jumpingfish

Trees I Have Known

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:29:07 GMT

A tree fell yesterday. I heard it the night before, cracking as I walked around the yard.

I looked up, hoping to jump out of the way of whatever was about to come down, then I realized that the sound had come from across the street. Yet there was no evidence of anything. Until the next day. Yesterday half an elm lay on the ground, a great gash left in the canopy where it had split off.

I don't know why I tell you this. There are plenty of trees where you are, I am sure, and that tree holds no real significance for you. But...

But there is another tree I want to talk about -- a little Chinquapin we planted across the street a year and a half ago when Bobby moved out of the rental house.

Bobby and Bill and I cut a hole in the dying canopy of the two Ash trees in the yard of that house and let a splash of sunshine fall on the ground. And I dug a hole there and planted a little Chinquapin -- for when the Ash trees are gone.

That was a more than a year ago. And I've been walking across the street with a pail of water every couple days ever since. And sometimes some fish emulsion. Which made the tree very happy. Big glossy green Chinquapin leaves.

Bobby moved away. The next family came and went. The rental house sat empty again. A man came and repaired the tattered garage door. Another man came and pressure washed the mildewed stone walls. Another came and mowed the lawn.

"I have some bad news," Trudy told me as I sat in my hotel room looking at her grim face on my computer screen. I steeled myself but couldn't imagine what it might be. "The Chinquapin is gone," she said.

I woke up that night alone in a musty hotel room, sobbing.

The Chinquapin is gone. Only a ragged hole remains where is was yanked out by the roots from that little sunny spot. A ragged screaming hole in a sunny spot under a blue summer sky. The Chinquapin is gone.

It Got Too Late

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 04:39:17 GMT

A story in two parts:

1. A Noontime Read

I went to lunch with one of those books the other day. One of those books that I pull off the shelf and put on my piles that accrete beside my bed and loom over me nightly. One of those books that I bought years ago because the title caught my eye. And because I liked the production values—the typeface they chose, the neat and simple diagrams, the width of the margins.

What Is Distance? was the title, and it was thin enough to qualify as I looked for a book to take in my backpack on my bike on my daily trek to some lunch time place not too far away. And what I found in that simple, little book was amazing.

Mind you, I've been dabbling in math books for years, guilty as I feel that I never quite mastered the deeper truths, shamed that all that time in grad school was never quite sufficient to make me competent in any significant sense. In real analysis I came close once, but topology and algebra and functional analysis stayed outside my reach although tantalizingly within view at times. And these unmastered subjects call to me from the bookshelves behind my back each day as I sit here typing at the keyboard. And they spoke to me from that little book.

For as I read that book today eating a juicy hamburger (without a pang of guilt, I might add, for I bravely passed on the fries which at times can out-call even a good wide-margined book), I read the chapter on metric spaces in which a simple definition was given and a related theorem proven in such clear language that there sitting in the middle of the restaurant with a glass of tea in my left hand and a hamburger in my right and that glorious little book sitting on the table before me, those epsilons and deltas of calculus finally lost their mystery, and it all finally made sense.

There in that hamburger joint, in my sweat-stained T-shirt (for that little bike ride is no mean feat in the hundred degree days of this 2008 summer) with a satiated look on my face, my long-felt calculus guilt was gone. It was gone because of those simple diagrams and that wonderful typeface and those straight forward words in that little book that I bought many years ago. The gaps were finally full.

But that isn't what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about was what happened as a result of that noontime read.

2. A Math Lesson

So it struck me some time later that the boy is taking calculus this fall. And it struck me that those epsilons and those deltas are hiding around the corner from him, waiting to pull on him what they pulled on me, waiting to burden him with at best a partial understanding and more likely a lifetime of suppressed guilt. And it struck me that we hadn't had a math lecture in a while.

Ok, it is summer, and he did just fine in his math class last year. And who lectures their kid on math in the summer when there's no reason to, anyway?

Well, um, we had a bit of an interesting conversation this evening over pizza in which I talked about the conclusions of the Columbia investigation board (actually the Diaz Report (pdf), but I digress) and about the need it revealed for credibility analysis to accompany simulations when decisions need to be made based on the simulated results. And I related that to the need, in general, for clear communication between people and how the inability to judge a speaker's credibility because they don't explain things well or because they don't supply enough evidence for their conclusions (or at least hint that such evidence exists) can lead to communications breakdowns at best and consequential catastrophes equivalent (in some sense) to the Columbia disaster at worst.

We talked about that over pizza. It's not a math lecture ... but then that's kind of picking nits, isn't it?

So the lecturing part wasn't new. He gets it periodically—mostly when I've been adequately caffeinated, which I certainly was in this case. And he's heard me talk about the fundamentals of math before, too. So I figured that even though it is summer (for a little while longer, anyway) that I'd give him a little lecture on math, on how they live in the world of abstractions, on how they weave great tapestries from little axiomatic threads. And I figured I'd top it all off by sharing that little bit from that little chapter on metric spaces in that little book that I read over lunch. A little head start on calculus.

He was on the phone. I was in the dining room with pencil and paper and a couple books for reference. (I can't do it on my own, man, even though those gaps have been filled.)

He chatted. I wrote. He chatted some more. Page 1 became page 5. More chatting and wandering around the house. More pages. And with page 11, I was finished.

"Ok," I said, "I'm ready!"

I had announced at dinner over pizza that I wanted to have a little math talk in the evening. But I knew it needed to be early, because we'd been thru late night math talks before, and I knew how that could go.

"I'm ready for the math talk," I said, and I looked up at him sitting in the chair in the living room.

Silence. There was silence in the house. Indeed, it had been quiet it seems for some time. His call had ended, and as I replay it in my head, I vaguely hear him playing with the dog and then all goes silent. He was sitting there in the comfy chair motionless with his head slumped down.

"Dang," I said audibly.

It got too late.

They Know It

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:38:52 GMT

Nations don't invade nations in the 21st century, we are told. Shame on the Russians. ...as they march to the oil ports on the Black Sea.

This is not 1968, we are told. They can't just invade a country, occupy a capital and overthrow a government like they used to. ...as their tanks roll thru Gori and turn toward Tbilisi.

...

By our actions, our words have lost their moral gravity. There is nothing we can do. There is no one listening to what we say. And they know it.

Books In Progress

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 04:56:49 GMT

So there are these books sitting beside my chair in the living room, and what they say about their reader is not pretty.

Economics Explained by Heilbroner and Thurow.

HTTP Essentials, an old book judged by Internet-time that in my humble opinion is so well written unlike most computer drivel that it deserves to be held as a standard but sadly won't, because after all who cares if it's readable.

Restful Web Services, which probably goes into a little too much detail on a mapping service but is really the only reference out there for this sort of thing.

What Colleges Don't Tell You, a book the reveals where I am right now in my parenting adventure.

Intellectual Property and Open Source, the book I've been looking for for a long time—it uses regular expressions as a metaphor for understanding certain parts of the patent process!

And On the Shoulders of Giants, a collection of five never-read classics by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and Einstein, edited with commentary by Stephen Hawking—how's that for an author list!?

The problem is that I'm on the edge of my seat with them one moment (Copernicus just a while ago—what a great dedication!) and the next moment I find myself at the shelves pulling yet another book down.

Five in progress. Five unfinished. So many more teetering on my bedside table and look at this pile in the bathroom:

Theory of Oscillators by Andronov, Vitt and Khaikin, The Key to Newton's Dynamics by Brackenridge, Classical Mechanics of Particles and Rigid Bodies by Gupta, Gyrodynamics by Arnold and Maunder, Lies My Teacher Told Me by Loewen, and Gravity by Gamow.

So many bookmarks, so little time.

Wait, I need to put Gravity back on the shelf. I actually finished that one!

This Life

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:06:38 GMT

It was Friday. The dog and I were finishing a short run around the lake. And even though the sun was low, it was still brutally hot, so we weren't exactly a pretty sight to see.

When we got there, you were there sitting in the shade on a rock under a tree waiting for us. And you suggested a place for dinner, which was a good thing, for the dog and I were in no condition to make decisions.

When we got there, the restaurant was empty. We had the pick of tables on the patio. And as we waited for our food, nighttime descended.

A flame burned from the top of the fountain next to the table. You read the paper. The dog crunched on ice cubes. I guzzled iced tea. And after the food arrived, I looked up and confessed that that was the best meal I had had in a long, long time.

Afterwards we just sat there as the world walked by on the sidewalk and drove by on bikes and in cars. You continued reading. The dog continued crunching. And I put my feet up and leaned back.

What did we talk about? I barely was there, so happy was I to be sitting with my feet up having eaten that wonderful meal and rehydrated myself with three glasses of tea. What did we talk about? We were there for a long time, and I remember us talking, but I'll be darned if I can remember a thing.

I do remember this: as we walked back to the car holding hands with the dog pulling on his leash (because perhaps he knew that his meal awaited him at home), you looked over at me and said, "I'm very happy with our life."

Me, too. I'm happy with this life we have made, you, the dog and me.

Diagrams

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:55:06 GMT

"Are you sitting down?" he asked.

He told me to sit down. But I was already seated. I sit all day for a living. So I told him to go ahead. And he started to talk about the diagrams I had drawn.

Arrows go here. Arrows go there. But this one should be different. And that one doesn't really matter. And you can draw this one if you want, but we're not going to do that any time soon.

That's why he wanted me seated. They wouldn't be doing quite what my diagram suggested.

I work as a systems engineer. We do early integration to mitigate future risk. And it seems that my role lately has been to draw these diagrams with colored arrows showing data flows and dotted lines showing boundaries and boxes within boxes showing the details of this or that.

But he didn't need to tell me to sit down. I don't care about the pictures themselves. What I do care about is that people look at them and poke at them and maybe even scrunch up their faces at what they see. And his news confirmed that the diagrams had served their purpose. Brains were engaging in ways that they had not before.

So we'll stop and talk and figure out what we need to do. I'll update the diagrams. And then maybe someone else will give me a call.

Toads!?

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 04:41:05 GMT

Toads?

Yes, and let me tell you about the two that live under the manhole next to the cutoff valve for the water.

It's almost midnight. Your wife has been in bed for hours. Toads! Have you no sense of decency!?

It's not just the toads. Have I told you about the hummingbird? And the bees that have come with the flowers that followed that rain we had a couple weeks ago? And...

Dear god, man.

Wondering About Toads

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 04:30:23 GMT

I wonder how it decides to come out at night, that toad that we found in the street several months ago and invited to come stay with us.

There's a shallow pan of water next to a low stack of logs between the Hummingbird Bush and Silver Germander, and we've seen the toad soaking there on occasion in the evening. But usually when I go out to look, the toad's not there. And it's not there tonite, although the pan is full.

It was hot today, and it still is, even though the sun's been down for hours. If I were that toad tonite and I had to choose between the logs or the water, I'd choose the water. But I don't need to state the obvious.

Maybe I should go check again.