A new school year is starting. Someone once told me the beginning of the school year was like a freight train. It is massive and has so much inertia that, when it comes by, you either have to jump on or get run over. I have actually come to see that analogy as being too …
So I have been thinking a lot about discipline. Not in the sense of punishment. Punishment is about an authoritative person or structure enforcing submission of someone who is subject to their power. There is probably a time and place for this type of discipline – such as in a functional accountability system – but …
Here is the thing about humility: it is not the same thing as self-deprecation. People (in my part of the world) often seem to think humility is about downplaying one’s own abilities or accomplishments. But that strikes me as ironically narcissistic. It is self-focused. To say ‘awe shucks, I’m not so great’ is still to …
The title of this post is a phrase I have heard both brothers Green (Hank and John – or, as John probably prefers, John and Hank) say more than once. And it is true. Collectively, as a species, human beings don’t know most things. What is more, individually, we each only hold a fragment of …
My mom wanted her ashes spread in the river at her favorite campsite. So after the memorial service, my family and some of her close friends made the trip south from Havre, into the foothills of the Bear’s Paw mountains. Actually, now that I think about it, I am not certain whether that particular campsite …
That’s No Moon In next month’s issue of Icarus, a group of geological and astronomical scientists argue for moons and planets to be classified within the same category. Maybe that seems like the very definition of tedium, but I think it is actually a fascinating look into the fallacy of reification, the human capacity for …
In today’s installment of Adam Savage’s One Day Builds, Adam re-created the first thing he ever engineered with a releasing mechanism: a ping pong ball launcher. He first made one as a 16-year-old high school student. It involved 3 rubber bands, a spoon, a length of coat-hanger wire, a hinge, some twine threaded around a …
Read more “On Reunions with Lost Selves – or – Whimsy v. Vogons”
I woke up yesterday thinking about what I wanted to write. And today, same. Yesterday I stayed in bed for a while, enjoying being able to puzzle through ideas under the warm sheets, knowing it was -15F outside. Today, I didn’t lounge – even though it was even colder outside. I got out of …
I drove past a small boulevard tree the other day, maybe 8 feet tall with a 1.5-inch diameter trunk, which was completely engulfed in a plastic sheet. A big sheet. I’ll bet it was 10’x 25’. Heavy too. Probably 15-20 mil thick. It was the day after a winter storm that had brought 12 hours …
It happened last night. The Mutiny. And it made me happy. There is a point in each semester that I give a task to students in a class I am teaching and they ignore it and do something else. If the students already know me, it happens early on. But if they come to …