50th High School Reunion--The Kinder, Gentler Reunion

SHS Class of 71

This past weekend on Saturday night I drove to my 50th High School Reunion. The Stoneham (Massachusetts) High School Class of 1971 met for dinner at Bear Hill Country Club on the north end of our little town.

Bear Hill Golf Club

Since 1971, I have attended four reunions:  the 10th, the 30th and the 40th before the current reunion. Just over fifty of our class of 364 attended this half-century gathering.  Several more wanted to attend by life got in the way.  

The reunion committee: Elaine, Niccie, Bill and Patricia

If my memories are reliable, this reunion was the most congenial I have been to. At all of the previous reunions nearly all of us were working, our kids were still at home, and we were still working out our place in the world.  At this reunion, I spoke with many people who seemed at peace with life--or at least more at peace than I remember.

Speaking of remembering, I introduced myself to about twenty people. Some had not been to previous reunions--or not the the reunions I attended.  Some people were instantly recognizable, but others I could not place.  

I had more trouble recognizing men than women. Our senior year, a lot of boys had long hair, some had shoulder-length hair.  Fifty years later, the men most difficult for me to recognize had the least hair--or no hair.  

Many of my classmates were recently retired. Some missed their jobs, most were happy to be retired.  

At the end of the evening several people were talking about a 55th reunion in four years--since the 50th was delayed a year by COVID.  If that 55th reunion or the 60th happens, I will be happy to go. 

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, Book 32 of 2022

This very popular book was published in the late 1970s.  It became a national bestseller in 1984 after the author went on TV and radio talking about how he came to write the book. Fifty years later, we live in a world with fewer readers, but the book promotional tour is part of being an author.  Every author does it.

I started to read this book in the 1990s.  I don't remember why, but I dropped it after 30 pages. It sat on my shelf for a couple of decades, then in the big clean up I did at age 65, it was gone.  This year I talked about the book with my friend Cliff, got a copy and tired again.  

It's funny to think I finished the book now and dropped in 25 years ago. I still agree with his central premises:  we have to accept suffering and death to live a happy life.  Peck is right.  But 25 years ago, I embraced suffering as a potential good. Now I accept suffering as part of life--and hope I do not have to do too much of it.  Death is now the same--I am not looking for it, but accept it as the most definite part of my physical future.

I enjoyed the book. His case studies are interesting. I would recommend it to anyone. Next I will read his book People of the Lie. After explaining why it is difficult to lead a good life in The Road Less Traveled, Peck discusses the existence of evil in his next book.  From ordinary assholes to extraordinary tyrants and sociopaths, Peck has a lot to work with on the topic of evil. 

First 31 books of 2022:

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Battery Life--Battery Death

The Red Triangle of Death

When I returned from a recent trip, my 2001 Toyota Prius let me know a big expense loomed in my near future.  On both displays on the dashboard was the "Triangle of Death" the indicator lights that say the hybrid battery is about to die. 

Dead battery indicator

I knew this indicator light was in my future because hybrid batteries last about seven years. The current battery is the third for my intrepid car.  We bought the car in 2002 with 15,000 miles on it. The first battery died right on schedule in 2008 and the next one in 2015. 

Good till 2029? 

Until COVID, I was sure that when this battery died the car would go to the junkyard.  The Prius has a current Blue Book value of $1,000 so putting a $4,000 battery in it is not the smart move.  

BUT.

Used car prices are crazy.  Everything else about the Prius is at least functional (and ,like me somewhat wrinkled). In its 205,000 miles it has had 65 oil changes and all other required maintenance.  So I ordered the battery and will now look at getting a used electric car in 2029. 

MackBook Air in travel case

Yesterday, my MacBook Air also displayed the Triangle of Death. I bought this computer in 2016. Recently I noticed the battery would not last more than 90 minutes on battery. I took it to Lancaster Computer Company. Ron, the owner, said the expected battery life is three or four years. He replaced the battery. I made several charge jokes (battery and credit card) and I left with a fully functional computer for less than $100.

Portable cell phone charger

Another battery death in the past month was the portable cell phone charger that is the second most useful travel accessory I have--after the green cube power adapter plug for every region of the world. 

Dropping further down the price scale, I replaced that very necessary item for just $30. I travel nowhere without a cell phone charger. 

My iPhone is less than two years old, so it has no battery issues.  In modern life batteries are all around us. Having three important batteries die in a month shows me just how dependent I am on these powerful, invisible devices.  

I'm glad I could replace them all, so my life can charge ahead. 

Can We See the World Through Someone Else's Eyes?

 

"I want to see the world through your eyes!" says a friend, a lover, a caregiver, a well-meaning person who truly wants the experience of seeing life through the eyes of another.  

Every person is infinitely complex. One of the ways I comprehend the existence of God in the universe is the complexity of every person I know. The more I know about anything infinite, the more I know that I don't know.  

To some degree, I know my children. I share many experiences with each of my children. The more things I share with them, the more I know that they were and are growing and changing in a world about which I know nothing: school, friends, jobs, teams, their own reading, learning, triumphs, losses and loves.  

For months now I have been working next to refugees and immigrants from Ukraine. Some have told me parts of their stories, but even as a veteran, I will never know (I hope) the vast pain they feel of fleeing their country because a tyrant invaded.  

Then I had a moment of clarity that told me for sure, I would never see the world through someone else's eyes.  Recently I visited the Musee des Arts et Metiers in Paris: a museum displaying French technology over the past half millennium.  

To say the museum is vast just begins to describe it. 

Three thousand permanent exhibits, many working models in glass cases, cover six thousand square meters of floor space (roughly an American football field with end zones) in in the Abbaye de Saint-Martin-des-Champs. It has half again as much space for storage. 

Long hallways are lined with models of ships, steam engines, bridges, buildings, towers, factory production equipment, tools, scientific measuring devices, satellites, rotary telephones, floppy disk computers, switchboards, cars, aircraft, Foucault's pendulum and much more.   

I walked through all of this museum in an afternoon, glancing at some things, lingering over others. 

I started down a long hallway near the end of the exhibit area. I had found some connection with all of the exhibits, at least some understanding of the use or operation of many of the objects.  

Then I saw a black inverted-V shaped object 50 yards away and connections with that particular thing started flooding into my mind.  I was looking at a V-10 Renault engine, one of the RS series of engines that first entered Formula 1 racing in 1989 and continued with updates until 2013.  I knew immediately that this engine powered the Williams F1 race car that won five world driving championships between 1992 and 1996. A later version of this engine powered the Red Bull car that Sebastian Vettel drove to four titles from 2010 to 2013. In between, it powered Fernando Alonso to both of his titles in 2005-6.  

Renault RS3 V-10

The first title for the engine in 1992 was the one and only title for my favorite driver, Nigel Mansell.  My youngest son is named for Mansell.  The Renault RS3 V-10 powered Mansell to the world championship.

Nigel Mansell in his Red 5 Williams in 1987

The Renault V-10 was the engine of the 1990s, powering four more champions in the five years following Mansell's title. 

In 2005, Fernando Alonso won the first of his two world championships with RS25 V-10, the last year of the V-10 engine in Formula 1.  The next year Alonso took the title with the new V-8 version of the engine.  Along with the new V-8 configuration, Renault introduced pneumatic intake and exhaust valves. The V-8 Renault could rev to 20,500 rpm.  No other race car engine has ever revved like RS26.  

Rev limiters followed. Then from 2010-2013 Sebastian Vettel drove a Renault-powered Red Bull car to four consecutive world championships.  

I watched all or part of every Formula race from 1984 when ESPN began covering every race until now.  The history of the Renault engine was alive in my mind as I approached the 350-pound lump of metal in a glass case.  

Later I told my son about this moment. I said seeing that engine was like seeing him in a crowd at a soccer game. I would see a thousand faces, but when I saw his face, I would remember things from his whole life.  In the museum, I saw more than a thousand objects, but that one flooded me with memories.  

And yet, there is so much more to know about the Renault Formula 1 engines, about my son Nigel and about everyone I love and care about.  Between zero and one lies an infinite number of numbers.  

Can I see the world through someone else's eyes?

Maybe for a moment.  

Maybe not.  

When I described all I knew about that engine, I did not even begin to try to describe the emotions I associated with some of those races.  I cheered myself hoarse when Mansell took the title in 1992.  In 2007 my son Nigel and I began following and cheering for a rookie driver named Lewis Hamilton.  In 2008 he won the closest title fight in Formula 1 history--the first of seven world championships.  Which meant Nigel and I were cheering against the dominant Renault engines of Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull from 2010-2013.  

Can I see the world through someone else's eyes?

Maybe for a moment? 

I think not.

Ukraine is My Country--Zelenskyy Showed Me Why

 

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the 

Bad Ass Ukrainian Army 

In 1787, Benjamin Franklin urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had written. 

“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

It is time for me to admit my ambivalence toward Ukraine. Hostility would be more accurate.  My grandparents escaped what is now Ukraine in 1900. Then it was part of Tsarist Russia. They were born in Odessa. The pogroms that killed a million Jews before and after their escape were carried out by the Tsar's army with willing help from local people.  

Neither my father, nor my grandmother (who lived to be 100) nor any of the my father's extended family of five brothers and their wives and families ever mentioned Ukraine or Russia. That was the "Old Country" if mentioned at all.  The one time my grandfather returned to Odessa led to the worst year of his life. The story is here.

In my barely Jewish childhood, I knew the Holocaust happened, but knew almost nothing about it.  I lived in Germany for three years in the 1970s and never visited a death camp or memorial or museum. In fact, it was 2017 before I visited my first Holocaust site: Auschwitz.  

After Trump was elected and made a Nazi-website host his chief of staff, I suddenly became interested in the Holocaust and where my grandparents escaped from.  The following year, 2017, I rode from Belgrade to Lviv, Ukraine. I had read a lot about the Holocaust in the previous year.  The ride began in Belgrade, where a century of Jew hating by Nazis, Soviets and the disintegration of Yugoslavia had wiped out a Jewish community that had been vibrant in the 19th Century.  

Then I rode to Auschwitz, the worst single site of the Holocaust. I continued to Lviv where the Jews were dispossessed, raped, and murdered by their neighbors.  Auschwitz and Lviv were the worst sites of the Holocaust in their own tragic ways.  

But in March of 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected President of Ukraine in a landslide repudiation of Victor Poroshenko.  The country I had looked at only through the lens of its bad history, looked very different.  Zelenskyy, a Jew, won with 73% of the vote.  He was asking for weapons to fight the Russian invasion of 2014 that continued in the eastern regions of Ukraine.  

Then the Jewish President of Ukraine stood up to Putin's Puppet in the White House!  Our mobster President tried to trade missiles for help with his own re-election and Zelenskyy wouldn't play.  Trump was impeached, but not convicted--that would have required Republican senators with spines.  

Then on February 24 Putin invaded Ukraine.  The experts gave Ukraine a week.  They offered Zelenskyy a way out.  Zelenskyy said, "I don't need a ride, I need ammo." Ukrainian Marines were told to surrender or die by the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.  They answered, "Russian Warship! Go Fuck Yourself!" 

In March I started volunteering with Ukrainians making medical kits for Ukrainian soldiers. Ukraine is now the center of the fight to maintain democracy in the world.  Russia and China are ruled dictators. Turkey and Hungary, both members of NATO are ruled by authoritarians who will be full on dictators soon. 

In the case of Hungary, Republicans cheer President Viktor Orban to the rafters when he talks about the Great Replacement Theory to justify his racism, and their racism.  The most vile Christian-labelled tyrant worshippers like Tucker Carlson, Eric Metaxas and Rod Dreher see Hungary and Russia as the real Christian west.  Which is true if the Crusades, the Inquisition and the wars of religion are your idea of true Christianity.

Ukraine suffered nearly a century of Soviet oppression. In the middle of Soviet horror, Ukraine was conquered by the Nazis.  After the Soviet Union collapsed,  Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom guaranteed the borders of Ukraine.  

With all of that, Ukraine is now the front line of democracy. Ukraine is fighting for all of the free world right now.  In every government and every organization Personnel is Policy.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a brave man leading a free nation in a fight against tyranny.  

My previous view of Ukraine was of a nation oppressed and conquered. As a free nation, Ukraine is a light to the world.  

And of all nations in the world, Israel should be offering whole-hearted support to Ukraine, and yet they are not. A Jewish state could and should do a lot more to help a Jewish head of state under attack by one of the worst tyrants in the world.

The Fight for Rationality in 1970s America: The American Skeptics Movement and the Problem of Counter-Culture

 

Dr.Stephen Weldon, 

Professor of the History of Science,

University of Oklahoma

Many people who lived through the 1970s see it as a weird transition from the earnest activism of the 1960s to the rapacious conservatism of the 1980s. The disco ball, Donny Osmond, the fall of Nixon, the US bicentennial, the debut of Star Wars  all happened in that weird decade.  

In a presentation at a history of science conference, Stephen Weldon reminded me that the 70s were even weirder than I remembered.  His presentation titled "The American Skeptics Movement and the Problem of Counter-Knowledge" began with Weldon showing us that NBC TV aired nationally televised programs with speculation about alien encounters and whether Bigfoot really existed.  

In those days broadcasting still had the Fairness Doctrine. Leading scientists got together and demanded that the network air the opposing view--the scientific consensus.  Carl Sagan, B.F. Skinner and Isaac Asimov were the public face of the protest. 

Weldon then took us back to the founding of the American Humanist Movement at the turn of the century. He presented its history up to the 60s when there was a split between scientific-oriented and protest-oriented parts of the movement.  Parts of the counter culture became targets of the rationalists.  

Weldon showed us the cover of "The Humanist" magazine in September/October 1974.  The issue was a critique of the cults that had risen to prominence in the previous decade.  These cults had many adherents among the people who were part of the counter-culture and on the political left.  The issue attacked those who were political allies as part of a dangerous rise of irrationalism.  

[In another irony of the time, the 800-page Christian fundamentalist handbook of false religions titled "The Kingdom of the Cults" by Walter R. Martin, published in 1965, had chapters on many of the same groups that were the targets of "The Humanist."  The Martin book sold half a million copies by 1989 and is still in print. I mentioned the Martin book to Weldon in the lively Q&A that followed his talk.]

Of course, Christian fundamentalists and scientific humanists were in no way allies, even if they both rejected the same alternative religions.

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In the late 80s, when Arkansas tried to force Young Earth Creationist ideas into school curricula, prominent scientists led the effort to stop the the teaching of religion in science classes.  

Christian B. Afinson, Francisco Ayala and Stephen Jay Gould submitted an amicus curaie brief with the backing of 77 Nobel laureate scientists opposing the teaching of creationism. (They won!) 

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Weldon also talked about the magazine "The Skeptical Inquirer."  The cover art surprised the audience with its very 70s strangeness and led to several comments in the Q&A.  

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Weldon published the book The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism  in 2020.  He has a huge database connected to the website for the book. It is here.

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We met at the conference outside the coffee shop. Weldon told me about the huge collection of rare scientific books at the University of Oklahoma that was once a private collection. I told him about the Neville Library at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia whereI used to work, also a collection amassed over a lifetime.

Then I mentioned that I spent two months in Oklahoma more than a decade ago and on my last day there went to a Rattlesnake Rodeo.  Weldon said he had never been to a Rattlesnake Rodeo, but would look into it when he returned to Oklahoma.

In-person conferences are the best.

How I Became a Photographer (Twice)--And Why I Don't Own a Camera

A Crew Chief checking the tail rotor of his Blackhawk helicopter on the 

air strip at Camp Adder, Iraq, at Sunset, November 2009. 

Sometimes I get a good shot.

Twice in my long and varied work life, I was handed a camera and told to take pictures. Both times I was in the Army.  I took thousands of pictures in Cold War West Germany in the late 1970s and in Iraq in 2009. 

But I never became a photographer outside the Army, and I don't own a camera apart from my iPhone. 

In 1978, I left my tank unit for a year to work in base headquarters writing about our unit.  News articles need pictures. The brigade had a photographer, so the headquarters staff said Sgt. Anctil is the photographer. Tell him what you need pictures of and he will shoot them.

I went to Anctil. For him, photography was the lab, developing, printing. That was his happy place.  He did not want to go away for 3 or 4 days or a week and take pictures of tanks at gunnery, or infantry in war games.  He handed me an Olympus camera showed me how the f-stop, shutter speed and focus work and told me how to bracket pictures.

"Take lots of shots," he said. "Take a dozen rolls of film. Shoot at different f-stops and shutter speeds. I'll develop and print them."

Anctil wanted no part of playing Army. He wanted to stay on base and sleep in his private barracks room. So I learned by trial and error how to take pictures.  My pictures were good enough for the base newspaper. Once I got the cover of the "Stars and Stripes" newspaper in Western Europe.  

But as I learned more, I knew I did not have that deep feeling for light that separated a good photographer from a great one. I concentrated on writing and took the shots I needed to take. 

When I left the Army, I never bought a camera.  

Almost 30 years later I was back in the Army In Iraq and they handed me a camera. My job for the last half of our deployment was to write about soldiers. But someone had to take the pictures and that was me. So I took thousands of pictures.

Thirty years did not give me any more feeling for light and framing. So I would occasionally get a really good shot, but when I left the Army, I gave the camera back and did not get one of my own. 

I take pictures now, but when I see something I really like, I want to write about it.  Sometimes I forget to take a picture.  

I think of myself as a professional writer, a professional soldier, and a professional dock worker--I can load a truck full and all the cargo will arrive in good shape. But I am not a professional photographer.  I admire great photography in the same way I admire great cello playing: both are beautiful in their own, but I will never be a real  photographer or a cellist.  

But once in a while, I get lucky and get a really good shot.