Our rain chain goes through beautiful transformations as the water freezes or thaws, with differences for flash freezing versus slow, and with varying amounts of snow on the ice.
As the ice melts it makes tinkling sounds like a tiny wind chime.
I just watched a couple of nuthatches swimming in the barrel at the bottom. They took to the (freezing) water like tiny ducks.
A friend in Wellfleet, Ernie Bauer, makes things of function and beauty, especially in metal. A few years ago he made a sculpture inspired by the Navajo word, Hózhó. It stands near the post office and WHAT, the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater.
You can see it and its shadow in the photo above.
Hózhó is often translated as ‘balance and beauty’; it can also be seen as harmony, finding peace amidst the jagged ups and downs of life.
Hózhó also emphasizes how ephemeral aspects of the world can be linked into a more significant whole. This shows up in Navajo weaving and other art forms.
The concept of beauty in Hózhó extends beyond what can be perceived directly by the senses. It implies orderly and harmonious relationships with other people, with the natural world, and with the world of spiritual beings and forces.
The estate of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom donated the rug shown above to the IU museum. It seems quite appropriate. Elinor Ostrom is best known for her work on how we can escape the “tragedy of the commons,” a phrase popularized by Garrett Hardin. For this work she became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Ostrom’s work examined how societies have found ways to manage natural resources and avoid ecosystem collapse. Like the rugs she donated, it’s a realization of the Hózhó idea of living in harmony with others and with the natural world.
Too few people notice Ernie’s Hózhó sculpture. It treads softly. It’s in harmony with the semi-natural area where it stands.
In Wellfleet, the post office and the theater serve as a commons without people needing the sculpture to remind them. They visit with friends and enjoy community events.
But in a larger sense, I fear that humanity is playing out the dystopic scenarios of Garrett Hardin. Can we ever find ways to work together as Ostrom showed is possible?
A balloon of unknown origin appeared in our yard this week. It was first stuck in a maple tree, but later ended up on our woodpile.
On closer examination I determined that it was “Made in China.” Some may want to claim that it’s just a weather balloon, but I’m convinced it had another purpose.
Apparently this kind of thing is happening everywhere––Montana, South Carolina, Columbia, …
Like many others I’ve been curious about DNA matching, especially with regards to my own ancestry. Could a simple swab tell me where my ancestors lived?
I asked this question of FamilyTreeDNA, one of many such services. Using a 12 marker test, it turns out that I’m 4.6% Irish and 2.5% New Zealander. But I’m also 2.4% from Trinidad and Tobago and, surprise… 12.5 % Faroe Islands. All of these numbers are higher than for the US (1.1%), even when including Native American (.6%).
If I wanted to have a simple narrative of my ancestry, these numbers don’t seem to help. I suppose I could say that my main origin is Faroese, with a little Irish, but my ancestors must have cavorted in New Zealand and the Caribbean as well.
The situation worsens when I use a different number of markers, Y-DNA, mitochondrial DNA, haplotrees, or other measures. It’s messy.
It may be disappointing to hear, but for anyone who has similar questions, the underlying science is deeply flawed. That’s true even for someone whose data seems more definitive than mine.
These tests are interpreted to fill in a jigsaw puzzle of who we are; 12.5 % Faroe Islands would be a big chunk of mine. I’d be a little bit of this and a little bit of that, an admixture. This is a term used to describe the process of gene flow between distinct populations. It can be fun to see the scores, but as applied to human populations, the whole idea is wrong.
It relies on assumptions of homogeneity among people living within national boundaries, mapping of ethnicities onto countries and of races onto continents, and racialist assumptions about pure categories. The idea that we can just fill in the jigsaw puzzle of our ancestry doesn’t work.
Kostas Kampourakis and Erik Peterson discuss the science of this in a recent article published in Genetics: The racist origins, racialist connotations, and purity assumptions of the concept of ‘admixture’ in human evolutionary genetics (2023).
The article shows how admixture of the kind an ancestry detective would like requires the existence of pure or unadmixed categories.
There are two big assumptions:
(1) particular populations existed before the colonization era, have not undergone significant admixture, and have maintained their genetic variation.
(2) the people included in the reference datasets have four grandparents all born in the same country, implying they are somehow pure representatives of that country.
But these assumptions are ahistorical and regularly violated. They don’t account for migrations due to colonization, wars, or plagues. And archeological evidence shows that humans were migrating around the globe long before the age of colonization.
In addition to being a problem in the field of genetics, admixture leads to people saying things like “I just learned that I’m a big part Faroese, with a little Irish and Caribbean thrown in!” which is nonsense scientifically.
I grew up in Fort Worth during the time of legalized racial segregation. There were no African Americans in my school. If not for summer and part-time jobs, I would have had little interaction across the racial divide.
This meant that I knew little about the schools for African Americans in Fort Worth. There were even segregated sports leagues. I think I went to just one Black football game and that was because I became friends with a Black fellow orderly when I worked in the local hospital.
Joe was a halfback on the Dunbar High School football team in the Stop Six neighborhood. I believe that the school is still largely segregated, a consequence not of the law anymore, but of residential segregation.
One major gap in my knowledge pertained to the Rosenwald schools. Thanks to Julius Rosenwald, who provided funds for 1/3 of the cost of school buildings, Anna Jeanes, who funded teacher preparation, Booker T. Washington, and others, thousands of schools were born. As important as that external support was, it’s important to note that local Black citizens from a poor, working class, donated cash, labor, and land to make the schools possible.
These programs provided education for generations of African American students, teachers, and scholars. Maya Angelou and John Lewis were grads from Rosenwald schools. Mamie and Kenneth Clark did their research on Rosenwald fellowships as did Pauli Murphy. Their work was crucial for the decision in Brown v, Board of Education.
The project began in 1915, when Sears and Roebuck President, Julius Rosenwald, established a matching grant fund to construct better quality black schools throughout the South. Between 1917 and 1932, the Fund assisted in the construction of thousands of school buildings This was during a time when public support for educating African American children was shamefully inadequate. Over one-third of black children in the South in the first half of the twentieth century passed through the doors of a Rosenwald school,
There’s an excellent photography/text book: A Better Life for Their Children: Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and the 4,978 Schools that Changed America by photographer and author Andrew Feiler. There are many fascinating photos. Feiler says 4,978 schools, but counting teacher homes and shops there was a total of 5,357 buildings constructed.
Just this past year I’ve learned about Rosenwald’s program to fund more than 10,000 school, college, and public libraries, and library science programs. The libraries not only provided resources for individuals; they enabled accreditation for programs for African Americans, which would otherwise not be possible. Aisha Johnson has a wonderful new book on these libraries, The African American Struggle for Library Equality.
I probably heard about Rosenwald schools and libraries, or the Jeanes teachers, during my career, but most of that passed right through my head.
With all the current talk about DEI and social justice, isn’t it a collective failure that the fact of those programs—the very need for them at all, their struggles, and their impact on individuals and society—were so little known by so many of us?
Yesterday we walked part of the way on the trail around Sutherland Pond in the Ooms Conservation Area in Old Chatham, NY, The path was treacherous because of the melting ice, so we didn’t make it the whole way. But we were mesmerized by the patterns of water flowing under the ice,
I assume this process is similar to the basal slippage seen for glaciers in temperate zones. Because of human-caused global warming, the ice melts underneath. Then the remaining ice slides on the water layer, leading to more rapid loss of the glacier.
Guest Editor: Chip Bruce
Schools editor: Andy Kaplan
This symposium shares ways to think about democratic education in today’s world, and how we should plan for the future. How should issues such as indigenous people’s rights, racism, women’s rights, authoritarian governments, the concentration of wealth, the climate crisis, pandemics, and more make us analyze, discuss, and work to create democratic education?
We highly encourage submissions from classroom educators at all levels, from educators outside the United States, and from educators associated with alternative schools or informal learning.
Our initial call for papers in February 2022 led to proposals by almost 40 educators from all over the world. We held two zoom workshops for contributors over the past summer, which led to exciting manuscript submissions. The submissions include articles about teacher education for democracy, a ninth grade program devoted to the dreams and hopes of its students, and a social justice program for pregnant and parenting teenagers. These three articles will appear in the Spring 2023 issue of Schools, marking the first of what promises to be a robust and ongoing symposium.
Interested authors should submit a one-page prospectus describing what their project entails. This is to determine appropriateness and balance for the special issue. We anticipate a mix of empirical and theoretical contributions. Completed manuscripts will undergo the usual Schools: Studies in Education review process before final acceptance.
Articles should be a maximum of 8000 words (25 double-spaced pages). Please follow the Schools style guide.
There is a possibility of a follow-on book publication based on revised versions of the articles, after publication in Schools.
For consideration in the Fall 2023 publication:
For consideration in the Spring 2024 publication:
Visitors to Cape Cod, especially those making it as far as the outer, aka lower, Cape should prepare themselves for wild behavior.
The area is known for its unconventional artists, poets, playwrights, and anarchists, but especially for its bohemian lifestyle and flouting of ordinary social rules.
There are stories of daring costumes, or no clothes at all. The house at 592 Commercial St. in Provincetown could on its own surpass what one might see in a lifetime in an ordinary town.
If you don’t believe that the Outer Cape deserves its reputation for creativity, daring, and non-conformity, just look at the unstaged, unedited photo here. It shows the complete set of visitors around 3 pm today at the Wellfleet library.
Notice the variation in color, from blue-green to green-blue. I’ll admit that that they’re all late model, greenish Subaru Foresters, but look closely and you’ll see fantastic variation in model year and features. One even has stickers on the back panel.
TCU’s extraordinary football season, which soared until the reality of Georgia happened, triggered fond memories of following sports as a teenager in Fort Worth.
Mark Boone reminded me that his grandfather, Pop Boone, was sports editor for the Fort Worth Star Telegram and the Fort Worth Press. There are now TCU athlete of the year awards named for him.
Our family subscribed to both of the papers, and enjoyed reading writers such as Dan Jenkins, one of Boone’s protégés.
Pop was a big supporter of both the TCU Horned Frogs and the Fort Worth Cats minor league baseball team. I spent many hours watching or reading about these teams. I saw only a a few Cats games, but I often listened to the radio, filling out stat sheets, as shown below right.
Some of my interest came from Bud Sherman, a sports announcer for radio and WBAP- TV. He was my friend Clayton’s father.
TV was a new thing in Fort Worth in 1948. Our family got one sometime after the political conventions in 1952.
Of the many stories from that time, one is that a viewer called WBAP on the first night telecast, complaining that she was not receiving any picture. The receptionist asked, “What kind of set are you using?” The viewer responded, “Why, my radio set, of course!”
Also, on that fateful night, Amon Carter, who owned the station and much else in Fort Worth, nearly fell to his death through an unmarked hole in the studio floor. He was grabbed just in time.
TCU’s Amon G. Carter stadium was built in 1930, long before my time, but I benefited from it, the two newspapers, and the sports legacy that Pop Boone created.
On football day when I was 10 or so I ‘d go with a couple of friends to sit in end zone seats. Tickets cost 50¢; I’ve heard that prices have increased since then. We’d move to better seats after halftime when the thin crowd thinned even more.
We watched Jim Swink, the star running back. He was an All-American in 1955 and 1956. During a game against the U of Texas at Austin, he rushed 15 times for 235 yards and scored 26 points in a 47–20 rout. The Longhorns’ slogan and the hook ’em horns sign was created in reference to stopping him. Swink was drafted by the Chicago Bears and later became an orthopedic surgeon in Fort Worth.
After the games, we’d collect a big stack of programs. These were in the form of a daily newspaper, but a bit smaller. They had seemed so valuable before the first kickoff.
I’m not sure why we felt compelled to collect them. We’d carry them home and bury them for some imagined future use. I imagine they’ve long since composted.
See the powerful pregame locker room photo from the 1957 Cotton Bowl pitting TCU against Syracuse. That was chosen by Sports Illustrated as the photo of the century.
Don’t the players look serious? They’re probably asking how they could possibly stop the amazing Jim Brown.
Brown was not only a football legend, but a star in basketball and track as well. He was so good in Lacrosse that they changed the rules of the game.
Brown rushed for three touchdowns in that Cotton Bowl game. He also kicked three extra points. It would have been a tie, but TCU blocked the final extra point try. TCU and Swink went on to defeat Syracuse and Brown, 28-27.
I wish I’d been able to go to that Cotton Bowl, but Dallas was a long ways off and tickets probably cost more than 50¢.
[Thanks to Mark Boone for telling me stories about Pop Boone. Also to Troy Seate for his excellent article on Jim Swink.)
I woke up to the disturbing news of a plane crash in Pokhara, Nepal. There are 68 confirmed dead.
The crash was at the just opened international airport. In order to build it, they had to take the tops off some nearby hills, or what we’d call mountains.
Rescue operations are difficult there because of the terrain and the lack of equipment.
Susan and I flew in and out of Pokhara several times. It’s a beautiful place. We’ve canoed (more properly, doonga-ed) on Fewa Lake shown here.
Pokhara is sometimes described as a “resort town,” which it is, but it’s also Nepal’s second largest city after Kathmandu, and a major center for industry.
Chip's journey 