Thirty Years

Yesterday was my thirtieth birthday. As I leave my thirtieth year of life and enter my thirty-first I reflect on the passed year.  Year thirty feels as if I've been a plane that's waited at the gate, taxied up the runway, and taken off for a new destination.  Here's the highlights:

• Working at inthinc : I continued my job at inthinc technology solutions for the first part of the year.  This time taught me once again the importance of good management.  Our last manager was very skilled at keeping the support team of which I was a part happy and feeling valued within the company.  During the first part of the year we had no manager and a number of internal conflicts arose within the team as well as numerous difficulties arising from a lack of effective interfacing with the rest of the company.  Our new manager, when hired, eventually turned out to make promises like a politician, fail to inform us about and connect us effectively with the rest of the company, and make the talent feel undervalued. I was the third person to leave the team as the burden on our team increased and feelings of valuation decreased.  After leaving the company I continued to hear of hardships and found the company was losing money and talent at an alarming rate, though it seems to have stabilized at this point. I have a number of good friends from my time there, but am happy to have gone.
• Returning to University : Leaving inthinc prompted an overall career change.  I had noticed that the career trajectory in technical support would take significant time to advance and might not lead to a place I really wanted to be.  Looking at what field might be related to my previous scholastic experience in physics I found that radiology is something that would probably take about as much time to train in as it would to advance in my current work, had similar job demands at higher pay, and ultimately would be more fulfilling and interesting.  I enrolled at Weber State University and started attending classes. I was reminded how much I appreciated the university atmosphere and learning new material.
• Entering Medicine : Preparing to enter the field of radiography I've been learning about the medical field generally as well.  I trained as a phlebotomist and am making arrangements to test for my limited x-ray machine operator's license.  I have been fascinated by the challenges and nature of the medical field. There's an intriguing intimacy to healthcare that makes me feel a great deal of responsibility toward patients. I never thought that biochemistry would hold any interest for me but after studying it (in part at least) for a semester I've completely turned the corner and am engaged by protein structures and metabolic pathways.  There's clearly a lot to learn and do in this field and I'm eager to continue exploring it in year thirty one of life and beyond.

Expressing Curiosity in Science

As a student of the sciences, mostly physics and recently medicine, I often will get caught in discussions of 'what is science?' as in a recent lab class.  I often resist engaging in these because I feel they too often are trying to promote idealized views of this particular human endeavor.  The humanity of the enterprise is forgotten in trying to give it good PR.  Most recently I did have one thought on the subject that seemed of value though: science is one expression of the curiosity of mankind (and remember man in this context is gender neutral).

We have an interesting relationship with curiosity.  The most well known phrase in regards to the subject is, "Curiosity killed the cat." I like to use the snappy rejoinder, "Well we better try to satisfy curiosity before that psycho goes off killing small animals to get their jollies then," but I recognize that the implication the phrase carries is to take caution with exploration and intuition.  As should be obvious to the reader at this point I don't agree with this mentality, but that said it's never wise to throw caution to the wind entirely and we should certainly ensure that our actions properly reflect  the correct balance of our desire to know something and other desires, such as comfort, safety, and community.

I still think that on balance curiosity is a virtue.  I believe in the freedom of information, an understandable order and structure underlying the universe at large, and that challenges to one's thoughts and beliefs will eventually improve them if faced head on and not ignored.  Curiosity lets us promote and explore these things.  Consider what the opposite of curiosity might be.  A quick look in the thesaurus brings up disinterest, indifference, perhaps even apathy.  Does anyone really want to be with people or build a society with these qualities?

Science is one way in which we express our curiosity.  It's perhaps the simplest, being based on straightforward observation of a community.  Laws and theories are only useful in as much they can make verifiable predictions and only believable in as much as they are supported by data and experiment.  This does make science somewhat limited in scope as most will recognize that there exist things that simply can't be proven one way or the other, but the pragmatic and skeptical mentality is a powerful tool for any thinker.

Science is of course a human enterprise, though.  This expression of our curiosity is subject to the same forces that might make a desire for self improvement into greed or a longing for love and community into exclusion.  Having guiding principles in a great human venture never means we follow them perfectly, or if it does it probably means we're losing sight of other virtues.  The guiding virtues of science - observation, falsifiability and testability, and of course curiosity - will indeed help us in our endeavors to become virtuous.

Devon's Reading List

I had a cousin visit recently and during our conversations we noticed how I often referred to a handful of books for their valuable insights, information, and wisdom.  We decided I should collect a short list of these and so I present below the titles along with a short summary of why they're valuable.  Many of these I believe to be 'required reading' for people in certain careers or ventures of life and I'll include that in the description as well.

• The Obesity Myth - Paul Campos : A superb examination of the weight loss industry, culture, & political machine. The book does a great job of bringing to light just how overblown the obesity problem really is and how our current culture surrounding it probably exacerbates the problem much more than it helps (i.e. a main contributor to Americans' weight may be frequent weight cycling due to going on and off diets).  Highlights are:

1. An examination of how the weight loss industry, politicians, and much of mass media all seem to exhibit thinking patterns found in anorexics and this anorexic viewpoint (including a certain level of revulsion at fat or fatness or an obsession with monitoring our weight and diet) filters in to the public consciousness
2. A fascinating cultural analysis of why fat seems to be one of the few remaining acceptable prejudices
3. Some horrifying but transfixing investigations of what fat prejudice and mainstream acceptance of the obesity 'epidemic' imply for public and individual health (such as the failure to effectively regulate fen-phen and patients with serious diseases that had trouble getting treatment due to doctors jumping to obesity and diabetes).  

After mysteriously gaining weight shortly after moving to Utah (seriously my diet didn't seem to change appreciably and I was exercising the same amount to more than in Colorado) this book was also a breath of fresh air and helped me realize I didn't have to feel shame and failure for going from a size 38 to a size 40.

• Required reading for : Those in the health field or making public policy, and probably anyone that's struggled with with weight or body image issues which I guess probably means every American.
• Innumeracy - John Allen Paulos : A beautiful explanation of the problems facing mathematics education and awareness in the U.S.  The title itself is an excellent commentary on the issue, innumeracy being the numerical equivalent to letters' illiteracy, and the fact that one of those terms is well known and the other, well, probably had to be invented speaks volumes.  It's an eye opening work and (though hopefully after reading it you'd feel a little embarrassed to ask) it's written without using any advanced mathematics so those that might need to hear the message the most will still be able to hear it loud and clear.  I've written some of my feelings around the subject previously in this blog here and here, so I won't belabor these ideas anymore at this time except to say that this book is a great analysis of the issue with mathematics in modern U.S. culture that I find appalling and everyone else seems comfortable with.
• Required reading for : Anyone going into education, especially elementary education as studies have shown them to be most uncomfortable with math and many of the problems individuals having arising in their early learning experiences.  Probably another one with wide enough impact on culture and society that those making public policy require a read as well.
• The Female Brain and The Male Brain - Louann Brizendine : An intriguing description of the physical differences in neural circuits, makeup, and systems between the sexes.  I find myself quoting this work probably at least once a week as things like 'Men can't multitask' can finally be part of a deeper conversation through explanations like, 'That's because female brains have a 30% larger corpus callosum (the structure connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) and a higher density of white matter (the structures in the brain representing connections between different nerve cells).  Female brains are indeed much more capable of making connections between differing ideas and performing more functions at once as their wiring facilitates that. It also explains why they often see connections between things that men view as separate and unrelated.'  Lest you think this may be a work promoting typical gender stereotypes and sexist viewpoints note that Dr. Brizendine in an interview said she wrote the first book, The Female Brain, with the intention of giving men 'brain envy' (an analog to Freud's 'penis envy').  I suspect that didn't occur for most of the male readers, but still I can say after reading the book I have a great deal more respect and regard for the female brain as a powerful processor that, like a CPU and GPU, simply works differently than I'm used to.  I've even been known to go so far as to say that after understanding the neurology of both sexes I think the female brain is wildly better suited for the modern day and the male brain has numerous systems and circuitry that were well designed for a world a physical challenges like hunting but are mostly just burdensome in a world where challenges are usually more intellectual or in expressing and communicating with others and a community at large.
• Required reading for : People in or entering long term relationships with the opposite sex, and probably anyone raising children as it provides a wonderful road map of neural development by gender.
• Reality Is Broken - Jane McGonigal : I can describe the central idea of this book as 'video games (or gaming in general) have indeed become sources of very high levels of engagement recently and many people are finding the games in their life more compelling than any other aspect.  Far from an indictment of video (or other) games this is a severe indictment of managers, policy makers, teachers, and others to keep up and learn how to make life more fun and fulfilling from the principles of game design."  It really is kind of a bold idea now that I think about it, but I also think it's full of truth and power.  The book goes into what makes games so compelling in terms that elucidate just how positive and powerful they are, such as a gamer subconsciously saying "Wow, I can actually see the impact and consequences of my actions and how I'm progressing and improving," (Think experience points and level up meters).  It also provides some captivating and impressive examples of games used for a positive purpose, my favorites being McGonigal's own Super Better a game with a superhero theme that aids recovery from disease or severe injury (developed by McGonigal after being concussed), and Chore Wars a game that makes doing the household chores more rewarding (a love McGonigal's anecdote about her and her husband having to sneak quietly into the bathroom to scrub the toilet lest the other hear them and swoop in to steal the points for doing so).
• Required reading for : Management and educators.  I worked for a little over two years in a call center tech support environment and remember being constantly bewildered at how much improvement McGonigal's principles could make to employee morale, especially in such a statistics driven job.  Parents may also benefit greatly from learning a few game design principles to implement in motivating their kids to worthwhile ventures.

• Willpower - Roy F. Baumeister & John Tierney : A recent read that I also found full of wisdom and good advice the subtitle, Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, is also a decent summation.  The book tells us about the latest research into what willpower is and how it works, as well as some tips on how to develop and use it effectively. While it was an interesting and edifying read for me, the last section of the penultimate chapter and the final chapter really sealed it for me by hearkening to a few of the other books on this list. The part just before the final chapter seemed torn from the pages of Reality is Broken, bringing up how video games actually show how we strive to use willpower in meaningful ways and have the perfect systems to develop it, as gamers' willingness to play a section of a game over and over and master concepts within the game demonstrate.  The final chapter was on the greatest intended use of willpower, dieting and weight loss, and while it may just be my bias I did feel much of the chapter indicated the whole venture was misguided.  He does even say "never go on a diet" though he seems to be referring more to the idea of 'you should never go on a diet that you can't or don't intend to stay on for the rest of your life.'  As one who's always venerated self control I highly recommend this book.
• Required reading for : Parents, teachers, or anyone in childcare though any human being can probably get something of value from this read.  I think the lessons about developing willpower are best applied to youth, and possibly most important when considering how to raise a successful child, which is why parents should definitely give this one a read.

On Campus

Four years after graduating with a degree in physics I'm returning to school.  I've always loved learning.  New facts, viewpoints, and skills are a thrill to acquire and I'm ecstatic about the opportunity I'm carving out together with my wife to collect a new bushel of these in the field of radiology.  I'm counting down the days until classes start, and have already read the first chapter or two in the books I've bought.  I'm excited to be back on the university campus.

The campus, in particular, has turned out to be something I didn't even know I had missed.  When I walked around the campus recently to fill out financial aid forms and speak with an academic counselor I took in with glee just being on a college campus.  I adored looking over artwork and artifacts displayed in hallways and lobbies of the health professions building.  I enjoyed the bustle of the student union and looked over message boards to see if any clubs, bands, or activities would catch my interest.

The college campus is a great reflection of the community made up by a college or university.  So much of community is ethereal these days that the physical presence felt on a college campus is refreshing.  Being 'at the office' has this too, but so few workspaces also include socialization, recreation, or relaxation spaces in them as well.  All is devoted to getting the job done, whereas on campus the goals of creating a positive culture and promoting student interaction also seem very present in the consideration of the buildings and landscapes.

I also love the diversity of a college campus.  Diversity often refers to a high degree of heterogeneity in skin colors, sexualities, and other traits with which the human race sadly divides ourselves into factions, but that's not to what I'm referring to here.  I love that the art building is on the other side of the student union from the business school.  I like knowing the computer science building is across the quad from the mineral museum.  I love the diversity of opinion, of interest, of passion, of expertise, or of study represented by having buildings devoted to so many varied pursuits together in one place.

The university experience and the role of post-secondary education is changing rapidly in our society.  Online classes are quickly gaining traction and more and more people are realizing that the bachelor's degree often doesn't carry the same value it once did and may not be worth the price tag it often carries.  I support this and believe that post-secondary education and career training  needs to be more readily available in an assortment of forms (and that high schools need to teach more career training and less academic fluff seemingly only to fill the time until you finally go to college and learn something useful...hopefully, but all of that is a different discussion entirely).  That said, I hope there will always be a place for the grand college campus that seems to include a park or two, community message boards and meeting houses, and building after building devoted to disparate intellectual pursuits.

Ownership in the Modern Age

We all subscribe to several services today.  Streaming video, e-books, music, and probably any other media you can think of come from a third party.  These providers are replacing the traditional physical media which end users purchased to enjoy a song or show.  I personally don't really care to buy DVDs anymore, even though I used to enjoy buying them to watch great TV shows or movies.  This prompts an interesting question; what do I own with these services?

The answer is, nothing.  This is very clear in the legal documentation of these service providers.  They own the content, we own a very limited license to rent it on an ongoing basis.  I don't own anything, and oddly I seem to be OK with this.  Is the very concept of ownership changing, possibly for the first time in human history?

Ownership was very straightforward for a long time.  An object, if I owned it, was mine and this meant only I could access and use it without having to ask permission.  This was all well and good when what we traded was objects, which was true for pretty much all of human history up until the last 50 years or so.  Information couldn't be encoded usefully into anything without directly changing the structure of that object in such a way that they were inextricably connected (writing something down changed a slab of stone to an engraved slab of stone, or paper into an ink stained paper, for instance).  Reproducing a piece of information was even harder.  In the modern age the exact opposite is true, computers take in gigabytes of information effortlessly with only minor changes to how the computer is assembled (magnetic sectors or electric cells in hard disks or solid state memory changing slightly) and this can be changed again with a simple word of instruction.  Reproducing this information to copy somewhere else or play back for our enjoyment is trivial.

What will this mean to our concept of ownership?  Especially as even the 'personal computer' gives way more and more to cell phones and tablets that store much of their media 'in the cloud,' and even the defining characteristic of whether or not it was something we had physical possession of fades away?  I'm most interested in what the rising generation will come to understand about ownership.

Traditional ownership will still apply to clothes (at least until we install the self adjusting nano-fiber network in our bodies that can become any outfit possible that's been programmed in) I guess, but books, movies, media - which is so important in shaping our culture - will start to be something that we don't own ourselves, but is doled out to us by 'service providers.'  Even the devices we view this on may continue to fall into trends of two year, yearly, or more frequent upgrades.  I would be more sanguine about these possibilities if our copyright law were more reasonable and our relationship with convenience less like an addiction.  The phrase, "It's not on netflix" already seems to be finding it's way into culture as synonymous with, "I can't get access to it."

A common piece of wisdom is that individuals are, or at least can be, intelligent but large groups are almost always lacking in reason.  This may be part of the genius of the founding fathers framing of America as a country where the individual citizen has power and the government at large is limited.  I think this is why I don't want to see traditional ownership fade away.  The less we can possess media, the less we're able to work with, exploit, and use it for our own means and the more we are at the mercy of corporations, governments, and other large groups- that may be lacking in reason - to engage with the media that informs our life and culture.

Why I Like to Play Pretend

I've always loved to play pretend.  As a kid the most entertaining thing I could do was imagine myself as someone different in a vastly different world.  My parents have said that in my early years a teacher once, in reference to my independent imaginings of intrigue, said something like, "I was a little worried that Devon wasn't getting along with the other kids, but then I realized he just doesn't find playing with them that interesting."  And why would I have?  What possible competition could attempts to direct the motion of a ball around a field hold to the vivid flights of fancy surging through my mind?

I still like playing pretend, but with age have changed the ways I do so.  There's writing, which is fun in it's creativity but requires quite a bit of commitment to craft something really satisfying.  It's certainly not on par with running back and forth during recess freely directing the actions of whatever amazing character I had created.  Reading is even more restrictive, and movies and television more so still.  The best way I've found to recapture that adventurous imagining of childhood, and even build on it in some ways, is through tabletop role-playing games.

Tabletop RPGs aren't known for being creative and fun, except by those who've played them.  Their reputation has sadly been horribly slandered almost since their inception. The most popular tabletop RPG, Dungeons and Dragons, was criticized in early years, like many works of fantasy such as the Harry Potter series, as being something which promoted satanism and witchcraft.  This had the unfortunate effect of causing the game's creator, Gary Gygax, to feel he shouldn't admit to being a Christian.  As he told a convention of gamers in 2007, "I was reticent to say the fact, you know, that I was a Christian, mainly because I was afraid that I would give Christianity a bad name because I did D&D. So I did, I kept my mouth shut."

The problem wasn't helped by a mother who, in my-admittedly biased by persecution and somewhat uncharitable given the involved tragedy-opinion, rather than accept the sad truths of mental illness which caused her son to commit suicide decided to crusade against Dungeons as Dragons as the evil which stole her son away from her.  The result has been a society that largely feared the game (it even seemed a little creepy to me as a youngster after I got an email, probably an ad or invitation to an online game, that talked about how to hold 'death matches' and my father mentioned it sounded like "A D&D thing," which was reasonable but devoid of the now known innocuousness of pretend in those early days of both the game and the internet), and pushed only those sufficiently unbothered by the tut-tuts of society at large to be able to enjoy the game.  This turned out to be the "nerds," and has left Dungeons and Dragons in particular and tabletop role playing in general with a stigma of silly foolishness engaged in only by those who never go outside or shower that has persisted to this day.

All this is a shame, really, because the games are quite fun and have a lot to offer.  Tabletop RPGs provide a system for cooperative story telling.  They can be similar in some ways to the games of 'pass the story' one might have played around campfires or in grade school writing classes, though a major difference is that one person takes primary control of the plot and everyone else directs the actions and dialogue of the main characters.  The game rules help with this by creating a system for directing action, resolving conflicts, and defining a character's attributes.  If you want to play a character that's particularly strong, but kinda dumb you can put this in his ability scores.  The old playground fights, of, "I shot you." "Nuh, uh, I dodged it." are resolved with attack modifiers, armor classes, and dodge skill rolls.  Players give respectful smiles and cheers to one another as they roll high numbers on dice of varied shapes, meaning that their characters have landed heavy blows on fearsome foes.

That camaraderie is another great thing about gaming.  A group of friends being creative and enjoying one another's company.  They pepper the story with details, often humorous as it's always fun to joke with friends.  Friends come together in the game world to take on great evils and seek untold riches or amazing power, and they come together in our world to have fun and tell a good story.

I wish the hobby didn't have the baggage it does, because I think it adds a lot of value to one's life and could be used for many wonderful things, but it doesn't seem like I'll ever be able to get together that church group of gaming friends where an ecclesiastical leader guides the adventures of a group of holy warriors fighting the forces of evil and striving to live the principles of their faith, the professional group of executives playing characters who are always striving to gain treasure and power but must also protect the innocent and the weak to avoid alignment penalties, nor the student group adventuring to find the secrets of the universe.  Games are a painfully under-utilized tool to motivate companionship, self-improvement, and promoting good causes.  Tabletop RPGs are another unfortunate example of this.  I'll still have fun playing though, whenever I can find a few friends that also enjoy playing games and being creative together.

Your Moral Earth's Magnetic Field

I've heard people talk about how important their moral compass is to them.  What this means can be something different to any different person, but one definition that I think matches most people's conception is, "a natural feeling that makes people know what is right and wrong and how they should behave."  Are the natural feelings we have really what should make us know what's right and wrong?

Doing what's natural may not be a terrible basis for morality, but it's not a good one either.  We have a number of pack animal and cooperative instincts that guide us toward some caring and concern for our fellow man (and remember man is gender neutral in this context).  These also create an aversion toward malice in many contexts, which is also good.  Our instincts don't stop with these, 'love your neighbor' drives though.

Being a pack animal leads to a set of instincts, and while some of those are positive like what's stated above others are decidedly negative.  It leads to a tribalism, probably due to competition with other packs.  We protect our own, but those who aren't are own are usually fair targets for whatever we can dish out.  This is why looking at history we only seem to have been fighting against racism, sexism, or similar discrimination for about a century or two, and to some even that's being quite generous.  There's also significant drives to personal status and individual gain.  We want the pack to be strong, but we also want to be the head of the pack (or at least be very secure about our position in it) and there's a good chance we're willing to trade the good of our group for a high position in it, too.  This is why children throw tantrums, politicians and important businessman are as willing to admit mistakes as they are to part with teeth, and people gossip about the shortcomings of acquaintances.

This leads me back to the idea of a moral compass.  Truthfully, I think it's a good analogy as long as we remember one thing: a compass doesn't operate in a vacuum.  A compass is a magnetized needle set on a spindle (or sometimes in other ways, such as suspended in a liquid).  It points to the north because it aligns itself with the Earth's magnetic field.  In morality, this leads to the question that might be much more important than how is your moral compass, but what is your moral Earth's magnetic field.

What things external to ourselves help us understand what is moral and what is not?  Is it divine scripture?  Public opinion and associated feelings of dignity or shame?  Articulate and interesting discussions on ethics?  All of these have flaws which must be examined and guarded against and all have certain merits as well.  Compasses can be disrupted by anything that produces strong magnetic fields, like high electrical current.  Precise navigation may also require an adjustment between magnetic north and 'true north' since the Earth's magnetic poles aren't perfectly aligned with her north and south poles.  Just like a compass will not point true in a lightning storm or around power lines we should learn where our moral compass may fail to point us true and why if we want to stay true to our moral north wherever we go.