Words on memories, food, and always more questions.

        It used to be something of a need.  Now  I only get by on a force of will.  The needs have degraded into ill-suited habits and the best of my actions are a memory not so attached to reality.  Therein lies a potential question.  What is a memory but a skewed perception of a time-space point?
We store some information with a purpose but most with no conscious reason.  I keep track of the clock because 20 minutes after the rice pot starts boiling, I need to turn it off.  When I focus on a specific element, the rest of life at the time fades off.  I must be doing the other parts of cooking a meal but I can't pick them out.  My memory is serving a purpose on several accounts.  Some purposes are more transient.
        Food is an interesting builder of situations because it is primal and refined.  Eating comes after breathing on our list of needs but we have cultivated the development of food to a high art.  Even the chemistry experiment that is fast food is developed.  The foods I can recall are situational.  Part of me is still there when I think of a candy bar at the top of a mountain, a bratwurst outside of Fenway Park, a drunken pretzel in Baltimore, or fresh picked concord grapes and farm milk at my grandmother's.  Why was all of that acutely stored when they were not the best meals I have ever had? I can't recall most of the food I cooked and I know I have made some pretty good dinners.  Perhaps it is because as I am making, my focus is on the product and my memory is telling me what did work and what failed.  Where did I put the knife? How long should I leave the chicken on the grill?  I eat then to both enjoy the fruits of my labor and to identify the process that led to something good or into a gooey mess of over-seasoned tastelessness.
        I have notes and scraps of poorly written slopes of letters detailed in repetitive doodles all over the place.  When I look back at some of these things, I can find the time-space I was in, which is odd because I had to have been focusing on the words and not my surroundings.
        Then again, my son likes to point out things when we drive that are fairly inconsequential but not to him. "That's where mommy got her glasses."  He states every time we passed the glass shop that we went to once over a year ago.  We weren't in their long but he knows where it is.  Something about that visit made an imprint on him and became a part of who he is.  The way he understood the waiting room and the shelves of eyeglasses or the lady at the desk or the parking lot or something else caused him to build a bigger picture of the world.  Maybe that's why my memories are less sensory and more pragmatic through age.  I have stuffed my head with a world view and now I need to focus on items I have deemed important.
        How wonderfully vivid my younger recollections can be.  The more recent ones are distilled down to important elements, not the taste of the breeze, sting of hot sand or cold water, the way my space in that time made me alive and free in that knowledge.  My only hope now is to focus on creating and exploring.  At least I may make some cool art and take Daniel James to some cool places.

A possible new line and a definite New World Order.

I am fiddling around with a few ideas and procrastinating anything productive.  The top image is the original of a card I made sometime after Christmas.  Since it was a card, I gave it to someone but I did think to take a picture. The second is a slightly edited version and the last is a more edited one.  I am gonna tr to make some more and see if they sell.  Let me know what you think..
On the procrastination front...somedays the interwebs can take you on a voyage through crazy.  I saw a friend post about Senomyx and that we can all drop the boycott of Pepsi.  It's some weird stuff.  Society is trying to get food companies to put less sugar in processed food.  They need the sweet stuff in there so it is tasty. To make consumers happy, they hire a company that has engineered human taste using embryonic stem cells from the 70s to make an additive that makes us think the food is sweet and wonderful and delicious.  It could be a pile of poo but our brain has been tricked.  So that part of the story is pretty weird.  It is probably another reminder to limit the processed food.  The next step was reading various articles where people compare it to Solyent Green, that we are being fed ourselves.  This processing is somehow tied to the Agenda 21 grand conspiracy of global domination that I never heard of.  It is a liberal agenda that W signed us into with the U.N. for the elite to gain control of all natural resources.  The more convoluted the conspiracy, the more entertaining.  I gather that the all powerful bike lobby is actual a progressive group aimed at destroying our right to drive and the structure of the American city so that the government can claim underused suburban land.  Those bike people sure had me fooled.  I thought they were some occupy hipsters but they are actually undercover U.N. Agents.  They are drugging us with PBR.
One of these fun commentaries on how the world is ending had a series of wild discussions of a movement to legitimize infanticide.  It turns out, that the BMJ did have an essay arguing the validity of infanticide.  I linked to a part which can take you the article, a statement from the BMJ, and a response from a Catholic theologian.  Those things do make for an interesting discussion and no matter where you stand on the  ProLife/Choice debate, the BMJ series shows how discussion works to advance.  Though that is not nearly as fun to read about the Socialist Plan to Destroy my Car and put Babies in my Frozen Pizza.  Conspiracy sites are the best.  Especially the ones trying to sell a book and with crazy front and all kinds of flashing warnings of the New World Order.  I think I may change my whole plan soon.

It's raining so I didn't start running...

I was going to go on a run this morning.  I hate running but I need some exercise and need to do something to force a change in habits.  It started to rumble just as I was getting the motivation and then it started to rain.  I probably could have gone and only got a little wet but it looks like the sky will fall at any moment and I don't feel like getting caught in that type of mess.
So I read somewhere that Goldman Sachs drove up the aluminum market and made a bunch of money by buying a couple of huge warehouses and moving the metal back and forth between the two.  They did not do anything illegal, they merely found a way within the system to make cheap money. This littlish event brings about a variety of questions and perhaps no answers.  I saw that some people had suggested that the government should have closer oversight of necessary resources.  We need to be careful of granting any entity more power.  One should look and see if that entity will be motivated to act in a general best interest with this added power.  What would the government's motivations be in the aluminum trade?  Would it change prices for preferential contractors? There is a history of such treatment and so we have no reason to think otherwise?  The brokerage firm was interested in buying the warehouses to control the price of aluminum stock.  It had no interest in making cylinder heads and airplanes.  No one group should control a needed commodity but those with the least interest to drive up price would probably be at the manufacturing end.  The company selling cylinder heads is not selling aluminum work done.  If that company did have the power to control the aluminum, it would change its focus and look toward how to generate a profit by manipulating the market.  This mess demonstrates how the free market is supposed to work as a network of people and companies whose overall best interest is to work together.  The network is compromised when a member can gain too much control or whose interest is not aligned with the rest.  How can the market decide which members are necessary for the whole and which are like Goldman, providing no benefit to the network?  How can you develop a system that meets the needs of individual and the group without having a governing body?

All this mess is not making too much sense yet and so I am just using this space to explore the various ideas involved.  My initial point was that I don't understand how people make money without doing any work.  The real estate "bubble" was inevitable when people where making hundreds of thousands of dollars just by buying and selling a house without doing anything to it.  I guess it is all part of the need for instant gratification by the buyer and the seller.  Well, back to marinating on the original idea of an organization with no governing body...Is it possible?

Off to the fun world of math and stuff...

No paper...

I seem to be lacking something to write on but this stupid keyboard. I suppose it will have to do. We are at some typevof opening at a gallery down the way from home. It is a bunch of presentations and very boring for kids. Fortunately, there is a pretty cool area in the back where someone has made a concrete backyard, full of intriguing things for kids. I wouldn't mind watching the stuff inside, but gotta make sure kids get new experiences and don't drive everyone else crazy. Time to go....more on it in a minute.

Another year wandering away.

I finished up another year of school this past Friday.  I am back at the school on a Sunday morning. I really don't mind it and feel more at ease with the preparation, planning, meetings, and misc. work I have for the next academic year than drifting through the summer.  It has been a different year, but each one has been so. The highs were less but the lows weren't so jarring and I feel like I may be growing to be a part of a school that identifies itself with a very tight community.  Along the way, I have learned a great deal as a teacher and let me see if I get a jump on the planning through this summer so I can use what I have learned.  Knowledge and experience are only valuable in how we respond moving forward and adjust our understanding of our place in the world.
I am really looking forward (because I am a dork) to studying more about the history of math and physics, which brings about a history of learning and it all turns into some understanding of the world, thought, myself, and some other esoteric stuff that I can use to make class more interesting since the people that came up with quadratics and angular momentum and gravity were nutty cool.  It is a summer, that among other things, I need to raise my level of learning to another level so that I can be a better teacher.  My best teachers challenged me to be the best and were so full of knowledge that almost everything they said taught me something.
I'll add some more later but this it for the moment.

Tests are the Bestest

I love teaching.  Learning is fascinating and guiding through others in the process is a honest joy.  Education should and could be one of the best parts of growing up but it is being suffocated by those who want to make it a controlled process rather than the inherently organic system it is.  I asked the internet the other day "Why can't I learn algebra?" and found enough interesting answers to get the rusty gears turning.  People could not even explain why they did not understand the subject for it was so obtuse to their line of thinking.  They had demonstrated problem solving through their writing or had successful careers and so they had the honest question of why they were forced to learn something that they never understood and so clearly aided little in their development.  Math is a growing field and we have found a way to apply it everywhere we can because it provides evidence to our arguments and makes us more confident in our decisions; moreover, computers only make choices based on logical progressions, though those are designed by people.  I have students who can grasp programming logic as if it is second nature but struggle mightily to solve an equation.  They think they are bad at math but I see them demonstrating and making use of calculated and formal decision making, finding patterns, and solving a problem.  If that ain't math, then I don't know what is.  Really, what is math?  My favorite thing to hear from a student is that, "It makes me think so hard." I know I have had some measure of success and he or she is gaining the real key from the study (at the level I teach).  I could have them make and design all kinds of cool stuff that allow them to have a purpose for thinking so hard.  I could try to guide a discussion on infinite and nothingness and all that would entail, or try to make sense of transcendental numbers but I need to make them learn how to find out how long it will take John to paint a house if he and Bob usually can do it in 7 hours and Bob can do it in 28 hours. Why? It could be on a standardized tests.  ETS, a non-profit, had a revenue of over $1,000,000,000 last year.  The largest component of education reform is standardized tests.  Kids in middle school are forced to stress out all year and then take two weeks of tests that determine their worth.  Later on, they are forced to believe that the ACT/SAT is the most crucial element for getting into college because all those grades mean so little.  There are many studies that don't support this, Geiser and Santelices have an excellent study.  Grades are the most important predictors of college success, followed by subject tests.  Those tests are focused and allow the student to demonstrate his or her strengths.  One going into the liberal arts needs to be able to write and one into STEM needs to be able to add.  Grades show a greater body of work as well as a student's work ethic.
At this time, we have models in other countries of better education systems that don't use testing.  The education communities are constantly proving that we need to foster real growth and learning for the best success but it falls on deaf ears.  Your tax dollars pay for people with PhD's to find the best solutions but those results are not use because someone else paid legislators for a different solution.  I want the smartest people solving the hardest problems, not the richest.
I got lost somewhere in this train of thought but it is a question I am still working with.  I believe all students can learn math and can find value in the subject but algebra is not the only math out there.  Even as a math, it is a toolbox and not an end.
- to be continued.