End of Feb 2014

Some days they are going to pound you.  The world.  Other people.  Time and circumstance.  You are going to have good days, sure, but you are going to have days where you start at zero and it all seems to go down from there.

I'm telling you this so it won't surprise you.  They will punch you in the nose and make you cry.  They will take your lunch money, and try to fight you for your soul.  They own neither.  They don't have a right to either.  If you don't fight and fight - even if you don't want to fight - then they will take both.

To win a battle takes heart.  It takes strength, mind ... tactics and strategy, but without heart there is no victory.  The will to fight.

So in order to not get crushed, mowed down, or eaten ... you have to set aside part of your will for these unexpected battles.  Much like you always have enough money in a bank account to deal with emergencies, you need to have enough emotional/will reserves to fight off these sorts of unexpected attacks from the sides.

And people will conspire to suck you dry of will.

Here is a beautiful lecture on time and capacity by Randy Pausch.  (link, link)  I hope that by the time you read this, the videos still exist.

Randy says of creativity that you have to find the times that you are most protective and guard them fiercely.  Times that are low-productivity can be spent on things like paperwork, or riding a bicycle around the block, or something.  Anything.

I think that you need to find the sources of strength of will, of courage of conviction, and guard them fiercely.  Like an ancient hunter tribes-woman you carry your fire with you.  You must make sure it does not die, it is not rained out.  That you have materials to quickly and effectively make use of the tool that it is.

Your family can lift you up or bring you down.  Most days you lift me up.  I fight the fight because I know you need me to.  That need, my experience of the reality, and importance of it, its impact to you, and who you are to me - it gives me fire.  My siblings, my brothers and sisters - sometimes they do good, sometimes great harm.  They taught me that they are not waterproof.  They will put rain on my fire, to try and quench me.  Some are addicted to drama - the slew rate, how fast they are falling, is more important than having their feet on solid ground - they will will push you off a mountain and fall into the ocean with you if they can just to experience the fall.  Stay away from them.

Games.  Doing things.  These are intermittent.  I play chess tactics, or video games.  Mommy plays crosswords.  They are like gathering seeds.  Small and easy to find one.  Not easy to get enough to feed a family.

Don't let them get you down.  Ronald Reagan, speaking about a day when others were trying to break his soul, and steal his hope and make his life meaningless - to eat him without pity or even consideration of him as anything more than meat for the fire - he said "don't let the turkeys get to you".  Gather now, conserve and grow a will strong enough to resist turkeys.  Know what they are, something about how they work, and have enough informed will, and understanding, and strength, and tactics and strategy - to fend them off.

I it is my sincere prayer that the days when you must fend them off are few, rare, and not hard.  It is also my prayer that you are unrelenting, and victorious in the battle - when it is most important.

I love you kiddo.  God be with you.

Feb 2014: Star Trek and Gender

Mathgirl,

I read the following Slashdot article:

• http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/14/02/14/1341220/star-trek-economics
• https://medium.com/editors-picks/29bab88d50

It suggests that star-trek is a prototype of a extreme-productivity civilization.  Not a utopia, but closer than now - in theory.

I had the following as my response:

I read through about 75% of it.  It is not a great read.  It takes a lot of time to get to a little meat. 

It relies on "social pressure" to stop conspicuous spending.  Lets see that work for real in womens shoes and I might believe it possible.  Otherwise there is a substantial bit of anthropology that the author is hand-waving his way past. 

Reproductively speaking, the minimum cost of reproduction is much smaller for the male than the female.  For the female the time-cost is 40 weeks, while for the male it can be around 4 minutes.  That is a 100,000 to one ratio.    Although females have oestrus cycle times that are 9x less frequent than optimal cycle-times for males, this does not establish a reproductive cost equality.

This high asymmetry in cost drives different general normative behaviors.Game theory says that when the costs are so asymmetric, and so much larger, then you will see radically different optimal strategies.  For women they have a huge vested interest in maximizing the input the man gives - they are selective in partners, and selective in frequency.  This also drives a strange phenomena of "Costly but worthless gifts facilitating courtship".  (link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559891/?tool=pubmed)  

The most archaic, currently used, non-worthless gift that can be given is not gold, diamonds, cash, or camels - it is footwear.  
If your "social pressure" to stop "conspicuous spending" can actually apply to womens footwear, then it has substance.  Don't just stop sales, show that the desire has been resolved.  It has not been resolved in Europe - this means that the fundamental forces are still extensively at work in that culture.  It also means that the Star Trek economy, while worth considering, is still a work of fiction.
Best regards.

The pub-med article is worth reading. This approach can help you pick guys who are not players, when you are older.  I don't like dating, but there is a selectivity in courtship - be selective.  You are amazing.  You are worth being selective.

I love you kiddo. 

Feb 2014

  You are selling girl scout cookies.  Your mom is too.  It is definitely a team activity.  She is as excited and aggressive as you.  I wonder what hunger inside her heart this is filling.

You have a solid bit of cute going on there.  Your smile is the engineered one you have, not your giggling/delight one, but the one you save for pictures.  You hunger to have a control on your own appearance.  

My friend Lucy L. is having another "Gateway to Godly Womanhood" party for her youngest daughter.  In chatting with her she says that enjoy the pure, sweet person you are now, because that goes away at ten.  The idea of you pickling or something isn't very fun, but Lucy knows kids and I respect her wisdom.

We got binoculars for my birthday (yay mathmommy) and we use them for looking at airplanes and stars.  It is a good thing.  

Your cousin Isaac came to cubbies yesterday.  You were delighted to have brought a visitor and he enjoyed it too.  He needs to get out and play more.  He doesn't do that enough.  Neither do you.  Neither do I.

I gotta go, kiddo.  Its early AM and I have to get working.  See you this evening.