Take a look around the site. I see it as an invitation to continue being a citizen. Not all ideas are created equal, but because there is a difference between needing to win an argument and needing to be heard, an ability to listen can be mutually empowering.

November 10th update: It looks like all of the substantive agenda content has been taken down. Propublica.org reports that the Obama administration is “retooling” the content.

November 15th update: The website is back up; I haven’t read enough to see what has changed (besides the YouTube weekly address link).

By focusing on the general qualities of the drawing before addressing any specifics, such as edges or details, I find the drawing mostly continues to improve as I work. Earlier, when I started in on specifics too soon in the process, I would “draw myself into a hole”: I would reach a point where something was wrong, and there was no easy way to remedy it.

In other words:

Polls collect data, and the poll trackers consolidate the data from numerous polls. The tracker tracker website compares the results that the various poll trackers report.

My dear friend Hao Huang was the soloist, and he played with his characteristic brilliance and superb musicality. The orchestra did an excellent job both performances, and I believe everyone involved deserves a relaxing Sunday evening after the successful weekend!

Charcoal: 7
Doug: 0

Practicing can be fulfilling for its own sake; it can also be the most efficient way to get better at something, if you happen to be practicing correctly. And therein, as the poet wrote, lies the rub.

If we imagine the world of techniques as a two-dimensional landscape, and the success of a particular technique as the elevation above the corresponding spot in the two-dimensional world, we’ll have a version of what is called a “fitness landscape.”

If there’s one best way to do something, then the elevation above the spot corresponding to that best technique will be the highest of the whole terrain, the “top of the mountain,” if you will.

If you imagine yourself as on this fitness terrain, improving means heading uphill. Sometimes, it’s obvious which way is uphill, and sometimes it isn’t. Or the direction that’s uphill where you are now might not be the direction to the top of the mountain.

This metaphor supports a lot more nuance, but even at this level of broad strokes, it should be clear:

To improve, practice may be necessary, but it isn’t (necessarily!) sufficient.

I know I don’t have a choice per se, but it feels good to have a vote.

Blending with a blending stump is hard (for me, at least). It’s easy to run over the border or contour I’m trying to blend toward, so the distinction between one, smoothly varying shape and the neighboring, also smoothly varying shape is violated, blurred.

Or, being afraid of running over the borderline, I don’t blend close enough to the border contour, and so there’s a region of blended values and then a border of unblended pencil strokes close to the border line itself.

I think of my time as department chair at my university, and of the problems I faced as ombudsman and general, all-around smoother of disagreements and angry people. It’s true: there was always either too much smoothing (real distinctions were “brushed over” in the effort to cool tempers), or not enough smoothing (sometimes, it’s just not practical or even possible to smooth and soothe to the point where everything looks balanced.)

The choice is then whether or not to keep practicing, in spite of the limitations of yourself and your materials.

But let’s say you’re sending out resumes, hoping to get a job. If each resume had a 1% chance of succeeding (a 1-in-100 chance), and if you managed to send out 100 resumes, you’d have about a 63% chance of landing a job. (The percentage chance of success in this idealized case is (1 - (0.99^100))*100 for reasons I won’t go into here…)

That’s a better than even chance, after doing the same, crummy thing over and over.

Or…

You decide you want to learn to draw. You sit down for an hour, try to draw a realistic picture of something on the desk in front of you, and it doesn’t come out.

Now even if you know, conceptually, what you’re supposed to do to make the drawing work, either through reading or from a teacher, you’re not going to succeed unless you practice - a lot. Getting the first 1000 failed drawings under your belt will take you a long way toward your goal of being able to draw.

Another case of doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.

There are other things going on, beyond the factors we can know. Even when we do the “same thing,” it’s just not the same thing. Our intentions and conscious inputs are not the sole determinants of the final results.

In a case where probability applies and works in your favor (the resume example), or if you trust that things are going on behind the scenes that work in your favor (the example of practicing, assuming you’re practicing correctly…), then “doing the same thing” over and over makes sense.

On the other hand, in a case where you know you will not succeed, and you know the reason why you will not succeed, then it would be “insane” (in the sense of the quote) to expect to succeed, whether you try the same thing over and over, or just once.

But…we spend much or most of our lives with an incomplete, insufficient knowledge or understanding of the other factors, the parts of the system outside of our intentions and conscious inputs. In these situations, we’re not “insane” to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results; nor do we know we will succeed or even have a chance of succeeding.

C’est la vie! Cheers! (We may as well celebrate it.)

It happens with people looking for personal relationships, and it happens for employers and job seekers. Somehow, a barrier of anxiety (”well, if someone wants to volunteer to help us, they must have something wrong with them, no?”) stands in the way of these otherwise promising matches.

Country A has too much corn, and country B needs corn. Still impossible to work things out.

When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, we had a saying: “if you can’t increase your cross section, increase your flux.” Translated, that means if you are having a low success rate, do something more frequently.

Eventually, theoretically, maybe, it will pay off with the sensible match being made. Even if the hiring/meeting systems are mostly, almost entirely broken, things sometimes work.

Insofar as time exists, or seems to, beyond a fundamental Buddhist idea of the all-pervading present, there is no such thing as “going back.” And regardless of which version of time I am holding, it’s healthy and stress reducing to think that even if I return to a place I have been before, it must be a “going forward.”

Anxiety comes and is hard. It is a comfort, though soft-spoken, that all movement is forward, that there is change.

Last week, my wife and I spent a few days in Scottsdale, Arizona because my stepdaughter was there for a two-week residency for her master’s program. Scottsdale, Arizona is pretty much Phoenix, Arizona, at least as far as weather, and we knew it would be hot. It averaged about 108 to 110, so that qualifies as hot.

I was struck by the use of water in Scottsdale. The monetary wealth of the area is obvious, but the water isn’t from there. Scottsdale is a desert. So why water huge expanses of turf with sprinklers at noon in 110 degrees? Why all the “water features” and misters? Is it a “use it or lose it” thing with the Colorado River? Ignorance? Or is there a good, positive reason to use all this water, one that I’m not aware of?

In the process, the H split in two, but I managed to prop the pieces next to each other in the board when I set them back in. Friends of mine had suggested a chair breaking ceremony as part of the transfer of power, so I guess this H incident will fill in for that on a somewhat more abstract level.

I feel invigorated by the negative reinforcement, and I’m very much looking forward to getting to work (and to play) now that I have the time and mental space to do so.

But just being “off the beat” doesn’t itself make a note syncopated; there has to be some emphasis on the note that is caused by its spring-like relationship to the beat. There are plenty of ways to play notes between beats so that they aren’t syncopated.

One interesting aspect of syncopation is that the effect requires a beat in order to exist, even though the syncopated note is necessarily not sounding together with the beat. No beat, no syncopation. Now the beat can be overt, as with an accompanying drumset, or it can be implied, something constructed real-time in the mind of the listener by imagining what beat could be present, given all the other notes. But if there is only rhythmic mush, with no beat either overt or implied, then there is no possibility for syncopation. There may be emphasis, accent, but it would not be the special kind of emphasis that draws its power from the surrounding structure by being playfully off.

And this brought me to consider adapting these concepts to management, specifically to a couple types of problematic management:

If there is a structure but no room for difference then syncopation will be absent. Having everything happening on the same beat removes the opportunity for the special enhancement of an idea that bounces up off the beat.

But equally stifling is management without a structuring beat, either an overt one with clear and consistent stated policies and procedures, or an implied structure that organizational members can construct and understand themselves by observing all the notes. Without any beat, there is no way to syncopate, to express the positive and playful energy that can be generated by being off the beat.

Welcome to spring 2008!

The most interesting “external” factor the author considered was beauty; he asserted that the quest for this elusive (and difficult, if not impossible, to define) factor called beauty was undermining the exercise of the scientific method and corrupting scientists, who ended up formulating misanthropic theories. The author considered chaos and complexity theories to be misanthropic, because they removed humans from the top of the evolutionary ladder, suggesting that humans might be examples of larger trends, rather than the ones in control. The idea that chaos and complexity theory amounted to a collective throwing up of the hands, insofar as they would represent an admission that a comprehensive, precise “theory of everything” would be a misguided goal, stood as a betrayal of the birthright of human reason to the author.

In one portion of the guest lecture, I asked students to discuss in groups the following four questions:

1. When is science used?
2. When is the scientific method used?
3. When not?
4. What does beauty have to do with it?

Admittedly, this was a lot for 10 minutes, especially in a group. But afterwards, when I asked each group to write on the board one of their findings, the answers surprised me.

One group wrote that science dealt with quantitative questions only; qualitative questions were outside its purview.

Another wrote that people generally employ the scientific method in their daily lives, even if they don’t refer to it as such. For example, we avoid hitting our heads into walls, because of informal experimentation we’ve done and observation. (This, of course, is rather contradictory to the previous statement.)

A third group wrote that “everything is subjective. I think.” Part of this response was motivated by the fact that the small group couldn’t agree on any answers to the questions I posed (or on approaches to the questions). Still, I found this quite a surprising response, coming from undergraduates at a science and engineering university…

I think the reluctance or inexperience of the students to analyze an argument rhetorically (be it the author’s argument, or just the way I led the discussion) left them in a bit of a bind, when it came to moving ahead confidently in their thoughts.

In the spring of 2006, I conducted a subset of the group together with the Albuquerque Gay Men’s Chorus performing some Masonic music of Mozart, and I was delighted to be invited by David Felberg (the APO’s music director) and the APO board to guest conduct these performances.

The program will be Bernstein’s Candide overture, the double concerto in d minor for violin, piano, and strings by Mendelssohn (featuring Hao Huang and Rachel Huang as soloists), and Brahms’ second symphony.  More information about the concert will be available at the APO’s website.

This is a very different - and very positive - read on what it means to be dangerous. Effecting change. Actually solving problems instead of spinning around and around, wringing hands and living with problems. Dangerous to the status quo.

For many reasons, individuals and groups are usually unwilling or unable to let others help them solve problems. This overarching “metaproblem” isn’t going to be solved once and for all, and it’s probably not worth getting depressed about that.

Helping where possible (by being aware of the “metaproblem” and effective in tackling ordinary problems) and moving along when it’s not possible to help (no real need to blame anyone in this case, and it might work out to come back again later) may be a good way to go.

The break is never really to be identified with “summer vacation,” which is what we enjoyed as students, particularly before we had to have our own incomes. The professional academic is generally active year-round, but the end of the spring term is when the university exhales - the students leave, and the faculty leave or at least aren’t always present. There is work to be done, yes: papers we meant to write, programs or concerts to organize, courses for the fall to plan…but there is a phase change in the daily schedule, a melting of regular deadlines into freeform.

On the downside, now we must come to terms with all of our scripted procrastination (”when the summer comes, then I’ll have time to work on that paper/presentation/course”). But if that’s a downside, I’ll happily accept downsides more frequently. Almost all of us work too hard all the time (I can think of exceptions easily, but even thinking of these people is not something I want to do during my summer), but I am happy to practice not working as hard, and this is the time of year I have given myself permission to practice.

The “sense” in my variety of reading selections comes - emerges - later. It’s an experience of definite, luminous (illuminating) connections arising between areas that seemed related before, where the relationships before were vague and incapable of generating new ideas.

Some of my reading now is in areas of leadership, problem-solving, intelligence vs. mindfulness, and fertile connections between Eastern and Western thought. I was reading in several of these areas in 2000 when I first started exploring ways to model creativity, and I have experienced a lot to enrich my thinking in this constellation of ideas and themes since then, particularly through failures and successes in teaching and leading.

It looks as though I may have some opportunities to reflect on these connections in the coming months, especially in the context of a new problem-solving course I’ll be developing (more on that later). One thing that I anticipate and hope will allow time and some mental headroom for this reflection is the end of the semester next week!