bearing blog

Bad-cop story of the day.

I would  so sue if this was my kid.

The 13-year-old son of John and Tara Farrell and a 12-year-old friend were walking in Brooklyn Park one August night when a Cadillac Escalade sped up and the driver ordered them inside.

The man drove to his nearby house, sat the frightened boys on a curb and slapped handcuffs on them. Only then did they learn that they had been placed under citizen's arrest by off-duty Minneapolis police officer Tony Adams, whose doorbell had been rung earlier by someone who fled and who had heard from neighbors that teens might be breaking into vehicles in the area.

The Farrells, who had called 911 about their missing son and had been frantically searching for him, didn't learn the identity of the man they believed had abducted the boys for at least 10 minutes.

Adams'  lawyer says he was only doing "what any cop would have done."  On behalf of everyone in Minneapolis:  Let's hope not. 

Several people witnessed the "arrest," and called 911 to report what looked every bit like a kidnapping to them.

Hotelling.

Mark had a business trip to Somewhere in Illinois today, and rather than have him fly out and back before we could drive through on our way to visit family for Thanksgiving, I opted to drive him there from Minneapolis myself. 

Bonus:  Free money from his employer, who will compensate us for 700 miles of wear and tear on the minivan that would have been incurred anyway.

Downside:  I had to get up at 3 AM and drive it all myself, so Mark could get adequate rest and also engage in conference calls.  Which were at least mildly technically interesting to me, so not too bad of a way to spend the day.

Bonus:  Am now enjoying free wireless at the hotel, also on the company tab, while the kids veg with cups of root beer in front of PBS Kids and we wait for Mark to finish up at the site and rejoin us for dinner. Mark claims there is a YMCA in town, so if we're not too tired, I may even get to finish up the day with a swim.

Professional values.

Interesting discussion at Althouse about the human interchanges revealed in the so-called "climate-gate" email leak.  Actually, interesting discussion in a lot of places, but I'll just pick Althouse to start.

I write this at a time before the emails are confirmed to be completely genuine, and I write as a global-warming agnostic.  It is reasonable to take prudent steps to alleviate the problem as long as there is a significant consensus among climatologists that there's a problem and there's something we can do about it, as seems plausible; it is also reasonable to continue to take data, to publicize raw data, and to keep objectively re-evaluating the data we have in preparation for revising those steps if necessary.   Really, that's the sort of thing I would say about any kind of research that seems to demand Action Be Taken -- look at the health recommendations of heart-disease researchers, for example.  

But there's nothing terribly shocking to me about how the climatologists are apparently behaving in these e-mails.  And I am not saying this because I believe climatologists to be peculiarly biased or peculiarly political-minded.  

Having got out of the academic research business immediately after receiving my doctorate, my experience with the writing and submission of scientific papers is limited. I have served as peer reviewer exactly once. My name appears on a couple of papers that I didn't write (and didn't ask to have my name attached to). I chose not to put in the work to finish or to submit the papers that were based on my thesis research.



That's a long caveat for this observation: Scientists and engineers are subject to human nature just like everybody else. 

Because "objectivity" and "adherence to the data" are explicit values of our profession, I think the human tendency to let our feelings about people influence our beliefs about their competence, or to ignore data we don't like, or to nudge our conclusions in the direction of our own ideologies, are probably mitigated relative to many other professions. (Which is why "Show me the data" is a demand that will always have teeth.)

 But those tendencies don't go away, and they never quite let go their sway over people. 

Every once in a while you hear someone sniff, "We're scientists, we make recommendations based on objective observations" -- as if the mere fact of "being a scientist" is a guarantee that he or she will behave like scientists are supposed to.  (What would you think of a sitting congressman who stated, "I'm an elected official, therefore you can be sure that I always act in the interest of my constituents and the good of the country?") It would be better for scientists and engineers to acknowledge that they must have biases, being human, and that those biases always exert a pull on their work, and then do their best to overrule them with the rational mind, to root them out in the service of the values of the profession.  

One way to root them out is to show your data to someone who disagrees with you, of course, and let him or her have their say.  That's one of the things which peer review is supposed to accomplish, but it's also the sort of thing that one could do in private, as a preliminary exercise or test of one's own conclusions.  How solid are they, really?  Can you really say "incontrovertible?"  That's almost like saying your theories are "untestable."  Which is treading close to saying that they are not scientific statements at all.

Anyway, my point is just that there's nothing special about climatology, or about other lines of research with policy implications, that make the scientists and engineers who are involved in it peculiarly subject to the whims of human nature.  You see it everywhere you look hard enough.  Maybe that's just another way of saying that everything is fraught with politics, and it doesn't matter how petty the politics is -- we could merely be talking about intradepartmental politics, or hunger for power within one single research group in one department in one corner of one university in the middle of nowhere -- it still gets deep into people and makes them forget the higher values of their profession.

In your own interest.

In the last six months or so, in political conversations and articles and blog posts that range from light to intense, I've repeatedly heard or read a certain phrase.   The context is mostly the health-care bill these days, but of course I heard it a lot back during the presidential campaign cycle too.  Maybe you have as well.  The implications of the phrase seem oddly illogical to me.  Help me out here.

It's this:  The person says (or writes) about some bloc of voters, with a note of incredulity in his/her voice (or style):  "They just won't vote in their own interest."  Or:  "I don't understand why they don't vote in their own interest."  Or "If only we could get them to vote in their own interest."  Or something along those lines.

What I don't understand is the incredulity here.

I mean, there's nothing WRONG with voting in "one's own interest," which I take to mean a purely practical calculation:  I will personally be better off if this policy gets enacted, or if that politician takes office, rather than the alternatives.  I expect that a largish fraction of voters follow this line of reasoning on a largish fraction of issues.       

What I don't get, though, is why anyone with a reasonable grasp of the diversity of human philosophies would be confused by the tendency of significant numbers of people NOT to follow that reasoning.

First of all, have the people who use this phrase never heard of "the common good?"   What's so odd about someone saying "I know I will never benefit from such-and-such a policy, but many other people will, and I cast my vote on the side of those other people?"   

Even if you truly believe that rank individualistic pragmatism is the way to go, and I can see the logic in thinking that if the majority of voters cast their votes in "their own interest" then "the common good" would necessarily be served, it just doesn't seem all that crazy to me that large numbers of people would prefer to cast their vote -- or think of casting their vote -- in the direction that they believe serves the wider society best rather than the one that serves "ME" best.  In fact, I'll bet a lot of people who really DO vote only "in their own interest" like to tell themselves they are voting for "the common good."

Second, the phrase assumes unquestioningly -- despite the evidence to the contrary that is implicit in the aforementioned incomprehensible voting behavior -- that the speaker knows what those people's "own interest" is.   Can such a speaker comprehend that other people's idea of "their own interest" may be different from his?  This possibility is so obvious that I am almost embarrassed to point it out.    And no one who uses the phrase ever seems to acknowledge the fact of this assumption with any qualifiers.   I can't think of any commentary I've read that goes, "I just can't understand why those folks don't vote according to what I think is their own interest."   

The obvious rejoinder is "You don't understand it because you haven't asked, 'Why do you perceive this policy, and not its alternative, to be in your own interest?"  Or else, I suppose:  "You have asked, and you reject the answer and believe that you know better than someone else what his own interest is."

In sum, it just strikes me that to wonder aloud (or in writing) why a group won't "vote in their own interest" is to openly admit one of these three things:

•  a philosophy of total cynicism, in which it is irrational to act for the common good; 
• open contempt for the agency, intelligence, and motives of other people
• at best, a complete failure of imagination

A better question is .... "Why is making such an admission in the speaker's interest?"  

What a difference 21 weeks makes.

 

Bra fitting.

I had to hit REI today for a couple of new sports bras for my expanding self, and so was amused to read this piece by Emily Piacenza appearing at DoubleX. 

Inside the store, I was seated briefly in a tight corner, surrounded by lingerie and hosiery, and there I filled out a questionnaire about my goals. I was interested in comfortable, everyday bras, not "special occasion" lingerie. Yes, I often found that my straps slid down and that underwire left marks. I did not have a problem with bras being too tight. I wasn't sure if they were too loose. No, I did not need a lot of padding. Yes, my breasts were two subtly different sizes. In the space marked "other concerns," I wrote, "I am a schoolteacher and cannot have my nipples visible at any time. Thank you." A small bespectacled woman eventually approached me through the screens of silk and lace, collected my paper, and glanced over it quickly. "OK, Emily, please follow me into the dressing room," she said, not really smiling, and back we went.

In a small, curtained cubicle she asked me to take off my top and bra, and I stood uncomfortably aware of my boobs as she looked at them quickly and quizzically and then left. Alone, I gazed at myself in the full-length mirror, but before I could do a thorough analysis, she was back, armed with twenty bras. She chose a plain black one with lacy straps, held it up in front of me, and then with one swift movement hooked it around me. I couldn't remember the last time anyone had actually helped me put on my underwear, and so distracted was I with that thought that I didn't even really notice that she was tugging at the bra and adjusting the straps, the band, and my breasts. She stepped away to give me a glance into the mirror. I stared.

I had a very similar experience (only with a consultation rather than a questionnaire) when I bit the bullet and went to the Expensive Department Store to get properly fitted a few years ago, and was transformed in the space of a few minutes from ill-fitting 40C to correctly-fitting 36DDD.  Had to get re-fitted again last year after dropping 50 pounds; who knows where I'll be post-baby?

Needless to say, REI does not employ bra fitting specialists that I know of, but by now I have a decent idea of how they are supposed to fit.  It's sort of amazing that I went for so many years doing it all wrong, though.

Goals.

I'm still swimming, and I'm still doing something I call "running," a few times a week.  It'll all get harder after the baby's born, I know -- mostly because of scheduling.  As much as we like the people who staff the child care in our YMCA, the new baby will be many months old before we even try to find out whether he likes being left there for 20-30 minutes.

It's not exactly dismaying to see my performance declining in pregnancy, because (a) I expected it and (b) I never managed to maintain the habit of exercising through any of my other pregnancies.  There is a certain amount of "Gosh I hope it doesn't take me forever to get back where I was" and a dash of "Is it even possible to get back where I was?"  Obviously one goal will be to return to where I was before my pregnancy started.  But I think I might like to set my sights higher than that, and set a "next" goal as well -- bearing in mind that it could be a while before I get there.  So here are two.

1.  My next performance goal as a swimmer is to raise my workout distance to one mile.  When I first started, I got noticeably faster every time I got in the pool, and so my workout distances lengthened steadily.  By the time I got pregnant, the improvement had slowed, and I'd been swimming 1400 yards (28 laps) each 40-minute workout.   1750 yards -- 35 laps -- is just about one mile, and I think I'd like to be able to say that I swam "a mile" at the end of my workout.  It's a modest improvement, 25 percent; but I need to get a bit faster for it to work, because I don't have much time to spare.  I'd like to be able to swim the whole workout in 45 or 50 minutes.

2.  My next performance goal as a runner is to complete a 5K -- walking or running -- in the spring, and to run a 5K (without stopping to walk) by late summer or fall.  It pains me a little bit to have such modest goals, but I'm a good bit nervous about returning to running, having perused the "post-pregnancy" forum at Runners' World.  Apparently injuries are pretty common if you overdo it too quickly, what with all the ligament -softening hormones.

Embarrassment.

At Gravity and Levity, before he gets into the meat of the post, there is a short memoir of his embarrassing first day as a graduate student.  He concludes:

The following month proceeded something like this: I would go to his office in the morning and he would give me a problem to work on.   I would spend the afternoon and evening reading through my old textbooks and lecture notes and trying to piece together a reasonable solution, usually using the direct and formal mechanisms I had learned as an undergraduate.  The next morning I would bring my big solution to his office and present my result (the usual evaluation: you’re kind of right, but not completely right).  Then he would show me how to solve the problem with one diagram and three lines of algebra, give me another problem to work on, and the cycle would repeat.

If I have any “intuition” in physics, it was only developed through a painful and somewhat embarrassing process like this one.  Sometimes I think that to be a scientist is to live in constant fear of embarrassing yourself.

I totally related to this post and wish I'd read some of it before I started grad school so long ago.  I had many days in graduate school that felt very much like that.  Fortunately, I didn't have the embarrassing moment of first encountering my adviser in the men's room.  If I had, that would have been even MORE embarrassing.

Grammar.

Eugene Volokh is blogging about grammar again and getting lots of comments.  It's the old "what is standard?" argument again...

So, commenters, is it that all these writers (whose work ranges from the late 1500s to the 1900s) and many more were wrong, and you’re right, when you say that “their” can’t be used in these contexts? Is it that you have the Logic of the Language on your side — the same logic that tolerates the singular “you are,” “aren’t I?,” “ice cream,” and much more, but that as a matter of the laws of logic balks at a singular “they”? Or is it just that you’re discussing what you find aesthetically pleasing (or even pedagogically optimal, for instance with an eye towards teaching students usage that will satisfy self-described “purists” and will thus serve them well socially)? If it’s the latter, I’ll happily end the debate. But my sense is that many people who denounce the singular “they” (including where the singular relates to nouns with a collective meaning, such as “everyone”) and similar matters are making an assertion about correctness, and not just about their own tastes or about the most useful teaching approaches.

As a writer -- of blog posts, personal correspondence, scientific papers, and the like -- my style priorities come in this order.

1. Clarity
2. Elegance (a context-dependent subjective judgment)
3. Logical construction
4. Adherence to standard grammatical rules

Most of the time, these four goals align.  Occasionally they don't.  And when they do, a writer has to make a choice.  Everybody must take his or her own bag adheres to rules, and is logical.  It is, I think, just as clear as Everybody must take their own bag.  In most contexts it's not as elegant.

As a teacher, though, I'm a big believer in instructing kids and other emergent writers "slavish adherence to standard grammatical rules," followed by "logical construction of sentences."  

First, I want them to learn the rules; occasionally context demands slavish adherence to standard rules, and in most contexts nonstandard writing creates unintended distraction rather than intended style and elegance.

Second, it's easier to teach younger children objective, clear rules.  It's much harder to explain concepts like "elegance" and "clarity," at least until they're older.

Third, subjective evaluation of writing is made easier over time as learners gain confidence and comfort with the language they're writing in, and as they gain exposure to many contexts and to examples of really excellent writing that may play looser with standard syntax.

Fourth, you get more leeway with nonstandard writing when you're good at it, and especially, good at judging when it works and when it doesn't.  

That's pedagogy for you -- and not everyone with an opinion on the subject has bothered to distinguish pedagogical from stylistic issues.

More gratuitous belly pics.

Thirty weeks tomorrow.  MJ operated Photo Booth for me so I could mug.

Charming advice.

The midwife told me it's time for me to start telling the baby that he should turn head down.

I admit to being skeptical that a life of perfect obedience will begin in utero.

Art lesson.

Milo and Silas have been working together on art prints, Charlotte-Mason-style, for several months now.  Yesterday I took the  two of them to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for a brief visit, and a chance to see some "real" artworks up close.

I took them straight to the "Art of the American West" collection, because I thought they'd find it exciting.

 Milo picked Edgar Payne's "Canyon Portal" as his favorite piece in the room; here's Silas examining it.  

Meanwhile, Milo sat on the floor with a sketchbook to produce his own version.  Here it is: 

 See the two little men on horseback at the bottom?

Silas chose a Bierstadt as his favorite painting, but while we waited for Milo to finish his sketch copy of the Payne, Si was drawn to this bronze by Harry Jackson, "Stampede:"

He talked about it at length, pointing out the three cowboys among the rushing mass of cattle, and was especially interested in two details:  one cowboy who'd fallen off his horse, dragged by his ankle in the stirrup, and one steer's missing horn-tip.  I suggested that perhaps it was the artist's intent to show that some of the cattle were hurt in the stampede, their horns broken off, but Silas was sure that some mishap had occurred to the artwork.  "It is really old," he told me.

We moved on to the next room of American Art, where the boys studied two beautifully crafted flintlock rifles.  "Why is a gun in an art museum?"  I asked them.  "Can a gun be art?" and got some interesting answers, mostly revolving around the idea "Because they're old."   

The room after that was a bit of a mixed bag, with furniture, textiles, still lifes, and things.  I thought the boys would go for the ENORMOUS still life on one wall, or the striking painting of a tornado over St. Paul on the other -- but no; Silas grabbed the sketchbook and crayons, and made a beeline for a jewel-like little still life on the opposite wall, next to a marble bust.

It turned out to be a Peale -- Raphaelle Peale's "Still Life with Fruit, Cakes, and Wine."  Silas has an eye for the well-regarded, I think.

I don't have a picture of Silas's sketch, but it was charming -- sort of a linear left-to-right catalog of all the items in the still life.  A line across the bottom made the surface the elements rested on, and from left to right he drew a cup of wine, an apple, a leafy twig, a medium orange, another leafy twig, two "cupcakes," and a stick-straight vine with five grapes like beads on a string.

Meanwhile, Milo was entranced by a giant silver Tiffany urn.

 

I let the boys choose the last room.  They led me downstairs and decided on the Chinese pottery.  Each picked some items to draw, and then I had them both draw the same item to finish up:  a little Sung Dynasty dish that had attracted Silas.  "It's so little, I can make it little like it is," he said happily.  Milo shrugged -'s'OK - and dutifully they passed the red-orange and green crayons back and forth until they had finished.

On the way home they were immersed in a book of picture puzzles Milo keeps in the car ("can you find the twelve differences between the two photos?") and wouldn't talk to me.  But they were happy to be singled out together for a "special" lesson today, while all their siblings stayed at our house and did "the usual" lessons with Hannah.  And they both agreed that it is more interesting to see the "real thing" than to study a print of a painting.   

History and today.

I've started thinking already about next year's literature-based American History study.  Last year we did "prehistorical North America through the War of 1812."  This year we're doing "19th century" -- really, "war of 1812 through U.S. entry into WWI," with half the year spent on Civil War and related topics.  Next year we'll wrap it up with "Twentieth-Century America" -- which is really going to be "World War I through 9/11/01," I think.

When I prepared the book lists for the first two-thirds, I started by picking up a couple of good high-school history textbooks and reading through them to get an idea of which topics to cover.  I think this time around, though, I am not going to do that.  That approach forces you to start in the past and look forward.  It's also an approach in which everything is important -- in which it's hard to make priority choices, given the limited time we have to spend.  But I need a way to decide which topics we must cover and which must be set aside.   So I think maybe the best approach is to start in the present and look back.  I want to ask myself, "Where are we now?  And how did we get here?"

It's not that I want to focus heavily on current events with the kids I'm teaching, who will be two fifth-grade boys and one seventh-grade girl next year (plus whichever younger kids "tag along" with the subject from day to day).   I don't think they are old enough to really dig into the complexities of modern-day politics, domestic and global.  

But I do want to supply them with the basic historical background they will need to understand today's United States and its place in the world.  I want to steep them at least a bit in the past, so that when it comes time to understand a complicated present, they'll have some idea that it didn't come out of nowhere.  And so when I select topics, I want to do it with an eye toward setting the stage for today.  That, I think, will be my primary organizing principle, since I can't cover everything.  Does this topic help us understand where we are today?  Here in the U. S.?

I think it has a way of focusing how to teach about things.  It's so easy to think of the twentieth century as a string of "eras:"  the World War I era, the Depression era, the WWII era, the Cold War era, the era of the Civil Rights Movement, and so on.  I was tempted to break it up like that myself.  But there are other ways to think about all these pieces, less as discrete time blocks than... phenomena maybe?   The end of American isolationism and the beginnings of intensive global involvement, for better or worse.  The great migrations from rural areas to cities, and from south to north.   U.S. involvement in the Mideast.

Let's talk presidents.  I'd rather cover a few in depth than all of them superficially.  In the 19th century I planned to cover biographies of only three presidents, the most interesting ones:  Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt.  In the twentieth century, whose full biographies to cover?  It strikes me that two are no-brainers:  FDR and Reagan.  They make interesting counterpoints, if nothing else.  When I was talking it over with Hannah I also ticked off "and Kennedy," but when I mentioned that to Mark he said "No way.  Kennedy's only interesting because he was assassinated.  You want an interesting character study, you want to do Lyndon Johnson."   

"Nixon maybe?"

"Well, sure, he's a character too, but a lot of interesting things happened under Johnson.  Think about it."  And I am thinking about it -- he has a point.

Anyway, I am a long way from committing anything to paper, but I will definitely have food for thought over the next few weeks.