It is pretty hard not to comment on what just happened with the George Floyd case. Amazing! A police officer was held responsible for something.

I feel pretty divided by all of the thoughts that come flooding into my mind about this. Obviously, we want (and need) police to help protect our safety. It is also obvious that to do that they need sufficient “tools” to do so. Once that point has been agreed upon, then a whole lot of difficult issues pop to the surface concerning the nature of those “tools” and their appropriate use. Most of us want benevolent, but strong, police that we can trust and respect. There are a many officers that want the same, and believe that describes them – they truly feel that they are providing “public safety.” As a safety engineer, I certainly align with this point of view. Unfortunately, it appears that the profession also attracts individuals that are more aligned with “public control.”

It appears to me that the selection criteria for police officers might be defective by failing to filter out those that like the aggression/control aspects of the job more than the trust and safety parts. Many (perhaps most) of us have all experienced officers that can best be described as aggressive “bullies.” We have also encountered officers that are truly helpful, friendly, while being “professional.” I don’t think you can train the bully out of bullies. I also don’ think you can scare them out of bullying by showing that they might be held guilty – they are much “stronger” than that. We need to prevent them from entering the system. Waiting for them to do something so egregious as to be convicted of a serious crime before they are “weeded out” clearly doesn’t work because it allows many lessor events to continue unabated. Unfortunately, expecting the local police chiefs to do the sorting is very problematical because they (the chiefs) are prone to being bullies themselves – thus not only allowing, but encouraging, overly aggressive behavior and tactics.

I don’t have a great solution to this problem. However, perhaps identifying the problem is a necessary first step. Perhaps it is not “adequate training”, perhaps it is not “appropriate protocols”, perhaps it is not public oversight or accountability – perhaps it is something amiss in the selection criteria for those willing to take on a very difficult, challenging, and potentially dangerous job. The conflicting requirements of “strong and brave” and “compassionate and helpful” might be pretty rare – but necessary. I wonder how, or if, we can change the makeup of the police departments in ways that better support the needs of the community without the nasty parts that so often boil to the surface. My personal encounters with police officers has been overall good (with only an occasional excessive pushiness that seemed uncalled for at the time) – but then I am a middle class, white, large, passive male. It appears that not everyone has similar generally positive experiences as I have had. I suspect there are “bubbles” of situations that enhance the “bully” attitude.

The April 2021 issue of Scientific American has a very interesting article discussing the possibility of achieving a sustainable energy system – including the role of natural gas in the future. Michael Webber, the author of the article, begins with the observation that while natural gas is often touted as being the bridge fuel to a zero-carbon future, but if it is a “bridge” it is not part of the long term game plan. His contention is that if we build that bridge, it will be extremely difficult to get off of it. It represents a type of status quo, continuing using existing technologies that continue to burn vast amounts of fossil hydrocarbons, continually adding green house gases in the form of carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. Webber explores opportunities that provide not only a viable bridge, but long term solutions.

Webber’s main focus is on ways to achieve a non-polluting, hydrogen based energy future. He discusses several interesting approaches to obtaining the hydrogen. One source of hydrogen is from anaerobic digesters that use microbes to create methane from organic matter such as crop waste, manure, landfills, and the like. (The reason that carbon dioxide created by burning methane from these sources is that the carbon for plant growth comes from the atmosphere, and just ends up back the atmosphere when it is burned – there is no net increase in the amount of carbon dioxide. It is actually better than not using it because the methane is created in any case when organics breakdown in landfills and such, increasing the amount of methane in the atmosphere, which might be worse than carbon dioxide. What the author fails to point out is that “big industry” often takes these kinds of solutions to the extreme, clear-cutting vast forests that are ground up and fed into industrial digesters. The point is to do this using materials that would normally be waste, creating fuel and organic compost used to enhance agricultural activities. To be effective, it should NOT including cutting down forests for fuel, or planting large crops such as is currently being done with corn to produce ethanol as a fuel additive.

Gas produced by bioreactors can be used in a number of ways including producing electricity for local use or put onto the grid, injecting directly into natural gas pipelines as a substitute for natural gas, or liquefied and shipped to the user by truck or train. While this source of methane is limited, it is currently available and being done globally.

Sources of hydrogen include creating it by electrolysis of water by using electricity produced by sustainable sources such as wind, hydroelectric and solar. It can also be obtained by steam re-forming of methane. Large deposits of hydrogen have been found and can be extracted using wells much like methane. Unfortunately, the existing natural gas distribution pipelines are not suitable for transporting pure hydrogen. There are problems with corrosion, leakage, and energy required to move it through pipelines because of its low density. A solution to this problem is mixing it with methane to reduce, but not eliminate, the amount of carbon in the fuel. It is even possible to pipe methane to the user and reforming it at that location by extracting the carbon from the gas, resulting in hydrogen and carbon powder. (The powder has economic value and can be sold.)

Another interesting possibility for making hydrogen suitable for pipelines is to turn it into ammonia (NH3) by combining it with nitrogen from the atmosphere for transportation and back to hydrogen at the end of the pipeline. Another advantage of using ammonia is that it is liquid at near-ambient conditions and can therefore replace traditional liquid fuels for ships and aircraft.

All of this is very interesting and encouraging because it describes what could truly be a bridge to a hydrogen economy that can eliminate the increase in carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere (with the added benefit of eliminating the other pollutants associated with burning fossil fuels). The author’s point is that we shouldn’t be thinking of methane as a bridge, but instead move toward a hydrogen and sustainably produced electricity based fuel system.

While this is an interesting approach to a better future, it follows the typical path of assuming a constant (or growing) demand for energy, and the presence of a vast commercial infrastructure that sells energy to the customer. I believe we need to focus much more on reducing our energy demands as a major step toward achieving an “green” energy footprint. The opportunities to conserve in ways that don’t result in reduced utility are astounding. For curiosity, last night I counted the number of LED “indicator lights” glowing in my house. They are on all sorts of devices, from smoke alarms and toothbrushes to televisions and refrigerators. I found 46 of them glowing like a spread out Christmas tree. If each of those little lights uses 1/2 watt of power, the approximately 125 million homes in the USA require the total output of four very large coal burning power plants just to keep those little lights glowing. We could shut down four coal burning power plants just by not including indicator lights in all of these devices. As I have discussed in the past, we can reduce the amount of energy required to condition the air in homes to about 1/3 of the current amounts by various means of “fixing” problems, at an initial cost that is less than the cost of not fixing them (this means “free” to me). Implementing these “free” fixes would cut the country’s energy budget by 5%. Doubling the mileage of cars and trucks would reduce the use of energy by another 15%. Switching to other low efficiency devices in homes can further reduce the demand by 5%. I believe that making energy efficiency a priority can easily reduce the country’s energy use by 50% or more, getting the demand small enough for a zero-carbon approach to be feasible without resorting to solutions such as nuclear power plants. For example, once homes are made more efficient, then making them “net zero” consumers is highly affordable using solar electricity. Combining this with on-site hydrogen production and storage can achieve not just “net zero” energy use, but “off grid” conditions that do not depend upon using the grid at any time except as a means of making a small income by selling excess power to the grid.

I would like to see a big study that researches how much we can reduce the energy demain using techniques that have costs less than the equivalent of 5 years (or some appropriate time period) of energy or at least pays back in less than the product lifetime. These relatively short payback investments result in a lower ownership/use cost for the consumer. Perhaps the government will need to provide some type of zero interest loan to absorb the upfront costs. These loans would be in a “revolving” fund that gets payed by as a fraction of the energy costs that would have been incurred without the improvements.

I think the focus should be on reducing our energy footprint so that we only replace what needs to be replaced. Just because we current use 93 quadrillion BTUs (QUADs) of power does not mean that we will always use that amount. Perhaps we actually only need 30 QUADs to power a more efficient economy. If so, that makes the problem of switching to “green” sources of power much easier considering that we already produce about 11 QUADs, with an addition 8 QUADs of nuclear (that could be the true “bridge” power source that will become smaller as the power plants age and become uneconomic to operate). While coming up with 10 QUADs of new sources of non-carbon fuels will be a challenge, it is not nearly as large as the requirement for 70 QUADs currently envisioned.

Like many times in the past, I started searching for him with an email message. I normally don’t get a response from him using this approach; I usually end up driving the three hours to his place in the hopes of finding him at home. However, my emails don’t bounce so I assume he is still somewhere in the vicinity. Since he has a tendency to roam the world, the odds of finding him at home are not great. This time the email bounced back, meaning that something had changed. On a whim I tried Googling his name, and up popped his obituary!  Something had indeed changed with his passing in October of last year.  I was surprised at the strength of my reaction to this news – I was stunned, and filled with tears.  I am still going through the roller coaster of feeling fine one minute, and choked up with tears and grief the next.  I guess this is a sign of deep connection and love with the deceased – it is too bad that our bodies are so great at informing us of this after the opportunity to stay connected has passed.  I was aware that I really like the guy, and think of him often even when separated by months (or years) – but I wasn’t prepared for the depth of my reaction to his loss.

Rocke was one of those one-in-a-lifetime kind of guys.  His world was always a “big” world with few apparent bounds – everything had an outsized aspect to it.  Perhaps the most amazing, and at times annoying, thing about him was his photographic memory about the big and tiny, details of everything around him.  Because of this, discussions might include recitations of pages of quotes from philosophers such as Kant, to detailed specifications (including part numbers) of the inner workings on some specific vintage fighter plane engine that took his fancy for some reason or another, to lengthy discussions of the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics – or any other of a myriad of possibilities.  It was always far beyond anything I knew about, and in far more detail than I had any desire to know – but he demanded my attention because it was all obviously somehow critically important to the functioning of the world.  I always found him to be endlessly fascinating, but only possible to withstand in small chunks at a time. 

The stories about him are probably endless – each person he encountered undoubtedly has many such stories that can’t be told in the right way because no matter how you approach them they all sound like wild exaggerations, and flights into one sort of fantasy or another – no person can live like that.  In fact, that was always one of my amazements – somehow he managed to get to 81 years as the artist of his own life, painting the most outrageous experiences of life lived his way.  I didn’t think it was “safe” to live like he did. And all the time he was full to overflowing with love, compassion and understanding of others.  He just did things for others, no question, no hesitancy – just “do it”.  Little things like driving down from Sparks on day to bring me a little stone that he felt was full of “power” that I needed to help me through my life.  Or bigger things, like putting on free “feeds” for the local down-and-out folks where he would cook for 300 people in his little kitchen in the bowels of what appeared to be an abandoned gold rush era hotel – at a time when he was obviously destitute himself.  Money didn’t appear to hang around him very long, there were always much more important things that needed doing. The stories could go on forever, but never really capture the essence of the man – my friend and a reminder that I have choices about how I want to life my life.   He will be missed – even though I seldom talked to him.  I knew that an amazing experience was in the offering whenever I felt the need to partake. 

This weekend I got to remembering the marble games we used to have during recess when I was in grade school. Spring was the “marble season” – perhaps that is what brought it back to my memory. As I think about it the feeling is kind of “Leave it to Beaver” moment in the ’50’s before the world became paranoid during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We played three different, but similar games. One was playing in a circle scratched in the dirt, another was in the shape of a fish, and the third as a game of “catch me if you can’ chasing game. I much preferred the one played in the circle. The game went something like this: (1) players dropped a number of their marbles into the ring, (2) someone started shooting from outside the ring, trying to knock a marble out, (3) if you knocked a marble out but stayed in the ring, you could shoot again, (4) if your “shooter” went out of the ring, or if you didn’t eject another marble, it was the end of your turn. Then it went to the next person. I don’t recall how the order of shooters was selected. My recollection says that if you missed and ended up in the ring, then your “shooter” was fair game for the next people. This was a serious situation because prized “shooters” were almost magic, losing one was not a good thing so you had to try to avoid being stranded at the end of your term.

I wasn’t a very good player, but consistent. I often won a couple of extra marbles, but wasn’t good enough to run the ring and knock all of them out. That was an advantage to me because people would play with me, usually someone else would pick up a few extra marbles too. The “good” players had a harder time getting a game – who wants to play someone that takes ALL of the marbles every time.

As the weeks from spring to summer progressed each year my marble bag would get full, to the point that I made a much larger bag than normal to hold my small but consistent winnings. As summer approached, things began to get more difficult because I often had most of the marbles, other players didn’t have enough to join a game. That is when we would switch to “chase” because that only took one marble to join a game.

When we were finally in the last week before summer, I did something that seems odd in retrospect. I would go to the middle of the paved part of the playground and dump all of the marbles out of my bad onto the pavement. They scattered in all directions, being chased down by whoever happened to be there – restoring almost everyone’s stash of marbles. I ended up with none (except for my magic shooters and enough to start playing during the following spring. Next year it would happen all over again. The thing about marbles is that they were expensive (for us kids) and relatively difficult to come by – being mostly passed down from kid to kid, or maybe parents buying a little bag if needed. My guess is that there was pretty much a constant number of marbles in play, we didn’t just “print” more when we ran out.

This reminded me a little of some of the stories about the Native American potlatch idea. Potlatches were “give away” ceremonies held for many reasons such as celebrating a birth, a victory, or some other good event. However, it is my understanding that they were also used as a means for “redistributing” wealth when as a course of events one person would accumulate too much while others didn’t have enough (kind of like my marble conundrum). There seems to be a natural tendency in trading situations for some people to acquire more while other get less. This tendency accelerates over time because the “rich” people have more, and better, resources and therefore have an edge in the game. The rules of the game of trade where that everyone had to try their best, but just naturally there were differences and the wealth would become too unbalanced. Periodically this would become unbalanced enough that it was time for a give-away (potlatch) to even out the wealth within the tribe. If this wasn’t done, then the game broke and could no longer be played (just like with my marble game). Resetting the wealth allowed a game that was obviously flawed because of the tendency of wealth to accumulate wealth to continue functioning thousands of years (or in my case, until the next spring).

At one point in the United States we attempted something similar through a steeply escalating tax structure. In the 50’s the top tax rate was as high as 90%, effectively limiting the accumulation of resources (wealth) by a few – thus fueling a very vigorous and thriving economy. Roads were built, public schools worked, colleges were almost free, the health care system was rapidly growing and finding amazing cures. We were attempting to follow Henry Ford’s business model that he had to pay his workers enough so that they could buy his cars because he needed to sell cars. He was wise enough to understand that he had to create a market for his products if he was going to succeed.

It seems to me that we have somehow lost track of the idea that taxes build things that industry requires in order to be healthy, and that industry requires a consumer base that can afford their products. They need a healthy and educated workforce. An easy way to accomplish that is to pay for the education, pay for a health care system and pay for many other services that are vital to the efficient and competitive functioning of the economy – including their businesses. All of those kinds of “socialist” things aren’t the wealthy paying for other people, it is the wealthy paying for the services that they require in order to do business. It is using the economic benefits of taxes to pay for things that are required by industry but which industry has no means of providing on their own.

The March 13, 2021 issue of Science News has an interesting article concerning the effectiveness of masks at preventing exposures to air borne microbes (including the covid-19 virus). One set of numbers when using medical masks was particularly enlightening to me. They performed a number of tests with two manikins (surrogates for people) spaced six feet apart. If the receiver alone wears a mask, it reduces the amount of inhaled droplets by 7.5%. If the source alone wears a mask, it reduces the receivers exposure by 41.3%. If both wear a mask, the reduction is 84.3%. Clearly, the most important player to reducing exposure is the source person (as we are being constantly told), but the real benefits come when both people wear masks.

If the masks are worn “properly” (knotting the ear loops close to the mask and tucking in the ends to eliminate side gaps), the single mask worn by the receiver reduced expose by 64.5% compared to when neither wears a mask. If both do this, then the reduction is 95.9%. Wearing double masks helps even more. When just the receiver wore a double mask, the protection increased to 83%. When both wore double masks, the protection increased to 96.4%.

While these numbers are interesting, and impressive, they still leave me scratching my head because I don’t know how to align the reductions in particles to reduction in risk. Obviously, if neither parties are infected the masks don’t do anything about reducing risks in that specific event. No infection means no risk, and it is as low as it can go. But what if the source is actually infected? What happens to the risk in that case? For example, if it takes 300 particles to cause infection (an ‘official’ estimate), and the source spews out 100,000 particles a minute (5 million in a sneeze), does reducing the exposure by 96.4% really help much? 300 particles is 0.3% of the initial 100,000 particles per minute. That means that the receiver still receives over 10 times as many particles as required to become infected each minute. Once again, it appears that the reduction in risk of infection is close to zero.

It sounds like wearing a mask is not necessarily “protective”, the only real protection is to avoid being in the vicinity of infected people. There are reports of what sound like valid investigations that found little evidence that mask wearing is particularly effective. Perhaps masks and distancing are helpful for necessary short term excursions into potentially infected areas (such as grocery stores and the like), but the real answer is to avoid infected people. I, for one, am willing to believe that masks worn by a source can prevent large globs of stuff from flying out of their mouth into my face, and that has GOT to be an improvement. I therefore do as we were told a year ago, I wear my mask to help protect others and sure wish they would do the same to help protect me.

By the way, while researching this piece I came upon a discussion about the back of the nose being the ideal “incubator” for the virus. Breathing viruses in through the mouth isn’t nearly as dangerous as breathing them into through the nose. Hence, all of those “nose breathers” that don’t put the mask over their noses are doing very little good for themselves. Perhaps it cuts down on the number of droplets being expelled when they talk or sneeze. I also found that the best science still points to vaccinated people being just as susceptible to infection, and just as contagious, as they were before being vaccinated. The only real difference is that they are protected from serious illness, and the creation of many more non-systematic people who think they are now “safe”. They may be safe in some sense, but those around them are not. Testing can help show that a person wasn’t infected when the took the test, but says nothing about what happened subsequently. Actually, since there is a delay of up to three days before tests show a positive response, the tests really only show that the person wasn’t infected three days before taking the test. A friend of mine that recently went to New Zealand said that prior to the flight all passengers tested negative, but by the time the landed in New Zealand, 6 tested positive. Those six were infected sometime between three days prior to their test and when they boarded the airplane. All were asymptomatic when they landed.

Bill Fell 8/16-17/20

According to Ani Pema Chodron, Anam Thubten gave a teaching that if you paused 108 times per day for six months, you’d be enlightened.  

1.

Out the front door, barely break of day
Sudden unforeseen hit of heat
Down the driveway, turn left
Me and my tall shadow head west
Down to the greenbelt, head-fake right, go left 
A soft glow coats the redwoods, ginkoes 
Fronting an oddly opaque blackdrop 
Blanket of clouds no doubt?
Why do I not pause?

2.

Borrowing a corner of Chestnut Park
We, a small-group of meditators take our seats, 
Removing masks . . . quietly gongggging . . .  breathing;  
Hawk-less, squirrel-less, subdued spaciousness
Scrub jays own the air
A sudden flash barely beside my left eye
Is that?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yes!  
Enmeshed in perfect rolling thunder
A southwest flash, but . . . .
Is that where the sounds started?
If it happens again, I need a count
Filling-up this now with ever-more storylines
Sympathetic nervous system invoked
Why do I not pause?

3.

Now, THAT CERTAINLY was a raindrop.   
Up front, Amanda flashes a friendly face  
Refreshing drips soak through, a cooling relief 
But where might all THIS be headed?   
When do we take cover under a yoga mat? 
Who’s the first to make a move?   
Just sit tight  Fill-up this new now with commentary 
Why do I not pause ?   

I think this illustrated graph of U.S. Energy Consumption for 2019 is worth taking a close look at in order to gain a little understanding of how we use, and loss, energy. The “rejected” energy blocks represent efficiency loses that are not usable. One of the big ones is the 24.2 lost from electrical generation. About 1/3 of the power gets to the user, the rest is lost in generation and transmission. Unfortunately, this diagram includes “transmission loses” within generation loses. About 18 quads are transmission loses and about 6 occur during generation. Another interesting one is the transportation portion of petroleum use. When powered by internal combustion, about 80% is lost to heat, 20% to motion. Clearly there are a lot of opportunities to make major reductions in primary energy use through conservation and switching how and where power comes from.

The task before us with regard to CO2 production and global warming is daunting. We need to decrease the energy consumption on the right-hand side by a combination of improved efficiency and changing what we do. We also need to decrease the use of natural gas, coal and petroleum for energy production. There are issues beyond CO2 production that come into play and need to be considered. For example, beyond the problem of burning natural gas(NG) producing CO2, the drilling and shipping of NG releases vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Therefore, reducing the amount of NG used, also reduces the amount of another green house gas in the form of methane. Coal has a similar double or triple advantage in the form of less destruction of the environment (lakes, rivers, mountain tops, etc), but reduces the amount of many pollutants (including radioactive compounds) into the environment. Similarly, capturing methane at landfills to produce electricity also reduces the amount of methane released into the atmosphere.

However, some “improvements” such as increased use of biomass is very problematic if that entails wholesale destruction of vast stretches of forest lands while harvesting trees to be ground up for use as bio-fuels. Diverting methane from land fills is one thing, cutting down thousands of square miles of forest is entirely different. Not all solutions are created equal in terms of green house gas reduction and overall improvements to the environment (or at least, reduced degradation of the environment).

This is a very complex problem, one that has dollar signs associated with each of these paths. Part of the problem is that the dollars in terms of costs and benefits are not distributed evenly. It is almost a zero sum game, where each increase in one location is accompanied by a lose in another – and different people or organizations own and control the various paths.

It appears that we are entering a pretty dangerous phase of the pandemic. People are getting vaccinated and thinking that is the end of their problems. Others are seeing the numbers dropping and feel like we are at the end – and there is no longer any need to follow “the rules” or be vaccinated. In both cases even those of us who have been “being good” are tempted to go out and play after a year of being cooped up. We are all ready to see people, especially our friends and family. The CDC is fueling this idea by telling us that it is fine to have small, indoor, meetings with a small group of friends without masks or social distancing as long as everyone has been vaccinated.

However, at the same time we are being told that there are several new variants that are much more lethal and spread much easier. In addition, organizations such as UC Davis point out that they continue to require regular asymptomatic testing for access to their facilities. They say that this testing continues to be absolutely essential, even for vaccinated people, because we do not yet know everything about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing transmission or infection. It is known that the vaccines protect us from serious illness, but it is not known if they prevent us from spreading the coronavirus. UC Davis continues on to state that there is a risk that the virus may find harbor in our upper respiratory tract even after we are vaccinated. So, by getting tested regularly, we are protecting our families and friends as they wait to get vaccinated.

This is starting to sound a little like double-speak to me. We are being told that it is acceptable to meet in small indoor groups without masks or social distancing, but that it isn’t safe to do so. It might be safe for the people who are doing the gathering, but maybe not so safe for those that we then contact that aren’t yet vaccinated (assuming the vaccination works as well as they claim – which we are told unknown with the new variants).

I read this apparent double message to mean that they believe the serious infection rates are low enough to not overwhelm the hospitals. I DO NOT see anything anywhere saying that this behavior is “safe” – especially for those who are still at risk that might encounter those that have been gathering. They are saying it won’t overwhelm the medical system – period. Unfortunately, it is pretty clear that giving vaccinations without continuing all of the protective measures has the potential for creating a very large cohort of non-symptomatic infectious people capable of stealthily spreading the virus to those who are unable or unwilling to be vaccinated including those that are not yet in the approved list, those that have pre-existing conditions that prevent them from being vaccinated, and children under the age of 18 (maybe it is now 16).

My personal thoughts on this are that I am not venturing out yet. I am waiting to hear that vaccination prevents infection and spreading of the virus. My guess is that we won’t hear that because it doesn’t do that, but testing should provide the necessary data soon. If the vaccinations do not prevent infection and spreading, then there is a problem until such time as all of the people that I might encounter are no longer at risk of getting it. I don’t trust the groups of people that I might socialize with to avoid contact with anyone that might be infected – in fact, I am absolutely positive that they haven’t done that and won’t do it now.

I wonder if those that refuse to be vaccinated or follow stringent safety measures would be willing to refuse admission to a hospital should they become infected? It seems only fair that they accept the natural consequences of their behavior. Silly me – of course they would want to be treated, they just don’t want to be bothered with the other parts. Oh well, that seems to be a part of being “human”.

Last night a friend of mine (Lori White) was a contestant on Jeopardy. This isn’t a game show I spend much time with, but check it out now and then when there isn’t much else going on and I want to watch something on TV. It was interesting how much more exciting it was with a friend in the contest. I noticed a couple of things of interest. For one, the other two contestants help their hands behind the podium and therefore you couldn’t tell what they were doing to get to answer. Lori had a push button thing in her hand so you could see her attempting to be first to respond. The previous winner was very fast, I couldn’t see any time delay, but Lori was pushing and pushing, but not so often getting in there first. She looked frustrated, and I was VERY frustrated – I wanted to hear her answer the questions, which she did in ways that would be totally impossible for me to compete with no matter how much time I got to try to get my mind focused – but honestly there wasn’t anything to focus on, I knew very few of the answers.

It was an exciting game with the points shifting back and forth with things like “double jeopardy” and other leveling features. In the end she won!!! So I guess she is going to be back tonight (or whenever the next game is aired). I have a ton of questions to ask her when I see her next. Does she get to keep what she won last night? Of does that somehow get wrapped up in the entire series, or maybe it isn’t actually what she makes? If so, it was almost $19,000 – not a bad evening. Also, was it live, or was it recorded some time ago? Was it fun?? She was really excited to go to the show, I sure hope she had a ball.

However that goes, congratulations Lori for a splendid game!

I apologize for the long gap in my “daily” posts. It isn’t that I have been ignoring this web site, it is because I have been using my time budget to change the website – hopefully for the better. The experience has been an interesting one that alternates between not having an idea of how to start, followed by experiments and frustrations, eventually calming down with a bit of “success” – only to realize that the success was but a stepping stone on an invisible path: then returning to not having an idea of how to start from that point.

I am finding this process to be highly frustrating because I have almost no “mental model” of how the web site works. The tool that I am using, Word Press, provides two views to the website creator. One view is through “blocks” of material (such as the drop down menu, the “sidebar” area, and the pages) that can be selected, moved around, modified in certain ways. This is fine for those that design by “messing around” – but that is not my style. I like to know “how it works.” For people like me, WordPress provides the completely opposite view – all of the html computer code that creates those blocks. So you can switch to that view and have much more control, but when I do it feels like I am faced with a big pile of letters and numbers in no particular order. Yicks! Does this mean I have to learn yet another computer language? Oh my goodness, that is a daunting task.

Perhaps I will eventually have to step off into the abyss and learn the version of html that is used because that seems to be my way of doing things. It reminds me of when I was first learning to drive. In those days a stick shift, with a clutch, was the option. I was having a hell of time using the clutch without jerking and jumping around. My friends mastered it quickly just be fiddling around until they “got it.” Not me, there was no amount of fiddling that was helping. Luckily, one of my brothers was working on his car and had the engine and transmission out of the car and on the shop floor. I took it apart until I could see what was in the bell housing where the clutch assembly “lives.” At that point I could see how the clutch worked, what levers and springs did what and why. From that moment on shifting smoothy was a piece of cake – I understood how it worked so I could make it work. I am having that problem again with this website. I still don’t know how it works, but it is slowly coming into focus.

So… please bare with me while I go through a period of changing, fixing, and hopefully improving the layout and presentation of the materials. I think it is getting better, but there is always a good possibility that I will completely change my approach and the look and feel will change a lot – or maybe not.