CelestialFamily

I read this book a few years ago. I can't say I enjoyed it, it was actually very painful to read, but I felt I had to read it. While I was in Japan I had an old man basically ask me for forgiveness on behalf of America. He had killed Americans during the war and even saw the bomb go off over Hiroshima from a boat in the harbor. I was the first American he had seen in decades. We can post hoc justify Truman's decision but that does not diminish the horror that it caused.
Today is the 64th anniversary of the day we bombed Hiroshima. I think we to make sure that no one ever has to experience this horror again.
The Japanese call today Peace Day. Perhaps we should start doing the same.

Earlier this week Aaron and I went to QT after scouts. We each got a fountain drink. Aaron asked me,
“What’s the deal with diet drinks?”
I got a little bit of a chuckle out of the question and told him that he needed to ask his mother that same question when she gets home. I then gave him a brief description of what her response would be. So last night we were walking around Ikea and Aaron pops the same question on Victoria,
“What’s the deal with diet drinks?”
Victoria went on complete autopilot and pulled out her prepared statement on why she dislikes diet drinks and read every point to Aaron, line by line. I’ve heard her diatribe about diet drinks several time. She didn’t miss a beat and hit every major point that I told Aaron she’d hit. At this point Aaron and I are just rolling and Victoria is just looking around confused, wondering what is so funny. We confessed that the previous few minutes were planned ahead of time and that she had played her part better than if we had handed her a script.
Last year I was in an online discussion and the subject came up that “the Mormon Church controls the Boy Scouts of America”. Like Victoria, and probably everybody else, I too have a cache of prepared diatribes that I pull out whenever certain subjects come up. I too went on autopilot and proceeded to state my reasons, and evidence that the Mormon Church does not control the Boy Scouts of America. I’d given the speech a few times before so I thought I knew what I was talking about. Over the course of the discussion it was shown that a couple of my facts were out of date. Specifically, I had made the claim that Thomas S. Monson was the only LDS member of the leadership committee of BSA. I was shown that although it used to be true there was at least one other member of the committee who was LDS. My prepared speech was out of date. The gist of it was still correct and I still stand by my initial claim, but my supporting details need to be updated. So I did a little more research to see what else had changed.
For the record I agree with Victoria’s assessment of diet drinks and I don’t know if any of her supporting facts have changed in the last few years. Both of us routinely just order ice water with a little bit of lime rather than ingest the artificial sweeteners in most diet drinks.
My only point in sharing these two stories is that they have given me pause for reflection. How many prepared speeches do we have cached away ready to give at a moment's notice? I’m sure we all have quite a few. Are the facts up to date? When was the last time you verified them? Have you given the issue an honest re-evaluation or are you still basing your opinions on the way things were when you first formed that opinion? Perhaps it’s time to pull out those speeches and give them a second look. If, after careful evaluation, you still feel the same and the facts still support your position, Great! If, on the other hand, things have changed the other direction does that effect your opinion on the issue? I just think that it’s healthy to periodically question our beliefs, especially those that we cherish the most.

Victoria is dead right about diet drinks. Most of them are rather nasty and unpalatable. I’ve become a little more tolerant of Sprite Zero lately but I still prefer just ice water with a little bit of lime. If you want to really have some fun with Victoria start talking about how you really love dark meat chicken. Incidentally I agree with her on that one too. She’s just got a better diatribe than I do.

A few weeks ago we got an email at work from the hive-overmind. The email told us that we needed to get rid of all plants that we might have in our cubes. The reasoning they gave for it was that “plants collect dust and can release spores into the air which may be harmful to people.” No sooner had I read that, I heard a coworker scream “Well yeah but they also collect CO2 and release oxygen which can be helpful to people!” I got a kick out of his response, especially since I’m the one labeled as the “tree-hugger”.
The email got me thinking about a much larger issue. How often do we avoid something because of the potential negative effects without properly weighing the potential benefits? And how often do we not consider the risks of what we would do instead?
We’ve heard it before with the controversy over airbags and children. Many group vilified airbags for a few deaths without considering the overwhelming benefit that airbags offer. One of my kids asked me a few years ago “Why do they put things in cars that kill kids?” He was talking about airbags. I had to explain that airbags are a safety device and in the overwhelming majority of cases they save kids lives.
Last week I was invited to go out to lunch with some co-workers. I respectfully declined since I wanted to get my lunchtime walk in. He told me that I was going to get killed walking along the roads around the office. He was concerned about the potential dangers of the traffic and ignoring the benefits of a 3 mile walk every lunch hour. Sure walking on the sidewalk can be dangerous but so can going out to lunch and eating a high fat lunch and then sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day.
I frequently get criticism for going rock climbing. I like to point out that, assuming everything is done correctly, the drive up and back is probably more dangerous than anything I would do on the rock.
I guess I'm just concerend that some really good ideas might be tossed aside for some relatively minor risks without consdiering the risks of what we would use to replace them. I can think of several hot button political issues that we should also exercise thsi same type of anaylisis.

When I was about twelve years old my scout troop and I went down to Emory University to assist in a study that some of the students were doing. We were told that the study was to test reaction time. They sat us in a chair and them they moved the chair into a very dark box with a monitor on the far side. We were then given an Atari joystick. None of the directions worked they just needed us to push the fire button on the top. We were asked to stare at a small X in the middle of the screen and to push the button when the X changed to an H. They started the test and I was eager to show that I had really good reaction times so I stared intently at the X in the middle. When it would change to an H I would hit the button as fast as I could. This went on for about ten minutes.
When the test was over they pulled me into another room and asked me some follow up questions while the next scout was actually taking the test. The follow up questions really surprised me. They didn’t ask me about the X changing to the H at all. The questions seemed to last longer than the test and they kept asking me about things that were happening outside of the task I was given.
“Did you see the large monkey at the top right of the screen?”
“No”
“What word was inside the large circle that kept going around the screen?”
“I didn’t see it.”
“The M just to the right of the center of the screen changed color at least five times. What to colors did it change back and forth from?”
“Um, I didn’t see an M.”
“Do you remember any of the other words that appeared around the screen? There were over a hundred?’
“Um, I thought y’all were testing reaction time so I didn’t pay any attention to that other stuff.”
As we drove home that night I felt that I’d been dupped. I talked to my Dad about it. He told me that the joystick probably wasn’t even plugged into anything. The test seemed to be a test of peripheral vision and not about reaction time at all. They basically had to lie to me to get me stare at the center of the screen. Had I known it was to test my peripheral vision I’d have not been focusing on the center and I’ve have been looking all around the get the right answers. So If I’d have known what the test was about I’d have given them faulty data.
Nurses frequently use a similar ruse. When they take your vital signs to put on your report one of the things they measure is your breathing rate. Do you ever remember being asked to sit back and breath normally? No you probably don’t. If you have been asked that, the nurse more than likely did not get a normal breathing rate for you. Most nurses are trained to take you pulse for 15 seconds while looking at their watch and then multiply that number by 4 to get your pulse. But they actually hold your wrist and appear to be looking at their watch for at least another 15 seconds. For those last 15 they are actually watching your chest rise and fall and counting your breaths. Like the joystick, the watch is just a misdirection.
So, why do I bring this up? Well lately I’ve been experiencing a lot of the same frustration that I felt as I left that Emory study. I feel like I’ve been concentrating on everything that I’ve been told was important. Yet now I’m beginning to wonder if many of these other details are just the misdirection so I can be tested on what the testers were really looking for. I’m afraid that when the test is over and they start asking me the follow up questions I’m just going to be stammering like I did when I was twelve.

Live Like They Were Dying

You know a phrase has transcended even being a cliché as soon as they make a sappy country song out of it. For years people have encouraged us to live each day as if it were your last. Several events of the last week or so have had me wanting to put a different angle on this view. In the last month death has seemed very real to me. Not that I’ve personally been in any life threatening situations, but several people that I know have either died, come real close or had loved ones die. Last week I got a email that a co-worker at another office had a seizure and died on the bus on the way to work. He was 29. Two other co-workers had parents die. A family friend has been hospitalized. My mother-in-law had a stroke. Just today I found out that another co-worker who I worked with for months died over the weekend. Last week was also the 7th anniversary of my father’s death. Also, in the last week somebody has erected a large cross at the scene of the fatal accident that I witnessed on New Years Day. So like it or not I’ve been forced to think about death more than I cared to lately.
My brother-in-law sent us an email that really got me looking at life from a different perspective. His next door neighbor passed away this weekend. He was being rather introspective because he and my sister were the last two people to see her alive and conscious. In the email he brought up the idea that you never know when it might be the last time you see somebody. That got me thinking. Rather than living like the country song as if you were the one dying, what would it be like if we treated everybody as if this my be their last day here?

Just a thought.

For years I've been fascinated with the concept of human decision making. I've enjoyed reading books that explore this concept. I'm also intrigued about the strategies that people use to justify their mistakes and the cognitive dissonance required to make your actual decisions jive with what you know is right.
Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph Hallinan is my latest read on this subject. In the opening chapter of the book Hallinan describes a commercial airliner simply flying into the ground because they got too hung up on a small light that was burned out ans ignored the fact that the plane was slowly loosing altitude. I felt that this one simple metaphor described the rest of the book. We do lose focus of the things that are truly important. And all too frequently our focus was shifted by relatively trivial details.
Hallinan skillfully points out how uncommon common sense really is. But rather than just blame the decision maker he talks about how we can put ourselves into positions that will help to make better decisions. sometimes it takes a design difference so that, for instance, clockwise is off on all the knobs. Things like always putting the hot on the left and the cold on the right, etc. Sure it sounds like a simple design issue but he gave some frightening mortality statistic from an anesthesia machine that was clockwise for off on on drug and counter-clockwise for another.
Hallinan compared the airline industry to operating room. In the past few decades accident rates in the airline industry have dramatically dropped and there has been an increase in the operating rooms. Hallinan points to the main cause of this as the changes that have been made to the authority system in on and not in the other.
In the airline industry anybody the cockpit is virtually free of authority struggles. Many decisions are not based on rank or position. A 20 year old air traffic controller tells the pilot where to land and the pilot obeys and doesn't pretend that he knows better just because she's been doing flying since the controller was a kid. In the cockpit as well the co-pilot and even attendants are valuable resources and their input is encouraged.
Conversely, this authority system seems to be trending the other direction in the operating room. Doctors all too frequently are seen as unquestionable. Even in situations where nurses have spoken up to prevent the error Hallinan sights instances of flipped x-rays and the wrong limb being removed.
A few years ago my youngest daughter had to have a tooth pulled. We went to see the specialist with the x-ray from our dentist. She'd taken a fall on the driveway and one of her teeth was a starting to go gray. The x-ray seemed to confirm that the root on the graying tooth was dying. When we went to get her tooth pulled the nurse questioned the x-rays. She thought we we looking at it backwards. The dentist did not question her and called to have another x-ray taken just to be sure. She was absolutely right. In spite of the fact that one tooth was starting to turn gray it was the tooth on the other side that had the dead root. The dentist went ahead and pulled the dying tooth and the gray tooth eventually regained its color. Had that nurse not spoken up and, more importantly, had the dentist not accepted her advice Eve would have had to go back and have the correct tooth pulled later and they'd have had a very upset father on their hands. I'm very grateful to have had a dentist who was willing to admit that he could make mistakes and ultimate prevent them.
I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anybody who is aware that they can make mistakes. I also think it should be force feed to anybody who thinks that they can't.

So the kids are all excited about having Martin Luther King's birthday off tomorrow. Eve was bouncing around the house and wanted to get some brown frosting so we could make cookies that look like Dr. King. I was a little concerned that she was more excited about having the day off from school and the prospect of cookies than she was Dr. King's accomplishments. So I asked her, "Eve, do you remember what Dr. King did for us." She didn't hesitate to answer and her response really brought it down to earth and convinced me that she really understood his accomplishments, "He changed the laws and made it so Selena and I could sit together."

Thank you Dr. King for making this picture and thousands more like it possible.

A few days ago we went through our normal bedtime rituals. After the never ending homework assignments were finished we started up with the baths, pajamas and teeth brushing. This whole process seems to take longer each night and on this particular night it seemed like we started prepping for bed at around 6:30pm still didn't start reading until almost 10:00pm. If we let the kids get too rowdy after their baths it takes quite a while to settle them back down for reading time. So typically I'll go hang out in one of the kids' rooms and quell any uprising as well as stay on guard for hair washing or fetching the always forgotten bath towel.
Our goal is to start reading time early enough that the two youngest don't fall asleep before the end of the chapter. All too frequently, for one reason or another, we fail miserably and the younger ones head off to dreamland without us.
On this particular night Eve had sidled up next to me and was out cold. I put my book down and just stared at her for a while. We're not financially wealthy and we don't have a lot of stuff from the materialistic standpoint. But the look of comfort and contentment on her face just made me ponder about what we do have. Lying there in her fleece footie-jamas she was warm and comfortable. She was clean and even freshly bathed. Her tummy was full, granted is was just a few slices of frozen pizza but it was food that she liked and she had plenty. In a few hours she would wake up and have a hot breakfast and be off to school. Far too many people children on this planet go to sleep with out these basic necessities and comforts.
As I try to think of what else I should get the kids for Christmas I can't help but focus on how much I really do have. A new game for the kids' Nintendo DS just kind seems trivial.

As I was walking around the office today I walked by two coworkers who were having a personal conversation. One of them has a husband who is currently in a hospice for cancer. The other's husband died a year ago from cancer.
Somehow this chance encounter in the hallway made all my problems seem much smaller. It made me think of how selfish it is to focus so much on one's own problems. I need to get much better at sharing the burdens of my fellow beings.