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~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

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Monthly Archives: September 2017

Horizons University

25 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, family, management, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

creativity, education, problem finding, problem formulation, problem solving

 

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Different people’s brains seem to me to be predisposed to pay attention to different kinds of stimulation. My musically inclined wife, for instance, is much more attuned to sounds of all types than I am. This makes it easier for her to identify music from just a few bars, but also makes her much more annoyed by stray sounds that I typically ignore. For example, when commercials come on the TV, she is very keen to “mute” the TV whereas I simply mute them in my mind (or at least I think I do). So, when she told me that I “had to” fix our doorbell right away, at first I had no idea what she was talking about.

“That beep!” she insisted. “Can’t you hear it? That doorbell is driving me crazy!”

After calling my attention to it, I also heard the beep. The doorbell was not something that we had installed. It came with our condo and up till now had been working just fine. Now, it appeared to be hell-bent on incessantly going “Beep! Beep!” Admittedly, it was annoying. Not so annoying as a failing smoke alarm. At least this was going off in the middle of the day whereas failing smoke alarms are not only much louder but scientifically designed to go off at around 3-4 am in the morning. I suppose on rare occasions, they do go off at other times, but I’ve never experienced that personally. Best of all, smoke alarms have directions printed right on the alarm in tiny white on white font. Seriously? You couldn’t afford to pay for .0001 cents of paint to make it legible? But enough of badly designed smoke alarms.

Let’s return to my wife’s request to fix our doorbell. I got out the toolbox and easily removed the screws over the housing. Inside were minor electronics connected with three wires to the house electricity. There did not seem to be a dying battery at fault. I had no idea, and could not decipher which wire would turn off the alarm. So, careful to touch only the insulated rubber guards on the wire snippers, I cut one of the wires. In response, I heard, “BEEP! BEEP!” Well, that didn’t do the trick. I cut another wire. “BEEP! BEEP!” Damn. Okay. I will have to cut the third wire. No battery. No electrical current from the house. Goodbye annoying beep. I cut the third wire. “BEEP! BEEP!”

What? Unlike my Dad, I was never trained as an electrical engineer, but I do know that a completely open circuit without power can’t keep “working.” At least not for long. A capacitor can hold a charge. In old time TV’s you had to be very careful. You couldn’t simply unplug the TV and start working on it right away. The large TV “picture tube” for instance, held a considerable charge until you grounded it against the chassis with a screwdriver. But there’s no way the doorbell could still be making noise.

Eventually, we discovered that there was nothing at all wrong with our doorbell. Well, to be more accurate, there had been nothing wrong until I cut every single wire. The noise source was something else entirely. Years earlier, we had attended a Dave Pelz golf academy focused on “the short game” and had been given a very cheap electronic metronome to help us learn a smooth rhythm on the putting stroke. We hadn’t ever used it for that purpose and had forgotten we even owned it.

But that’s what our lovely, lively cats are for! The cats had managed to turn on the metronome and then carefully and meticulously slide it down into the small slice of space between our piano sounding board and the wall that separated the kitchen from the dining room. Voila! A nice loud “BEEP! BEEP!” sound.

Looking back on the incident, I can’t quite reconstruct why we thought this was a doorbell. It didn’t actually sound like our doorbell. Well, nothing actually sounded like our doorbell because now it didn’t make any sound at all. I had cut all the wires that would enable it to work. But it didn’t even sound like our doorbell used to sound. Somehow, we had gotten sucked into a particular framing and formation of the problem. That specific way of approaching the problem led us down a “garden path” that not only had no possible chance of solving the real problem; it also had negative (and unnecessary) side-effects such as ruining our doorbell. Sadly, even two supposedly “well-educated” people found it all too easy to go down that “garden path.” This brings me to “Horizon University.”

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Articles that claim to calculate the “best” University for you to attend have grown up like ragweed in the last few years. What irks me about such articles is not that they rank order university programs according to the average “Return on Investment” of graduates, but that they don’t even seem to acknowledge that this is only one of many criteria by which such programs could be ranked. They too, have gone down a very particular garden path when it comes to defining the “goodness” of education.

Instead of an undergraduate program that is essentially a high level trade school aimed exclusively at getting you the highest paying job, let’s imagine a University with a different focus.

Consider a University where students focus on seeing things in different time perspectives.

Maybe it doesn’t need to be an entire university; perhaps a department or a course. But somewhere along the line, it seems absolutely critical to me that people receive more training in taking a flexible view, a broad view, a long or short view, a loving view, a defensive view. In my experience, people often have one particular way of approaching a particular type of problem. In extreme cases, people approach every problem the same way. Sometimes that one way works extremely well. More often, it works pretty well. Sometimes, it is more of a hindrance than a help. And then, every once in awhile, it results in an unmitigated disaster. And, that’s true for everyone on the planet so long as you stick to one approach for every single problem.

At “Horizon University” you would not take a calculus class or a psychology class or a creative writing class. Why? Because it is all too tempting — indeed probably necessary in order to pass any such course — to use your knowledge of that particular course, using the methods of that particular course. You do not answer a calculus question with an insightful essay on the probable family dynamics of Pascal’s family; not if you want to pass.

In real life, a particular problem might require only calculus, or only creative writing or only psychology. More likely it will require some combination of these and many other skills. It will most likely be solved, not by you alone, but by you in combination with a team diverse in almost every dimension imaginable.

At Horizon University, people would be guided in every aspect of problem solving which includes the extremely important and seldom taught skills of problem finding and problem formulation. These are the hardest parts; they are the least taught parts; indeed, they are the least understood parts of the overall problem solving process.

Let’s take an example puzzle: “There are 435 people in the US House of Representatives. What is the probability that at least two Representatives share a birthday?” I have given this problem to a number of people. After a few moments thought, most smart 10 year olds can solve it. Adults have more trouble. Adults who have taken a college course in statistics however, typically have the most trouble of all. When such an adult hears this problem, they are immediately reminded of the so-called “Birthday Problem.” Counter-intuitively, it turns out that even a small group of 30 people is more likely to have at least one shared birthday than not. A ten year old is unlikely to have heard of this problem, so they think about the 435 people in the House of Representatives for awhile and come up with the correct answer. A statistics-trained adult however, is likely to say something along the following lines, repeated more or less verbatim from someone attending at a party organized by my office mate at the University of Michigan.

“Ahem! Well, this is the famous ‘Birthday Problem’ and, having just received my Ph.D. in statistics, it would be fairly trivial for me to answer this if only I had access to some logarithm tables. (This was long before hand-held internet access). I had happened to notice that my office mate had log tables so I escorted this guy to them and said, “There you go! Knock yourself out!” I went off to enjoy the party while he spent the next few hours muttering in a corner trying to make good on his boast. I checked up on him later, but he still insisted he had almost solved it.

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His insistence that he knew enough to solve the problem and his persistence in tackling it with the same method over and over is one of the things that scares me about the coming ubiquity in “Artificial Intelligence” especially as it intersects with the “Internet of Things”, “Driverless Cars”, and “Intelligent Agents.” It isn’t so much that people won’t make perfect AI systems for a long time. It’s that people will make imperfect AI systems and insist that they are perfect. In other words, hubris is one of the human failings that can be greatly amplified by Artificial Intelligence.

We see this kind of hubris is all sorts of software systems; indeed, it isn’t even limited to software systems although the absurdly short development cycles of software tend to make it more evident there. For example, Microsoft’s Windows 7 had over 2000 bugs.

http://www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+Says+It+Has+Fixes+for+2000+Windows+7+Bugs+Thanks+to+Testers/article14426.htm

Bugs, of course, are not limited to Microsoft products. Here’s a list of recent bugs in the MAC OS.

https://eclecticlight.co/2017/07/21/known-bugs-in-macos-sierra-10-12-6-an-incomplete-summary/

“Bug” is a general term, of course, and there are many varieties. One of the “minor” kinds of bugs are usability bugs. For instance, I recently signed up for an alumni site. They asked users like me to enter the name of the University of my advanced degree. Instead of allowing me to type in the University, however, I had to use a pull-down list. This alphabetical list had over 2000 entries. But where is “The University of Michigan” to be found in an alphabetical list? Looking at the names of other universities showed no consistency whatever. It might be under “T” for “The University of Michigan.” It might be under “U” for “University of Michigan” which might be abbreviated as “U” or “Univ.” and it might be listed under “M” for “Michigan.” It wasn’t under any of these. So far as I could tell, The University of Michigan, one of the top-ranked universities in America with a current enrollment over 44 thousand wasn’t listed at all. You could call the omission of this particular university a “bug” but the more fundamental bug is why they are using a pull-down list to have users select among thousands of items. No-one thought through the fact that new universities arise; they merge; they fold. In addition, there is no obvious single way for them to be listed. But all of these errors in design thinking pale in comparison to the one that prevents the user from simply typing in the name of their university. Not only have the designers and coders of this software omitted an important option; not only have they chosen an inefficient way to enter the data; beyond that, they are so cock-sure of themselves that they have not even provided an alternative input method.

You might argue that subsequent data analysis will be easier if everyone chooses from among a fixed and finite list than it would be if people could type in whatever they wanted. True, but if that’s really the argument, then you are saying that your time and convenience are more important than those of your users. That’s too gigantic an error to be labeled a “bug.” It’s much more fundamental.

If you think I’m exaggerating the scope of software bugs, you might want to check on the Wikipedia entry of known and severe bugs in a number of different fields of human endeavor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs 

If Horizon University does a good job, its graduates will likely produce fewer bugs, but more importantly, they will be willing to admit the possibility that their code is buggy. Of course, bad design is not limited to software. Shelves of every store abound with poorly packaged items encased in nearly impenetrable plastic. Many roads are equipped with road signs that cannot be read at night. Processes are designed without feedback on whether they work. The crucial point here is not that humans make mistakes; obviously, they do. The problem is thinking that because you’ve learned a particular method or way of thinking that method is also capable of solving all problems; that your way of thinking is the only way there is.

Let’s return to the poor guy who spent the entire party at the University of Michigan pouring over my office mate’s log tables. He was not so much unable to apply the methods he had learned; it is just that the methods he was attempting to apply were not applicable in this case. There are only 365 days in a year (or 366 if you count leap years). But there are 435 people in the House of Representatives. So, even if the first 366 people you looked at happened to have different birthdays, the 367th would have to match someone.

At Horizon University, students would be taught a variety of methods for each part of the problem solving process. These methods would not be taught in a series of lectures. Rather, from the beginning, students would begin working on individual and group projects of their own defining. They would have access to a variety of experts including many generalists on site as well as remote experts available at varying time scales. They would hear from and see in action a wide variety of ways of attacking each problem. They would learn to respect other ways of looking at problems, not just the one or few that they themselves chose to focus on.

Everything in life is not about solving problems however. It is also important to discover and learn about the things that give you the most joy. For some people all of those things will be closely related to problem solving. But for others, many or even all of those joy-inducing activities will not really be about problem solving. They may want to hone their skills in writing, painting, music, choreography, and so on. Perhaps they will earn enough money to get by without another job and maybe they won’t. A few will find a way to use those skills as part of a collaborative problem solving endeavor. Others may find teaching their skills to others is a good way to keep their own skills sharp for their creative work.

At Horizon University, various activities and architectural features would encourage people to communicate and interact with people across the entire variety of interests. In the short term, this would be beneficial to the individual because all their project work would require a broad range of talents. Of course, in the longer term, the benefit would be understanding the value of all kinds of knowledge and skill rather than just the one that they happened to choose to study.

The idea of project-based learning is not a new one. Indeed, it is far older and more ubiquitous than the invention of subject matter based courses or classes. In the USA, we often have historically tried to balance a public education that makes for “well-rounded citizens” with an education that helps ready people to “earn a living.” More recently, we seem to be focused only on the latter goal. In addition, we now seem to believe it is okay for people to go into great debt in order to secure an education. Putting resources into educating the next generation however, is not something meant to benefit only that next generation, but all generations to come.

Rest assured, it is not only Ph.D.’s in statistics that have challenges addressing problems in multiple ways. As Norton Juster in The Phantom Tollbooth suggests, many of us are prone to “jumping to conclusions.”

Precisely because we humans have such an exciting and completely new set of opportunities, challenges and dangers facing us now, it is more vital than ever to be flexible in our approach to problems. Under pressure, people are prone to fixate on the first approach even more than they usually are. How can we possibly believe this is a good time to cut back on public education? We need a citizenry who are not only knowledgeable but versed in a variety of ways to problem solve. It certainly won’t be enough to know what answers others have given to problems in the past. Why? Because they will be facing literally unheard of conditions. We need to let them at least jump to a different set of conclusions than the previous generation. Hopefully, they’ll do even better than that and not jump to conclusions at all. Rather they will work in cooperative groups to solve complex novel problems using the skills and confidence that were built at Horizons U.


Author Page on Amazon

 

Lost Horizon.

17 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, apocalypse, psychology, story, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Business, celerity, history, innovation, life, politics, stories

 

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One of my favorite movies as a young child was Lost Horizon. I believe I happened across this movie quite by accident (but then, maybe it was no accident after all). In any case, for those who haven’t seen it, the basic plot is that an Englishman, Robert Conway, ends up, seemingly by accident, in a semi-magical city high in the Himalayas, “Shangri-La.” It turns out that he was actually brought there intentionally to be the new head of Shangri-La. However, he heads back to England and later decides that was an error and nearly dies of exposure on the icy slopes of the mountains trying to scrabble his way back to Shangri-La. The plot echoes the idea of a lost Eden. In the Biblical account of Eden, humans lived a kind of carefree existence before defying God and thereby incurring his wrath which cursed all humanity to have pain bearing children, having to work, etc. There are many stories and myths of an earlier time or a magical place where life is much longer, more fulfilling, less filled with strife and disease, and generally speaking, better in every way than where we are now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Horizon_(1937_film)

I believe that there really is a “Lost Horizon” in much of modern civilization and that horizon is a longer time horizon. In the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that people used to have a tolerance for much longer and more nuanced debate about about public issues than we do now. For example, the famous “Lincoln-Douglas Debates” about slavery lasted all day! Now, we try to compress dialogue, discussion and debate into a sound bite or a 140 character tweet.

I never had the pleasure of climbing “real” mountains when I was a youngster. I never even saw the rockies till my early twenties. However, my neighborhood did have a large empty field. And in the middle of that field was a small hill. Because the land around was mainly flat, even this small hill provided a panoramic view of woods, fields, and nearby houses. Whenever I faced some particularly weighty decision facing me, I instinctively walked about a half mile to this hilltop. I went there, surveyed everything I could, and thought about the problem at hand. This seemed the most natural thing in the world and whether true or not, it certainly gave me the impression that I could think about the problem more holistically than if I simply sat in a chair or walked through a forest crowded with trees. On that small hill, the silence from human voices was broken only by the noise of distant traffic, the wind in the grass, and the trills of bob-whites. Sometimes, I would whistle to them for advice. Their “answers” always seemed timeless and untinged by hurry.

In 2003, I was invited to give a keynote talk at a conference in Madeira about my work on a socio-technical Pattern Language (some of which, not so coincidentally, encouraged a broader look over time and space). My wife and I decided to make a vacation out of it with our nephews, Mark and Ryan. On the way to Funchal, we visited Oxford University and a professor friend in cognitive psychology, Peter McLeod. We played “lawn bowling” (the English version of Bocci) at Oxford. While we did our best to out-bowl Peter, he pointed out to us a grove of gigantic Oaks. He said that they had been planted hundreds of years earlier and some of them would be culled soon for renovating one of the buildings. This, he claimed, was no accidental windfall. These oaks had been planted specifically for that purpose centuries earlier.

https://www.slideshare.net/John_C_Thomas/toward-a-sociotechnical-pattern-language

 

It wasn’t just Oxford, however, that had been planned with the future in mind. Medieval cathedrals often took a quarter century or a half century to complete. Notre Dam and Lincoln Cathedrals took about a century while the Cologne cathedral took 600 years! Meanwhile, here in the 21st Century, the US Congress seems powerless to pass legislation to repair our crumbling dams, highways, and bridges.

http://natgeotv.com/ca/ancient-megastructures/q-and-a

The US has an opioid addiction problem. In addition, there is an obesity epidemic. There are many reasons for these, but at least part of the problem with any kind of addiction is that people are unable, unwilling, or unpracticed at behaving in what is their own long term interests and instead doing what feels good in the short term. While one might imagine that the advent of widespread literacy, electronic communication and access to a huge amount of humanity’s knowledge via the Internet would encourage people to take a longer view of life and happiness, instead, many people seem more short-sighted than ever.

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Think how we cherish the word “instant.” We have “instant coffee”, “instant pudding”, “instant messaging.” We have “speed dialing,” “speed dating,” and just plain “speed.” Software companies feel the need to release new versions and “subversions” at a breakneck pace that necessarily sacrifices sufficient testing.  While people often used to invest in a company’s stock and keep it until they retired decades later, now people invest in a portfolio of ever-changing stocks and a CEO who doesn’t deliver quarter over quarter improvements may soon find themselves out of a job. Many people, in fact, do “day trading” to try to make money. Imagine investing and then uninvesting a few moments later in companies whose products and services change over month or years.

 

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While parents encourage their kids to get good grades now so that they can have a good career later in life, the parents themselves often vote on their short term interests. Politicians cannot solve budget deficits or the over-reliance on fossil fuels. Large number of people who would feel demeaned to be or to be called a heroin addict, will nonetheless buy the SUV, throw the recycling and trash together, and generally accept the rhetoric that denies global climate change and its impacts. Together, our obsession with speed has sometimes been called, the “Cult of Celerity.”

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/26391

Why does a society that has more material wealth and seems to require less of a “hand to mouth” existence, instead, seem ever more focused on the near term and less on the long term? I suppose one possibility is that it is a symptom of a transitional period in humanity’s evolution from a collection of individuals with strong ties to a small number of people to a world-wide interconnection in which individuals become more like “parts” in a giant machine and the “processing” of information that each person does becomes more and more fragmentary.

In teaching Intro Psych, I constructed an exercise for the students in which the class as a whole solved a simple problem. But each individual person had a slip of paper with simple instructions. For example, one student’s instructions might say, “Take a piece of paper from the person on your left. If the paper they hand you has a cross on it, pass it to your right. If it has a circle on it, pass it to the person ahead of you.” No individual person could possibly understand what they collectively were doing.

Indeed, this aligns precisely with “Taylorism” that shaped so much of the so-called “Industrial Revolution.” Some one person or small group of people designs an assembly line. They understand the overall process. But a person actually working on the assembly line may only know that they see a series of widgets passing by and for each widget, they are supposed to turn a screw. They are not supposed to worry about how their job fits into the overall picture. Indeed, they were not encouraged to take a broad view or a long view of their work. Many such jobs have been replaced by robots.

too brief an article which claims Taylorism “ended” in the 1930’s!

An alternative to ever-increasing atomization and automation of work is instead to structure small teams of people to design and build cars. They can do this, incidentally, with a view toward overall energy costs of manufacturing, distribution, and driving rather than just reducing the emissions of the vehicles after construction.

 

http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/06/the-future-of-car-making-small-teams-using-fewer-materials.html

Even when people are part of a deconstructed process, it can still be worthwhile for them to “see the bigger picture.” Knowing how your job fits into a larger picture provides motivational advantages and knowledge advantages. As a common folk story goes, two travelers are passing by a wall where two folks are laboring. Each laborer selects rather large rocks in a nearby field; carries them to a wall and places them carefully then using cement to fill in tiny cracks. Objectively, these two workers appear to have the same job. However, one of the two was happily going about their work humming and smiling while the other slumped their shoulders and sported a grim visage; could be heard ever muttering beneath his breath. Curious, one of the travelers asked the Glum one, “What are you doing here, my good fellow?”

“Oh, what a pain! I’m building a wall, of course.”

Then, the traveler approached the cheery builder and asked, “What are you doing here, if I may ask?”

“Oh, what a joy! I’m helping to create a marvelous cathedral, of course!”

IBM’s Think magazine once contained an interesting example of the cognitive benefits of seeing the big picture. People who worked on the Endicott, NY assembly lines were given a few hours of training to see how their job fit into the overall picture. At one point, one of the mask inspectors jumped up and yelled, “Oh, no! I’ve been doing it wrong all these years!” It turned out that they had not wanted to “throw out” a mask that “only” had a few errors because they knew a lot of time and effort had gone into making the mask. They thought it prudent to pass masks as “okay” unless there were a lot of errors. Of course, each mask was used to make many thousands of chips, so it was vitally important not to pass a mask if there were even the slightest error. But until this training program, no-one had really made this clear.

At IBM, I managed a research project for several years on the business uses of stories and storytelling. One of the “knowledge management” consultants I worked with, Dave Snowden, told a story of the Thames Water Company. At that time, when people in this part of the UK had trouble with their water or sewer, they called up a help line and the people who staffed the help lines (almost all women) were to follow a script and dispatch engineers (nearly all men) to go and fix the problems. Of course, as is customary, they were measured on how many calls they could handle in an hour. Most of the help personnel were young, but one middle aged lady took about two and a half times as long to dispatch engineers. She was about to be fired for being so slow, when some enlightened individual decided to look a little more deeply. It turned out that, indeed, she was slower. However, it turned out that her husband was one of the engineers who fixed problems. Because of the knowledge she gained from talking over their jobs together as well as her long experience, she actually solved many problems on the phone herself. In fact, while the average service rep sent an engineer out into the field on about one out of every ten calls, this woman sent an engineer out only one out of a thousand calls. By taking slightly longer on the phone, she was actually saving the company a lot of money! Chances are excellent that he probably did a much better job as an engineer for having conversations with a dispatcher as well.

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It seems as though more widespread public education and literacy would allow people to undertake their jobs as well as their political and personal decisions with a longer time horizon and a broader view of what the impact of their behaviors are on others. Beyond that, it seems to me that many of the problems of today require longer and broader views in order to take appropriate action. In fact, it seems the evolutionary advantage to early (and contemporary) humans does not lie in our sharper teeth or stronger jaws; it does not lie in our sharper vision or hearing; it does not rely on our superior strength or speed. Our only advantages are to be able to cooperate and communicate over a longer period of time and space. Yet, here we seem to be — focusing on smaller pieces of complex problems, over-simplifying both the problem and the solution, and insisting on instant answers and speedy resolutions.

Rather than pay a dollar more in taxes to build mass transit to help stem global climate change, we would rather wait for a hurricane and spend ten dollars more in taxes or thousands more to repair things. Rather than pay a penny more in taxes and find a cure for cancer, we would rather pay a hundred thousand in medical expenses. Rather than pay to repair a bridge, we’d rather wait till it collapses with scores of people on it. Rather than wait three years for a new software release with minimal bugs, we would rather wait three months and get the newest with a mosquito horde of bugs. Rather than take the time to fully understand a problem before trying to solve it, we’d rather categorize it quickly and apply a solution that might or might not be appropriate or better yet, “hand it off” to someone else. Rather than take the time to enjoy what we are doing at the moment, we’d rather jump ahead to the next moment.

Maybe “Shangri-La” is not a magical village hidden deep in the Himalayas. Maybe Eden is not something humankind “lost” but something we are yet to build. Together. Slowly. Over time. Maybe finding or rediscovering Paradise is not so much a question of scrambling up frozen mountainsides as simply taking a deep breath, a break, a pause in the action in order to see things from a more global perspective.  Even a small hill can help you collect your thoughts and see the broader picture. It might be quiet there and you can hear, not the voices of bosses, managers, advertising and overlords urging you to buy more, get more, work more but instead you can hear the clear call of birdsong reminding you that Eden may only be a few deep breaths away.

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Much lost!

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

family, history, learning, life, loss, marketing, politics, rationality

 

IMG_9722Why do we feel so devastated after losing someone we love when we generally felt pretty good before we ever met them? That person lives in us; at least a mental model does and that includes what they looked like, how they talked, their habits, their mannerisms, their smell, what they liked and disliked, specific interactions and conversations, shared memories. It’s really little wonder people believe in ghosts. I often dream about my grandparents, for example, decades after they died.

Their life is gone and that is a huge sadness but there is also an impact on you and me. We will have to do things differently, say things differently, recall things that they used to recall. In some cases, of course, it means we may now have sole responsibility for raising children or running a business.

Here’s another strange case. People pretty much exactly like us physically used to live, mate, reproduce, bring up kids, find food, find shelter, find water, avoid enemies, make friends, grow old, share stories, and eventually die. But they did all that without cellphones. They did that without television. They did that without oil or wheels or electricity. They did not miss these conveniences because, for them, they were not even conceptions. But if all those things are taken away from us, we would feel deprived.

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Let’s get more specific. The video games of today are fantastic. But, let’s rewind recent history. I thought the original adventure game was completely awesome. We would type in two word commands and the 80 character by 40 line display would flash up green word descriptions of places and events. The descriptions were well-written and there were clever puzzles to be solved. But how many gamers of today would be able to enjoy the original Adventure game as we did in the 1980’s? Maybe all of them? But probably not.

Every time I go to youtube, they ask whether I want an “ad-free” experience which I can “try” for free! Of course, after having the ad-free experience, going back will be relatively difficult whereas right now, I don’t even notice them. I totally get why people eventually become unable to “hear” the other side of a political argument. Instead, they simply tune it out. Indeed, it is often the same approach and probably often the same people who end up trying to “sell” a political candidate as those trying to “sell” a new brand of deodorant. There is much that needs to be fixed about our current political system. But if we replace it with corporate rule, I think we will miss the “good old days” very much indeed.

Do you recall the oddly delicious pain of a loose tooth? To wiggle that tooth caused pain. At least that’s the way I remember it. Yet, I loved to cause myself that hurt. It didn’t hurt much. And, I could control the pain pretty precisely by how hard I pushed with my tongue. Of course, I knew that eventually the tooth would come out and be replaced by a newer stronger tooth. I also knew that placing my tooth under the pillow would cause my parents to supply cash; typically, a dime. That was not an inconsiderable sum. Yet, neither better teeth nor financial gain provided my main motivation for wiggling my tooth. Simply having a small pain that I could control seemed a wonderful thing.

In fact, once the tooth eventually fell out and the newer, bigger, stronger tooth began to grow in, I missed the old, weak, loose tooth, not because of the tooth, per se, but because I had lost that controllable pain. The desire to have something is rather strange, particularly because it is both fundamental to the “rational man” of classical economics and at the same time, extremely irrational. 

People who lived a hundred years ago did not desire iPhones, television, or central air conditioning. They might have thought, e.g., “I am frigging frying – need a cooler breeze.” But they wouldn’t exactly desire air conditioning. Later, some people actually could afford air conditioning and others could not. The “could not’s” would feel the lack of air conditioning much more than their ancestors. There is one group of people who would feel the sting even more: those who had air conditioning and subsequently lost it.

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In fact, once we have something for awhile, we not only feel the loss of that thing intently; we feel we deserve whatever it is we lost. After all, it is ours! (Even if we just stole that very same thing from someone else a few weeks ago!).

It isn’t just things and people that people feel a loss for. They feel a loss for places, situations, abilities, and even abstractions such as progress toward a goal. And that brings me to my dissertation.

I gave people a fairly simple river-crossing problem. The problem begins with three hobbits and three orcs on one side of the river. There is a small boat that can hold one or two creatures. The goal is to figure out how to get all six creatures to the other side of the river. They can’t swim, or wade, or leap, or build a bridge. The only way is to use the boat. At least one creature must be in the boat at all times. The orcs can never outnumber the hobbits on either side of the river. If that happens, the orcs will gang up and eat the hobbits. It’s a little tricky, but it is possible to get all six critters from one side of the river to the other by ferrying it back and forth.

Some people were first given “half” of the problem; that is to say, they were given a starting position that was half-way through the entire solution. After they solved that, they were given the whole problem. Many of them wanted to give up the problem as impossible, precisely at the spot from which they had just solved the half-problem no more than 20 minutes earlier. Apparently, the position was psychologically different if they were plunked into the spot as opposed to getting to that same spot through their efforts. People who started the problem from the beginning felt as though they had been making “progress” toward the goal. At one point, they had to appear to move away from the goal. It may have seemed to them, in other words, as though they were losing the progress that they had already made. On the other hand, when they started at that same mid-way point, they didn’t feel any “loss” and had an easy time solving the problem from that point forward.

This effect is related to a major deviation people have from acting in accordance with the economic fantasy of the “rational person” when it comes to decision making. Consider investments in stocks. Let’s say that  at one point, you buy 100 shares of IBM stock at $50/share and at another point, I buy 100 shares at $150/share.  Now, the current price is $100/share. You and I have the same exact information about IBM, the tech industry, the economy and so on. Rationally, we should make the same decision (leaving aside tax consequences and whether we need the money desperately). People do not typically view these situations as similar. If you bought the stock at $50/share, you feel as though selling it at $100/share is a great deal. You’ll make a cool $5000! Sounds great. On the other hand, what would you counsel me to do? You might well say that I should definitely not sell right now because I would lose $5000. Actually, the stock certificates have no memory. They have no idea what either of us paid for them and are worth identical amounts.

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I will not try to “prove” this to you. For now, it’s enough to realize that people feel quite different about the two situations. People are very motivated to avoid a loss. Indeed, even the pain of a wiggling tooth can be something not to lose. In Lord Byron’s poem about the Prisoner of Chillon, the long-time prisoner is finally set free, but feels the loss of the prison.

The longish poem ends with these lines.

“My very chains and I grew friends,

So much a long communion tends

To make us what we are:—even I

Regained my freedom with a sigh.”

Returning veterans, despite the dangerous and uncomfortable conditions they’ve been in, often feel as though they have lost something vital when returning to civilian life; e.g., a clarity of what is important, a clear mission, and being part of something bigger than themselves. In fact, the sense of loss can be so overwhelming that more US veterans have committed suicide after returning from duty in the middle east than have been killed in combat.

When people lose a limb, whether through war, an industrial accident or in some other way, they often have “phantom limb” feelings. They can feel sensation and even pain in the limb that is no longer there. Is this similar to what happens when we lose a loved one and then see them in a crowded room? Our mental models of what is true about the world, about others, and even about ourselves are always in danger of being out of touch with what is really happening now. As your kids grow up, your mental model of their capability is always behind the times because it is based on your past experience with them. People who are dangerously thin can still be concerned about being overweight. People no longer capable of driving safely because of their vision or memory may resist the suggestion to stop driving because of a lifetime of experience driving safely. To a computer program, loss and gain may appear symmetrical but they don’t appear that way to a person.

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My three older kids are a year apart in age. When they were young, there was one large shared toy box in the family room. On more than one occasion, one of the kids dug through a random pile Lincoln logs, Lego pieces, tinker toys, monopoly money and pulled out, say, a tiny, green, broken toy car. The car, so far as I could determine, had no QRC code, embedded electronics, or wireless connection. Yet, within seconds, one of the other kids would appear from the other end of the house where they had been doing homework or reading and — Voila! — they would appear and announce: “Hey, that’s my car. I’ve been looking for that! Where did you find it? Anyway, give it here.” Seriously? They hadn’t seen the car for two years, perhaps. They had completely “gotten over” the loss. Now, however, they were reminded of their loss as well as presented with an opportunity to recover that loss. You might think they would be much more inclined to share this toy than they would a new toy. You might think that if you didn’t have multiple kids of your own, that is. No. This “prodigal toy” was welcomed back with open arms and more than a little suspicion and hostility toward the sibling that discovered it.

Another controversial and related phenomenon is the notion of constructed memories or confabulations. Here is a simple example from the psych lab. You give a person the following list of words to recall:

Peach, Pear, Brandy, Tree, Plum, Orange, Pie, Book, Seed, Dish, Grove, Orchard,  Plate, Cinnamon, Zest, Peel, Cobbler, Supple, Couple, Farm, Sample, Computer. 

No, a few hours later, you ask them to recall the list. Almost everyone will remember part of the list. A few people might recall all of them. But more people typically recall “Apple” than any of the items actually on the list! Of course, advertisers are not unaware of this phenomenon and neither are political consultants. They can easily get you to imagine that the candidate said something when they actually did not say it. But the words chosen got you to think it and recall it. But wait. It gets even better. The inclusion of “Apple” in your memory is based on associations that are widely shared in the mental structure of most American native speakers of English. The same technique can be used to arouse words, thoughts, and images selectively in specific segments of the population.

Consider the following list:

Sharapova, Halep, Muguruza, Federer, Del Potro, Mcenroe, Navratilova, King, Evert, Keys, Vandeweghe, Tilden, Laver, Andersen, Radwanska, Gore, Nader, Roddick, Connors, Borg, Ulna, Radius, Radium. 

If I listen to that list and try to recall it a few hours later, I am very likely to include “Nadal” in the list. If you’ve never watched or followed professional tennis, you’re very unlikely to include “Nadal.” For you, the list is pretty random and has little association with “Rafa Nadal.” But for me, these are all strongly associated.

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Ponder that for a moment. Advertisers and political consultants can send an implicit message that only “works” for certain groups of people. When it comes to political consultants, one of their favorites is to convince you that you have in fact, lost something which you never had. Because it is something you come to believe you lost, you want it quite dearly.

A case in point is the mythical perfect America of the past. If you have been reading this blog before, you know that I love many of the things that actually used to be true in America. For instance, when I used to pull into a “Service Station”, I actually got service! Someone came and cleaned the window and checked the oil as well as pumped the gas. Now, when I pull into a “Gas Station” that does not happen. That really is a loss although if we did have that service today, gas might be $10 a gallon instead of $3. And, there are many other things that are gone that really did exist. But many people have also been convinced that there were a lot of things that they have lost, even those things that never actually existed. 

The Founding Fathers, for example, were not all Protestants. And, even among those who were Protestant, they did not all agree on the same Biblical interpretations. And, I am extremely confident that very few of the Founding Fathers interpreted the Bible in precisely the way that your particular minister does. There was never a time when workers didn’t complain, had no unions, and yet were treated fairly. There was never a time when every politician was above corruption. There was never a time when children were never molested, or when the press did not sensationalize, or when everyone “got along.” That is not an America that has since been lost. That is an America that never existed.

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Legends of a “lost land”, Atlantis, Eden, Shangri-La, and the “noble savage” are not unique to modern America, of course. Many politicians in many eras and many different lands have tried to gain power by making people feel that they have “lost” something that never actually existed! It’s a pretty cool trick when you think about it. If done with artistry and tact, and especially if done with billions of dollars of advertising, they can not only make you think you heard the word “apple”; they can make you remember the taste of an imaginary apple!

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Author Page on Amazon

Poems of Loss

Too Much!

03 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, health, psychology, sports, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

#excess, #GoldenMean, #stress, #therapy, #USOpen, Business, innovation, sports, Tennis

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A  tennis player hoping some day to be at the US Open improves their serve; hits it harder and deeper. Good! They practice more; hit it harder and deeper. Now, every serve is rocketing over the net and sliding off the service line. But should they hit it even harder, they will double fault their games, their sets, their matches and their careers away.

A baseball pitcher learns to throw faster and faster, hitting the corners of the strike zone. Too far left or right and no-one will swing. Right in the middle risks at least a single and probably worse.

The surgeon cuts beside the heart. The tumor must go. The cut must be made but should the scalpel slide too far from the target, the surgeon could prove more lethal than the tumor.

A life lesson hard to learn is that there really can be too much of a good thing.

How much is too much varies according to circumstances.

Yet, individuals and businesses seem so easily to fall into the trap of “If some is good, more is better.” This is almost never the case except within extremely narrow contexts and under many sets of assumptions. Much more common is the case where some is good, more is better, and too much is worse than none at all.

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Cases in point litter the annals of human misery throughout the centuries. No vitamin A is very bad. A little is better than none. More is better. But only up to a point. Beyond that, it becomes toxic. Too much.

There are often natural boundaries and tradeoffs in nature that do some of the work for us by keeping things within reasonable boundaries. For example, we think it’s really cool if a football player (whether American football or soccer) is extremely fast. But by “extremely fast”, we mean humanly possibly fast. It would ruin the game if one player could run 300 miles per hour.

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Like most kids, I liked candy. Favorites came and went though themes repeated such as chocolate, nuts, and crunchiness. Caramel and peanut butter — yum. I would always opt for more rather than less candy.  Parents though consistently pushed toward less candy. Nonetheless, I found and developed clever ways to cajole and trick them into letting me have enough candy to ruin my teeth. Too much of a good thing.

One of the chief ways that companies make too much of a good thing is when it comes to motivation. It has long been known that the performance of people tends to increase with increasing motivation, but only up to a point. After that, further motivation reduces performance. This so-called “inverted U” is true, not only for humans, but throughout the animal kingdom. In work that involves more than one person, companies often multiply the error. As pointed out by Frederick Brooks many years ago in “The Mythical Man-Month” when a software project gets behind schedule, the typical response of management is to require tighter reporting on progress and to add more people to the project. Requiring more reporting obviously puts people under more pressure and takes time away from actually accomplishing anything. Adding more people is typically even worse because they don’t know what is going on in the project and the people who actually are being productive have to take time away in order to instruct them!

The optimal level of motivation interacts with other things of course. For one thing, how you take external stress depends a lot on how you take it. Some people begin to awfulize when things get hot; they take things personally; they imagine the worst, etc. So, to an extent, it depends on the person’s own character how they react, but it also does depend a lot on the external stress. No-one is most productive under too much stress.

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The optimal level also interacts with how creative is the task at hand. For an extremely simple task, higher motivation can work well. If I ask you to hang suspended onto a bar as long as possible, you may be able to do it for a minute. If I offer you a thousand dollars, you’ll probably hang on longer. Suspend you over the grand canyon and you may be able to hold on still longer. But now imagine instead, I ask you type, without error, a page of text at your maximum keying speed. You may do better for a thousand dollars than doing it for free, but if you’re life’s on the line you are almost certain to make errors. When it comes to a task requiring you to do something completely new or do something creative, you will most likely to best under very low levels of stress. The more stress you experience, the more you are likely to stick to what you already know.

Again, these relations can be moderated by personality but they are pretty robust across gender, age, education and, in fact, even apply to other animals. If you want to teach your pet a new trick, you will have much better success if they are motivated but not overly so. A simple “creativity” task for animals is the “Umweg” test. “Umweg” means “way around” in German. You place the animal and a treat on a platform separated by a screen that does not go all the way across the platform. A lizard may starve to death instead of walking around the screen. They are too bent on going straight for the treat. A dog will typically have zero or little problem with this task, unless the dog is extremely hungry. As for humans?

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I recall reading about such a test that was performed on US army recruits. Each recruit in the experiment was put in a large room they had never been in before. This room had a large number of doors. An announcement came over the loudspeaker asking them to leave. Each recruit would go to a door, typically find it locked, move to another door, etc. At last, they would find the door that was unlocked and leave the room. Sounds easy, right? You and I could probably solve this without any real difficulty.

Now, comes the “fun” condition. In that condition, the announcement comes on while a simulated fire is right outside. The announcement now says to leave because the building is on fire. What happens? The vast majority of recruits go to the nearest door, try to open it and upon finding it locked, do not try another door. Instead, they try harder and harder to open this same door, jiggling the handle ever more vigorously. Yes, under enough stress, people cannot solve this simple problem. 

In my sophomore year at college, my girlfriend at the time was a Freshman at Oberlin. As part of her requirement for introductory psychology, she ran an experiment about the inverted U of motivation with lab rats. I helped. Here is how the study went. Rats were in one of three states of “stress” before having to swim a small underwater maze. The maze was quite simple. The rat had to go down a long corridor, make a left turn and then come back another long corridor. The “stress” was induced by holding them under water for a small, medium, or long period of time before they started. (I don’t really like this as a way of inducing “stress” because brains don’t work as well with less oxygen but I didn’t design the experiment). Anyway, my job was to get the designated rat out of the cage, hold under water for a few seconds and then let it go so it could swim the simple maze.

All went well until I went to get one of the rats who was in the “high stress” condition. All the other rats were pretty tame, but not Mr. “High Stress Condition.” Oh, no. He ran around the cage trying to avoid my hands. When I finally grabbed him around the belly, he grabbed hold of the cage wire with all four paws! He began barking like a dog! I had done various training exercises with rats before and this was the first one that did anything like bark! I had to pry his little paws off the cage one by one. I can tell you that at this point, this poor rat was already in the “high stress” condition. And so were Janet and I!

And, now I needed to hold him under water for the longest time before letting him swim the maze. I felt horrible. I was well aware that this rat was already stressed and was already probably exhibiting an oxygen debt from his vigorous attempts to avoid capture and escape my clutches. Nonetheless, we decided to go forward with the experiment. I held the poor critter under water the requisite time. Now, we could hear him swimming down the long corridor, make a quick turn and swim toward his freedom. As long as we could hear him swimming, we knew he hadn’t drowned. He was indeed the slowest of the rats so far. We didn’t care at this point. We just wanted him to survive. Down the long corridor he came to the open place where he could escape the water at last. He got there! Whew! We both sighed in relief.

But only for a second! Unlike every other rat, when this one got to the open space instead of surfacing so he could get to the air, he immediately made a U-turn and began back the other way! Oh, crap! I hadn’t really signed up for drowning rats! We could still hear his little rat paws churning through the water. Janet and I were trying to figure out whether we could break into this apparatus and save the rat if he stopped swimming. Meanwhile, Mr. “High Stress Condition” kept paddling along. He came all the way back to the origin of the maze, turned and went back. Freedom was there for the taking for this poor rat, but he was too stressed to look up and see it. Sigh.

At long last, after Mr. “High Stress Condition” had swum three times as far as his mates, he finally came out of the water. He looked a lot like a … well, a drowned rat. I patted the poor fellow off with a towel and put him back in his cage. His stress level hopefully fell at that point, but I know Janet and I were both relieved that he survived. Our pulse rates eventually returned to normal too.

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As a therapist at the “Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy” I had plenty of chance to work with people who were just as over-stressed as poor Mr. “High Stress Condition” had been. This is not to say that people are just like rats. Of course, they aren’t. But when it comes to reactions to stress, we are very similar to our animal cousins. What people can learn to do is to moderate their stress by what the focus on and what they tell themselves.

To take a sports example, if you are playing in the US Open tennis round of 16, you are in much higher stakes game than someone who is just having a friendly social match. But every world class athlete learns to control their stress level. They do this by focusing on their process and on the current condition. If they start thinking much about the score, the stakes, the errors they’ve made, they will get in trouble. And if they start saying things like, “Oh, you idiot! How could miss that shot? Now, if you don’t get this next point, your chances to win are ruined.” Humans can intentionally make themselves more stressed or less stressed than the objective situation would justify. This is a skill that everyone should learn, by the way, not just athletes.

Our society seems to have forgotten how to motivate people “just enough” and instead puts too much stress on employees, encouraging them to work too many hours and thereby lowering productivity and greatly lowering creativity. Once again, it’s no accident that IBM was successful for so many years and had the motto: “THINK” and every employee had this on their desk. Mr. “High Stress Condition” rat would have done better had he kept this in mind.

Our society’s obsession with overdoing is not limited to over-stressing employees. We tend to overeat, overuse drugs, over stimulate ourselves, drive too fast, spend too much money, buy way more than we need, and use way, way more energy than we need. It’s just too much! Too much of a good thing is bad for you personally and even too much success can be bad for a company in the long run. (See, for instance, the link below about how Kodak actually invented the digital camera but then got on board too little and too late because of their overwhelming success with film and cameras). And, in that spirit, rather than continue to argue the point, I will end with The Jewels of November. 

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The Jewels of November

(Third prize winner in the Chatfield National Poetry contest)

Winter ripped into our neighborhood last night;
Gale and pail of rain turned flake by morning;
Gutters filled to overflowing; my basement flooded.
And the riot of yesterday’s autumn light
Gone as though it never burned its magic riots of red and gold.
All the tallest tulip trees and oaks stand naked now,
Black, bucking wet twigs against the steel gray sky.

Bundled in my leather hat, jacket and gloves,
I walk out to survey the carnage of fallen leaf and broken branch.
The wind still gusts to make my eyes smart and my cheeks burn.
Low black clouds swim and swirl.
Somewhere a flag cord bangs against an empty pole.

So off I go through deserted streets of a condo Sunday morning
Into the drear of pale November.
The wind sings a shriller note when the leaves are gone,
The hush is replaced by a whistle.

And, walking down the hill toward the main road
I see beneath the broken canopy the first Jewels of November —
Coral leaves laid in relief against the wet black woods
The amber leaves, the carmine leaves of shrubs
Protected by the barren trunks of their taller cousins.

Beside the road, a head of goldenrod casts against green grass.
A few lonely wood asters, white and an occasional blue.
Hanging from the dead vines, clusters of gold and red.
Before me, the sky breaks for a moment only
And a hawk wheels through a single shaft of sunlight
Rejoicing, so it seems, in the thick cold air,
His outstretched white wing fingers glowing white for a moment.

And so I find, here in this gray and lifeless world
Treasures of color and texture and form — and music too
For the overflowing brooks are singing quiet giggles
Just as ten black crows careen and crackle through the trees.

I look down and see a broken piece of branch
Bedecked with lichens, the palest possible shade of blue-green.
I bend to pick it up and out of my jacket pocket coins tumble
Tinkling on the black macadam roadway, they splay themselves:
A shiny copper penny, dime, quarter, nickel and a dark penny.
How fine when I was a child to find a few coins like this! How rich!
I knew the different smell and taste of every coin,
My parents’ dire warnings not to put them in my mouth
Making the taste so much more exotic and exciting.
Now my money comes to me as a blue paper note
Claiming the check was deposited directly in my account.
How efficient, I note.

Another shaft of sunlight strikes me from the briefly parting clouds
As I retrieve my coins one by one
And remember that today is the New York City marathon.
Phillipides, so the story goes, died after bringing the news
Of a Greek victory back, from exhaustion, so we suppose.
But I wonder: was it simply that his life’s best work was done?
Or could it even be the sheer clear joy of the news delivered?
Or, the ecstasy of the swinging legs and arms, the hot heart,
The heaving chest — feeling so alive that pain itself is joy.

The wind is at my back and I wonder what it would feel like
To run today that long race through the windy streets of New York.
But a walk through the woods is enough for me, enough today,
Stopping to watch the hundred precious scenes laid out before me.
I wonder where all these treasures were last week-end
When I walked this same path.
The answer is, of course, that they were drowned in a sea of color
The neon chaos of autumnal carnival showing off.

I turn back toward home now.
Lonely snowflakes hit and actually bounce once off the black road
Before settling down to melt their brief beauty on still warm tar.

The wind is fully furious in my face.
I dream what lunch I might fix once out of this blowing cold
A steaming chicken broth thick with onions, carrots, and peppers.
And I recall a time when I was a senior in college and had the flu;
The medicine the doctor gave me made me worse
And I ended up not eating for three days
But the at-last, ah-ah, taste of the clear broth I savored oh so slowly!
A feast from a magic bullion cube!

And I wonder as I begin the ascent up the long hill toward home,
Whether winter might not be the whirling earth’s greatest gift.
What would autumn, full summer, or the tender spring be
Without the deadly in-between, the waiting, the wail, the white.

In a land of endless plenty and eternal life, would we ever see
The Jewels of November?

short stories and poems by author

Author page on amazon

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