(Old) Epistemic Ingemination

The Real Last Post

Gang, the new site is up at http://blog.kirchhof.com/. You can create an account and post comments, etc. Let's take up the conversation over there.

Stop on by. Signing off of this one...

...And so, a transition.

Hi gang. I've been aware of your interest; we've gone from 750 people checking for a new post every day to, most recently, 40. Deservedly. I've certainly had the feeling of being burdened to write, and being the ever-vigilant rebel, I haven't. In the immortal words of Roberto Duran: "No Mas, No Mas."

This will be the last post of this weblog.

Over the last few weeks, I've actually read the Whole Thing. All of it. (I think that the 5/28/04 post is perhaps the most informative, and that the first two are the best. After that, it's pretty much all self indulgent.)

...Which is not necessarily bad. You have to be a strong ego to do this kind of thing. But I don't have that fire anymore.

I had it, over the years. You can see, here, political posts, truth as clear as the nose on your face -- from three years ago -- that is only now coming into the group consciousness of our nation. I'm sick of that. I can't be the leftist rejoinder to the idiocy of the common zeitgeist anymore. It'll drive a sane man insane. And there are stronger and better and more well-informed people who can take that lead, who do it every day, better, and faster, and smarter. I am simply an informed citizen of the United States of America, and you have a responsibility to be the same.

But there are posts here that are beautiful, even poetic to me; posts that expressed exactly my feelings of the moment. I like those. The soundman post of 6/4/2006. Birthday posts on 6/2. The Armadillo birthday post in August of last year. The February '06 Folklife post. Tracy's death. Others.

This is a capsule; it's the record of a man who, well, is not in a mid-life crisis, I don't think. It is a record of a man who was discarded, laid off, retooling; one step away from the street for much of the last four years. Much of that work is done now.

So, anyway, it'll remain intact, warts and all.

I'll leave the blog up through the end of the year. After that, I intend to put up some software that will engender a community. Where all of you can comment too; where you can have your own blog and I can comment. Where we can all be human.

Interestingly, it's not better to burn out than to fade away. Sorry, brother Neil. It's better to do neither.

Perhaps the kindly old guy with the enigmatic smile, friend to all, sitting on the park bench, feeding the pigeons -- he may know something that I need to learn. Might be worth exploring.

Thank you, friends, for your attention to this thing. I have no wisdom to write for the moment; I'll look forward to yours soon. It'll be better by far -- it'll be more human.

The Mess

Hi gang; I'll be writing more often now. In the meantime, Paul Krugman has a fine column up about the mess that we're about to go through.

We Must Be Getting Close To Having A Winner...

...of the Geekiest Thing Of All Quest.

Ladies and gentlemen, the theme from Super Mario Brothers, played via the sparks of two massive Tesla coils:

Be Careful

...because on Saturdays, the squirrels are all surveilling on your stuff, yo...

(These two play around in a pecan tree all day. Fun to watch.)

Back In The Saddle

Sorry for the quiet month blog-wise. I've been utterly enjoying a new home and a new neighborhood, watching my beloved son make new friends and seeing him actually looking forward to going to school. And not just him; I have a buddy a block away to share coffee in the morning and an occasional beer in the evening while we fix the problems of the world to our satisfaction. We trade meals and lies, and Ryan plays w/ the dog. It's also a great bike riding neighborhood, and people actually smile and say hello as you pass. There are pecans everywhere. I bet that there's half a bushel in my little 30 x 30 front yard alone. Makes sense; my dad says that this area was once a huge commercial pecan grove, back when he was a kid.

It is really a satisfying time of relief and rejuvenation; after a particularly difficult and ill-fated few months, things could not be developing in any better a direction than right here and now. I feel a sense of community here that I haven't seen in perhaps thirty years. It feels like home, and I am grateful to Mama Universe for providing such an amazing turnaround in our lives. It has all clicked together so easily that it's difficult not to believe in what feels like a supernatural intervention at play here... it's as if somewhere a dam broke, and all good things started flowing freely in our direction. Today is the second month anniversary of Ryan's mother's death, and in that 60 days we've gone from bereaved, panicked and all-but at a complete loss, to supported, free and very much at home. It's not just as if we moved to a new city, although there is that feel; it's as if we've moved to a new civilization, a better, kinder one. We're utterly blessed.

So, anyway, I'll be pecking out stuff on the keyboard here much more regularly now. I've been formulating a relatively detailed post to put up soon; not a very pretty one either. Over the last couple of weeks or so, I've noticed a sort of a synchronicity in widely disparate articles on climate change that have me genuinely scared. I don't want to besmirch my happy post today with a sky-is-falling essay, so I'll save that for another time.

Here's hoping that you are having a wonderful day today.

Hoo-Wee

We are into the new place; the moving is done. Now the unpacking begins. And, naturally, it's one of the busiest weeks (and earliest show times) of the year at the club. I am just inundated at the moment.

But it's all good. In fact, it's more than that; it's the best it's been in years. I'll talk more about it soon, when I catch my breath.

Moving Is Such Fun

And that's what we're doing over here for the next few days. I'll tell you all about it when we're in the new place.

Public Notice

Saturday Night at Threadgill's has one of the best guitar players that you'll have a chance to see in this lifetime.

Just sayin'.

State Of Things

Well, chirren, I've been head-down and eyes straight ahead for a while now. We're adjusting to the new rhythms of life and making some changes.

The best is that I think that we've found a nice little place in Crestview, which'll put Ryan in the appropriate schools and near to his friends. I've just talked to the landlord, and she relates that she prefers us in there to anyone else. (I took Ryan along when we looked at the place. Manic little boy energy exuded from every corner. Kitchen!! Bedroom!! Pecan tree!! Look! A closet! We can do a garden over here and you can have some tomatoes!) Ahh, yes. Looks like we'll finally get away from this horrid little apartment that we've been planning to escape since before we moved in, and Ryan will be within a five minute walking distance of his high school next year.

And God bless F.D.R. and the Democratic Party, who created and defended Social Security for all of these years. Ryan will have the option to go to any college he prefers. (Of course, given his intellect, he'll likely have that choice anyway. So maybe he'll be able to buy a house, too. In any case, the money is his.)

I've actually come out of the shell a bit and started looking around, too. Everything got huge for a while, but it doesn't seem so big now. I note that the politicians are still out there campaigning like it's a year from now. Silly. I'll no doubt post some screed to stave off an aneurysm sometime soon.

And, nice, the rest of the music season at the joint is going to be chock-full of many of my all-time favorite artists, and work will be play. Y'all should keep an eye on the calendar and come by, often.

Expect more of the patented trivial content here more often now. We're gonna be okay.

Sorry For The Silence

I've wanted to say something substantive here for a week or so, but there's not a lot in my world right now that is interesting enough to say anything about. Ryan & I are still mapping the new terrain; there are moments of joy and the opposite; mostly it's normal if not quite yet routine. Finances are coming back into some area of sanity after a fairly brutal few months. I have an overdue project at my day work that is taunting me at every turn, one of those situations where nothing does what it says it's supposed to do, and there's no documentation to support the errata. Very frustrating.

Heh. That's not a bad description of day-to-day life in general here lately. It's like badly documented beta code right now. Lots of exceptions and very little in the way of instructions. Yeah, that's it.

Boy, I can be a poetic kind of guy, aye?

Hopefully you'll see something more interesting here, sometime soon.

Goodbye, Loved One

This
Is our fork in the road
Love's last episode
There's nowhere to go, oh no

You made your choice
Now it's up to me
To bow out gracefully
Though you hold the key, but baby

Whenever you call me, I'll be there

I'll Be Around...

We'd had a hard breakup in 1987, seven years before we married. "I'll Be Around" by The Spinners was the song that I chose to get me through it. Tracy considered it "Our" song after we cycled back into one another's life, which I thought was kind of strange—it was my breakup song. Girls are funny that way.

Well, okay. Ours, e're it shall remain now.

It was a beautiful, unique service today. So many fine people. I'll gather my thoughts sometime soon; tonight, I am doing the "bear in hibernation in my cave" thing. But a truly blessed bear; one who is aware of the extraordinary hearts who've crossed the path of my son and myself in this fine life.

Thank You So Much

Tracy Lee Austin
March 26, 1959–August 29, 2007
Rest in Peace, and Welcome Home Again, beautiful Queen of Hearts.
You left this a richer world than you found it.

As many of you are now aware, Ryan's mom, Tracy Austin, took her own life on Wednesday. She was a good and kind person who suffered bipolar disease; she finally lost her struggle with depression. She was a fine and conscientious mother, and we had remained friends after our divorce and close partners in the gifts and responsibilities of parenthood. We together made sure that Ryan is supported and loved, and she will always have my great respect.

I want to thank all of you who have called and written with your support. It is comforting indeed. I'd especially like to thank Principal Troutman and Ms. Cannon from Pearce for their incredible attention and concern; I've never seen such support from so many. Today, the school sent a huge envelope containing handmade cards from Ryan's classmates. What an extraordinary gesture. What an extraordinarily comforting gesture to Ryan.

We are doing well, considering that we're only two days into this. In some ways, it is something that I've navigated before—I lost my mom at an early age, albeit to ill health, not by her own hand. We will continue to work our way through this as time unfolds; there is no roadmap. It is simply this thing that we have chosen to do, to come here and live this thing called life.

In the meantime, please know how grateful I am to you for your kind thoughts and your extraordinary support. We feel your sympathy and love, and we are comforted in our loss. Thank you all.

Might Be A Bit Before I Post Again

We've had a foundational shock and a change in our lives tonight; I'll write more at a later time. I don't know when that will be.

On The Philosophy Of Education

I've been exchanging mail with a friend lately, a schoolteacher, who knows that Ryan is a pretty sharp kid who needs to be in a sharp educational environment. It being a Sunday morning, my traditional day of free-form cogitating, I'm going to put down some thoughts on the subject. Serendipitously, it is the eve of the first day of the '07-'08 school year. Okay, then. Good timing.

Yeah, I've looked around pretty extensively at the available options out there. KIPP, Kealing, magnet schools, Breakthrough, Duke project, UT pre-prep services, augmentative education, private schools, co-ops, boarding schools. I find (to varying degree) that all of these programs are geared towards making him an attractive and productive cog in the machinery of our particular (and in my opinion, skewed) economic system.

I have yet to find an educational program that is designed to assist a child in discovering their hidden interests and talents. We emphasize getting good grades in a standardized curriculum, getting good scores on standardized testing; getting accepted to a good college so you can get a standardized degree and spend your life doing a good standardized "career" definition for some company and have nice things and raise up another generation to do the same thing. The whole of it reflects why we are going nuts as a society. At its worst, organized education can be an assembly line for robots, and I wouldn't sentence a dog to such a pointless existence.

My son's potential far exceeds a life goal as silly and monotonous as that. He and his type can change the world, and there's a hell of a lot out there that needs to be changed.

I'm not worried about his academic education—he knows how to educate himself, because I've raised him to know how and taught him how to do it. His vocabulary already far exceeds the average high school graduate. He has an in-depth and matter-of-fact knowledge of disciplines that would've been considered graduate studies in my time. (I know that I certainly couldn't explain general relativity or discuss speculative Mayan cultural minutiae at the age of thirteen...) He knows of geography, social studies, multidimensional mathematics, history, cultural anthropology, political theories and histories, paleontology, quantum physics. He is already better educated than probably 98% of the population of this planet, right here and now, before his voice has even started changing.

Is it because I am such a great parent? Nope. I am simply the caretaker that points his hungry brain in the right direction. He asks "Why is the sky blue?" and I answer "Let's find out." After 30 minutes of research, we both know that molecules interact with photons in the frequencies of the visible light spectrum in interesting ways, tending to scatter blue-frequency photons more efficiently than the rest. It's known as the Tyndall effect, or Rayleigh scattering. We know that it has to do with the relative kinetic energy of a photon as a derivative of its oscillation frequency, and we know about John Tyndall and Lord Rayleigh, and the status of cutting-edge physics in the mid-nineteenth century. And we know why the sky is such a beautiful color of blue, too.

You see, there is a critically important thing to remember here: Ryan is a member of the first Internet Generation.

Ryan is among the first of our species—quite literally—to grow up with the totality of the accumulated knowledge of the human race at his fingertips. Everything about education has now changed, and there aren't many who see the magnitude of that change. Yet.

The old-as-the-human-race question of educational access is answered. Over. It's done. We have the contents of every textbook ever written; the mind of every artist and genius and businessman; the thoughts of every philosopher and saint and sinner; the information on the techniques of every craft; the cast of similar minds, sometimes as fresh as this morning's coffee. They're all available via the machine that you're using to read these words. To you. At this instant.

How cool is that? Think about it. You can type in "Quantum Chromodynamics" or "Knitting", sitting in your home, right now, and get virtually everything that is known on the subject, instantaneously.

There's now a new operational imperative regarding the education of our children, and we'll realize it soon. A new question that never had real meaning before. If everyone can now access every bit of knowledge effortlessly, then there is a profound moral and ethical issue that has to be addressed. We must deal with the no-longer hypothetical question: "What if Beethoven had never been exposed to music?"

It is a wholly new question of philosophy.

Ryan will excel at anything that interests him. Of that, I have no doubt. What he needs here and now is a full illumination of what is available out there to potentially engage his interest. I'd like my son to get a good Human Cultural Overview and, quite simply, to be exposed to every unsolved idea available. Whether he chooses to be a medical doctor or filmmaker or a truck driver or a designer of toilets doesn't matter to me. He will pursue and excel at anything that he feels is worthy of his talents. What matters to me is that he is made aware of as much of every branch of the tree of human knowledge as possible, so that his latent creative talents can be kindled, illuminated and developed. He'll pursue his personal predilections; we all do. And if I have taught him anything, I have taught him how to efficiently research an interest. He's learned how to learn at this point. What he needs to know is the variety and the extent of the playground, the gameboard. Ryan might be an expert at weaving Tartan plaids for all I know.

I believe that we as a people have an ethical duty to make sure that the hypothetical "Tartan plaid weaving geniuses" of the world have a chance to find out who they are. Whether they live on a sheep farm in Scotland or next to a crackhouse on 160th street is immaterial. For the first time in the history of our existence, we can find everyone's genius. And we have a duty to do so.

Given that contextual milieu, I have been looking for a kind of "philosophical survey of the disciplines of the human race" curriculum that probably doesn't yet exist—but one that in my opinion is desperately needed. Soon, every young mind on the the planet will have instant access to this Encyclopedae Humanae that we call the Internet. What we have to do now is to find a way to help our children to discover their interests and their talents. They'll do the rest. I am here to tell you that I watch it every day.

So. Education and what it should do. In my opinion, the organized primary education that I see out there is currently failing to provide the breadth of information that will prepare my son for the world in which he will be living his life. But it's not catastrophic; it's not doing any particular damage either. There are certainly social and cultural benefits to being in school, and the failure is ultimately marginal in our household. We pick up the slack in our own way.

That having been said, the cat is already out of the bag; The Internet is here. The magnitude of what it represents is only now beginning to dawn on us. Primary school is going to have to become primary meta-school. We are going to have to teach our children how to educate themselves, and we are going to have to give them what used to be called a world-class liberal arts education, straight out of the crib.

When I was his age, we took something odius called the "Differential Aptitude Test." It helped the administrative staff to determine who took algebra and who took shop class, and it labeled us and threw expectations upon us—long before we knew ourselves well enough to have any opinion about it. That mindset will soon be a goner. We are approaching a day when the average third-grader will be more intellectually sophisticated than the average twelfth-grader was in those days.

I'd like to see something along the lines of grades 1-3 teaching basic reading, writing, math, and small-group social skills. Grades 4-6 could be devoted to discovering the individual talents and interests of the child—musical, arithmetic, artistic, rhetorical, cognative, administrative, athletic, scientific, social, whatever.

Any human interest or talent; there is dormant genius in everyone. Some folks will formulate theories in cosmology. Other folks will be fascinated and fulfilled operating a precision machine tool. We have a duty to ourselves to help those people to find out their interests and expose them to the myriad possibilities.

So the rest of the 7-12 school experience could expose the student to every human discipline related to their talents and interests, teach them large-group citizenship skills and responsibilities (read: civics), and expose them to the concept of community service. By the time of high school graduation, students would most certainly have a clue of who they were and what to pursue, and be fired from within, having the interest and intention to pursue truly meaningful higher education.

In the meantime, Ryan and I will keep doing our own little exercises in research, and I'll keep looking for the upcoming and inevitable crack in the monolith that we call public education.

To quote Arthur C. Clarke, "Something is going to happen. Something Wonderful."

To quote Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

And, to quote Steve Earle, "The Revolution Starts Now."

Forty Years Ago Today

August 22nd, 1967 was the last peaceful day for parents in the summer of love. On the following day, Johnny Allen Hendrix (later to be rechristened James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix) released "Are You Experienced?", and parents everywhere realized that their daughters were no longer going to be safe. Pat Boone and Connie Francis were not going to be on the radio any more. Half the female population of the planet were suddenly feeling urges that no one had ever told them existed.

The guy came out of nowhere with "Purple Haze", "Foxy Lady", "Hey Joe", "Wind Cries Mary", "Fire", and more. There wasn't a bad song on the album, and it was all unlike anything ever heard before, anywhere, period. Taken together, it looked like civilization itself was crumbling to most of the older generation, not the least reason was that a "black" man was playing "white" music better than any whitey could possibly do it. With one phallic thrust of an upside-down guitar connected to a stack of Marshalls, backed by a white rhythm section, Jimi swept the gameboard clear, installed his rules into the new game, and every rock guitarist in the known universe was scrambling to catch up. They still are, come to think of it.

I remember hating it at the time. It seemed loud and self-indulgent and violent and base to this little gentle intellectual proto-geek. Of course it was, all of that. But when the testosterone of my adolescence kicked in three years later, I began to understand. Forty years on, it can be pretty clearly seen that this little hyper-talented drug addict from Seattle did as much as Martin Luther King to begin to break down the race barriers of the world, and that is one of his great legacies.

So. Thanks, Jimi. You streaked through like a short-lived exploding rainbow comet and changed everything. You heralded a new day, and provided us with both a map and a warning, all in one package. It was cool to watch and be a part of. It all happened just the way it was supposed to. And I am sure that you simply grinned at St. Peter and said "That was fun."

Just A Reminder

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert A. Heinlein

The Current Stock Market, In A Nutshell

Nouriel Roubini 'splains:

First, you take a bunch of shaky and risky subprime mortgages and repackage them into residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS); then you repackage these RMBS in different (equity, mezzanine, senior) tranches of cash CDOs that receive a misleading investment grade rating by the credit rating agencies; then you create synthetic CDOs out of the same underlying RMBS; then you create CDOs of CDOs (or squared CDOs) out of these CDOs; and then you create CDOs of CDOs of CDOs (or cubed CDOs) out of the same murky securities; then you stuff some of these RMBS and CDO tranches into SIV (structured investment vehicles) or into ABCP (Asset Backed Commercial Paper) or into money market funds. Then no wonder that eventually people panic and run - as they did yesterday on an apparently safe money market fund such as Sentinel. That toxic waste of unpriceable and uncertain junk and zombie corpses is now emerging in the most unlikely places in the financial markets.
Second example: today any wealthy individual can take $1 million and go to a prime broker and leverage this amount three times; then the resulting $4 million ($1 equity and $3 debt) can be invested in a fund of funds that will in turn leverage these $4 millions three or four times and invest them in a hedge fund; then the hedge fund will take these funds and leverage them three or four times and buy some very junior tranche of a CDO that is itself levered nine or ten times. At the end of this credit chain, the initial $1 million of equity becomes a $100 million investment out of which $99 million is debt (leverage) and only $1 million is equity. So we got an overall leverage ratio of 100 to 1. Then, even a small 1% fall in the price of the final investment (CDO) wipes out the initial capital and creates a chain of margin calls that unravel this debt house of cards. This unraveling of a Minskian Ponzi credit scheme is exactly what is happening right now in financial markets.

Do You Like Good Puzzle Games?

Bloxorz

Bloxorz

Yes, I know

I've been screeching here about our unsustainable economy, big business, the common good, and the folly of consumerism pretty regularly for the entire existence of this blog. For years before that, actually. Hell, old and dear friends refuse to drink with me during election season. I don't blame them; it's okay.

But when the Comptroller General of the United States of America releases an official report comparing our economic state to the final days of the Roman Empire, perhaps it's time to attend the issue more seriously and thoughtfully?

(PDF file.)