THINKING ABOUT MATH

Caption: Seamus McGoogle contemplates the square root of -1.

El Cabrero has been brooding this week about the nature of science and knowledge. Must be the weather.

One aspect of human knowledge that I find fascinating is math. I like thinking about math--much more than actually doing it, anyway.

For several years I taught GED classes in Head Start centers in southern WV. Ordinarily, one might think people do a better job of teaching things they're better at (pardon the ending of a phrase with a preposition), but that wasn't the case with me.

I've done a lot of writing over the years, a good bit of it for publication, but I was a total flop at trying to teach it. It always seemed like there were an infinite number of ways to write just about anything.

Math was different. I was horrible at it but at least there were rules.

Sometimes, just to mess with (my own and) the students' minds, I'd ask them why math seemed to work--was it just the way our minds were wired or was it something "out there"? Was it discovered or made up?

As a pragmatist, I'm not sure it matters, but the question is an interesting and old one. For the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras (of eponymous theorem fame), math was the key to the secrets of the universe. He was a pioneer in geometry who claimed to be able to hear the music of the heavenly spheres. He also discovered the mathematical relationship between notes on a musical scale.

Plato was an admirer both of Pythagoras and math. He believed our mathematical ideas were an innate knowledge of the eternal forms. The following words were said to have been written above the doors to his Academy: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."

That would be one more club I'd never be able to join.

A DAY LATE AND... This really should have been in yesterday's post, but July 24 was the day when the federal minimum wage went up for the first time in over 10 years. That was a good fight. The next one will be to make sure we don't wait 10 more years before it happens again. Here's a good op-ed on the subject by Holly Sklar.

IS THAT A PYTHON IN YOUR EVERGLADE OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY... From the NY Times, it looks like released Burmese pythons are having a good time in Florida these days.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT. The title of this op-ed says it all: If This Is Such a Rich Country, Why Are We Getting Squeezed?. It's a good analysis of growing inequality and what we can do about it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

CRACKED OPEN ANY GOOD CARS LATELY?

This blog is covering lots of issues this week, but the guiding thread is a fond look back at El Cabrero's short and inglorious career as a volunteer firefighter.

Firefighting is a good metaphor for what we need a lot more of in our world today.

If this is your first visit, please scroll back to earlier entries.

Anyhow, by far the coolest training I ever attended as a volunteer was basic auto extrication, the art and science of dealing with car wrecks and trying to get people out of them.

We studied the anatomy of vehicles and the means of opening them up like sardine cans, the hazards of airbags, and the means of removing windows—even down to the art of removing a windshield when a person’s head has gone through it. I must say that my personal use of seat belts increased markedly as a result of that weekend.


The most fun part of auto ex was getting to play with the toys. (I must say in all honesty that playing with cool toys is a major plus in firefighting). The toys in question are often called “the jaws of life.” These are pneumatic tools that can cut, spread, push, and generally dismantle vehicles.

At first, we were very proper, carefully applying the techniques we learned in class to some donated wrecked vehicles. After a little of this, however, we dropped all pretense and just starting slicing them up like butter. In an anthropologist would have walked on the scene, she or he would have thought we were a primitive tribe ritually slaughtering our sacred animal in some Dionysian revelry….which wouldn’t have been far off the mark.

In the real world, though, there are lots more car wrecks than structure fires, so this was very practical training. Our department was responsible not only for rural roads but major arteries of traffic, including several miles of interstate.

But the most memorable part of the class was the instructor, whose favorite expression was....goat rope. As in, "Boys, you know what I see here? I see a goat rope," meaning a real mess or a situation out of control. A pretty good expression for the state of the world today.

What can I say? It was love at first hearing. I'd heard the expression before, but never said as well. So now you know the rest of the story.

Speaking of goat ropes,

CREDIT CARD DEBT. America's credit card indebtedness (along with other kinds) is reaching stunning proportions. Here are plenty of links on the extent of the problem.

A CLOSELY RELATED ISSUE is growing inequality, a frequent Goat Rope theme. This is from an editorial in this week/s The Nation:

The top 1 percent of Americans are now getting the largest share of national income since 1928. And a mere 300,000 are now getting almost the same income as 150 million others on the bottom of the wage ladder.

The wage gap has nearly doubled since 1980, the dawn of the conservative era. The deterioration of equitable income in American society is not over. It continues to get much worse. The top 10 percent--the people earning roughly $100,000 a year and higher--now get 48.5 percent of total income. Not surprisingly, average incomes for the bottom 90 percent are down slightly. These numbers are from the Internal Revenue Service for 2005, and experts agree they understate the disparities.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. This week, Maryland became the first state to pass a living wage bill. Here's some info:

Companies with state service contracts would be required to pay workers a "living wage" under first-in-the-nation legislation that the General Assembly approved yesterday and sent to Gov. Martin O'Malley, who championed the idea on the campaign trail.

Lawmakers gave final passage to the bill on the last day of the session, less than one week after legislative leaders and O'Malley hashed out an agreement to make the proposal palatable to some opponents. The bill, as revised, sets up two pay grades for the workers - at least $11.30 an hour in the Baltimore-Washington corridor and $8.50 an hour in rural areas.

That would be a good campaign to replicate in other states.

DWIGHT! Finally, El Cabrero admits to being an addict of "The Office," although I've chose to manage my addiction by indulging it. For other fans, did you know that the character Dwight Shrute has his own blog? Too bad he doesn't update it more...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE WAR WITHIN, plus the privatization of war and global inequality

Caption: Seamus McGoogle's main psychological conflict is due to his inability to break the window and get to the bird feeder.

This is the second installment of Goat Rope's official Fun With Freud Week. This means that in addition to snarky commentary and links on social justice issues, each day will highlight one aspect of ol' Sig's thoughts that are still interesting today.

(Disclaimer: El Cabrero is not a psychologist and is also fully aware that a lot of what Freud talked about not only would not hold up to scientific investigation but is on the order of science fiction. Good though.)

One idea of Freud's that I think is a keeper is the vision of people not as totally rational animals nor yet as robots conditioned by stimulus and response but rather as inherently conflicted critters.

We are divided and the different parts of ourselves do not always or even usually play nicely with each other. Much of human life consists of trying to reconcile drives and demands that aren't all that reconcilable.

He believed that not only is the human mind partly conscious and partly unconscious but that it it also divided between the id or "it" that wants what it wants when it wants it (usually RIGHT NOW!), the superego or "over-I" of internalized social norms whose job is to tell the id it can't have what it wants, and the ego or "I" that has to deal with the demands of the external world and try to mediate the demands of the other two warring factions.

Actually, this idea is way older than Freud. Plato in the fourth century BC used the analogy of the rational soul as a charioteer trying to control two very different horses, one of which is "is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control" while the other is "companion to wild boasts and indecency...shaggy around the ears--deaf as a post--and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined." Elsewhere Plato talks about the soul as having three parts, the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive.

St. Paul also spoke eloquently of the war within. In the Epistle to the Romans, he says

The good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do...I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. (7:19, 23)

and in Galatians

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the other; so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. (5:17)

For Freud, the war within goes on pretty much all the time, sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly. It makes human life not only tragic but interesting.

THE WAR WITHOUT. In Joseph Heller's classic Catch-22, the hyper-capitalist Milo Minderbinder says "Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry." What was once a laugh line is becoming a reality. In the April 2 issue of The Nation, Jeremy Scahill has an interesting feature on the privatization of war titled "Bush's Shadow Army."

GLOBAL INEQUALITY. A brief item in the Spring issue of Yes Magazine highlights the wealth gap on a world scale:

A new global study of personal wealth shows that the richest 2 percent of adults now own more than half of global household wealth. The study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University, Helsinki was based on data from the year 2000. It showed that the richest 1 percent of adults (those worth at least $500,000) controlled 40 percent of global assets, and that the richest 10 percent of adults (those worth at least $61,000) owned 85 percent of the world total. Meanwhile the bottom half (those worth less than $2,200) together owned barely 1 percent of global wealth.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED