This is what happens when I stay up late watching TED videos :-)

We have only explored 5% of the oceans on our planet. 

The ocean is 70% of our planet.

There are lakes and rivers 

running along the bottom of the gulf of Mexico!

There is a waterfall...under water...under Iceland!

And the new creatures - so strange

The vampire squid is amazing!

It flies through the water with wings like ears

It glows

It shoots a bioluminescent confetti 

Glittering and confusing the enemy

It paints glowing eyes on its butt

and shrinks them to a pin prick of light 

so in the deep dark

it looks like it is receding, running away

but really

It is wrapped in its own black cloak

And the others - ones I had seen before - 

Leatherback sea turtles fewer and fewer yet

They have lasted one hundred million years

They used to watch T-Rex wander by as they lay their eggs.

Great urban wales in the sea lanes of the east coast
They are more highly stressed than 

The ones who live in the wilds of the arctic south

In the south the whales are fat and sassy

Romping near ancient ice

But 90% of the big fish are gone

In the last 50 years they have gone
gone...gone...gone...

Please Prove You Are Not a Computer

NAGVIn iturtac

Please prove you’re not a computer

ulopl gueseelo

I make mistakes on my own

ndleg spords

I change my mind

sitherel isersiber

I disagree

ednised ftstest

I am slow to process love

nciasp smencern

and grief

theauro dedise

I think therefore

tioneste rentmen

I am not a computer

Who am I, how did I get here and what do I do?

I am a teacher at an independent school where the students pick a topic they are passionate about to study in depth.  I teach math and Latin but mostly I take students on field trips related to the topics they choose to study.

One of the most exciting times of the year is when we field trip teachers get the lists of the topics the students have chosen. It’s like Christmas! The lists have been coming in during the last few days. I’m working on many of the topics that relate to anthropology and one of the students I get to work with wants to know how we got here. He’s not asking about the origin of humans, but once there were humans how did they spread out over the planet.

I started my search for the perfect person to help him with his questions.  I started reading about anthropologists who use genetic markers - small mutations that occurred at various points in human history and were then passed on - to build up a map of early human migration.  

The weight of human history haunted the rest of my day - as I listened to news from Syria, as my husband told a family story at the dinner table, as I glanced at family photos from 1900 on the wall going up the stairs, as I read my children a bedtime story about Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. And I thought - when my ancestors were on the verge of extinction and each day was an infinitesimally epic quest to survive, all I do and know was far and away, in a future where each minute is filled with unimaginable, unbelievable wonders. 

Digital Utopia

In the beginning was word.  In Ascii’s fancy code for on and off.  And then the word became image and there was youtube.  And there was nothing that was made with out word and the word became digitized and dwelt among us almost instantaneously everywhere at once and all (well, almost all) people beheld it.  And took it and created themselves in the image of media on facebook. And twitter. And doing stopped except for the sake of image. And image shaped doing and image grew into a world of Kodachrome perfection shaping perception and giving us a measure to value our souls by the look of our digital lives.

Recently I found myself enthusiastically telling a friend of mine about blogging.  At the risk of coming off as just another narcissist, I expounded on the benefits of blogging for a hesitant writer. She had been telling me she wanted to write more and I was encouraging her to give blogging a try.  A few weeks later I spoke with my friend again.  She had read my blog and had some fun exploring a few others as well.

            “But,” she continued, “After a while I started to feel badly because everyone’s life seems so much more exciting and together than mine is right now.”

            This from a woman who has traveled the world as a street performer and who tackles every challenge life presents her with go-getter confidence.  One who has ridden through life storms, holding on to flotsam by the skin of her teeth and lived to tell the tale!

Utopias always fall apart, abandoning truth for an image of perfection.  Truth is hard and risky to write.  Whenever I edit, I create something not quite real, often a bit more like the world I wish there was.  I’m only human. 

I hope my friend does eventually write something she’ll let me read.  It can’t help but be a gripping tale!

Rated AAA Risk Free

It is Wednesday and I am going to write for 15 minutes. . . I had thoughts in the car, listening on the radio. Yes, today I am going to do it.  Sit down and write. I am.

My dear husband has Wednesday afternoons handled.  He picks up all four of our offspring from their respective institutions of learning and trundles them all off to circus arts classes at the Boulder Circus Center. Then he feeds them junky American fast food on the way home (if I were a good mother I would pack them a nutritious dinner the night before and leave it in the fridge…but…sigh).  I guess the exercise offsets the fried chicken sandwiches.

So back to my point, Wednesdays I can write.  I will come home, sit down and write.  I had thoughts -  in the car - listening to the radio.  Two bright young women were talking about the European Debit Crisis and I was feeling October 2008 déjà vu all over again.  So I will write. 

I walk in the door and I see that my blessed husband has cleaned the kitchen and folded last night’s laundry.  Still, my house starts screaming at me: another load of laundry! Sort through that box of stuff! Bake a few of those little somethings so you won’t be tempted to buy them at the coffee shop tomorrow! You’ve not watered those plants in a while! The bathrooms could use some attention! For the love of God woman – CLEAN SOMETHING!

But TODAY I WILL WRITE!  I had thoughts of my own, about risk, in the car.  The two women were talking about how ratings of AAA were taken to be essentially without risk and that this is the second time this has happened recently.  The mortgage backed securities were rated AAA, so were treasuries issued by Italy and Greece – AAA – risk free.  Yet…

I put a load in the washer, mix up a yeast dough and let it stand in the warm oven and run upstairs to write while the washer runs the first cycle and the bread rises.  My husband and the children will be home soon.  Nothing is without risk.  They could get hit in the head with juggling clubs, fall off their unicycles or eat tainted chicken and cantaloupe.  The washer could leak, the bread could fail to rise, a meteor could crash into the planet and send us all reeling into a dystopic nightmare.  As I kneed the bread I spin out possible futures: Greece and Germany dance in a mirror, reversing roles in 1919 demands for reparations from the Great War.  Europe deftly shoots itself in the foot, again.

The garage door opens and my family is home:

“Mom! Mom! I was juggling on a unicycle and I was swinging the poi but the they collided and then I dropped them and I fell off but I’m all right then I went on the bola-bola and tried the diablo but the string was too short so I could just toss it but I didn’t quite catch it.  I did do a pinwheel though! Two of us on unicycles held hands and went around in a circle and Quarto (the youngest, who is eight) was riding on the teacher’s shoulders!”

Nothing is risk free.

Just ask Dr. Who

Alien Life

By the time I was in fourth grade I had decided what I wanted to be when I grew up, an exobiologist.  I was elated by this decision.  I felt that the great question of my purpose in life had finally been settled.  It didn’t occur to me that it might be less than obvious to the other people in my world why this was such an obvious choice for my vocation, much less that others might not even know what exobiology was.  I told my two best friends and received only blank expressions.  I gave my most enthusiastic explanation, still blank faces. I thought my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Bannock, would provide a better reaction.  I told her, she was very enthusiastic and I was delighted.

            “Dinosaurs are one of my favorite things to study as well!” she said.

            I was crushed.  In desperation I even told my father, who pointed out that there wasn’t anything, actually, to study yet and probably wouldn’t be for some time.  I saw the sense in what he said and ran away to join the circus.  So ended my brief career as an exobiologist.

Now days we call the field Astrobiology and NASA has a whole institute devoted to the study of alien life.  O.K. we haven’t actually found any yet, BUT in the last twenty years we have found liquid water in the most unexpected places in our solar system and we have found life in some very unexpected places on our planet.  Now my eleven-year-old son has got the astrobiology bug (so to speak) and we recently went to listen to a current astrobiologist, Dr. Benner, give a lecture at the museum in Denver.

On the drive there my son and I talked about what life is, exactly, and tried to hammer out a simple definition.  To my delight Dr. Benner spent much of the first half of his lecture talking about the philosophy of science and the difficulty of constructing a theory of life without bias.  He handed out a number of rocks and asked the audience to determine which ones showed evidence of life.  He talked about the human propensity to look for patterns – and see patterns, even if no patterns really exist.  He talked about constructive belief and how that influences the design of experiments meant to look for life.  He talked about theories that operated under the assumptions that life must: metabolize oxygen or carbon dioxide, fix carbon, be a cell, have our kind of DNA, make protein, have a minimum volume.

Good scientists, he warned, must continually check themselves and each other, examining the sources of assumptions.  Thinking outside the box with integrity is very hard work.

The rest of the lecture was filled with wonders.  We have made so many amazing discoveries about life just on our own planet, past and present.  The quest of astrobiologists has spawned whole new fields: paleogenetics, synthetic biology, computational bioinformatics and the intense study of extreamophiles.  Experiments related to the search for life are on board many of the missions we plan to send off into space over the next fifty years.  Mars is exciting, of course, but so are moons I had never heard of in my fourth grade enthusiasm: Europa, Enceladus and Titan.  What a great time to be alive!

On the car ride home I was waxing philosophical, relating Plato’s parable of the cave and connecting it to the thoughts on the philosophy of science Dr. Brenner had shared.  I was really on a roll when my son interrupted me.

            “Mom,” he said, “I really like synthetic biology.  I think you should help me learn organic chemistry next.”

            I didn’t have the heart to tell him that organic chemistry was the only class I ever had to drop in college because I just couldn’t hack it.  Isn’t life ironic? I heard my mother’s voice: “I hope you have four just like you!”   

Facebook and the Dead

I’m going to write about death and social networking.  Within the last year I’ve lost three friends to cancer.  This really sucks.  I know death is inevitable, but I don’t have to like any aspect of it.  Since they saw death coming they all “made a good end” as Ophelia says.  They had bucket lists and the ability to do most of the things on them.  They had parties to celebrate their lives, their friends, families and their children.  There was music, art and poetry.  One chose assisted suicide, the other two had access to good hospice drugs so, as far as we can tell from the outside, physical suffering wasn’t an issue at the end.  This, of course, is different from the profound and horrific suffering that has accompanied death through most of time and place on our planet.  Despite these good ends, I still hate the huge gaping hole that is left when they are gone, not to mention the stunning reminder of my own mortality and the fragility of all the lives around me that I love. 

So I turn to facebook. 

I notice an interesting thing begins to happen.  The facebook page of a dead person seems to go through a consistent transformation.  First it becomes a digital gathering place for people to leave condolences for the bereaved.  After some time has passed, posts transition to statements of praise and appreciation for the person who has passed.  After still more time passes posts begin to be addressed directly to the dead: “found a picture of us…,” “went to such a place where we…,” “was singing a song and thought of you…”  Five months after one friend had passed he had accepted the friend requests of over forty new people!  Finally, I have noticed that people are posting as if the dead person were still in communication – birthday greetings, events “Visiting the coast. Wish you were here.” “Hope things are going well for you in your new life.  Bet you are putting on quite a show up there!” 

The way we communicate has changed radically in the last ten years, but we are still tribal creatures.  We sit at computer screens in the gathering dark of an awesome, terrifying universe.  As a globe we each huddled around our flame in this digital community fire, while an invisible host of the living and the dead sits at our elbow.

S.A.M.E. Cafe

On Thursday I went to the Denver TED event with my oldest daughter and some friends from work.
TED is a conference where amazing brilliant people get up on stage and have eighteen minutes to talk about their best idea.  Then TED posts video of these presentations on the Internet for the world to see.  We all knew one of the presenters.  She was a teacher at our school, but left to open a restaurant with her husband.  I was so excited for her.  And I was star struck too!  I couldn't help telling anyone I was sitting next to, or chatting with during the breaks, that I knew her and that she, her husband and their restaurant really are as amazing as they sound.  Here is what they do:  People come and eat and pay what they think is fair or what they can.  People are welcome to volunteer to help with the cooking and washing up.  They have built a community in and around this restaurant where everyone is treated with dignity.  People from the neighborhood, people who are homeless, business people, all sit down and eat a delicious, healthy organic lunch together in a beautiful environment.  It is a miracle they have all worked very hard to make together.  Her name is Libby Birkey and the name of the restaurant is the S.A.M.E. Cafe (Stands for: So All May Eat).  I can't wait to see her video on the TED website!

Buzz and My Dad

I’ve been watching and listening, online, to people speaking about education.  I’m hearing this buzz:

The public education system we have, essentially worldwide thanks to 19^th century colonialism, was designed to educate children to be adults who could function productively in a world that was in the midst of rapid change from agrarian to industrialized.  The world is again changing rapidly because of the current Cambrian explosion of technology, but the school system is still educating for the 19^th century.  This inability of the current educational system to evolve is structural and entrenched, the buzz says, and those that don’t get this, and respond by finding ways to evolve intelligently into a system that does educate for the now that actually is, will watch their economies and their power dwindle.

I wonder if others are hearing the same buzz?  What do you think?

            My father, who passed away recently, was an educational visionary.  In 1965 he was working at Stanford on “computer assisted instruction.”  I used to visit him at work. I enjoyed tagging along with the man who constantly moved about the computer rooms with his shopping cart full of cathode ray tubes.  It was very loud.  But the best thing was when my dad sat me down at the computer.  He put earphones on my head.  They were so large that they covered the entire side of my face.  Then a lady’s voice:

            “Draw a line from the boy to the bicycle,” she instructed.

            I took the white stylus, with a cord attached to its end, and placed it on the flickering green cartoon of a boy.  I drew an imaginary line from him to the flickering green cartoon of the bicycle. Oh!  The boy walked to the bicycle, got on, and rode it off the screen!  I did the same with the girl and the ice cream cone. I could have sat there for hours.  My dad thought that computers might be a powerful way to enhance education, but he met with a lot of resistance in 1965.

            In the last months of his life my dad became confused about time.  One day he woke up from his nap, ready to work again on the problem of making computers effective learning tools.  It was just he and I in the house for the afternoon.  We talked for quite a while, and I tried to keep up with when we were, as he discussed the problems he and his team were having with getting enough computing memory and the challenges of designing a program that could be instantaneously individualized for millions.  Eventually we made our way into his study and got on the Internet on my parent’s computer.  I showed him the interactive games I use with my math students. We played a few and he was delighted.  We poked around on wikipedia and I tried to explain how people all over the world could write articles.  I even showed him how to translate an article on Bach, written in German, instantly into English.  He was amazed.  Finally I showed him his book on Amazon, and the reviews people had written.  He was very surprised.

            “But that book was written for another world,” he exclaimed, “It’s so out of date!”

            We surfed some more, but I could tell he was getting tired.

            “Those mathematics games we were working with, did you write those?”

            “No dad, I just use them in class.”

            “Are they expensive?”

            “No dad, they’re free.  They are on the Internet and anyone with a computer can use them.”

            He leaned back comfortably in his chair with a contented sigh.

            “Well that is good,” he said, as he began to drift off. “Now teachers can be freed from all the paperwork of drilling and testing and available to nurture their student’s souls.” 

Message in a Bottle Loose on the Digital Sea

I have discovered something!  There is a “stats” button on the blog dashboard.  It tells me something almost incomprehensible.  One hundred sixty people have read something I have written in the last eighteen days.  Amazing!  

Here I am, just overjoyed that I have been able to clear the space to write everyday, amazed and blessed to be part of this little community who read each other’s slices and then leave encouraging and thoughtful comments.  Here I am, just toodling along, writing bits of this or that daily snippet that strikes me as funny, interesting or beautiful. And I find I have visitors – from all over the United States! From China! From Mexico, Estonia and South Korea!  From the United Arab Emirates!  Is this possible?  

I thought I was passing notes to friends in class, but no.  I have been rolling up small notepapers and tapping them into bottles, sealing them with a dab of wax from my late night candle and setting them lose to float along in the great digital sea, where other sailors have picked them up and…read them?  Glanced at them?  Worked out the random English grammar?  Or heard a familiar voice with the sound of home?  Perhaps some are just machines looking for an unprotected site to spam, but I am so hopeful.  

Can it really be possible to reach across oceans and continents and converse about ordinary human moments as we hurtle through space together?

Bonjour!  你好!  Hola!  أها!  Tere!  안녕하세요!

20,000 Years of Fashion in One Day

The art museum was today, all day, with just an hour of Latin as an appetizer.  What a joy and privilege to be the guide on a whirlwind tour of western history, from Ancient Egypt to yesterday, all through fashion as seen in art.  In the car on the way there we chatted about what fashion was. 

            “It is what is cool.”

            “How do you find out what is cool?”

            “Sometimes when your friends have it.  Like when everyone came to school with silly bands last fall.”

            “How do they find out?”

            “Fashion shows!”

            “Magazines!”

            “But who decides? Why do they decide?  Why do fashions change all the time?”

            “It's what kids find in the store that looks cool.”

            “Do you think if Mrs. Obama wore a certain style other people would like to dress like her?”

            “Hmm… Maybe, but I don’t think she wears silly bands.”

We chanced to meet a wonderful docent on the way in and told her our mission: to see how modern western high fashion looks back into history and across to world cultures to find inspiration and comment on the present.  She guided us to the perfect piece to start our quest.  It was a modern work, 1999, by an artist born in Taiwan, but who lives and works in Beijing. Alas I left the artist’s name written in my journal at school.  A tall female manga character in a sleek, space age, silver and blue body suit was the central character.  Her blue hair floated about her head like a halo, a video effect made her large eyes move ever so slightly.  She stood on a small field of bright green Astroturf, bordered on three sides by colorful cartoon flowers.  Behind this figure was the blurred architecture of a medieval nave. At her feet Twelfth century European saints, popes and bishops gazed up at the central figure.  Above them, rank on rank of angels rose, and all had golden halos glimmering and shimmering ever so slightly as they gazed adoringly at the Manga Madonna.  It was the perfect start! 

We moved through Egypt, Greece and Rome.  When we arrived in medieval Europe my students cried out in recognition as they saw the many depictions of the Madonna surrounded by ranks of adoring gilded angels.  We talked about beauty; watched as the ideal changed over the centuries.  The students were amazed at the extremes people went to in order to shape their bodies to fashion.  We tried on corsets and a bum roll we found in a discovery closet near paintings from Elizabethan England.  Marveled at the stiffness of children dressed as miniature adults.  Watched neoclassical style turn its head back towards Greece and Rome. Saw pastoral peasants relaxing in an idealized countryside.  And on up to modern silver body suits inspired by the first space walk. 

In the car on the ride home the students talked about fashion again as they searched for and found parallels between images from the last fourty years of Vogue and all the bits of history we had wandered through that day.

            “I wonder if two hundred years from now people will think our fashions are funny?”

            “I wonder why people try and change their bodies so much to be fashionable?”

            “What would fashion be like if it was just for normal body shapes?”

There was power in their discoveries today, and I hardly taught at all!  

Spring into golf!

Happy William Willett day!  

We do this now for golf.  

That’s what started it, golf and after work amateur bug collecting.  

Finally pushed through because of the war effort for two world wars, but after the crisis it was golf that fought the repeal!  Oh, the backyard barbeque lobby, the 7-Eleven lobby and the French fry lobby all threw in their support.  

But in the end, as it was in the beginning, it was all for golf!