Catching up to normal time - 3-6 July 2010

Greetings, people of great influence and interest, whether doctors, or the comic book characters that can influence children enough to be afraid of X-rays, requiring that character to send a letter to the doctors so that their children will stop being afraid.

One Marty McFly arrived in a DeLorean Motor Corporation vehicle yesterday, presumably to find things that will help him rewrite the past.

Over the course of the weekend, Americans lit off many explosives in celebration of the shells, bullets, and blasts the country endured to become an independent nation, instead of a series of British colonies. A recent Marist University poll indicated that up to 26 percent of Americans may be deficient in basic civics and history, as they could not correctly identify which county the United States declared independence from. Which throws out political situation into a black-light situation. If potentially a quarter of us are deficient in that simple thing, what else are they deficient in when it comes to politics?

And before we get to the news, profesional material, first good: the commissioner of the Chicago Public Library takes the hack writer who thought too much money was going to libraries mentioned some time ago to school about the true benefits of library service, including a suggestion that the next time they want to do hidden camera work, they should point it at the circulating collection, instead of reference stacks, and see what happens.

Then very bad: the Chicago Tribune article making public libraries seem like free day care centers, staffed with lovely people who would love nothing more than to look after all your children and take care of them while you're elsewhere. We understand the financial crush of day care or of staying home, we really do. We’ll help you find assistance in those areas. But for the love of Prime, if you leave your children here with us unattended, we cannot guarantee their safety! There are the obvious problems, like kidnappers, paedophiles, and the children wandering off to hurt themselves or out the doors into the world at large. The subtle ones, like discipline resulting in eviction and a kid out on the street with nowhere to go, or being without food at lunchtime, just add to the problem.

The library is a public place. If you’re not comfortable leaving your child in the middle of a shopping mall while you go to work, then don’t leave them here.

Out in the world today, something that’s many years in the making - perhaps now Iraq's oil reserves will finally be tapped to add to the world market, making those petroleum companies with the contracts very likely to get even more wealthy in time. (Maybe BP can use some of that cash to clean up their messes, and other companies can sink it into research on how to clean up things better than a three month relief well drilling period?)

Iran reminds us why the UN needs a commission on women's rights, upholding a conviction for adultery that will result in stoning for a 42 year-old woman.

Inside the country, while economists are talking about the probability of a W recession, we should also be paying attention to who is affected the worst. People without the college degree are much more unemployed than those who have one. While I don’t necessarily attribute it to “class warfare”, it is worth noting that the economy continues to move in the direction of knowledge and away from a primary focus on industry. That necessitates college, for the most part. So if we’re going to keep going in that direction, we’re going to have to find ways of making sure nobody gets left behind because they can’t afford college.

The Governor of Arizona claimed there were beheadings happening in the Arizona desert by illegals and drug cartels. When investigated, however, those claims could not be substantiated. The Governor looks to be trying to justify the Papers Please Law with something other than empty promises. Maybe next time, she can do so with the truth?

Republican Chairman Michael Steele took a broadside of resignation demands after making private remarks about how Afghanistan is not a war of necessity and that getting involved in such a land war was a stupid idea. He made those remarks trying to pin blame on President Obama, but instead likely planted it firmly on the previous president, the one that started the whole affair.

Finally, they're knocked down, but not out of it: the state of the legislative cadre sitll trying to repeal the health care bill passed and possibly replace it with an alternative.

In technologies, reading books on an e-reader apparently slows your reading speed down, likely because of the loading times and the need to scroll while reading, instead of having the whole two-page spread at your fingertipes.

SCIENCE! Or, the possibility that one could detect the presence of Alzheimer's disease a full ten years before symptoms start appearing.

And then things like secret surveillance systems used to eavesdrop on private calls, in the name of predicting and being able to respond to potential criminal behavior, walking robots without cameras, high pressure fabrication processes create high-capacity battery, and a therapy robot, like the seal that winks and coos when petted.

Oh, and one more bit - the Tibetan people's ability to adapt to low-oxygen environments might be the fastest recorded human evolution on record.

Welcome to opinions, where the Angry Mouse says that liberals should be in favor of the Second Amendment, as it is the right to revolution first and foremost, as well as other reasons why the Left should be just as incensed about gun bans as the right is.

The Slacktivist takes a look at the phenomenon of evangelical Christian membership, and what it means about their effectiveness that their numbers have stayed roughly the same over the course of the many decades of evangelism. We might have a convenient example of what drives people out the back door of the church - opinions that say the BP oil disaster should draw our attention to the decline of Christian morality, so we should be sure to keep oppressing the gays, insisting that rape victims carry their rapists child to term and decrying the prevalence of pr0n and strip clubs. Oh, and fix the oil spill, too, sure. For something a bit more sane and more in line with the actual teachings, Mr. Moore suggests that the disaster is a wake-up call to Christians to get on their moral horse and make corporations be virtuous, because they, of all people, know what human nature is really like when nobody’s looking. Not that Mr. Moore will find much purchase in his chosen community, which are mroe likely to believe the first piece than his, but we can hope that he will be able to get more people on the message that not knowing the day or the hour means to take care of the place until the return, not to try and burn it all up and force the timetable to fit yourselves.

Getting into politics, Mr. Fund is not impressed with the recent Siena poll ranking the presidents, dismissing it as simply a reflection of left-wing bias in academia and touting the Wall Street Journal poll that ranked only so many presidents as great, others near great, and the rest just what they are. Mr. Fund, dismissing a left-wing poll by citing a Journal poll, even with as much stuff about how ideologically balanced it was, is not exactly refuting the proposition. It’s just saying that you trust other polls.

Mr. Will wants to present Sharron Angle as a candidate not to be dismissed, despite her non-mainstream views, because if she successfully makes the campaign about the economy and how Harry Reid has apparently not done much for it, she can win. He’s right. We’re thinking, though, that the media messages will be sure to highlight those choice statements of hers about “second Amendment remedies” and the desire to privat-[recordscratch]personalize Social Security and so forth. Angle is no slouch to new media, though, apparently - she fired off a cease-and-desist to her opponent when he put up her old, unprettified, un-toned-down website to direct voters to what the real Sharron Angle thinks. And thus, Sharron Angle learns another rule of the web - there’s always someone who has a copy. Somewhere.

Mr. Murdock believes it a travesty that incandescent bulbs are being phased out by new energy efficiency requirements - and if he had anything to say about the quality of light they cast compared to CFLs or whether they’re jumpy or flickery or anything else, he might have a point. But no, he just says “The Market (A.P.T.I.N.) should decide whether it wants cheap inefficient bulbs or more expensive, efficient bulbs” and expects that to be sufficient.

Mr. Root starts by falling on his face claiming that President Obama has not seen any jobs created during the recession and then goes further by accusing him of killing small businesses and giving taxpayer money that he doesn't actually have and has to create on the printing presses to everyone who doesn't deserve any through stimulus and bailouts and government receivership of enterprises. And he hates unions, too.

And, of course, regarding the “America is great!” paen that shows up around the time of the 4th of July, when not being used to promote one's own materials, Mr. Stossel says America's friendliness toward business and entrepreneurship makes America great, Messrs. Blackwell and Klukowsi say the 4 July celebration is about American exceptionalism, the thing that Barack Obama doesn’t believe in and is trying to get rid of (through anmesty for illegal immigrants, putting liberals on the Supreme Court and reworking the economy containing the bestest health care system evar, apparently), and Mr. Lillback says America is great because of its Christian heritage and continued Christian influence on everything, because George Washington was a Christian, and thus Christians deserve a special place in government and the secularists are wrong.

Us? We’d prefer to just read the source document for ourselves. Then we can go back to declaring someone’s interpretation of those source documents totally wrong.

Sliding into the spot where we thump people for their worst impulses, Mr. Stein attempts to pen a "humor" column about how his hometown has been overrun by Indian immigrants and, well, facefaults, even after attempting to apologize for it. Cue the Head-desk Chorus. *thwack* Ow. *thwack* Ow. Now that that’s out of the way, bring on the takedown of the column, written in the very best wit with acid that there is available.

Mr. Paul goes one more in comparing the United States to decadent Rome, and blaming the government for the slide. He is, however, competing with the resident nut, Michelle Bachmann, whose latest belief is that President Obama is trying to band the world together into one big economic union and/or government. *thwack* Ow. *thwack* Ow. *thwack* Ow.

But because you can’t beat people who have real consequences attached to their pressures and beliefs, the NYT does a piece on Helen Ukpabio, Nigerian witch hunter. If you want to know why she merits the bottom spot, well, read about the abandonment and the recovery of children who were accused to be possessed, her insistence that everyone who disagrees with her be silenced, and think about what kind of cruelty it inflicts on children to be accused of being possessed and then having one’s family and the village turn on you and demand that you be cured somehow, probably painfully and expensively. We have at least one prominent example of past times and probably several smaller ones of the recent times where we see the consequences of this. Why do we persist in believing such damaging things?

Last for tonight, your Internet Access Guide from 2025.

Special Comment: On Embracing Error

I separate this one out from its place in a regular posting for personal reasons. Kathryn Schulz writes an article in the Boston Globe about the need to embrace our error-producing capacity so that we can design systems that compensate for our inevitable errors, instead of making being wrong a bad thing. As a self-professed perfectionist with an absentminded streak, you can guess that the idea of embracing error is almost anathema, and the relentless drive to be error-free means there's a lot of negative self-talk involved whenever the perfect percentage is less than 100.

Perhaps less than paradoxically, advice from others who are more comfortable with the limits of their abilities is usually fuel to the fire instead of the retardant they think it will be. It's like telling a competitive player that "It's only just a game." For the Zen few, they're aware of it and don't need to be told. For the striving, or for those who have invested an amount of their self-identity into their game playing, it often comes across as a dismissal of their efforts and investments as trivial or unimportant, and by extension, a dismissal of them. So while it would seem like "Nobody's Perfect" is the right thing to say in that situation, I would say it's usually the wrong thing to say to someone in that situation, especially if they're still visibly agitated about it. Comparisons to "the big picture" are also usually not recommended at that point. Most people, once enough time and distance has passed, will be able to regain their equilibrium and place things in their larger contexts by themselves. So long as it's not dangerous to do so, letting them ride out the wave and get their frustration out will probably get them back to sane and rational faster than aggravating them by trying to make them get calm faster.

I also think that people who have been good at things throughout their lives have a harder time of embracing error and being able to shrug off, yet learn, from things going wrong. The A student that hits a sudden jump in difficulty is going to be more frustrated than the C student if their grades start to suffer. The person who wrote the book on method X is going to be more frustrated when method Y becomes the default, and they keep getting things sent back for being done under method X. I suppose that's part of the rationale behind the philosophy that says failure is good for us. Where the problems develop, though, is that finding the thing that perfectionists, nerds, and brains aren't good at usually results in the conclusion, "I'm not good at that, so I intend to avoid having to do it. I'd rather feel good about myself and my skills, thanks." That conclusion will get reinforced in required schooling, because, well, it's Hell, and the unsocialized residents are always on the look out for whatever weakness they can find. (We note, on the side, that there's no requirement for intellectual sport in required schooling - just about all of the arts, music, academic games, and speaking classes/activities can be avoided on the road to graduation, assuming that they're there in the first place.) Instead of embracing error and working to help people feel confident and okay if their ability is limited, the incessant drive for perfection results in the bad end described in the article - shunning and not talking about the problem to find ways of improving one's form. (Well, sort of. In the beginning, when learning, we're patient and willing to teach the form. Once we think you've got it, though, there are far fewer opportunities to correct the form and/or to catch things that will lead to error before they get there. A yearly performance review versus continual feedback, for example.) As the article notes, in places where error can be costly, deadly, or damaging, it would make better sense to foster an environment where people are okay talking about what went wrong, or to ask questions as to whether something is about to go wrong because of what they did.

That goes for personal lives, too. The oft-cliched caricature of men that don't talk about their feelings and have only violent responses to problems that arise in their lives has its grain of truth. After all, we don't want to be the gossipy drama llamas that read six layers of intent into everything said, right? We don't watch soap operas (except if you're a professional wrestling fan) and we want action and explosions, not confessions of love and romance. If we talked about things, we might have to admit we're wrong, and that undermines our Power and Authority as The Man. There's only one thing to say about that:

*thbbbbbbbbbbpth*

Thing is, though, I'm betting on a lot of people who don't want to admit they're wrong have some emotional trauma on the matter in the past. If the brainy kid stood up and gave a wrong answer she was sure was right and all the other kids teased him and chanted and smirked and basically made her feel like being wrong was the path to social ridicule, guess what she's going to think about the acceptability of being wrong? If the physically awkward child got teased for not being able to swing a bat and was always referred to as the "easy out", what kind of boldness will be instilled in him to trying physical challenges or playing other team sports? What message does a parent send to a child by telling them it's "just a game" right after they make the mistake that causes them to lose? These events, over time and repeated enough, give us an aversion to trying in case we fail, because every time before someone has been there to tell us just how worthless we are or how unimportant our efforts really are. After a while, they don't need to be there. We'll see it as further confirmation of our worthlessness. And then it can spread outside of one area into others, so that any failure becomes a reaffirmation of our worthlessness. For things like sport, there's the coach there to help improve, correct, and keep the psychological state of the player relatively in balance. Out here in life, for far too many things, we're out here on our own. The professional coaches and listeners usually charge large amounts of money per session, putting them out of the financial reach of most of us. (Not that we begrudge them charging fees to impart their expertise or to listen and help us work through our issues.) Society expects us all to keep calm and carry on, at least while out in public. Think about it - a Supreme Court judge was attacked because she said having empathy for someone else, being able to feel their feelings, was a good thing for someone administering justice.

I don't know that I have solutions in this case. I mean, if society suddenly got on its horse and made the default mode to be that we accept errors as they come and work to find ways of compensating for them, that would be fantastic. If Zen descended upon our lives so that we could accept ourselves as we are and be unafraid of mistakes happening, even with preparation, that would be wonderful. And in some aspects of our lives, we're better than others about mistakes. There will be good days and bad, days where we can shrug off one, but three in quick succession reduce us to tears, and days where we made six in a row but got beyond them. (And not always because we got number seven just right to prove we can do it.) It's always a struggle. Not one that you can easily spot, either. But it's there, and until we realize our own innate perfection or actually make it to the perfect plateau, it will keep going.

One last thing, one that provides the possibility of hope. Baseball is still nominally the American past-time. Hitting a round ball traveling at high speeds and sharp breaks with a round bat in such a way as to avoid nine fielders is pretty tough to do to start with. So much so that players who manage to do so a mere three times out of ten, who succeed thirty percent of the time, are almost assured a place in the Hall of Fame as great baseball players.

If, however, padded rugby has become the national sport, then the culture has shifted over to one where you only have a limited number of chances to make progress, and that if you can't do that, you're going to have your ball taken away from you or have to punt it off to someone else and play defense.

I want a baseball culture. Makes life easier in a lot of ways, being untimed and much more forgiving of one's ability at the plate over a career.