The Answer Is Seven

When my son did math team as a sophomore in HS, someone came up with the idea of getting t-shirts that said "The Answer Is Seven" because it came up enough to be a good guess.  I agreed, and told him why this is, about which he cared not a whit. He is more geeky/Aspie than I am in many ways, but in math, and specifically what is a fair answer on a competitive math problem, I chase even relatives away. I told him the second possibility was -1, because they are testing whether you kept track of the signs, or Did you keep track of the signs even when we threw a bunch of them into the problem? In one way this is not good teaching, because reality does not favor that rule over a dozen others. On the other hand, it is one of the things you are most likely to screw up, even in real life, so teaching you to be more alert for that one is good. I told him that if there was a circle in the problem somewhere, the answer was going to be 2π, especially if revolutions were going to be involved.

When my wife told me today that worldwide, people's favorite number is seven (second place is 3), my first thought was "Gee, there are more autistic people in the world than I thought." It's sort of the first really cool prime number. But it is considered the Lucky Number in our society, probably from English or Northern European roots, so there's that.

It's going to be a low number, less than ten, because most people don't think of high numbers day-to-day, and those that are willing to think out there are going to wash out between them whether it's 103, 104, or 105. Some numbers will be disproportionately popular in their region, but still not get up over the rise of the first ten.  17 is going to be big among math-y people, as are 111 and 1001.  And those are all very cool numbers, I agree, for reasons not immediately apparent.

But answers on a team math test to be answered on the spot, even if quick written computation is allowed, are going to be designed to not reward "mere" calculation. We want to see more than just arithmetic, Caleb.  We all like arithmetic, but we want to see you do MATH. Yet they also want to see you struggle for it just a bit. Low multiples of 2 and 3 are likely to be too easy at a glance, as are 5 , 10, and 11.  12's not bad, but 13 is getting to be a tougher compute in your head. It's good because you won't intuit 13's in numbers over 80, certainly 100, but we are starting to get into the territory of rewarding mere computational skill again.  It's okay to favor the arithmetic nerds a bit, but frankly, they've got a leg up to begin with.

7 is the sweet spot, a prime porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold.

You can just feel it.

Jealousy

Aporia magazine likes to link to what they call "classic" articles from social psychology, presumably because they believe those ideas are less-known than they should be. From this morning's email

Sex Differences in Jealousy In a classic article from 1992, David Buss and colleagues examine sex differences in sexual jealousy. Consistent with predictions from evolutionary psychology, they find that women are more jealous when their romantic partner becomes emotionally involved with another woman, while men are more jealous when their romantic partner has sex with another man...

I have two takeaways from this:

1. This is a great example of social psychology discovering things your grandmother could have told you, except

    A. I cannot imagine having this conversation with either of my grandmothers (or grandfathers, for that matter) My mother or father, maybe.

    B. It might actually be a useful thing to give such evidence for obvious ideas, because human beings, perhaps even especially in modern times, are fond of convincing themselves of non-obvious things, usually because they are making excuses for themselves.

2. I don't want to even be part of research that asks me to think about these things.

Praying For Your Enemies

But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you Matthew 5:44, NKJV  

I was taught years ago that praying for your enemies essentially means wishing for them what you wish for yourself. So yes, you make special exemptions for the safety of people who are in dangerous places when you are in a safe one, or people who are poor when you are rich, but you look to yourself, and what is in your own secret heart.

This pulls us away from high-sounding prayers to the low levels that we actually live in ourselves. Are we secretly hoping for vindication, or admiration? When we hope that they see themselves clearly, do we mean that in the same way that we hope to see ourselves clearly, by coming to the realisation ourselves, or do we want it shoved down their throats while we look on? When we pray for their health, shouldn't we be zipping in our own medical issues, our sleep disturbances and anxieties and foot pain - things that we actually care about and will remember with sincerity - rather than vague and general health? Who knows, that may be exactly what they are themselves hoping for at this moment, and you are brothers in worldly things even as you are distant spiritually.

May he have the admiration of his children.

May her resentments not rule her.

May those who wish her ill not come near her.

If he has been treated unjustly, may he live to see vindication. 

It is impossibly hard, and I would not say it to your face as it would be too confrontative. Introspection is a technique, not a virtue, but self-honesty is sometimes the first thing that is necessary.

Lutefisk Hotline

 The whole idea of a lutefisk hotline just slays me.

Psych Testing Hall of Shame

Reposted from 2006.  If anything, I look on this with more astonishment now than I did then.  McLean is a good hospital, and my experience with them was very good. But this...

**********

The following report was sent to us by McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. Affiliated with Harvard Medical, currently costing $2500/day, and considered to be one of if not the best psychiatric hospital in the world.

The report was done in the 1990's - names of both patient, tester, and supervisor are left out. The report was generated on the basis of the following tests: Bender-Gestalt; Draw a Person; Rorschach; Thematic Apperception Test; and a WAIS-R. Conspicuously absent is the MMPI. Hmm.

Those of you who know these tests might well wonder how the psychologist discovered this deep insight into the patient from the above tests. I don't hold much with the Rorschach, but I admit that many of the psychologists I most respect use it. It seems to be at its best when there is a specific question, such as "is there an affective component to this presentation?" My own diagnosis is at the bottom.

Mr. S is struggling to overcome a deeply ingrained myth of his patriarchal lineage, which concerns the inheritance of the son from the father and the rivalry played out between them. While he believes that a child, and above all a son, inherently supports and redeems the father, validating and rewarding a father's traditional role, he also fears that a child may overpower or disappoint his father destructively, and that a child will inevitably undermine a parent's authority and autonomy by hindering their freedom. A father is latently a fallen leader. Mr. S tries to sustain the idealize image of his father as invincible, fearless, and forbidding, but he fears he will undermine his father. By acting out his ambivalence about subscribing to his father's modeling of the male role, by his passive surrender to instictual impulses, and by his valuation and admiration of his own children as more promising and resilient than himself, he feels he may endanger paternal authority.

Mr. S is chronically and helplessly depressed, caught in an unthinkable wish to kill the father already dead, and still haunts him intimidatingly and commands a meek and unquestioning reverence. He is painfully introspective and emotionally conflicted, without being able to focus an issue to his conflict, doubting and disgusted by his own life-solutions while faithful to the family ideology of presumptive masculine pride. His need to distance himself from an obsolete and inappropriate myth is internalized and becomes translated into a wish to do away with parts of himself he attempts to minimize and disown as flawed and faulty "outcroppings" like dead branches of a family tree useful only as firewood on the family hearth.

Frankly, I can't bear to type any more of this. If there is a groundswell of enthusiasm for wanting to see the rest, I will oblige. That was about 25% of the report. I think we know a great deal about the psychologist at this point, but precious little about the patient.

The patient was a depressed father with teenage sons. He drank a little too much, to "try and relax" so he could get to sleep, and had sleep apnea, which we discovered in the hospital. He elevated the head of his bed, reduced his drinking, and went off the energizing anti-depressant we put him on about three months after leaving the hospital. I ran into him a year later, a quiet but cheerful and pleasant man. In retrospect, he thought it was the sleep disorder that had overstressed him.

Two From 2006

Diffuse Power  Is it more comfortable to believe that there are just a few forces, or even a few individuals, that are controlling it all, so that if we just could get at them and rein them in we'd be fine? It ain't so, which is why at the end of the day it might be more important to just do your job, raise your family, and help your neighbors than worry about who you're voting for.

No One is Minding The Store  No, really. Maybe it's lots of people minding lots of different parts of the store.  Or maybe there's no store, just some store-like signs to make us think so.

Once A Queen

We have discussed here before the problem of Queen Susan, who later "is no longer a Friend of Narnia," and speculated about what happened to her after, mostly with a hopeful tone that she would find her way back to Aslan's Land and True Narnia in a more conventional way here. Well, it seems someone has put out a new novel on that subject.

Sarah Arthur has a new YA novel Once a Queen that came out this week. From the Amazon blurb:

When fourteen-year-old American Eva Joyce unexpectedly finds herself spending the summer at the mysterious manor house of the English grandmother she’s never met, she soon discovers that her family, the manor staff, and even the house itself are hiding secrets...

As she starts unraveling the dangerous secrets around the grandmother who is more than she appears, Eva begins to wonder if she, too, is more than she understood herself to be.

I got the introduction in somewhat different words, but essentially the same thought, listening to an interview with the author.  I am only a few minutes in, and the title was a broad hint, but learning that the grandmother was sad and estranged from the family for reasons no one would talk about, I thought This is going to turn out to be Susan. And I was not happy.  I hope the story ends well, but the thought of her still being sad and avoiding discussion of magical worlds late in life brings a little moisture to the eye. 

Let me know how it turns out.

Lew McGeehee

I first met him in Dupont lobby at William and Mary in 1971 and was blown away. I always knew that lots of other guitarists were always going to be better than me, but I simply couldn't imagine anyone only a year older than me could do things like this. To this day, his version of "Here Comes the Sun" is the best I ever heard - though you know about me 'n nostalgia.

In the late 80s I ran into a kid working at Camp Calumet up here in NH who turned out to be one of Lew's students.  Coincidences happen more when you look for them.

We were playing the same Uncle Morris coffee house in 1973, but I don't recall this song at all. 

 Greg Greenway, now in Acton, MA was there. Bill Whitman was in my band, he's still making his living at music also. Paul Van Hook, Hugh Hegyi, Paul Wehrgli, Steve Nobles...none of us making a living at it. Cabot Wade, Glenn Close's first husband, played all over Wmbg.

The Chosen

The church now has a small group that will watch an episode of The Chosen together every week and then discuss it.  Tracy and I missed this week because of covid so I watched episode 1 at home. While it was remarkably well-made in terms of costumes and cultural details, I found myself not very interested.  This has been true of life-of-Jesus movies in general. The amount of speculation they have to include in order to create a credible character leaves me cold. In this one, Nicodemus is troubled, even tormented because despite his knowledge and status as a leading rabbi among the Pharisees, he was unable to perform a particular exorcism, in pretty dramatic fashion as the demon told him directly "You have no power here.". Well, that could be. His wife counsels him that he did everything he could for the woman and should focus on being the teacher of Israel.  Mary of Magdala is an alcoholic to forget her shame and pain. That could also be. Matthew is presented as nervous, fearful of the crowd, contemptuous of most Jews around him. Well, I suspect lots of the tax collectors were, so it could be. Simon and Andrew gamble and try to cheat. Could be.

Yet none of these is. There is no hard value to this information. Its value is in making the characters seem real to us, making them human. It is an artistic expression designed to put us in the scene. I tend to like such things in sermons and we did lots of them in our annual Jesse Tree skits for 20-25 years. But those take very limited liberties with the text. Dialogue is written, or cultural details are included by way of explanation, not atmosphere. Why did the men lower their friend through the roof? Why was the intent that the woman be stoned? What's up with the palms? What did the Sadducees and Pharisees have against each other?  Why do we think Jesus initially refused to make wine? Those tell you something, they are not just for decoration.

I think I also respond better to portrayals that try to counterbalance a common error. When Dorothy Sayers wrote "The Man Born to be King" many people were scandalised that the characters used informal everyday language, even slang, rather than elegant speech. They couldn't have talked like that. Those words made it INTO THE BIBLE and God wouldn't want us to take BIBLE WORDS lightly, would he? We see something similar in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever when Imogene Herdman burps the doll that is the Baby Jesus. Alice Wendelkin is shocked that anyone would think that Jesus might have had colic or anything. The narrator sides with Imogence pretty quickly after thinking about it. She doesn't use theological language, but she correctly perceives that the whole point of the Incarnation is that Jesus does take on our nature. One of the major fights in the early church was around the heresy of docetism, that Jesus only seemed to be human.

I have to figure that these movies must work for a lot of people, maybe even most. But I look at this "development" of Nicodemus as unnecessary.  We know how his story goes at the important times, we don't actually need any backstory at all. If there was something that looked quite puzzling and unexplainable, then speculating what might have gone before might have some use.

I'm going to the small group anyway, because of the potential quality of the discussion. That's usually the thing for all small groups and Bible studies. The questions, even the supposedly deep and thoughtful ones, can't hold a candle to what sparks are set off in an individual Christian.  Or skeptic, for that matter.

Container Ship

I went down to New England Seafarer's Mission in Boston yesterday.  The mission primarily serves cruise ship workers, who often have very difficult lives for what we would consider little money. It is often unclear whose laws they are subject to or protected by, and in that vacuum they are often not much protected at all. 

When the cruise ships aren't going, between October and April, the mission shifts focus to the container ships that come into port.  These have much smaller staffs. They are usually only in port a few hours, and only a portion of it can go ashore to do shopping for family back home. The docks are quite a distance from Wal-Marts or shopping malls, and because of security concerns for the port, taxis and ubers can only get so close them. When you only have few hours and are hoping to get a particular item, like compression socks, vitamins, specific cords for electronics, or snack foods you know you will like, walking the mile in the cold each way can be onerous, especially if you are unused to cold. We look if there are some who need rides when we leave. 

What we do is called a ministry of presence, of mostly just showing showing up and being friendly.  The main chaplains do find that just establishing that trust fairly often results in being asked for help, such as sending a package home, asking whether some treatment is legal or should be reported, confessions of loneliness and concern for family they have heard is sick. Some ask for prayers, and interesting, this includes the Muslims.  Makes sense, really. We also bring a couple of (heavy) bags of goods as well, which are sold at cost or just a bit more. Sim-cards are big. Chocolate and chips are universally understood worldwide. The seafarers like small souvenirs, like magnets with pictures, and especially flannel shirts and t-shirts that say "Boston." Those are fun back home.

Lugging the bags up the gangway is a bit harrowing. You become aware that OSHA rules do not apply here.  The owners do stress safety because of potential lost work time, but the stair design, railings, and riggings are designed for the experienced and fairly athletic. The wind is cold up there, and I am not fond of heights. Still you meet interesting people.  Yesterday's ship included a couple of Romanians and Indians, but was mostly Sri Lankans. I got to use my toddler Romanian.

The Return of the King

 Theo Epstein is returning to the Boston Red Sox in an ownership capacity, joining the Fenway Sports Group. He is widely credited as being the primary mover in breaking bothe Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs curses.

I have stopped following baseball, bu this may pring me at least partly back.

Worried About Fruit in the Philippines

 My DIL, the TikTok and Facebook sensation Jocie Walker is in the Philippines with her younger two daughters for six weeks, while my son and her oldest daughter are left behind in Nome. Those two are heading out on a flight today - they hope, after yesterday's Alaska Airlines flight was cancelled - for the remaining four weeks.

Aurora, the oldest, thinks that her sisters are taunting her with all the videos about the fresh fruit they are eating.  She is worried they are going to eat all of it before she gets there. This sounds odd, laughable, yes.  But when you have lived your whole life in Nome, you are used to the idea that someone migh throw a celebration, and there really will be no fruit left for anyone else for the rest of the wee.

Farm Girls

 I have mentioned before young friends who are farm girls. The previous occasion was when there was a proposed ordinance in their expensive suburb to ban roosters and geese. They spoke before the town selectmen, and the person who had submitted the petition laughed and immediately withdrew it. 

They will be on church retreat with one of my granddaughters this weekend, and their mother submitted the following on her FB page

goodmorning! oh man i’m watching my girls go outside to do their chores before leaving for Winter Blast with their Church Youth group tonight and mustering up the energy to fill in while they are gone

…. Willow feeds grain to all the animals which includes sneaking into the horse pen and giving each horse their individual bowl of food w/o the horse pushing her around to knock the grain scoops out of her hands,(she’s reading over my shoulder and reminded me this includes the bunnies goats and attack geese) and autumn does hay and water, which means if the ground is hard, taking the tractor to lug buckets she filled with water down to the pens and dumping them over the fence, or using a wagon if not(autumn is also reading over my shoulder and she corrected me that if I use a wagon for the buckets of water will fall off, so she just walks with them!), and hauling a bale of hay over the fence twice a day…. and i’m thinking, oh man i’ve gotta do this 4 times for them both while they are away!! last winter blast it was -22 and i went out every two hours all night in my pj's petrified their animals would die on my watch!! … i’m thinking I probably AM the only one having this panic this am. I’m also beginning to think I relate more to my great grandparents when their oldest children married off at 14 more than I do to my peers in town today! - not a bad thing, but an interesting realization. well - i like the way my grandparents came out so i guess i’ll keep on this path!

- Just to clarify for those who feel badly that my kids know how to (and enjoy) work…

the animals belong to the kids, they asked for them they paid for (most of) them they decided they wanted them AND the responsibility that goes with it. I’m fully supportive if they decide to get out of farming, and i’ve backed them up with all my favorite furry friends they’ve rehomed over the yrs, but they keep assuring me that they enjoy this life style, so i’m

happy to support their aspirations and work mornings and weekends in the hair salon to fund their farm with the hay, feed, vet bills and garden supplies and seeds they need to make it possible! (I call it working to cover my view tax- cuz i get to look out the window and not only enjoy the farm, but the cute kids running it!!)

Autumn and Willow are 13 and 11. Willow looks like she weighs about 11 lbs, frankly. They are also musicians. 

Their father runs the technologically amazing Events United, which is now nationwide.