Delta's Children
Quite an eclectic mix today, catching up on items of interest to me the past few weeks aside from our family vacation trip.
I go on forever.It's true, it's true.No matter how mad I getI always shine through.
(An original riddle by [Older], age 7)
It's sharpbut it's easily broken.
(An original riddle by [Younger], age 6)
Answers at the bottom.
A couple of Christmases ago, my spouse and I independently, secretly came up with the same plan for the boys to make gifts for the other, and they got two clandestine trips to Ceramic Cafe to paint pieces. We all enjoyed it enough we've gone back since. Recently I've gone a few times on my days off as a special treat to myself. I've started experimenting with stoneware and decided I like it better than ceramic. Some of it is that stoneware is more durable, is more solid and can handle kitchen heat better. But some of it is the randomness that's built into the glazing process.
Stoneware is baked at much higher temperatures, which means that the glazes melt more. They melt so much that they drip and run. You can trust that anything you paint on ceramic will look the same after being fired. Not so with stoneware. Colors change and droop and combine in unexpected ways. Some glazes are more fluid than others. And many have "crystals" mixed in that become interesting spots and dots after melting. It is not possible to completely control the process and be exact about what will result; its always a guess and an estimate.
Something about this lack of control appeals to me. I've been delighted about some of the results, disappointed in others, and always been at least a little surprised. Each creation is an experiment. I think I like it because it feels particularly true to life in general. We always have our hopes and intentions, yet what comes of them is never quite what we envision. A big part of getting along in life is accepting our lack of control and understanding. This art reflects that.
I overheard the boys in the other room on their Kindles the other day, each playing some kind of video game.
"I just learned how to make a toilet. . . . This is going to be so great. . . . Oh, I just made my first poop."
A couple weeks ago [Younger] and I were riding our bikes. I had masks for us, but was waiting until we dismounted to put them on. We saw someone coming toward us on the sidewalk; [Younger] worried but I said we would give them a wide berth and it would be okay. After we passed them, he reassured me he'd been safe: "I held my breath and closed my eyes while we rode past the person."
I still advocate for their chronological group to be called Generation Mask. Or The Masked Generation. Living through this pandemic during their formative years is sure to impact them in ways that last their whole lives.
More on Covid from Baratunde Thurston:
The pandemic isn’t over just because you’re over it.Delta is more transmissible than any other variant, and it’s breaking through some of the vaccine defense. But here is where a false narrative needs to be corrected. The vaccines never promised to end or stop Covid-19 fully. They were always 90 or 95 percent effective, not 100 percent. So we should have expected some vaccinated people would get infected.What vaccines remain great at is preventing severe illness, hospitalization, and death. The vast majority of hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated, so those who have easy access to this magic science should avail themselves of it.But there’s another reason to get vaccinated beyond short-term personal protection. (Hmm, that phrase makes me wonder if we told the Second Amendment crowd that vaccines were teeny tiny firearms, would that help increase the vaccination rate in the U.S? But I digress.) The more unvaccinated people we have, the more opportunities we offer Covid to evolve and become worse. If you can get the vaccine and choose not to, you’re choosing instead to incubate the next variant, which may be far worse.I don’t want to see what Delta’s children have in store for us. Where we are in the pandemic right now is like a scene out of Alien. We’ve come across a nest filled with alien eggs. When we get vaccinated, we kill off those eggs. When we don’t, we encourage those eggs to grow and come back to destroy us.
I'm not looking forward to meeting Delta's children, either.
In 2015, I began the post Morality & Empathy: A Chain of Associations with: First, take a moment to ponder a question: What makes you feel disgust? I drew from things I'd been reading to consider the ways disgust has been used to marginalize and oppress groups of people. "Disgust is the opposite of empathy. Disgust makes us meaner." This article considers something similar in relation to the pandemic.
Across history, dominant social groups have exploited this sense of disgust as a means of social control against ‘dangerous’ others. Social practices of segregation, discrimination and racism rely on tapping into this basic emotion. In the United States, African American bodies have been regarded with disgust in wider culture, portrayed as sources of contamination. In India, more than 160 million people known as ‘untouchables’ or Dalits are stigmatised as being innately impure, less than human beings. Despite the fact that untouchability was banned in India in 1950, discrimination and hate crimes against the country’s Dalits are still prevalent. In both the US and India, it’s telling that segregating a wide range of everyday, bodily activities and objects has been at the heart of such structural discrimination: drinking fountains and lunch counters, cutlery and glasses, appliances and beds. These are the same types of shared social practices that were banned beyond families or social bubbles for the best part of a year in many countries across the world because of the COVID-19 pandemic.Historically, ruling social groups have used an imputed fear of contamination to project disgust in order to sustain oppressive measures against certain groups. It’s also the case that a real fear of contamination can result in more discriminatory social behaviours. . . . The behavioural immune system mobilises cognitive and emotional responses such as fear, anxiety and disgust to avoid pathogens. . . .The behavioural immune system can be exploited for different purposes – and, once it’s active, it can spill over into new domains beyond the one it’s meant to be protecting us against. For example, emphasising the risks of infection makes people adopt more conformist and conservative attitudes; when people were given cues to remind them of physical cleansing in a public setting, they professed more politically conservative opinions than individuals who were not given such reminders. Another study showed that priming people with disease-related information made them move in more socially avoidant ways. In addition, people who display greater levels of disgust in response to pathogen cues are more likely to endorse xenophobic attitudes, but also exposing people to information of high disease-salience made them express less positive attitudes toward foreign immigrants. And beyond the lab, large-scale population-level studies have shown that the presence of different diseases affects the extent to which people are ethnocentric or in favour of authoritarianism. . . .It seems that the threat of contagion, whether real or imagined, and discriminatory attitudes are mutually reinforcing. . . . That sociobiological relationship between touch and disgust also helps us grasp the history of why dominant social groups have so often deployed a fear of contamination to marginalise and oppress people.Historically, ruling social groups have used an imputed fear of contamination to project disgust in order to sustain oppressive measures against certain groups. Over time, we find the fear of the same basic types of human interactions: the simple yet fundamental actions of touching each other, touching the same objects as others, and breathing the same air. . . .In a world where we are less willing to touch others, will we slowly become more xenophobic, discriminatory and bigoted, despite our best intentions?
I hadn't even considered that implication of this virus until I ran across this read. It's definitely something worth pondering.
This appears to be from 2015, though it's new to me. From Tom Gauld in The New Yorker. The Four Undramatic Plot Structures.
I. Ignoring the Monster - The hero is confronted by an antagonistic force and Ignores it until it goes away.II. Erroneous Accusation - The protagonist is accused of wrongdoing, but it's not a big thing and soon gets sorted out.III. The Enigma Unsolved - The heroine is faced with a problem but it's really, really difficult so she gives up.IV. Diminishing Desire - A man wants something. Later he's not so sure. By suppertime he's forgotten all about it.
This art reflects life. These are far more common than the dramatic plot structures that end up in stories.
A couple of pages from a book I just finished.
The author contracted a rare and mysterious illness that kept her completely bedridden for extended periods of time. During one such season, a friend brought a few flowers and a snail into her room. She slowly warmed to the snail until it became her constant companion, fortifying her through her isolation. Bailey made a study of the snail, along the way making connections between its life and her forced one. Later she made a study of snails as a species, then wrote this book, a combination memoir and science discourse in beautiful, poetic prose.
Just before this passage she describes the lengthy, sensuous mating practices of snails, then here shares a few reactions others have had to that process. The long quote is from the 1969 autobiography Birds, Beasts, and Relatives by Gerald Durrell. Context for Larry's first observation: snails are hermaphroditic and can be either male or female for any given encounter.
It dawned on me that perhaps the snail needed some real food. Letters and envelopes were probably not its typical diet. A few long-gone flowers were in a vase by my bed. One evening I put some of the withered blossoms in the dish beneath the pot of violets. The snail was awake. It made its way down the side of the pot and investigated the offering with great interest and then began to eat one of the blossoms. A petal started to disappear at a barely discernible rate. I listened carefully. I could hear it eating. The sound was of someone very small munching celery continuously. I watched, transfixed, as over the course of an hour the snail meticulously ate an entire purple petal for dinner.---I could never have guessed what would get me through this past year--a woodland snail and its offspring; I honestly don't think I would have made it otherwise. Watching another creature go about its life . . . somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on . . . Snails may seem like tiny, even insignificant things compared to the wars going on around the world or a million other human problems, but they may well outlive our own species.
Speaking of quotes from books, there's this. It's always a good idea to consult people with decayed teeth when in search of sound ideas.
It's from Stuart Little, which we just read to our kids. I noted it because it amused me so much. This, on the other hand, is simply a lovely thought.
What is important: A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells.
This.
A southern-African philosophy points the way to a thriving society.Interdependence is not often considered a cornerstone of the American ethos, but it lies at the heart of what binds us together, in both a moral and a practical sense. It constitutes an essential beatitude of building the Beloved Community. A greater understanding of how our lives are inextricably linked opens up new possibilities for developing empathy toward others and helps us counteract the atomized, overly individualistic excesses of American culture. Ubuntu also provides a needed lens to understand the ways in which all parts of the globe have become increasingly interdependent. Both our security and our prosperity are increasingly tied to the rest of the world. Global crises such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic require shared global leadership and cooperation.The Beloved Community requires deepening our sense of interdependence. It involves a deeper appreciation that we are in this together socially, politically, and economically. Ubuntu interdependence forms the basis of expressions of solidarity and helps individuals and communities move beyond naked self-interest and hyper-individualism. Properly understood and practiced, ubuntu interdependence provides a compelling rationale behind many public-policy commitments that are central to promoting the common good, such as a strong and effective social safety net, universal access to good health care, strengthening families so they can thrive, and ensuring that every child has access to a quality education.This kind of ubuntu interdependence provides a social and moral framework. It offers an organizational and governmental policy framework for fighting poverty and expanding economic justice and opportunity for all Americans, including advancing a greater commitment to the triple bottom line of generating benefit for shareholders, employees, and the broader society within the private sector. . . .Ubuntu interdependence teaches us that our nation’s health is inextricably linked to the thriving of all people. In particular, it teaches us that when the most vulnerable thrive, we all thrive. When one part of America suffers, all parts suffer with it. When one part rejoices, all parts rejoice with it.
When the most vulnerable thrive, we all thrive.
This has long been my favorite bit from the Bible:
And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Then he will say to those at his left hand, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”
Love--take care of--the least and most vulnerable.
This seems related.
What factors, then, determine how individuals become wealthy? Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be exploited to make the world a better and fairer place?Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of colleagues. These guys have created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in this process.The results are something of an eye-opener. Their simulations accurately reproduce the wealth distribution in the real world. But the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest. And this has significant implications for the way societies can optimize the returns they get for investments in everything from business to science.
We need to stop revering the wealthy and despising the poor. Those statuses reveal nothing about character. Love--take care of--the least and most vulnerable.
I have to share this one as a librarian.
Research has already suggested that opening a book may help improve brain function, reduce stress, and even make us more empathetic. Now, a team led by Joanna Sikora of the Australian National University is looking into the benefits of growing up around a book-filled environment; as Alison Flood of the Guardian reports, the researchers' expansive new study suggests that homes with ample libraries can arm children with skills that persist into adulthood. . . .Home library size can be a good indicator of what the study authors term “book-oriented socialization.” . . .Across the board . . . it seemed that more books in the home was linked to higher proficiency in the areas tested by the survey.The effects were most marked when it came to literacy. Growing up with few books in the home resulted in below average literacy levels. Being surrounded by 80 books boosted the levels to average, and literacy continued to improve until libraries reached about 350 books, at which point the literacy rates leveled off. The researchers observed similar trends when it came to numeracy; the effects were not as pronounced with information communication technology tests, but skills did improve with increased numbers of books. . . .“So, literacy-wise, bookish adolescence makes up for a good deal of educational advantage,” the study authors write.
Give literacy to the least and most vulnerable.
Earlier this year, in Nobody's Ever Clean, I wrote about My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts by Resmaa Menakem. He writes about where we hold trauma in our bodies. I don't remember him making reference to interoception, but the idea is present in his book and I'm sure the exercises he recommends for dealing with trauma are very much about activating and strengthening our sense of interoception.
There’s growing evidence that signals sent from our internal organs to the brain play a major role in regulating emotions and fending off anxiety and depression[Interoception is] your brain’s perception of your body’s state, transmitted from receptors on all your internal organs.Interoception may be less well known than the “outward facing” senses such as sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell, but it has enormous consequences for your wellbeing. Scientists have shown that our sensitivity to interoceptive signals can determine our capacity to regulate our emotions, and our subsequent susceptibility to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. . . .Importantly, these findings include promising new ways for you to “tune in” to the body and alter your perception of its interoceptive signals – techniques that may help treat a host of mental health problems. It is only by listening to the heart, it seems, that we can take better care of the mind. . . .This idea stems from the pioneering work of Prof Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California in the 1990s. He proposed that emotional events begin with non-conscious changes in bodily states, called “somatic markers”: when you see an angry dog, for instance, and your muscles tense or your heart begins to race. This physiological reaction occurs before you are even aware of the emotion, and it is only when the brain detects the alteration to the body’s internal state, through interoception, that we actually experience the feeling and allow it to shape our behaviour. Without the back-and-forth between the brain and the body, the feelings of happiness, sadness or excitement wouldn’t exist. . . .Such processes may play an important role in many mental illnesses. A large subgroup of people with depression, for example, often show poorer interoceptive awareness on the heartbeat detection tasks, and, for these patients, the reduced ability to feel their bodily signals may lie behind their sense of lethargy and emotional numbness – the sense that they can “feel nothing” at all.People with anxiety, in contrast, do report being attentive to their interoceptive signals – but they don’t necessarily read them accurately. They may misinterpret a small change in heart rate as being much bigger than it really is, for example, which can lead them to “catastrophise” their feelings and amplify their sense of panic.AdvertisementProf Hugo Critchley at Brighton and Sussex Medical School points out that poor interoceptive awareness can also lead to the sense of “depersonalisation” and dissociation, which are early symptoms of psychosis and may be a precursor of their delusions. Interoception helps us to form our most basic sense of self, he says – and it seems to be askew in these patients. . . .Therapies that aim to address these problems are still in their infancy, but the early signs are promising. . . .Perhaps most intriguingly, the new awareness of interoception can help us to understand why certain physical exercises can be so good for our mental health. . . .Interoception, it seems, is one of our most important senses. And by paying a little bit more attention to the signals it sends you, you may be healthier in body and mind.
This is definitely something I need to work on.
The lack of real competition in Wingspan, its physical beauty, the grand themes it smuggles into the family rec room—they’re all enough to make you think about what a game actually is. What are the requirements for play? Does a game even require fierce competition, or scoring? Is Wingspan actually a game at all, or is it something slightly different? Is it art?If it’s an art form, it’s a collaborative one. Unlike a painting or a movie, the game, on its own, is not yet complete. “You’re sort of creating a platform for them to have this experience,” Hargrave said. “And you want to send them signals about what the game wants them to do that are consistent with the experience that you want them to have.” When you play birds with great powers, you see those powers benefit you over and over, you see how you accrue points, so you keep doing it. “And by the end of the game,” Hargrave said, “if you follow those nudges that the game is giving you, you will have a beautiful tableau of birds. You may not have the most points, but you’ve built something.”Thought of this way, Wingspan, the thing in the box, isn’t a work of art. It’s more like a set of paints, or musical instruments: Wingspan allows you and your family or friends to make art together, a creative journey that results in something beautiful and satisfying, if ephemeral. Each time you repack the box, you understand a little more about the ecology of the game, and so the next time you refine or upend your practice—and create something new.
-----
There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Vol. 3
Riddle answers: love and a leaf.
posted by Degolar @ 2:47 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home