Hella-cool

Sometimes as a wee tad, when my teacher's voice began to drone on interminably, I'd turn listlessly to the inside cover of my arithmetic book. What peculiar information I'd find there! How many pecks in a bushel! How many feet in a rod! Dry ounces and fluid ounces. Furlongs, fathoms and nautical miles.

The conversions were all so arbitrary -- fascinating to my immature brain -- and the units so wonderfully named. But the system was impossible to grasp in any manner other than by sheer memorization. Who, for example, ever decided that there should be 437.5 grains to an ounce?

On the other hand, set out beside these weird measurements was a different system. The metric system, of course, but at that age no one had ever explained the metric system to us. I knew about feet and miles and quarts and pounds, just from daily life. I didn't know about meters and liters. The conversions from English measurements to metric, and vice versa, were even weirder than those within the English system. But the metric system, viewed within itself, was beautiful -- everything in multiples of ten.

And even more fascinating to me -- novice connaisseur of words that I already was -- were the prefixes affixed to units of distance, weight, and everything else. Deci-, centi- and milli-, as things got smaller. Deka-, hecto-, and kilo-, as they got larger.

That was the extent of the metric system inside the cover of my fourth grade math text. Later, I learned even more beautiful terms. Micro, nano and pico -- for a millionth, a billionth, and a trillionth. Mega and giga for a million times larger and a billion times larger. Today, of course, even cheap computers have gigabytes of memory.

And despite education in physics, that's really where my knowledge of metric nomenclature remained. Until today. This week's edition of the Economist points out the usefulness of two additional terms. While "gigameter," for example, would be 10⁹ meters, a "yottameter" would be a much greater distance -- 10²⁴ meters, or 10¹⁵ gigameters. Similarly, at the other end of the scale, a "yoctometer" is 10^-24 meters -- a fairly short distance, by anyone's reckoning.

Why would anyone be interested in a "yocto-anything"? The actual subject of the article was experimentation that has permitted scientists to measure a tiny force of only 174 yoctonewtons. A "newton" is defined as the amount of force needed to accelerate a mass of one kilogram at the rate of one meter per second per second (although the Economist -- a British rag addicted to typically English definitions of measurement -- whimsically describes the newton as the approximate force exerted by the earth's gravity at the earth's surface on one of Sir Isaac Newton's apples).

"Yocto" also is useful in measuring mass. A proton has a mass of about 1.26 yoctograms.

So far, yocto and yotta mark the upper and lower limits of the metric system. No one has any need for a unit representing 1/1000 of a yocto-anything, or 1,000 yotta-anythings.¹ Linguistically, however, as the Economist observes, we're ready if science creates the need. Terms for 10²⁷ and 10^-27 logically should be based on the Greek root "ennea" (meaning "nine" times three zeros).

But an undergrad from California (where else?) has reportedly started a campaign to scrap the Greek nomenclature when we reach that next level, and adopt the prefix "hella" for 10 to the plus or minus 27th. Cuz, dude, that would be either hella big or hella little.

Hella good idea, I'd say.

------------------

¹Fans of humongous numbers will recall, of course, the proposed "googol" as representing 10¹⁰⁰, or 1 followed by 100 zeros. And the later refinement, the "googolplex," defined as 1 followed by a googol zeroes. (Mega-behemoth Google derives its name therefrom.)

Since there are only about 5 x 10⁸⁷ elementary particles in the known, observable universe, the googol -- let alone the googolplex -- seems of limited utility. (Estimated particle numbers, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

My desire to fully describe large-number nomenclature requires that I also acknowledge the Facebook page, "Shitload" is a Standardized Unit of Measurement," to which 847,456 fans now subscribe.

On the trail

Of all recreational activities, one of the coolest and most rewarding has to be also the simplest -- walking. Just putting one foot before the other. Watching the scenery go by.

Walking, in its purest form, requires no equipment other than a pair of shoes. You can walk through your residential neighborhood, observing your neighbors as they live their lives, enjoying the fresh air, admiring the trees and landscaping. At a slightly higher level, you can get out of town and hike the trails: lowland trails along rivers and lakes, or mountain trails through forests and alpine scenery. With a bit more planning, and a little more equipment, you can backpack -- bearing your world on your back and sleeping in the wilderness for a night -- or for a week or for ten nights.

Mountain trekking (and climbing) such as I did last fall in Nepal combines the simplicity of a day's walk on a trail with the advantages of a longer escape from civilization. Freedom from a backpack's encumbrance comes at some cost to your self-respect, however, as you shift a burden that is rightfully yours onto the backs of native porters.

Reliance on porters -- or pack animals, for that matter --is convenient, but requires complicated logistics. It also arouses feelings of guilt from asking poor people to do the dirty work of hiking while you enjoy its pleasures. Your sensation of guilt varies inversely with your degree of exhaustion. It's also somewhat irrational -- you are, after all, providing employment to men who are grateful for it, and whose jobs are considered desirable, even prestigious, within their own society. But the feeling, to some degree, remains. And beyond this "sahib-guilt," there's the added suspicion that you're not quite pulling your own weight, that you've taken one step away from the pure simplicity of the act of walking and one step closer to powering a trail bike up the path.

Next summer, I'm planning to do an eight-day trans-England walk, from sea to sea, following Hadrian's Wall from hamlet to hamlet across the "waist" of Great Britain. This hike, again, isn't quite the pure, self-sufficient walking experience that I've been trying to extol -- I'll be carrying only a day pack each day, while a concessionaire's truck carries my baggage from one hostelry to the next. I'll sleep in beds and eat at inns.

As rewarding as the trek in Nepal certainly was, and as I anticipate the hike along the Roman wall will be, something in my soul urges me to simplify further, to get away from supply trucks, porters, mule trains, and other forms of "assistance" that only complicate the walking experience. Therefore, I'm also hoping to spend some time this summer -- even if only a long weekend or two -- returning to the kind of hiking that I did in the years just after my days as an undergraduate. Backpacking. There's a peculiar satisfaction to be derived from camping in the mountains, out of sight and earshot of other campers, knowing that your own legs provide your only means of transportation, and the pack on your back provides your only source of food and shelter.

Whether alone or with a friend or two, for a few days I want to feel myself once more a part of nature, seeing the world about me as it was seen by pioneer explorers over a century ago.

So, I look forward to a little backpacking -- walking the mountain trails of the Sierras and the Cascades.

Perspective

From outside the United States, many of our nation's political fears and conflicts seem weird and difficult to understand. While I was in Thailand, dependent on sketchy news in the foreign press and occasional reports on the international programs of CNN and the BBC, Congress finally pulled itself together and passed some version of Obama's health care reform bill. It was an exciting moment for me, but obviously not for the non-American world.

To overseas news services, Republican laments that America had gone socialist seemed quaint, just one more peculiar feature of American politics. They felt the same about Democratic exuberance over passage of the bill. Outside our own borders, universal health care, in one form or another, is taken for granted by virtually all developed nations. The foreign press was interested in the story only as representing a political triumph by Obama over the Republicans. They had virtually no interest in the actual provisions of the bill itself.

Travel is broadening in many respects. One quickly realizes that human happiness flourishes under many forms of political system. (So does political conflict, as the "Red shirt" demonstrations in Bangkok illustrated while I was there.) Excellent medical care and good government can co-exist -- do widely co-exist -- with health care programs far more "socialistic" than anything Congress has legislated, or even considered legislating.

And from a foreign perspective, calling Obama a "radical" or a "socialist" appears laughable. But I return home to a world where right wing fanatics clearly aren't laughing.

Closure advisory

The Northwest Corner will be closed for regularly-scheduled maintenance until April 7, 2010.

Repairmen will also check plumbing and ductwork for clogs that may have limited the frequency and clarity of posts during the past few months. Will re-open with a fresh paint job, and with spruced-up landscaping surrounding the Corner's perch overlooking Puget Sound.

Best team money can buy

Tennessee and Kentucky are two highly-seeded teams in the NCAA tournament, which started today. Kentucky graduates 31 percent of its basketball players; Tennessee graduates 30 percent. The U.S. Secretary of Education has suggested that any team graduating fewer than 40 percent of its players should be barred from post-season play. "If you can't graduate two out of five of your student-athletes, how serious are you about the academic part of your mission?" he asks, rhetorically.

A good question, I would have thought, but Tennessee's coach, Bruce Pearl, doesn't see it that way.

If he wants to fix it, fix it at the high school level, fix it at the middle school level, fix it at the elementary school level. I'm an educator, I'm a teacher. I share the pain in not having student-athletes graduate. But I don't want to deny the opportunity to student-athletes who are not prepared. I'm going to stand up here and I'm going to fight for student-athletes who come in who aren't as prepared.

Does anyone besides me find anything odd about this argument?

Pearl does not want to deny students the opportunity to play college basketball merely because they do not have the academic preparation to attend college. And this means, necessarily, that young men should not be denied the opportunity to play college ball merely because there's no way in hell they'll ever graduate from college.

His argument makes sense only if we view college basketball as a collection of semi-professional conferences, each member team being associated for sentimental reasons with a college or university. In that case, it would be unreasonable to deny a high school graduate the opportunity to play for a member team simply because he was not interested, prepared, and/or capable of handling college-level work and, ultimately, graduating. Such teams would be licensed to use an affiliated school's name and logo and provided a place to play on the school's campus. No one would care -- it would be totally immaterial -- whether any athletes actually chose to avail themselves of the opportunity to enroll at the school while they happened to be living in the area.

Such an arrangement may be closer to the reality of today's world than anyone in academia wishes to admit. Outside the Ivy League Conference, few if any college basketball teams are made up of a bunch of college kids who simply enjoy shooting hoops and who take time out from their studies to engage in good natured competition with rival universities.

I know. You've heard it all from me before, back when I was rhapsodizing over the basketball-shooting engineers from Cal Tech. Whenever I explain my views to even my most rational and sympathetic friends, I find them nodding quietly in agreement, in the same way they'd agree with some abstruse mathematical argument I proposed, one that had no discernable relationship to the real world.

Then they begin discussing the Huskies' recruiting prospects for the coming season.

Oh well. WTF. Washington (29 percent graduation rate) plays Marquette in the first round of the NCAA East regionals, coming up shortly at 4 o'clock .

GO DAWGS!!

Plunging to earth

I skydived solo once. After a few drinks, friends often find me willing to give an elaborately detailed account of my experience. My narrative continues until I notice my audience drifting away, as they invariably and unaccountably do. My dive was from a small plane about 3,000 feet high, with no more than ten seconds of free fall. It's a hard experience to forget.

A gentleman named Felix Baumgartner is also planning to "skydive." Not from 3,000 feet, however. From a balloon, 120,000 feet (about 23 miles) up in the stratosphere. He will find himself in free fall for about 5½ minutes, long enough to mull over the joys and sorrows of his life to date. Within the first 30 seconds, he will have reached a speed of 600 miles per hour.

The point of his endeavor is to "see what happens" when a human body, virtually unprotected except for a pressurized suit, breaks the sound barrier.

Felix isn't a completely crazy cat. Serious scientists and science are behind his stunt. Actually, an Air Force pilot did something similar, from 100,000 feet, back in 1960. Unfortunately, he went into a spin of 120 rpm and blacked out, not waking up until his chute automatically deployed near the ground.

My first reaction to reading all about this in the New York Times was to wonder how Felix would be able to exceed the terminal velocity for a human body, usually put at around 120 mph. But that figure assumes the falling body's arms and legs are extended. Terminal velocity increases if the diver pulls his extremities in and up close to his body, and falls head down. Also, the customary figure for terminal velocity assumes normal atmospheric pressure. During much of his fall, Felix will be plunging downward through an extremely tenuous atmosphere, almost a vacuum. As you fall, terminal velocity decreases one percent for every 525 foot loss of altitude. With this information, terminal velocity at 120,000 feet can be readily calculated. The calculation is left as an exercise for the reader (as my math books used to so frustratingly put it).

Also fascinating -- to me, at any rate -- is the meteor effect, although the scientists must have reasons for believing this not to be a problem. The atmosphere protects those of us on the earth's surface from having to dodge a daily shower of space debris. The friction through the air as rocks fall towards earth causes them to vaporize long before they reach the surface.

Even tiny rocks, not much bigger than a grain of sand, can be clearly observed as meteors as they heat and burn. Why wouldn't the same happen to a human body? It would be an awesome way to go, if you had to go. Streaking across the sky, a ball of fire, observed by millions. Almost worth it.

At least better than having a heart attack while tending your virtual garden on Farmville.

Discharged

Nokia has reportedly filed for a U.S. patent for a "self-charging" cell phone. The cell phone converts the kinetic energy of the owner's daily movements as he walks about into electrical energy stored in the battery.

The phone is designed to permit small internal movements within the device as it's jostled about -- for example, while the owner carries it about in his pocket. The movements back and forth cause compression of piezoelectric crystals, crystals capable of creating electric current when compressed or bent. The current charges a capacitor, which in turn can charge the phone's battery.

Very interesting. Of course, only the United States has citizens so sedentary that even their technologically advanced self-charging batteries will discharge as they lie sprawled out inert on the living room couch, gaping at the TV.

Good teachers: made, not born

Looking back at high school, I'm impressed by the incompetence of so many of my teachers. The elderly woman who taught my required senior course in American government -- a topic that had fascinated me since at least sixth grade -- managed to extract every last drop of juice and interest from the course, relying on a lesson plan that required rote memorization of dry facts. Facts that I'm sure, for 90 percent of the class, were forgotten the day after the final exam.

At least she ran a taut ship. No one clowned around while her steely gaze was upon them.

I've mentioned before that teaching at one time interested me as a profession. I suspected back then, however, that not only would I be incapable of transmitting my enthusiasm for any subject to the majority of my students, but that I'd be wholly incapable of controlling a classroom of typically restless kids.

And yet, some teachers do succeed. Some did, even in the intellectual and economic backwater that was my hometown. How did they do it?

Newsweek discusses the problem in this week's issue, and concludes that the solution is merit pay for good teachers and the sack for bad teachers. These solutions may improve the teaching in some schools, but they do not enlarge the pool of competent teachers. A more careful discussion of the problem was provided in yesterday's magazine supplement to the New York Times.

The NYT article discusses two on-going studies devoted to the question: "What makes a good teacher?" These studies are not abstract and theoretical. In fact, the article implicitly criticizes many present courses at American schools of education for being abstract and theoretical, often taught by professors who have never actually tried to teach a class of elementary or high school students. The studies discussed in yesterday's article are empirical, based on close observation of successful teaching techniques as used by successful teachers -- observation of actual classrooms and of videotapes of actual teaching.

The first study, by Doug Lemov, consultant and author of the forthcoming book Teach Like a Champion, has generated a list of 49 proven techniques to control the classroom -- ways to capture the attention of the students and get them to follow instructions. The study suggests that a successful teacher can have any type of personality -- Lemov describes himself as an extreme introvert. Successful teachers are those who have learned the appropriate techniques in leading the class, not charismatic figures with inborn talents.

The second study is one originating independently at Michigan State. Teachers may have developed exceptional abilities to control the classroom and interest the students -- but still not have the ability to teach their subject. The work at Michigan State recognizes that a solid background in the subject matter being taught is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good teaching -- the teacher's own knowledge is important only insofar as he or she has the ability to convey that knowledge to the student. Again, this is a skill that can be taught.

The Michigan study was aimed specifically at developing methods for teaching mathematics. A Stanford professor is now attempting to develop similar techniques for teaching English.

If attained, the goals of these two studies -- engaging the students and transmitting the subject matter -- should together permit schools of education to produce exceptionally strong teachers. Although evidence of success to date seems primarily anecdotal, the examples discussed by the NYT article provide hope that these approaches actually work. Anyone interested in new approaches in American education should read the article -- and perhaps the studies on which it's based.

A fairly bashful kid, such as I was, may in future years have less hesitation in choosing to be a teacher, knowing that Schools of Education actually are capable of teaching him how to engage and educate real students -- not just ambitious kids from middle class families, but "problem" children from broken homes and dysfunctional street cultures. Like new doctors and lawyers, new teachers might then bring an arsenal of proven techniques to their new jobs -- rather than finding themselves thrown into a hostile classroom with no idea of how to meet the horrific challenges they're often forced to encounter.

Scrutiny

The lure and the danger of mountain climbing have always fascinated those of us who mostly keep both feet on the ground. In November, I reviewed Ed Viesturs's history of the conquest of K2, which included his brush with death during his own successful climb in 1992. Viesturs emphasized the climber's responsibility to assess the risk throughout his climb, turning back when the risk becomes unreasonable. The climber should never consider a prudent decision to abort the climb as a "failure."

In the current issue of Sierra, the bimonthly publication of the Sierra Club, Emmett Berg asks whether modern commercial sponsorship of climbs and the technical ease of filming those climbs are making it more difficult for climbers to call it quits in the face of highly risky mountain conditions.

The article describes last year's failed first ascent of the east face of China's Mt. Edgar. The climb, by two well-known, experienced Colorado climbers, was sponsored by a film company, and was intended to be shown as one episode on a National Geographic Channel climbing series. The company provided a photographer who was to accompany them during the lower portions of the climb.

The Mt. Edgar climb wasn't really the ideal climb to make Berg's point. Once the danger of avalanches, caused in part by unusually warm temperatures, became apparent, the climbers abandoned the climb and their equipment after establishing an advance camp about 8,000 feet below the summit. They retreated to their base camp, hoping to return when conditions improved. After waiting at base camp for three weeks, with no improvement in conditions, they gave up and decided to return home. But they made the fateful decision to climb back first to the advance camp and retrieve about $10,000 worth of equipment.

Conditions were even worse during this second climb. An avalanche swept both climbers and their photographer -- a young man shooting his last film before beginning a Ph.D. program in chemistry at the University of Washington -- to their deaths.

The climbers had made the proper decision in aborting their climb, and the attempt to recover their gear seemed reasonable, according to other climbers. But Berg suggests that the expectations of sponsors and the knowledge that they are being filmed throughout the climb does put constant pressure on climbers to present the right image, to succeed, to earn their funding.

Our world today is preoccupied with reality shows, with insatiable voyeurism into every aspect of the lives of others. No matter how used we become to being on camera, I suspect, the camera is never wholly absent from our thoughts. Lawyers increasingly not only have to satisfy the judge, the jury, and their own clients -- but, when cameras are permitted in courtrooms, also have to be concerned with how they appear before the eyes of their TV audiences.

A lawyer risks only his reputation and his client's case when his decisions are affected by the camera's eye. A climber -- hoping to satisfy his sponsor's desire for a good show -- risks his own life and that of his companions when the camera prejudices his sound judgment.

That may not have been the case with the climbers on Mt. Edgar. But it is a risk worth noting. Not all climbers have Ed Viesturs's strength of character when the time comes to make the decision to quit, especially when that decision won't be one that best amuses the television audience -- or their own sponsors.

Purgatory

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Thus should be engraved above the entrance to the downtown office of the Washington Department of Licensing. Once every five years, I'm forced to pass through that dire portal. Inside ... the land of the walking undead.

Time to renew my driver's license.

Five windows, like tellers' windows in a bank, face me as I enter. Only two windows, of course, are manned. In the open space in front of the windows, seated on ancient folding chairs like masses of frightened immigrants on Ellis Island, are huddled the uncomprehending supplicants -- Washington taxpayers hoping against hope that some obscure technicality won't bar them from obtaining their license. Many, I observe, hope in vain.

For I had time to watch their travails. Oh, I had time all right. In a rare display of bureaucratic efficiency, I'm instructed upon entering to press a button and receive a number. My number is 244. The two windows are currently serving numbers 213 and 215.

It's going to be one of those days.

As time passes, first one ghastly pale priest of the Bureaucracy and then another drifts in. They open up two of the unused windows. Several "customers" get served. For a moment, hope almost seems possible. Then two of the peoples' servants begin discussing some matter between themselves. No one new is called to either of their windows. Eventually, a hundred eyes burning holes in them, they wander off. They're never seen again.

We are back to two windows. Well, really only one and a half. One of the two remaining workers doubles as a part time photographer. When she gets bored, or sees too many applicants crowding the photography waiting area, she shuts down her window, takes a break from paper shuffling, and begins expressing her creative side by taking mug shots.

Finally, #244 is called. I pay my money. I look deep into some governmental version of an optical instrument, and somehow prove that I can see. I wait for another ten minutes to be photographed.

It's over. For me, this Stygian nightmare comes only once every five years. But for the governmental zombies who run that dismal pavilion, it's all in a day's work. Each day. Every day. For years upon mind-numbing years.

Not Dante's Hell perhaps, but certainly Purgatory.

Have gun, will travel

Beginning Monday, you can start packing heat in our National Parks (with the exception of ranger stations and certain other governmental buildings). Yup. You can walk fully armed through the lobbies and restaurants of the massively timbered lodges. You can keep your finger on your trigger as you walk in and about the camping areas. You can carry guns on the trail. You can hike armed to the gills down into the Grand Canyon, and carry your AK-47 (presumably) to the top of Half Dome.

Not hunting rifles, I guess. You still can't hunt in National Parks -- we like to keep them natural. You can't shoot your guns recreationally. So what's the point? I guess they might be carried for "self-defense," despite the fact that our parks tend to attract peaceful, bird-watching, Sierra Club-types, along with the occasional French or German-speaking tourist.

Never mind. The NRA has spent "millions" to overturn the ban on guns in parks.

According to the Associated Press, gun owners have been rushing in "record numbers" to obtain concealed weapon permits. They suspect that Obama will find some way to get around their Congressional victory -- a rider attached to a credit card reform package that Obama signed into law -- and they want to make sure they have their gun permit in one hand and their Smith & Wesson in the other before that happens.

I know that I've promised from the outset that my blog will be devoted to critical analysis of the world about me. But I'm at a loss. How do you analyze madness, except to admit that you find no other explanation than madness -- paranoid madness -- for what you see?

Virtually everyone in my small circle of friends and acquaintances seems sane, rational, reasonably educated. They at times disagree with my political views or question my aesthetic judgments, but these are the kind of disagreements that it's a pleasure to discuss. But I apparently travel in very, very small circles. There's a significant portion of the American population -- I mean, there's a hell of a lot of them out there! -- who live in a mental universe utterly beyond my comprehension.

I throw up my hands. I consider avoiding rowdy groups or silent loners next time I venture into a National Park. I stare at my map of North America, again pondering the possibility of somehow detaching my Northwest Corner from the far, far scarier remaining 48 states of the Union.

I throw the occasional "eh?" into my speech patterns.

To the chipper

In an unforgettable scene from the 1987 movie Fargo, a character is discovered running the body of his partner in crime through a woodchipper.

I recalled the movie as I watched workers shove hunks of an old friend -- a huge laurel bush that until now towered over one side of my house -- through a similar chipper at 8 a.m. on a President's Day morning.

There are those whose natural instinct is a craving for cleanness, openness, simplicity. I, it seems, am not one of those. My house is full of strange twists and turns. I happily enclose it with overgrown shrubbery, partially protecting myself from the prying eyes of neighbors and passers-by. My laurel tree was, at one time, a small laurel bush. Like Topsy, it just grew. Finally, it almost entirely blocked access between front and back yards along that side of the house. It gradually spread its canopy over my second story roof.

The laurel had developed into a large sturdy tree, a tree that showed what laurel can do if given free reign. My kitchen, whose windows opened under its canopy, became increasingly dark over the years, forcing me to turn on the lights even during the day. More to the point, its canopy was depriving my neighbor's less robust hedge of light, causing some of her plants to die. I had to sacrifice my old friend -- to save my house from being fatally enveloped in laurel leaves, and to avoid open warfare with my neighbor.

The laurel, imposing though it appeared, put up little fight when subjected to chain saws. Workers swiftly chopped it into pieces, which were hauled to the front of the house and run through the chipper. My old friend is now a pile of sawdust, on its way to the dump. From dust it came, unto dust it has returned. The kitchen seems unnaturally bright, the side of my house sadly empty.

Somehow, life of all kinds feels unnecessarily short and precarious.

Olympic carping

Conservatives used to grumble that the media always painted everything black. We need to read more "good news," they argued. (The subtext was that life in these U.S. of A. would be just dandy, if only TV and newspapers didn't keep calling attention to isolated problems and demanding public programs as solutions.)

I'm beginning to see their point, but from the opposite perspective. Time magazine has a story this week about the Olympic Village in Vancouver. Our neighbor to the north has built perhaps the finest housing for Olympic athletes ever provided, giving the athletes spectacular views out over False Creek inlet. Because of the banking disaster last year, however, the city had to provide unanticipated financing for construction of the Village, or end up staging the 2010 Winter Olympics with no appropriate housing for participants.

The private developers planned (and still plan) to sell the housing as condo units for about $1 million each after the Games are over. Once they sell, the city will recover the money it has advanced. Obviously, however, these are not the best times to be selling million dollar condos.

The development is well-designed, environmentally friendly, and close to public transportation. Aside from the cost, it's clearly a benefit to Vancouver and its residents. But Time chooses to picture the project as a boondoggle. The magazine quotes an ophthalmology professor (!), and "vocal Olympic critic," as declaring that "The whole Village fiasco leaves the city with fairly dangerous exposure." The Time article then points out that the project is only blocks away from a poverty-ridden neighborhood, where crime and drug abuse are common.

Time quotes, with apparent approval, its eye doctor source as suggesting the irony of the juxtaposition, declaring that it was the height of irresponsibility for the city to help build the Olympic Village while poverty existed so close at hand.

Yes, but. The poverty pre-existed the Olympics. Does Time believe that if the city had not guaranteed completion of the Village, it would have used the cash to end homelessness, crime, and drug abuse in that portion of town? I can't see that the city was robbing the poor to reward the athletes; combatting homelessness and poverty makes up a totally different agenda with different political and economic considerations.

I suppose Time could be commended for calling our attention to social problems amongst even the best run of North American cities, but the article strikes me as just one more attempt by the media to tear down every attempt -- by all levels of government -- to accomplish something for the community. After noting that visiting athletes were highly impressed by the Village, the article concludes by editorializing: "Rave reviews from the Olympians, for sure. But the taxpayers of Vancouver may sharply disagree."

Maybe. But maybe they don't disagree. Maybe they're hopeful that Vancouver's financing will be repaid. They may be well aware of the pockets of poverty that exist in their city, but also aware that more than doling out city money is going to be required to solve the problem.

And maybe they're proud of the fine job their city has done in hosting this year's Olympic Games.

Finally ... !!

I start piano lessons next Monday.

Odd reflections

Anyone hanging around Facebook this past week, anyone with way too much time on his hands (isn't that redundant?), is well aware that we've just passed through "Doppelgänger week." Anyone childish enough to participate¹ substituted, in place of his own profile photo, the photo of some celebrity who he supposed (hoped?) bore some resemblance to himself.

I was familiar with the German word as a term commonly used to describe one's "double," but until now had never thought about its origins. It comes from German folklore. (English folklore had a similar concept, called a "fetch"; and the Norse had something called a "vardøger.")

It seems that a Doppelgänger ("double walker") was believed to be a spectral embodiment, or projection from a different level of reality, of one's own soul. If you saw your doppelganger (using the anglicized form of the word), you didn't clown around about it. You froze in terror. The doppelganger was a harbinger of your own death.

The doppelganger was often perceived in the peripheral area of vision, or was seen looking back at one from a mirror or a darkened window. Mirrors were magical objects to the people of many early cultures. They seemed to be windows into a similar but different reality. Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass is a non-threatening description of such a world, one more than slightly askew, found on the other side of a mirror. In some versions of the superstition, the image in any mirror was a doppelganger by definition. It was not until the doppelganger was seen outside the mirror world, seen moving about in our own world, that it became frightening and a sign of disaster.

In some places, it's still a custom to cover all mirrors in the house where a person has just died. Doing so prevents the reflected doppelganger of any visiting guests from being sucked into the afterworld by the deceased's spirit.

In modern times, with our understanding of the optics of mirrors and reflections in general, the whole concept is of course ridiculous. True, Abraham Lincoln did see his doppelganger shortly before he was assassinated, but, well, he was under a lot of stress. And, of course, the poets Percy Shelley and John Donne also saw doppelgangers before their wives miscarried. But you know how hyper-imaginative and sensitive poets can be.

In the spirit of complete honesty and openness, I'll confess that -- up into my teens -- I'd sometimes cover the mirror in my bedroom when I went to bed at night and was alone in the house. Of course, back then I'd never even heard of "doppelgangers" -- with or without the umlaut. However, I had read this damn horror comic book where this guy looked into his bedroom mirror one night and saw ... Well, after he went to sleep, the reflection in the mirror came out and ....

Ah, it was stupid. You don't want to know.

Doppelgangers are part of old folklore, like leprechauns and dwarfs. They don't exist. Never have. On the other hand, who needs a mirror in his bedroom, anyway? I'd chuck it out and use the mirror in your bathroom. Keep the light turned on bright.
-----------------------------------
¹I chose Woody Allen.