Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
I officially felt it today. The weather has turned and it has definitely affected me. I had a great morning, doing my Coquitlam Crunch, I came back and enjoyed a hot tub too. But I felt the gloom. It was a shadowless afternoon and I felt closed in.
Could it be from spending my first 10 years in Barbados? A place where there is almost always 12 hours of sun. A place where even the rainy season means a day mostly of sunshine and a series rain clouds passing over for 5 minutes to an hour before the sun shows up again… and where it will even be raining above while the sun still shines from beside the clouds?
It usually takes until late October or early November for me to feel clouded-in, but today I felt it. It seems my sunny disposition relies a bit on the sun, and I’m going to have to make an effort to brighten up inside my house and work to compensate for the lack of sun outside.
The idea of being in an echo chamber suggests that you are surrounded by people, media, and information sources that are constantly reinforcing your beliefs… without exposing you to opposing viewpoints unless arguing convincingly against those viewpoints.
I’ve discussed, a number of times, my concerns that we are living more and more in dichotomies, where sides or factions are so diametrically opposed, no one can hold a stance in the middle without being considered to be from the opposing viewpoints. You either live in an echo chamber or you live in an opposing echo chamber. Because the voices in the middle are ‘othered’ and so not part of any stance or view that can be snuck into an echo chamber. The voices of the middle don’t get to echo. And so the echo chamber narrows, keeping exposure to outside views securely away.
The echoes are getting louder and it’s getting easier to listen to them and nothing else… which ultimately leads to us spewing the same echoes we hear. So it’s up to us to seek diverse stances and viewpoints. It’s up to us to actively extend our searches for reliable information. And it’s up to us to question the reliability of our sources. It’s either that or voluntarily be just another voice echoed in a narrow echo chamber that seems to be getting further polarized and biased every day.
A couple Fridays ago the school got a call from a guy with an Australian accent. He said he was a former school principal who now does consulting promoting progressive and innovative practices in schools. He said he knew it was short notice but he was in town and could he visit our school. I had time at the end of the day and invited him to visit. He Uber’ed in from Vancouver and after a quick chat we had a tour, talked to a couple teachers, and a few students.
He got to see the tail end of a presentation and hear some of the feedback our students gave. Then we went back to my office for a chat. So I asked him, how did you choose Inquiry Hub as a school to visit? He said that he has been working with AI recently and he had put all the factors he looks for in progressive schools, and asked Chat GPT which school he should visit. Inquiry Hub came up.
I find it fascinating that we were found this way. A chance encounter created by an LLM.
For a few hundred people, if not thousands, September 23rd brought profound sadness and disappointment. At first that they were perhaps left behind, then that The Rapture did not actually happen. They were convinced that this was the day that believers were going to ascend to heaven. Many believing in an actual, physical ascension, where bodies float up into the air and up to a heaven in the sky.
For many of these disappointed believers, the lack of this actually happening will not alter their belief that this will one day happen. The date was wrong but they will still believe that it is coming. In fact, they will still believe that it’s going to happen in their lifetime. That is one of the common themes of ‘end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it’ prophecy believers… the idea that this is the end times and that they will be witnesses to The Rapture.
It reminds me of those workplace signs about how many days since the last injury. Like those signs, there is an inevitability that the next injury will come… the next rapture date will come. Except that for the end times believers, the lack of the event only means they guessed wrong. A new date will be chosen by some influential follower soon.
When belief is that strong, even the people who had unwavering conviction that September 23rd was the day, even the ones who prayed and believed they were given godly confirmation, will not falter in their faith. Instead, there will be a quiet period of recovery from disappointment, than a few months or years from now some false prophet will make another prediction, and the cycle will continue. After all, the testing of faith produces perseverance… It isn’t faith if it can’t be tested and still hold.
And so blindly forward the faithful will go. A lack of evidence is not proof of anything other than to test faith. Excuses are substitutes for apologies, and misinterpretations are easy to justify, be they made by others or felt by individual believers. The message is the same, The Rapture is indeed coming, it’s just the signs were not clear as to when.
And so some time in near future we will reset the sign, the one that says how many days since the last promise of rapture… and the cycle of waiting will continue.
Last year we took students camping and it poured rain for most of the night. I recorded the sound of the rain from inside my tent around 2am and it sounded torrential. This year the weather was perfect: Hardly a cloud in the sky, warm, windless, and rainless.
I just came back from the trip. It could not have been better. It was well planned, the weather cooperated, and the students were awesome. The only kid ‘issues’ we had the whole trip, and I use the term ‘issue’ loosely, was speeding the slower kids up on our walks. That’s hardly an issue to deal with. There were zero discipline issues.
Looking back on the two trips, students getting flooded out of their tents, and getting soaked to the bone on our walks last year are things our students think back fondly on. The adversity didn’t ruin the trip, it emboldened the memory, and our students look back fondly at it.
Here’s the interesting thing. If I had to choose, I’d absolutely prefer the amazing weather we had this year over camping in the rain again. But for the students that went both years, I’d bet that in a few years they will remember the stormy night much more than they’ll remember last night.
No one wants to voluntarily go through adversity, but sometimes adversity is what galvanizes a fond memory. And getting wet on a camping trip, while uncomfortable, isn’t trauma inducing. In fact it can be character building. All that said, isn’t it interesting that I’d still pick a night like last night over a repeat of the rain storm we had last year.
I remember a couple friends doing a puzzle in front of me that left me clueless. One of them had 2 forks and placed them on a table, one on top of the other on an angle, and asked, “What number does this represent?”
I guessed wrong and the other friend guessed right. I kept trying and got it wrong far more times than right, while my other friend got it right every time. I accused them of cheating so the guessing friend started writing the number on a piece of paper. The friend placing the forks on each other would place the utensils down, the other friend would write the number down. The first friend would wait for my guess, reveal the correct number, then my second friend would show his correct guess that he wrote down.
This went on for an embarrassingly long time, with my friends offering to tell me how they did it, and me refusing because I was going to figure it out!
I didn’t.
Finally, they showed me. When they did, I realized how the ‘tell’ was being exaggerated for my benefit, but I was so fixated on the forks that I missed it. The forks placement had nothing to do with the chosen number. After placing the forks at an odd angle on top of each other, my friend would place a few fingers on the edge of the table. How many fingers he placed there was what the mystery number was.
But my eyes stayed focused on the shapes made by the two forks. Even when my friend was tapping his fingers loudly on the table, I ignored them and stayed fixated on the forks.
I think too many people are focused on the forks these days. Where would you benefit from widening your focus and attention?
Question to ponder: Would you hire a fitness coach that wasn’t physically healthy?
I had an interesting conversation today with a buddy. It was about the dance between personal bias and expectations that isn’t an easy conversation. Reflecting now, the main issue was a question of how important it is that someone helping you is ‘walking the talk’.
Question to ponder: Would you hire a swim coach who can’t swim well, but really knows how to coach?
Where is the line that you personally draw when it involves coaching and advice, when it comes from someone that doesn’t necessarily follow the same advice?
Question to ponder: Would you hire a marriage coach who has been divorced twice and was not in a stable relationship?
I think these are messy questions with no clear line to be drawn. Ultimately it comes down to personal biases. I’d sooner accept a swim coach who has a crappy stroke and doesn’t swim well themselves, before I’d hire an obese fitness coach or a marriage coach with a poor relationship history.
Question to ponder: Would you hire someone to help you quit smoking if they smoked? Would your answer change if they had a 90% succeed rate when most other strategies and coaches max out their success rate at under 50%?
In the end we need to recognize our biases and follow our instincts. Whatever line we draw in one area of our lives might not be the same line we draw in others. It’s not a question of if we have biases, we do. It’s a question of where we draw the line, and are we happy with our biases? Because in the end, if I’m putting time, effort, and/or money into a coach, or counsellor, or taking advice from a friend, I’m the one that needs to feel good about it… given the biases I hold.
Question to ponder: How important is it that the coach, counsellor, or confidant giving you advice walks their own talk?
My wife bought a scale that tells you more than your weight. It’s called Hume and it gives a whole bunch of data to you about your body. You stand on it barefoot and hold a handle with sensors on it and it gives you your fat percentage, lean mass, subcutaneous fat mass, body water percentage, heart rate, and more information.
It seems interesting and I’ll try it for a few more weeks, but I’m questioning the accuracy of it. First of all, it had my body fat percentage go up over 3% in 10 days. That seems odd. And it says my heart rate is higher than I think it is. Yesterday and today I canceled and redid my first weigh-in because it said my heart rate was above 80 yesterday and 78 today. I know that when I wake up in the morning my heart rate is not that high. My second reading today was 70. I then took out our blood pressure monitor which also measures my heart rate and it measured it at 57.
Sometimes I think too many features are put onto things and they come at a cost to other features. In this day and age, heart rate should be a low bar for accuracy. Being off about 20 beats a minute is not acceptable. I don’t want ‘all the bells and whistles’ if they are not hitting accurate notes.
Again, I’ll try this new toy out for a couple more weeks, but I have to say I’m disappointed so far, and if it can’t get heart rate and body fat percentage right, can you blame me for questioning the other results? And if I’m not accurately tracking these data points, why would I use the product, no matter what bells and whistles it claims to offer.
I was due to go to court this morning for a jury summons. Last night I checked my personal email before bed to learn that it was canceled. It’s a bit of a relief for me because this is not a great time to miss work and the summons was for a 20 day criminal trial.
Like voting, I think that being summoned for jury duty is a civil duty. To participate in a free and just society, you need to support the political and judicial systems that make that society work. But I can’t imagine having to leave a job for 20 or more working days.
Perhaps there should be incentives for retired people to be jurors? I don’t know how you would design this to be fair, but I will say that I’d be much more willing to do my civic duty as a juror when I don’t have to worry about missing work. More than fixing that, I wonder if there isn’t a way to make the whole process shorter? What parts of a case in a law court could use a revamp in design and process so courts cases are less drawn out and more to the point? I honestly have no idea, but I think this is a question that’s worth looking into.
