Raising a Wall Can Open a View

I visited 2 very different construction sites today, on a whim. Two sons of one of my clients each were working a different site, and we just went by to see what was going on.

The first site is a new 9-story office building in Clayton, MO, a financial center near the center of the country. The son was applying fireproofing to the steel structure, much like you may have seen in 9-11 WTC documentaries. It was fun to ride up the external cage elevator on a breezy January morning and watch concrete sprayed onto the steel, to take a look around, staring down the open elevator shafts and the stairwells still missing stairs, to feel the wind in an office building with just cables between me and the precipice.

Then we went to the other son’s site, where a 2 story residence was being constructed in an old neighborhood. We were just in time to help raise the first external wall up on the second story. I rarely do that, generally preferring the George Jetson style of gainful employment.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with politics and economy and faith? Try the notion of distance from an issue, of perspective. From the points of view I had today, I’d say the building trade is thriving. People are hard at work putting up new buildings all over. Compare this to the national housing starts (down). Were you aware that the Empire State Building was built during …

Share

Continue ReadingRaising a Wall Can Open a View

Learn by ignoring

About ten years ago, when I first started auditing graduate-level classes in cognitive science, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to learn (I still do). The topics included such things as connectionism, evolutionary theory, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and education theory.  It felt like I was learning less and less about more and more to such an extent that I was eventually going to know nothing about everything.

One of the professors acknowledged the enormous scope and depth of the material.  He commented to me “it’s like trying to take a drink of water out of a fire hydrant.

That phrase stuck with me ever since.  It seems like I run into yet another entirely new overwhelming topic every few weeks.  It helps me to keep in mind that it’s often not supposed to be easy.  That’s why people spend much of their lives getting good at each of the many hundreds of disciplines.  There’s very few people that have command over more than a few of the numerous challenging fields out there.

That feeling of being overwhelmed while studying cognitive science reminded me that I felt the same way in my first year of law school.  If you did what many of the professors told you to do, you would be spending 18 hours every day reading material that would be largely unhelpful.  An alternative strategy that worked for me was to work hard to quickly determine what to ignore.  In law school, …

Share

Continue ReadingLearn by ignoring

The Media (which media? THE Media!)

This age.  Bizarre.  Part of the bizarreness rests in how much we actually know about it.  We swim in a deepening sea of information.  How to cope?  We compartmentalize.  So, though, do those providing us the information, and therein lies another problem, which is a question of integration. Recently at…

Continue ReadingThe Media (which media? THE Media!)

Violence in Iraq is systematically being under-reported

Think Progress contrasts Laura Bush's recent argument that the media are failing to report all of the good things that are happening to this excerpt from the Iraq Study Group: In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter…

Continue ReadingViolence in Iraq is systematically being under-reported