Happy Carl Sagan Day
Carl Sagan
Conflicts
Many years ago I played saxophone in my middle school band. I wasn’t very good at all. Typically I was either 3rd or 4th chair. That depended entirely on how many saxophones there were that semester, 3 or 4. In band if you wanted a promotion to a higher chair you had to “challenge” the chair in front of you. Friday’s were challenge days. We would go around the band and listen to each challenge. Typically the 2 players would each play the same piece and they were judged by the band director. If that challenger played it better they advanced to that chair. Sometimes challenges would be issued to show an expertise in a specific technique. I remember challenges issues entirely on breathing at the correct spots in a piece.I will always remember one particular challenge. I was in the flute section. Our band director had been working with us on keeping our fingers close to the keys; basically not wasting energy and time by completely straightening your fingers when a smaller motion will get the job done. So the 3rd chair recognizes that she had an advantage in this area and challenges the 2nd chair to a piece. Here’s where it got interesting. She challenged him based on two criteria, accuracy and keeping fingers on the keys. Both musicians played the piece and then the director had to make a decision. The 3rd chair flutist clearly had mastered the concept of keeping her fingers near the keys. However the 2nd chair played the piece with more accuracy. So what do you do? Which of the 2 challenge criteria trumps the other? Without any ground rules in place before the challenge he decided that a tie meant no change in the positions.
No you’ve probably already realized that this post isn’t really about who sits where in a middle school band class. At our company we have a long standing safety creed. Until a few years ago it read,
“No job is so important and no service is so urgent that we can not take time to perform our work safely."
I have no problem with that at all. It’s simple and to the point. When I would get spot checked while on site my supervisor would ask me what it meant in my own words. I would typically say something like, “It’s just your phone or your internet. Nobody should have to get hurt to make this work.”
Well a few years ago we were bought out by a larger company. And that company made a slight change to the safety creed. It now reads,
“No job is so important and no service is so urgent that we can not take time to perform our work safely and in an environmentally responsible manner."
Hmmm. Now like our band director I am presented with a possible conflict. I have no problem with either of the goals expressed in this creed as long as they don’t conflict with each other. But what about when they do conflict? I can think of several cases where the most environmentally responsible thing to do would not be the safest thing to do in the short term. What if a coworker is being attacked by a Canada Goose? Whose side do I take? The coworker’s or the threatened migratory bird? While I have no criticism of either goal, I just think that bringing up environmental issues in the context of a safety creed waters down the creed and could actually make a situation more dangerous.
Now on to other issues. How many times do we find ourselves in situations like this? Do I swerve to miss the animal in the road and endanger my passengers in the process? Or make a professional decision without considering the family? I guess my only point is that you need to be clear which goal would trump the other before you get into that situation.
Different Monitors
I’ve been looking at buying a flat panel monitor for my wife’s computer. I had a friend of mine email me a link to the monitor he has. In the email he was bragging about the color definition on his monitor. I looked at the monitor online and then, with tongue firmly planted in my cheek, responded, “The color definition doesn’t look any better than my monitor.” He laughed and thought it was pretty funny and then suggested we head over to a computer store and look at one in real life.The incident reminded me of the TV commercials where you’d see a whole bank of other TV’s and you get to compare the picture quality. As a kid I remember remarking to my dad about how stupid those ads were. We never even had a color TV so I got a kick out of a Magnavox commercial showing a bunch of color TVs and I only saw 6 relatively identical black and white images. Today it’s the same thing. You can brag about your 1080P HD images all you want. Showing me a picture of it is not going to convince me unless I already have a 1080P HD TV. And in that case I don’t need the advertisement.
Well y’all know how I think. I couldn’t help but take this experience and extrapolate it out to other aspects of life. How often do we try to relate to somebody else and not take into account how they would see it? Each of us has certain filters that we view the world through. Expose somebody to a new idea and they are going to experience it differently than we are based on those filters. Suppose a friend were confined to a wheelchair. She would likely see a youtube video of a rock climber with a whole different attitude than I would. It would remind me to get off my butt and work out a little bit more, but it may bring nothing but discouragement to her.
I see this same thing come up all the time in discussions. Take the topic of climate change. Many people are only looking through the filter of politics. And it is a very political issue. I have many friends who refuse to accept the science behind climate change because they are afraid of what the political ramifications might be, higher taxes, increased cooperation with other countries, etc, etc. All of these are honest political concerns and there is nothing wrong with debating them. When I put on my political filter I see much the same image that they do. But if we could look at it with another monitor, if we could set the political filters aside and look at the science alone, ignoring the politics for now, I think it’s much easier to see the real image.
Lately there has been a lot of press about some remarks that were made by an LDS general authority at last week’s General Conference. I think we have the same thing going on to a great extent with this issue too. Those in the gay community have their filter that they are looking through and the faithful members of the church and church leaders are looking through another. Both sides seem to be talking about the same event yet they each see it in completely different colors. I have my own opinions about this issue too. But I recognize that my perspective may not be any better than the others.
It’s all too easy to jump to conclusions based on just our perspective. I’m not going to completely dismiss purchasing the monitor that my friend sent me until I check it out in person. Similarly I try not to completely dismiss anyone’s opinion or idea until I’ve at least attempted to view it through the same filters that they have. Now I still may not buy the new monitor or accept the other opinion. But at least I have made a solid attempt to view it in the most realistic way before I dismiss it or accept it.
Qualifiers
I had an interesting discussion with a coworker last week. He had just driven back from out west and was relating his trip details to a few of us. Having driven across the country more times than I can count I threw my two cents into the conversation. I was curious as to which route he had taken. It turns out that he had taken one of the same stretches of road that I always take. He commented on how much he liked the road and I remarked about how annoying the road is.Hwy-78 from Birmingham to Memphis will someday be incorporated into the interstate system. But currently the road is incomplete. The divided hwy part of it starts about 12 miles north of Birmingham and ends a few miles south of Memphis. Consequently if you hit either section at rush hour it can be miserable. Even if you miss rush hour your average speed is severally limited due to the miles of traffic lights.
Well this coworker commented that he just loved the road and I said it was moderately annoying because of the incomplete sections.
Him, “I just drove it yesterday. They’ve completed it.”
Me, “Well they must have completed it since I drove it in July”
Him, “It’s complete all the way except for those 12 miles in Birmingham and a few miles in Memphis.”
At this point he threw his elbows back and was waiting for me to respond.
Me, “I don’t know what else to say. You’ve just completely conceded my only point and you act like we still have something to disagree over.”
This was just a recent dramatic example, but I see people attaching qualifiers to statements and not realizing that the qualifier removes most if not all of the original meaning from the statement. A generic example would be something like, “All psychic predictions come true except those that don’t.” Okay? The statement would seem to be rather powerful, at first. Then the qualifier removed all of the bite. Such was the discussion with my coworker. The road is complete except for the parts that aren't. Once he had qualified the statement to exclude all the annoying parts of hwy-78 we were left with only the nice parts to discuss.
What I find frustrating is that in these types of situations I always feel like the other party walks away feeling like we still have some disagreement when we don’t. In this case we both enjoy the completed sections of hwy-78 and find the traffic lights through both big cities rather annoying.
Puzzles
It’s been a few years since I’ve done a jigsaw puzzle. But last month my youngest asked me to sit down with her and work on a small one that she got for Christmas.
This puzzle was of a horse wearing a Native American blanket. We went through all of the standard techniques for building a puzzle. First I propped up the box lid so we could see the picture that it was supposed to look like when it was finished. Then we proceeded to flip all of the pieces so that the picture side is up and the raw cardboard side was down. Next I started sorting out all of the pieces that had a flat side, assuming that these would be the border pieces. Ideally, in the process we’d find the four corner pieces. Then the two of us started sorting the pieces by color, trying to group the pieces into smaller groups to work on separately; horse, sky, grass, blanket, etc.
Next came the process of assembly. Each of us would pick up a piece and try to see how it fit into other sections that we’d already assembled. I started by looking at the picture and trying to establish the border. I don’t always start with the border but it seemed to work for this puzzle. Sometimes it’s easier to start with a predominant color and try to get it together first and then work in the border later. I don’t really have a preference as to which method I choose. It just depends on the puzzle.
Eventually you’ll end up with a few sections assembled but not linked together. At this point you start looking for pieces that have a little bit of two different things on it, pieces that could conceivably go into more than one pile. The pieces with a little grass and a little bit of horse help tie those together and the pieces with the grass and sky help defiant he horizon. The “ah ha” moments of most puzzles come when you can link two large parts together with just a few small pieces or sometimes with just one. The best pieces are the ones that help tie three different chunks together. Once you’ve linked them you start looking for support pieces that also connect those chucks. Those help reinforce that your linking pieces are correct. Sometimes they disconfirm and force you to look for new ways to link the puzzle together.
At some point it seems you are always stuck with a bunch of pieces of relatively the same color and your only clue as to how they need to be assembled is to look at the shape of the pieces themselves and try to make them work.
Using these methods we were able to assemble this 200 piece puzzle in about 15 or 20 minutes. It struck me that in order to assemble it we had to make several assumptions about the puzzle.
1. The picture on the puzzle is the same as the picture on the box. I’ve put puzzles together without the box just to see how much longer it would take. If I had to guess it’d take at least twice as long. I’ve also participated in a team building exercise where the puzzle was put into the wrong box with a similar but just different enough image n the outside.
2. The pieces only have images on one side and raw cardboard on the other. I have actually done a puzzle that had images on both sides, but the stamping process made for edges that were easy to determine which side of the piece was for image one and which was for image two.
3. Flat edges are for the border. It’d be really sneaky to see a puzzle that had a jagged edge to the image and flat pieces that but up together inside the body of the puzzle.
4. The completed puzzle has no missing pieces in the body. We’ve all been in the situation where we’ve lost one piece and we just don’t feel like we’ve finished it.
5. All of the pieces have to be used. Want to really throw your head for a loop? Throw in a few pieces from another puzzle just to spice things up. I remember doing a puzzle and my grandmother’s house and having exactly that problem. She’d found a few pieces on the floor and just threw them into the first box she found.
I can think of several more assumptions that we make when we try to make sense of the scrambled pieces in front of us. But this will do to start out with.
Lately I've been working on a puzzle that seems to violate all of these assumptions.
No picture on the outside of the box. No raw side to the puzzle and no obvious way to tell one side from the other. Flat edges in the middle and bumpy edges on the edges. A few holes in the main body. A few extra pieces from other puzzles.
And the coup de gras of the whole puzzle is that I have a few large chunks of the puzzle that don’t even attach to each other.
Anyway, that’s my little analogy for today. I think I stopped talking about jigsaw puzzles a few paragraphs ago.
For Good Reason
One of my favorite podcasts lately has been Point of Inquiry. DJ Grothe has great guests and he does a great job of showing multiple different approaches to rational thinking. So it was with mixed emotions that I heard the news that DJ would now be President of the James Randi Education Foundation. I suspected that this would mean fewer episodes of Point of Inquiry.
Well I was pleasantly surprised to see DJ is hosting a new podcast for the JREF called For Good Reason. Check it out. I just finished listening to it and I enjoyed it. This episode had an interview with James Randi about the future of his organization as well as some information about some scams that have hit the news lately. I don’t know if DJ will be able to continue to be able to host both podcasts but I look forward to future episodes.One small disappointment: In the intro to the podcast there is a segment by Jamie Ian Swiss. It’s brilliant but has a few not safe for work words. I loved the podcast but would have loved it more if I could have been able to recommend to my kids and family members without having to give this caveat. I think many podcasts in this genre disqualify themselves from a large audience, school children, by not exercising a little restraint when it comes to their language.
