Second Front

The Heroes Journey

2009-10-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

My son Elliott (5) dictated this story to me tonight. The words are his. He was extremely excited throughout the process. He stood in front of me and jumped up and down with delight as he spun his yarn for 30 minutes.

This was part of a writing class he participates in through our homeschooling cooperative. It is a role playing game that requires the students to write in order to advance in the game. This exercise was for learning the literary components of the "The Heroes Journey". I loved going through this exercise with him and I could tell he delighted in the attention.

The Heroic Journey of Harry Potter

A very important guy named Bill was giving out newspapers and came to me one day. He gave me a newspaper and he asked me if I could free the queen from the castle. I had met her once before. I knew that castle because I had been there once before. I was really really really really really worried about the queen. I was so scared that I started vibrating and my teeth chattered.

I was at home when this happened, at the front door. When I found all this out, I got my gorilla and wand. I got on my megaclothes – a checkered white shirt, jeans, and yellow shoes. I was scared for both me and for the queen. There is this place called the haunted woods. There is one thing you have to avoid. The trees are like humans. They stay in the ground but they can bend down and whack at you. That is why they call it the haunted woods. But my gorilla was in front and he just kept snapping them.

After the haunted woods we got to the castle. There are these big ax choppers that go ker-klunk ching. These hit an opponent and they immediately die. There are big spinning axes on wheels. And there are also big dropping anvils. There was a person who tried to kill me while I was on the spinning ax. I did my fireball spell right at his chest. He fell to the ground. I zipped on a vine across a pit of tigers. Big gates shut in front of me. But before one closed I got through.

I found two crystals. The crystals were magical and they helped my pet gorilla. I fed my gorilla lots of fruit outside and then gave him the yellow banana shaped crystal and the red apple shaped crystal and this gave him giga-strength. The gorilla held open the castle entry as they were trying to close it and we got in. My gorilla walked in while holding the gate open, it was the kind that closes from the top, and we entered the castle.

I’m in a castle made out of stone with a floor covered in bones. Torches on the sides light the place – it is a very spooky place. I got to the queen, a castle queen, with a wand and wings. She is looking at me very surprised. She is glad I am here. They trapped her here for a punishment and they tried to kill her. But they hadn’t killed her yet. They were trying to kill her by giving her no food. It is a bad guy’s castle.

I have my pet gorilla with me. I use his muscle and strength to break the bars on the cage that the queen is in. The queen says ‘thank you’.

I take the queen back through the castle and I take her to my campsite.

I get a big reward for doing all this spooky krooky stuff and saving the queen – the beautiful one.

Symmetry Redux

2009-03-03T09:25:00.000-08:00

The Sail Robotics team is rebuilding last year's award winning robot, Symmetry. This little robot will be used for community demonstration and recruitment purposes. We will be sharing the enthusiasm of our young engineers as they participate in the The Collin County BEST robotics competition.

Family Glasses

2009-01-19T09:07:00.000-08:00

Rach was talking to Friend Joy and decided we could improve our kitchen efficiency if every person in the family had their very own glass. We loaded into the car and each of us selected a glass. Each person is responsible for cleaning the glass each time they need it. I find the choices revealing.

Ruta del Norte

2009-01-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

I participated in another 6 hour endurance race this past weekend. You can see the results here

I finished 16th in the Men's 40+ division. That felt pretty good compared to 23rd a month ago. I came in 'standing up' and was able to turn 7 laps totalling about 60 miles. The first lap was the slowest and the last lap was as fast as the third. Starting slow seemed to work pretty well.

This was the same course as the Ultracentric 12-hour relay competition (at Erwin Park in McKinney, TX) where Kirk and I almost froze to death. The course was setup for a complete loop and included the ‘Expert’ section – this is the segment containing the big dips, elevated bridges and off-camber roller-coaster single track.

The weather was cold with the high at 40 degrees and a constant 20-30mph wind. the sun was out part of the day and that made it much more comfortable than the Ultracentric competition. Comfortable probably isn’t the right word for such conditions. I'm looking forward to doing one of these with windchills above freezing.

I learned that tight shoes make for a very efficient peddling platform. It is a terrible way to treat feet though. My feet were blocks of ice until I loosened them up and gave them a little blood.

The fastest lap of the day appears to be 36 minutes. This compares to my fastest lap of 52 minutes. I don't know how you would run that pace on 400cc two-stroke, much less on a bike. I think I'll keep my day job as soon as I get one.

One guy completely broke his foot off - you can see the carnage here: (check it out, it is safe for work and not gruesome - this guy is awesome)

About 160 people show up for the competition. The race is started using a "LaMans" start where everyone lines up and races on foot to their bicycles. This helps spread everyone out so the serious people can get on the trail first.

Here are the bikes:

Here are the people:

The trail has a lot of technical challenges. This means you can crash if you aren't paying attention. One section of the trail is called 'Screaming Drop'. I don't think the photos really capture how steep the drop is. From the top it looks like a cliff. You have to get well behind the saddle of the bike to keep from going over the handle bars. This can be difficult after 50 miles of riding.

Here is the Screaming Drop from a different angle:

Another feature of the trail is the Bank Shot. This is a roller coaster-like feature of smooth off-camber single track with deep steep drops through a creek bed. Its about as much fun as I can have for free.

Here is a section of 'Bank Shot'.

The Rattler

2009-01-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

Check out this diamondback rattler encountered during the trip to Enchanted Rock last October. It was between 3 and 10 ft long and in the middle of the trail.

Cooper Cycling Completes 6 Hour Race

2008-12-17T20:40:00.000-08:00

Cooper Cycling completed the Los Aguantes de Seise winter race put on by the Dallas Off-Road Bicycling Associations (DORBA) As the name translates, this was a six hour endurance race. Kirk and I finished 12th and 21st in the 40+ category. We had a lot of fun. Unlike the Ultracentric race we entered individually so we could get our 6 hours of exercise in one continuous effort.

The 35 mph winds were not a factor because the trail is wooded and temperatures were in the 50's. I completed about 50 miles and Kirk completed about 60 miles of single track sweetness.

The Boulder Park Trail in South Dallas is a gem with fast flowing lines, intense short climbs, technical descents, ladders, bridges, creek crossings, and tight twisting turns in dense woods. The trail doesn't permit the rider to maintain a static position to crank the pedals. You are continuously out of the saddle and moving on the bike to negotiate the technical features of the trail. It is a blast covering an 11 mile loop.

Hydration and feeding all happened on the bike with short breaks in the pits to top-off the hydration pack. There were some fantastic competitors present. The leMans start required us (about 150 of us) to sprint about 60 yards to the staging area, leap onto our bikes and race on the road for about a mile before entering the trail at a mid-point.

I was home at 5pm just in time for my eldest son's 12th birthday party.

Cooper Cycling 1st Place

2008-11-20T11:30:00.000-08:00

The UltraCentric race series is for Ultra-endurance athletes competing in 12/24/48 hour running and riding competitions. Twin brother Kirk and I won the 12-Hour 2-Person Team competition on Saturday November 15, 2008. We completed 124 miles on a tight twisting single track loop. The conditions were rather appalling for North Texas in mid-November. We faced a constant 15 mph wind with 30 mph gusts at sub-40 degree temperatures. The race is essentially a relay where we pass an RFID chip between the teammates. Riding at night was especially cool with special headlight equipment on the helmet and bike. Special thanks to Joe Clay for making the night-time adventure possible.

Enchanted Rock

2008-11-05T10:01:00.000-08:00

I recently climbed the 5.8 Dome Driver route at Enchanted Rock in the Texas Hill Country. This was my first face climb and first climb over 30ft. It is a 400ft. face on the Enchanted Rock batholisque.

From the bottom it looked like this:

I'm the person/fool in the green helmet. The half way point looks like this from the top:

The photo below offers more perspective. You can see me standing in the middle of the photo. (You can click on the photo to enlarge it)

The top looks something like this:

It is an exhilarating experience.

Berryman Trail Epic

2008-11-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

The Berryman Trail Epic (BT Epic) was on October 25th and 26th. It was 100K of off-road bicycling madness. I completed the course in about 8 hours which is about double the time required for this guy to complete it. My six hour Saturday morning training rides on the DORBA trails didn't quite prepare me for 5,800 feet of climbing in the Ozarks. I'll be a little smarter next time on my preparation. Speaking of preparation, Scott Davis and team at Springfield Cycles put on a great first year event. I'd definitely drive 8 hours to do it again. The Ozarks had their fall colors ready for us. The trail was almost all single track with insane but 'cleanable' climbs and awesome downhill.

The two day event is divided into a 'Tour' on Saturday and a 'Race' on Sunday. The Tour is for normal guys who really want to ride their bike for a long time and test themselves. The Race is for super-human freaks of nature competing for cash prizes. The Tour offered some really great lottery items including three single speed bikes and a lot of gear.

I got 16 hours in the car with my brother, a cool t-shirt, one photo, and a destroyed suspension linkage.

Robot Fabrication

2008-10-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

The photo below is Emerson and Mike using a dremel to finish bolt ends for smooth operation of the robot arm. This particular arm did not make it to competition because it didn't meet the driving team's drivability requirements. This was one of many important and hard lessons - the users/customers' opinions really do matter.

The Robots

2008-10-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

The picture below is representative of the robots in the Collin County BEST robotics competition this year. It is a pleasure to see the creative talents of high school and middle school aged kids unleashed.

The Field of Competition

2008-10-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

The BEST engineering program was developed to encourage engineering. This year, the students were given a large selection of raw materials, 6 weeks, and a very demanding task. They had to maneuver their robot to 1) throw the switch to open the warehouse doors, remove ground obstructions, remove airplane parts, assemble the airplane onto the airplane base, and then hang the airplane 4ft in the air. This competition was properly named 'Just Plane Crazy'.

Below you can see the field of competition. It is divided into 4 quadrants. Each quadrant is divided into a warehouse and assembly area. Once assembled, the robot is hung on the poles in the center.

The robot is in the starting position next to the driver. A spotter stands between the warehouse and assembly area. Points are awarded for exiting the starting square, opening the warehouse switch, removing parts from the warehouse, assembling the aircraft, hanging the aircraft and removing foreign/obstructing objects.

The overall effect of walking into this gym is much like walking into a rock concert. It is loud and full of youthful energy.

Zen Assemblies - Vice President of Engineering

2008-10-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

This is Emerson. He is the Vice President of Engineering for Zen Assemblies.

Robotics

2008-10-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

The fine little robot below was the product of six weeks of planning and testing. It was produced by Zen Assemblies, our make believe robot manufacturing company, a division of the SAIL homeschool group. Our team of kids ranged from 5th grade to 11th grade. This was their second year to compete. They were amazing. Last year they won the 'Blood, Sweat and Duct Tape' award. This year they won Most Robut Robot, Third in overall competition, and 4th in the robot competition.

I'm very proud of the whole team. They produced amazing ideas and exhibited a lot of courage to see them through. Everyone found a role where they could contribute their unique gifts to the team effort. We had specialized teams for marketers, chasis, arm, and gripper designers, fabrication specialists, microcontroller programmers and drivers.

Thank you to all of the homeschool parents for supporting their childrens' drive. A special thanks to the Tharps who lead the effort and let us take over their home and garage for six weeks.

Flagstaff, Arizona - Post Ride Nutrition

2008-09-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

I piled up a lot of miles in the saddle. Getting older has made my post ride nutrition critical to recovery. This trip it was especially important. After Dakota Ride/Red Rocks in Denver, Slick Rock and Moab Rim trails in Moab, I rode the Ft. Valley trails in Flagstaff. I'm getting ready for the 100K Berryman Classic in Missouri in October. All this 'four corners' riding was more than a little challenging for this North Texan.

Slick Rock - Campsite

2008-09-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

I camped out the night after my first whole day in Moab. My iPhone doesn't do the garish scenerey justice.

Slick Rock - Scenic Overlook II

2008-09-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

they call it the bad lands but I guess that depends what you are trying to do with it. Its fantastic for mountain biking.

Slick Rock, Scenic Overlook

2008-09-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

The scenic overlook was a wonderful payoff for a couple of hours of relentless ascents and behind the saddle descents.

Slick Rock Trail, Moab, Utah

2008-09-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

Slick Rock is one of the preeminent mountain biking trails in North America. I've wanted to experience it since I took up the sport a decade ago. Despite all the hype, it surpassed my expectations. It is an extremely demanding trail from a cardiovascular and technical riding skills standpoint. The scenerey is surreal. The exposure is unsettling at first as you peer several hundred feet into the canyons. But the positive traction with the rock surfaces shores up confidence. This 12 mile loop can be ridden either direction. I chose the 'hard' direction and got all I bargained for.

The available literature speak to death on the trail - mostly this is due to heat exhaustion. Its difficult to imagine riding in the summer. it would take me at least 3 gallons of water to survive the loop.

For perspective in the photo below, note the rider in the lower left pushing her bike up the trail.

Northeast New Mexico II

2008-09-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

Looking south.

Northeast New Mexico

2008-09-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

My great Four Corners trip lead me through northeast New Mexico. This photo was taken at day break between Clayton and Raton. New Mexico is the land of enchantment.

Climbing

2008-06-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

I climbed at Mineral Wells State Park this weekend. It was my first time to use a top rope outdoors. There was fun for the whole family. Like most things, it was really fun to watch the experts.

Why We Homeschool

2007-09-03T17:57:00.000-07:00

by Brendan and Rachael Cooper

We think it is important from the onset to clearly state that this essay describes our motivations and reasons for educating our children and we don’t presume our choices are any better than yours. There are many ways to successfully educate a child. Discussing how and why to educate your children is like discussing religion. It can be polarizing and contentious. We all make the choices we believe to be the very best. If you have different reasons, or have pursued another path, we wish you all of the best. We know there are many successful paths. It is our intention to share our thinking on this topic and welcome your constructive thoughts on the ideas presented.

Our reasons for homeschooling have changed over these first seven years. Our journey has not been planned. It was not a path we knew anything about. We had no history and no expectations. It has been a course started on intuition and continued with growing anecdotal learning from the broad, ecumenical, eclectic, and devoted homeschooling community. We’ve learned from books, groups, the web, blogs and lots and lots of husband and wife dialogue.

We began homeschooling our first son after we placed him in a private school at the age of 3 1/2. Like all parents we want the very best for our child. We sought and found what we believed was the best possible school to “properly” educate him. It lasted a week. His separation from the nuclear family was extremely painful and emotional for the three of us. He hated it. We hated it. Our notion of what was best was turned on its head. What was best had nothing to do with foreign language acquisition, math aptitude, or structured learning. It had everything to do with our relationships. It had everything to do with snuggling, playing, eating and sleeping. It had everything to do with intimacy and our emotional lives. Emerson, our first son, helped us learn the primacy of our connections with one another. Nothing else matters to a three year old and we discarded our previous notions of what is best and we moved forward without any sense of how to see to our son’s education. We knew what we would not tradeoff.

We worked hard to learn how. We drafted a first curriculum outline that we felt was worthy of our children. We obsessed for several weeks over all of the important areas of knowledge we were going to need to stuff into our children’s heads. We found homeschooling resources on the internet. We found course curricula with full scope and sequence. We drafted a second outline. We looked at classical educations, Montessori, Emilio Reggio, Waldorf and the best private and public schools, modern and historical. We found other homeschoolers. We drafted a final curriculum.

We moved forward with our ideas on how to educate our children. And then we began the process of stuffing all of this information into their heads. It sounds uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable. We quickly realized that the stuffing process was not going to lead to long-term beneficial results. We learned that we could destroy the desire to learn. We were very fortunate to have a first child who was capable of saying – “Dad, that is not helpful,” at a very young age. This made us take a step back and ask if we were trying to accomplish the right thing.

We realized we were attempting to fill their minds with knowledge at the expense of their emotional lives, working against their natural impulses and interests. It was not an approach that we liked. We were transferring our own learning experience and our fear of offering a substandard education to our homeschool. But the habits of mind we wanted to develop weren’t developing. We asked, and circumstances begged the questions: “What are we trying to do?” “What do we want for our child?” “What do we want to do with our child?” and less often asked, “What does our child want to have done to them?”

People have a wide range of opinions on what to do with a child – what the goal is. Many are under the illusion that they will build the child they want. In truth, you lead, care, teach, and coach the child you get. Your preconceived ideas of what they can be, may have very little to do with who they are, their innate gifts, and personality. When we really examined what we want our children to be, it is a decent, moral, loving, strong and prepared person. All but the last of these attributes requires no formal education. All can be independent of their innate gifts and personality. The re-focus and statement of what we wanted to do with our child changed our perspective.

Why do we homeschool? We homeschool because after our first encounter with school our son’s enthusiasm for life evaporated and we had to try something new. When we set out to do better ourselves, and failed, we realized that we had absorbed an external definition of the task of education, but we had not defined the root task. Once we realized that there was no such thing as a complete education, and we realized we could not force feed an ideal formula of knowledge into the minds of our offspring, we began to ask the real question: What are we trying to accomplish in an education? What is the final goal?

We decided that teaching our children to use their minds was very important. Our first priority would be to teach how to use a mind and then worry about the facts you put in it. As we contemplated teaching our children how to use their minds we were forced to explore how we use our own minds and how we would like to use them. If you teach someone how to fish instead of giving them fish you have given them power. In the same way, we believe teaching someone how to think is giving them power.

Our minds are beautiful instruments. Education needs to focus on understanding how to use the specific instrument/mind. Each of us needs to find where our mind’s flow and rhythms are, and finding where it isn’t. Using an instrument is both something that requires regular practice and intrinsic desire. In our first attempts at homeschooling we focused on the daily practice and not fostering the desire. Fostering desire, or enchanting children with learning, we have concluded, is accomplished through making learning real and valuable.. Perspective gives you a sense why things are relevant. This understanding of relevance, this perspective is not something easily gained from standing in one place. It is not accomplished reliably in the process of teaching to a test. It requires that you move about your environment, interact socially with many different kinds of people, and understand the context and history of what you are learning.

Why do we homeschool? We homeschool because we believe the pillars of an education are those things that will make you a competent adult. Those things that will serve you best as you pursue life, liberty and happiness. They are not Latin, or the periodic table, A Tale of Two Cities or football - important and fun as these things may be. We believe the goals of an education are learning how to create and maintain relationships, gathering perspective and using it to inform your judgment, learning how to work with the mind you have been given, creating your own initiative, becoming resourceful, practicing courage and maintaining your health. And no school we know has chosen those same goals and works toward them as earnestly as we do and will.

Our Pillars

On the surface our homeschool curricula looks like other curricula, but the underlying pillars, which we discuss openly and regularly with our children, are different. And they inform all of our discussions, which are frequent. We believe that these goals are best served by homeschooling. The pillars are

1. The Value of People
2. Perspective & Judgment
3. How to use your Mind
4. Initiative and Courage
5. Resourcefulness
6. Health

The Value of People

Our first lesson, already related here, was the importance of our relationships to these young creatures we have brought into the world. This also extends to our relationships with other people and their importance in our lives. All things we undertake exist within a social context. This social awareness and capability is very important. We want our children, irrespective of their natural interpersonal gifts or limits, to develop the social skills necessary to build loving families, communities of friends, and constructively participate in organizations. Some of this can be taught and some of it is demonstrated every day of your life. So, for example, we can teach our children the value of knowing social context. We can place them daily in novel social situations and allow them to practice their conversational skills in varying environments. We can teach them salutations and social graces. But just as important, we must demonstrate love and patience every day. This is a smile to a spouse, a measured, instead of hostile, rebuke when poor judgment is used and a hug when you have the blahs.

Providing this environment every day fosters an environment that becomes the baseline expectation of your children. It’s the normative force of the every day emotional and ethical space created in your family. This becomes a child’s conception of human interaction and is extended to their conception of a properly functioning family, friendship, community or organization. We teach our children that relationships are most important. Our social beings start and end with the relationships, the connections, we establish with others. We teach the necessity of emotional resilience and thoughtfulness. We stress the importance of avoiding emotional brittleness and volatility. We teach that communication is a trade-off between truth and harmony. Social skill involves learning how to make the trade-off. We have and will continue to cultivate this so that our children can comfortably interact and build relationships in a wide variety of situations.

Another relationship skill we find we often use is teaching, even before becoming homeschooling parents. As we ask our children to learn about relationships we are purposefully placing them in situations where they must teach others. Aside from being an important social skill, teaching is also one of the most important ways to show people how important they are.

We have found that homeschooling is an excellent platform to develop relationships.

Perspective and Judgment

Perspective is having enough background to know what is important. Judgment is good decision making. We want these two things to be a way of life. Life is a continuous testing of thought and action. If you could follow our family you would hear a constant refrain “This is important because…” or “Why do you think this matters?” or “Is that good judgment.” We point out that good judgment is practiced daily. A spirit of wonder and connectedness is essential with these conversations, without it you can sound preachy and what should be a discovery becomes a perpetual lecture. Perspective is a habit of mind. Experience and pain seem to be the best teachers of perspective. With our children we ask and remind them of their perspective, history, and values. We constantly discuss others judgments and their perspectives. We know good judgment is important, and even kids in grade school can be taught to recognize it. If you disagree then go to youtube.com and look at some of the “life lessons” folks have videoed and get back to us.

We have found that we can provide a unique environment to enable both perspective and judgment building in a homeschool.

How to Use Your Mind

Knowing how to use a mind, and very specifically, your own mind, requires a great deal of experience and perspective. As parents, we have many years of perspective on how we use our own minds and we can use this to help guide our children to learn the workings of the brain they have been given. Specifically, we have noticed that our children often expected to quickly learn everything and would get frustrated if they didn’t. We want them to understand that learning can be difficult, that performance and learning aren’t linear. We believe that learning requires courage and honesty. We acknowledge some people learn things much faster than others and some brains are really good at some problems and not at others.

Kids seem to readily understand how to throw themselves into a problem. We teach our children to sleep on problems and revisit setbacks when they hit a wall. In our homeschool setting we can truly destigmatize failure and use it as the learning step it is. Setbacks happen as a matter of course and adapting takes practice. Learning to use the brain involves knowing that emotional states impact cognition, emotions have a release cycle, that counting to 10 really can help, sleep really matters, intuition is extremely valuable, and methodology is important. So we are teaching these things. Interacting with our children while learning every day gives us insight into their minds. We notice the frustrations and the “A-ha” moments and we can feedback perspective to them on how this happens. We notice if they have visual or auditory learning preferences and we discuss and explore these with our children. We notice the things they like and don’t like and we discuss and explore why. We discuss their own theories about how they think their brains learn best and then test these theories.

Teaching a child to understand their own unique way of learning and problem solving is crucial. We talk about this constantly. Sometimes we discuss it at a developmentally appropriate level with our children and sometimes we discuss it in front of them as adults.

We didn’t realize it until we started to teach our children how idiosyncratically we used our own minds. All the kids we know are fascinated when we discuss some unique or bizarre way in which our mind works. For example, if Rachael needs to think creatively she needs a pencil in her hand. The ideas don’t flow without the pencil. Brendan can’t think clearly about a problem until he has done it while moving. Some people can only learn something after they have written it. Other people can’t learn while writing – taking notes impairs their cognitive processes. Sharing this frees our children to think about what they discover about themselves as they learn.

We have noticed that we sometimes have difficulty transitioning from one problem to the next. In particular, we find that transitioning from very detailed work to skillful and empathetic interpersonal communication is difficult. A case in point is finding yourself immersed in a good book and then having to interact socially. Knowing that transitions in brain function can be difficult, or even exist, lets you manage, anticipate and reframe those transitions.

We have read books on learning styles to our children and helped them pick out the parts that resemble, or do not resemble themselves to help them better understand their own learning style. We encourage our children to try learning another way if a concept is having trouble cementing in their minds. Our eldest, a dyslexic, looked at us with mixture of shock and fear when we said he needed to tell us how to teach him to read. But he wanted to learn and knew that if he was going to read he would need to tell us how to get it into his head. And he did. He did as much evaluating of reading programs as we did, noting which things worked and when they worked best. It was a powerful learning moment for him.

Another part of learning your brain is learning what you love. The subjects to which your mind is inherently attracted. We all learn best what we love to learn. And we all do best what we love to do. Mihaly Cziksummihaly describes “flow” as a state of mind where time stops to have meaning and the application of your mind to solving a problem is uniquely fulfilling and meaningful. Finding this flow state is pretty easy in children. Just watch them play and they will seek flow. We are teaching our children to seek this throughout their lives. And we remind them that the amount of flow increases in a subject as you move up the skill curve. Making sure that our kids can exercise their initiative to keep themselves moving up the skill curves in the areas that fascinate them. We keep them in flow while at school as much as possible.

Finding flow is supremely important. It is a natural place for the mind. This is where you want to direct your children’s interests if it involves making, creating, exploring in the real world – passive flow is a trap and the human mind is easily captivated in it. We keep TV and computer games out of our lives as much as possible for we believe the passive flow it offers is seductive and largely not instructive.

Homeschooling allows our kids to know flow, and live with it for gratifying periods of time, hopefully creating a baseline conception of how to use a mind. As our children grow, they may not find the flow they need in their professional or academic lives. But knowing the difference between a mind in a state of flow and one that is heaped and tasked will give them the perspective they need to endure those stretches of life when there is no flow. Knowing what you don’t have keeps that lack from defining you and how you experience the world.

Initiative & Courage

Initiative is the will to start something new or to see something through. It is a personal, internal, formulation of what one ought to do and the drive to do it. Learning that you have the power of self-determinism is not something one gets from a textbook. Independence of mind and character is a trait strengthened only by use. We teach our children that they can gain power as a result of sustained and concentrated self-directed effort. Initiative is a habit of mind born from an imaginative mind and the will to realize your imaginings. As teachers and coaches we stand ready every day to develop initiative.

Peter Kostenbaum defines courage as sustained initiative. Courage is often required when learning subjects or performing essential tasks that you don’t want to do – where there is no flow. Sometimes it is hard to memorize the 50 states, the Gettysburg address, or the Latin vocabulary for the week. Likewise the dishes and the laundry. But life demands courage. Life demands ”small courage” which is the steadiness/steadfastness to attend to the bureaucratic detail and activities of daily life that need attention every day. Life also demands ”big courage” which is the heroic effort or the big push to make something happen. We read about these, and hopefully, demonstrate them in our lives, in person.

Every day, initiative is the quality most desired in the workforce, in our fellow citizens and in our community. It is what is required to keep hope and to keep faith. Without it we are stalled, moribund, stagnant, static, and no longer learning, no longer growing. We want children with initiative. At home, they get to see it as a way of life. Their daily posture is forward, in command of their work, their questions, their resourcefulness.

It seems contrary to logic to say that homeschooling is less restrictive, less sheltering, than public school. But in many ways it is. Our children spend more time out in the world interacting with people than most. They have more say in the things they do and accomplish. As there is no particular year when a bit of knowledge must be learned (so that it can be quantified) the children have much more room to stimulate their inner drive. They have the right to exercise their own initiative which is an essential skill for life and an integral part of the citizenship of a free people.

Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness is the ability to figure out what you need to get in order to do what you want to do. We teach resourcefulness as a habit of mind. Knowledge is a tool to be wielded against the problems they wish to solve. Our children are encouraged to ask themselves “What do I need, to do what I wish to do?” In order to make this a valid lesson the children must believe that once they figure out what they want to do they will be allowed to do it. Our surface syllabus can and does change based on the initiative of our children. Being resourceful means determinedly seeking information and answers on these new problems. This involves letting a person have a question and to spontaneously get online and start with Google, or the Wikipedia, and then get on the phone and call an adult, professional, family friend, or go to the store to procure the necessary materials, or to engage in extended dialogue to refine their understanding of the question. Then go to the library and get all of the books on the topic, or to drop the current assignment to pursue a line of questioning that is more in-depth. These activities comprise the successful modus operandi of adult life – we do these things every day. We want the habits of mind formed in these first eighteen years to serve what they will do as adults, so that what is expected of adults is not foreign to our children’s every day experience. Knowing that they can choose a path, that they must choose a path is easily demonstrated in a homeschool environment. And the daily example of us, the parent teacher, trying to facilitate that path is a lesson in resourcefulness. Because we have the time for the children to ask questions and lead the lessons, they very often take us out of our knowledge areas. And as they participate in the finding of these answers it provides a space for the demonstration of self-directedness

We want them to have experience wielding their own minds as we believe that they will develop an independence in character and thought because they trust their mind. An adult brings value to the community by being prepared to contribute. We aim to teach our children to know who they are, to figure out what needs to be done and to have courage in their ability to do it.

Health

The importance of exercising and practicing good health is something we find important and strongly tied to learning. We continually teach the importance of diet and that our food choices matter. An uncomfortable child, an ill or restless child will not learn, will not find flow as well as a healthy one. The flexibility of being at home allows us to identify the time the children are most able to learn and gives us the freedom to adjust if they are not. Fidgety children can be exercised, hungry children can be fed and tired children can nap. We value exercise and believe that using the body frees minds to concentrate. Many studies have shown the importance of physical activity in mental health and have tied exercise to learning. While all schools devote some portion of their attention on fitness, nutrition and health, we live what is often relegated to a thirty minute class once a week. Ironically, being homeschooled allows our family the opportunity to be much more active outside the home. We teach our children to monitor their bodies and minds. By homeschooling, we insure that caring for the fabulous machine that is the human body receives the primacy we feel it deserves.

Summary

These are the things we teach, demonstrate, coach and foster in our children. We believe we can do them best homeschooling. Modern homeschools draw on vast resources in the community. These resources include multi-family cooperatives, play groups, clubs and continuing education classes. Most people are surprised at how much time our children spend outside of the home. We think other schooling options involve institutions that are structurally incapable of developing what we prize most in our children.

Obviously there are many, many valuable institutions in our society and they play a vital role in our lives. To say that institutions have limits is not to demolish them wholesale but to recognize them as tools for the purposes of people. Institutions give collectivities focus, pooled resources, and power. To do this institutions make demands of you. They subordinate your needs to the functioning of the institution. This is true if it’s a business, government, church, family or public school. A person is socialized in the institution where their minds are occupied for most of their waking hours. They learn institutional thinking; their perspective is from within the institution. The institution influences how you exist in the world. In fact, it does more than influence you but shapes how you think and moulds you. Anyone who has spent a significant part of their working life in one business and then leaves to work for another knows what we are talking about. Another example is spending a long time in a particular church or congregation and then moving to another one. You learn new behavioral expectations, new ways of saying things, of communicating, of thinking, of presenting ideas, of negotiating the mental space that is always particular to the institution. It is this “institutional think” that is problematic for us. It has limits that are of great importance and consequence to the development of children. It is at times obvious and at other times insidious.

Public schools are institutions that of necessity must control the student body; they must test them, measure them, and standardize their learning. It’s the only way we know how to build operating leverage into the education process. Schooling institutions must be economically viable and are therefore production oriented enterprises. One teacher to “x” students. Scale upward or downward this ratio depending on the economic resources of the institution and the limits of control of the one teacher. It can and does work for many. However, we believe the ratio categorically limits the objectives that can be achieved.

The habits of mind developed from institutional thinking don’t develop initiative or resourcefulness. By definition social control, hierarchy, scheduling, and structure are placed above these two attributes. You learn to think like the institution thinks – it is universal and unavoidable. Institutions can’t help but to teach to the test and you can’t help but to learn how to be tested. It does not foster independent thinking or flow. The character of person is built in thought and action. To develop character a person must face choices, real choices and practice failure and success.

Of course, institutions have capabilities that families cannot muster. Organizations are very exciting to learn and move through. Their physical space and culture are interesting to people. They have resources, football stadiums, teams, PTA and business alliances that the homeschool community cannot match. They can provide access to wonderfully educated professionals who work with children every day. They can bring years of teaching expertise to bear on the challenges facing your child. They can teach your children things you cannot or won’t. They can teach children you cannot or wouldn’t.

But, the goals we have set aren’t answered best by traditional school. Schools consume resources on initiatives and objectives we wouldn’t. They can teach our children things we don’t wish taught. They create habits of mind that we find are not helpful. They offer an insular world that doesn’t create the meaning or worth we wish for our children. And so we homeschool.

Music Notation

2007-05-31T16:05:00.000-07:00

Music notation is frequently lauded for its beauty and succinctness. Of course, it has the benefit of being refined by practitioners of music for the last 400 years. For me, it is inaccessible, highly encoded information. It lacks visual spatial regularity in time. Decoding a single note to a position on the keyboard is at least a 5 step process. But music notation is beautiful and historical and used by lots of people. Unfortunately there are probably about 10 people who have failed to learn or love playing the piano, for every one who has succeeded, because of that notation.

As a pianist, it is extremely frustrating to spend hours learning a new piece of music because one can't read music notation. So I am abandoning music notation in favor of Piano Notation. A piano notation should be specific for a piano. I am not presently attempting to learn how to play any other instruments. It should make use of a 600dpi gray-scale printer - remember that the beautiful music notation we use today was originally written with ink and quills.

Below are two examples. They represent two octaves each for the right and left hand. The music is read top down instead of left to right. The octaves are represented by the thinner horizontal blocks.

Charcoal

2007-04-23T15:20:00.000-07:00

This was my first effort using charcoal. I may have peaked about two drawings ago. I worked fast for me which is less than 15 minutes. Working fast frees the mind though, so I will probably do a lot more fast work.

Portrait Number Two

2007-04-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

This is a portrait of my middle son Dash. This is my second portrait attempt.

Portrait Number One

2007-03-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

My first portrait.

AVAYA 5420

2007-02-27T18:31:00.000-08:00

A recent drawing of my phone constructed in between phone calls, e-mails, and administrivia.

Clock

2007-02-11T08:26:00.000-08:00

I received a book on how to draw for Christmas. This is my first serious effort. I haven't gotten to the chapter on perspective yet. I'm enjoying drawing. Creating is good.

Big Brother

2006-11-04T19:49:00.000-08:00

Big brother is about 5 minutes older than me. We had a lot of fun then and we have a lot of fun now. The picture says a lot. I'm holding my favorite donkey who also has a matching Eval Knievel shirt. Were we cool or what?

Comparative Economics

2006-08-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

I found this article fascinating.

The chart below even more so:

Essentially, the chart compares the percent of median income for persons in the top decile and lower decile of income for various European countries and the United States. It appears we have the same percentile of poor and twice the rich. A very interesting outcome vis a vis more socialist countries. Read the whole article.

Welcome

2006-05-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Brendan Cooper's Second Front. This is where I publish the occasional essay or whitepaper on various topics. You can find more topics to the right. Feel free to e-mail me at the address found at the bottom of the right-hand column.

Tommy

2006-05-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Tommy was a good man. He was a captain, soldier, husband, father, executive, neighbor, friend and Uncle. He was kind, curious, friendly, stern, thorough, obsessive, intelligent, caring and intense. He could teach. He would rather do it right the first time. He could listen. He would rather hear from you than not. He was tough. He knew what it took to get things done. He was busy. He didn’t sit around and wait – he was not idle. He had a lot of layers. He had a lot of stories. He lived a lot of life. He was a man of conviction. He was someone to be admired as much for his character as for the interesting things he had done and the beautiful people he kept around him.

Tommy taught me how to use chopsticks, sail a boat, care for a wife, keep a family together, question my children, wear sunglasses, block an RV, think about business, build a Honderosa, do things right, be strong AND caring.

I remember Tommy teaching me how to sail a boat. He was very serious about teaching my brother Kirk and I. He was earnest and we paid attention to the captain. I remember his pride. I can’t remember if he was proud of us, his boat, or the capable way he could sail it into a slip without using the motor. It didn’t matter which, I felt proud too, watching him, because I knew that it was a difficult thing to do – to just use the wind, sails and rudder to guide that boat right up to the pier. We all smiled and clapped under the moonlight as the boat gently stopped next to the pier. I remember how proud we all felt at his accomplishing such a thing so deftly. I could tell he was proud too. Tommy did a lot of things like that right up to the very end. I think it is the way I will remember him.

Tommy just sailed up to the pearly gates. He did it with dignity, strength, and an amazing, worthy life. I’m really glad too, because now we’ve got someone in heaven who will soon know everyone up there. He’ll have a bunch of projects going and he’ll get it in ship shape before we get there. We celebrate your life Tommy. You touched many lives and made the world better.

Visual Complexity

2005-11-17T22:58:00.000-08:00

I recently found a great website at Visual Complexity. It is a list of networked data displays or visualizations. They are beautiful to behold.

Networks are everywhere and networks are extremely important to the human race. Networks define our supply chains, how airlines run, the power grid, the internet, disease propagation and the 6 degrees of separation between you and any other human being on earth. They permeate our lives and we are only now beginning to understand how to analyze them. The emerging science of networks can tell us how robust a network can be based on the 'type' of network and the 'kinds' of connections. It can inform us how a network will perform and characterize the kinds of behavior we can expect from it. When you consider the intricate web of connections that transport essential commodities, resources, diseases and ideas across the globe you begin to see the value of comprehending networks. Visual displays can play a vital role in that comprehension.

In 1997 Toyota lost a key manufacturing plant in a fire - known as the Aisin Crisis. The company was suddenly forced to respond to a supply chain crisis that could have killed a global multi-billion dollar company. The plant manufactured critical brake valves used in most of its cars. Running a just-in-time inventory system meant that global production would be completely halted. Because of a robust social/industrial network the greater Toyota group company employees were able to engineer, refit, and recover from what could have been a total loss. The Wall Street Journal noted "36 suppliers, aided by more than 150 other subcontractors, had nearly 50 separate lines producing small batches of the brake valve in less than a week. In one case, a sewing-machine maker that had never made car parts spent about 500 man-hours refitting a milling machine to make just 40 valves a day." Understanding networks means understanding how to recover from catastrophe or leverage extraordinary capabilities.

Scientists are discovering there are universal principles that apply to all networks. Electrical grids, the internet, social networks, food chains, and transportation networks can all be analyzed using the emerging science of networks. The science of networks has developed rapidly over the last half decade. A good primer is "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age" by Duncan Watts. In this book, published in 2004, Watts presents a useful overview of how the thinking on networks has developed over the last half century. He and his colleagues have defined types of networks and developed the mathematics to explain the universal behavior and characteristics of networks. This book introduces the leading thinkers, their ideas, and the interdisciplinary way in which the science of networks has been advanced. It provides some powerful anecdotes of how our lives are impacted and influenced by networks. I was enthralled.

Like the science of networks, presenting and sharing information about networks is an emerging area of information design. The best way to display networks is still experimental and the Visual Complexity site gives us a lot to consider. It takes a long time to build generally accepted conventions for data display. Information design began with maps over 5000 years ago, and statistical data wasn’t presented in them until the 1100’s. The first graph was invented in the 17th century, and time-series and bar charts were not seen until the 18th century.[1] The paragon of network data display has not yet arrived and it will be some time before it does.

The Visual Complexity site offers a lot of beautiful designs – most of them created in the last few years. Interestingly, the utility of these displays is sometimes very limited. There are several reasons for this. The essence of a network is captured in the relationships with which it is constructed and network visualizations can be found that display hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of relationships. Network data is not necessarily reducible as is statistical data. It is hard to simplify without losing useful information. Also, networked data is frequently labeled. Because labeled data is conceptual it suffers from problems of accessibility, overlapping graphical and textual elements, and limited feature extraction.

Effectively communicating the important features of a network and the relevant concepts on display is a very difficult problem to solve. These are challenges faced by those of us in the business of strategic scenario analysis, project planning, contingency planning, and risk analysis. It will be fun to watch the technology of network visualizations develop over the next decade.

1. Edward R. Tufte – The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Visual Explanations

Free Advice

2005-05-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

In this article I offer free advice to a family member graduating from High School.

Graduating is a very momentous occasion and an important marker along your life’s journey. You will remember it as long as you live, I think, but I am certain you will remember until at least the age of 36 - provided you don’t get out of hand during your college years. Because of all this momentousness I’m going to give you some free advice. Remember it’s free; you didn’t pay anything for it so you don’t have to feel obligated to use it or feel good about it.

Advice #1: Take free advice. Just kidding the real Advice #1 is

Advice #1: Don’t be surprised by what you see and hear out there or you’ll walk around with your mouth open all the time. Now this is rather silly as it’s stated but the real point is to have an open mind and don’t get too comfortable. Life is going to leave you scratching your head sometimes wondering what in the hell happened. Now a lot of people focus on advice about how to prevent those times from happening. This seems rather futile because there are so many ways that life can surprise you, good and bad, that the best course of action is to not be too surprised when you get surprised. Getting emotionally flattened by a surprise degrades your ability to pursue the life you want. When it happens, just remember this free advice and close you mouth and laugh because I told you so. And then move forward the best you can.

Advice #2: Stick with people you trust. From my experience thus far (I’ll remind you I have about an 18 year head start on you) this is the most important piece of advice and should probably be Advice #1 but it isn’t as humorous, if you know what I mean. Because of the surprises discussed in Advice #1 you need to be sure to be around people you trust. Obviously you trust your family. That is as it should be. Keep that going because some of us are going to be around a long time. Not only does this mean lots of free advice of varying quality, it also means a place to crash, a free meal, and help on those surprises that come up in Advice #1. I have talked to the wisest and dumbest men and women of all ages about how to know when to trust someone. The truth is it is very, very hard to know. Trust your intuition. Try to sort out whether you like someone or whether you trust them – they are two very different things. Liking someone is circumstantial, trusting someone is persistent. Behavior over time is a good predictor. But you’ll still get surprised by people and need Advice #1.

Advice #3: Constructively experience anxiety. Everyone has anxiety, and the difference maker is how and whether you deal with it. This means actively dealing with stuff that is bugging you. I had to be 30 years old before I actually figured this one out. Anxiety may result from a surprise, something you can’t do, or something else, but, in any case, its bothering you. I’m very organized about dealing with anxiety and you will need to find your own way. Sometimes I call people (the people you trust from Advice #2) and ask for free advice. I wake up every Monday morning and write down all the stuff that is bugging me in no particular order. I sort through the stuff I can’t control and push it aside – if you can’t control or influence it don’t waste brain space worrying about it. Easy to say, hard to do. Anxiety will degrade your ability to do what you want to do if you don’t manage it. This is an exercise in mental healthiness. Practice really, really hard. I mean it.

Advice #4: Take care of yourself. Now some people will offer you this advice meaning don’t get drunk before your finals, avoid promiscuity, and don’t drive like an idiot. This is good advice but there are too many ways for you to not take care of yourself to actually list. So, take care of your self means be healthy. You’ve had some good examples around the house and that is helpful. But remember, that guy in the mirror needs to look after himself. Take smart risks. Take care of your physical human being.

Advice #5: The law of the farm. Good things don’t happen fast. Some people get lucky and good things happen for them fast. I don’t go into the world depending on luck to get me where I want to go and neither should you. The law of the farm is this: plant a seed and pay attention to it every day, water it, protect it, and you will get something useful. Diligence is the word.

Advice #6: Obsess. If you want to make your way in the world you’re going to need to obsess about something. This is easy advice to give you because I’ve seen you wash a car. Now I don’t expect this is your highest calling. But I am absolutely certain that the seeds of your greatness (see Advice #5) can be found in your innate ability to focus for long periods of time on perfection – again, I’ve seen this personally. Everyone I know who I consider successful has this ability. It has multiple benefits. First it makes you good at whatever you choose to obsess over. Second, it creates a focused mind and gives you a really good feeling. Some people don’t have this and it is a real problem for them. Some get carried away and get monomaniacal. I think you are sensible enough to use what you got.

Advice #7: Listen with a silent mind. This means subordinate what you are thinking and what your response is going to be to the person speaking. Good listening means setting your ego aside. It doesn’t mean the other person is right, it doesn’t mean they are smart and you’re dumb. It means you are listening. Try it as an experiment sometime. Just sit there like a bump on a log and listen to someone without trying to immediately talk back to them. Look them full in the face and pay attention to them. I bet you’ll be amazed. I’m still learning to be good at this. Some may think something is wrong with you. The people you trust (Advice #2), or should trust, will come to recognize that you actually are listening to them. People, ALL people, want to be heard, and you will find an uncommon source of power through listening. People will come to you because they will learn that you listen. You will learn because you have listened. Try the experiment and see what you get.

Advice #8: If a family member can’t make it to your graduation assume they have some kind of guilt about it and hit them up later to make it up to you.

Your Pal,

Brendan

Ps. More free advice here

A Train Wreck

2005-03-03T10:52:00.000-08:00

I once saw a train wreck, live and in person, when I was a young teen sitting out on the porch of a farmhouse in Kaufman County. We were all sitting on the porch in Warsaw, Texas watching the train after the annual corn fest. Alta and Sterling were well into their 70’s but they still worked the farm they had had most of their lives. Their small 2-bedroom farmhouse was adjacent to several hundred acres of maize and corn growing at its peak height in September. My brother Kirk and I would take turns running into the cornfields and getting scared. 10 yards in and you were completely isolated. The silence was surprising and the huge zig zag spiders were threatening. Sometimes the only way out was to call out and follow someone’s voice.

Each year these two septuagenarians would invite my family over to eat corn and celebrate the harvest. They loved to see my brother and I rip on a dozen cobs of corn. Some consider this pig food but my (pre)adolescent self found that fresh corn out of the pot and a stick of butter was truly blissful. It was hot, probably in the 90’s, but after August in North Texas 90 feels really good. After dinner we were sitting around on the porch because it was much cooler than inside – there was no air conditioning to speak of. We had been sitting there with little conversation - the Freiley’s weren’t talkative people. We sat there being with each other and enjoying the serenade of the cicadae’s of late summer. If there is any romance in farming I’m sure that this is where I came to believe it.

Well, we were sitting there and in the distance was a faint rumble and Sterling says “Must be the seven fifteen right on time”. The long dirt driveway to this farmhouse crossed railroad tracks about 50 yards from the house. The proximity to the raildroad and graineries added not only practicality to the farm’s location but but served as a visual testament to their commitment to practicality. The train was really long and really loud. We sat there watching the cars roll by because there was absolutely nothing else one could do. As we watched it slowly dawned upon my mind that I was looking at the tops of the boxcars. My ears also noticed that the noise level had dramatically changed in character. The large moment of inertia, the linkage between cars, and the sheer momentum of several hundred cars on a large freight train means that a train wreck happens very slowly. Slowly means more than a minute. The train slowly rotated on its side for maybe two dozen box cars. Time stood still or in any case it slowed way down. Disbelief was frozen in our minds until the slow thaw of reality. The visual and auditory information didn’t cause the thaw. It was the deep kinetic vibrations of the ground underneath our feet that that made it real. What takes even longer than comprehending all of the signals is grasping the actuality of it, the implications, the disasterness of it..

The wheel assemblies broke free once the sides of the cars hit the ground. These assemblies were extremely heavy and buried up below their axles in hard packed September baked dirt. Dirt, gravel, goods and heavy gauge sheet metal shredded and flew everywhere. It was spectacular.

Sometimes even when all of the information is at hand the mind balks at the conclusions. Your mind suspends judgement because the conclusions are not acceptable or expected.

A Powerful Example of News

2005-01-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

The terrible events following the earthquake in the south pacific have provided a unique opportunity for blogs and wiki to deliver news. What you will find is that these technologies allow coverage that is immediate, graphic, intelligent, succinct, context rich and persistent.

Bloggers on locations are delivering compelling first hand accounts, photos, and more. The wikipedia current events source is providing an outstanding summary of events with relevant links to most if not all aspects of the story.

These tools enable the creation of a very dense narrative of events in time.

The Blogosphere

2004-12-17T10:56:00.000-08:00

The Blogosphere refers to the worldwide community of blogs. Blogs are a self-publishing technology that enable anyone to publish content to the world wide web. It is a fascinating phenomena because of the scope of its impact. It is, in itself, cause to be hopeful because it is empowering individuals through the creation of an entirely new social medium. It is creating new political space - eliminating the isolation that Hannah Arendt would call the precondition for totalitarianism. The recent election in the Ukraine, blogging crackdowns in China, Howard Dean's fund raising and many other examples demonstrate the importance of the blogosphere in our lives. There is a lot of power in this nascent technology that connects people and ideas.

Dan Gilmore, in his new book We The Media, delivers an important analysis of blogs and how they are shaping events today. But blogs are only completing the first step in what will be a staggering transformation of how people are connected to news, events, ideas through a rich dialogue and collaboration in every sphere of our daily lives.

To start, the blogosphere is a force mutiplier for civic audit of our institutions. Not only is the Fourth Estate challenged and daily critiqued by this new medium , it promises to vette policies and scrutinize our government and its officials with the combined talent of millions of citizens.

The self-organizing blogosphere draws on the creative power and deep technical expertise of a few million today. The primary enterprise of this talent is currently deconstructing the news and political events. Have no doubt that these same resources will be brought to bear to solve extraordinary challenges in the future.

My mobile phone can dispatch photos to my blog and I can call in audio to this blog. In another two years I will send video clips from my phone from anywhere in the world. Production costs to distribute my ideas globally are currently zero. Content syndication automatically distributes my contributions. These trends are powerful.

In an age when our erstwhile agrarian and tribal communities are reeling from the quick succession of the Industrial and Information Technology revolutions we find that our connectedness with others is not that of our pre-19th century forbears. In fact, we interact with our new technology and media within a social context that our primitive brains don't easily overcome. Even if you don't live among a million people then no doubt your entire pattern of living is influenced through the social structures, institutions, and products arising from a civilization that does. The blogosphere is a new medium to harness independent voices and communities that will increasingly shape these social structures, institutions and products of our ideas and labor. It gives voice and reach to the millions who have been silenced in the face of blocked parties, colossal government and the simulcasts of the corporate mainstream media.

The blogosphere is cause to be hopeful that we can increase our bearing, our community, our connectedness and ultimately our wealth, however you may conceive it, through the product of our minds.

The Palimpsest Problem

2004-11-17T11:00:00.000-08:00

In May the estimable Wretchard the Cat at the Belmont Club described the events surrounding the Wedding Party that was bombed by American Troops in Iraq. Using this particular event Wretchard describes how this story is delivered via the press and the very serious limitations of simulcasted news stories.

One of the challenges facing intellectuals at a time when the political and cultural dimensions of war have grown in relation to the purely military is how to make sense of information acquired through the public intelligence system: the news media. Because modern American warfare now involves only a very small percentage of the population it has become a kind of spectator sport where the plays are actually called from the stands. One would hope on good information. Yet a news industry whose techniques were adequate to cover traffic accidents, murders or cumbrous wars in which armies moved a few hundred yards a day must now must cover events whose complexion can alter in hours. The difference is that this time there is no low-tech acetate overlay, maps, or timeline in battalion notebook. Battlefield events are still reported like isolated traffic accidents, conveying no sense of spatial location, temporal development or continuity. To the extent that any symbols are plotted on the public mental map, they remain there, hours or days after the information has been updated. Long after it became clear that the attack may not have been an attack on a wedding party at all, the original accusation soldiered on.

The the Mainstream Media (MSM) has serious limitations. It is not presently configured to distribute intelligence in support of a thriving, successful democracy. The lack of persistence in the storyline and the evolving interpretation of events undermines the intelligence of the populous. This in turn undermines the civic audit functions of the populous vis a' vis the government and, in this specific case, the prosecution of war.

Wretchard has illuminated a very important limitation of how news is disseminated. The press creates a discontinuous and incoherent story. What you know is a function of the point in time in which you acquired the latest news. The press creates a stream of temporally and spatially disjointed stories without historical context to support a continuous narrative. Citizens are therefore either ignorant or misinformed concerning a specific newsworthy event. Even those of us who are news-addicts cannot keep up with the story.

This is a problem that is ripe for a solution through the use of emerging technologies. Blogs and Wiki's will solve these current limitations and will be brought to bear to solve extraordinary challenges in the future. These technologies will enable the manpower behind the blogosphere to create a unique, persistent, visual and narrative analysis of news stories.

Babies

2004-08-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

Elliott was born today. We are going to have a blast together.

Yummy yummy
Blow that tummy
Pitter patter feet
Smiles of little teeth

I like those snuggles
Like nothing else
Warm and wiggly
The smell of cell division

little breath
little fingers
snuggles linger

The feeling is sublime
I find them divine
God-like creatures
Perfect and new

Nothing changes and we never do
Suggesting maybe some of us have just lost our way
Ranging minds and emotion
Bodies in motion
Wrap me in ebullience
I cannot define