#52 photograph albums, historian, childhood firearms deaths, Elliott's paintings, schadenfreude

Good morning.

            I know that you can hardly wait to know how I spent the majority of my time between mid-September and early November (apart from traveling), so I'll tell you.  (Hint:  this short narrative is also a suggestion to anyone who wants to give their children a record of part of their lives that they can carry into old age.  My story reflects my unfulfilled goal to be a historian.)

            Elliott's birthday was November 3.  As presents for him, I did a couple of archival projects.  After pulling all my emails and text messages with/from Krystin for the volume being prepared, I realized that Elliott and I had exchanged many such messages as well.  Given how he and I use them (frequently and often on matters of substance), I decided to copy and paste all the text and email messages into an MS Word document.  (As I may have mentioned about doing so with all of the messages with Krystin, this is a tedious and time-consuming process because there are a lot of extra spaces, formatting oddities, and extraneous text in these messages.)

I apparently purchased my current cell phone in May, 2014, because that's how far back I had text messages.  So I went back that far and copied all the messages through May 2018, and I also transferred all our email exchanges during the same period.  (I didn't include the purely logistical ones, of course, like "meet you at the corner at 5:00.")  The document totaled 421 pages (!); I titled it "Four Years of Electronic Conversations with Elliott:  Weather, Food, Politics, Travel, School, and More."  Although I hadn't noticed before, it seems that he writes almost as much as Krystin did!

In addition to the text and email messages, I finally printed a large number of the photos that Kathy, her son Spencer, and I took during our two weeks together with the two boys in Italy in 2016 and put them in an album (well, 3 albums). 

Photo albums for me are a great deal of work.  When I inherited all my parents' albums, they were mostly falling apart; the glue was failing, the pages were yellowed, the bindings were disintegrating.  So years ago I learned that the best way to preserve photos is to buy acid-free pages, use acid-free double-sided tape to attach the photos, print labels for the photos, and put each page in an acid-free transparent plastic page cover.  It took me about two weeks to select pictures (all saved electronically), get them printed, and then mount them on the pages and write the labels.  (I did discover, courtesy of Krystin's lifelong friend Christine, who's an assistant professor of art (photography) at Northern Michigan University, something called "Snapfish."  I could download my selected photos to their site and pick them up at a local Walgreens; the miracle is that they have the photos ready within an hour or so after I enter the order.  So getting photos printed these days is extraordinarily easy.)  I believe in continuing to print photos.  There is, in my mind, no guarantee that photos in the cloud will still be there in 10, 20, 30 years; the only guarantee is to have a physical copy of them.

When I gave both the 421 pages and the 3 Italy albums to Elliott on his birthday, before we took him out to dinner, I think he was nonplussed, although he liked the Italy photo albums.  I was dismayed to learn that he had over 100 of his own pictures from that trip--which I hadn't known about.  I didn't recall him taking many pictures.  So I obtained his; he also dictated his commentary on the photos.  I integrated them into the 3 albums.  He did pull a couple of random pages out of the email/text transcript and was amused at what he read, about events he'd completely forgotten about.  I told him that in both cases, these were not items for this year or next, but something he'd enjoy in 20-30 years.

Elliott inadvertently bore witness to my concern about losing photos on cell phones.  He took many more than he had to give me; they were on his cell phone.  At the time of the trip he downloaded quite a few to Facebook, and those are the ones he provided to me.  Those he didn't download at the time have disappeared—because that cell phone died, taking the photos with it.  (Of course, he could have avoided the problem if he'd downloaded them all at the time, but I don't blame him much because we aren't always assiduous about such mundane tasks.)

            So the answer to the question about what I did for six weeks is "put together Elliott's birthday presents."

            The sequel to the story is that I finally decided, yesterday, to begin the process of sorting through Krystin's photographs.  She took hundreds of them, but she made my job fairly easy because she was a careful curator of her photos.  Most are in albums devoted to a particular time or place (travels in Europe with her friend Mike when we lived in Scotland, high school, travel with Elliott to San Francisco, travel to Vienna with the family and my brother and sister-in-law, and so on).  Those that were not in albums she had grouped neatly into "family" and "middle school" and "vacations," etc. 

Elliott will inherit 3-4 of the albums (and many of those bound in rubber bands) because many of the photos include him and his parents.  The remainder I will disperse to Krystin's friends, to the extent they want them.  The one that most breaks my heart is a huge volume with photos of her travels across Europe, carefully divided and labeled by city and country.  She clearly put hours of work into compiling it, but it contains no pictures of anyone I know except Krystin herself—it is her memories of Europe, but her memories are gone.  I wish I knew of some positive way to dispose of the album.

* * *

            A sidebar to the preceding tale.  I'm going with "a."

[aelarsen.wordpress.com/why-an-historian/  A Historian Goes to the Movies, explaining why he uses "a" rather than "an"]:

Obviously in English, we use the indefinite article 'a' before words that begin with consonants and 'an' before words that begin with vowel sounds. 'However, h',' is a very weak consonant. When it's the first letter of a word, sometimes we pronounce it (as in 'happy') and sometimes we don't (as in 'honor' or 'hour'), so sometimes it takes 'a' and sometimes it takes 'an'.

In the case of 'historian' and related words ('history', 'historical'), we technically pronounce the 'h'. If you say the word aloud all on its own, the 'h' is clearly there. However, the accent in 'historian' is on the second syllable, not the first, so there's a tendency to de-emphasize the 'h' and say something a little closer to 'istorian'. So when the 'h' starts to disappear, 'an' starts to be more acceptable.

In the 18th and 19th century, the standard rule was to say 'an historian', but over the course of the 20th century, American English has tended to shift away from that and say 'a historian'. But British English still tends to say 'an historian'. Although I'm American, I grew up watching a lot of British television shows and apparently this somehow crept into my English, because 'an historian' simply feels natural to me and 'a historian' feels clumsy. Every time I try to say it the American way, it just feels ugly and wrong. So the title of this blog is "An Historian Goes to the Movies".

[grammarist.com]:

In all main varieties of English, the use of an as the article preceding historic (an historic) is an unnecessary affectation. The rule for the indefinite article is that we use a before words beginning with a consonant sound, and an before words beginning with a vowel sound. The h at the beginning of historic is a consonant sound, soft though it may be. As far as we know, there are no modern English dialects in which the h in historic is silent (please correct us if we're wrong), so there's no reason for anyone to use an instead of a before the word.

The same applies with the words historical, historian, and so on. They start with consonant sound, so their article is a.

An historic appears about a third as frequently as a historic, even in some normally well-edited publications. . . .  But in most edited writing, whether British, Australian, Canadian, or American, a historic is thankfully more common than an historic.

* * *

            This is sort of "well, duh" research, but the data do provide ammunition for arguments about public policy.  Researchers at the Stanford Medical School learned that "compared with U.S. states with the strictest gun control legislation, gun deaths among children and teenagers are twice as common in states with the most lax gun laws."  There's another dark side to their findings:  "states with laws that restrict children's access to guns have lower rates of firearm-related suicides among youth, even after controlling for other factors."  The data were presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics 2018 National Conference.  Personally, I think the health sciences (medicine, public health, nursing) can provide considerable insight into the gun problem in this country.

            The statistics are little scary.  "A child is 82 times more likely to die in our country of a firearm injury than in any other developed nation. . . .  We focus a lot on the federal government and the things they can do to protect our children from firearms. But our study shows that what states do at the state level really does have an impact."  A pediatric surgeon, medical director of trauma care at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford, where her role includes investigating how to prevent serious childhood injuries, commented that "if you look at what causes injury deaths in U.S. children, sadly, firearms are always in the top five."

            To put the numbers in perspective:  looking at 2014 and 2015 data from the Centers for Disease Control (which keeps statistics on a wide array of events), one learns that about 2700 children (ages 0-19) died from firearms injuries.  "Of those deaths, 62.1 percent were homicides, 31.4 percent were suicides and the remaining deaths were accidental, of undetermined intent or the result of legal interventions."  They ranked the laws of all the states using a standard scale to evaluate gun laws and looked at socioeconomic and demographic factors as well ("unemployment rates, poverty, urbanization, alcohol dependence, tobacco and marijuana use, and high school graduation rates. The analyses also accounted for the strictness of gun laws in each state's neighboring states and the number of registered firearms per 100,000 children in each state").  Basically, they found that the states with the strictest gun control laws had child deaths from firearms at about half the rate as states with loose laws.

            Like I said, no surprise.  When will anything happen?

* * *

            OK, I'll admit to a little fatherly pride.  Here's Elliott's website with his paintings; he's still playing around with the site (there need to be more paintings on the home page).  He tells me that he is willing to consider commissions.  In my opinion, one of his greatest talents is portraiture, so if you have kids, grandkids, others, maybe pets that you want painted. . . .

https://brushwizard.com/

* * *

If true, then we can no longer be labeled a successful society.  "At the core of all successful societies are procedures for blocking the advancement of bad men" (Paul Collier).  On that same theme, here's (second U.S. President) John Adams, who must be spinning in his grave:  "May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof."  (Adams was the first president to live in the White House.)

* * *

            Schadenfreude, the sense of being pleased at others' misfortune, was the subject of large review of 30 years' work in several of the subdisciplines of psychology by researchers at Emory University.  I suspect that many of you, like me, had never given much thought to the sentiment.  These people did and came up with hypotheses that are at least interesting.  (The term itself translates from the German to "harm joy" in English.)

            They propose that schadenfreude "comprises three separable but interrelated subforms—aggression, rivalry, and justice—which have distinct developmental origins and personality correlates."  There is a common element underlying it all, they surmise:  "Dehumanization appears to be at the core of schadenfreude. . . .  The scenarios that elicit schadenfreude, such as intergroup conflicts, tend to also promote dehumanization."

 They define dehumanization as "the process of perceiving a person or social group as lacking the attributes that define what it means to be human. It can range from subtle forms, such as assuming that someone from another ethnic group does not feel the full range of emotions as one's in-group members do, all the way to blatant forms—such as equating sex offenders to animals."   They go on the say that "the propensity to experience schadenfreude isn't entirely unique, but that it overlaps substantially with several other 'dark' personality traits, such as sadism, narcissism, and psychopathy." 

            One challenge is that there isn't any widely accepted definition of schadenfreude.  Moreover, some see it as "malicious, while others have perceived it as morally neutral or even virtuous. . . .  It's kind of a warm-cold experience that is associated with a sense of guilt. It can make you feel odd to experience pleasure when hearing about bad things happening to someone else."

            There are three theories that can be used in considering schadenfreude.  One is envy theory, "a concern for self-evaluation, and a lessening of painful feelings when someone perceived as enviable gets knocked down a peg."  The sense of justice arises with deservingness theory, which "links schadenfreude to a concern for social justice and the feeling that someone dealt a misfortune received what was coming to them." The third, intergroup-conflict theory, "concerns social identity and the schadenfreude experienced after the defeat of members of a rival group, such as during sporting or political competitions."

            One of the aspects of schadenfreude that the researchers looked at was how it played into child development.  "Research suggests that infants as young as eight months demonstrate a sophisticated sense of social justice. In experiments, they showed a preference for puppets who assisted a helpful puppet, and who punished puppets that had exhibited antisocial behavior. Research on infants also points to the early roots of intergroup aggression, showing that, by nine months, infants preferred puppets who punish others who are unlike themselves. When you think of normal child development, you think of children becoming good natured and sociable, . . .  But there's a dark side to becoming socialized. You create friends and other in-groups to the exclusion of others."  Things don't get better as kids get older.  Maybe that's why middle and senior high schools can be such awful places for some.  "Spiteful rivalry appears by at least age five or six, when research has shown that children will sometimes opt to maximize their gain over another child, even if they have to sacrifice a resource to do so."

            The principal factor that militates against widespread schadenfreude—and, I would think, helps preserve civilized society!—is "the ability to feel empathy for others and to perceive them as fully human.

            I hope not to feel schadenfreude about any of you at any time! 

            My best.

Gary

#51 Dandelion seeds, unselfish people, complicated findings, business practices, coins

Good morning.  In Minneapolis it's a crisp autumn morning, but rain is on the way—for the entire weekend, of course.

* * *

            Back to my occasional look at research that appears, on its face, silly—but isn't.  Folks at the place I spent half a year, the University of Edinburgh, studied the flight of dandelion seeds.

            The mystery of dandelion seed flight has been that the little "parachute" of seeds that form after the flower has bloomed is almost all air.  Nevertheless, those seeds can travel up to a kilometer or more from the plant!  That's an amazing distance.  The folks at Edinburgh did experiments.  I don't fully understand what they found; perhaps you do:

Their study revealed that a ring-shaped air bubble forms as air moves through the bristles, enhancing the drag that slows each seed's descent to the ground.  This newly found form of air bubble -- which the scientists have named the separated vortex ring -- is physically detached from the bristles and is stabilised by air flowing through it.  The amount of air flowing through, which is critical for keeping the bubble stable and directly above the seed in flight, is precisely controlled by the spacing of the bristles.  This flight mechanism of the bristly parachute underpins the seeds' steady flight. It is four times more efficient than what is possible with conventional parachute design, according to the research.

            So of what value is this?  "Researchers suggest that the dandelion's porous parachute might inspire the development of small-scale drones that require little or no power consumption. Such drones could be useful for remote sensing or air pollution monitoring."  Yeah, but those damn little drones could do a lot of other things that I might not like as well.

* * *

            And here's a piece that doesn't seem to have much application in daily life but that's nonetheless provocative.  Research from three different places suggests that being unselfish has its rewards—at least in the American and European populations they studied.  (Stockholm University, the Institute for Futures Studies, and the University of South Carolina; the second organization is an independent research institute in Sweden; the University of South Carolina must have become involved because it has researchers in the field)

            What they found was that "unselfish people tend both to have more children and to receive higher salaries, in comparison to more selfish people."  There is a nuance to the findings:  "The most unselfish people have the most children and the moderately unselfish receive the highest salaries" (emphasis added).   They add that "the result is contrary to theories that selfish people manage to get their hands on more money through their selfishness, as suggested in previous research."

            I did not know, but am not surprised, that earlier "research has shown that unselfish people are happier and have better social relationships."  Of course.

            No doubt one can pick apart the findings.  The researchers drew their conclusions from four studies that examined attitudes as well as reported behaviors.  Self-report research can be suspect.  It is comforting to know, however, that doing good may have its rewards here on earth.  (The researchers also found that while "people generally have the correct expectation that selfish people have fewer children," they also—incorrectly—"believe that selfish people will make more money.")

They hypothesize that "improved social relationships may be the key to generous peoples' success from an economic perspective, but note that their research does not definitely answer this question."  That supposition makes sense to me.  While salary increases are presumably based primarily on performance, when there is discretion, surely an unselfish boss/manager will direct larger raises to employees who are generous in character and—surely—well liked by their peers and coworkers.  A selfish boss may be a different case.  I had the good fortune to work for unselfish people almost my entire career.

            The authors also observe that whether having more children, given population pressures, is a good outcome is subject to debate.

* * *

            Here is an example of research that I suppose will have applications in many places.  This precis also demonstrates how far from common understanding some advanced research is.  I'm sure this is noteworthy progress that makes perfect sense to those in the field, but I haven't a clue in what.

Optical frequency combs can enable ultrafast processes in physics, biology, and chemistry, as well as improve communication and navigation, medical testing, and security. Engineers have built a Kerr frequency comb generator that, for the first time, integrates the laser with the microresonator, significantly shrinking the system's size and power requirements. They no longer need to connect separate devices using fiber -- they can now integrate it all on compact and energy efficient photonic chips.

* * *

            One small example of why, on a practical level, Libertarian/de-regulation approaches to government are wrong-headed.  As anyone who reads the news knows, this example could be repeated endlessly.

            Three (the major three, I would guess) producers of canned tuna were found to have engaged in price fixing for a couple of years (~2010-2013).  StarKist is paying a $100 million fine as part of a guilty plea; Bumble Bee pled guilty last year and paid $25 million.  Some of the executives at the two companies have also pled guilty to price fixing.  The third company, Chicken of the Sea, isn't being charged "because prosecutors say the company exposed the scheme and cooperated with the investigation."

            When I think about business news over the course of my life, and how industries large and small have misled consumers, concealed negative research results, engaged in fraudulent business practices, and so on, and when many of those instances have led to the deaths of hundreds and thousands of people, I cannot fathom why letting corporate America have relief from regulatory oversight is a good idea.  No one would maintain that government is pure while business is malignant, but having agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission—to name but two—makes me a little more confident about the conduct of business and the purchase of goods.  (Well, they made me more confident under earlier administrations; now I'm less sure.)

* * *

            Like many people, I suppose, I've been dumping change into a big jar for years.  Maybe decades.  I acquired—I have no idea where or when—one of those large glass jars that is turned upside down and placed on water coolers (often seen in offices).  I've had the jar for as long as I can remember, and it finally got full.  I've never had any plan for the money, so I decided I'd contribute it to Elliott's retirement funds.  I told him so, which email message elicited an amusing response:  "Always thought we were going to dump it out and take a trip to Disneyland with it. A mutual fund is sort of anticlimactic."  I assured him that there would be nowhere near enough money for one plane ticket, much less three—and that Disneyland was never on the travel bucket list.  (Besides, he's already been there when he was much younger and got to ring the opening bell.)

            Emptying the large jar was a project and a half.  The jar itself is heavy, and full to brim with coins made it far heavier than anything I could lift.  So I tipped it over and could barely raise the bottom to make the coins tumble out.  It took me 45 minutes to get all the coins out and into small plastic containers that are transportable.  So I now have 17 containers full of coins to take to the bank.  Elliott will be helping me with this task.

            My guess is that each container has no more than $10 in it.  I told Elliott that this will not be a windfall for his retirement.  The vast majority of the coins are pennies.  We know that pennies no longer contain copper, but many of them in my jar are from years ago, when they did.  (The U.S. Mint tells me that "the alloy remained 95 percent copper and 5 percent zinc until 1982, when the composition was changed to 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper.")  So my dreams of building the family fortune when the price of copper increases by 1000% have been dashed.  Might as well put the money in a mutual fund.

* * *

            We got through the first anniversary of Krystin's death.  The phrase "got through" is chosen purposely.  It wasn't easy.  Kathy and I invited Krystin's mom (Pat), Elliott, and Peggy, Christine, and Dan (Krystin's closest friend and her mom/stepdad) over for dinner and drinks.  We remembered and celebrated Krystin; having a group made it far easier.

            Then Krystin's birthday was October 30.  October has become a difficult month, although her birthday did not elicit (from me) the same sadness that the anniversary of her death did.

            In the meantime, the editor I retained is working her way through all 1700+ pages of Krystin's writing to condense it to a reasonably-sized volume.

            Vote!

            Warmly,

            Gary