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.
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.
I get stuck on certain songs sometimes and I’m really stuck now. I stumbled on to an album called Folklore Riddim. I thought it was an album by an artist, but the first 3 songs had the exact same beat, and the 4th and final song was an instrumental with the same beat again.
Well, the joke was on me. It wasn’t an album by an artist. Folklore Riddim was the rhythm and the three songs were three different artists using that rhythm with their own lyrics. And now, about a month after finding this little album I’ve probably listened to the first song, Hello by KES about 250 times, Holing On by Turner 100 times, and Aye Yo by Sekon Sta 75 times. Yes, those totals are estimates, but no, they are not exaggerations.
Add one more listen to each of these as I’ve written this. The way I can get fixated on music is a bit obsessive. I know. I don’t care. These songs make me happy. I drive to them, play them on repeat in the gym, and find moments in the evening to just soak them in. In another month they will slip into my regular listens and I’ll find another obsession. But for now, thank you Kes for Hello, thanks to whomever wrote the original score, and thanks to whomever put this little album together… I love it!
This morning I watched a video that explained that to get to the next galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, it would take 2.5 million years travelling at the speed of light. Imagine that, travelling 300,000km per second for millions of years. And then you’ve only reached the first of trillions of galaxies… Not billions, but trillions of galaxies in our universe.
It’s so hard to make sense of these numbers. I understand what they mean, but I can’t really comprehend the scale. For example, let’s break down the idea of traveling 300,000km in a second. That means travelling 18 million kilometres in a minute, or 1,080 million kilometres in an hour, or 1 billion & 920 million kilometres in one day.
And at that speed it would still take 2.5 million years to get to the next galaxy.
I understand what the numbers mean, I just struggle to fathom the scale in a way my brain can grasp beyond saying, ‘That’s really far,’ and ‘The universe is really, really big.’ No matter how much I cognitively try to grasp how ‘really big’ our universe is, I know that in reality it’s magnitudes bigger than I can comprehend. This is truly mind boggling.
