I weighed myself after the Thanksgiving meal without an intervening stop in a small room. While my weight was at the upper end of my guesstimated weight range, vanity wanted it to be at the bottom.
Weighing myself again today with the same clothes after emptying my pockets and an intervening pit stop, the difference was 5.8 pounds.
Now when people tell me I'm full of it, I can agree and provide a quantitative response.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Childhood in a Strict Modernist Household
Once again I find myself reading the NY Times out of time. I couldn't tell. The cover said "Design & Living Winter 2009". (I didn't know when it was published. After a few perfunctory searches I decided to bag the baloney and move on. Here's a quick scan of the cover.)
On second thought, I went to the NY Times site and searched for the title of the article. "Empty Nest Syndrome" and there it was with the subheading "When your parents are hard-core-minimalist, you grow up with nothing — and like it." by Fred A. Bernstein. The article was practically new having been published on November 8, 2009. A passage bothered me:
In Chicago, Emanuela Frankel has spent her life in a loft with concrete floors, white walls, black leather furniture and not much else. Even in her own room, ‘‘I can’t have anything on my desk except a pencil holder and a tissue box,’’ says Frankel, 15, whose parents are both designers in the strict Modernist camp. And nothing on the walls — ‘‘no posters, no magazine cutouts,’’ she said. She compensates, however, with a colorful wardrobe.
No clutter. I can appreciate the thought, the dedication, the rigor and ruthlessness of their lives. I am appalled. I've been in very modern designer residences saddened by the lack of the warmth, the absence of humanity. They don't have a dog do they? Who would want to live in such a sterile environment? Weren't kids supposed to be able to hang posters in their room so that 10 or 15 years later they could mock their younger selves?
On second thought, I went to the NY Times site and searched for the title of the article. "Empty Nest Syndrome" and there it was with the subheading "When your parents are hard-core-minimalist, you grow up with nothing — and like it." by Fred A. Bernstein. The article was practically new having been published on November 8, 2009. A passage bothered me:
In Chicago, Emanuela Frankel has spent her life in a loft with concrete floors, white walls, black leather furniture and not much else. Even in her own room, ‘‘I can’t have anything on my desk except a pencil holder and a tissue box,’’ says Frankel, 15, whose parents are both designers in the strict Modernist camp. And nothing on the walls — ‘‘no posters, no magazine cutouts,’’ she said. She compensates, however, with a colorful wardrobe.
No clutter. I can appreciate the thought, the dedication, the rigor and ruthlessness of their lives. I am appalled. I've been in very modern designer residences saddened by the lack of the warmth, the absence of humanity. They don't have a dog do they? Who would want to live in such a sterile environment? Weren't kids supposed to be able to hang posters in their room so that 10 or 15 years later they could mock their younger selves?
Where are the books that a kid in sheer desperation and boredom might pick up and hours later, where did the afternoon go? Perhaps kids of those parents have enough of the parental gene and psyche to be able to live in that environment. To me it smacks of Harlow's maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys and infant macaques. (See for example A Critique of Maternal Deprivation Experiments on Primates and The Nature of Love by Harry F. Harlow, first published in American Psychologist, 13, 673-685. I remember reading reports of the experiments not long after they were published.)
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Reading History/Boxing and Cleaning Gutters
Just as I was bundling the November 14th New York Times Saturday Sports section for recycling, an article about Joe Santiago, Cotto’s Trainer Learned Outside the Ring caught my eye. The nice thing about reading old newspapers is that the internet makes it easy to jump to the end of the book to see if the butler did it. Did Cotto beat Manny Pacquiao in their World Boxing Organization welterweight title fight?
A quick search gave me the answer: Pacquiao had won. If I were really interested I would have tried to do a competent job determining if ring aficionados blamed Santiago for the loss. Instead, I posted this.
This day was noteworthy because after several weeks of fantasizing (if that is the correct term) I cut a Styrofoam™ block (a Dow registered trade mark for a polystyrene plastic), stuck it on the end of a ladder to avoid marring the siding and unblocked the drain on the gutter of my parents' house.
The whole gutter cleaning operation was unremarkable except that I was reminded once again how aluminum ladders wiggle and why spending a lot of time on ladders with sneakers is a bad idea. (In my case it's because a great deal of pressure is applied to a small area of the foot by the round ladder rungs. I used to wear very stiff soled boots which distributed the pressure evenly on the foot.)
A quick search gave me the answer: Pacquiao had won. If I were really interested I would have tried to do a competent job determining if ring aficionados blamed Santiago for the loss. Instead, I posted this.
This day was noteworthy because after several weeks of fantasizing (if that is the correct term) I cut a Styrofoam™ block (a Dow registered trade mark for a polystyrene plastic), stuck it on the end of a ladder to avoid marring the siding and unblocked the drain on the gutter of my parents' house.
The whole gutter cleaning operation was unremarkable except that I was reminded once again how aluminum ladders wiggle and why spending a lot of time on ladders with sneakers is a bad idea. (In my case it's because a great deal of pressure is applied to a small area of the foot by the round ladder rungs. I used to wear very stiff soled boots which distributed the pressure evenly on the foot.)
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
12 - 8 = 4
I'd had a few e-mail exchanges with a student about tutoring. Our original schedule didn't fit her schedule, but as more tutors came on board and the schedule was changed she let me know she was coming in. That she did. The tutor did the best he could, what with two other students also being there.
She was having problems converting values between number systems. (It is possible to teach students to convert from decimal to binary in their head. I've done it. They've even done the conversion with negative numbers which seems impossible until you learn the trick. I'm shading the truth a bit. The students do the conversion by having each student act as a binary digit. Each student performs a subtraction and passes the remainder on to the next student representing the next smaller digit. I've wandered afield - back to the narrative.)
All that conversion requires is that the student be able to recognize which of two numbers is bigger (most get that), be able to multiply and subtract. Having spent a long time among technical people I was taken aback when the student needed to use her fingers to calculate the result of subtracting 8 from 12.
I thought she was a joking. Then I saw that she had no feel for numbers: when asked "how many times 4,096 went into 49,000" I expected that she's say "a little more than 12." I never expected her to say, "I dunno" and then start guessing.
Hoo-boy we're in trouble here. She said she didn't like math, I replied that part of the reason that the country was in the financial mess it's in might be attributable to people quite literally being unable to do the math on their mortgage commitment. Her answer was something I never have expected. "Oh, I'd only get a fixed rate mortgage.
Take home message? Maybe a heuristic is an adequate substitution for knowledge. Even so, seeing a college student use their fingers to perform simple math still upsets me. (One exception: computer science students learning once again how to use indexes which begin at zero instead of one.)
She was having problems converting values between number systems. (It is possible to teach students to convert from decimal to binary in their head. I've done it. They've even done the conversion with negative numbers which seems impossible until you learn the trick. I'm shading the truth a bit. The students do the conversion by having each student act as a binary digit. Each student performs a subtraction and passes the remainder on to the next student representing the next smaller digit. I've wandered afield - back to the narrative.)
All that conversion requires is that the student be able to recognize which of two numbers is bigger (most get that), be able to multiply and subtract. Having spent a long time among technical people I was taken aback when the student needed to use her fingers to calculate the result of subtracting 8 from 12.
I thought she was a joking. Then I saw that she had no feel for numbers: when asked "how many times 4,096 went into 49,000" I expected that she's say "a little more than 12." I never expected her to say, "I dunno" and then start guessing.
Hoo-boy we're in trouble here. She said she didn't like math, I replied that part of the reason that the country was in the financial mess it's in might be attributable to people quite literally being unable to do the math on their mortgage commitment. Her answer was something I never have expected. "Oh, I'd only get a fixed rate mortgage.
Take home message? Maybe a heuristic is an adequate substitution for knowledge. Even so, seeing a college student use their fingers to perform simple math still upsets me. (One exception: computer science students learning once again how to use indexes which begin at zero instead of one.)
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