Today, Tuesday, 2/7/2012, is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dicken’s birth in Portsmouth, England, so it’s fitting to remember Thomas Gradgrind, teacher of facts, in Hard Times.

Also, listen to the TED talk by Tim Hartford, who presents the antithesis to the Every-Complex-Problem-Has-A-Simple-Solution-But-It’s-Wrong assertion that he calls the God Complex: There’s a simple solution to every complex problem, and it’s right.

Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy merchant who only believes in facts, is an ardent believer in the God Complex, but then he learns that a wise man knows he’s a fool and begins helping the poor.

NOVA image from "What Darwin Never Knew"

It was the early 1950s when I was about seven or eight when I saw a public TV program on the dance honey bees do to communicate the location of  food sources.  (Such information is now readily available on the internet.) At the end of that program there was a question that viewers had to answer to demonstrate an understanding of the science that had been presented, and if we answered correctly, we would win a subscription to a science magazine. While I no longer remember the name of that magazine, I wrote my answer on the back of a postcard, sent it in, and won a subscription.

Though up until this point I had been collecting anything I found interesting, which included bugs and butterflies and feathers and rocks and shells, that TV program triggered an interest in me that  eventually led to my becoming a physicist.

This, of course, was in the middle of the 20th century when at about the same time, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick were discovering DNA. It’s amazing the progress science has made in the last 60 years understanding DNA structures and their role in life forms, disease, and biological evolution. If you’d like to be amazed, too, by this progress, spend just two hours watching NOVA’s “What Darwin Never Knew.”

To say that it will blow your mind is probably an understatement. Indeed, if you’re young and curious and would like to play a role in what Richard Dawkins calls The Greatest Show on Earth, consider science in any of its forms as a career.

When we get together during the holidays with family and friends, one thing naturally leads to another — generational catching up, drink, food, song, games, photos, long walks — until we arrive at discussions that involve the state of affairs, which can be challenging, for we try to focus on things we want to explore while navigating around stressful deep pits that wreak havoc.

No matter how these discussions worked for you — my hope is that they were pleasant and thoughtful — you, like I, were probably exposed to a range of intelligences that made the holidays more memorable.

Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Model

And when thinking of multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner is our go-to psychologist who has long been recognized as the person who can help us understand the complexity of intelligence, which, by his definition, consists of the ability to create, solve and discover:

• the ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in a culture;
• a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life;
• the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge.

With this as his foundation, Gardner, who started with seven intelligences in his 1993 Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice, believes now that there were nine different intelligences on display during our Thanksgiving holiday:

HOWARD GARDNER’S NINE MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES:

1. Linguistic Intelligence: the capacity to use language to express what’s on your mind and to understand other people. Any kind of writer, orator, speaker, lawyer, or other person for whom language is an important stock in trade has great linguistic intelligence.

2. Logical/Mathematical Intelligence: the capacity to understand the underlying principles of some kind of causal system, the way a scientist or a logician does; or to manipulate numbers, quantities, and operations, the way a mathematician does.

3. Musical Rhythmic Intelligence: the capacity to think in music; to be able to hear patterns, recognize them, and perhaps manipulate them. People who have strong musical intelligence don’t just remember music easily, they can’t get it out of their minds, it’s so omnipresent.

4. Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence: the capacity to use your whole body or parts of your body (your hands, your fingers, your arms) to solve a problem, make something, or put on some kind of production. The most evident examples are people in athletics or the performing arts, particularly dancing or acting.

5. Spatial Intelligence: the ability to represent the spatial world internally in your mind — the way a sailor or airplane pilot navigates the large spatial world, or the way a chess player or sculptor represents a more circumscribed spatial world. Spatial intelligence can be used in the arts or in the sciences.

6. Naturalist Intelligence: the ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) and sensitivity to other features of the natural world (clouds, rock configurations). This ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters, gatherers, and farmers; it continues to be central in such roles as botanist or chef.

7. Intrapersonal Intelligence: having an understanding of yourself; knowing who you are, what you can do, what you want to do, how you react to things, which things to avoid, and which things to gravitate toward. We are drawn to people who have a good understanding of themselves. They tend to know what they can and can’t do, and to know where to go if they need help.

8. Interpersonal Intelligence: the ability to understand other people. It’s an ability we all need, but is especially important for teachers, clinicians, salespersons, or politicians — anybody who deals with other people.

9. Existential Intelligence: the ability and proclivity to pose (and ponder) questions about life, death, and ultimate realities.

Seeing Benicia Old Town Theatre Group’s preformance of The Voice of the Prairie and writing a response to the play is one thing you can do for extra credit. My review of John Olive’s play can be found at Benicia.Patch.com.

Lexi Hart as Frankie Reed and Dan Clark as The Watermelon Man

"Just a Family: A multiracial family gathers to talk about being mixed race in America."

. . . or as the French say, plus ça change, plus ça reste la même: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Those of us who don’t experience discrimination tend to forget, since we believe our society has moved past racism and bigotry, that others do not share our experience. When we go to the store, no one notices us one way or another.

Susan Saulny writing in the  New York Times last Thursday finds that some multiracial couples are too-often explaining their family’s complexions to strangers who should, at a minimum, think empathically before speaking. Take, e.g., Heather Greenwood’s experience:

“How come she’s so white and you’re so dark?”

The question tore through Heather Greenwood as she was about to check out at a store here one afternoon this summer. Her brown hands were pushing the shopping cart that held her babbling toddler, Noelle, all platinum curls, fair skin and ice-blue eyes.

The woman behind Mrs. Greenwood, who was white, asked once she realized, by the way they were talking, that they were mother and child. “It’s just not possible,” she charged indignantly. “You’re so…dark!”

I encourage you to visit Sherman Alexie’s FallsApart.com. All my students of English 1, and this semester of English 370 as well, will remember Lester FallsApart from Smoke Signals, a weather forecaster who has been broken down at the crossroads since 1972.

When you visit, you should join Alexie’s email list, for if you do, you’ll start receiving emails, as you might suspect, that challenge you to think. In particular, the email I received today, the contents of which you’ll find below, squeezes the Petrarchan sonnet form down from 14 lines to 14 syllables with some interesting results:

Hey, folks,

Been working on this new little form. A little sonnet in the form of a couplet. First line 8 syllables, second line 6 syllables, mimicking the 8-6 lines in a stanza structure of a Petrarchan sonnet.

The two lines must rhyme and, as in the Petrarchan sonnet, there must be a thematic turn between the two lines…

So here are a few:

Simultaneous sun and rain,
I am addicted to pain.

That tree is ten thousand years old,
But doesn’t have a soul?

I don’t care if there is a God,
But I fear there is not.

Of course, I married my mother
And so did my brothers.

Shouldn’t we think more of the worm
Than of the predator bird?

Yes, I have often battled Grief.
Both of us used our teeth.

Rather than comments on Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which I unsuccessfully tried to understand while reading next to a pool in Monrovia, Liberia in 1968, the heat unbearably baking my brain, these are links to impossible “being”:

• There’s a new star forming about 4300 light-years away, a new super-massive star in our
  
  

  This galactic bubble is known as RCW 120. It lies about 4300 light-years away and has been formed by a star at its center. The star is not visible at these infrared wavelengths but pushes on the surrounding dust and gas with nothing more than the power of its starlight. CREDIT: ESA/PACS/SPIRE/HOBYS Consortia

  Milky way, that’s just too big to be possible given current solar evolution models. But that’s okay, since scientific models must be falsifiable to be valid and since scientists can improve their model by watching the star’s evolution during  the next 200,000 years. Or, of course, they can come up with an improved model sooner, which would be nice since 200,000 years is rather long. Wasn’t it about this long in the past that mitochondrial Eve began our current human race?

  and to nothingness:

• And Canadian poet Tom Wayman has formulated an answer to the student who asks, after missing a class, whether anything happened that involves nothingness and everythingness:

DID I MISS ANYTHING?

Tom Wayman
From: The Astonishing Weight of the Dead. Vancouver: Polestar, 1994.

Question frequently asked by
students after missing a class

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

A few articles in the New York Times that might be of interest:

1) The same U.S. agency, DARPA, that initially funded the development of the internet is now offering a half-million dollars, to be awarded on 11/11/11, to an organization that will research stellar exploration. Are you interested?

Unfortunately, since gravity is so weak, some 36 orders of magnitude — 36 powers of 10 — weaker than the atomic force holding atoms together, objects in our Milky Way are very, very far away. Indeed, the nearest star beyond our Sun is Alpha Centauri, approximately 4.3 light years or 25 trillion miles from Earth.

Interstellar travel is a tall order. It would take Voyager 1, humanity’s fastest artifact, now traveling 38,000 miles an hour relative to the Sun, more than 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, if it were headed in that direction.

2) A team of scientists has discovered single-celled fossils that are 3.4 billion years old, which is only a billion years after the formation of Earth. This is surprising for many reasons, not the least of which derives from the modern definition of a planet, which is a body large enough to clear its orbit of debris. This is one of the reasons Pluto, too small to accomplish this, was demoted from its planet status.  But this also means that Earth was being constantly bombarded during the first billion years, a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, that created an environment so hot that life was not possible.

3) “The Kids Are Not All Right,” Joel Bakan writes, because these times are not like previous times. While each older generation tends to believe that the younger generation doesn’t measure up, the corporate culture that has evolved during the past 30 years is definitely a change from the past. The push to recognize corporations as “people” using legal arguments that have been so effective in the development of human rights has created an ethical dilemma because corporations have ever-increasing power whereas other groups that historically lacked rights — African Americans, women, children — lacked power. And corporations’ power to influence us, as we’ll see in my English 1 class during our discussion of advertisements, has had a profound influence on how our children think and behave.

I hope you had a restful and interesting summer.

Links to your class can be found at the top right of this page or you can go to QCounty.com, where the link path to my Solano classes is a bit shorter.