Ten non-stuff things that you could have got your kids for Christmas (not including a World Vision goat)

We got stuff for Christmas. Good stuff, but it's all stuff.
So many people were driving around with so much stuff in the boots of their cars yesterday. And pushing each other at checkouts to get all the stuff they were obliged to buy for all those other people who were going to give them stuff too.
The cost of unwanted Christmas presents in Australia has been estimated in the order of AUD$1B every year since 2010.

SO for next time, maybe don't get them stuff.
Don't simply get them a World Vision goat certificate. While there appear to be lots of happy kids with baby goats, one of the key objectives of Christmas is that your kids are happy too.

Here are ten alternatives.

1. Tickets to live music (anything from the Wiggles to a rock festival to a folk festival depending on the age of your kids)
2. A creative writing workshop, community theatre, a music or painting course (these run for even very young kids, and most people have a latent dream of becoming an ar-tiste of some kind.
3. Hot air balloon ride, glider flight, light plane flight, hovercraft ride, fishing charter etc.
4. Membership of an organisation or subscription to a magazine of interest. "Horrbile Histories" for an 8 year old boy, or you could cover bee-keepers club fees, or pay for a subscription to a rock magazine, New Scientist, or even contribute to their membership fee to a professional organisation
5. A tray of tree seedlings so they could plant and nurture their own forest - either on your land, on your nature strip (choose plants to match the power lines please!) , or in a public or pseudo-public place (see Guerrilla Gardening)
6. Surfing lessons, horseriding lessons, kung-fu lessons, ballet lessons etc. over summer, or for the next year.
7. A cheese-making course, a salami making course, or your local equivalent
8. A trip to somewhere they've always wanted to go. For young kids this might be the Zoo, or the city fire station. Or a museum of special interest. Ring these kinds of places and see what latitude they have for a 'special tour' for a 'super fan'. You could travel further - My 5 yr old wants to go fossil hunting at Lake Mungo in southern NSW. The neighbour wants to go caving at the Jenolan Caves. White-water rafting on a local river is also on his list.
9. Do any of the above as a family. It's more 'bonding' that way.
10. Give them cash. Paper money. In a red envelope for good luck. Not a gift certificate but a nice crisp paper sheet (although paper money is actually plastic with a clear window in it here).

Just a thought.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Five Extremely Dangerous Words

"Fact":

There is a gulf between an opinion and physical reality which few people notice. The frequently-used phrase “... the fact that....” makes our brains feel reassured, calm and comfortable in the confidence of the speaker, but it is so rarely true that the statement ought to trigger at best wariness, and possibly a bit of panic. Physical reality is complex, multi-layered, frequently contradictory, and extremely hard to describe in facts. Even a simple 'fact' statement: “The sky is blue”, is bound to a geographic definition (here, where I am looking at it), a temporal definition (during daylight hours, provided there are no clouds, and air pollution is below a certain limit) and a subjective definition (as seen by my eyes which have receptors for light in the blue part of the visible spectrum; other eyes may not recognise it as 'blue'.).

You can tell when someone really knows the reality of their subject matter, because their phrasing is always buffered by definitions and exclusions, and they refuse to give 'yes' or 'no answers. Top scientists often talk like this, and they often are very careful to avoid the word 'fact'.  This indicates to me that those who are too sure of their correctness either are ignorant of the parameters within which it holds and outside which it does not, or are spouting opinion and trying to make it sound like fact.

"The Truth":
Truths are multiple and often contradictory, and are also bound to geographic, temporal, cultural and subjective definition. But truths can be slipperier and more dangerous because sometimes, very occasionally, they can be true. And when they're not true, they are almost impossible to disprove.
Inside a truth is part fact, part personal perception. And it is such a heavy, ponderous, heart-stoppingly important word.
Today I happened to overhear a mother telling off one of her children, which is not a good template for how to resolve sibling arguments, but it neatly encapsulates the problem with truth.
"You stole that from your sister. Give it back."
"No. She gave it to me." 
"Don't lie to your mother. Tell me the truth." 
"The really true truth is she gave it to me."
"I so did not give it to him. He snatched it."
"You gave it to me, you did, you truly did."
"Stop arguing you two, or the truth is that I will make sure you both regret it."
Three different people, four different truths in two minutes. This is pretty typical. And at the core of the argument was a physical reality (the transfer of an object from the girl to the boy) and an accidental or deliberate misunderstanding of posession.
So when the legal system decided to abandon the search for truth, and constructed the idea of "beyond reasonable doubt". it was one of the best strategic moves in the development of credibility for any profession. (Up there with the Hippocratic Oath, anyway.)
It is not a new philosophical idea to abandon the search for The Truth when you recognise the multiplicity of relative truths. But outside theoretical philosophy we cling to Truth. We are just not very good at perceiving and enjoying and using the diversity of truths out there.

"It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault":
Don't we love having somebody to blame for everything that goes wrong! There must always be someone at 'fault'. Let's look at a compelling use of 'fault': motor vehicle accidents in Australia.
According to a Big Ideas on ABC radio national, in 2012 and 2013, only 45% of fatal accidents and 10% of non-fatal accidents included alcohol, drugs or speeding. A high proportion of all those other accidents were failures of the driving system: road infrastructure, environmental conditions, car technology, road rules, human limitations. At some point some human usually does something sub-optimal right before a collision, but the underlying cause is usually a property of the rest of the system, which was set up in a particularly disastrous way.

Punishing the guilty is fun. Crime stories, courtroom dramas, talkback radio, decades of research into monkey psychology and human economics, and now FMRIs and blood/saliva hormone tests involving the above show that our brains really do enjoy enforcing social norms by targeting and punishing those who break the rules. We get a dopamine hit from blaming somebody. And another one from punishing them ("Off with her Head!"). A dopamine rush feels very nice, and it is addictive. This is why it is so easy to hook us on the trigger for the dopamine. Even very young children like to play the game: "It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault".
Fault can be real, but it is not always the important thing to look for. We are far too quick to blame - and some of us to take the blame - when the important question should be "What does this mistake represent?" "How do we not make that particular mistake next time?" and then  "How do we change the particular system to move away from this bad configuration?"

Just about every time there is somebody at "fault" - bad driver, financial embezzler, serial rapist, mother whose child died in a hot car - the structures around them had more to do with 'causing' the events than they did. The use of the word "fault" indicates that the speaker is not interested in prevention or improvement of the underlying structures. They just want a dopamine hit and someone's head on a plate.

"Insight":
This is a new dangerous word, but it's becoming more popular. Having more or less rejected 'closure' as not particularly useful, it seems we are collectively hankering after 'insight' instead.
To have a moment of insight is to stand on the cusp of change or discovery. This is the moment when you see that your world, or another person's world, is not as you imagined it. It feels profound. The trouble with 'insight' is fourfold:
1) Psychotherapy created the word 'insight' and has successfully marketed it as an end in itself, which journalistic media has picked up nicely. Psychotherapists are primarily interested in helping someone traverse a cusp, and turn around their mental or emotional pathway to achieve whatever change they needed when they walked into the therapist's room, getting to 'insight' is in fact a goal of psychotherapy. It is not any kind of goal in life. It is only an intermediate step towards understanding, and eventually wisdom.
2) Insight feels better than wisdom or understanding. Insight feels like a profound change, a pivotal moment in your being when the world opens up a set of new possibilities. But when the 'insight' perspective is actually integrated into your being (ie understanding) and you are in a position to use it well (ie wisdom), it feels like nothing, because it is normal now. So much import is given to the possibility of change, none to the hard work of ongoing adaptation that brings the change into your being.
3) A moment of insight is hard to hold onto. It is an aberrant set of synaptic loops (an engram) which your brain structure isn't conditioned to accept. We need to get many moments of the same insight in order for it to stick, that is, in order for the engram to get strengthened. It is quite normal for a mind to test out thousands of observations and ideas at any given time subconsciously, and discard most of them as not-useful. That magnificent wash of 'insight' is simply a neurochemical bookmark for an idea: "Oh that might be handy, let's watch to see if we can use that again". And if you don't, no big deal, your brain will just re-wire any spare synapses to something more useful, eg flirting or looking for food.
4) When applied to other peoples' experience, insight can be a convenient proxy for empathy or inter-human understanding. Making statements like "That gives me an insight into what you might be experiencing" are much easier than if you actually allowed your sympathetic nervous system to feel the feelings that the other person's experience evokes. It's an intellectual rather than an empathic connection, and a very neat way to cut off the confronting conversation - leaving the other person feeling a bit more understood. But they're not understood. 'Insight' gets used to fob off the hard people and things to understand.

"The Only Option":
Don't tell me that anything is the only option. There are always other options. Always. They may not be good ones, or they may be much better ones hidden in plain sight. "The Only Option" is a way to keep me obedient. People who routinely see the other options are visionary, or from the other perspective too powerful and too dangerous. Just see:
Mahatma Ghandi (satyagraha), Mohammed Yunnus (microcredit), Nikita Kruschev (social, military & economic reforms within Russia plus a fabulous political tap-dance during the Cuban Missie Crisis).

But other options do not have to be big to be confrontational. Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls presented a nifty TED lecture about crowdfunding their albums, which she tried after she refused to take the 'only option' of signing with a record label. I am still looking for a link to back up this marvellous story that a reality TV show was made about bride kidnapping (with consent from all families), which, when screened around villages in central Africa (you get a lot of "oh somewhere in central Africa" when asking white people in mostly-white single-nation-continents like here) caused a crash in the cultural approval for, and incidence of, kidnap-marriages. I wish I could find it. It is such a clever idea to bring a personal experience of bride kidnapping into public scrutiny by making it reality TV.

If you're in a tight spot, are you really out of options? At any point, you can break off mid-sentence and start singing a Puccini aria or get up and dance to 'Campdown Races'. Sometimes this actually helps, like when I tried it with 3 kids under 5 in a long supermarket queue on a particularly hideous Easter Thursday evening. Possibly not so useful in the traffic queue for the police breathalyser after New Years Eve, if you're driving a bit drunk. Opera in an engineering meeting? Could work. Ever thought to try it?

The greater your decision-making responsibility, the more people there are with vested interests or fixed habits who would seek to convince you that the "only option is...", but paradoxically, the greater your financial resources, the greater your degrees of freedom.
Consider the following large-scale options. Some of these may not be palatable or executable for a number of reasons, but they are alternatives which exist. Stop illegal refugee boats arriving by setting up the Coast Guard to set up a discount ferry service for refugees - cheaper, more effective, more humane. Want to increase public transport use? Bulldoze key arterial roads, or else hire male and female models to be "railway hosts", serving beverages and offering headphones to passengers. Their mere presence will make people feel safe (hey, it worked for air travel....). Want to eliminate homelessness? Provide extensive shelters for short-term homeless and buy houses for long-term homeless. I am being glib, of course, but even glib options are options.
Here is the risk. Sweeping revolutionary changes have poor track record when executed as government or high-level organisational policy (Mao's GLF and Cultural Revolution are classic examples). Outside options have quite a good track record when developed and refined in small areas in context, by people who know the terrain. Examples include Bromley-By-Bow community entrepreneurship, or women holding sex strikes over a particularly important local issue, or even the September 11 2002 attack on the World Trade Centre.
Maybe we all have much broader degrees of freedom than we see when it comes to "other options".
But don't ever tell me that anything is my "only option". I might start singing opera at you.

Learning to draw

I could cry for places where weeds don't grow - but that doesn't mean I am encouraging weeds everywhere

I love weeds. They are the rebels of the plant world. I love their relentless tenacity, their live-fast die-young lifestyle, I even admire their "f- you" attitude to the rules about where
to grow, their disregard for the presence or absence of things like soil and nutrient, I am fascinated by their diversity of shapes, colours, textures, spikyness. But above all I love the complex insect and bird life systems that weeds bring.

My own lawn is small and messy. We have bindi. We do not plan to eradicate it. The TV series Gardening Australia has a forum on how to eradicate bindi. Check out the mutagenic sideaffects of the chemical solution proposed, MCPA. Urgh.
We also have tiny blue and orange flowering weeds which fascinate the children.
And dandelions and nasturtiums. I put them in salads.
Did you know how many edible weeds there are? Several of them are in my lawn.

Our city council is a bit slack in the mowing and poisoning department right now. Our nearby highway verge has nifty spiky little roadside weeds and idyllic meadows of golden dandelions on the nature strip, for kilometers. And the weedy, overgrown grass hums quite loudly, louder than the cars sometimes. Native bees harvest nectar and pollinate. Grass flies rise in clouds. Cicadas leave their brown husks on the grass stalks and sing and beat in stereo. Birds gorge themselves on insects in these weedy verges. And most magpie nests have managed to raise 2 or 3 chicks on the insect feast this spring.

A funny aside about the cicadas. One hot day, a week or so ago, I was with my two younger kids in a very cicada-noisy place, and we were having a blast collecting the dirty brown vacated shells from all the trees. I had a plan to spray-paint them silver to decorate the as-yet-unsolved Christmas tree problem.
I saw a tangle of waving green cicada-y legs at the base of a tree. "Hey kids, come and see a living cicada!" I shouted over the very noisy white noise. The kids trundled closer. I put my hand out and the gently waving legs grabbed it. (Cicadas don't bite in my area, although their feet have hooks and tickle a bit.) And out of the bark came.... the front half of a cicada. My middle son came out with "Oh look mummy, he has no bottom, what happened to his bottom? And is that dark stuff his blood coming out all over your hand?"
I had to explain that a bird found this fellow first and bit him in half, and ate up his bottom, and now he can't sing anymore. My youngest laughed and laughed, and kept saying "Bottom!" and pointing to mine, then the cicada, and then mine.
We put the half-cicada back on a tree, and in a few minutes found another one - a complete one this time - which obliged us by singing like a chainsaw on my hand. The kids didn't see when a crow hopped over to the previous cicada and crunched up the rest of it.
Later at the shopping centre, my middle son took delight in telling everyone he saw about the cicada that had its bottom bitten off by a bird. And my youngest would punctuate the story by pointing at my backside and saying "BOTTOM!". The lady at the deli and the butchers' apprentices thought it was hilarious. The passers-by on the street looked a bit bewildered.

So back to marvellous weeds.
Weeds grow almost anywhere and they grown fast. They flower fast, and keep flowering throughout a season, either on a single plant or in a few generations. They provide food for bees. Especially wild bees.
And bees are so very important to us.

Long grass provides home for grass flies and caterpillars and all kinds of small beetles and soil invertebrates.
These provide food for skinks and larger lizards and frogs.
My garden has skinks and larger lizards and frogs in it. Most gardens in my street do. There is an annoying cricket that makes popping sounds like a tin roof expanding in the heat, who lives near our chook shed and has been known to scare the b'jeezus out of me by suddenly singing on hot nights.
Our garden is alive and you can tell because it is noisy. The highway verges are alive and you can tell because they are noisy.
Have you listened to your garden? Have you got weeds? Is it noisy? Have you seen a lizard in it?

Or do you live in a weedless, skinkless moonscape which you must maintain with either herbicides and pesticides or an obsessive weeding regime? Are you a lawn person?

I just discovered this book and although it might be a little extreme, it has a point. It proposes that the ownership/leasing and maintenance of a property with a lawn change who you are.
That the pressure of a social expectation to keep turfgrass weeded and mowed and groomed and monocultured can actually cause individuals to use chemicals which they know their dogs and children have allergic reactions to, which they know contribute to the poisoning of the ecosystem and that means killing weeds and directly or indirectly also killing cicadas, bees, worms, lizards, frogs etc. That owning a lawn predisposes your brain to blindly trust Big Business and its marketing with everything, inclusing your safety. That maintaining a lawn well is symbolic of your virtue as a contributing, hardworking, properly behaving consumer, a good citizen in an increasingly anxious and prescriptive Americanised society. That within that society, a Nature Aesthetic is defined by uniformity and flatness; not function, resilience and diversity. That this prescriptive aesthetic can infect the rest of your life and make you crazy in your pursuit of order and symmetry, and intolerance of metaphorical weediness, in other parts of your life.

(Honestly. It's in the e-book. I've just summarised. They've jumped the shark. It's not me.)




At this point I want to point out that my love for weeds is not unconditional.
There are identified introduced plants which have growth habits that are highly destructive to aspects of the rest of the ecosystem.
The department of primary industries has a list of noxious weeds.

A large number of them, like star thistle, are classified as weeds because they compete with pasture grasses on marginal land, so they are noxious primarily from the perspective of the farmer and her ruminant animals. Fair enough. But I'm not totally convinced that they are evil. Many of these are great for bees and insects, they live fast and die young, and they tend not to thrive on good pasture anyway. Here was a very beautiful star thistle near my work.

A number of weeds are truly noxious. These have been helpfully marked "State Prohibited" in the list.

For example, Water hyacinth chokes waterways, killing off native plants, leaving no room for native fauna like fish or platypus, and encouraging mosquito larva.

Giant knotweed and Japanese knotweed cover creek beds and eliminate other vegetation. When the leaves die back over winter, the now-bare slope erodes.


Giraffe thorn is a large, extremely spiky, fast-spreading African tree species which is only really food for giraffes. It could be quite invasive here and we have no giraffes.

I do not love these kinds of weeds. There are others in the list which I do not live.


Nonetheless, I feel that the definition of 'weed' requires a social re-think. What is the designated weed actually harming? A suburb of lawn peoples' obsessive urge for symmetry and conformance - or can you identify measurable damage to the whole ecosystem? What might the weed actually be helping? Is it preventing erosion on marginal land, or causing it? Does it harbour and protect insect and animal life, or does it poison it?


Near my work, there was a fenced-off carpark and building site which had earth heaped up on it. Weeds had been growing there for two years. It hummed. I was pleased that whoever owned it had not built another glass and steel high-rise. And then, just as the flowering gums were growing buds, a bulldozer came and took away all 'my' weedy dirt.
I was pretty disappointed.
"Oh that's much better, it's so much neater," a colleague said to me, as we were looking down from the 7th storey glass wall of our corporate cube. That made me furious as well.

Now two weeks later, the architecturally sanctioned gumtrees are flowering and there are no bees. There is no sound.
There are tiny brown finch-type birds in the area. They were busy in the weed field, and I located one nest in the tree near my carpark. Yesterday there was a dead almost-fledged chick on the ground under the nest. I tried not to wonder if it had starved because the insects had gone. The adults are still around but they travel further each day. Maybe they are migratory, and would move on anyway.

Where there are no weeds, I guess life moves on.

The seasons, according to our family

From the shortest day of the year, we count the seasons like this:

• Getting Sick season, or Big Windy Storms Rolling In from the South season
• Navel Orange Season
• First Spring Flowers Season HOORAY!
• Mega Hayfever Season
• Nut Season, which is also Spring Lamb Season
• Queensland Strawberry Season
• Start of the Sailing Season HOORAY!
• Start of Victorian Strawberry Season
• Stone Fruit Season HOORAY!
• Christmas Party Season which is also Summer Bogun Season
• Christmas/New Year, or Commissioning Season #1
• Beach Picnic Season, which is also University Grant Season and Music Festival Season and Blackberry Season HOORAY!
• Fresh Apple Season, which is also Corn Season HOORAY!
• Easter, or Sacred Music Season, or Commissioning Season #2
• All the Summer Boguns Leave Us Alone Season
• Are there Mushrooms Yet? Season
• End of the Sailing Season
• Wild Mushroom Season HOORAY!
• Cold and Wet and Tired Season
• Travel to Somewhere Where it's Not Winter? Season

and back to the shortest day of the year.

It is funny when people ask my kids about the seasons and they reply "Corn season" or "Blackberry Season". But is this not a more interesting and intuitive way to count the season?

The moral dilemma of the Christmas tree

A tree can be a moral dilemma and worthy of quite a bit of discussion. I am crowdsourcing thoughts.


For Christmas, should we:

a) Go down to the Christmas tree farm and pick a live, healthy tree which is happily sequestering CO2 in the sunshine, then ask a strapping young local lad  gainfully employed at the farm to chainsaw the tree down , and then haul said tree carcasse home for a mere five weeks' decoration, watching it drop needles on the carpet and decompose, only to finally park its skeleton in a corner of the garden for months as a reminder of our shameful act, or else squeezing it into the green waste bin for the good folks at the council tip to dispose.

or

b) Get a plastic Christmas tree, made from either polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or polyethylene (PE), the former of which exudes surface and gaseous chlorine when heated as in a closed room on a scorching hot sommuers day, and the latter of which contains pthalates, chemicals which mimic the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen, and the long-term exposure effects of which are unknown but suspected to be quite negative. No, I don't like the smell of plastic trees.

or

c) Get a potted coniferate for about 4 times the price of a) or b), which would be knee-high for the first Christmas, and (working on the assumption that it does actually survive) a respectable Christmas tree size for the next 3 to 5 years, after that would require a permanent, towering spot in my otherwise-native-treed garden while we source a knee-high successor. I have seen the gardens of those who believe in live Christmas trees. They generally have a comically stepped row of old Christmas trees up behind the old shed. The people in the picture have clearly only been living there for 8 years. Another decade or two and they will have a windbreak.

or

d) Not get a Christmas tree. Bah. Humbug.

Your thoughts?

ETA
D has suggested a wire tree. I love it. Attractive, postmodern, pthalate-free and broadly speaking sustainable.

Malleability, and Tibetan-Buddhist engineering

I wandered further in my reading and connected another fragment to this idea.

In my travels, I got to thinking about malleability. Much of the world which we perceive as fixed is actually highly malleable, in the right circumstances, with the right heavy machinery or scalpel and bone saw, and with a little bit of know-how. Unless you are in a profession which directly causes a particular kind of change, you are unlikely to notice it and you are likely to assume that whatever-it-is is fixed.

When I was a wet-behind-the-ears new graduate engineer, and spending a lot of energy dealing on being one of about 3 women on a worksite of several hundred men, I had the good fortune to be supervised and mentored by a guy called Craig. He was just the right combination of expert on everything rail-related, patient and attentive teacher, and curious friendly human being.
There was a track machine running during the commissioning, it looked a bit like this. It was huge and floodlit and it trundled back and forth on track. Craig knew the driver. (Craig knew everybody.) We got to climb up in the cabin and have a ride.


The "business" end of the tamper machine is in the middle. It reminded me a little of the maw of the Alien Queen, with all those toothy bits and hanging cables.

This is what the tamping machine does:

• Two claws pick up the track like spaghetti strands.
•  The four-clawed maw then pokes coarse gravel (known as ballast) down between the sleepers - which are still attached to the rail, they've been hoisted up too.
• By doing this the machine can raise the track by up to 30cm in a single pass. 
• It moves 1.5m down the track and repeats the process. 
• It can move the track left and right too, to straighten out kinks. 
• It has laser levels and all kinds of straight line sensors to do this.

There are three men in the control box, one driver, one tamper, one supervisor. I thought it would be an interesting job. Craig replied: "No, it sucks. It's bloody boring. And really noisy. These guys are good because they're all a bit obsessive. They just really like getting the track absolutely straight and level. You need a particular kind of mind to work the tamper."

It took a couple of hours for my perception of the railway to readjust. I mean, I did realise that we were constructing a new rail junction. I could cope with a new building project. But once it was built, it had not occurred to me that a railway line was still malleable. That you could get a machine and hoik the whole thing two feet to the left and up a bit in a couple of passes. Craig then told me that heat expansion is a real problem, and that to prepare for summer, the civil team stretches out the rail and then cuts out a couple of metres every km, welding the ends back together. At the start of winter, they weld the cut sections back in again. So if you're ever looking out a train window in summer and you see a couple of metres of rail sitting out trackside, it's not thrown away or forgotten, it will get welded back in later. These days, I think of a railway as malleable, flexible, stretchy string-lines rather than fixed immutable permanent infrastructure.

People with limited experience of earthworks or building projects vaguely assume that the terrain is fixed, and that building structures are solid and immovable. When they see large-scale earthworks or even some renovating acquaintance knocking out an internal wall, it jars for a while until they readjust to the new landscape, and then it's 'how it always was'. The driver of the giant excavator has a surveyor to tell him where and how to dig, and measurement equipment to tell him when to stop. With the right tools, any quantity of earth can be dug, it's only a matter of planning it, persisting, and having the right mind to prevent the task being boring.

A friend's father had a hip replacement last year. He described the procedure and it sounded really quite creepy and a bit extreme. Bone saws and a modified eggbeater for the socket, and he was aware of the procedure because he had it done under spinal anaesthetic and heavy sedation. When I see him these days, my brain forgets very quickly that he ever had the surgery, that the socket and ball are now ceramic and are all set to give some archaeologist a hell of a shock in a thousand years time. But for the orthopedic surgeon, a bone hip joint is not fixed, it is quite malleable. I looked up "hip replacement surgery" on Youtube (despite my rant on Expertosis) and just like the tamping machine and the guy driving the big excavator, the surgeon has equipment which provides levels and reference points and straight lines to follow. I wondered if other medical specialists look sidelong at orthopedic surgeons and mutter "Bloody boring work. Twelve hips a day, it's like being a car mechanic. But clearly he's got the right mind for it."


So on to this matter of perception of malleability.

Kahneman (in Thinking Fast & Slow, still one of my favourite books) and Tversky identified the mental shortcut (heuristic) of "What You See Is All There Is". By default, our minds exclude anything outside the present, the recent past, and a future with very limited change from the present. This influences our decision making enormously - it's why it's so hard to stretch your paycheck for the end of the month, or buy only the groceries you need when you're shopping hungry. As to the world around us, individuals often have this silly idea of things being fixed, where there is so much more malleability in systems. And as a species, we are getting very good at coordinating to change just about anything, by developing specialists to deal with small areas of malleability and wrapping their brains around it, developing tools, following straight lines and laser levels, and turning the utterly revolutionary mind-blowing power of massive change into a relatively boring, routine job.

Another established mental heuristic is the distinction between "being" and "doing". What parts of what you do are intrinsic to your being, and what are just transitory behaviours? In general, we assume a lot more is fixed, where in reality our choices are so context-driven, we are fabulously malleable, and in particular self-malleable just by changing the context.
I have spent most of the last year experimenting on this at my work. The prevailing negative language in the office, especially when managers talk about people, was the "being", fixed, intrinsic language. "He's not smart enough for that problem." ... "The project leadership team is crap." ... "That department is incapable of meeting a deadline." ... "Whoever wrote this document is an idiot." ... etc. There was a perception that the culture was fixed, and a very strong "What You See Is All There Is" habit of persisting with technical and cultural approaches that had never ever worked.

I had come across the idea in my reading (which I would reference here if I could remember where) that fixed-language descriptors inhibit an individual's capacity to change.
I figured my team would be happier if they were not crap/incapable/idiot etc. I had to find a way to frame it as malleable.
So a year ago, I set about shielding them from the worst of this language, and constantly trying to reframe the "being" into "doing" ("... yeah, we did do a bit of a rubbish job on that site, didn't we... well we need to work out what to do about it now."). I maneuvered into a spot where my job was to focus persistently and deliberately on what we do, rather than what we are. In due course, I 'became the expert' on project process and continuous improvement. (I'm a bit stuck with intrinsic language there!)
And the language was malleable. While we are still struggling with deadlines and rework from projects where the contract finished years before, the big projects from the last year have unfolded so smoothly our head of engineering cannot believe the change. We have gone from 50 commissioning logs being a good result, to 5 logs being a substandard result. We have had to rework all our bidding metrics because the labour costs have shrunk - and shifted to earlier design phases. Staff turnover has reduced, staff mood has improved enormously.
The change has been noticed around the company. Maybe I am enjoying being a little bit smug.

I found a book about the Tibetan buddhist practice of Mahamudra, which requires rather a lot of reflection on the impermenance of your self and of the world, meditating on time and death and :

"In Buddhist logic it is said that all concepts are based on exclusion. As soon as we affirm something by saying, 'It is this', we automatically exclude so many other possible identifications, or things that might have been. By imposing a conceptual limitation, we create or fabricate an idea..."

"Wisdom will only arise if we realise that the things we take to be real and substantial are not real and substantial at all. All of our negative views and habits come from failing to understand how things really are and concentrating instead on how they appear... This fiction gives rise to the belief in our psychophysical constituents as a 'self' and to the misapprehension of objects... as real and substantial... If we want to put an end to the dissatisfaction of samsara [the suffering of being alive and unenlightened], we have to put an end to our delusions..." 

I like the thought of doing Tibetan-Buddhist engineering; teaching others about the misapprehension of self, and releasing them from suffering by helping them embrace the impermanent and malleable nature of the project environment and the corporate culture. I don't think the negative-language managers or some of my more literal, technically focused colleagues would take this kind of talk particularly well. If I run the experiment, I will post on it.....


There might be another post brewing about malleability - it is a potentially powerful idea which I need to roll around a bit more in my head- but it is not tonight. I need to be kind to my precious human body, and take it off to sleep.

Hair, and our War against it

I've been quite sick recently. I am convalescing. I have been noticing how important my hair is in my perception of how I am doing. On a good day, I brush my hair and plait it up and feel a little stronger. On a bad day, I can't control how it falls around my eyes, lustreless and sad. Maybe I noticed this because I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell's compilation of articles "What the Dog Saw", and there was a nice one called "True Colors: Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America". It's also about the revolution of marketing specifically to women. Apparently Clairol blondes are the girl-next-door home-grown apple-pie American teens & young women, and L'Oreal blondes are sassy, powerful, older women who choose the more expensive brand for themselves ("Because I'm Worth It").

I have never been a blonde. I don't think I could do it. I could not tolerate how blondes are portrayed and differentially treated. But I very much liked the underlying observation in his article.

A person's identity and social position - especially a woman's - is very caught-up in her hair: colour, length, style of cut or treatment, type of care; and the layers of meaning embedded therein. Blondes, for example, are well studied. Gladwell references a guy called Grant McCracken and his "Blondeness Periodic Table", which pegs six different images for bottle-blonde women:

The Bombshell, eg Marylin Monroe or Pamela Anderson
The Sunny Blonde, eg Goldie Hawn or Cameron Diaz
The Brassy Blonde, eg. Sarah-Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The Society Blonde, eg. Paris Hilton or Kiera Knightly
The Dangerous Blonde, eg. Sharon Stone or Meryl Streep
The Cool Blonde, eg.Patricia Arquette or Cate Blanchett

Caucasian brunettes and redheads also carry layers of meaning - and I am sure if I find Grant's book there will be some mention of them. But clearly we are more invisible than blondes. Brunettes are permitted - and perceived to carry - more authority and capability than blondes, and redheads are almost expected to have a temper.
In Asia,where hair is almost always black and straight to Caucasian eyes, there are actually clear distinctions between hair in terms of the shade and lustre (blue-black, red-black, purple-black, green-black, silver-black etc.) as emphasised in female Anime characters. Additionally, the choice of style is critical: sleek, straight, untied long hair is a youthful trait, a low-maintenance short cut is a sign of practicality and good sense.
I have insufficient information on African-American haridos, so if anyone who knows would like to post a comment, please do!

I notice cross-cultural congruences, though. Around the world, obvious chemical treatment can be the sign of a tart, whether it is bleaching red streaks into a young HK-Chinese woman's otherwise long straight locks, or a frizzy boofy middle-aged perm. Around the world, haircuts mostly get shorter as women get older, as a nod to practicality and also acknowledging the gradual slide towards the androgeny of old age (old men and old women are hormonally and neurochemically extremely similar). A haircut can also signify a life change: let go of an ex, then cut your hair short or dye it a completely different colour. Across many disparate places and times, short hair on a woman has been a sign of mourning, or a new start.

But hair is not just head-hair (although this gentleman clearly likes his very much!). Hair is eyebrows, eyelashes, facial hair, noticeable body and pubic hair that men and women often try to remove, the downy invisible hairs all over our bodies that prickle in the cold or a scary movie. Human hair has evolved with our species over millions of years to be mostly-bare in some spots, and to grow unregulated on our heads, and to be a naturally self-regulating length in other areas.






And yet, in this late-20th and early-21st century, women are at war with their hair.
Again.
Some proportion of the population was at war with hair during most of the great empires of history. This page has a nifty summary - although I haven't cross-checked each one - but the short version is, Society people of both genders from the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Moghul, Manchu and Qing Chinese, Victorian British and modern American empires insisted on extensive or complete hair removal. Heads were shaved in order to wear wigs on them, or in order to be shiny and bald. Eyebrows, body hair, pubic hair, leg hair - these have been the Enemy for a long long time.

There were of course exceptions.
Roman Emperor Hadrian is famous for quite liking Greek statues with beards, and growing a beard himself, turning the established Roman fashions upside-down.
Where the Qing dynasty had an edict of shaving mens' heads but leaving a queue, rebellions were extensive and bloody. Truly a gurerrilla war over hair. Also, Google indicates that Incan hair-removal was probably not a particularly important custom, which is handy because that's how archaeologists have worked out the extent to which child sacrifices were drugged.







But body hair is useful. It reduces chafing when you work at repeated physical tasks (hoeing a field, running after a bison etc).
It absorbs sweat and stops it beading on the skin. This ad would not be able to create a problem if such women weren't so inexplicably keen on removing their pubic hair. 

Body hair keeps you warm - to a surprising extent.
It repels dirt. Eyebrows also direct rainwater, snow and sleet off the forehead to the sides, away from your eyes.
Beards and moustaches warm the face and inhaled air.
Body hair can be a good instant indicator of age - particularly the beard-fuzz of a boy at the end of adolescence growing into a proper man's beard, and older adults going grey.
Body hair can also indicate something about  hormonal health: thyroid conditions and certain gynecological issues such as PCOS can cause masculine pattern body hair growth; anorexia and other eating disorders can cause hormonal disruptions that trigger long fine downy hair all over the face and body.

So why do we go to war against hair? My theory connects two pieces of established thought.

1) Humans are still primates. We have evolved from a group of animals where every single species has a complex social structure which is maintained through grooming. and every single one of us - whether rhesus monkey or Romanian orphan - has a psychological need for physical contact and touch. Without loving contact as children, our brains simply don't grow - the orbital frontal gyrus, prefrontal cortex, and the deep brain (amygdala, hippocampus, brain stem) are all compromised in size and function. Such individuals can't regulate their emotions, they can't interact 'normally' with others in their species, and they can't manage the tasks of finding a mate and parenting young. A grooming culture is actually a critical neurological prerequesite for reliable transfer of the genetic material of the individual to the next generation. When a primate colony's food supply is good, much of the spare time is spent grooming. So the condition of a troupe's hair may indicate to others the prosperity of that troupe.

2) Modern humans have lots of spare time (defined by waking time not directly occupied with the business of survival). An archaeologist friend of mine has a (not explicitly published) theory that spare capacity in a society is turned to "goofy stuff", ie the development of culture and custom. Goofy stuff can be construction (like the Easter Island statues or the Mayan plaster-coated temples which deforested their lands and caused micro-climate-change, contributing to the fall of their empire), the development and refinement of art and music, and these days Hollywood blockbusters and Pomeranian shows and kinder coffee mornings and writing blog posts are all clearly goofy things to put resources into.
Considering this in the context of the War on Hair, a large proportion of culture and custom is devoted to grooming and socialisation (the fashion industry, fitness industry, and aforementioned coffee morning, for example). But another proportion is devoted to establishing and maintaining social hierarchy in terms of acquiring posessions, and grooming those posessions as a simulacrum for self-grooming and allogrooming (grooming other people). This is what the consumer culture hinges on: using our "extra spare time", above and beyond our primate cousins' "grooming spare time", to shop for objects that make our house look better ('grooming' the house) or working overtime to save up for a renovation (more house 'grooming'), or cleaning and washing things that our primate cousins wouldn't bother with, like dishes and underpants. And this self-pride and house-pride is actually a social indicator of good mental health too: if you let your dishes stack up and don't wash your undies, you're one shopping-trolley away from being the batty old bag lady who talks to herself.


So don't go to war with your own hair. That's just goofy. It hurts, and hair has some very practical uses.
Don't go to war with the war on hair either. The war has been running for at least 4,000 years. And if you win a skirmish, and encourage a community to be comfortable with their natural body hair, another type of grooming will bubble up to fill the spare "grooming time". For example, the twirling of dreadlocks. (Hi, happy dancing lady with the hairy armpits and dreadlocks.)


I think we should all return to the original purpose of primate 'grooming time': human touch. Give your partner a massage. Rumble with your sons or go play your local type of football with your friends. Have a hot shower then get yourself a ludicrously soft towel. Race on the grass barefoot. Stand in a shopping mall next to a sign that says "Free Hugs". Use touch to look after your brain.