End of Sept, 2015

Hey girlies.

Today was a busy day.

• We slept in waaay late, but it was rainy and Saturday so that was a good thing.
• We got dressed to go and went out
• initially we tried troy McDonalds, but it was craaazy busy
• We checked out a cake-ish shop, but that looked really expensive, had nobody in it, and I wasn't sure if it was open.  

... so we went to Piqua.

They had this really cool hungarian bakery.  (link)   They had good doughnuts and other treats.  Then we walked around downtown Piqua.  We went to the library for a bit.

Later we went to get hair cuts.  It was Micro's first and she was so well behaved.  She looked great.  While strolling and waiting for mom we found this nice little nail salon place.  The kiddos loved it - and for a few dollars each they had nice new painted fingernails.  We got sodas at the Speedway, and spent a little time looking around at the video game store.  We didn't buy anything.

We had a busy, more cosmopolitan, but nice afternoon. 

Of notice: there were like 6 sireny blinky-light vehicles beetween noon and 3pm near the Walmart.  Either an ambulance, a fire, or police.  If it wasn't a bad day for accidents, then it was training day.  It was very out of place.  What surprises me is that in Phoenix, these sorts of things would happen at similar rates, and I would think nothing of it.  I think that it is so rare here that I did.  It says something about the peacefulness of the community... or that everyone in the midwest owns guns and so nobody goes knocking on doors looking for trouble.  I'm not sure which, but either option seems like not a bad thing.

Good night little girls, I hope you sleep well.  I hope that I sleep well too.  I should write these on Saturday evenings.  We do more on those days.\

Oh.  Dad lesson learned.  If your 3 year old daughter hands you a cup that is empty, and claims it has fluid, then she is playing tea-party.  Don't be a dolt.  Play with her.  You will not regret it.

In September 2015

Hello math girls how are you doing? You are big and smart and fun. Do you know you are my favorite littlest creatures?

We have three monarch chrysalis at home. We found the caterpillars. We fed them and protect them from predators and the environment. We gave them a good place to go through metamorphosis. The hope is that we would have an increased number of pollinators. We like butterflies here. 

Tomorrow is Saturday and we will have a very busy day. We will go to the farmers market we will prepare for afternoon activities and in the evening we are invited to a hog roast. I've never been to one of those we will see how it goes.

The farmers market here boors you kiddos. I don't think you understand its value to me. I like connection to things that endure. I like things of my local community. I'm like Tolkien's idea of a Hobbit in that. The habit and confirmation of seeing the familiar things is comforting to me. I make sure we get a yummy breakfast at the bakehouse where they have maple frosted cinnamon buns. Because of this you come with me but when you are grown-up you too may find comfort in the rituals and assurances of community and culture and things that indoor like Hobbits.

Last weekend we went to a swimming hole on the Stillwater river near Stillwater prairie reserve. You enjoyed finding rocks and splashing you knee-deep water and a cool during the warm of the day. We had a good time. We also went to Fort Rowdy. It is a event where people dress up like it's the 1750s and the campout intents and dressing buckskins and trade cars to work and for metalsmith works and similar period- appropriate sundries.

I love you and miss you.  This was written by speaking into Siri while walking on my lunch break.

just a link ... Early Aug 2015

Girlies,

I have a new publication that I have been working on with you and some friends.  It is not yet ready to publish.

Also I had this... fyi:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thought-success-michael-munroe

I love you all.

-Hub/mathDaddy

mid-May 2015

(edited because Siri is a poor typist)
Hello math girl. I was thinking about you. My old company, Intel semi conductor, had a LinkedIN blog about diversity. They are making good progress. A ignorant male commentator said that diversity was a liberal failure. I replied and pointed out that a poisonous climate is not a win and that the distribution in the work-group should reflect the marketplace. I want you to have good opportunity. It made me sad to remember that there was only one blond girl in all of C5, only one girl who looked like you of hundreds . I want you to have opportunity. I want you to have a better than one in hundreds odds of success.

It is midweek in mid-May in the Midwest. There are a lot of "mid's" in that sentence.

I wish I could tell you how the month of May is really its own season.  It is. I will have to tell you about it in person sometime.

We have a membership now at the YMCA. That is how people can go swimming in Ohio. It is unlike Phoenix in that the large majority of people do not have swimming pools in Ohio. I hope you have fun at the "Y".

You may not realize what I am doing, but I am talking and spending time with somebody who loves me: You. It may not feel like it to you. In my heart, in my inner self, I am not speaking at a phone but I am sharing my love and my joy and enthusiasm and some of the wonder that I have seen with somebody who is delightful and fun, with somebody who is interested in hearing it and who loves me. As much as this may be like the episode of SG-1 titled the "Torment of Tantalus"[1,2] where one of the characters has spent years in isolation -  in his heart, like mine, he was not alone. The love living inside of him allowed him to not be alone.

You will feel alone sometimes. What do you feel is not the same as what is. Just as important - what you see is not the same as what is. Truths of the heart and mind can provide astounding context that is, often, sadly, ignored. You can look at a sign on a building and instead of seeing colors or shapes your mind imposes on its words in text and imposes context.  That context does not exist within the perceived symbol it exists within the observer.  It exists within you.  An otherwise ignorant but intelligent first-time visitor to our universe seeing only that sign could not take from it what you do - no matter the level of intelligence available. Just like that sign there are many other components that define reality - from driving directions to time itself and what it means when o'clock on where the meeting is in the person not the object. If you look close you will find that the places where this occurs is strongly characterized by, and only find nucleation within, the context of community. In the same way that you can look at a symbol and see the meaning there is a subset of you that has meaning outside the symbol, a non-obvious part of valid reality. Like the vampire though, we cannot see ourselves in the mirror and so you cannot see clearly even the symbol and it is very hard to see the existence and very real meaning of the symbol within your own self. The fingerprints of what has formed you, what you have loved, they comprise your existence and your self, an intrinsic invisible but valid and important reality. Part of the meaning of that reality is that you, like me are never alone. Love has given meaning into your self that cannot be taken away or altered.  I have been lucky enough, graced by Providence enough, to be a part of that.

Wow! That is a lot of text to go through. I should stop here to maintain readability. I love you. I'm glad you were born. You are smart and fun and delightful. You are strong and fast and brave. You are one of my favorite people in the whole wide world.I love you. Talk to you later, math girl.

Love, Mathdad.

Mid April 2015

Hello Mathgirl.  Hello Mathbaby.  My math-girlies. Your math-mommy.

You are my favorite people in the whole wide world.  I hope you already know that, but I'm writing it down for you just in case.

I was asked a question on "ycombinator". I want to share both with you because - I want you to have truth.  Truth is powerful stuff - like rocket fuel.  It is the only way to reach the stars.

Here is the link, though I expect it to eventually die of age as many webpages do.  This is the failure of the great cacophony that is the internet.  In a few years nothing remains.  There is not even paper for archaeologists to dig up.  The link:  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9392780

Here is the question:

Ask HN: When do you know your startup has failed?
	135 points by superpi 3 hours ago | 72 comments
	I'm currently going through a mini depression. We've gone without salary for the last 4 months, abandoned our business model to do pay for hire work in the hopes of trying to raise money to keep the lights on.Honestly I feel like I'm going to be evicted from the house. My rent is already up, and as of now I have < $1 :). My partner is fine actually, he has rich parents and doesn't really depend on the startup for income. Which actually gives my friends and family the illusion that we're both killing it. We have almost 0 chance of raising more money, it's much harder to get money it seems if you're in a poor country. So, if you've had a failed startup, how did you know? Did you run out of money and call it quits? If you succeeded, did you have a patch so rough that you were evicted? I'm 25, I feel like I'm losing at life already. It was okay to be broke earlier, because it's expected. It's not anymore, when almost none of your peers are. Also, I'm not in a developed country, where being broke means living on ~$1k a month. I've been living on ~$200 a month. Anyway, I just want any input from you guys. Like anything, I just wanted to get this off my chest. Not even sure I've really expressed what I wanted to express (English isn't my first language).

Here is my answer:

You are not a failure. You are not a success. Where you are is about the world around you, who you are is not. Who you are is about your character, your person, your choices, and your integrity. The only way the outer world changes your inner person is when you allow it. Its ability to change you stops the minute you decide to stop helping it to do so. Nobody is broken, some people quit.  

It is good that you feel like a worthless failure. You are likely too young and ignorant to realize how valuable this is.  

Great results come from great decisions and great work. Great decisions and great work come from the mind and will, and are learned by experience. Experience comes from making decisions and actions and learning from them. If you have nothing, then you have learned something. If you have learned something then you have nothing.  

You can choose to think through where you are and what you are doing and learn the most, to understand the most, to get fuel for the engine of your willpower, or you can let it pass by like an invisible and silent locomotive an inch away from your face. What happens now is the consequences of your actions now. Your actions now are the consequence of your choices. You are not a product of your past. You are not the squeezings of your circumstances.  

If you want to be successful in business, then understand what value is, and return it to the customer. If you always return more value to the customer than they lose through the sales price, then you will always have customers.  

The world, though it looks like it is solid and complete, is like a sponge, like enormous swiss cheese - it is dense with holes. Each hole is a place where value can be returned. Find one. Fill it.  

Money isn't the goal. It isn't the goal of capitalists or plutocrats. It is paper - it burns. It has no fundamental value. All the engines of industry and finance in the world are an expression of human failure to handle value healthily in the context of community. Unlike you they are not broken - so they can never learn and never change what they are doing. They are too poor to have that wisdom.  

Never blindly walk down the road. Take good wisdom based on good vision, and walk down that road. If you are going to make a startup - 90% fail in the first year. Go into it knowing that it will fail. The second startup success rate is better than 50%. The third startup is upwards of 80%. Find the best value you can create and create it for people. Even if you fail once or twice, you fail doing something noble, something worth having done it. Even in "failure", in "defeat" in having done something great you get not only the learning, but the having done something worth doing. The defeat gives you two of the most meaningful measures of victory.  

Read wisdom. Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius. How to live on 24 hours a day. Make a log of your time and be brutally honest. Know your budget of time - where it goes. Truth allows you to allocate it in improved ways. Watch Randy Pausch - the last lecture. Live life well. You only get a few days till it is done, and in death every victory that can be taken away is. The ones you keep in your heart and soul - those are not taken away because that part of the person is immortal.

Darn near march 2015

It has been months since I posted and so much has happened.

We have enjoyed the Indiana/Ohio/New Jersey winter.  We have hiked many frozen nature trails and looked at waterfalls.  Ice sculpting, Mathgirl, you loved it.  You and the mathbaby have taken to sweets.  We had Christmas at your grandma Tema's house and it was wonderful.  Not too much snow,  but gosh can it get cold here.

In Dec 2013 I had the worst Christmas of my life, (thank you Jon and all) and I have to say that Christmas 2014 was stunningly better.

You are such a reader.  You loved the book Radio Rescue (link) about a young ham operator in the 1920's who helps people and carries messages for sailors to their families.  You want to become a ham.  The world doesn't have much use for noble spirited people like you - but you don't do it because the world needs.  You will, like me, have to do it because of who you are.  If the king of the moles requires you to give up light and warmth in exchange for being "queen" the you, like Thumbelina, will be compelled to say no.

You love sledding and snow.  You have fun with the neighbor boys sliding down hills at the golf course.  You are growing your courage.

We may have found a church with life in it.  There are many churches in this part of the country - a building on every corner - but does Jesus walk down the halls?  That is the question.  Where does he love to hang out?  I think that the Pharisees with their deep-culture were offensive to him.  Those inside the organization do not have the ability to measure the cost of entry.  If the cost is higher to the lost, the one that Jesus came to rescue - then I don't think he would rejoice to send folks there to be helped.  I think a place that is good to the lost is good to him.  We may have found that - or at least that for us.  We will test to be sure.

It is nice to hear you and mommy sharing pages as you two read through Little House on the Prairie books.  You look at Pa and Ma and the various girls and you see .. us.  And the idea of who Pa is in the books comes through and is imputed to me.  And that is good and bad.  I get a benefit of a good name - but it isn't exactly my name.  In some ways it is worth aspiring to - but I am never going to make it.  In some ways it tells you who I am in ways you would not know.

I have been thinking about you and about "outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell.  It is an unintentional roadmap for parents to chart world-class success, as a team, and avoiding a few of the big world-class-failure-makers, for their kids.  It says that 10,000 hours (or so) gives world class mastery in a topic.  The right kind of vision for the topic and the right kind of fit of the topic and kid are what make the magic.  I am trying to make what I see as a good breakthrough, perhaps even some defining work, of the next 20 years to be yours.  Mommy is helping.  It is grace - our current job and location allow it.  Hint: (the animal morphology and biology you love, deep belief/Q networks (link, link), and the idea that there are no service jobs after about 2025 - the minimum wage increases are going to strongly drive move to highly automated "productivity".  We expect it to take a couple of years to work out some of the kinks.  If we are moving to a second aristocracy then I don't want you being a serf.  I don't want to do it but the politicians in charge of the US are just obliterating the middle class - and the current middle class is both to dumb to realize it, to blind to look for it, and to powerless to do anything about it.

I love the painting that you gave me.  I put it on my wall.  Thank you.

I have to go.. I may be waiting for "compiling" but I have to work nonetheless.

EDIT (26-Feb-2015):
Slashdot gives an article that says that 47% of total US jobs could be automated by 2033.  (main-link, paper , link, link).  I guess we are going to see either a second rise of the unions, or the current sold-out unions are going to betray on a grand scale the people they are meant to protect and serve.  Which one of those sounds like "politics as usual".

Jobs that are going to be computerized, according to the paper, major in "administrative support and secretarial", "sales and sale related", and "service".  It is the death of the McJob.  Also adjacent are "construction and extraction", "production", "transportation" and "installation, maintenance, and repair".  The jobs less likely to be computerized include "management, business, financial", "education, legal, community service, arts and media", "STEM", and "Healthcare practitioners".   I guess they don't believe in Baymax.