Thankful

It seems much easier to be aware of absence than of presence...to focus on what we lack instead of what we have...to see that what we're not getting at the expense of what we are.

Besides a large meal, this is something that I most enjoy about Thanksgiving: the opportunity to be mindfully grateful, and to pay attention to what we have instead of what we lack.

"What you focus on increases."

What a Way to Go

I watched What a Way to Go a while back. It is a documentary about our culture and change, and an interesting independent film.

I'm starting to notice an undercurrent of books and media that start to talk about a common "end of times" theme. Books like Ishamel and The Story of B, The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older than Words (haven't read Endgame yet), Collapse, The World Without Us, and Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization. Any one book, article, or film is interesting on its own; taken together, I start to wonder if the stories we tell ourselves about our global culture in all its magnificance, if perhaps a conversation about the darker side of civilization and progress and technology and culture isn't starting to bubble to the surface. Even the Left Behind rapture texts, in their own way, address an "end of times" theme.

Is catastrophe inevitable?

Drive 55

There's a Web site out there in the magic of the Internet called Drive55.org; this site encourages us to drive 55 miles per hour.

I was in Seattle recently, driving on Interstate 5. There were four lanes...three regular lanes, and a far left "high occupancy vehicle" (HOV) lane. We had three people in the car, and appropriately were travelling in the HOV lane. This was not rush hour--traffic in all lanes was moving along at highway speeds.

We came upon an automobile with a "i Drive 55" bumper sticker. Not in the middle or right lane, mind you. Not even in the left "fast" lane. The car was in the far-left HOV lane.

Here's what I don't get. If your intention is to save fuel, why choose the left-most lane to slow down other drivers? Ours was the 4th (and not the last) car to have to mash down the gas pedal to accelerate and pass in the "fast" lane to get around drivers who apparently have an interest in saving gas. The two right lanes were easily doing 55 MPH. Why not position your gas-conscious car there, where everyone is doing 55?

Sometimes I just don't understand it when we say we want one thing, yet our choices push for the opposite result.

Dice and probability, v2

Last month I wrote about probability.

Here's the problematic way of thinking: if I have a 1/3 chance of rolling a 1 or a 5 with one die, then I have a 2/3 chance of rolling a 1 or a 5 with two dice.

I looked at a 6x6 image of possible dice combinations (on Ed Collins' Web site) that shows all 36 two-dice combination possibilities. If you count, you'll find that 24 of the 36 dice represented are indeed 1s or 5s. 24 out of 36...that's 2/3.

So why isn't the probability 2/3?

Because probability is about dice rolls, two dice taken together, and sometimes the 1s and 5s appear together. Four times, to be exact. Which means that the number of successful rolls is 20/36 (or 55.5 out of 100). Better than half, but not nearly 2/3 that my faulty math (1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3) might imply.

What I find fascinating is that my initial thought (1/3 + 1/3 = 2/3) has some merit--look at the chart, the numbers 1 & 5 do appear 2/3 of the time. What wasn't accurate was what I was measuring, which is combined dice rolls that score, and not the total number of individually thrown dice.

Dice and probability

Playing dice recently we got into a conversation about dice odds. When I first played I figured if the odds of rolling a 1 or a 5 (a scoring number) was 1 in 3 for one die, it had to be about even for three dice. Looking closer, that's not exactly the case.

The odds for one die: 4 of 6 losing combinations, meaning 2 of 6 wins. 1 in 3

The odds for two dice: 4/6 x 4/6 = 16/36 = .444 or 44 of 100 losses, meaning 55.6 of 100 wins. 11 in 20 (roughly)

The odds for three dice: 4/6 x 4/6 x 4/6 = 64/216 = .296 or 30 of 100 losses, meaning 70 of 100 wins. For three dice, we must subtract 4 other scoring combinations of triple digits (222, 333, 444, and 666, as 1s and 5s are already accounted for). So instead of 64/216, the number really is 60/216 = .277 or 28 of 100 losses, meaning 72 of 100 wins. 7.2 in 10

For four dice, it gets more complicated because we must count triple digit scoring rolls (111, 222, 333, etc.) as well as any 1s or 5s...without double-counting 1 and 5 triples. My math ran out of gas at this point. (Anyone good with probability math who can explain the formula to me for figuring scoring probabilities for 4 through 8 dice?)

Maybe it's enough to say that, if my math is correct, the odds look something like this:

# of dice ----- odds of a roll that scores
1 die ----- 33 in 100
2 dice ----- 56 in 100
3 dice ----- 72 in 100


[I described the dice game in the first comment.]

Protect your queen

Recent chess advice..."protect your queen."

I'm trying to learn chess. By reading a book. And playing online. (FaceBook has a moderately functional chess application...or rather, chess.com has a moderately functional chess app on FaceBook.) I've even played a couple of real live humans with an actual chess board.

As much as I say I love learning, I'm finding chess a bit frustrating. My hunch is that seasoned players "see" the board in a different, more comprehensive way than beginners like me. I want to see it like they do, but I haven't yet learned how.

I'm also finding that a mistake in the 6th move comes alive (for my opponent) in the 19th, or the 33rd. "Oh, yeah, I moved that piece off early, didn't I?"

And cause-and-effect aren't readily apparent. I don't always see what leads to what. Mostly I'm noticing my desire to "hurry up" and learn.

A handful of books suggest that the ability to learn and adapt to change (two sides of the same coin?) are the skills of the 21st century (Veil, Senge, Conner, Kotter, et al.). Change is the only constant, and the ability to deal with change, and to learn quickly, will soon be the commodity most sought after in employees, managers, and leaders.

Why then do I so struggle with learning? Mastery, expertise, knowing...they're so much more comfortable than their opposites. Maybe that's the point--stretching beyond what's comfortable into the unknown, and staying open to surprise along the route.

User Interface

User Interface, or UI, is a fancy-pants term that describes how humans interact with something. A Web page is a UI, when you open a word-processing program, you see a UI, the buttons on your alarm clock are a UI.

Microsoft Hotmail recently changed the UI on e-mail messages that users compose, such that a quick add pane now takes up a significant portion of the place where one ordinarily composes messages.

One workaround is to change your country of origin. Change the country you're from, and the quick add pane no longer appears when one composes a message. Having mostly Norwegian ancestry, I changed my locale from the U.S. to Norway.

Here's the fun part. All the advertisements on Instant Message (IM) now appear in Norwegian.

April 15th, Tax Day

Last year I missed my April blog entry. I had moved to Omak, Washington, which kept me from my writing. For this tax season, I offer two quotes, the first a Vonnegut...

"In every big transaction," said Leech, "there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic second, taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient's blubbering thanks."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

And the second quote...

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to get the most feathers with the least hissing.

Jean Baptiste Colbert (French Economist and Minister of Finance under King Louis IV of France, 1619-1683)

Good luck on tax day.

"Did You See That?!"

"Did you see that?!"

Often in a vehicle I'll see something and ask my wife this question. If she answers in the negative, I sometimes feel disappointed, as if my own experience would have been more complete or fulfilling if she had also witnessed or observed what I saw.

What is it about having another witness an event that makes the event richer? When I go fishing alone I often take photographs of the fish I've caught. I know I've caught them, yet somehow I think sharing the experience with others will enrich the experience.

I once took a photograph of a bald eagle picking up a trout on a lake. Is the experience more real or more fulfilling if I share it with others? If so, why?

Paradigm Shift v2

Last month I wrote about paradigms, a word I would define as a shared mental model. What I set out to say...I don't think I quite said it.

There's a dominant paradigm afoot, one in which science is the new God. If a thing is to be of any merit at all, it must be "scientific." So much so that "non-scientific" is nearly an insult. Anything that cannot be proven scientifically does not exist, or is relegated to a secondary status. Two weeks ago I heard a Native American facilitator say that some grant applications require "science-based evidence" as part of qualification, a requirement that can contradict with indigenous ways of knowing and being.

I have no desire to retire scientific thinking. (Some might argue that new science undermines or re-writes the old.) I am reminded of a phrase, something like, "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." It's my wish that scientific thinking would be placed in context, a particular thinking tool that's appropriate for some, though not all, sets of problems.

Scientific thinking isn't bad. Nor good. Bad and good aren't the relevant measures. Is scientific thinking useful? That, to me, is the interesting conversation. Some contexts--very useful. Other contexts--no so much. The truth is, in 99% of most of our days, our thinking and reasoning and process of discovering knowledge is not scientific. Mostly, we use other tools.

Paradigm Shift

I studied English literature as an undergraduate. This isn't an apology.

My English department split classes up based on time periods. Medieval literature. Eighteenth century. Victorian. Renaissance. Colonial. Each time period had a different way of thinking, what Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm. I think "paradigm" and "mental model" work adequately well as synonyms.

Each time period had its own assumptions, beliefs, values, thoughts, and ideas that define its way of thinking, its mental models, its paradigm. Knowing a period's dominant paradigm helps to understand a period's literature.

It's easy to see paradigms from the past. Modern ones are more difficult to see because they are, "in the air" and "in the water." They're ambient. I believe one of the reasons the film "What the Bleep" succeeded was that it made clear some modern paradigms and how they're shifting.

I think the most important thing to know about paradigms and mental models is this: how to quietly acknowledge the dominant paradigm, and then how not to be bound by it.