loquacious

Juju (~1992-2009): He Paid His Kitty Rent

Dear Juju:

I don't know how to begin this letter. Your death overtook me in a way that I did not expect. We knew you were sick, but the end came quick for you, I was not prepared to let you go. I felt a grief and a sorrow that has no remedy. I've thought a lot about this over the past week.

I think you know how much we loved you, but it troubles me that there was no way of really telling you how much I appreciate all that you did for me and Otts. In your last days I really wanted you to understand that, to know what a difference it was you made in my life. Did you know? Could you know? You were a pretty smart cat, but I'll never know what you really understood.


 When you and Otts moved to the Thomas Street apartment, they charged Otts extra every month for having a pet in the apartment. We called this your kitty rent and tried to think of kitty-appropriate jobs that you could have to pay off your rent. Doughnut delivery was our favorite possibility, but as far as we knew, you never had a paying job. However, I want you to know that I think you paid your kitty rent, more than in full, over the years.

You paid in friendship. I think it still sounds odd to describe you as our friend, but you really were. Your 'puppy dog' ways made you always present in our lives, always around on our laps or under our feet or at minimum somewhere in the room keeping track of us. What friend is perfect? You were not, for sure. But it's the unique things about a friend that make them special, and you had lots of that.

Inside the apartment, you hunted for us each night. On your big legs and your clicking toenails (which we trimmed for you, like your personal kitty spa assistants) you brought your mousie toy to us each night, announcing your approach and hunting prowess with a distinctive meow, before settling your large self on our small bed for the night. You lay, a warm spot on our bed, somehow immovable, like you had swallowed a teaspoon of the sun. Our bed seems empty now, with only the two of us and your kitty brother.

At the risk of making this more about me than you, I can not get over my reaction to your death. I'm not ashamed or afraid of this grief. Grief over a death is the price you pay for having really loved someone. I'm glad to have this grief now because it affirms how much you meant to me, how much I loved you.

It seems wrong somehow that the world goes on. You were so unique and only brought happiness into the world, no sorrow, so it seems wrong that life continues. People drive their cars around, Congress talks about health care, I go to work. We buy groceries. We plan for the future. How can things go on when you are missing? Yet they do. I find this both hopeful and depressing. You are missing from the world and can never be replaced. Something unique and good is gone forever.

I firmly believe that there is nothing after life (and so the rhetorical conceit of this letter should be clear). The measure of who you are is solely based on the life that you have lived. Although there is no one and no thing anyone has to prove themselves to in this world, I can vouch for all the joy, happiness, and love you brought into the world. I'll always remember your warmth, your smell, your purr, the way you'd nuzzle your head on my chin when you were very happy. Mostly, I'll never forget the way you looked me in the eye when we talked. I really felt like you were listening and understood.

"The greatest gift of life is to know love." I'm sure you remember this song, we played it all the time. I really believe that that is true, and you both gave and got that gift. You paid your kitty rent.

I will love you always.

Ken

The Brain Science Dot: hidden forces in human thinking

I'm not quite sure what to call this dot, nor really sure what it means, yet.  But I think it does fit somewhere into the world of the major dots I'm trying to connect, under the assumption that there are some key interacting forces in our culture (and maybe the world) that are driving current affairs and might provide some kind of hints as to what direction things are headed in, or conflicts that may await us.

If I'm moving toward something here, it's that we're not really all that much in control of ourselves and our perceptions of the world. According to many books I've been reading, there are unseen battles going on in our heads, which we are largely unaware of. These battles impact our ability to think and the actions we take.  Without doubt, these have always been around, and as a believer in evolution, they no doubt at one time served an important evolutionary purpose (or at least they did not have an evolutionary downside). I think what I'm starting to wonder is if there now might be some serious downsides to how our brains work, given the world we now live in.

Just a few thoughts here, I'm sure it's not all adding up to anything yet (damn my brain...maybe it's purposely trying to thwart me?).

• Randomness: our brains are hardwired to see patterns and meaning where there is none. Randomness may actually be threatening to our brains, so we actively ignore it, causing us to misinterpret the world.
• Evil is Easy to Get Used To: based on Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect, shows how easily it is we can accept 'evil' things that would otherwise shock us, based largely on whether we think that authorities have approved such actions. Calls into doubt whether any of us have any real moral compass of our own, when other pressures come into play.
• More than One Brain: it's not even clear that we're in charge of our own brains. They make up some of their own shit part of the time. Our brains are particularly bad at managing times when they are receiving contradictory information.
• We can't trust our own Perceptions: and finally, even the inputs we think we are getting are not very trustworthy. Of what does get in, the brain is editing and/or filling in the missing parts, sometimes to disasterous results. 
• We're completely unaware of our biases: check out this great website, which can tell you more about your unconscious biases than you really ever wanted to know. They are beyond our control. How can we be just if we are unaware of the reasons for the judgments we make?
• Lakoff has written extensively about the (invisible to most of us) frames that guide our lives, opinions and decisions.

So, are we in control of ourselves? Can we shape our own futures -- and especially, can we change our perceptions/how we are?  I think it's the idea that all of this is invisible to us, that we're unaware of it, that I find so interesting. It makes working logically through problems much more difficult if there are forces at play that logic has no bearing on.

When I was working as an artist, I was always most fascinated with unsurfacing ideas or notions that lay beneath the surface of the human psyche, to get people to be willing to question ideas or assumptions which they found so apparently obvious that they had never thought to question them. I guess that interest continues still.

Book: The Drunkard's Walk: how randomness rules our lives

Leonard Mlodinow
2008
272 pp
Rating: 4 out of 5

Quite a fascinating book, which I am sure I will not do credit to here, at least partially because the discussion of some mathematical concepts got a little beyond me at times. But mostly very readable, I would not want to frighten anyone away from reading the book because of some challenging math/logic problems.

The book's thesis is that humans are not very adept at understanding randomness. We seem to be built to recognize patterns, and so randomness is a little hard for us to recognize when it happens. The author points this out in several ways, but the two that stick with me are:

1. Things that are actually random can sometimes appear to have a pattern. Think about it, if random things happen enough times, at some point they will appear to be happening in a patterned way. It's built into the definition of randomness!  But we are easily (and gladly, it would seem) fooled into thinking there is an actual pattern.
2. We just really want to see patterns where there are none. Mlodinow points out many experiments that have pretty much proven this. We especially want (and try to) see patterns that confirm our existing biases when confronted with absolutely randomized series of events.

The book starts with a rather brilliant examination of why people tend to fixate on what are really pure coincidences as somehow meaningful or part of a pattern, or even worse yet, having some kind of direct causal link when there absolutely is none. I've always thought that of course, in an infinite universe, anything can occur, so of course 'miraculous' seeming coincidences are going to naturally (if you will) occur all the time. I find that most people are not very appreciative when one brings this up. Mlodinow explains that too.... as beings that tend to excel (again, proven in experiments) when we feel more in control of any situation, randomness is seen as tremendously disempowering.... and therefore threatening.

I think this is giving me an idea for a new dot... one that has to do wtih limitations of our own brains/perceptions, and how they interfere with us accurately understanding the world around us.

Dishwasher v. Handwashing

Court is now in session!

I have long wondered about this question, but not until today (home sick) have I bothered to look it up. As I'm sure someone (ahem!) would point out in the comments if I did not do so myself, I really detest washing dishes by hand. It's not the action of it, I think it's the frequency with which it must be done. So I admit my bias, but I think you will find the evidence I present here impartial and of the most rigorous scientific standards.

The first place that Goggle sent me was to this TreeHugger.com post on the issue [worth reading for the comments - strong feelings by some there that their dishwashing techniques are powerfully superior to the test conditions]. In short, this summary of a German research report states that

The Bonn study proves that the dishwasher uses only half the energy and one-sixth of the water, less soap too. Even the most sparing and careful washers could not beat the modern dishwasher. The study also rated the cleanliness achieved, again in favor of the washing machine (sorry grandma). There have been studies before, but this is one of the few that stands (wo)man against machine and it sets itself apart by including a thorough analysis of the effect of half-loads and the whole demand range from your cake plate to the grimiest pots.

It links to The University of Bonn's Ag School "Household Technology" Research group. Here is their quite entertaining list of research projects, [for example, Uncertanty of measurement of tumble dryers.]

However, we are after the final word on the dishwashing question. It's actually a bit difficult to find the report the TreeHugger site references, since there has been quite a few obscure dishwashing-related research papers written here. However, I'm pretty sure this is the one in question (pdf file): Washing-up Behaviour and Techniques in Europe.  As the abstract states <SPOILER ALERT>:

In the discourse on global warming and other man-made environmental defects, the energy consumption of household appliances is under close scrutiny. Dishwashers, however, are used to substitute or supplement manual dish-washing, so that the question arises about the environmental effects not only of automatic but also of manual dish-washing. To investigate this question, a test was performed covering seven European countries/regions for which the consumption and performance of manual dish-washing was compared with the equivalent data for dish-washing machines, following standardised conditions (EN 50242). As result out of the investigation of 113 persons it is found that the average consumption to clean 12 place settings of dishes was measured to 103 litres of water, 2,5 kWh of energy and 79 minutes time. When these data are compared with values of a new A/A/A dishwashing machine (best machines according to European Energy Labelling scheme taking about 15 litre of water and 1,05 kWh of energy for a full load), possible savings get evident. For a full load this results in 88l water per cycle or about 32,000 litre a year saved when the dishwasher is used once per day fully loaded.

I must state that the report is a literary masterpiece. It combines a very rigorous case-study approach with a fine statistical analysis. The case studies are not to be missed. Who would have thought that a page long description of how a specific person washes dishes would be so interesting? (And I'm talking micro detail here)  However, the more of these you read, the better it gets. The differences in style and approach to hand dishwashing in this study is intense. At the end of each, you can read exactly how much water, energy (heat for the hot water), time, and soap was consumed by each technique. Some techniques used 20x more water than others!

The novel's report's coup de grace, however, comes when, on page 9, the author slips into the summary table a comparison of use of a dishwasher to all the hand techniques used.  Guess what? The dishwasher uses less water, less to about the same energy, takes less (human) time, and produces cleaner dishes than the handwashing techniques. The biggest difference was in the water-usage area -- only the most miserly handwashers even came close to the dishwasher in water consumption...however, their dishes did not get as clean as their techniques necessitated re-use of dishwater. [they measured cleanliness as well]

Also fascinating was to find out that there is an international standard for the creation of dirty dishes for use in dishwashing-related research. I shit you not.

Um, I guess it should be noted, in all fairness, that the dishwasher comparison was for newer (and presumably European) dishwashers. Not sure how US dishwashers stack up for energy and water use that way.

I'm sure there is research that proves the opposite. Handwashers, fire away!

Book 21: A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
2003
478 pp.
Rating: 5 of 5

I think that Bryson has nailed it on the head here. The natural world around us is basically unknown to us. Those who understand its deep mysteries spend years becoming experts and don't know how to explain it all to anyone. Moreover, I'm not sure that we'd really get it. The universe is a bizarre place that life here on earth hasn't really prepared us to understand -- which is kind of logical, when you think about it. We don't really need to understand the macro world of the universe or the micro world of physics (and biology) to really get by, so why would most of us ever need to really try?

I guess you might reasonably ask at this point, "why read a book about things we can't really understand (or apply to our lives)?"  I don't have good answer to that, other than "why not try?"

Actually, I do think it's incumbent on us to try and understand the world we live in. Understanding the physical world/universe might just help us be better human beings. Plus I think that one of the big problems of the world is a general lack of inquisitiveness... so let's go!

I'm not even going to go much into the content of the book here - let's just say it includes the creation of the universe, how we figured out what our planet is made of, how old the earth is, animal and plant biology, and much much more. The book is a history of scientific thought (mistaken thought, more often than not!), and shows us how little we understand about the world we live in, and how little time we've understood what we now know. [which, given the historical evidence, could largely turn out to be mistaken]

In the end, the book does really make you look upon life - even your own life - as an amazing and precious thing. As Bryson points out, a whole lot of things (accidents mainly) had to happen over 10 billion years or so, in order for me to sit here typing at this moment. Matter in the early universe had to get dispersed in the right way for a big clump of it to form together (the Earth); various species (the majority of known species) had to go extinct while the one branch leading to homo sapiens survived, which then somehow attained consciousness; all of my ancestors had to meet and copulate at the right moment in time; etc. etc.! That's not even counting all the stuff that makes me (cells, etc.) continue along as planned.

It really is crazily improbable that you, gentle reader, or I should exist. While I'm not quite ready to consider God as a plausible explanation for existence (somehow adding an omniscient diety into the mix just seems to add a layer of improbably complexity!),  it is quite humbling to consider the lengths to which nature had to go to create this world, and these sacks of water and protein for us to exist in.

Book 20: Mutants

Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body
Armand Marie Leroi
2003
448 pp.
Rating: 4 of 5

I'm not quite sure how I got sidetracked onto these science-related books, but I'm really enjoying it. They actually interact with the religion books in an interesting way, but more on that later....

Anyway, Mutants is not a sensationalist/sideshow sort of book at all. It's really about genetics. I can sense your eyes glazing over already, but wait --  Mutants is a great read. Leroi does a great job of explaining a lot of interesting information about genetics by using it to explain a lot of common human mutations. Why do conjoined twins occur? Why is our skin the color it is (or isn't, if you're albino)? Why are some people incredibly tall and others short? There are a lot of very interesting biological processes behind these variations in human anatomy, and they all get explained here. For example. while we're fetuses, apparently there is some group of cells that have the job of starting as a bump on our torsos, then they build an appropriate appendage from wherever they are. If they are in the wrong starting place, voila, you've got an arm growing out of your back!  If they give out before they get the fingers done, you might be electrodactyl. Or if they keep working too long, you end up with 6 fingers (a pretty common human mutation, you don't see it much because doctors tend to cut off extra digits).

There's a great section on intersex/hermaphrodite genetic mutations as well. Some estimates put hermaphroditism at occurring somewhere (to some degree) in one in every 2000 people. That would put the intersex population of the US at somewhere around 150,000.  Our normal "XY or XX" understanding of male or femaleness is woefully inadequate, there are several variations on those two combinations available. I haven't seen much if anything written about how this might relate (or might not) to homosexuality or transgender issues - but that would be interesting to know.

It's also worth noting that we share much genetic information with other animals on the planet. 98% of our genes are the same as a chimps. 90% of our genetic material is identical to any other mammal's - from a whale to a mouse. 60% of our genes are identical to those of insects, for gods' sake.  This is where things start to get interesting to me. One experiment showed that if you snipped the genetic codes out of a fruit fly that make a fruit fly eye, and you put them in a mouse (in place of the mouse codes for mouse eyes), what happens is not a mouse with fly eyes, but a mouse with regular old mouse eyes. That is to say, most of our genetic material is actually - literally even! - interchangeable with other animals.  This really puts humanity in it's place, I'd say. Or at least I'd hope so.

Finally, understanding how these genetic and biological processes work is always astounding. It's pretty incredible that such complex (and simultaneously fragile and robust) evolved to make you or I. I'm not doubting that evolution is what created it, it's just interesting that it's one of those things that's bigger than the human mind can really consider well - I think both because it happens on  a scale so much larger than us (in terms of time) and simultaneously so much smaller than us (the physically microscopic). In a certain way, you do have to take it on faith that the systems exist and occur as we are told they do.

Book 19: Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Got His Gun
Dalton Trumbo (1939)
243 pp.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Johnny Got His Gun. How did I not ever read this in high school? It’s the perfect teaching book. And weirdly timelessly eerie in its statement of the effects of war, of young life lost. Although written theoretically about WWI, it’s a kind of timeless book that could be about the physical and psychological impacts of war on any young person. It also got the author (who was also a screenwriter) blacklisted in the McCarthy era, so it’s worth reading for that alone.

What is interesting to me, and how this relates to other reading I’ve been doing lately (though I didn’t know it when I picked it up) is that (warning: spoiler coming!) the only character in the book is blast victim who is a quadruple amputee who has lost his ability to see, hear, smell and talk.  The book is really his interior monologue as he figures out how to live life in this new state – the moat frustrating part of which is that he can not communicate with anyone. Nor does anyone caring for him know whether he is conscious or not.

Similar to Mind Wide Open and Rattling the Cage, the book makes you think for a moment about what it means to be human and to be conscious.   Or rather, Johnny Got His Gun becomes interesting in light of having read these two other books because not for a moment do you wonder if the protagonist is human or conscious, even though he can not longer perform any function that one would associate with human-ness or consciousness, typically.

Book 18: Mind Wide Open: your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life

Mind Wide Open: your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life
Steven Johnson (2004)
216 pp.
Rating: 5 of 5

Okay, every chapter of this book was great, but I’m a little pressed for time so I’m not going to blog about each one, which is too bad since each one had it’s own insight and interesting connection to one of my favorite questions: what does it mean to be human/to be conscious?

Again, I did not intentionally read this right after Rattling the Cage, but the two books go really well together. Right off the bat, Johnson starts to tackle the consciousness question. He goes into some detail to explain what it means to be conscious of self (stage 1) and conscious of others (stage 3 I think).  From why babies are so adept at recognizing the human face (we need to understand quickly that other consciousnesses exist), to our ability to easily distinguish between the facial expressions connoting 412 distinct emotional states, to the current best thinking about what ‘causes’ autism (failure to recognize other minds and their emotional states), to why people are ticklish (yes, it has to do with recognizing consciousness in others), this is a scientific whirlwind (yet very readable, thank god) of discovery about the brain.

I hate having to overly simplify every complex book I read, but here goes for this one: The idea that we are each one conscious person is apparently out of date. The various parts of our brain, while networked certainly, also remain quite autonomous (for various evolutionary reasons). This is why it’s pretty easy for humans to perceive things that aren’t actually there, or not perceive things that are there.  He goes over many common examples of how to quickly and easily show parts of the brain conflicting with each other (example – the Stroop Test. Quick, say out loud the color of the text of the word in quote here: “blue”).  In additional, he gives some pretty interesting information on the hormonal chemistry of the brain, and how biology and environment can permanently subtly alter the chemicals that might well determine important aspects of your or my personality.

Book 17: Rattling the Cage: toward legal rights for animals

Rattling the Cage: toward legal rights for animals
Daniel Wise (2000)
270 pp.
Rating: 5 of 5

I’m not sure whether the whole vegetarian/animal rights thing should be a dot in the Connect The Dots network of ideas.  While I personally gravitate towards these ideas as illuminative of our sense of what it is to be human and act morally in the world, the truth is that I’m not so sure how easily I can connect this dot to the others (eg. globalization, masculinity, the rise of conservatism) that do seem to all go together much better. Maybe I’ll figure it out before I give up on this blog!

At any rate, this is an excellent book. I had a chance to meet Jane Goodall several years ago, who handed this book out to the group I was in. Took me this long to get around to reading it. Shame on me, because it’s an extremely interesting and thought-provoking book.  Although the book Is putatively about making the legal, scientific and moral arguments about why chimps and bonobos should be consider legal (non-human) persons (rather than property, their current status), the book to me was really about having to understand what it means to be human. Because to understand how close these animals are to us, it’s necessary to understand what make us, well, us (human beings).

What is usually understood to distinguish humans from other animals is consciousness. Most importantly, an awareness of self as conscious, as well as an awareness that others are conscious as well; as well as a tertiary awareness that those others are aware of your own consciousness. Just think about it, we wouldn’t get very far if we were only aware of our own consciousness (see Mind Wide Open).

After some drier legal chapters (skippable!), Wise gets into discussing the wide variety of conclusive research that shows that chimps (and bonobos, but I’ll just say ‘chimps’ from here) raised in supporting, language-rich human environments, have this ability (and in spades!). In fact, as you’d expect, the secondary level of awareness is also proven in cats, dogs, parrots, pigs, dolphins… the list goes on). What makes chimps somewhat different than these others, is that they can master a language – sign language. So they can also communicate to us. Dramatic evidence of their consciousness is given in the book, which seems to pretty conclusively show that these chimps reach at least the developmental stage of a human 3 year old.   

Only a few chimps have been raised in this supportive environment, but all chimps have this capacity. Unfortunately, most chimps are endangered – entirely from humans, who hunt them for food, who torture them in medical experiments, who jail them in zoos. You really can’t look at chimps the same after you read this book.

The irony, of course, is that many humans who lack the abilities of these chimps – say, humans in deep prolonged comas, the profoundly mentally retarded, and in many place, unborn humans – have many more rights than these chimps do.  Of course, I am not arguing for reduced rights for any humans. I'm saying it's time to take a cold hard look at how we are treating other conscious species.