Quiet: A Review

"Quiet" is a book by Susan Cain whose full title tells the story: "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking." It is an interestingly structured book--one can almost see the note cards piling up and being ordered as the research proceeded--that traces the history of scientific thought about our introverted and extroverted personae, applies some of these observations to modern life and then theorizes about the future, hinting at value judgments.

She starts with Jung's binary--inner thoughts and feelings vs. people and activity-- then progresses to high reactive personality and low reactive personalities (where the inner, thoughtful individual is highly reactive, the low reactive extroverted) to sensitive vs. insensitive and ends with postmodern man where social life is a performance with masks. In all of these stations she tries to explain the concepts that distinguish the introvert and extrovert at the time.

She spends some time on three good modern examples of extroverts in business, religion and education. The business model is the Tony Robbins sales program which tries to teach confidence and interaction. The Saddleback Church emphasizes the active, non-contemplative life. In the final educational example, Harvard Business School gives her a chance to mix education with business. Here she spends some time with the program's approach that is guided by the current understanding of the predictors of success: Sociability and verbal fluency.

In the final section she comes to some soft conclusions about business, government and education. She claims ­extroverts helped bring us the bank meltdown of 2008 as well as disasters like Enron. Cain writes we must create “a greater balance of power” between those who rush to speak and do and those who sit back and think. Introverts she says reassuringly are “relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame” — and all of us must learn to “embrace the power of quiet.” Education too.

Generally I avoid books that give me tests, sound like a Janice Ian song or  verge into self-help. This book started comparing the last centuries as the Age of Character and the modern age as the Age of Personality. This I thought might be interesting. Our emphasis on personal reward, immediate gratification, our apparent superficial thinking and especially our seeing reward in celebrity could serve as an interesting counterpoint to the Age of Character. Unfortunately it was not to be. The tiny stream of introvert gradually took on more and more characteristics until it became a river of broad qualities, spilling into generalities and flooding everywhere like an astrology chart. It became a compilation of things everyone will recognize but really doesn't mean much.

Wallace's Childhood Poem

David Foster Wallace was a writer of gigantic interest, energy and appetite in the manner of Pynchon. His best known work was the 1996 novel, “Infinite Jest.” He was a brilliant, sad man. He wrote this poem about Vikings when he was six or seven:

Vikings oh! They were so strong
Though there warriors won’t live so long.
For a long time they rode the stormy seas.
Whether there was a great big storm or a little breeze.
There ships were made of real strong wood
As every good ship really should.
If you were to see a Viking today
It’s best you go some other way.
Because they’d kill you very well
And all your gold they’ll certainly sell
For all these reasons stay away
From a Viking every day.

Sunday Sermon 3/16/14

Today's gospel is Matthew's version of The Transfiguration. Christ and His visitors become dazzling with an inner, radiating light. There is a revelation aspect here where Christ's human quality falls away and the divine "shines through."
We have always had great respect for light. In Genesis, right after the creation of the formless heaven and earth, light displaces the dark. Even Lucifer (appearing only once in the Old Testament) means "the morning star" or "light-bringer."
The architect Wren, on deciding to avoid stained glass windows in his churches, said ""Nothing can add beauty to light." Edison's first commercial electric light system was installed on Pearl Street in the financial district of Lower Manhattan in 1882.
Before that, the world was lit only by fire.

The World 

by Henry Vaughan

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

       All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

       Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

       And all her train were hurl’d.

The doting lover in his quaintest strain

       Did there complain;

Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,

       Wit’s sour delights,

With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,

       Yet his dear treasure

All scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour

       Upon a flow’r.

The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,

Like a thick midnight-fog mov’d there so slow,

       He did not stay, nor go;

Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl

       Upon his soul,

And clouds of crying witnesses without

       Pursued him with one shout.

Yet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found,

       Work’d under ground,

Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see

       That policy;

Churches and altars fed him; perjuries

       Were gnats and flies;

It rain’d about him blood and tears, but he

       Drank them as free.

The fearful miser on a heap of rust

Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust

       His own hands with the dust,

Yet would not place one piece above, but lives

       In fear of thieves;

Thousands there were as frantic as himself,

       And hugg’d each one his pelf;

The downright epicure plac’d heav’n in sense,

       And scorn’d pretence,

While others, slipp’d into a wide excess,

       Said little less;

The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,

       Who think them brave;

And poor despised Truth sate counting by

       Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,

And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;

       But most would use no wing.

O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night

       Before true light,

To live in grots and caves, and hate the day

       Because it shews the way,

The way, which from this dead and dark abode

       Leads up to God,

A way where you might tread the sun, and be

       More bright than he.

But as I did their madness so discuss

       One whisper’d thus,

“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,

       But for his bride.”

Cab Thoughts 3/15/14

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'--E. L. Doctorow 

 

 

Gallup in December had 72% of those polled saying big government is a bigger threat to the future than big business and big labor—a record high.

 

Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder, was testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight. He said, "There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years." 

 

The United States has always been a republic. Federalism was the basic concept that drove the creation of the United States.The framers feared a true democracy as much as a royal tyranny; up until 1913 senators were elected indirectly, largely by state legislators, and the president, indirectly, by the electoral college. Direct democratic input--to balance the indirect Senate--was assigned to the House of Representatives.

 

Who is....Horatio Gates and the Conway Cabal? (hint: not a garage band)

 

On MOOCs: On Coursera, the average student retention rate is just four percent. No more than 51 percent of students passed Udacity’s online math program offered at San Jose State University. And according to a study released in May 2013, the average MOOC completion rate was just 6.8 percent, and the six most-completed courses relied on automatic testing, not peer review grading.

 

Audi, Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW "have announced their decision to push for the rapid implementation of 48-volt systems".  Ford, Land Rover, Jaguar, are "exploring the technology". "A huge potential market is possible because of pending global CO2 emission targets that are all converging. Simply put, the auto industry has about a decade to achieve another 30% reduction by 2022."---From an Autoinformed article on the SAE World Congress in April in Detroit.

 

The Spanish bombings at the Atocha train station occurred ten years ago.

 

This Lois Lerner problem is bewildering. She is accused of some serious stuff and there seems to be a suffocating disinterest in resolving the questions. Here an important member of the IRS, a powerful organization, has taken the Fifth and refuses to talk about her involvement in targeting American citizens and nobody seems interested. Recently it has been shown that former acting IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel, in an investigation aimed at explaining the IRS' motives during this problem,  found no intentional wrongdoing and no political motivations behind the agency’s targeting efforts yet never interviewed Lerner during the review process.

 

At a Hong Kong auction by Christie’s International, a winning bid of $474,000 for a case of 1978 Romanee-Conti by a Chinese buyer set a new auction record, far surpassing the previous case record of $345,000.

 

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/08/hold-your-peace.html

 

Records show that, when entertaining the queen in 1577, Lord North ordered 3,996 gallons of beer and 384 gallons of ale. The daily allowance for a man --servant or nobleman -- in many large houses at the time was a gallon of beer.

 

Kim has been reelected in North Korea. Unanimously. Ah, consensus.

 

 From MRI studies of 90 students University College London scientists were able to predict which of those individuals was more likely to be a liberal or a conservative. (Those designations were self-assigned.) The more conservative students had a larger right amygdala; greater liberalism, on the other hand, was associated with a larger anterior cingulate. We are dangerously close to becoming really crazy.

 

70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.

Music: n. The harmonious and rhythmic arraignments of sound. The word is derived from the Muses, goddesses of the arts and sciences.

 

In 1933 the Great Depression was in its fourth year. One in four working Americans -- ten million people -- had no job and no prospects of finding one, and only a quarter of them were receiving any kind of relief. Industrial production had fallen by half in those four years. At least one million, and perhaps as many as two million, were homeless.

 

The venous system communicates with the arterial system through the lung, where the blood is oxygenized. Any other communication mixes venous blood with arterial and is called a fistula. Several such communications occur as residuals of cardiac development, the commonest being patent foramen ovale and atrial septal defect. The former have been found on autopsy in up to 35% of the healthy population. This communication allows for a clot traveling in the venous system to cross into the arterial system and cause an infarct, a small area of tissue which has its blood supply cut off. Such embolisms are usually trapped in the lung. Because it is in the arterial system, such an embolism is called "paradoxical." Embolectomy and closure of an intracardiac communication (eg, a patent foramen ovale [PFO] or an atrial septal defect [ASD]) are the surgical treatments of choice. This is the likely problem with Chris Letang but, as the defect is so common, it will be presumptive, not certain. The next question is whether to repair his heart defect.

Another interesting question is, if this was a paradoxical embolism, how common is venous thrombosis (a clot in the vein which can move to become an embolism) in these men with violent sports.

 

We are terrified of the NSA, which ca n see everything. The satellites can read my license plate. But we do not have any idea where a plane half the size of a football field is? The Malaysian behavior has been particularly creepy. It is much more likely that these nations do not want to reveal the extent of their abilities.

 

In April, 1841, U.S. president William Henry Harrison died in office of pneumonia after serving only thirty-two days as President. The situation had never been faced before. How was the President to be replaced? The Constitution was vague: Was the Vice-President to be President or "Acting President?" The Vice-President, Henry Tyler, was not a particularly popular man--seen as a Virginia slaver by the North--but behaved more forthright than expected. He addressed Harrison's cabinet, announced himself as President and Webster suggested giving him the oath of office.

 

 

AAAAAAaaaaaaannnnnnnddddd.....a picture of North Korea at night. Look hard:

Making Chili: A Fable

A young woman wants to make chili for dinner. She follows a well regarded recipe and when she tastes it says she wishes there were jalapeños in it. When questioned as to why she did not add the jalapeños she replied the recipe did not allow for it.

Moral: The meal is made by the cook, not the recipe.

Ducks and Fireflies

This is "The Duck Curve" showing demand made on the energy grid over the day extrapolated out over years. It is a great worry to managers, politicians and business people (but not voters yet) as it exposes the vulnerability of energy sources to asynchronous use.

There is a strong argument that can be made that energy storage is the bottleneck in our energy growth and that solving it will unleash a myriad of new energy sources. Wind and solar, for example, can be converted to energy but not reliably. Thus the search for storage alternatives. Firefly is a small company with an innovation in the lead-acid electrode; it attempts to improve function with an increase in its surface area. (While I am interested in batteries and invest in them, I have no interest in Firefly.) Kurtis Kelley of Firefly International Energy Co. wrote a white paper on the current direction and implications of federal funding of energy storage. It is, in many ways, typical of comments in the past written by observers watching the distortion of the research and market place caused by ignorant, biased and crony investing by government. This is an excerpt:

"Writing this paper has been particularly difficult. We really have two goals; first, to express concern

about the potential for one-sided efforts at the new Illinois Battery Research Center and, second, to
dispel some myths and show you why advanced lead-acid chemistry, often overlooked, is so much
better than believed. We, at Firefly in Illinois, are very concerned about what technologies will receive focus in the new facility at our back door; and if this is going to be just a repeat of the $2B federal investment in batteries from just a few years ago. We are concerned, for the sake of this country, that we will see more misguided focus on “flavor-of-the-day” technologies rather than taking an objective approach to solving our grid and energy issues. I don't believe we need to go over specific misjudgments involving that $2B investment, but we are wondering, are we doing it again with this new center?

Poor decisions in these government-funded ventures are more hurtful than you realize. We all recall

that $2B U.S. federal funding of several battery technologies, overwhelmingly of lithium. What is not known is some of the side effects of those technology decisions that were enormously harmful to this country's other evolving battery technologies. In the eyes of battery investors, the federal government had just “voted” on which technologies were good and which were bad, assuming that the decision makers in Washington were qualified to do so. Investors quickly drew back from some promising technologies and jumped to the federally funded technologies. Meanwhile the unsubsidized companies struggled to find even private funding. New lead-acid technologies were largely ignored and some small companies were accused of lying about test data. Venture investors reinvested in failing, “federally identified” technologies with no ROI. Firefly is a case in point, and the response letter that Firefly sent to the DOE, challenging each point for denial of funding in detail, went ignored.

Why was it ignored? Embarrassment? Were the companies being funded already chosen and excuses

manufactured to deny the others?"

Cab Thoughts 3/12/14

“You don't know how easy this game is until you get into that broadcasting booth.”--Mickey Mantle

Only one quarterback who has 2 Super Bowl rings is not in the Hall of Fame: Jim Plunket

Harold Macmillan, read classics at Oxford and received a first-class degree; in 1980, the holder of that office was Margaret Thatcher, who often said that she was less proud of being the first female prime minister than of being the first with a science degree. Harold Wilson was the most academically gifted of 20th-century British politicians, read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford and then became a lecturer in economic history there at the age of twenty-one. Quite different from our esteemed leaders in the last few years.

TESLA market cap is $40B, FORD market cap is $60B. Astonishing.

The Panic of 1893 was one of the greatest economic calamities in American History. It was initiated by a crop failure in Argentina where American investment was heavy, and then a domestic bubble from railroad overbuilding resulting in bank failures and commodity declines which hurt farmers. 500 banks were closed, 15,000 businesses failed, and countless farms ceased operation. More than 1,800 firms disappeared into consolidations. The unemployment rate in Pennsylvania hit 25%, in New York 35%, and in Michigan 43%. Soup kitchens were opened. Facing starvation, people chopped wood, broke rocks, and sewed in exchange for food. It is said in some cases, women resorted to prostitution to feed their families.

Who is....Lois Lerner?

Princeton researcher Salvatore Torquato helped author a study published in Physical Review E (the broad scope of the journal includes quantum chaos, soft matter physics, classical chaos, biological physics and granular materials) and released this statement: "We’ve… discovered that such physical systems are endowed with exotic physical properties and therefore have novel capabilities. The more we learn about these special disordered systems, the more we find that they really should be considered a new distinguishable state of matter." "A new distinguishable state of matter!" The "system" he is talking about is in chicken eyes.

Rube-publicans lost the unmarried women vote in 2012 by 36 points.

Except for the brief first marriage, Borges lived with his mother until he was in his seventies; even after his mother's death, the housekeeper says, Borges maintained his habit of pausing each evening at her bedroom door to tell about his day.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/08/hold-your-peace.html

Narcissistic: adj. excessive self-admiration; narcissism: n. self-love. In Greek mythology, expanded by Ovid, Narcissus was the very handsome man who was loved by Echo, a mountain nymph who always answered his "Who's there?" with "Who's there?" He spurned her. She was heartbroken and wasted away in lonely glens until nothing but an echo sound remained of her. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, learned of this and lured Narcissus to a pool where he saw and fell in love with his own reflection. When he realised that his love could not be fulfilled, he died.

Dry ground with high nitrate concentration causes natural mummification by dehydration and anti-bacterial action.

Nixon was not impeached, he resigned. Clinton was impeached but was not convicted. Some of the Right are furious at Obama and would love to impeach him over his selective enforcement of laws and the IRS targeting but an impeachment is hard to generate.
The first was Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat, who was sworn in as president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. As a Democrat and a Southerner he was unloved by the Republican majority in Congress. In 1867, Congress passed a law of doubtful constitutionality barring Johnson from removing a Cabinet officer without Congress' permission. Johnson felt duty-bound to resist that encroachment and tried to remove his secretary of war. Congress responded with impeachment. In the Senate, the vote fell one short of the two-thirds majority needed to remove Johnson from office.

What does Riley Cooper's signing for $25 million mean? Does it mean anything?

Testosterone replacement in older men can maintain their youthful testosterone levels. Testosterone addition in young men replaces their own production and essentially creates infertility.

Saw the roadshow Porgy and Bess revival. It has received some praise, especially Audra McDonald’s Bess on Broadway. At 2 1/2 hours it is quite different from the original--the original was over 4 hours long. The story is goofy, the music terrific and the cast sang their brains out--everyone was really good--but it was disappointing. I have never heard a production of the music, only the songs sung individually by throaty blues and jazz singers, and the production was like Leontyne Price singing "Love is a Battlefield." This music walks both sides of the street and loses some heart when it become refined. The audience seemed to love it, though. They gasped at times, applauded at pivotal moments and seemed genuinely involved. It was fun but the music is better.
 

AAAAaaaaannnnnndddd.........a graph: