Zuzu.com yesterday carried a story about what has to be the world’s largest treehouse — 97 feet high and 11 stories — see “The World’s Greatest Treehouse.” The treehouse was built by Horrace Burgess in Crossville, Tennessee. The article includes many stunning photos.
Here’s one of the photos, linked from Zuzu:
AB — 27 Oct. 2009
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, an interesting study that contradicts much traditional thinking about success, merit, and entitlement.
The comforting aspect of Outliers is that it turns out that all those arrogant muckymucks who thought they were better than you really weren’t so special. But the downside is that neither are you.
The traditional narrative is that people who excel make it to the top through willpower, dogged effort, and especially through that magical spark of something that is only found in the hearts of special people. Gladwell marshals some quite persuasive evidence that the very successful people in the world — the outliers — really benefit from being born at the right time and from receiving the right kind of assistance and influences in their lives.
Bill Gates became successful because he had unlimited access to a timesharing computer as a teenager. The Beatles became successful because they got a gig in Hamburg, Germany, playing eight hours a day in a strip club (read the book to find out how this makes sense).
According to Gladwell, the important takeaway is that many more people could be much better at what they do if society could provide them with the kind of environment that allows success to happen.
Gladwell’s arguments and evidence are intriguing and persuasive. I have doubts about how much influence this book will have — the myth of merit is too seductive. People love rags-to-riches stories. Many successful people are convinced that they have made it because they tried really hard or were smarter than everybody else — or because they are specially blessed by God or some other higher power.
As I’ve said before, it’s easy to think God is on your side when all the lights are green.
AB — 24 Sept. 2009
A student mental health nurse who is also a cartoonist is creating a book about mental illness. Calling himself “Tall Guy,” he has published his chapters on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder on his LiveJournal blog.
These comic strips are very informative as well as entertaining, and I think they are very accurate — I have studied counseling and abnormal psychology and worked for several years as a counselor and mental health worker in a psychiatric institution. I have also worked as a volunteer helper for mentally ill people and have friends and family members who suffer from mental illnesses.
Having befriended many people suffering from these disorders, I like to see others educate themselves about them. Tall Guy’s cartoons are a very accessible way to do that.
Here are links to his blog entries on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder:
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One source says Tall Guy’s name is Daryl Cunningham and that his book will be called Psychiatric Tales, to be published in 2010.
As an aside, for an alternative viewpoint on psychiatric medications, Crazy Meds is an interesting web resource. It’s a user-oriented web site “by crazy people for crazy people,” maintained by Jerod Poore, who calls himself “Chief Citizen Medical Expert.”
AB — 24 Sept. 2009
I just decided today that I can’t play piano because of my first-grade teacher’s southern accent.
For my first few days in the first-grade classroom of Miss Margaret Mackintosh at Mount Vernon Goodwin Elementary School in Raleigh, NC, in 1957, I was puzzled by the kids who left the classroom at odd times during the day to take Miss Margaret “out.”
I couldn’t understand why Miss Margaret would need little kids to take her out, presumably to dinner. I was even more puzzled because Miss Margaret did not go with them on these mysterious excursions. How could they take Miss Margaret out when she didn’t even go with them?
Later I learned I had been the victim of a linguistic difference between Miss Margaret and the dialect I learned at home. Miss Margaret was not in fact asking to be taken to dinner. She was inviting students to take piano, which she pronounced as “pee-ann-uh.”
Unfortunately, the piano-lessons boat had already left the dock, and I had missed my opportunity.
AB — 10 Sept., 2009
I recently completed two books by two very different authors, Douglas Rushkoff and Benjamin Wiker. However, the serendipitous fact that I read them one right after the other brought home to me some intriguing commonalities between the two, focusing particularly on the widespread societal effects of social darwinism.
The two books are:
Although I suspect that these two authors would be very far apart on political issues, my reading of these two books in juxtaposition emphasized two interesting commonalities:
In writing the above, I also came to an interesting realization on another more-subtle commonality: Wiker starts with the classic cynical treatise The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. Rushkoff starts with the Middle-Age “princes” who created the corporation and imposed central currency in Europe.
Rushkoff’s premise is that the aristocracy in the Middle Ages devised the chartered corporation as a legal mechanism to give them control over commerce and wealth. Because of their privileged status granted by government, corporations have progressively gained more power, even becoming legal “persons” over time.
Rushkoff’s criticism is that Western society has become steeped in corporatism, and that this pits individuals against one another in a win-lose competitive struggle. People operate according to unconscious corporatist values and assumptions about how life should be and are prevented from connecting in a natural way through communities.
Wiker’s premise is that modern civilization has been affected by a materialistic, atheistic philosophical tradition preserved and promoted by a series of highly-influential thinkers and their books, starting with Machiavelli, then Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kinsey, along with others along the way.
As I said, where I see an important commonality between Rushkoff and Wiker is when it comes to their implications and comments about social darwinism: The modern world is strongly influenced by the idea that the natural order demands that the strong survive and the weak die off.
Ruskoff writes,
Richard Dawkins’s theory of the “selfish gene” popularized the extension of evolution to socioeconomics. Just as species competed in a battle for the survival of the fittest, people and their “memes” competed for dominance in the marketplace of ideas.
Human nature was simply part of biological nature, complex in its manifestations but simple in the core commands driving it. Like the genes driving them, people could be expected to act as selfishly as Adam Smith’s hypothetical primitive man, “the bartering savage,” always maximizing the value of every transaction as if by raw instinct.
Ironically, says Rushkoff, religionists were used to promote a compatible economic regime:
Right-wing conservatives turned to fundamentalist Christians to promote the free-market ethos, in return promising lip-service to hot-button Christian issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
It was now the godless Soviets who sought to thwart the Maker’s plan to bestow the universal rights of happiness and property on mankind. America’s founders, on the other hand, had been divinely inspired to create a nation in God’s service, through which people could pursue thier individual salvation and savings.
Rushkoff contends that
What both PR efforts had in common were two falsely reasoned premises: that human beings are private, self-interested actors behaving in ways that consistently promote personal wealth, and that the laissez-faire free market is a natural and self-sustaining system through which scarce resources can be equitably distributed.
Wiker follows the development of atheistic social darwinism from Machiavelli, but he takes considerable time to establish the connection between Darwin and eugenics. On pages 88 to 89 of 10 Books he quotes from Darwin’s Descent of Man (not as well known as On the Origin of Species):
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health …. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination [by means of various works of charity and relief]. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind ….
If … various checks … do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world.
Wiker argues that the writings of Darwin and other atheistic thinkers have led to a modern world in which the weak are seen as expendable for the good of human progress.
At the end of his book, Wiker comments:
We are so fond of thinking of our progress from the simple savage that we forget to take account of whether we are really progressing in some sort of virtue or rather becoming more complexly and deviously savage.
We have a higher regard for health than our ancestors did, and a far greater knowledge of biology. But when biology, rather than theology, becomes the queen of the sciences, then Christian prohibitions against eugenics, the elimination of the unfit or the unwanted through abortion or infanticide, or the elimination of diseased races or classes all become merely “medieval” and irrelevant.
Rushkoff and Wiker approach their analyses with very different objectives and foci, and it would be far from accurate to say that they reach the same conclusions.
But both Life Inc. and 10 Books That Screwed Up the World shine light on some of the historical and philosophical sources of the great streak of heartlessness evident in the modern world.
In about 1970, I was picked up hitchhiking on I-85 in North Carolina by an older fellow driving a sedan. We got into a conversation about the problems of the world. From his point of view, one of the biggest problems was welfare and charity — all the giveaway programs that are supposed to help the poor.
I raised the question, Well, what are they supposed to do? Suppose they need help to survive and get back on their feet?
His response was, “Who cares? Let ’em die. That’s the way nature works.”
I wonder who he had been reading.
AB — 4 September 2009
The other day I ran across a kind of cute story in the Daily News about the couple holding each other wrapped in a quilt, the photo of whom was used on the cover of the Woodstock album and has become one of those iconic 60s images — see “Woodstock concert’s undercover lovers, Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, 40 years after summer of love.”
Upon looking at the photo, though, what occurred to me was not how romantic or evocative the image might be, but how much litter is on the ground and what a mess the festival made. Here’s a link to the photo:
And here’s the same couple today (still married):
AB — 20 July 2009
Just yesterday I read on The Watchismo Times (a blog dedicated to unusual timepieces) about a new mechanical wristwatch designed with a linear time display rather than the traditional circular clock face. (See “Urwerk King Cobra CC1 Reintrepretation of 1958 Patek Philippe Cobra Prototype – Cylindrical Retrograde Linear Jumping Hour Display.”)
This design is thought-provoking: We normally conceive of time as a line, and yet for centuries the standard timepiece interface has been a circle. The author of the Watchismo site explains why this is:
Why do we think of time as travelling in a straight line yet display it rotating around a circle? The answer is straightforward: mechanisms that continually rotate are much simpler to produce than those that trace a straight line then return to zero. In fact, the latter is so difficult that, until now, nobody has ever managed to develop a production wristwatch with true retrograde linear displays.
It makes me think about how I conceive time personally. In the big picture, I think I do see time as a straight line going infinitely to the left and right.
In spite of the more linear design of the calendars I use, I believe I conceive of the calendar as a circle, as if the year were superimposed on a standard clock face. However, in my mind, the calendar runs counterclockwise with January at approximately the 11:00 position. I think my circular conception of the calendar comes from the periodic nature of the solar year. Why the year goes counterclockwise in my mind I don’t know.
When it comes to my conception of days, though, I see some ambiguities. I do conceive of them on some level as a circle of 24 hours, but on reflection I think that conception is at least partly based on the circular clock faces we use to keep time, as well as on the collective 24-hour standard we use to keep our society synchronized.
Certainly the new Urwerk King Cobra CC1 provides food for thought about how we think about time and about the user interfaces of the devices we use to keep track of it. Below is a link to Watchismo’s picture of the watch. Watchismo also provides many fascinating details about how the watch is designed and constructed.
AB — 10 July 2009
Robert S. McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under U.S. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, died yesterday at age 93 — see today’s article in The Washington Post.
As a teenager during the Vietnam war, my view of McNamara was two-dimensional, you might say. For the black-and-white morality of a young war resister, he was the enemy.
Years passed, and I didn’t think about Robert McNamara much until 2004, when the documentary The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara came out.
Watching the movie, I was fascinated at the nuanced picture it presented of this once-controversial and divisive figure. The film includes comments from a long interview with McNamara. It would be over-simplifying to say that he admits he and other policy-makers were wrong in the way they prosecuted the Vietnam conflict. He really gives the viewer a sense of how hard it is for decision-makers to be certain they are doing the right thing.
Watching and listening to McNamara in his late-80s, I also remember feeling some shame at my previous attitude toward this somewhat stooped old fellow in his tan raincoat.
Can’t remember where I read it, but it was good advice: If you find yourself hating someone, try imagining them as a helpless little baby or as a very old person near the end of their life.
AB — 6 July 2009
[Note: This is another essay/memoir I wrote awhile back and just rediscovered. Decided to publish it here on Quriosity to give it the exposure and adulation it deserves. AB — 26 June 2009]
The American Dream
A memoir, mostly true, from Spring 1972
by Al Bredenberg
Oct. 10, 2006
Melissa (not her real name) walked with me across the quadrangle after our American Literature class. The sun shone on her curly brown hair through the tall oak trees, their leaves bright green in their early spring growth. Melissa had very large brown eyes and an ample figure that filled out in a pleasing way the tight dress with low-cut rounded neckline, a bright floral print on crinkly fabric like crepe paper.
I asked her to go out with me and was happy when she said she would.
The night of our date, I walked to Melissa’s dorm from the house near downtown Chapel Hill where I lived with my friends John and Linda. Melissa lived in Granville Towers, not exactly a dorm — more of a quasi-off-campus apartment tower for kids with a little more money. When I had lived on campus my first semester, I had lived in Avery, one of the plebe dorms on campus.
Melissa was what at the time I would have called a “straight girl.” I didn’t go out with many straight girls, but Melissa was very pretty and nice to talk to — a doll with cheerleader good looks. And when I asked her out she said yes, so that was a positive sign. That usually didn’t happen with straight girls.
To be honest, I don’t remember much about that date. Knowing my financial situation at the time, I doubt if we did anything that cost money. I do remember that Melissa dressed down for me, wearing jeans with a white blouse. I do remember walking together; there’s a real possibility that the entire date consisted of walking around Chapel Hill and the UNC campus. I remember I told her about the meditation and yoga classes I had been taking from Ananda Marga Yoga Society and about my recent initiation with an Indian teacher called Dadaji. Hearing all of this, Melissa listened politely but didn’t have much to say. I can’t imagine what she thought about this skinny, long-haired, bearded oddball with the expanding consciousness.
Besides American Literature, I was taking Latin, Music Appreciation, and Creative Writing. In American Literature we were studying The Great Gatsby — my second try at this novel, as it was one of the ones I was supposed to have read as a junior in high school.
One day, not long after my date with Melissa (not her real name), our professor, Dr. Allen (not his real name either) started using the phrase “the American Dream” during our Great Gatsby discussion. That phrase actually sneaked out of his mouth and drifted around the room two or three times before it slithered past me and got my attention. He used it in a familiar, pat, matter-of-fact sort of way, but I wasn’t about to let him get away with it.
“What do you mean by ‘the American Dream’?” I blurted out.
Dr. Allen leveled a smug gaze at me, a hint of a smile pulling up the corners of his mouth. He explained the concept in a soothing voice: “It’s the goal we all have as Americans: to achieve wealth and success through hard work and competition.”
I sat back, eyes wide, jaw dropping. “You’re joking, right?”
The silvery, balding professorial head tilted slightly. “That’s what we’re all looking for. That’s what happiness is all about, isn’t it?”
“Nobody really believes that, do they?” Titters arose from around the classroom. I glanced around at my classmates.
“That’s why you’re all here at college. To get an education, get a good job, get ahead in the world.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Nobody really buys that, do they?” More titters and a few guffaws. Dr. Allen smiled down indulgently. I glanced wildly around the classroom. “Is that what you all think? Do you really think it’s going to make you happy to make it in this world and get rich?” Their expressions gave me the answer.
“So did you think that was funny?” I asked Melissa after class, as we walked across the brick courtyard in front of the bookstore. Big round eyes, full face, rounded figure. She smiled and nodded.
It came to me that this was going to be my last semester at UNC, even though I loved learning and I was making good grades. I was going to finish the semester in a few weeks and go get a job as a carpenter.
“Why are you here at school?” I asked her.
She shrugged and spoke in a matter-of-fact, ‘well, of course’ tone: “So I can get a job and make a lot of money.”
“Is that really what you think is going to make you satisfied?”
A puzzled smile on her luscious mouth. So beautiful it hurt to look at her. “Well, sure.”
“I don’t believe in it,” I said. “It’s not real.”
Large brown eyes glistening. “I don’t understand what you mean,” said Melissa. Not her real name. Actually, I don’t remember her real name.
AB — Written 10 October 2006, posted here 26 June 2009
[Note: The following is an essay I wrote in December 2003 put never published anywhere. I just ran across it and thought I would post it on Quriosity.]
Two months ago I stood in a cemetery in Wilton, Connecticut, looking down at the shiny wooden coffin containing the body of my wife Virginia’s uncle, Paul Lyon, soon to be lowered into the dug grave and covered with earth. Nearby the coffin stood an easel bearing a montage of photos from Uncle Paul’s life mounted on a sheet of poster board. A good breeze was blowing, so my chunky teenage nephews, Kellen and Tristan, trussed uncomfortably in neckties and sport jackets, stood flanking the easel like a pair of ushers, holding either side of the cardboard sheet to keep Uncle Paul’s pictures from sailing away on the wind.
I’m a real crybaby, and that day was no exception; I thought about the cold body inside that wood box — a man I had known and liked, an affable man of my parents’ World War II generation, who had lived what I supposed was a basically decent life.
Two photos stuck to that cardboard matting also stick in my mind from that windy day in the cemetery:
One, a picture of Paul Lyon sleek in his airman’s uniform during the war, not much older than my willowy 20-year-old son Paul (named more for my father than for my wife’s uncle, and named even more for the apostle than for any relative).
The other, a photo of Paul Lyon at age 80, only a few weeks before his death, standing at his front door waving goodbye. Maybe when he lifted his hand to the camera for that wave, he had in mind the cancer that was spreading inexorably inside him.
I think a lot about life and death, and I find myself again and again coming back to photos and to numbers. I told you about some photos; now consider some numbers: At 52, I stand right about between son Paul and uncle Paul: age 20, age 50, age 80. Thirty years back and I am my son’s age, hitchhiking across the country with a duffle bag, tambourine, and five dollars in my pocket. Thirty years ahead and I am lying in a wooden crate.
I love to look at old photos from the 19th century, to leaf through a book and muse on the faces of people from that time. Their faces are fresh, the spark of life is in their eyes. In a moment, this man, I imagine, will turn from the camera, kiss his wife, walk home with her, have dinner, go to bed, and make love.
In reality, he is long dead, a pile of bones under the ground. In fact, all of these faces are gone, carried away on the wind across a cemetery. They are all dead, every single one. Maybe nobody now living remembers them or even knows their names.
And of course, the thing that I am trying to grapple with, to force myself to confront, is that, in the normal course of things, mine will become a face like that. Someone will look at my face in an album, wonder briefly who I was, then flip to the next page.
You should understand that I am speaking as one who believes that this life is not all there is, that there is a higher being who cares, who remembers us and will bring us back. And that belief underpins my life so I can live hopefully. But it doesn’t completely do away with the visceral reaction to the enveloping death that is moving toward me to cover me over and draw me down into the unthinkable sleep. It will flow over me, and I will be gone. How can there be a world, if I am not in it?
Last week I got in my car to drive up to New Hampshire to my consulting job at a graduate school in Keene. The Public Radio program Morning Edition was on, and because of the proximity of Christmas, the interviewer was speaking with bookstore managers across the country asking for recommendations of good books for gifts.
One store manager recommended a book called “When It Was Our War,” and my stomach dropped when I heard the name of the author, Stella Suberman. Jack and Stella Suberman were friends of my parents when I was growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. I remember watching them play tennis with my mother and father, and I remember swimming in their pool, and I remember them from dinner parties and cookouts. They were two larger-than-life people, awe-inspiring and wonderful and frightening (well, Jack was scary, anyway — Stella was bright and beautiful and charismatic).
One of the devastating moments in my life (among many, admittedly) was when I told my mother I wanted to invite the Subermans to come to my high school graduation and she waved off the idea — the Subermans don’t really know me that well, she said, and they would think it odd if I invited them to my graduation. Suddenly I learned I was nothing in the eyes of these two marvelous people who had been giants to me.
So, sitting in the car last week, hearing a recommendation of Stella’s World War II memoir, I was affected … well, as I said before, I’m a real crybaby. First chance I got, I ordered a copy of “When It Was Our War” from Half.com and started reading it this week.
Reading Stella’s book I become a time traveler. It’s a story of the young wife of a soldier during the war. The fascinating thing is that I am peering into the lives of two people, important in my childhood, before I ever knew them, before I was even born. On the cover of the book are black and white photos, a small one of Jack in his uniform, a larger one of a gorgeous Stella in a short tennis skirt, leaning against a palm tree. In the photos, Jack and Stella are easily recognizable as the people I knew. Seeing their faces, I can hear their voices on the tennis court and by the pool.
But reading Stella’s reminiscence and seeing these photos gets me going playing with numbers as I am wont to do.
In these photos, Jack and Stella are about 20, the age my son is now. But they are actually the contemporaries of my father and Virginia’s departed uncle. So I can peek in on their lives and see them practically as children. When I knew them 15 years later, they seemed old and formidable to me. But even at that age, they were in fact youthful in comparison with my now ancient age of about 50.
So I take these odd jumps of 15 years backward and forward along the line of my life and that of the Subermans and somehow it emphasizes to me how fleeting it all is, while yet so rich and wonderful.
Here’s another game with numbers: I was born in 1951. Go back about five years and you’re at the end of the Second World War, which doesn’t seem that long ago to me but would to my 20-year-old son. Go back just 35 years from 1951, and you are at the end of the First World War. That does seem like a long time ago to me, but it’s a relatively short period of time compared to the 50 years that have passed (quickly it seems to me) since 1951.
I wonder if I’m making any sense.
What it kind of amounts to is that I am like the character Dave in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”: I’m a middle-aged man looking back at myself as a young man. But standing in the doorway is an old man, also myself, watching me as a middle-aged man. The whole thing passes in a flash. Day by day, the experience is sweet and incredibly deep. But all in all, 80 years is very short.
As we drove away from the cemetery in Wilton, I told my sister-in-law Natalie and my nephews, “You know, the Bible says it’s good to go to a funeral. And it says that the day of your death is better than the day of your birth.”
Natalie was intrigued by the idea. She thought maybe I was referring to the cycle of life, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. The point is that when you’re born, you could turn out to be anything at all, good or bad. But at your death, you’ve had a lifetime to show what kind of person you are — what you made out of that thin thread of years as they spun their way out.
It’s Ecclesiastes 7:1, 2 I was thinking of: “A name is better than good oil, and the day of death than the day of one’s being born. Better it is to go to the house of mourning than to go to the banquet house, because that is the end of all mankind; and the one alive should take it to his heart.”
So I look through the pages of photos and run through the numbers in my head. And I try to take it to heart. Because I can feel the wind picking up, and all-in-all I’m not much more than a picture taped to a piece of poster board.
AB — written December 2003, posted 26 June 2009
A Thinking Person, a.k.a. Cogit8R 