Hey, One-Thumb, Find Me That Book!

I'm known for my deadpan humor, and even those who know me well often aren't sure whether to take me seriously or not. Still, the kids are used to me spouting random nonsense, so I can't believe this worked:

Looking at them lingering in bed, wondering how to motivate them today.

"The first person to get dressed gets . . . a special look at my thumb."

A second's pause, then they start racing to get dressed.

Halfway through, when it becomes obvious [Younger] is going to win, [Older] starts fussing.

"Hey, but you know what? I have two thumbs."

"Nuh-uh!"

"Oh, that's right, I only have one. That's why they call me 'One-thumb.' At the library, everyone's like, 'Hey, One-thumb, find me that book!'"

"Nuh-uh." But he's distracted from being upset.

Eventually [Younger] celebrates triumphantly that he's fully dressed.

"Okay, come over into the light for a really good look."

" . . . nothing . . . "

"I said a special look, not a special thumb. Okay, who's ready for breakfast?"

I thought I was just saying something stupid for a laugh, but then they went with it.

The older one, age seven, unsuccessfully trying to fake it during Sunday school while not really paying attention:

"What do you think the shepherds did with the information after the Angels told them that Jesus had been born? How would they share the news without phones or computers or technology?"

"Well, without TVs or video games or things like that they'd have to find other ways to entertain themselves."

"Okay, and how would they spread news to other people?"

"They'd get on their bikes and throw newspapers to people's houses."

"And who would be the first people they'd want to tell?"

"Jesus's parents."

That's a big fail, kiddo.

My wife adds:

I pulled him over and asked him, "Do you think there's a chance his parents already knew he was born?"

"No".

"Where were his parents when Jesus was as being born? Did you think maybe his mom HAD to be there?"

"Oh, yeah . . . "

Now I'm picturing a pageant that includes a paperboy chasing angels on his bike yelling, "Two dollars! I want my two dollars!"

Here's work from school he brought home a couple of consecutive afternoons:

First: "Who will help me eat the cow?"

Then: "No one likes to eat Mrs. Baker."

Except he explained in the picture of the two of them he's licking his lips.

This resonates. Strongly:

It's from Buried in the Suburbs by Jamie Lynn Heller

A collection of lovely, poignant moments captured beautifully. Scenes of nature, both suburban and wild, parenthood, elderly parents, exhaustion from overbusyness, pieces of life, each a small bit of resonant truth.

Three short samples:

Kansas August Evening

Open my window, Mommy

she said

I want to hear the

cicada lullaby

When the leaves thin

I can see my neighbor

on down the way.

He looks up

and we hesitate, caught

between waving

or pretending the curtain

is still between us.

Breath

Mourning the time I deny myself,

I steal minutes from drained routine

to watch rain-bent grasses

stretch themselves in the sun

where breezes can again

stroke their long blades, and

I remember to recognize

my breath as it enters, swirling

against my bloodstream,

and as it rushes away

losing itself in the morning.

Speaking of resonating, that transitions nicely into this:

Have you ever looked at a painting or heard a song or just been somewhere beautiful--maybe an old creaky house or a sunlit field or in front of a wild oak tree, just as the moon was rising--and felt like, yes, this is me this is me exactly, I could be looking in a mirror of my dreams? Have you ever felt anything like that at all in your life? If not, well, take it from old Buddy here--you ain't been looking hard enough. It's out there for you, the feeling of recognizing yourself in something else, and when you find it, oh it will feel so good deep inside of you. It'll change you forever.

And this:

"You know how the best stories are all about the Rambling Duke, or the Mountebank, or any old adventurer who takes off down the Wayward River?"

"Yeah," I said. "So?"

"There are other stories, Buddy," she said. "Of folks who maybe aren't quite so free, who can't just pack up and run after any adventure that comes their way. Their stories might not seem as exciting, and they might take place somewhere regular and boring. But that doesn't mean these folks haven't sacrificed and loved and lost and fought battles just as hard as someone out on the road. It doesn't make their stories any less powerful, important, or real. It doesn't make their stories mean any less."

They're from The Rambling by Jimmy Cajoleas. My review:

Well, now that was a durn good tale. One set in the deep, dark swamp, with gators and witches and spider-folk, hexes and blood magic and the bone-eating Creepy, and, most of all, the high-stakes game Parsnit, where cards and magic and storytelling converge.

Buddy's tired of feeling like he can't do anything right, the unluckiest boy in the world, so after halfway burning down his mom's bakery he sets off on his own to find his dad, a legendary Parsnit player and luckiest scoundrel in the swamp. But no sooner does Buddy find his Pop than he's snatched away by two goons working for the crooked Boss Authority, and it's up to Buddy to give chase in the hopes of a rescue. If he can manage to survive, it might just be time for Buddy to learn how to play Parsnit and see if he can tell a good enough story to work some magic of his own.

Parsnit players win by Orating so well that listeners get fully drawn in and feel the story as real, and that's just what Cajoleas accomplishes with his book. His sinister, mystical world is tangible, the characters fleshed out and alive, the adventure arousing. I've read another book since, but this is the one that still lingers. It is powerful good magic. 4.5 stars.

And one more bit of wisdom from it:

Real life is too big and weird and confusing for something so simple as making sense.

Which is bit more well stated than InspiroBot's attempt at the sentiment:

How can we claim life makes sense when there's so little of it we even understand?

Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees

Her specialty is mycorrhizae: the symbiotic unions of fungi and root long known to help plants absorb nutrients from soil. Beginning with landmark experiments describing how carbon flowed between paper birch and Douglas fir trees, Simard found that mycorrhizae didn’t just connect trees to the earth, but to each other as well.

Simard went on to show how mycorrhizae-linked trees form networks, with individuals she dubbed Mother Trees at the center of communities that are in turn linked to one another, exchanging nutrients and water in a literally pulsing web that includes not only trees but all of a forest’s life. These insights had profound implications for our understanding of forest ecology—but that was just the start.

It’s not just nutrient flows that Simard describes. It’s communication. She—and other scientists studying roots, and also chemical signals and even the sounds plant make—have pushed the study of plants into the realm of intelligence. Rather than biological automata, they might be understood as creatures with capacities that in animals are readily regarded as learning, memory, decision-making, and even agency. . . . 

"I’ve come to think that root systems and the mycorrhizal networks that link those systems are designed like neural networks, and behave like neural networks, and a neural network is the seeding of intelligence in our brains."

I find this science fascinating, but I do feel awful for the moth.

Tiny Cyborg Drone Uses Surgically Removed Moth Antenna to Steer

So when they were building a new smell-hunting robot, a team of University of Washington engineers instead turned to nature, equipping a small drone with an antenna plucked from a live moth, according to research published in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. The resulting cyborg, which they call the Smellicopter, uses the antenna’s biological sensors to automatically travel toward the source of a smell while dodging obstacles — something the team says could safely one day identify gas leaks in homes.

So. On to current events. There's still an alternate reality in which the incumbent won the presidential election, and he's one of those living in it.

Ex-National Security Officials Warn Of Mass Radicalization

MCCORD: How do we address this going forward, this apparent radicalization of such a large segment of the population?

ALLAM: McCord is a veteran Justice Department prosecutor. She used to oversee terrorism cases. Now she's one of many former officials who warn about the conservative drift into conspiracy.

(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Stop the steal. Stop the steal. Stop the steal.

ALLAM: Just look at the lockdown protests, or Stop the Steal movement, she says. Ordinary conservatives who are fired up by disinformation now march alongside heavily armed extremists. McCord says the line between mainstream and fringe is vanishing. What we're witnessing, she and other analysts say, is a mass radicalization.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MCCORD: This tent that used to be sort of far-right extremists has gotten a lot broader. To me, as a former counterterrorism official, that's a radicalization process.

ELIZABETH NEUMANN: Thank you for bringing this up. This is, like, the thing that I lie awake at night wondering about, and I look forward to other solutions 'cause I feel like I'm...

ALLAM: That's Elizabeth Neumann. She was a Homeland Security official who served until last spring. She talks about the conservative media world as a portal to another reality, one where the election was stolen, the pandemic isn't a big deal and Democrats aren't just political opponents but dangerous enemies.

Exactly, InspiroBot.

Unfortunately, it's taken a long time to get here and will take a long time to fix.

How Do We Get to Herd Immunity for Fake News?

The chorus of angst over misinformation has focused too sharply on the channels supplying it. The bigger problem is the public’s appetite for consuming it. . . . 

The bigger project is not to prevent lies. It is figuring out how to educate citizens so they are more resistant to them. . . . 

In a free society, the best response to viral misinformation is to fortify our immune systems against it, informationally speaking, by developing citizens who are motivated and able to distinguish truth from fiction. Perhaps more important, these citizens must be able to deal with the nuance in between. . . . 

That is why liberal education seeks to foster intellectual virtues. One is humility, which is the foundation of curiosity. It opens us to ideas that challenge our own. Education that seeks to affirm rather than unsettle students is fundamentally incompatible with inquisitiveness. . . . 

Another intellectual virtue is the ability to embrace nuance — the fact that most of life occupies a realm of opacity that is neither stark truth or fiction nor obvious right or wrong — without collapsing into nihilism. The rejection of nuance is perhaps the most compelling explanation for the rise of disinformation. . . . 

Liberal education is a generational rather than an immediate solution to the legitimate crisis of misinformation. That is not a reason to reject it. . . . 

The goal should be herd immunity, achieved by educating citizens capable of — and interested in — careful thought.

"Herd Immunity" is a reference to Covid-19. People have started receiving vaccine injections this week, so an end is in sight. Distribution is going to be a slow process, and we're still months away from getting our own doses. In the meantime:

Kansas Surpasses 2,000 COVID-19 Deaths — and the Second 1,000 Came Much Faster Than the First

In Kansas, it took about six months to go from the first death, to 500 deaths. The next 500 took six weeks. The 500 after that, four weeks. The most recent 500 — to get the state over 2,000 total — took about two and a half weeks.

A couple of pandemic memes:

2019: Stay away from negative people

2020: Stay away from positive people

Maybe I'm happy but asymptomatic

Another theme of 2020, a stellar metaphor for racism:

The Fish, the Lake, and the Groundwater

If you have a lake in front of your house and one fish is floating belly-up dead, it makes sense to analyze the fish. What is wrong with it? Imagine the fish is one student failing in the education system. We’d ask: Did it study hard enough? Is it getting the support it needs at home?

But if you come out to that same lake and half the fish are floating belly-up dead, what should you do? This time you’ve got to analyze the lake. Imagine the lake is the education system and half the students are failing. This time we’d ask: Might the system itself be causing such consistent, unacceptable outcomes for students? If so, how?

Now . . . picture five lakes around your house, and in each and every lake half the fish are floating belly-up dead! What is it time to do? We say it’s time to analyze the groundwater. How did the water in all these lakes end up with the same contamination? On the surface the lakes don’t appear to be connected, but it’s possible — even likely — that they are. In fact, over 95% of the freshwater on the planet is not above ground where we can see it; it is below the surface in the groundwater.

This time we can imagine half the kids in a given region are failing in the education system, half the kids suffer from ill health, half are performing poorly in the criminal justice system, half are struggling in and out of the child welfare system, and it’s often the same kids in each system! By using a “groundwater” approach, one might begin to ask these questions: Why are educators creating the same racial inequity as doctors, police officers, and child welfare workers? How might our systems be connected? Most importantly, how do we use our position(s) in one system to impact a structural racial arrangement that might be deeper than any single system? To “fix fish” or clean up one lake at a time simply won’t work — all we’d do is put “fixed” fish back into toxic water or filter a lake that is quickly recontaminated by the toxic groundwater.

Our groundwater metaphor is designed to help practitioners at all levels internalize the reality that we live in a racially structured society, and that that is what causes racial inequity. The metaphor is based on three observations: racial inequity looks the same across systems, socioeconomic difference does not explain the racial inequity; and inequities are caused by systems, regardless of people’s culture or behavior. Embracing these truths forces leaders to confront the reality that all our systems, institutions, and outcomes emanate from the racial hierarchy on which the United States was built. In other words, we have a “groundwater” problem, and we need “groundwater” solutions.

Related:

Providing Police with Military Gear Does not Reduce Crime or Protect Officers: Studies

Two independent studies have drawn the same conclusions: billions of dollars in surplus military equipment, including armored vehicles and high-powered rifles, that have been transferred by the federal government to thousands of U.S. police departments have not reduced crime or increased officer safety.

And those are this week's pieces of my life.

A bad idea only exists in theory