There ought to be a law

Some time back, only one phone company operated in the United States. Law makers decided it had grown too big, broke it apart and made room for competition. This was bad for the environment.

With only one phone company, there was only one phone book publisher. Over recent weeks, I’ve received phone books from at least three publishers. Most of these have gone straight from my doorstep into recycle bins. I didn’t even crack the covers.

Thanks to the internet, I rarely look at a phone book anymore. I’ll bet I’m not alone. Think of all the trees that have died in order to supply paper pulp to manufacture books people don’t use.

Wouldn’t it be better if phone book publishers were required to ask consumers if they want their books instead of assuming that they do. This would save countless trees and prevent much of the pollution of streams that results from paper manufacturing.

There ought to be a law. There really should.

In a reading groove

I’m enjoying reading Jack Vance’s “Lyonesse” trilogy even more than I did the first time I read it. Midway through however, I decided to take a Vance hiatus. While visiting the library with my daughters, I noticed that a new book had been added to a series I’d begun reading years before. I remembered the author. I remembered the character. I’d forgotten the writing style.

I brought the book home. Now, I can’t put it down. That’s because I want it out of my hands and back in those of the librarian’s. But, first I want to know how it ends.

It’s a struggle to finish because it’s so very badly written. Did the author always write this badly, I wonder. Did he change, or was it me? I’ve already added him to my short list of best-selling authors whom I can’t stand reading.

It’s probably not all his fault. In my formative years, I watched cartoons all Saturday morning. One day in my teens, I asked myself why I wasted Saturday mornings on such moronic fare. On that day, I stopped watching cartoons. Sometime later, I stopped watching situation comedies.

Apparently time changes tastes. Authors I once enjoyed, I won’t read today. In this case, the author tells his story in plain and simple language. His writing lacks style and bores me. Vance has style. His language is elegant, yet pithy. With Vance, it’s not so much about what’s going to happen next, it’s about how he’ll describe it.

When I first picked up a Vance in a Hong Kong bookstore, I assumed he was British. He’s not, but he knows his English. Yet his elegance is fresh, not archaic. Other authors, born in 1916, use styles that are dated. Vance has moved with his times, and yet his writing moves beyond his times.

I wish I wrote like that.

Learning a Living

Learning a Living: a guide to planning your career and finding a job for people with learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, and dyslexia
Dale S. Brown
Nonfiction 342 pages
Woodbine House, Inc. 2000

Many books have been written about career planning and job hunting. This one’s a little different. While it offers all the usual stuff found in books of its type, it also offers useful information for people with learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder (ADD), and dyslexia.

People who don’t swim in the mainstream while learning can be victimized by misconceptions held by others and themselves. This book aims at dispelling some of these misconceptions and takes a realistic look at learning disabilities and difficulties.

Because learning disabilities, ADD and dyslexia manifest themselves in a variety of forms, no one career planning approach fits all. The author addresses questions like:

• How does a learning disabled person identify his strengths and weaknesses?
• How does he know when he is being objective, instead of influenced by his own bias or that of others?
• How can a weakness be turned into a strength?
• In what jobs are those strengths assets?
• How can weaknesses be compensated for?

He also considers the relationship between the job market, the individual and the law. For example, when is it advisable to inform an employer of a handicap and when is it best not to do so? What protections are offered under the Americans with Disabilities Act and what does the act not cover? What constitutes reasonable accommodation? When can an employer refuse accommodation due to undue hardship?

Sometimes asking the right questions is more useful than knowing readymade answers. This book teaches people with, and without, disabilities how to ask good career planning questions.

Rise of Magic. Death of Science.

Fast Company devotes two pages of its February issue to Charles Darwin, who will turn 200 on the twelfth of that month. Francis Collins, whose comment is one of nine, remarks that when Darwin published, On the Origen of Species, 150 years ago, many accepted his theory as an explanation for how God carried out creation.

Today many people accept evolution, or at least aspects of it, as compatible with their religious beliefs. But some do not. Evolution requires a much longer time frame than the Bible’s mere seven days of creation. Some religious people argue that we can’t know the length of God’s day. It might span the eons needed to make evolution work. These are people who view Biblical truth as figurative, rather than as literal truth.

There are others who believe that the Bible means exactly what it says. There’s no wiggle room for scenarios spanning millions and billions of years. Everything came into being during the last ten thousand years or less. If the time since creation is so short, evolution is false and so are geology and physics.

My watch synchronizes its time with the atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. The atomic clock is based on the dependability of radioactive decay. But the whole idea of radioactive decay is based on a timeline that far exceeds the time accounted for by a literal interpretation of Biblical creation. Those who accept this timeline must necessarily reject much of modern physics.

I believe that religious truth is compatible on some level with scientific knowledge. This belief is based on faith. Far more scientific knowledge exists than I can comprehend in depth; therefore, my belief in science must be faith based. Though most of us are taught science in school, few of us are taught the history of detailed reasoning and observation that led to establishing what is now considered scientific fact.

Those who interpret the Bible literally, must reject as false, much of what science teaches, if they are to be consistent in their beliefs. Few realize the implications of their rejection of science. They are protected from having to face the contradictions they create by rejecting science by their superficial understanding of science. Arthur C. Clark postulates that if technology is sufficiently advanced, than it can’t be distinguished from magic. I think we’ve achieved that level of technological advancement.

Science was far more comprehensible in Darwin’s day than it is today. Some churchmen readily incorporated evolution into their religious thinking during Darwin’s time, just as some do today. However, if Clark is correct, advancing technology must be accompanied by a decreasing comprehension of how things work. When everything exists as magic, than dependence on reason and observation must decline. The tools of reason and observation have well served mankind. Once they are lost, only magic will remain.

Don’t miss our year end blowout.

Last night I learned on Coast to Coast AM that Yellowstone has been having earthquake swarms since December 26. Earthquakes are normal for the Yellowstone region and largely go unnoticed. Although a swarm of more than 250 quakes in several days is unusual, so far no one is panicking. Not that panicking would do any good. If Yellowstone blows, half of the country will be covered in ash three feet deep. Still, it’s something to ponder, 2012 enthusiasts.

The Learning Disability Myth

The Learning Disability Myth*

Dr. Robin Pauc with Jacqueline Burns

Nonfiction 213 pages Virgin Books, 2006

In his book, “The Learning Disability Myth,” Dr. Pauc addresses a number of developmental and behavioral disorders and presents the basics of his treatment methods. These disorders include: learning disabilities, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Childhood Turette’s Syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Asperger’s syndrome. Each of these conditions share overlapping symptoms, causes and treatments and should therefore be reclassified as aspects of what he calls, Developmental Delay Syndrome. The cause of Developmental Delay Syndrome is that spindle cells, which appear in the prefrontal cortex four months after birth, fail to properly integrate with other parts of the brain. The treatment involves proper diet and stimulation of these cells. Dr. Pauc prescribes removing unhealthy foods and food additives from the diet while adding healthy ones. His book includes a two-week eating plan. He is less specific, however, about his therapies for stimulating wayward spindle cells. Quoting from the letter of a thirty year old patient, these therapies could include, “listening to Mozart, with a view to gain right-ear dominance, looking through a Syntonizer at different lights for an hour a day for two weeks to open the fields of vision, … walking up the stairs with my eyes shut and holding a tray with a glass of water on it to help stimulate the left cerebellum!” Has Dr. Pauc made revolutionary discoveries, or are his claims exaggerated? Dr. Pauc readily discusses neurology, but never mentions that he is a Chiropractor, not a Neurologist. If the reader wrongly infers his profession, Dr. Pauc can, at worst, be accused of omission, rather than of deception. Evidence presented in books written for casual readers tends to be anecdotal rather than statistical. Dr. Pauc’s evidence is also anecdotal. If you want statistics, you’ll need to read elsewhere. Based on the evidence offered, I am unable to form conclusions. I invite your opinions, be they based on personal, or professional, experience.

*March 12, 2021 - No longer published under title above
 

Link building with Blogger

One of the best ways to increase your blog traffic is to encourage other bloggers to link to your blog. The easiest way to do this is to post comments on other people’s blogs. Your comment should always include a link to your blog.

Here’s a few more things you should do:

1. Open the Settings panel from the Blogger dashboard.
2. Select the Comments tab in the Settings panel (Figure 1).
3. Set the Backlinks option by checking the Show radio button. Your blog information will now display a link that says, ”Links to this post.” (Figure 2).
4. Clicking, “Links to this post,” will display the permalink for the current post. A link reading, “Create a Link,” is displayed under the header, “Links to this post.”
5. After clicking, “Create a link,” a window appears displaying the link. You can choose to display either rich text or HTML. The HTML will look something like this: “<a href="http://truthtalltales.blogspot.com/2008/11/when-ceos-come-begging.html#links">Truth and Tall Tales: When CEOs come a begging</a>”
   You can change the title to, “See related article,” by changing the code to: “<a href="http://truthtalltales.blogspot.com/2008/11/when-ceos-come-begging.html#links">See related article</a>”

Another good way to encourage links to your blogs is to provide links to other’s blogs. Blogger provides several ways of creating lists of links.

1. Open the Layout panel from the Blogger dashboard.
2. Choose the option to “Add a Gadget” (Figure 3).
3. Choose either Blog List or Link List from among the available gadget choices. When you add a blog link, inform that blog’s author. The author might return the favor. If he doesn’t, try replacing that link with a link to someone else’s blog. Eventually, you’ll have a list of links to blogs linking to your blog.

Dangerous uses for peanut butter.

I once supped with a bachelor who poured chocolate syrup on his pizza. BeauJo’s located in three spring towns, (Idaho, Steamboat and Glenwood), and elsewhere in Colorado, furnishes honey to put on their thick crusts. Okay, I can deal with that, but chocolate syrup?

Fortunately, peanut butter isn’t pizza. Everyone knows that Elvis liked to put bananas on his peanut butter sandwiches. I like mine with sharp cheddar cheese, or perhaps sprinkled with bacon bits. Think that’s strange? How about mixing peanut butter with vinegar, chilies and soy sauce and pouring it over noodles? Live dangerously.