Early July 2014

I wanted to play in a stream this last sunday.  There are none in Phoenix that aren't yucky.  We decided to go to Christopher Creek in Payson.  While there Math-Mommy and Math-Girl wanted to dig fossils.

Here is the route:

We were only able to start out around 1:30pm.  This put us in Payson around 2:30-3:00.  We stopped by Walmart for some toy shovels and pails.  These are great for the beach and great for the mountains too.

We then headed down 260 to the Paleo site.

Here is what it looks like when you first drive in.

It is a little turn-off on a gorgeous mountain road.  Everything is dry because it is the middle of summer in Arizona.

So you park up near the gap in the guard-rail and you can walk in through it and up to the lamellar deposits.  I think they are shale, but they are soft and you can break them with fingers or a plastic hammer.  Sometimes you get clumps that look like a tiny pile of stone leaves ... it is trippy.  But I digress.

After you pass through the gap, you (like math-girl) must walk up to the gate, and go through it.

Then you walk up the path to the hill.  

Now, most people don't know much about fossils.  They think "Night at the Museum" or "Jurassic Park" but in reality 99.5% of all fossils are marine invertebrates.  That means shellfish or plants.

At the Payson Paleo site you find tiny little stone shells, sometimes leaves, worms, or worm tunnels, etcetera.

Now I think it would be neat to see if one could look at the non-planar layers of mud that make this up and estimate timing of seasons from the seas where these tiny stone shells in layer after layer after layer on the top of high mountains.... must not digress.

So here are my girlies on the west(right when looking from the parking area) hill getting fossils or at least playing in the dirt.

And these are the worlds cutest math-kiddos playing with beach-toys on a mountain top digging fossils.  The little screener thing is really nice for helping let dirt through, but keep the shells.

I wonder if there are microfossils to be found in this, plankton, or krill (whatever they are) or such.....

Here is the cutest micro-mathbaby.  She is pretty sure she loves that binky, but when I asked her to take it out for the picture - she did.

Isn't she beautiful?  Happy little kiddo on a very old seabed, on a mountain top.

We did get to splash in the creek, but I didn't get any pictures.

Early April 2014

Hi there, mathbaby.  Mathgirl.

So we were talking about the Clone Wars episode "Duel of the Droids" where R2-D2 battles it out against the evil R3-S6. (link) Anakin never liked R3, and I suggested it was because of "gut".

I tried to talk with you about two very hard things, but very valuable things:

• You need to know how to "hear" your gut
• You need to know when you can trust your gut.

First I said, look at that star, then touch your eyelid.  Now realize that your finger touching your eye is on the other side of the star.  The world you perceive is internal to you, and is not the same thing as the real world.  When your heart "breaks" I am not refering to the muscle in the real world, but the emotional center you associate with it in your perceptual world.  In the same way that the muscular pump is not the same as an emotional center, but they have similar designators between the two world, the "gut" is not the digestive/absorbtion tubes in your bowels, but is a different center in your perceived self.

I think that Anakin had a gut-feel about R3, but didn't know how to trust his gut, or even to recognize when it was speaking to him.

I had your mathmommy tell you two things: once when she ignored what she heard, and once when she listened.  That gut will keep you out of trouble, and when it speaks loudly then the trouble is deep.  You wanted to know the particulars of how those boys hurt your 17 year old mom, but telling you those details too young will compromise your innocence.  One of her friends from high school was trying to do something evil to the adult her, but she listened to her gut and even though there was no reason to avoid that person she did so - and so cleanly sidestepped all the ugly.  Some day I will tell you about my versions of those.  

.....

So I watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjMqMLZIt30

I think that reading the book and watching the movie might be a good thing.  Life is short.  Your choices make it meaningful.  Wasted opportunity is one of the great sins.  I want you to be able to make great choices and to be able to make the most of your opportunities.  Seriously - my eyes are tearing up.

I love you.  

So your Auntie-Bee said...

Hey there.

Your auntie drives me to work two days a week.

She recently said

"someday your daughter is going to be living this song".

And I was like "what, huh, what song".  

This is the song:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml1u8qEBH7g and it is by the band Play

Here are the lyrics of relevance, I think:

Won't someone tell me what is happening to me
Why am I so misunderstood
Why can't they see
Now I'm caught between the devil and the angel
That I used to be

They say I'll understand it all in good time
But age ain't nothin' but a number in my mind
Goin' crazy with this push me pull me
Caught between wrong and right

I wanna give in to the woman in me
I wanna be someone they don't want me to be
The moral of the story is I got no choice
I must not chase the boys

So it is a confession.  It is your auntie saying that she was there, that your cousins were there.  

It is also a warning.

You are half way to where they go to eat you.  They change you from a person to throwing you into a gladiatorial ring to go feral.  They want to make you bleed.  If they can keep you in that cage long enough, you will want to make people bleed.

Sad and scary seasons are coming for both of us, kiddo.  If we had what looked like a brain, or some good game theory then maybe we might formulate an approach, and have a strategy in which we can have nonzero confidence.  I want a strategy like that.  A lot.

When I hear things like this, and ponder them, it makes a bat-mitzvah or its cultural equivalent seem like a funeral for the little girl I know and love right now.  The idea of her really being gone forever and something else that grew in her - some alien seed - makes me tear up and want to cry.  

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.

Nov 30, 2013

Happy Turkey day, Mini.

We had a good Thanksgiving with my friend Kevin and his family.  Smoked turkey, great caseroles, and good community.

Last night we watched the parade in Tempe.  We took light rail from our neighborhood to downtown tempe.  There were a ton of people.  You and mom went and sat near the first red tree on the other side of the street from the station.  I went and got a grilled chese (with mayo, and tomato) for you and split a grinder with your mathmommy.  All sorts of be-lighted people and floats and loud music went on.  Some people from floats threw candy and you collected some.  You shared - that was nice.

After we went to the Tempe town lake.  There is a boat-based light parade there in a few weeks.  After strolling a bit, and trying to figure out if there was a boat-based event, we went back to light rail, and took it back to the part-and-ride, and went back home.

Mommy has a stomach cold.  She is not feeling good.  Micro, your baby sister is all snotty-nosed with a nose cold of some sort.  For now, kiddo, you and I do not have colds, but that isn't going to last forever.

You were sharing your candy.  You gave some to a little hispanic girl who was sitting near you.  Her father saw that and thanked me.  You were being generous - one of the characteristics of princess-hood.  You are working on being a princess, of the order of Twilight Sparkle, and she is a good role-model.

Work is work.  I'm about to, God willing, redefine our approach to measurement and warpage. It is hard work, but it is good value.  I want to make sure to deliver good value.

I love you and admire you.  Your sister is just starting to talk so I don't know her person, her character, or her growth yet.  I will need to add letters to her in here as part of the process. We should figure out how to do that.


Those bunglers in washington are doing what they have done for 4 years - sing "the recession is over" when it isn't.  If they sing it long enough are they going to be accidentally right?  It is, sadly, the only tool they have in the toolbox to attempt to fix what they broke.  This is what we get for having lawyers make a government - something complex with loopholes but doesn't do the job.  We should get control system engineers in on it - they would guarantee stability in things like growth using their control policies.  Watson perhaps?  Someday maybe. 

Work is calling, and I have miles to go before I sleep.