Did you know this? What is a spork?

Table utensils are, above all, cultural objects, carrying with them a view of what food is and how we should conduct ourselves in relation to it. And then there are sporks.

The term “spork” is first recorded in a dictionary in 1909, though the first patent for one was only issued in 1970. Both the word and the thing are a hybrid of spoon and fork. Like a pencil with an eraser on the end, the spork is what theorists of technology call a “joined” tool: two inventions combined. In its classical form — fashioned from flimsy disposable plastic and given away at fast-food outlets — the spork has the scooping bowl of a spoon coupled with the tines of a fork. It is not to be confused with a Splayd (knife, fork and spoon in one), a knoon, a spife or a knork.

Sporks have developed an affectionate following of a somewhat ironic kind in our lifetime. There are several web sites devoted to them, proffering tips on use (“Bend the prongs inward and outward and stand the spork on end. This is a leaning tower of spork.”), haikus in their honor (“The spork, true beauty / the tines, the bowl, the long stem / life now is complete”) and general musings. Spork.org has this to say:

A spork is a perfect metaphor for human existence. It tries to function as both spoon and fork, and because of this dual nature, it fails miserably at both. You cannot have soup with a spork; it is far too shallow. You cannot eat meat with a spork; the prongs are too small.

A spork is not one thing or another, but in-between. In the Pixar-animated film “Wall-E,” a robot in a postapocalyptic wasteland attempts to clear up the detritus left behind on planet Earth by the human race. He heroically sorts old plastic cutlery into different compartments until he encounters a spork. His little brain cannot cope with this new object. Does it go with the spoons? Or the forks? The spork is uncategorizable.

The spork in its way really is a big, new idea. But where did it come from? 

An urban myth circulates that sporks were first invented by Gen. Douglas MacArthur as part of the U.S. occupation of Japan in the 1940s. The story goes that MacArthur decreed that chopsticks were barbarian tools, whereas forks were too dangerous (the fear being that the conquered Japanese might rise up and use them as weapons). Therefore, the spork was forced on the Japanese as a safe, truncated version of Western tableware.

This story cannot be right — as mentioned above, the term “spork” dates back to before 1909, and the form itself is still older: In 19th century American silverware, both terrapin forks and ice-cream spoons were sporks in all but name (they were also known as “runcible spoons” after the Edward Lear poem). It is true that as far back as World War I, various armies used foldable spoon-fork combinations in the mess kit. However, these were not true sporks but rather a spoon and a fork riveted together at the handle. These utensils are still used in the Finnish military: They are made from stainless steel and called Lusikkahaarukka, meaning spoon-fork.

Actually the first person to create a hybrid fork-spoon for the mass market was Bill McArthur, of Potts Point, New South Wales, who in 1943 launched his patented Splayd — derived from the verb “to splay” — after seeing a magazine photo of women awkwardly balancing knives, forks, and plates on their laps at a party. Boxes of stainless-steel Splayds — which described themselves as an “all-in-one knife fork and spoon gracefully fashioned” — were marketed as the ideal solution to the newly popular Australian barbecue. They have since become an Aussie institution, having sold more than 5 million units.

In the 1970s, Splayds were finally joined by Sporks. The name was trademarked in 1970 by a U.S. company (the Van Brode Milling Company) and in 1975 by a U.K. one (Plastico Ltd.) as a combination plastic eating utensil. It wasn’t long before they became standard issue in fast-food restaurants. The spork made business sense: two plastic utensils for the price of one.

Other important users of the spork included schools and prisons and any other institutional setting where the business of feeding is reduced to its most basic, functional level. American prison sporks are generally plastic, orange in color and very ineffectual because it is vital that they should not be used as weapons. In 2008, a man was arrested in Anchorage, Alaska, for attempting an armed robbery with a spork from a fried-chicken restaurant. The victim’s body was gashed with four “parallel scratches.” The most remarkable thing about this story is that anyone could have managed to do such damage with a spork, which in its fast-food incarnation is a pitiful implement, splintering into plastic shards on contact with any remotely challenging food.

In 2006, the spork was given a radical reboot in an attempt to address some of its structural shortcomings. Joachim Nordwall is a Swedish designer employed by the outdoor supplies company Light My Fire. Having grown up in Sweden, Nordwall had no background in using the fast-food spork, and he was not much impressed by it. “It feels like a compromise to me,” he noted (to which one is tempted to say: duh!). The tines did not work well on their own terms as a fork. Nor did the bowl really work as a spoon: When eating soup, it would dribble out through the gaps. Nordwall’s breakthrough was to separate out the spoon part and the fork part, placing them on opposite ends of the handle. For good measure, he added a blade to the outer edge of the tines, thus turning his construction into a sort of knork as well as a spork. “Sporks get a new look,” raved a business review of Nordwall’s design. Really, though, it was very old. Nordwall had reinvented the double-ended medieval sucket spoon.

There is now a spork for every occasion, except a meal where any degree of formality is required. Light My Fire sells brightly colored sporks for campers and sporks for office workers, “lefty” sporks for the left-handed, and “spork little” for toddlers. Unlike previous utensils, which always carried with them some cultural expectation of how you should behave in relation to food, the spork is entirely devoid of culture. It bends itself to the owner, rather than the other way around. It carries with it no particular mores and demands no etiquette. Eating with a spork is neither mannerly nor unmannerly. One of the many spork tributes on the Internet has fun with the notion of table manners for “sporkware,” advising: “When using a spork to eat mashed potatoes out of a Styrofoam container, it is common courtesy to leave a little ‘spork waste’ at the bottom rather than scrape the styrofoam with the spork to get every last morsel. If you must have every little bit of potato, please use your finger.”

The many lies of Mitt Romney- Part II

Pundits from both sides of the aisle have lauded Mitt Romney’s strong debate performance, praising his preparedness and ability to challenge President Obama’s policies and accomplishments.

 But Romney only accomplished this goal by repeatedly misleading viewers. He spoke for 38 minutes of the 90 minute debate and told at least 27 myths:

1) “[G]et us energy independent, North American energy independent. That creates about 4 million jobs”. Romney’s plan for “energy independence” actually relies heavily on a study that assumes the U.S. continues with fuel efficiency standards set by the Obama administration. For instance, he uses Citigroup research based off the assumption that “‘the United States will continue with strict fuel economy standards that will lower its oil demand.” Since he promises to undo the Obama administration’s new fuel efficiency standards, he would cut oil consumption savings of 2 million barrels per day by 2025.

2) “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about.” A Tax Policy Center analysis of Romney’s proposal for a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut in all federal income tax rates, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax, eliminating the estate tax and other tax reductions, would reduce federal revenue $480 billion in 2015. This amount to $5 trillion over the decade.

3) “My view is that we ought to provide tax relief to people in the middle class. But I’m not going to reduce the share of taxes paid by high-income people.” If Romney hopes to provide tax relief to the middle class, then his $5 trillion tax cut would add to the deficit. There are not enough deductions in the tax code that primarily benefit rich people to make his math work.

4) “My — my number-one principal is, there will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit. I want to underline that: no tax cut that adds to the deficit.” As the Tax Policy Center concluded, Romney’s plan can’t both exempt middle class families from tax cuts and remain revenue neutral. “He’s promised all these things and he can’t do them all. In order for him to cover the cost of his tax cut without adding to the deficit, he’d have to find a way to raise taxes on middle income people or people making less than $200,000 a year,” the Center found.

5) “I will not under any circumstances raise taxes on middle-income families. I will lower taxes on middle-income families. Now, you cite a study. There are six other studies that looked at the study you describe and say it’s completely wrong.” The studies Romney cites actually further prove that Romney would, in fact, have to raise taxes on the middle class if he were to keep his promise not to lose revenue with his tax rate reduction.

6) “I saw a study that came out today that said you’re going to raise taxes by $3,000 to $4,000 on middle-income families.” Romney is pointing to this study from the American Enterprise Institute. It actually found that rather than raise taxes to pay down the debt, the Obama administration’s policies — those contained directly in his budget — would reduce the share of taxes that go toward servicing the debt by $1,289.89 per taxpayer in the $100,000 to $200,000 range.

7) “And the reason is because small business pays that individual rate; 54 percent of America’s workers work in businesses that are taxed not at the corporate tax rate, but at the individual tax rate….97 percent of the businesses are not — not taxed at the 35 percent tax rate, they’re taxed at a lower rate. But those businesses that are in the last 3 percent of businesses happen to employ half — half of all the people who work in small business.” Far less than half of the people affected by the expiration of the upper income tax cuts get any of their income at all from a small businesses. And those people could very well be receiving speaking fees or book royalties, which qualify as “small business income” but don’t have a direct impact on job creation. It’s actually hard to find a small business who think that they will be hurt if the marginal tax rate on income earned above $250,000 per year is increased.

8) “Mr. President, all of the increase in natural gas and oil has happened on private land, not on government land. On government land, your administration has cut the number of permits and licenses in half.” Oil production from federal lands is higher, not lower: Production from federal lands is up slightly in 2011 when compared to 2007. And the oil and gas industry is sitting on7,000 approved permits to drill, that it hasn’t begun exploring or developing.

9) “The president’s put it in place as much public debt — almost as much debt held by the public as all prior presidents combined.” This is not even close to being true. When Obama took office, the national debt stood at $10.626 trillion. Now the national debt is over $16 trillion. That $5.374 trillion increase is nowhere near as much debt as all the other presidents combined.

10) “That’s why the National Federation of Independent Businesses said your plan will kill 700,000 jobs. I don’t want to kill jobs in this environment.” That study, produced by a right-wing advocacy organization, doesn’t analyze what Obama has actually proposed.

11) “What we do have right now is a setting where I’d like to bring money from overseas back to this country.” Romney’s plan to shift the country to a territorial tax system would allow corporations to do business and make profits overseas without ever being taxed on it in the United States. This encourages American companies to invest abroad and could cost the country up to 800,000 jobs.

12) “I would like to take the Medicaid dollars that go to states and say to a state, you’re going to get what you got last year, plus inflation, plus 1 percent, and then you’re going to manage your care for your poor in the way you think best.” Sending federal Medicaid funding to the states in the form of a block grant woud significantly reduce federal spending for Medicaid because the grant would not keep up with projected health care costs. A CBO estimate of a very similar proposal from Paul Ryan found that federal spending would be “35 percent lower in 2022 and 49 percent lower in 2030 than current projected federal spending” and as a result “states would face significant challenges in achieving sufficient cost savings through efficiencies to mitigate the loss of federal funding.” “To maintain current service levels in the Medicaid program, states would probably need to consider additional changes, such as reducing their spending on other programs or raising additional revenues,” the CBO found.

13) “I want to take that $716 billion you’ve cut and put it back into Medicare…. But the idea of cutting $716 billion from Medicare to be able to balance the additional cost of Obamacare is, in my opinion, a mistake. There’s that number again. Romney is claiming that Obamacare siphons off $716 billion from Medicare, to the detriment of beneficiaries. In actuality, that money is saved primarily through reducing over-payments to insurance companies under Medicare Advantage, not payments to beneficiaries. Paul Ryan’s budget plan keeps those same cuts, but directs them toward tax cuts for the rich and deficit reduction.

14) “What I support is no change for current retirees and near-retirees to Medicare.” Here is how Romney’s Medicare plan will affect current seniors: 1) by repealing Obamacare, the 16 million seniors receiving preventive benefits without deductibles or co-pays and are saving $3.9 billion on prescription drugs will see a cost increase, 2) “premium support” will increase premiums for existing beneficiaries as private insurers lure healthier seniors out of the traditional Medicare program, 3) Romney/Ryan would also lower Medicaid spending significantly beginning next year, shifting federal spending to states and beneficiaries, and increasing costs for the 9 million Medicare recipients who are dependent on Medicaid.

15) “Number two is for people coming along that are young, what I do to make sure that we can keep Medicare in place for them is to allow them either to choose the current Medicare program or a private plan. Their choice. They get to choose — and they’ll have at least two plans that will be entirely at no cost to them.” The Medicare program changes for everyone, even people who choose to remain in the traditional fee-for-service. Rather than relying on a guaranteed benefit, all beneficiaries will receive a premium support credit of $7,500 on average in 2023 to purchase coverage in traditional Medicare or private insurance. But that amount will only grow at a rate of GDP plus 1.5 percentage points and will not keep up with health care costs. So while the federal government will spend less on the program, seniors will pay more in premiums.

16) “And, by the way the idea came not even from Paul Ryan or — or Senator Wyden, who’s the co-author of the bill with — with Paul Ryan in the Senate, but also it came from Bill — Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.” Romney has rejected the Ryan/Wyden approach — which does not cap the growth of the “premium support” subsidy. Bill Clinton and his commission also voted down these changes to the Medicare program.

17) “Well, I would repeal and replace it. We’re not going to get rid of all regulation. You have to have regulation. And there are some parts of Dodd-Frank that make all the sense in the world.” Romney has previously called for full repeal of Dodd-Frank, a law whose specific purpose is to regulate banks. MF Global’s use of customer funds to pay for its own trading losses is just one bit of proof that the financial industry isn’t responsible enough to protect consumers without regulation.

18) “But I wouldn’t designate five banks as too big to fail and give them a blank check. That’s one of the unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank… We need to get rid of that provision because it’s killing regional and small banks. They’re getting hurt.” The law merely says that the biggest, systemically risky banks need to abide by more stringent regulations. If those banks fail, they will be unwound by a new process in the Dodd-Frank law that protects taxpayers from having to pony up for a bailout.

19) “And, unfortunately, when — when — when you look at Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office has said it will cost $2,500 a year more than traditional insurance. So it’s adding to cost.” Obamacare will actually provide millions of families with tax credits to make health care more affordable.

20) “[I]t puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have. I don’t like that idea.” The Board, or IPAB is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, should Medicare costs exceed a target growth rate. Congress can accept the savings proposal or implement its own ideas through a super majority. The panel’s plan will modify payments to providers but it cannot “include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost-sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria” (Section 3403 of the ACA). Relying on health care experts rather than politicians to control health care costs has previously attracted bipartisan support and even Ryan himself proposed two IPAB-like structuresin a 2009 health plan.

21) “Right now, the CBO says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obamacare goes into effect next year. And likewise, a study by McKinsey and Company of American businesses said 30 percent of them are anticipating dropping people from coverage.” The Affordable Care Act would actually expand health care coverage to 30 million Americans, despite Romney fear mongering. According to CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, 3 million or less people would leave employer-sponsored health insurance coverage as a result of the law.

22) “I like the way we did it [health care] in Massachusetts…What were some differences? We didn’t raise taxes.” Romney raised fees, but he can claim that he didn’t increase taxes because the federal government funded almost half of his reforms.

23) “It’s why Republicans said, do not do this, and the Republicans had — had the plan. They put a plan out. They put out a plan, a bipartisan plan. It was swept aside.” The Affordable Care Act incorporates many Republican ideas including the individual mandate, state-based health care exchanges, high-risk insurance pools, and modified provisions that allow insurers to sell policies in multiple states. Republicans never offered a united bipartisan alternative.

24) “Preexisting conditions are covered under my plan.” Only people who are continuously insured would not be discriminated against because they suffer from pre-existing conditions. This protection would not be extended to people who are currently uninsured.

25) “In one year, you provided $90 billion in breaks to the green energy world. Now, I like green energy as well, but that’s about 50 years’ worth of what oil and gas receives.” The $90 billion was given out over several years and included loans, loan guarantees and grants through the American Recovery Act. $23 billion of the $90 billion “went toward “clean coal,” energy-efficiency upgrades, updating the electricity grid and environmental clean-up, largely for old nuclear weapons sites.”

26) “I think about half of [the green firms Obama invested in], of the ones have been invested in have gone out of business. A number of them happened to be owned by people who were contributors to your campaigns.” As of late last year, only “three out of the 26 recipients of 1705 loan guarantees have filed for bankruptcy, with losses estimated at just over $600 million.”

27) “If the president’s reelected you’ll see dramatic cuts to our military.” Romney is referring to the sequester, which his running mate Paul Ryan supported. Obama opposes the military cuts and has asked Congress to formulate a balanced approach that would avoid the trigger.

A unique thank you

A dear friend of ours recently visited us and spent an evening of food and laugher. The next day I received a thank you note- a unique one at that - a poem!

"Continuity

Three generations signaling life;

Grandfather’s overwhelming joy

beaming forth in smile

and purpose. Here he is,

the grandson I feared might never be,

he on whom we all, his closest kin, dote.

Take note, by all objective standards,

he is a precious child, precocious, clever.

He surely knows which lever

to pull to have adoring servants

at his beck and call.

Most of all

in his small self he holds the key

to eternity

at least in the sense that this family

has continuity."

The many lies of Mitt Romney

One of the most astonishing things about the recent presidential campaign in the US has been the facility with which one of the candidates - Mitt Romney lies. It has almost become a cottage industry with his campaign. But the main stream media has not yet found an effective way of presenting these facts to the public. And the fast paced TV programs do little to correct the impression that truth and lies are distinct entities and not ones that can be balanced.

Take for example the latest salvo which came during the first presidential debate. While the  results of Wednesday night's first presidential debate are in and it's clear that according to the pundits, Mitt Romney won round one. For he was aggressive, he was decisive, and he delivered his lines with panache. The fact is that he also lied through his teeth for most of the debate.

Thus Romney lied:

• When he claimed that "pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan." They're not.
• When he said that President Obama had "cut Medicare by $716 billion to pay for Obamacare." Obama didn't.
• When he denied proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. He did.
• When he said President Obama had "added almost as much to the federal debt as all the prior presidents combined." Not even close.
• When he resurrected "death panels." That was called "one of the biggest whoppers of the night."
• When he stated that half the green energy companies given stimulus funds had failed. Only if three out of nearly three dozen is half.

The real question facing us is will he pay any price for his serial lies at the ballot box. Will the press and the same pundits tom toming his so called victory call him on his serial prevabrications?

Explaining Obama's "cool"

David Frum traces Obamas "cool" to Stoicism in an interesting article.

“Cool on the outside” is something Americans rarely see in a politician; less charitable observers look at the same presidential quality and see “aloofness,” “standoffishness,” “arrogance,” and even the great American sin of not being “a people person.” In these times, a philosophy, built on emotional control, seems strange in the age of over-sharing. Yet it may be the right philosophy for this day and age and it seems to be, according to many observers, the epitome of Obama.

 Invented in Athens just a few decades after Alexander the Great’s conquests and premature death upended the Greek world, Stoicism took off because it offered security and peace in a time of warfare and crisis. The Stoic creed didn’t promise material security or a peace in the afterlife; but it did promise an unshakable happiness in this life. For Stoicism tells us that no happiness can be secure if it’s rooted in changeable, destructible things. Our bank accounts can grow or shrink, our careers can prosper or falter, even our loved ones can be taken from us. There is only one place the world can’t touch: our inner selves, our choice at every moment to be brave, to be reasonable, to be good. The world might take everything from us but Stoicism tells us that we all have a fortress on the inside. 

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born a slave and crippled at a young age, wrote: “Where is the good? In the will…If anyone is unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone.” While it’s natural to cry out at pain, the Stoic works to stay indifferent to everything that happens on the outside, to stay equally happy in times of triumph and disaster. 

It’s a demanding way of life, but the reward it offers is freedom from passion–freedom from the emotions that so often seem to control us, when we should control them. A real Stoic isn’t unfeeling. But he or she does have a mastery of emotions, because Stoicism recognizes that fear or greed or grief only enter our minds when we willingly let them in. A teaching like that is designed for a world on edge, whether it’s the chaotic world of ancient Greece, or a modern financial crisis. But then, Epictetus would say that–as long as we try to place our happiness in perishable things–our worlds are always on edge.

The world that originally gave birth to Stoicism was a parochial, often xenophobic place: most people held fast to age-old divisions of nationality, religion, and status. It was perhaps the first Western philosophy to preach universal brotherhood. Epictetus said that each of us is a citizen of our own land, but “also a member of the great city of gods and men.” The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, history’s best-known Stoic, reminded himself daily to love the world as much as he loved his native city. If the key to happiness is really in our own wills, then even the biggest social divides start to look trivial. The Roman Stoic Seneca lived in a society built on slavery, but he also urged his fellow Romans to “remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies.”

This embrace of cosmopolitanism (a word invented by Stoics, which literally means world-city) made Stoicism the ideal philosophy for the Roman Empire, which brought an unprecedented range of races and religions into contact. Stoicism made sense for a globalized world–and it still does. Imagine a religion that stressed human brotherhood under a benevolent creator God; that told us to moderate and master our basic urges rather than giving into them; that nevertheless insisted that all humans, because we’re human, are bound to fail at this mission; and that spent a lot of time talking about “conscience” and the multiple aspects, or “persons,” of a unitary God. All of that might sound familiar. But the philosophy that invented all of those ideas was not Christianity, but Stoicism.

Stoicism dominated Roman culture for centuries—and Christianity went mainstream in the same culture. What’s more, many of the leaders of the early Christian church were former Stoics. Of course Christianity borrowed much of its thought and terminology from Stoicism–because thinking about religion in the early 1st millennium meant thinking like a Stoic. Stoicism is still there at the foundation of the Christian religion, in some of its most basic terms and concepts.

In her book The Stoic Warrior, Nancy Sherman, who taught philosophy at the Naval Academy, argued that Stoicism is a driving force behind the military mindset–especially in its emphasis on endurance, self-control, and inner strength. As Sherman writes, whenever her philosophy class at Annapolis turned to the Stoic thinkers, “many officers and students alike felt they had come home.”

Stoicism teaches us that, before we try to control events, we have to control ourselves first. Our attempts to exert influence on the world are subject to chance, disappointment, and failure–but control of the self is the only kind that can succeed 100% of the time. From emperor Marcus Aurelius on, leaders have found that a Stoic attitude earns them respect in the face of failure, and guards against arrogance in the face of success.

Stoicism has an appeal for anyone who faces uncertainty–that is, for all of us. But leaders are especially subject to risk and flux, so it’s not surprising that many of them find a Stoic attitude crucial to their mental health. We mentioned Barack Obama’s Stoic demeanor above–and there’s some more evidence for it in his recent interview with Michael Lewis. “I’m trying to pare down decisions,” he told Lewis. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make…You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” Whatever your opinion of Obama’s politics, that’s classic Stoicism–trying to draw lines between the essential and the inessential at every level of life.

 The Stoics taught that we fail far more often than we succeed, that to be human is to be fearful, selfish, and angry far more often than we’d like. But they also taught a realistic way to be more.

The more we practice Stoic qualities in good times, the more likely that we’ll find them in ourselves when they’re most needed.

The joys of grandfatherhood

Many are the joys of grandfatherhood.. 

Some of you may remember I wrote of my weeks of depression and how conversations with my grandson kept my spirits aloft even though I only saw him on my computer. But then last week he flew into town with his parents and I could hold him in my arms, it was really different. And when he wrapped his chubby arms around my neck, gave me a kiss and said "dada", it was bliss indeed!

Truth be told, there's nothing better than being a grandparent. It is only now that I realize the real joys of grandparenthood. You have all the pleasures of parenting with none of its obligations. And your grandchildren respond in kind. Our grandchildren accept us for ourselves, without rebuke or effort to change us, as no one in our entire lives has ever done, not our parents, siblings, spouses, friends - and hardly ever our own grown children. Indeed, I came to realize that perfect love does not come until the first grandchild!

And what a bargain grandchildren are!  You give them any loose change, and they give you a million dollars' worth of pleasure for the rest of your life. Most often when they create mischief and mayhme , they can always run to grandpa to escape the wrath of their parents. Of course grandparents are there to also help the child get into mischief they haven't thought of yet.  But there is a down side as you grow old. While an hour with your grandchildren can make you feel young again, anything longer than that, you start aging quickly! 

Just watching him get up each day, discovering new things with joy and wonder is a particular delight. For him everything is new and every day has a miracle hidden inside it. And as he meanders around, he teaches you to look for the beautiful little things in life: how a window remote works, how the little wooden spoon makes a wonderful drum stick, how the raindrops fall from the heavens. While every day is not always beautiful and good, he manages to find something good and fascinating in it. 

Looking for that good will also teach us to be grateful for what we have and worry less about what we don’t have. It will help us to find contentment and happiness in the small things. So does his perspective teaches us that life is made up of everyday miracles. Truly grandchildren are God's way of compensating us for growing old. 

And an unexpected joy of grandfatherhood is watching your son become a loving and doting father!

Wait or procrastinate

Just when we thought that we had the procrastinators on the run, out comes this book recommending the very opposite. It says you should wait till the very last second before making a decision or taking any action. Our family is split evenly between the procrastinators and the quick decisive ones and so this book comes at a very discouraging time for me since I am not a procrastinator!

Frank Partnoy's "Wait: The Art and Science of Delay" is about the value of waiting. His examples range widely, and so does the time scale of the delay involved: the elite baseball hitter's ability to wait the extra milliseconds to "find" a pitch; the comedian's ability to wait a few seconds to deliver a punchline; the skilled matchmaker's advice that blind daters suppress their snap judgments and wait a full hour before deciding whether they might want to go on a second date; the innovative company's ability to hang on to creative ideas, for months or even years, until they pay off. "We are hard-wired to react quickly," Mr. Partnoy says. "Modern society taps into that hardwiring, tempting us to respond instantly to all kinds of information and demands. Yet we are often better off resisting both biology and technology."

For example, most people are taught that you should apologize right away. But in most cases, it tuns out, delayed apologies are more effective. If you’ve wronged a spouse or partner or colleague in some substantive, intentional way, they will want time to process information about what you’ve done. If you acknowledge what you did, and delay the apology, then the wronged party has a chance to tell you how they feel in response, and your apology is much more meaningful.

In technology, the story of how the Post-It Note was developed at 3M is a classic case in the business innovation canon. Mr. Partnoy recounts how the inventors of a new adhesive, casting about for ways to use it, were inspired to create bookmarks that would stick inside a book but leave no residue. The management at 3M thought the bookmark market was too small to pursue. Employees at the company eventually started to use the sample "bookmarks" for writing notes—completing the creative act by discovering a valuable purpose for the invention. The story is said to show the value of serendipity, or perseverance, or the eureka moment. In Mr. Partnoy's telling, however, the moral is different. He focuses on the 12-year delay between the invention of the adhesive and the launch of the notepad product, emphasizing that the inventors and the company were content to wait and keep the project alive in the hope that something would come of it. 3M's policy of letting employees use 15% of their time for new projects, later one-upped by Google's 20% time policy (since eliminated), may have had something to do with its ability to delay gratification but the delayed decision led to a path breaking innovation!

But too much waiting can't be good, can it? Twelve years is a long time to procrastinate for results! Mr. Partnoy is not so sure. He recommends waiting until the last possible moment to make decisions or take positions, on the grounds that waiting gives you the benefit of all the time you possess, allowing ideas to form and thoughts to coalesce. He cites technology investor and guru Paul Graham, who notes that even when we are procrastinating we are not doing nothing—we are doing something other than what we are "supposed" to be doing. Sometimes the task we avoid turns out to be less important than the one we choose to focus on. And perhaps other people will do the things we are avoiding!

These strategies don't always work, of course. Delaying a task could mean forgetting important information when we finally get around to doing it. Procrastinating can leave you with a meticulously organized closet but no money left to buy clothes after you pay the late fees to the IRS and return the advance on your novel. Paradoxically, minimizing important commitments can be a bad strategy for the procrastinator, since he will then have proportionally more unimportant things to capture his time and attention. 

Historically, for human beings, procrastination has not been regarded as a bad thing. The Greeks and Romans generally regarded procrastination very highly. The wisest leaders embraced procrastination and would basically sit around and think and not do anything unless they absolutely had to. The idea that procrastination is bad really started in the Puritanical era with Jonathan Edwards’s sermon against procrastination and then the American embrace of “a stitch in time saves nine,” and this sort of work ethic that required immediate and diligent action. But in recent studies, managing delay is an important tool for human beings. People are more successful and happier when they manage delay. Procrastination is just a universal state of being for humans. We will always have more things to do than we can possibly do, so we will always be imposing some sort of unwarranted delay on some tasks. Some scientists have argued that there are two kinds of procrastination: active procrastination and passive procrastination. Active procrastination means you realize that you are unduly delaying mowing the lawn or cleaning your closet, but you are doing something that is more valuable instead. Passive procrastination is just sitting around on your sofa not doing anything.The question is not whether we are procrastinating, it is whether we are procrastinating well !

There are a few who have taken action the procrastinators. A publisher in Argentina decided to light a fire under those of us who sometimes procrastinate when it comes to actually cracking open a new book. They’ve printed a book that goes away if you don’t read it. No, the actual book is still in your hands, but as time passes, and the ink is exposed to air and light, the actual words go away. On average you have two months to read their publication, before it turns into a lovely blank page volume that you can then use as a journal. Sad to say, this experiment could have used some time to procrastinate before rushing into print.

Perhaps the way to go is to call procrastination, "managing delay". Now you are not procrastinating, you're managing delay. And that is a very important lesson in life and business, which is to delay gratification. People are better off and they're happier, they make better decisions, when they're able to delay gratification. And that's true whether or not the time frame is milliseconds long or months long or years long. 

As the psychologist Robert Sternberg says: "The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly." 

The arithmetic of our bodies

From the DNA that encodes us, to the fingerprints that characterize us, to our place in the universe and our friend counts on Facebook, we are mathematical marvels. So says Steven Strogatz in this rather interesting piece:

"Let’s begin with what our bodies can teach us. We all know that toddlers learn to count with their fingers and sometimes their toes. Those appendages are called “digits,” and it’s no accident that the same word refers to the 10 symbols 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 in the decimal system. Our bodies are our first arithmetic teachers."

"But what is less widely known is that our bodies are also trying to teach us higher math, if only we’d let them. Look at a baby’s first hairdo:

Courtesy of Sheila Larson

The cowlick at the center of that cute little swirl is, in mathematical parlance, a “singularity,” a point of confusion where the baby’s hair can’t seem to decide which way to grow. On the back of the cowlick the hair falls to the left; on the front it grows to the right; and on the sides it falls forward and backward. What makes a cowlick “singular” is that a variable (the hair’s direction) changes abruptly and discontinuously there."

Singularities reflect nature’s attempt to resolve mismatches, to enforce continuity against all odds. When disagreements become inevitable (between hair directions, or wind directions, or time zones), singularities confine those mismatches to the smallest space possible: a single point. One of the most remarkable features of singularities is their persistence. They have a kind of permanence to them. As you grow, your skull and scalp get bigger but you never lose that cowlick. 

Or take a close look at your fingers and palms. See all those neatly patterned fingerprint ridges? On small patches of skin they run nearly parallel to one another. That’s nature enforcing continuity again. But when different sets of ridges collide head-on, it’s hard to keep everyone happy. Each ridge wants to stay parallel to its neighbors, but also wants to merge with the newcomers. The collisions create unavoidable discontinuities — singularities — that are not only of interest to palm readers and the FBI. 

In 1965 Lionel Penrose, a British medical geneticist, pointed out that fingerprints and palm prints obey a universal rule: no matter what your personal pattern looks like, everybody with five fingers always has four more triradii than loops... The irony here is amazing. The most distinctive feature we sport — the geometry of our fingerprints and palm prints — is also the least distinctive: the same topological rule holds for all of us.

Using topological reasoning like that shown above, Art Winfree, one of the world’s great mathematical biologists, predicted that rhythms ranging from heartbeats to sleep cycles would have their own North Poles, states where the phase of the rhythm would become singular and the cycle could cease. His ideas were confirmed experimentally and are now regarded as important clues by doctors and biomedical researchers working to unravel the mysteries of cardiac arrhythmias.

Of course, Leonardo was there first. Leonardo envisaged the great picture chart of the human body and believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe. According to Leonardo if you open your legs enough that your head is lowered by one-fourteenth of your height and raise your hands enough that your extended fingers touch the line of the top of your head, know that the centre of the extended limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.

He predicted the following arithmetic of the body:

• the length of the outspread arms is equal to the height of a man
• from the hairline to the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of the height of a man
• the maximum width of the shoulders is a quarter of the height of a man
• the distance from the elbow to the tip of the hand and from the breasts to the top of the head is a quarter of the height of a man
• the length of the hand is one-tenth of the height of a man
• the foot is one-seventh of the height of a man

Life before screens

A recent report suggests that modern urbanites spend a greater and greater portion of their lives in front of their TV screens. According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. That means that in a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube! 

I remember a time when our life was bereft of screens - no TV, computers, Ipads or iphones. Heck, I even remember the time when we had no radio. It was 1948 and the three of us kids were pestering our father to buy a radio. Mindful of its potential for distraction, he extracted a solemn promise from each of us that we would only listen to the radio for the "Children's Hour" and the news! The TV and computer screens entered our lives only decades later and when they came it was years before our lives became entangled with spending hours before these pesky screens that took away a larger and larger parts of our waking lives.

These screens brought the world to us with all its splendor and mysteries and entertainment. A click provided access to the world's knowledge and to words of the wisest statesmen. These soon became our reservoir of knowledge, music and soon even movies. But even in its wonders lay a trap for our minds.

The biggest trap of watching too much TV is that it could become a safe way to escape your own life instead of looking at it square in the eye. People who gossip have the same problem. Their lives aren’t interesting enough so they feel the need to know everybody else’s business and spread the word to whoever will listen. The person who watches television for hours on end is no different. They end up so wrapped up in the lives of others that it becomes their entire life.

Also when you watch TV, you’ll find that it does all the work FOR you. You don’t need to “create” in your mind like you do when reading. When you read, your brain has to use its imagination to come up with the smells, the tastes, the sounds, the pictures, and the feelings described in the book or article but when you watch TV, all of that is already done for you (at least the hearing and seeing part). If you ever wonder why your brain feels so “empty” after watching television, that’s exactly why. Your brain shuts off because it has no job to do. Use it or lose it indeed.

The fact is that TV can easily become the biggest time thief of all and yet, people don’t realize it. They don’t become indignant at the opportunities in life that they lose. It’s amazing how people take the time to buy the best security for their home so their precious belongings don’t get stolen, but when it comes to protecting their mind and their time, two of their biggest assets, the doors are wide open for easy pickings!

 Finally TV can be just as addictive as any illegal substance on the market today. It’s easily accessible, pleasurable, and makes you forget your troubles for the day.  This is the worst part of watching too much television. You watch one show and when it ends, the TV says “Coming up next…stay tuned for blah blah blah”, so you become curious, you watch it and you like it and BOOM, you add another rotation to your weekly TV schedule. Those hours add up and once you get vested in the shows, they’ve got you for life.

In recent years, the situation has become even worse with the advent of IPADs and cell phones. Indeed nearly a quarter of people now use these second screens while watching TV. If you add the computer screens and the smaller screens of IPADs and cellphones, I am guessing that those four hours per day will double or even triple. We are rapidly reaching a stage where people would prefer to do all transactions through screens big and small rather than directly. I am sure many of you have been in households where the entire family is sitting in the room but each one is glued to his or her own screen and the sound level in the room is zero as no body is talking to each other!

When it’s all said and done, in too many cases, watching so much of life on screens- television, IPAD, or cellphone- may provides a safe escape from looking at your own life, but just as surely it deteriorates the mind, makes one unproductive, and can lead to a dangerous addiction. 

A love of the screen can truly be one of the most dangerous drugs out there on the market today and the sad thing about it is, most people don't even realize it.

Thank yous in books

I was finishing my autographic book a few years ago ""A Passion to Build" when a dear friend of mine sagely advised me to make sure that the finished book had neither an acknowledgement section nor an appendix. Curious at this advise, I asked him why. His sage reply; " If you do, you will lose both your friends and many of your readers: the former because you have not thanked them enough and the latter  will only read the sections of your book that have their names on them!"

Now Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal, in an article, rails against the commercialisation of the book industry today. And he takes off against a surprising part of the industry- the author of the book. He criticizes the authors for caving in to the publishers and always attaching a separate chapter on acknowledgement at the end of the book.

Acknowledgments typically open with a statement to the effect that, although writing is lonely work, the author could never have completed his book without help and support. They are the Thank You Oscar speech of the writer. And like the Oscars, the thanking is long and tedious.

Of course, it is right and proper to be grateful to the people who helped you in your endeavor by sharing memories or thoughts or in other ways, and if it were done less obtrusively, there would be something sweet about crediting them in the book. But because the acknowledgments page functions primarily as an extension of the book’s publicity, it tends to become far more than that. What seems to be far more common is for a writer to offer his thanks in such a way as to announce the tremendous effort he himself put into writing and revising the book. One author humblebragged that his first draft was so marked up that he’d had “first-year French essays that came back clearer.” This undercurrent of faux-modest self-promotion runs like a viral strain throughout every acknowledgments page. 

After the professional shout-outs comes the collegial name-dropping, when writers thank the published novelists who taught at their M.F.A. programs or lectured at their writers’ retreats. Friendly as this may seem, it often has the comical side effect of counteracting the efforts of the book’s publicity department, since the authors being thanked are usually the same people who have written the blurbs. Perhaps readers already know that book publishing is an insular, back-scratching industry, but does it have to be revealed quite so openly?

Next our scrupulously thorough author will thank the fellowships and grant organizations that subsidized his work—and here we have the pleasure of seeing a novel transform into a billboard. Even the acknowledgment page’s fig leaf of justification—that it would be churlish not to credit the people who helped midwife the work—now vanishes, because, pace the  US Supreme Court, corporations are not people. When a writer thanks Yaddo, he’s not being gracious to anybody; he’s just telling the world that he went to Yaddo.

Typically, it’s around this point that the author will turn his attention to the little people. The difficulty here seems to be similar to that faced by a couple choosing their wedding guests: once you start putting second-tier names on the list, it’s impossible to know when to stop. The author is usually reduced to a rolling eructation of proper names, like this case in point: “Kevin Spall, Angie Fugate, Josh Mosher, Heather Shultes, Kandy Tobias, Sue Lube, Jenny Taylor, Mike Shubel, Rich McDonald, Andrea Koerte, Rick Goss, Christina Ballard, Frankie Hall….”That particular list may well continue for another forty-two names. 

It’s all meant to seem very generous, but readers are within their rights to be skeptical. For one thing, the gratitude is unwarranted. Despite protests to the contrary, novel-writing is necessarily solitary; however well-meaning they may be, friends, family, lovers, and colleagues will only ever hinder the process (the most they can do—and it’s no small thing—is forgive the author for ignoring them). But on the off chance that they really did help with the creation of the book, how meagerly they’ve been rewarded! Is it really so gratifying to be recognized in print when your name is included on a list that looks like the bcc line of a mass e-mail?

Finally, the acknowledgments page will conclude with the sort of crowd-pandering favored by stumping politicians—with expressions of awe and humility for the author’s supportive parents, brilliant children, and devoted spouse. Apparently having dedicated the book to these same people in the front of the book was insufficient as a gesture. Even so, you’d think that they might have a little more respect for the book that they have presumably worked hard on. 

Instead, why not reserve your thank-yous for your Web site, where the interested can seek them out? Or, as some canny authors have done, hide them in the small print of the copyright page. The best solution of all, of course, is to write a few masterpieces. Become great, and all the picayune biographical details that bored and annoyed us will suddenly become numinous with secret importance. We’ll want to know all about your editors and childhood friends and Starbucks baristas—you’ll be giving them true posterity.

"Until then," says Sam, " adoréd authors: spare us. Readers of fiction are an embattled lot, and the buzzing of book promotion is only one of many distractions that cut into the extended quiet needed to disappear into a novel. We’ve already ceded to a fair share of compromises. We know that the blurbs are very often polite exaggerations and we know that the jacket copy is pablum; we even keep quiet when it’s obvious that your author photo has been retouched. All we ask is that you don’t let that same commercial rot spread inside the book’s covers."