Category Archives: Daily-Ink

Traffic flow

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I’ve had a couple days of long highway drives in Los Angeles and despite significantly more traffic than in Vancouver or Toronto, I have to say that traffic here flows very well. Two things make the flow here unique compared to what I see in Canada. First of all, highway speed limits here are more of a suggestion than a limit. When the traffic opens up the speed goes up. Tonight, at one point I was going in excess of the speed limit and for about 10 minutes and many cars passed me, while I didn’t catch up or pass any. Even when traffic is heavy it seems every lane will travel at speeds seldom seen on highways I’m used to driving on back home.

Another thing that works far better here are lane changes. There seems to be an acceptance of lane changes here that is far more polite and efficient compared to anywhere else I’ve driven. I’ve seen, and in one case actually been, a car needing to cross 2 lanes to get to an exit in heavy traffic, and with indicators on, cars make way for the move.

In Vancouver, that would be responded to in two very different ways. First of all, there would be an angry horn blast and/or the person in the lanes you are trying to get into would speed up to squeeze you out of the lane change. Here, I have seen countless lane changes with neither horn beep nor accelerated blocking.

After hearing about the driving here, and stories of road rage in LA, I’d say, ‘Don’t believe the hype’! The reality is that I’d rather drive here than on any busy highway in Canada. Maybe I’m just in the honeymoon stage and living here would be different, but my sister has been here for 20 years and she’s often told me this is the case. Sounds a bit weird to say, but Vancouver and Toronto drivers could learn a thing or two from spending a little time in LA traffic.

Morning sun

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It is better than coffee, stronger than a multivitamin, and more energizing than sleep or a good workout. It is the warm feeling of the early morning sun.

Bathing in light, not yet too hot, which seeps into my body, much deeper than my skin. While it warms me from the outside, it also invigorates me from the inside. I feel a radiance that is not just an absorption of energy but an emergence of it from within.

This is the power of the early morning sun. Caffeine for the soul.

New achievement unlocked

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In my second year as a teacher, I got to work with Mrs. B, who taught my French class and co-taught PE with me. She was a gymnastics coach and she taught me how to do a muscle-up on the rings. For the next couple years I was the demo guy for this every time the gymnastics unit rolled around. I think the rings muscle-up is easier than doing it on a bar, because on the rings you can keep the rings close to your body, where you have more strength. Think of pulling yourself out of a pool with arms wide on the deck versus just in front of you, close to your body where you have more leverage.

Fast forward almost 25 years and add over 20 pounds to my body and I haven’t tried a muscle up since… and have never in my life tried to do one on a pull up bar.

That changed today.

I unlocked a new achievement. I attempted and successfully achieved a muscle up for the first time ever on a pull up bar. My warm up was some pull-up shrugs, followed by about 5 really high pull-ups. Then I went above the bar and lowered myself down from the top position of a muscle up a couple times. Then I went for it.

I also recorded this first attempt, not because I thought I’d make it, but rather to provide myself feedback to correct any errors. The video is a bit funny to me because I look like I’m in pain even before I started the muscle up. I was visualizing the move, thinking about using my back muscles, and I look anguished rather than focused. 

After my surprise success, I did it a couple more times. The first time I thought I’d try two in a row. I did the first one and didn’t even get close to a full pull-up on the second. Then took a long break and watched the video a few times.

My third attempt was the cleanest, then I stayed on the bar and followed up with 10 pull-ups as high as I could go, which was very high for the first few, degenerating to a struggle to get my chin barely over the bar on the last one.

Still, I couldn’t be happier with the results. I was expecting this to take me a month to six weeks to achieve and I hit it on day one! My new goals will be to be able to do more than one in a row and eventually to be able to do one without swinging my body. But for now I’m going to celebrate the win. My workouts have definitely been building my strength, and I think it’s pretty awesome that this 58 year old body was able to pull this off on my very first attempt.

Who will get us there?

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Stephen Downes shared the following on LinkedIn:

“I was asked, “Please provide a brief abstract that summarises your views on the impact of AI on higher education.”

As far more than the language models that have captured the attention of the world over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) represents a significant increase in human capability, augmenting and sometimes exceeding our natural capacities to perceive, reason, create and remember. Ubiquitous access to these capabilities changes the definition of what it means to learn and to be educated. Skills once reserved to the domain of experts are now in the hands of everyday people, while most every discipline is devising new models, methods and pragmatics of work alongside, or teaming with, these new tools. This challenges educators along a number of fronts, impacting how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach. Today’s educator in a world of AI is responsible for far more than passing along knowledge (indeed, the machine can do most of that). We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care.

Thoughts?” ~ Stephen Downes

—

Although my thoughts align with K-12 education as well as higher education, these thoughts come to me in the form of a question:

Who is going to get us there?

Who is the ‘We’ that Stephen is talking about when he says, “We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care”?

Because I love this vision of what teaching can become, I just don’t see a clear path to take us there.

‘We’ won’t get there following the guidance of financially lucrative edu-tech business, products, and tools… their locked-in subscriptions will tout measures of success that don’t align with this vision, even when they say that they will.

‘We’ won’t get there like we did with Web2.0 tools in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, on the backs of tech savvy educators leading the charge.

‘We’ won’t get there because of some governmental vision pushing a new AI enhanced curriculum, or even new guidelines that somehow redefine for teachers, “how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach”.

I hope I’m not coming off as a pessimist. I’m excited about what’s possible. I just fear that ‘we’ aren’t going to get ‘there’ any time soon unless ‘We’ align philosophy, policy, and economic support for the transformation of schools into something different.

Short of that, I fear that ‘We’ will be having the same ‘20th century schools in a 21st century world’ conversation in another 10 years… which I’ve heard since getting into education in the late 1900’s.

It takes time to unwind

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It might have been slowed down a bit due to having a cold, but it has taken me a while to unwind this holiday. I always take a short while to get used to holiday mode, and not feel guilty for having a quiet day where I don’t do much.

Today I didn’t do much of anything. I spent a bit of the morning feeling guilty about not getting a workout in, and then late this afternoon I finally felt it… I felt unwound enough to just relax and enjoy doing a little bit of nothing.

The big plans for tomorrow are to head to a beach and rent some bikes to ride on the boardwalk. A busy day compared to today, but also, how chill is that for a day plan?

Now the holiday really begins. Now it becomes guilt free listening to a an audiobook for over an hour. I can just chill, and not feel like I should be doing something else. I can sip my morning coffee in the sunshine and feel like no matter what the day brings, it will be a good day.

I don’t have to fill time, I can just appreciate what I’m doing, while I do it… even if the thing I’m doing is nothing.

Lemon love

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My sister has a lemon tree in her back yard. The lemons on this tree are not normal. First of all, they grow quite large. The phot below show lemons from her tree. The two in my hand are what I’d consider large sized at my local grocery store, the rest are more typical of what comes off of her tree. Secondly, these lemons are sweet. I make a lemonade with them and there is no need for sugar.

The juice of two lemons fills half of a tall glass. Add water, (or if I’m feeling fancy, soda water), a little Angostura aromatic bitters, and some ice and I’ve got the most delicious lemonade I’ve ever tasted.

The lemons in the photo produced a litre of juice. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some lemonade to make.

Duffy and Crab

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Today was a wonderful first day of holidays, visiting my mom and sister in Tustin. We went for a cruise on a Duffy boat then enjoyed a bag of seafood at a restaurant called Kicking Crab.

What’s a Duffy? It’s a fully electric boat that travels at 5 mph at its maximum speed. I got to captain it, with my wife, sister, mom, and an aunt who I haven’t seen in over 25 years. We circled protected a harbour in the boat, then drove around the beaches before going for a crab, shrimp, and clam feast.

A late afternoon nap was the final part of a wonderful day. I could get used to this!

…And crash

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Day three of March break and my eyes and nose are streaming. The good news is that I don’t feel sick other than a little congestion. The bad news is, even if I’m not feeling awful, I’m still sick.

I’m tired of the pattern of getting to a holiday break and my body crashing. It’s a pattern I’ve seen too often and it has decided to repeat on my last March break.

Oh well, it got me again.

As I was reminded be a retired friend, March breaks from now on will be times to avoid holidays rather than go on them. My upcoming retirement will include not travelling at the most expensive times, when everyone else is travelling.

Now it’s off to bed with a handful of tissues and cold medication. I’m hoping some sunshine and rest will hurry this runny nose along. And I’m really hoping to avoid these kinds of crashes in the future.

Meaning in the Universe

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I love this quote by Brian Cox,

There’s only one interesting question in philosophy. The interesting question is, what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe? I think the answer is, paradoxically, whilst we are definitely physically insignificant, I’ve just said that the Earth is one planet, around one star, amongst 400 billion stars, in one galaxy amongst two trillion galaxies, in a small patch of the universe, right?

So we’re definitely small, you can’t argue with that, we’re just specks of dust. But if you think about what we are, we’re just collections of atoms. Our bodies were made in stars, right? So it’s all cooked over billions of years. And we’re in this pattern that can think, you have a means by which the universe understands and explores itself, which is us. And that sounds unlikely when you put it like that, that you can have a few things that were cooked in the hearts of stars, you stick them together in a pattern and suddenly it has some ideas and starts writing music.

There aren’t any other worlds where this happened, certainly in our galaxy. So it could be that this planet, notwithstanding its physical insignificance, is the only place where anything thinks.

Think about it… think about consciousness and thinking… without thought the entire universe has no meaning. And so, while we live on an insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, in an insignificant part of the universe… we might also be the only significant part of all existence, or at the very least, in our own, known part of the universe.

We are simultaneously insignificant and potentially the most significant thing in the universe. Without consciousness there is no meaning to the universe, and while there might be a lot of evidence of life beyond our solar system, there is no guarantee the these other life forms have achieved the level of consciousness of humans.

This makes me question my own assumptions about consciousness and free will. I’ve previously said in my post, ‘Consciousness and Free Will’:

1. I don’t think consciousness is fundamental.
And;
2. Consciousness comes from an excess of processing time.

But maybe my first premise doesn’t need to be true for my second one to be true. Maybe consciousness is fundamental, but we need excess processing time in order to tap into it?

Maybe consciousness is essential to the existence of the universe, because without it, why should the universe even exist? If that question doesn’t create at least a little existential angst, I’m not sure what would?

Are we beings that became conscious so that we can add meaning to the entire universe, or is the universe somehow dependent on consciousness and we are simply living beings capable of tapping into this on some fuzzy frequency? A fuzzy frequency which also clouds our minds with a desire to seek beliefs that make sense of a consciousness far too great for us to truly understand?  Be it religion or physics, we are meaning seekers, and we might just be the most important meaning seekers in the entire universe.

 

The corner staircase

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I’ve always had this vision of building my own house. I have no experience with architecture, I struggle to build IKEA furniture, and lack basic handyman skills… but I’ve always wanted to design my own dream home. One feature I envision is a staircase in an all-glass corner of the house. It’s kind of a double spiral staircase, and it is designed such that both at the top and the bottom, you walk towards the corner to go both up and down the stairs, and they turn at the halfway point. At the top, you just walk towards the corner and then have a choice of turning either to the left or right. Essentially, you go down about 5 or six steps to a landing where the spiral splits both ways, going away from the corner and along the side walls.

At the bottom of the steps, the first 2 steps create a half circle or crescent, going completely across the corner. Then the stairs spiral left or right with a railing that is only about 6 inches above and behind the second step at the center, and then spirals up with the steps to railing hight by the 4th or 5th step. This creates an empty space on the inside of the spiral, behind the first 2 steps. In this space, underneath the stairs that are coming  down from the floor above, there is a waterfall and then a fish pond in the void behind the spirals.

One more feature is that the wall behind the waterfall has 2 possible positions, one is just less than 90º and the other is just a bit more than 90º. This allows the waterfall to either be a true falls, with water splashing as it lands in the pond, or it can be subtle with water silently sliding down the wall into the pond. So, it’s a wonderful, natural background noise when you want it, but also a subtle trickle when you’d like quiet.

I’ve tried drawing it, but can’t seem to get it right. The AI image I created here is a start of the idea, although not completely what I envision. I’ve tried many times to tweak this image, or use other tools, but I lack the descriptive skills to really get what I want. Still, this would be one feature I’d love to have if I was ever given the chance to design my own house.