acted upon; in this case they are acting, which you know because the morpheme before was -éí-
-the last two parts together, éí3i, means it is an ´iterative´tense, which combined with the ´how´gives the connotation of the unknown in the word ´somehow´

Had this same sentence been in a conversation instead of a narrative, the order of the parts would be reversed, and there would be no special marker to indicate that the people acting were more important than the person they were acting upon, although all the other information would still be there -- the person (which means I, you, or he) and number (we, you all, or they) of actors and acted upon, as well as whether they´re alive and whether they´re involved in the conversation. If you change any one of those things, the word changes too, and some things will change differently according to whether or not you changed something else too.

Since the pronunciation is dictated by the sequence of sounds, the parts would sound different in conversational speech too. This means the same idea would be communicated using what would sound like an entirely different word according to whether it is a story or a conversation. Pretty much everything is like that; a single part of a word (a morpheme) may always mean something like past tense, but where it comes in the word and how it sounds changes according to whether the sentence is in a story or a normal conversation and whether it´s a postive statement, a negative statement, a command, a question, something you aren´t sure of, and on and on.

Because Arapaho has very few sounds, a lot of morphemes sound identical to boot. English does that too -- you can blow an exam, a boxer may land a blow on his opponent, you can blow on soup, in speech at least something can be blow the table, which sounds almost identical when said naturally. Just like Arapaho, English speakers also know which blow we mean according to the other words around it. The big difference is that we have 26 letters -- 5 of which, the vowels, have 12 different pronunciation options that differentiate meaning, like telling the difference between cot and caught, which gives us a total of about 33 sounds to use to make our words distinct. Arapaho has half that many sounds to work with, with an extra difference being the high or normal pitch in which the vowel is said -- and the result is that tons of words sound exactly the same and can only be understood once you know what the stuff around it means in the specific order it´s in.

My point: learning this language is like learning Martian. If only a European linguist had documented the complexity of Native American languages before it was decided that natives had the minds of children, that linguist would have been utterly convinced that only a very complex mind could decode such a sophisticated system -- and our fathers´fathers´fathers would have been amazed by their intelligence and wisdom. Then Thanksgiving would have been remembered as the feast to thank the wise natives for smartening up the stupid Europeans who´d kept dying until they were taught everything they needed to know, instead of becoming a celebration of excess, laziness, and America´s self-proclaimed right to God´s Blessing.

My less preachy point: this is why I won´t be finishing the translated conversational database by the end of this semester like I promised to. I can´t remember the multiplicity of rules well enough to even identify what I should look up to find the translation (in the same way if you wanted to know what ´bought´meant you´d need to already know that the dictionary listing is under ´buy´). So this is my excuse for not getting an A in my PhD class this semester.

And given all that -- Yay that the linguistically gifted Native Americans were willing to help the linguistically far more simple-minded visitors survive, and Yay that Americans have managed carving out paid holidays that consecrate excessive eating and watching football.

The Eternal Contract

Two years ago, Brian and I threw a 3-day party to celebrate our marriage since we could not afford a real wedding. Our friends' wedding presents were the cost of their lodging and a whole lot of their time, particularly the very generous many who took care of logistics like location, decoration, food, ceremony, music, and sufficient places to sleep for all 35 of us. We rented one huge house in Breckenridge for 3 nights and everyone took a hiatus from life to come relax and be happy. Since we had no money for a family wedding, the tint of the celebration was distinctly less white than most weddings are. It made for some really great memories (or lack thereof), specifically involving (or failing to involve) the hot tub and the fire pit.

Today is Brian's 34th birthday, so as a birthday present to him I am framing what I promised and hanging it in the bathroom by the TV (where it is guaranteed to be read many times a day). For the same reason I'm posting it here -- if you read this and then we all hang out and you notice I'm failing to love him in every way I can, by all means please point it out. :o)

Brian,
I promise to be a loving and faithful wife, to comfort you, to be patient with you, and to be gentle, kind and honest in good times and in bad.

I promise to respect your right to define yourself and to help you become the person you want to be.

I promise to hold you every night before you sleep and to kiss you every day.

I promise to remember you are first and foremost my friend, and to love you with my whole heart in every way I can.

Fetch

Life gestures to me in his eyes
beckoning me to movement
eager and expectant and critically alive

He pounces again at the ball
to remind me
how perfectly he's behaving,
how politely silent he
fixes his level gaze
hard into mine

He makes me put down my book and
engage
so now with sticky fingers I
cannot recapture the current
of the poetry

He plunges again --
I must put down the pen and live --
so the poem ends