The Joys of Unrequited Blogging

I noticed today that sometime in the last 24 hours I have exceeded 5000 all-time page views.

I've been writing my little screeds--550 of them now--into this blog now for a little more than five years.  5000 page views is a microscopic number for that amount of time, especially when you consider that the vast majority of those are robots or weird search-throughs.  I know that there are a handful of you out there who are actual readers, and maybe one or two that are regular readers.  Thanks for bearing with me.  You must find some of this stuff interesting or you wouldn't bother.  It makes a huge difference to know that I'm not always shouting into the void.

But, to be honest, I'd keep writing this even if there was nobody receiving.  I've always liked keeping up with the news and having an opinion about it.  I've found that you don't really know what your opinion is until you write it down.  Writing it down in a form that's fit for consumption by another human being gives me a little responsibility to be semi-clear, semi-coherent, and semi-civil.  All of those are nice personal qualities, deserving of periodic maintenance.

If you scroll back through my history, you'll find that my posting levels wax and wane, depending on what shiny object has currently attracted my attention.  Presidential campaigns tend to make me cranky, and I'll increase my output.  The result of presidential campaigns tends to make me depressed and post-averse for a while.  We'll see if that pattern holds up.  I'm not sure what would happen if somebody that I actually liked won.  Maybe one day I'll find out.  Hey, it could happen.

I post a three of four comments a week on other blogs.  No doubt the few of you who read this came to me through one of those.  I'm sure that the comments get more readers than the blog.  Maybe some day that will change.  Maybe not.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to run a successful blog.  I'm not sure I'd enjoy it.  I certainly don't desire it enough to market the blog, fool with search rankings, or write the inflammatory posts that seem necessary for the amateurs to be successful.  But it might be interesting if it just happened, but that's about as aspirational as I'm going to get.

So I'll just keep plugging away, if you don't mind--or even if you do mind.

Again, thanks.

Yipeee! I've Been Discredited!

I kinda geeked out on a net neutrality policy debate over on Obsidian Wings and I actually got somebody to quote this humble blog in order to discredit me. They used this post, which of course has nothing to do with network neutrality but which did contain some mildly out-of-context red meat through which I could be scorned.

I'm sure that my traffic stats (if I were measuring them) have gone up by a factor of a hundred. I'm so proud!

The Death of 8.01 and 8.02

MIT is doing away with its lecture=based introductory physics courses. One of my most excruciating memories from my intensely checkered career at MIT was attending 8.01 lectures in introductory mechanics in the dreaded, auditorium-like room 26-100. During the lectures on conservation of momentum, the professor set up an air track, smashed a couple of shuttles together to demonstrate his points, and then droned on with the rest of the lecture--while leaving the air track running, with the shuttles bouncing back and forth.

Now, it's impossible to get an air track completely level, and friction eventually does slow things down. So after 15 or 20 minutes, the shuttles would ever, so, sloooowly, coast to spot in the middle of the track, stop, and then, even, more, sloooowly, slide back in the other direction. There were 500 freshmen in that auditorium, all of them with the same wincing expression on their faces, watching that damned shuttle come to a stop. They all had similar expressions of relief on their faces when it started moving again.

Forget waterboarding and stress positions and prolonged isolation. Just put your enemny combatant in front of that air track and you'll have him spilling everything he knows in about two hours.

MIT is going to a high-tech, participatory approach to teaching its introductory physics courses. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out. This looks like a significant innovation in teaching technology, which is ultimately the way how we solve our education problems.

I'm Back (?)

I seem to have taken a couple of months off. Some of this was post-election stupor, but I've also had a bit of a health issue (a bit of C6 radiculopathy, which has made it painful and/or disturbing to type very much).

Starting Monday, I'll be heading back to work. I've been on a leave of absence for nine months and it's time to do something productive.

Which leaves the future of this blog sort of up in the air. I've enjoyed doing something approaching structured, non-technical writing for the first time in years, but it does take up a certain amount of time. We'll see.

Morgan, RIP

Today we put our dog down.

Morgan was a happy, bumbling cocker spaniel, more than a little neurotic, and just smart enough to consistently draw the wrong conclusion. You haven't experienced true canine hilarity until you've seen a dog who can't quite grok the concept of three dimensions try to figure out what the hell happened when the squirrel she was chasing ran up a tree.

As with many cockers, she was really a one-person dog. In her case, that meant that my wife was her mom. (Apparently I must be the alpha dog of the pack, because she would always crawl between my legs during thunderstorms.) My wife and Morgan were inseparable. She was, as my wife said, simply "the best dog I ever had."

I'm not really that much of a dog person but Morgan was just a sweetie. You have never seen anybody--dog or person--that was happier just to see you.

Morgan had a simple life. As long as her mom was around, all she really needed was the occaisional game of squirrel (the stuffed, two-dimensional kind), a walk where she could sniff stuff, the occaisional belly rub, and as much food as she could get her little doggy paws on. My god, how that dog loved to eat! It was truly an amazing sight, watching her hoover up whatever happened to be around. A dog of simple needs: if you gave her any of the above, she got all wiggly and smiley.

At about age 11, Morgan began to exhibit the symptoms of Cushing's disease. She became lethargic. She gained weight. Her usual love of food became a sort of desperation. She developed a wide variety of skin disorders. Her arthritis got worse. She just wasn't the same dog, but she was hanging in there.

Then she developed sudden acquired retinal degeneration (SARD), a condition that's sometimes associated with Cushing's. Over the course of about two weeks, she went completely blind.

I'm told that some blind dogs adapt after a while. Morgan never did. During the day, she seemed to have a small residue of sight. She could navigate outdoors OK, and usually could avoid bumping into things in the house. But if she went to sleep and then woke up, she would consistently panic; it was as if she forgot she was blind every time she slept. At night, she was helpless.

Coupled with the Cushing's, and arthritic hips, and a variety of digestive disorders that seemed to accompany the Cushing's, she became more and more lethargic, more and more fearful, more and more in pain. The smiley face was replaced with a pinched, confused look. Mercifully, she slept a lot.

We arrogate certain responsbilities to ourselves when it comes to our pets because, well, they're animals. They can reason out certain things, but it's beyond their capacity to reason out things like "the life I'm living now isn't worth living and I wish it would end." We have to do that for them, knowing that if we could ask them, they might easily disagree. We dithered for a while, but ultimately it was just too cruel to let her continue.

We had a terrific vet who walked us through the euthanasia procedure beforehand. Morgan died in the arms of her mom and dad, peacefully and quickly.

As a nonbeliever, I just can't quite wrap my arms around the idea of the afterlife. That's a problem when loved ones die, because you can't really jolly yourself into thinking that they've gone to a better place. For Morgan, I'll have to content myself with the knowledge that she had a terrific life and the few months of suffering she had at the end are now over.

But if there were going to be such a place as doggy heaven, I'm certain that Morgan would be a shoo-in. No doubt, in doggy heaven, trees are just high enough to pee on, and squirrels have to manage in two dimensions.

Two Years of Being Poor By Proxy

It's not so much a dirty secret as it is a source of personal shame that my children did not initially excel academically. I will spare you the litany of things that I wish I'd done differently. It's long, it's embarrassing, and there's ultimately no excuse for it.

My oldest daughter recovered from her disastrous early high school years to do pretty well at the end of high school and, after taking some time off to travel and work, went on to junior college and art school, where she got a BFA. My youngest daughter didn't finish high school, got a GED, and is now off-and-on in cosmetology school.

My son graduated from high school the California Way (i.e. he was on the rolls, so they gave him a diploma) and eventually joined the Army. By the time he left the Army he was married to a woman who had a 5-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl and now, two years later, they also have a 16-month-old daughter. (I feel it's only fair to inform all you other grandparents out there that my grandkids are cuter and smarter than all of yours. Just get over it.)

Needless to say, with a wife, 3 small children and no marketable skills (my son was an NBC specialist in the Army--as it turns out, there's not much of a market for them--mercifully), my son's financial position is, to say the least, dire. So he's attending junior college on the GI Bill, trying to get some marketable skills, and my wife and I are giving them enough money so they can keep their heads above water.

I have never been poor. Sure, I was living in somewhat straitened circumstances during and right after college, but I have never known that oh-shit desperation that comes of not quite knowing how you're going to feed yourself and your children. I've never had to worry that my sick child would have to do without medical care. I've never had creditors dunning me. I've never lived in squalor. In short, I've been incredibly lucky.

My son has had to worry about all of these things, even with our support. When we no longer support him, I'm sure that he'll worry about them even more, even if he's successful with his retraining. His wife is in a similar position.

They're poor. Without our support, they'd be destititute.

I hate the idea of the government supporting my son's family. And yet his kids get their medical care through Medicaid and they get some support through food stamps. Without the GI Bill, I'm not sure I could manage to support him and his family. I'm absolutely certain that he couldn't be a full-time student to get the training he needs to be successful in the future. I believe in these programs. But they're just money, and money is only about a third of the problem.

With a little luck, my son will emerge from junior college with a marketable skill that will allow him to make $25-30,000 per year. With a little luck after that, my daughter-in-law will also be able to go to college (she recently got her GED) and train for a similar job. In a few years, they could be a solidly middle class family making $50-60,000 a year.

I estimate that, by the time we have my son's family well-established, we will have invested more than $50,000 in getting them out of poverty, and the state and feds will have invested a similar amount. This is quite modest compared to sending a child to a 4-year college, but that really wasn't an option, nor is it an option for any but the most academically talented poor children. Mind you, the jury is still out on whether this investment will actually pay off. My son's poor academic skills are improving only slowly and he's chosen something fairly challenging to learn. We'll see.

But I've learned more than a few things about being poor through this experience. Here's what I know:

• Ignorance can destroy you. You lack a huge number of basic life skills if you've had a bad upbringing and/or a poor education. You don't know what credit card debt can do to you. You don't know when and when not to take a sick kid to the emergency room. You don't know how to negotiate with a service provider to convince them to give you fair service. You don't know how to manage money. My son's and his wife's ignorance has cost their family hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. My wife and I spend a significant amount of time each week answering simple questions and slowly getting them up to speed to live in modern, middle-class society.
  
  The other area where ignorance kills is in the fact that you don't know where to look for services beyond simple ADC and Medicaid. There are lots of programs out there to help alleviate poverty. Getting the right people into those programs is incredibly difficult. My son didn't know about the Earned Income Tax Credit until I did their taxes for them. Neither he nor my daughter-in-law knew how to apply to junior college, or how to get financial aid, until we showed them what was available. Anti-poverty programs only work when the people that need them know that they're there.
  
  If my son and his wife didn't have my wife and me to impart this information, they would be condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over, with devastating consequences. Imparting this kind of survival knowledge to children is absolutely essential.



• Two-earner families with lots of small children are simply impossible without support for day-care. At this point, my son has one kid in elementary school, one kid in private pre-school (which we pay for) and the baby is still at home with my daughter-in-law watching her. My daughter-in-law is currently unemployed, but given that the best she could do would be part-time, minimum-wage employment, it really makes more financial sense for her to stay home and take care of the kids than it does to put them in daycare so she can work. That will hopefully change once she's acquired some training for a skilled job.
  
  Low-cost daycare facilities appear to be mostly hell-holes. If we have any chance of dragging more families out of poverty, we've got to come up with a better model for child-care for the poor. I can't see how throwing money at the problem is going to help. The economies of scale that are required to handle large numbers of pre-school children in publicly-supported institutions are going to leave more generations of kids without the skills needed to succeed academically. Head Start sounds like a wonderful idea and its heart is completely in the right place. I'm just not sure that there are enough talented caregivers to make it successful.



• Organizational skills are key. It's chaos at their house 24/7. This is understandable--it's pretty much chaos in any house with 3 small children. But the chaos can drag you down if you can't organize to reduce it a little bit. Things have slowly gotten better as they've learned little organizational tricks.
  
  The same is true for re-training. Knowing how to organize time is a challenge for most students, but it's doubly a challenge with screaming kids in the picture.



• Medical services to the poor are scary. I don't even know where to start. The grandkids are on Medicaid. Private insurance simply didn't make sense, since they qualified for public help. My son has a high-deductible individual policy--he's healthy. My daughter-in-law is currently uninsurable. We're holding our breath and hoping that nothing bad happens.
  
  I'd estimate that a third of their doctor visits are still handled through the emergency room, even though they have well-established ties to a decent medical clinic. Ignorance is part of the problem, but lack of a personal physician is another part. Ignorance of what costs what, and what will impact your future insurability, is a major problem.
  
  Right now, I'd kill for a high-deductible (say $10K) catastrophic insurance policy that you could count on. I'd insure them all in a flash. My regular readers (all 0 of you) know that I strongly advocate the division of medical care into an insured catastrophic portion and a routine-care portion. My experience with my son's family informs this opinion more than anything else. If Medicaid were simply subsidizing routine care, it would be higher-quality and vastly more cost-effective. We could then concentrate on putting in place decent catastrophic insurance, adequately subsidized for the poor.



• Education is everything. Unskilled jobs are simply not adequate for supporting families. If you can't get training, you're screwed. If you won't get training, you have no business having children.
  
  For those of you who might be in danger of having your children go off the rails educationally, all I can offer is my experience in how not to manage the situation. Don't give up, ever. No matter how hard your children fight you and pull every form of passive-aggressive nonsense that they can invent (and they are all very inventive), don't let them off the hook. They can recover from their mistakes but it's really hard. Once they have kids of their own, it's almost impossible.

I never really knew, viscerally, what the term "grinding poverty" meant until two years ago. I do know. Make no mistake, the grinding is occurring between a vastly complex society and a group of unfortunates that have no idea what is happening to them. Government support can lubricate that grinding in spots, but it contributes to it in others. The only real solution is to ensure that enough knowledge is injected for the poor to get out of the way of the juggernaut.

Education is everything.

Education is everything.

Education is everything. If we really want to reduce poverty, we'll need educational innovation more than anything else.

Fifty

I am fifty years old today.

One of my little psychological quirks strongly predisposes me to think more about the future than the present or the past. I'm not a live-in-the-moment kind of guy. And the past is a country I don't visit that often. Nevertheless, hitting the half-century mark seems to require that one spend a moment reflecting on where one has been before looking to the future.

I was born four and a half months after Sputnik was launched. I grew up as a child of the Space Age. The world was made of big things. For some reason, I still vividly remember New Year's Day of 1964. I remember thinking that, before (from my lofty perspective as a five year old), the world looked drab and old-fashioned but now, 1964 was all shiny chrome and glass and plastic. 1964 looked like the future.

I was too young to understand the adult fear that the sixties represented. I don't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember queuing up to leave kindergarten when the principal announced that JFK had been assassinated. My friends and I wondered what would happen as we walked home from school but we weren't frightened. I remember flying back from Maine to Detroit in the summer of 1968. As the plane banked into final approach, the pilot pointed out the smoke rising from Twelfth St. I couldn't understand why somebody would want to burn down their neighborhood. I still can't.

Like most kids my age, I was enormously excited by the space program. When I was young, space represented everything good that my country could do. Space was difficult. It required huge energy--physical, intellectual, societal energy--to conquer space. I couldn't understand why anybody would want to cut the Apollo program short. I still can't.

I spent the early seventies out of the country. My father worked for Ford and I spent junior high in Japan and high school in Brazil. My experience of Watergate and the other Nixon scandals was more the experience of a foreigner than of an American. We were puzzled: how could the most powerful country on Earth rip itself to pieces over what appeared to be some fairly modest corruption? As an American teenager, I understood dimly that this was probably a big deal. As a resident of Brazil, I was alarmed at what appeared to be the capriciousness of the US.

My infatuation with space lasted all the way to college. I entered MIT fully intending to build rockets. But my time there was not happy. For the first time in my life, I wasn't the smart kid. I was intimidated. I wasn't disciplined enough to work through the intimidation. The realities of big system engineering weren't nearly as glamorous as my imagined version of them. Instead of thermodynamics and aerodynamics and structural engineering, I learned more about uncertainty and drugs and depression.

Well, drugs and depression and software. When I left school, sans degree, I left with the knowledge that I had a talent. I understood, almost intuitively, how software systems should be constructed. I had a skill. I was employable. Oddly enough, my first job was at Rockwell, doing software for the Space Shuttle. I wasn't an aero and astro engineer, but I still had some residual love for the space program.

I got married early and had kids early--three of them by the time I was twenty-seven. I'd like to tell you that I was a good father back in those days but that would be a lie. Instead, I was a good provider. I worked like a crazy person. Perhaps I worked as a crazy person. Work was a sanctuary from what turned out to be a very bad marriage. Work was my identity. That lasted until my kids became teenagers and everything blew up. The marriage ended. My children suffered because of my inattention when they were little. I think I did better once I realized the mistakes I'd made but things were bad for while.

My second wife was the best thing that ever happened to me. I still don't quite understand how she knew that there was a sane person trying to emerge from the morass of dysfunction that surrounded my relationship with my kids, but she did. The first few years were touch-and-go but it's amazing what you can accomplish when you know that the person you love actually expects things from you. At the age of thirty-eight, I finally became something like a well-rounded adult. My wife saved four lives.

Depression and I are old friends. We may drift apart but we always touch base every five years or so for a visit. Recently, my old friend has come for a visit where he's kinda worn out his welcome. I suppose you can't be smart, deeply flawed, and fifty without having a doozy of a mid-life crisis. Still, I'll be happy when this one's over. Literally.

One of the things I've learned about being preoccupied with the future is that you can't do it without being terrified of death. After all, when you're preoccupied with what will happen instead of what is happening, death really gets in the way of your plans. When you're an atheist, things are even harder. If I believed in an afterlife, perhaps I could jolly myself into believing that I'd still get to see what happens next. Sadly, I can't believe, comforting--and convenient--though that would be.

At fifty, it's hard to deny death its due. It's out there. Sure, I'm still hoping that Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey will throw some terrific down-field blocks for me. But the field is finite.

There's been a lot of fear in the last eight years, the "oh-ohs," as I like to call them. I am not one to deny the appropriateness of fear when it is appropriate. I worry about my country, not so much because there are people out there that want to destroy it; that's ultimately part of the American condition. You identify those people and you pull their teeth with as much charity as you can get away with. But we are clearly in a period where titanic, historical forces are rumbling beneath the surface, bursting forth in an unsettling pattern that isn't yet quite discernible. We live, as the Chinese like to say, in interesting times.

I worry about my kids and how their lives will turn out. They're all adults now. My son has a family of his own. My children are all still struggling to make their way. For some of them, success is not yet assured. And yet I'm more hopeful about their futures than I've been in a long time. There are still lots of things that could go wrong. But there are lots of things that can go right.

Ever the dweller of the future, I worry about whether, at the end of my life, I'll look back on it and be content with what it was. The outcome of that worry is within my control. If I were run over by a beer truck tomorrow, I'd give myself a passing grade but it certainly wouldn't be an 'A'. I have talent that I haven't always put to the best use. I have people in my life who love me and I haven't always done my best for them. I'm no longer young, and I wish I'd made more of my youth. I have examined my life as best I can and haven't always picked up on the important things until much later. Still, I have a family that I love and who loves me back. I've been moderately successful professionally. I haven't been bored. I've been happy at least as much as I've been sad.

I resist change, as I think many do. Still, when I must change, I do it pretty well. I've coasted for some years, but change has been coming for me. This time, I have resisted it about as long as I can. I feel a second act coming on. In it, I'll be older and slower, but I hope I'll be a lot more comfortable in my own skin.

I'm fifty. Time to grow again.