Silent Night? No way!

Lots of Christmas carols refer to the first Christmas as somehow being quiet.  There is "Silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm...."  There is "O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see the lie...How silently, how silently the holy gift is given..."  And, there are others.  No doubt inspired by some late night stroll in a snow covered small town, sometime in December. 

However, it is obvious that none of these people were ever present at a real birth.  It is noisy as "H", "E" double hockey sticks.  After Mom screams or groans or cusses (as I did) for several hours, then the baby takes over, making more racket than you would ever think a 7 pound person could generate.  On top of that, at least in my case, the nurses were shouting at me and at each other because my son's birth did not go as they had anticipated. 

Silent Night?  You must be kidding! 

Art?

The college where I work has a great theater program, and I try to catch all of their productions.  Last night I saw a very thought-provoking play called The Shape of Things. 

It starts slowly, with two college students, Adam and Evelyn, meeting each other and starting to date.  The play, up until the very last scene, is actually kind of boring - just typical dating angst.  The only non-typical aspect is that Evelyn is very manipulative of Adam.  At first, it's minor stuff - suggesting he cut his hair differently, then she moves on to more and more manipulatiion, designed to improve his appearance.  The last thing is she actually persuades him to have plastic surgery on his nose, which he doesn't really need and cannot afford.  Evelyn is an art major, and makes vague references throughout the play to a big art project she is working on, but she is never specific. 

Then, in the last scene, we find out that Adam IS Evelyn's art project.  She has re-made his appearance just as a sculptor would carve an image out of marble.   Her art project presentation includes several "artifacts" of their relationship, including video tapes of their love making.  The whole thing was an act, and we find out that very little of what she told Adam was true.  Adam, on the other hand, is madly in love, and has presented her with an engagement ring.  In her public presentation of her "art project" she rejects his proposal.

Evelyn makes it very clear that the whole thing with Adam was for art's sake alone.  Art is her highest good.  She doesn't understand why Adam is devastated.  She sees everything she has done as something that has helped Adam. 

I guess there is a fine line between artist and sociopath.

Unpopular People

For a number of years now, I have been hearing about some guy called Al Khaida.  No one likes him.  He and his buddies have been doing all sorts of mischief all over the world.  Our army and navy seem determined to stop him, but Big Al is ever elusive. 

Now,  I hear about a new guy that no one likes.  His name is "Fiscal" Cliff.  Haven't heard his last name.
He is expected to show up shortly after Christmas and do all sorts of bad stuff.  The army and navy can't stop him.  Only Congress.  And that's depressing!

Reflections on governments

The current campaign and elections has reminded me of an interesting experience from several years ago.  When I was a graduate student, I was presenting a paper at a conference in Washington, D.C.  One of my fellow presenters was a young lady from China, who was a graduate student at a Canadian college.  Most of the presentations were fairly boring, so we started chatting when we should have paid attention, I guess. 

This was years ago, when China was even less "open" than it is now, and my new friend, I found out, knew almost nothing about American government.  And here we were in the middle of D.C.  I had been to D.C. several times, and knew my way around a little, so I proposed that we play hookey from the conference one afternoon and I would take her on a guided tour.  She thought this was a great idea, so off we went.  Explaining the buildings and institutions to her, and answering her questions, was quite a priviledge and interesting experience.  I wish I remembered more of our conversation now, but the only thing that stuck in my mind was that she was disappointed that the White House was so small.  I explained that it was just a "house" on purpose.  The founders wanted to make sure no one mistook it for a king's palace. 

I saw an interesting interview on TV in the last few days.  The news person was interviewing a gentleman who supposedly had some independent expertese on the relationship between the Chinese government and the Chinese people.  He said that after Tianaming Square (did I spell that right?) the government struck a sort of unspoken bargain with the people.  The government would let them have a capitalist economy, and not interfere, if the people would let the government alone, and not interfere.  The interviewer asked if it was working.  The man said "not really." 

Every college in America now, I think, has a relatively large student population from China.  The vast majority of these young people go back to China after graduation.  This has been going on for many years, at least 20 or 30, and it MUST be having some effect on their society.  It makes me wonder if the Chinese  government, by allowing and even encouraging this, has any kind of clue. 

Wisdom of the crowd.

I watched a few episodes of a series called The Code on the Science channel recently.  The Code, by the way, is mathematics.  It's a GREAT series to show to math students of high school or college age!  It talks about mathematics that occurs in nature and that can be applied to numerous areas of life.  And, I learned a few things! 

One of the things that intrigued me was an experiment that the narrator/host conducted about the wisdom of the crowd.  He filled a large jar will jelly beans and asked a rather long list of people to guess how many beans were in the jar.  There were about 4,000 beans in the jar, but he got guesses that ranged from 400 to 50,000.  Very few were even close.  Yet, when he took the average of all the guesses, he got a number that was within 5(!!) of the actual total.  He says that this kind of result is not that unusual. 

I would write this off as a coincidince except that it goes hand-in-glove with another phenomenon called open source software development.  This is a form of software development in which hundreds or thousands of programmers work on the same project at the same time and communicate very little, if at all, with each other.  According to traditional software engineering methods, it shouldn't work.  I would have bet the farm it wouldn't work.  But it does, and it produces really good software!  I learned about this from a book called The Cathedral and the Bazzar by Eric S. Raymond. As a person who was engaged in software engineering for a living for the better part of 20 years, it blew me away. Software engineering is supposed to work best in small teams of 5 to 8 people who are tightly controlled and in constant communication.  Open source is the exact opposite. 

Does this phenomena apply to other areas?  The underlying philosophy of democracy is the same -- the broad-based electorate is wiser than any small group.  There is another book that I would recommend - Never At War by Spencer Weart.  In that book, Dr. Weart makes a good case that two countries that are true demoncracies never go to war with each other.  He does spend some time defining a true democracy, which is crucial.  For instance, the American Civil war is not a counter-example because the slaves could not vote in the Confederacy.  But, if you use his measuring stick, you will see that though democracies do, unfortunately, find it necessary to go to war from time to time, it is never with another true democracy.  The crowd is even wiser than we knew!

Food for thought...does this mean that the outcome of most, if not all, elections, is the best outcome possible, given the individuals who are candidates?  No matter what you political leanings, you are probably thinking "What?  No way!  What about the time that [insert name] was elected in [insert year], given that he was a(n) [select one or more from: idiot / nut job / spawn of the devil] ?"

Again, food for thought.

Heads still rolling???

Last spring, I thought the last head had rolled in response to our scandals from a year or so back.  I'm not so sure now.  This summer, an administrator resigned, and the word was that he wished to go to school full time to get a doctorate in education administration.  Since his office was in no way  involved in the scandals (or so I thought), I believed this was the case.  Then, recently, I heard his departure discussed in those tones of voice that people use when they know something, but know they are not supposed to directly talk about it.  So, now I wonder. 

And I wonder about a senior staff member that suddenly quit this summer.  In the business office - i.e., money. 

Then, today, a sports coach resigned, effective immediately.  The scandal did report that some student athletes received scholarship amounts above and beyond what was proper, but I thought all of that was taken care of last year.  Are more heads rolling? 

Well, this new president seems to be really cleaning house. 

Every international student file for the last umpteen years is being audited, and I am one of the ones auditing them, since I am chair.  I got two files to look at this week.  One seems normal so far, though I am still in the process of going through it.  The other has a BIG problem!  It seems that this student has mastered the art of bilocation, that is, being in two places at once.  His Chinese transcript shows that he was studying in China during the same school year he was studying here.  How did he do that?? 

I'm not signing anything that says this is OK.  Lots of people signed off on fishy things in recent years.  Those people are looking for work now.  Not me!

Senior Moment

I had a serious "senior moment."  I have a little refrigerator in my office, and I usually bring my lunch. 
The other day I brought some cottage cheese for lunch, but I couldn't finish it, so I put the rest away for another day.  Today, I looked in the refrigerator for it, but it was not there.  I looked in the trash, thinking I had absent-mindedly thrown it out, but no, it was not there.

Then, a little bit later, I looked in a desk drawer for something else, and there was my cottage cheese.  No longer good to eat, of course, but that didn't bother me as much as the fact that I was lame-brained enough to put cottage cheese in a desk drawer. 

So, the next time you have a senior moment, remember, you are not alone.