Watershed moments

I often think of the big power of little moments; they can switch you to a new and dramatically different track in life, even though it doesn't seem like a big deal at the time. In this way, life is chaotic:

Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic.
Another way of looking at this phenomenon is to think in terms of path dependence. Early-developed choices, habits and tastes can have huge long-term ramifications, and the person making many of the most important decisions that determined what kind of person you grew up to be was a younger version of you. Even the five-year old version of you had your life in his or her hands. If you like how your life has turned out, thank that 7-year old (and that two-year old) who had your life in his or her hands once upon a time. The 7-year old who raised me found many abstract ideas interesting, and put me on that track.

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A gene for artistic interpretation and 2001’s odyssey

I have four sons, in two sets – 23, 20 and 13, 11. One cool benefit of this “arrangement” is that I can re-watch movies I like for reasons other than I just want to: Hey! They haven’t seen Tron, let’s watch that! (of course they have, that’s just a for instance.) Some are movies my wife and I both like, some are movies that only I like (Goonies is a good example.) Some will still have to wait – Terminator, Conan, Die Hard, etc. – we believe most of the ratings are for good reason. But I can wait. Last night I introduced my younger two to “2001: A Space Odyssey”. It’s still a great movie after 42 years. I was not surprised when my youngest said he didn’t understand it. I explained about the (SPOILER ALERT! In case someone hasn’t seen it and may want to someday, skip to the next paragraph) extraterrestrial influence nudging evolution and then about the TMA-1 monolith signaling humankind’s advancement to sufficient level to discover the monolith on the moon. In a rare moment of parental thoughtfulness, I refrained from commenting on the third and fourth segments. You see, I happen to think that all of the interpretation and analysis of the ending are a bunch of hogwash. Kubrick was deliberate in his tedious treatment of what I thought was a very thin script, plodding without dialogue, enhancing the pre-Vader breathing of Bowman, flashing pretty colors with the intent to impress a much greater than human intellect and meaning at work. (Ooops. Forgot to alert. Not really) Flashback: in the sixth grade, my class read “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and we discussed as a group the “meaning” of the book. I put that last word in quotes, because as you might guess, I found no meaning. My first out loud responses to the thoughts being bandied were along the lines, “Where does he [author Richard Bach] say that?” But I got squashed by the group and the teacher, and kept quiet after that. I started thinking something was wrong with me for not being able to “see” the “meaning” behind the work. Some years later, I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t me; they were the ones making up that crap about positive thinking and human potential. It really was just a simple, very simple children’s story with no deeper meaning. (I bought a copy last year on the Half Price Books $1 shelf just to see if I had changed. Still not impressed.) Several many years later, I came to the conclusion that it was both me and them. Well....me. I can't be sure about them. My wife is an artist. And she understands people. I understand people from a perspective of leadership and that works well in my life. She really understands people. (Good thing she’s the mother of my children, because if it were just me, they’d be emotional lepers!) We’d get into “discussions” over books and films on what the director (or author) was trying to convey. I, in my obstinate cynicism, used to dismiss with prejudice what she had to say, because after all, they are telling a story, not expounding a deep philosophical commentary on the human condition, because that’s a load of hokum anyway. Yeah. I couldn’t be more wrong, right? Besides, just because I dismissed it didn’t mean she dismissed it. Anyway, there have been more than one occasions where I might have had negative comments on films. I usually learn a lot during the subsequent analysis. Andrea has told me in many certain terms, “here, the director was trying to …” Once, I rented the DVD and played the director’s commentary. At all the scenes she pointed out in our earlier discussion, the director said something like, “in this scene, I was trying to …” … same as what she said. It's like a magic trick. I stopped trying to figure it out. But she’s usually right. And that applies to art and sculpture as well as film and print. I just don’t get it. I don’t see why Jane Austen is a great author. Hemingway? Fitzgerald or Faulkner? Nope. Not buying it. Oh, they did things I don’t do – write, get published, etc. But how are they any better than Stephen King (not a fan, by the way)? I also feel that if something can't stand on face value without apologetics, then it shouldn't be lauded. How is one interpretation more right than another? Yeah. I know. Different discussion altogether. But with film, print and art, it's me. Sans interpretation gene. Now, given that my sons are mostly artistic, I think that understanding people the way Mom does is more valuable than the way I do, because what I do can be taught (even though some people come by it naturally) at any time. I think that much like learning other languages, if the appropriate synapses are not used early enough, then they atrophy and that makes learning those skills that much harder later, if possible at all. I think some synapses are more like stem synapses (I'll take credit for coining that phrase if it hasn't been used yet) in that they can serve any function. And some are specialized. Just a theory. Not a scientific theory, but more of a Holmesian theory. So my sons need to understand how authors and artists may (or may not) have intended meanings beneath the superficial. I think they've got the gene that I don't. And back to “2001”. I found a few sites - here, here, and here, and an interesting flash presentation at Kubrick2001.com that offer explanations and I’m showing them to my son so that he might understand. This one talks about a scene near the end of part III (before HAL: "What are you doing, Dave?") as "one of the most exciting, suspenseful sequences in all of movie history." See, I don't get that. I like the movie for the science and technological vision in the context of 1968. But, I’m given to understand that there might be more to it than that. Apparently. So here are two questions for the home audience: 1) Anybody else out there sort of like me? Don’t usually see much alternative meaning in {art, film, literature} where other people do? Don’t be shy. Oh, that is not to say we don’t appreciate art, movies, literature; just that the “meaning” is not apparent. Gee. Kind of quiet here in Kubrick's space... 2) If you’ve seen the movie, what are your thoughts on it? I’ll pass on to my son, so that he can see what other people think, and maybe I’ll learn something too.

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What do Wall Street Banks do for society?

What do Wall Street Banks do for society? According to a New Yorker article called "What Good is Wall Street?," not much. Many people assume that most of the money made by Wall Street banks is associated with raising capital for fledgling businesses. Not true:

Wall Street’s role in financing new businesses is a small portion of what it does. The market for initial public offerings (I.P.O.s) of stock by U.S. companies never fully recovered from the tech bust. During the third quarter of 2010, just thirty-three U.S. companies went public, and they raised a paltry five billion dollars. Most people on Wall Street aren’t finding the next Apple or promoting a green rival to Exxon. They are buying and selling securities that are tied to existing firms and capital projects, or to something less concrete, such as the price of a stock or the level of an exchange rate. During the past two decades, trading volumes have risen exponentially across many markets: stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, and all manner of derivative securities. In the first nine months of this year, sales and trading accounted for thirty-six per cent of Morgan Stanley’s revenues and a much higher proportion of profits. Traditional investment banking—the business of raising money for companies and advising them on deals—contributed less than fifteen per cent of the firm’s revenue. Goldman Sachs is even more reliant on trading. Between July and September of this year, trading accounted for sixty-three per cent of its revenue, and corporate finance just thirteen per cent. In effect, many of the big banks have turned themselves from businesses whose profits rose and fell with the capital-raising needs of their clients into immense trading houses whose fortunes depend on their ability to exploit day-to-day movements in the markets . . . Other regulators have gone further. Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain’s top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has described much of what happens on Wall Street and in other financial centers as “socially useless activity”—a comment that suggests it could be eliminated without doing any damage to the economy. . . “Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?” Woolley said to me when I met with him in London. “It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.”
Yet Wall Street is where great amounts of money exist, and that is why many of America's best and brightest are flocking there to engage in careers of . . . well . . . making money. A starting point for this article is that financial markets are grossly inefficient, and that instead of directing money into productive projects, Wall Street financiers follow trends and "surf bubbles."
These activities shift capital into projects that have little or no long-term value, such as speculative real-estate developments in the swamps of Florida. Rather than acting in their customers’ best interests, financial institutions may peddle opaque investment products, like collateralized debt obligations. Privy to superior information, banks can charge hefty fees and drive up their own profits at the expense of clients who are induced to take on risks they don’t fully understand—a form of rent seeking.

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Funeral Misbehavior

I don't follow gossip columns, or even broadcast news. But I do read a few blogs. Yesterday FriendlyAtheist posted Tony Danza’s Funeral Outburst Makes Sense. I don't particularly care about the actor or the author involved. But apparently he has gotten some negative press for an action that I wish I'd had the cojones to do a couple of times. He cut off a a cleric who was in full stride in a fire and brimstone recruiting speech at the funeral of a friend, to redirect focus to the friend. Personally, I think the cleric was misbehaving, not the friend. And I wish more people would stand up at funerals and demand that the subject be of the life departed, not of the faith of the orator. Better yet, make sure the minister knows beforehand that bald propagandizing will not be tolerated. If the deceased had been a pious person, then discussing the faith and piety of the departed meets with my approval. But using the occasion simply as a recruiting drive is too common of an occurrence. I've been to a few funerals where the cleric/priest/minister had nothing particular to contribute about the guest of honor, but went on and on about how doomed the rest of us were unless we took his preferred sacrament. He simply knew a captive audience and marketing opportunity when he had one. Very dissatisfying to those of us who knew the decedent. I have also been to good memorials, where the focus was on the life as lived. My two favorite memorial services ended with a participatory kazoo performance, or recessional music by Groucho Marx. They were fully celebrations of the life departed, not dire warnings to the audience. Unless as a cautionary example to enjoy life while you can. Here is an example of an appropriate farewell, although NSFW:

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Did Anne Frank go to hell?

Now here is a question I'd never thought to ask. Not of myself, mind you. I discarded belief in any afterlife long ago. But it is a good question to pose to fundamentalist Christians. And so Rachel Evans did. Credit where due, I found it via the Friendly Atheist. If you read her post and comments, you see a lot of hemming and hawing from Chrisitans who believe a) in a kind, loving, and just God who b) sends everyone to hell except the most extreme sycophants. They try to have it both ways. In brief, yes, all Jews go to Hell. But when considering this actual young, innocent person, who was a victim of Martin Luther's plan enacted by a Catholic leader, they sputter.

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