Where are the rocks?

When you grow up in the Southwest, you spend a lot of time looking at rocks.

Now the rocks we have are admittedly pretty cool (in a baking hot sort of way). Arches, Garden of the Gods, City of Rocks, Goblin Valley, Shiprock, Rockhound State Park, even White Sands if you want to count very small rocks. On the long drive from Albuquerque to Provo, the only thing to watch is the changing rocks, from the pink and yellow stone in central New Mexico, past the desolate stretches of plains broken abruptly by crumbling stone streambeds, alongside the bookshelf mesas, between the smooth stone mounds that start with the giant turtle, into the rich red rock cliffs of bizarre formations of southern Utah, and finally into the powerful gray mountains of central Utah.

But, much as I admire all the stone, I’ve often wondered we don’t look at the rocks simply because there’s nothing else to look at. The whole world is made of rocks, right? So what if everywhere else in the world has great rocks, too, but you can’t tell because there’s trees and stuff covering it up?

A quick trip to western Massachusetts to see the glacial potholes has confirmed my theory.

There, granite boulders rolling in the stone streambed under the force of a churning waterfall have worn deep cylindrical wells into the stone. The granite is gray swirled with pink and warm browns, and it looks entirely surreal. There aren’t many cooler rocks than that.

And why did we get to see them? Because they have rerouted the river to expose the site.

So the question is, should we go around tearing out forests, moving waterfalls, and melting ice packs so we can admire the rocks underneath? Or should we bring in water, plant trees, and scatter flowers so that the poor people who’ve spent their whole lives thinking rocks are interesting will have attractions like everyone else in the world has? I’m rather tempted by both.

Books and Biscuits

Last Tuesday was our last day for the year of books and basketball—the tutoring program I’ve been doing for the last year. Glad as I am to have a summer break, I’m really going to miss it.

I tutored a fabulous 12-year-old girl, who spent the first half hour running away from me and the second half hour telling me about Mitchel Musso while I tried to get her to do her math homework.

Was she rambunctious? Yes. Did the other tutors give me the evil eye every week? Oh yes. And was she totally worth it? Absolutely.

My favorite was the rap she made up about our multiplication problem. The answer was 16, which you can write in green when you’re seventeen if you’re not too mean. In the picture she's trying very hard to look angry with me.

“Working” with her was great, but it definitely reminded me of how often service is not what I expect. I thought I might sweep in and be a noble role model and brilliant teacher for a struggling inner-city kid, when really all she needed was someone to listen to occasionally tease her about her Disney Channel crush.

It reminded me of About a Boy, which we read last month for the Movie Book Club. The self-absorbed Will, who has suddenly found himself unwillingly mentoring the needy young Marcus, isn’t quite sure what to do to help the kid—or even sure if he wants to:

“The thing was, Will had spent his whole life avoiding real stuff. He was, after all, the son and heir of the man who wrote Santa’s Super Sleigh. Santa Claus, whose existence most adults had real cause to doubt, bought him everything he wore and ate and drank and sat on and live on; it could reasonably be argued that reality was not in his genes. He liked watching real stuff on [TV] . . . but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. No wonder, then, that once he’d made it a cup of tea and offered it a biscuit he didn’t really know what to do with it.” (Nick Hornby)

This girl was real stuff. And I wasn’t quite sure what to do about her. But I liked my weekly encounters with someone else’s reality and daydreams.

Chrisman

I believe I should briefly mention that my incredibly awesome brother Chris graduated from college and is headed to Emory for a PhD in immunology.

Elder Christofferson delivered an excellent commencement address at the graduation. The essence of his message was that while academic accomplishments are important, they should not distract us from the most important element of life: our moral quality. Elder Christofferson quoted Hugh Nibley as saying that the point of life is to be morally tested. Everything else we do is “just dabbling.”

I’ve had that phrase running through my head ever since graduation. It’s so liberating: it means I can investigate things that I think might be interesting, or fun, or unusual, but whether it’s work or hobbies or travel or whatever, it’s just a small part of what I’m really trying to do.

It reminded me a little of the message my parents are always trying to get into us: that you should perform well, but it won’t matter unless you’re also good. My boss Alice is the same way. She has multiple advanced degrees, she’s raised a good family, she’s lived in Europe, she knows all the experts in her field, she all but single-handedly runs the company, and yet she’s the most humble, likeable person you could meet. She treats me like a peer even though I’m decades of experience and capability behind her. When she talks about her children, she mentions their awards and honors in passing, but focuses on who they are as people.

That’s what made Elder Christofferson’s speech so appropriate for Chris’s graduation. Because my brother Chris, as I believe I mentioned, is fabulous. I’ve looked up to him for years—and not just because he’s a foot taller than me. He’s brilliant: he had top scholarships, published papers, aced classes, and got wined (non-alcoholically, of course) and dined at almost a dozen graduate schools. He’s daring: he likes all kinds of wild hobbies, from scuba diving to rock climbing to performing in talent shows. He’s hilarious: he’s constantly teasing and playing with words. He’s artistic: he sings, he dances, he writes poetry, he tries to turn bachelor apartments into something attractive enough to live in. He’s a great cook: of pretty much everything. He’s dashingly handsome. And yet all of that dabbling is just the ornamentation on the real substance: Chris is as morally sure, as gentle, as sensitive, as humble, as perceptive, as caring, as genuine a person as you could find. It’s a good thing there isn’t a graduation for character, because he’d be wearing so many robes and stoles and medals and ribbons and tassels he wouldn’t be able to walk. And that would be embarrassing.

Ninja Night

Tonight for our FHE, my roommate got kidnapped by ninjas. I know what you’re thinking: What self-respecting young woman manages to get herself kidnapped by ninjas in the middle of a young single adult activity? Let me tell you, it happens to the best of us.

Let me preface this account by informing you that our family home evening activities tend to be very staid: long formal lesson, brief stiff activity, reserved conversation, quick parting of ways. And Camber had prepped everyone by informing them that this would be an exciting evening of “team-building activities.” We were expecting a big turnout, as you can imagine.

I taught a brief lesson on never leaving behind any of our brothers and sisters. I stalled as long as I could, but the ninjas still hadn’t shown up, so my friend Sherilyn jumped up with one of the most popular games known to adults party-goers: Simon Says. Then Camber ran to answer the door, we heard her scream, ninjas in ski masks came running into the living room doing dramatic karate chops, and we rushed outside just in time to see . . . Camber carefully explaining to the neighbor that it was all a joke and they didn’t need to call the police—before Camber was whisked away by the fearsome ninjas.

Fortunately, Sherilyn happened to have a copy of Worst Case Scenarios for FHE Groups, which just happened to have an entry explaining what to do if your FHE group leader gets kidnapped. We followed the instructions to the letter: we asked the Armenian grocer down the street how to say “Thank you” in Armenian (apparently ninja rescuers should be culturally sensitive in many languages). When we got it right, he gave us a clue sending us to the cemetery up the road.

There we were met by none other than the ninjas themselves. Two of them spoke only Ninjese, but fortunately they had a translator, who sent us on a quest to find a certain name on a headstone. We tracked it down using the light from our cell phones and when we presented it to the ninja master, he sent us to Billy Joe’s Ninja Training Camp at the playground across the road, where we learned to meditate, slide, and build a pyramid.

When we had accomplished our ninja training, we returned home to find Camber ready to reward us with ninja headbands. It was an altogether heroic evening. And no one even had to call the police.

Save the Whales

Recently my friend Sherilyn went to tour the USS Constitution (Old Ironsides. Which, by the way, has a fabulous museum: a Boston must-see). The Constitution was closed but there was a visiting German battleship (actual iron. Or maybe even steel. Much more effective). They were just in dock for a day or two and they said she could take a tour.

So Sherilyn was being shown around by young handsome navy guys who knew a lot about their job but not much about tour guiding. They took her up to see the main control room and showed her how they steer the ship. As they were walking out she looked up on the front window and saw a number of labeled drawings of a gray whale, showing it from different angles and in different positions. She asked what the drawings were for. And the navy guy said, "Oh. That is a whale. Sometimes when we are driving the boat, we drive over whales. This makes the Americans very angry. On our way here we drove over a whale. The Americans were very angry. So now we post drawings of whales to remind everyone to drive around the whales."

My middle school biology teacher always used to complain that campaigns to save endangered species always choose big attractive animals as their poster critters. “You see Save the Pandas and Save the Whales everywhere, but you never see a Save the Tapeworms T-shirt,” he would say.

While I *almost* appreciate his concern, it seems we still have some work to do on the whale front.

If you thought Dungeons and Desktops sounded interesting . . .

The big news in our office this week was an unexpected award given to one of our books.

The award? The Diagram Prize for oddest title of the year. Established in 1978 “as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair,” and maintained by Bookseller.com.

The title? Crocheting Adventures in Hyperbolic Planes

When we first heard about the nomination, we couldn’t decide whether we were supposed to be excited. But it turns out winning was exciting: we got calls from the Associated Press and the award has drawn attention to the book from newspapers and blogs all over the country.

And while the award itself may be goofy, it represents something serious: that freedom of the press, of expression, and of creativity is thriving and that wild books can get published. Horace Bent, custodian of the award, said:

[Given the economic downturn,] I feared for the future of this most prestigious of literary awards. Surely oddly-titled books would suffer in a climate that was prompting publishers to focus on more bankable works. . . . But I am delighted that I was being overly pessimistic and that oddly-titled books proved recession-resistant.

Recession or no, the publishing industry has turned out some truly incredible books, including these other winners and nominees (highlights listed at Bookstove):

• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter
• All Dogs Have ADHD
• Bombproof Your Horse
• Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw
• Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
• Highlights in the History of Concrete
• How to Avoid Huge Ships
• Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings
• People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
• Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
• Reusing Old Graves
• The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais
• The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today
• The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
• Versailles: The View From Sweden
• What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua?

Upon reflection

One would think that 3 women with college degrees could hang 4 mirrors on a wall. And they could . . . after 2 hours and no thanks to my input.

As usual, I’d gotten a ridiculous and ambitious idea: this one was that we ought to decorate our living room using some square mirrors I’d found lying around the house.

But we didn’t want them in any boring pattern. Only something exciting would do. Our solution? A diamond shape.

I’m usually more of an eyeballer sort of person, but I wanted this to be exact, so I was in there with a tape measure and a broom handle for a straightedge and a notepad and calculator for dimensions and distances and a glass of water acting as a rudimentary level. Disaster waiting to happen.

My housemates came in, took one look at the mess, and took over. Simple solution: tie a nail to a thread and use it as a level, pencil in where the mirrors will go, check for accuracy, and mount mirrors to the wall.

We felt quite triumphant about our success—nearly as proud as the day the 4 of us managed to hoist our futon over a wall and burst into spontaneous cheering when we succeeded. I think the mirrors look quite professional, and they brighten the room, but best of all is when Skippyjon Jones comes to visit and looks in the mirror to see, not a Siamese Cat, but a Chihuahua.

First Business Trip

What I learned on my first business trip (working at a booth at SIGCSE):

1. A K Peters holds a small but prestigious niche in the world of computer science publishing: we have some of the best and most advanced reference books available on graphics and games.
2. Even though Miss Gill, one of my all-time favorite teachers (2^nd grade) was from Wisconsin, Milwaukee is not a particularly magical place.
3. In the early days of computers, the focus was developing hardware, which was done by men, and all the software was written by very bright women (who were doing “just typing stuff”; see, e.g., the famous Ada Lovelace, the ENIAC programmers, etc.). So women in computer science are mystified as to why there aren’t more females in programming. They didn’t buy my “stop making first-person shooter games and make more Tetris” solution.
4. If your flight gets canceled, it’s OK. You can get another one.
5. The people with Jones and Bartlett (there sharing their computer textbooks), ETS (there to advertise AP tests), and Franklin, Beedle, & Associates (there showing computer languages books) are very kind. They all helped me a lot.
6. In the ancient world, among the Jews women wore eye makeup, but among the Romans the men wore eye makeup (courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum very impressive Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit).
7. I prefer models of live triceratops to models of mauled triceratops (also courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum).
8. Computer people have strange tastes. They bought Practical Linear Algebra but not Dungeons and Desktops.
   

And, most importantly, even though it was helpful for this particular weekend, I learned why you should not stay in a fancy hotel

1. You get the opportunity to pay for a nice sit-down breakfast instead of grabbing a muffin and ice water from the continental breakfast spread
2. You get to stare through the locked doors of the reservations-only indoor waterpark instead of swimming in the unheated pool
3. You can choose from among a wide array of 5 channels all showing news on a large flatscreen instead of watching old Star Trek reruns on an old tilting TV set
4. You get to tip people for doing things like getting you a cab, instead of getting a cab yourself

Fluid Simulation

This evening I went with my coworkers to a lecture at the Boston Museum of Science given by Doug Roble, editor of A K Peters’ JGT.

Don’t worry: this was much more lively than it sounds.

Doug Roble has won two Scientific and Technical Academy Awards for his work with Digital Domain, which does CG effects for movies.

He’s got a PhD in computers and has developed all sorts of software—this is one smart guy. But rather than abstract and complex his presentation (which focused on fluid simulation) was clear, engaging, and hilarious.

The basic facts I came away with:

In the eighteenth century Leonhard Euler developed equations to describe the motion of moving water, which we now use to help us generate computer models of water. CG water is much cooler (though less thirst-quenching) than real water because it can do things (like pile up or form shapes) that you could never do with real water, even in a model. Even if you just want a regular flood, it’s often better to use CG water because sets with water can be no smaller than 1/3 scale of actual before it looks cheesy. Artists can make things look like water, but they can’t make it move like water, and vice versa for computer engineers, so the two team up.

Doug took us through a series of movies: from Dante’s Peak, which used a 680,000-gallon tank of water to model a flood (the biggest—and last—dump tank in film history); to Lord of the Rings, where the Ford of Rivendell used his fluid simulator to flush out the black riders; to The Day after Tomorrow, where his fluid simulator created the director’s impossible vision of a plough-shaped wall of water hurtling through New York; to Pirates of the Caribbean, where his fluid simulator sent the ship over the edge of the world while a smoothed particle hydrodynamics function sent mist swirling up to greet it; to 2012, where his fluid simulator created wave, fire, smoke, and dust effects and tossed his own company into the ocean with the rest of LA; to Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, where the latest in fluid simulation created both the hydra’s flames and the towering wall of water Percy used to fight them.

Of course the modeling was even more interesting because those are all movies I love, partly because they shamelessly, as Doug said, “throw reality to the winds and make something really cool.” My favorite moment of the night: Speaking of the destruction of LA in 2012, an incredible scene in a really silly movie: “If only we worked on better movies . . . but can you a imagine a good movie with that scene in it?”

Atul Gawande

I've spent the weekend at ALA, which has been fabulous. This morning I went to Atul Gawande's sunrise presentation (fortunately not exactly at sunrise).

I first encountered Gawande's work two years ago when I read Complications, which gave me lots to think about and, in concert with some of my rhetoric readings, changed my ideas about human logic, reason, and intuition.

Today he talked about his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto. Here's the short version of his fascinating presentation: About half of deaths that occur in surgery are preventable. He was on a WHO committee looking for ways to prevent those preventable deaths, and they thought of airpline flights, which like surgery are extremely complicated procedures but that nearly always work. So he went to the Boeing Checklist Factory (he said the Boeing guys didn't like it when he called them that) and asked them to train him in the art of checklisting. Then he made a checklist for surgery that included things like have an extra bag of blood around and some antibiotics and also things like make sure everyone in the room knows everyone else's name and also knows why you're doing the surgery. Then they sent the checklist to a bunch of pilot hospitals around the world, from the best research hospitals to struggling refugee hospitals.

At first everyone looked at the list and said, We already do all this. But it turns out that when they measured it, even though everyone meant to do all those steps every time, 2 out of 3 times they forgot a step. So the checklist made a big difference, and they saw a huge reduction in the number of complications. So at the end of the study he asked the doctors, Are you all going to keep using the checklist? Only 80% said yes--the others said it was a waste of time. But 93% of them said they would want someone doing surgery on them to use a checklist.

So, Gawande said, Why is that if we had a medicine that would drastically decrease fatalities everyone would prescribe it, but when we have a piece of paper that does exactly the same thing, not everyone is willing to use it?

He theorized that the problem is our idea of being experts and heroes. We think heroes act all by themselves, like superman. But in real life, they have to work in concert with other people, especially as we face increasingly complex problems. So he said the checklist itself is merely a representation of a set of values, chief among which is humility: recognition that we are fallible humans and even our experts need checking. He said the checklist also embodies ambition: the hope that we really can combat extremely complicated problems like diseases and that we really can strive for perfection every time.

The presentation reminded me very much of Paul Woodruff's excellent book Reverence. The basic premise is that, ironically, when people begin thinking they are gods, they begin acting like beasts. Instead, people are at their best when they have a sense of reverence: a glimpse of being part of something larger than themselves.

First Day

Just completed my first day as an editorial assistant at A K Peters. It was a good day with good people, and I think I’m going to learn a lot here. I expect to get good experience with the entire publishing process and gain a broad perspective of editing. I also expect I'll learn a lot more discipline doing the nitty gritty hands-on of editing.

The day started with 3 meetings:

1. Editorial meeting, where we discussed all the projects currently in editing and made assignments. I was assigned to my first three projects.
2. Company meeting, where every department discussed status updates on their work. Because the company is so small, I got to hear from acquisitions, production, design, marketing, and sales, which was fascinating. I’m looking forward to learning through experience about every stage of publishing.
3. Covers meeting, where we discussed some cover possibilities for a new publication. No surprise, this was much more subdued than the Candlewick covers meeting I attended.

I spent most of the rest of the day starting to learn LaTex (“tech”), the math-oriented typesetting program we use, which involves quite a bit of coding. It will take some work, but I think I’ll really like having so much direct control over the text, as I did while editing in WordPerfect for a professor years ago.

Camber and I celebrated the day with dinner at Not Your Average Joe’s where we had a delicious dinner that made up for the terrible one she had at Joe’s American Food during her first week at A K Peters.