Army wristwatches

My army unit had a dozen of these tritium-lit U.S. military wrist watches. They really were very nice. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years. As I recall, the watches had a wear-out date after which we had to turn them in so they could give us new ones. We kept them locked up in a safe with the fancy knives, a couple of compasses, some kind of beryllium gizmo, and the pistol lanyards. Once a month the Property Book Officer (me) and a witness opened the safe and counted the watches and other stuff. Once a year for the big inspection a Major came down from headquarters and counted them. Because, you see, those watches are radioactive and expensive.

We could have, in theory, issued them to soldiers in the unit. But watches get lost, or they break, or they get stolen (or “stolen”) and turn up in a pawn shop in Phenix City leaking tritium. With these there would have been a pile of paperwork to fill out because of the radioactive material; and the soldier would have been billed an enormous sum for the watch.

If you haven’t been in the military, you might think we could just not have them; return the watches to the supplier and get the taxpayer some money back. No such thing was remotely possible. We had to possess them to pass the annual inspection. Well, I did my job. The inspections went smoothly when I was there, except once when an extra pistol lanyard appeared somehow. Fortunately, a resourceful Specialist made it disappear again. The watches were in the safe when I left.

Encyclopedia Britannica

Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer publish a print edition. You can still get the 2010 edition, and some years of update volumes, but the 2010 will be be last print edition.

We had a Colliers Encyclopedia when I was a boy. I used Britannica at the library, but never liked Britannica’s division into three parts – Macropedia, Micropedia, and an Outline of Knowledge. Colliers was simply alphabetical.

Our Colliers Encyclopedia had acetate transparent overlays of the internal combustion engine, of the human body, and of a frog; maps of everywhere; articles on everything important (by definition); and an update volume every year for 10 years – an under-rated and under-used feature. I would have kept the Colliers but for the space – 24 or so large heavy volumes plus annual update volumes takes up a lot of shelf, and the encyclopedia was inevitably out of date on many topics.

Since then I’ve had Britannica on CD ROM and DVD, a free copy of Encarta (not a bad product, as I recall), for 5 or 6 years a personal subscription to Britannica Online, and since then varying levels of library data base access to Britannica Online and other things. The local library has a copy of Britannica, which I have occasionally consulted.

I’ll use Wikipedia for casual look-ups – what country is north of Zimbabwe; what’s Upper Volta called today; who plays Raj on Big Bang Theory? But for anything important I follow the reference (if there is one), find the answer in some reliable reference source, or go to the library.

Good penmanship

My late aunt, a Dominican sister, retired from teaching back in the sixties. I can barely remember going to visit the elementary school of which she was principal (They had a globe!) She kept up on trends in education, and years later we were talking about some aspect of it. She said the root problem was that students didn’t learn good penmanship anymore. I was dubious. It turns out the nuns were right.

Reading curriculum

From Reading Is Elemental, by Helen Vendler, (seen here) here’s the way to do it:

1. “engage in choral singing of traditional melodic song (folk songs, country songs, rounds);
2. “be read to from poems and stories beyond their own current ability to read;
3. “mount short plays—learning roles, rehearsing, and eventually performing;
4. “march or dance to counting rhymes, poems, or music, “reading” rhythms and sentences with their bodies;
5. “read aloud, chorally, to the teacher;
6. “read aloud singly to the teacher, and recite memorized poems either chorally or singly;
7. “notice, and describe aloud, the reproduced images of powerful works of art, with the accompanying story told by the teacher (Orpheus, the three kings at Bethlehem, etc.);
8. “read silently, and retell in their own words, for discussion, the story they have read;
9. “expand their vocabulary to specialized registers through walks where they would learn the names of trees, plants, flowers, and fruits;
10. “visit museums of art and natural history to learn to name exotic or extinct things, or visit an orchestra to discover the names and sounds of orchestral instruments;
11. “learn conjoined prefixes, suffixes, and roots as they learn new words;
12. “tell stories of their own devising;
13. “compose words to be sung to tunes they already know; and
14. “if they are studying a foreign language, carry out these practices for it as well.”

I agree wholeheartedly. This curriculum describes my school from Kindergarten through third grade, plus SRA but minus the foreign language. We did learn a few children’s songs in French: Frère Jacques, Alouette, Sur le pont d’Avignon. Professor Vendler continues:

“Later in my ideal schooling, a familiarity with authors would arise as three successive cycles of literary acquaintance would take place. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, the students would read short excerpts in chronological order from major authors A, B, C…Z. In the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades the very same authors would appear, but in longer or more complex excerpts. And finally, in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades the same authors would again recur, but now in larger wholes.”

The next years followed her plan as well, and it was great, except for a massively annoying pedagogical failure that caused us to read The Red Pony three years in a row. Around this time foreign languages became available. I took French because they told me that was the language of international commerce and diplomacy, and then took Latin, because that was the language to study if you had professional ambitions. I’ve never used either, except to order coffee and a sandwich once, but Latin has been the more rewarding.

It all fell apart in the next-to-last year of high school when we “read” Julius Caesar, stopping every line to explain the hard words:

Student, reading: “Oh pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth, tha…”
Teacher, interrupting: “Now class, who is speaking?”
Student: “Marc Antony.”
Teacher: “And what is he saying? Anyone? Marcel?
Marcel, visibly grinding his teeth: “Can’t tell yet.”

So that was my last year of formal instruction in literature. This gave me an extra period in study hall in senior year, where I was left alone to read, or to wander the school at will, because of another pedagogical failure.

Hot Stuff, 1971

Hot Stuff is a short animated cartoon I remember seeing on Curiosity Shop, a children’s educational program from the early seventies.

The dialogue is exactly what I remember (“No! Not the fork!”). The animation seems different, but I may be conflating it with something else. For a long time I searched for this without success thinking it was Fire! by Michael Glyn, made in 1969.

I was only able to get this by asking a librarian. If you go the the cleaners and say, “I lost my ticket, but it’s a blue sport coat” they can’t do much for you, and may well show a bit of annoyance. (Surprisingly, they don’t sort them by color). If you go to a librarian and say, “I’m looking for that one video with the fire demons and the toaster,” they’ll keep at it until they track it down.

Hot Stuff, by Zlatko Grgic, is a nine-minute educational cartoon from Canada, designed to promote fire safety. It’s pretty funny. The site, by the National Film Board of Canada (Office National du Film du Canada) has other good stuff too, for different age groups.

Information and home-buying

Years ago when we were buying a house, we wanted to live near a good school. Being new in town, we didn’t know which of the elementary schools were good. So we asked people, but nobody quite wanted to say.

Let the schools be Oak, Ash, Pine, and Maple. One person would say, “Oh, they’re all good. Oak is very nice, but our kids went to Ash and had wonderful teachers.” Another would praise Oak and Maple, “but really they’re all fine.” Still another would tell us about the great principal at Maple, and the great soccer field at Ash. Everyone said all the schools in town were great, but nobody ever praised Pine by name. We thought, “okay then, not in Pine school district,” and only months later confirmed that Pine school was a wretched hive of scum and villainy. The people who knew didn’t want to tell.

Likewise, it seems, with crime rates. Charles G. Hill, when buying a house,

“…was handed a sheaf of disclosure statements, which covered everything from the date of installation of major systems to the predicted extent of flood waters should Deep Fork Creek, which runs through the southern end of the neighborhood, run out of its concrete-lined banks. (My conclusion, though not theirs: I shouldn’t lose any sleep over the possibility.) Conspicuous by its absence was any assessment, by the seller, the inspector, the appraiser, or anyone, as to the existing crime rate in the area.” — The Vent #732

It might even be illegal to tell, maybe for fear that crime-rate could be used as a proxy for race.

I have to contrast The Mystery of Pine School with a different experience we had looking for an apartment, years before that and far away. The woman showing us around took us some place that looked nice enough. On the way out, I asked about another development a ways off across a field. “Oh, you wouldn’t care for those; they’re mostly African-American,” she said, which brought the tour to a chilly end.

Progress

or slower regress anyway

It’s a warm sunny day in late September. Out in the country, windmills are going up at an astonishing rate. Here on the State U campus we’re wasting energy as fast as we can. The boilers are running, the air conditioners are blasting, and we peons without AC have the windows open. At that, I’m lucky to be in an old building with actual working windows.

The radiators are hot because that’s the state of the art in 2010. Just like in grade school forty years ago the boilers come on three weeks early, just in case. They’ll make up for it at Christmas, when they turn off the heat in November, and everyone who has one plugs in a space heater. Never mind the flying car, why can’t they make a thermostat?

It could be worse. Long ago and far away (gotta be vague here…) a need was felt to demonstrate to visiting dignitaries a commitment to green energy. It was a nice breezy day, but the wondrous device designed to extract energy from the pressure gradient was not visibly operating. The powers-that-were commanded, “Make it go!” The engineers complied, turning the device into a giant mechanism to generate motion in the working fluid. The dignitaries, all either drunk, clueless, or cynical, could not have cared less.

There has been progress though. When I was in second grade there was a transom over the door of our classroom. It was operated with an enormous wooden pole that only the teacher was allowed to touch. Finally, this year, I have my own transom. The architects have not yet covered this one with beige particleboard, so I can open whenever I want. And I do.

Ahead of my time

When I was in college I wrote what I remember as an enormously clever sarcastic letter to the newspaper saying basically what Steven Hawking said – that all the animals created themselves. Those that didn’t exercise prudent foresight were eaten by those that did. I called it “spontaneous generation science.” The difference between me and professor Hawking (besides a few IQ points) is I was kidding, and was content that my letter generated a few chuckles for a week.

Sliced bread or a sack of wheat?

“All around the country are women and men who thought they would love nothing better than to grind their own wheat and create a picture-perfect loaf of bread for their families every day. After a while that got old, and now they want to rid themselves of that bothersome wheat grinder. You’ll find these grinders, or mills, on eBay, Craigslist, and even Freecycle.” — Prepping on Pennies: #1 Get to know wheat

The problem comes at the end of that first sentence, “every day.”

My grandmother thought store-bought bread was the greatest thing ever, sliced or not. She was a fine cook, and made bread herself once in a while. Grandma’s was better than the bread from the store, and one time I asked her why she didn’t just make her own. She told me when she was a girl she and her mother baked nine loves of bread twice a week all year round (more during harvesting), and she’d got tired of it. She liked to cook and bake, and she liked to garden. But having grown up on a farm in the early twentieth century, she then raised vegetables commercially with my grandfather during the depression, and was well content to grow lettuce and tomatoes, and to bake pies and cookies when she felt like it.

I can roast my own coffee, and I do once in a while; it makes better coffee. Yet I still buy ground coffee at the store. I could get a fifty-pound bag of green coffee beans and drink only what I roast myself, but I’d need to roast a batch at least once a week. After you’ve done it a few times, it’s not the most exciting way to spend an hour. I could, and may yet, turn an old electric rotissiere into a drum roaster, so I can make bigger batches. But there’s not much point in making more than two weeks worth at a time. If it isn’t fresh, it’s not noticibly better than Maxwell House. Now I am, after all, a mechanical engineer. I could design and build a roaster, and set up the equipment and process to grind and vacuum-pack my own coffee, just like Maxwell House. But that’s not a hobby, it’s a business.

It’s fine to buy your own wheat, grind it into flour, and make your own bread. You might give loaves to friends, or sell artisan crackers at the farmers’ market, or trade bread for home-made cheese. With a bread machine it might even be sustainable, in the sense of not becoming a terminal nuisance after a month or two.

As far a preparedness goes, there’s no doubt having fifty pounds of wheat on hand would make life better when the world turns completely upside down. With everyone still enamored of just-in-time,^* if anything is going to be in stock it will have to be in stock at home. Sensible preparation is a good idea. I would just say rather than trying to do everything, pick something that fits with your life and do that. One person grinds his own grain; another keeps goats; someone else has a few laying hens. Pretty soon you’re part of a resilient community – hopefully one with a Starbucks.

^*UPDATE – Today’s Walmart special: no oatmeal.

Vuvuzela

I and some friends got these at the state fair in 1973. They were fun for a couple of weeks. The following winter we found you could jam the bell into a snow bank, and then swing it overhead to hurl a loose snow ball a long way. Of course I didn’t call it a vuvuzela, just “one a them big horns from the fair.”