Letters From Home

Life looks at infmom / infmom looks at life

December 25, 2007
by infmom
2 Comments

Your own library

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

To get back to a theme of a previous post, why should any of us bother with “hard copy” reference materials when it’s so easy to look stuff up on the internet?

Yes, I know. Most of us dropped the whole idea of “looking things up” as soon as we got out of school, and most of us said “Good riddance!” as well. Unfortunately, our teachers taught us all kinds of things they never intended to, and the notion that looking things up is sheer drudgery and totally without relevance to the real world is a sad legacy of our years of education.

The main problems with internet reference resources have to do with content and space. Wikipedia, for example, is an extremely popular site for “looking up,” but the content of a Wikipedia article can be altered by anyone with time and an axe to grind. So is what you’re reading a fact or just someone’s opinion? Who knows?

Likewise, web page content tends to be digested down to fit on one or two screens. It’s tough to get all the relevant information cut down to that size (I’m reminded of Billy Joel’s line “It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long–if you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05”). I’m amused by the fact that I edited this post down quite a bit to make it shorter and easier to read. We internet writers know the consequences of blithering on too long. 🙂

And yet–people who won’t look things up are far more likely to be snookered by some “entertainer’s” fast talk and plausible sounding hooey. To take a stand against ignorance, we need to be willing to start looking things up again.

It’s easy to buy a package like Encarta, or the electronic version of the Britannica, which have both expanded over the years to become multifaceted reference works. And that’s a good place to start building your own reference library. Software takes up a lot less space than books, and many people just don’t have shelf space to spare. But that’s not the universal answer. Software enyclopedias suffer from the same shortcomings as web pages and help files–the articles are short and don’t go into a lot of detail.

To get more out of the material, one should add a few “hard copy” books as well.

One of the best all-in-one reference books I’ve seen is the New York Public Library Desk Reference. It even costs less than a copy of Encarta. And it’s a fascinating book in its own right. Once you get started looking stuff up in there, you’ll likely find yourself reading it easily just to learn more about stuff you might never have heard of otherwise. What better way to learn something new and take a stand against ignorance?

Take pride in having your own reference library at hand. It may be the smartest purchase you ever made.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.
Previous in series Next in series

December 24, 2007
by infmom
0 comments

Look at your world

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

I know a lot of us have spent time laughing at that hapless beauty-queen contestant who flubbed the dub trying to answer a question about why so many people can’t find things that really should be obvious on a map.

The problem is not so much that one poor girl got totally flustered, but that so many people can’t find stuff on a map! That’s been shown again and again to be true, and it’s a form of ignorance that we should, collectively, be ashamed of, especially since it’s so easy to fix.

Get a map!

Of course, the most obvious question is, with so many fabulous “map” web sites out there, why on earth should anyone use anything else for geographical inquiries?  Heck, you can click on Google Maps or Google Earth and find the most obscure corner of the world instantly.  Who needs more than that?

We all do.  Because when all is said and done, if you let Google Maps do all the work for you,  you still won’t know how to find anything on a map for yourself.   Not to disparage the wonder of those web sites–I use them all the time–but there is something about looking at a physical map and doing a little brain work to look locations up that pushes back the boundaries of ignorance a bit.  Try it and see.

If you don’t own any maps right now, start with a road-atlas book for your country. That way you’ll have the advantage of both knowing where you’re going and knowing where things are. Next time the news tells you there’s some big flapdoodle somewhere in your country, get out your road atlas and look that place up. They all have easy-to-use indices in the back.

The next step is to get a map of the world. The National Geographic has some dandy ones, and they are not terribly expensive. Same thing applies: Hear about something in some other country somewhere–look that country up on your map. If you have space to display the map on the wall, so much the better, because it’s a lot easier to see where things are if the map can be spread out and positioned for good viewing. Of course, this may mean that you can’t use the directory on the back of the map to locate things easily.

So, the third step would be to buy a world atlas. Again, you can get one from the National Geographic, but the Reader’s Digest has put out a good one for years, too (doesn’t seem to be available from their web site at the moment, but I’m sure you could find one in a good used-book store). The atlas will have maps of the world that are much more detailed than a wall map, and an index to show you where each country and city can be located.

Ideally, we should all have globes, too, because it’s a lot easier to figure out where those other countries are in relation to each other and in relation to our own home towns if we can see them on a globe, but globes are more expensive than maps and there’s the problem of figuring out where to put the globe. They are decorative and you can buy a nice stand to put your globe on, but not everyone has the space, the money or the inclination for that. Our family bought a big globe at a grade-school auction years ago. Sure, the map itself was way out of date (in fact, it was current as of my birth year, which made me wonder why the school had hung on to it for so long) but on the bright side, that meant I got it for $5. And I can always consult my atlas to see what the political boundaries are these days. The land masses themselves look the same.

So, if someone asked you to find Afghanistan on a map, or a globe, could you do it? If not, then that’s something to take action on as soon as you can. Don’t put yourself in that poor beauty contestant’s shoes. Don’t be ignorant of where you are in the world.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.
Previous in series Next in series

December 23, 2007
by infmom
0 comments

Break on through to the other side

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

It may seem paradoxical, in light of the previous entry’s suggestion that one may take a stand against ignorance by watching more TV, that today’s suggestion is: Stop relying on radio, television and/or the internet as your primary source for news and current events.

By their very nature, such media can’t provide background, careful analysis or in-depth reporting. There just isn’t time. People get bored. The advertisers won’t go for it. Broadcasters aren’t journalists, they’re entertainers. You know the drill.

But in the end, it’s mostly true. There is no time in a half-hour show to explain the buildup to this or that current event and put things in perspective. A “personality” who does commentary on the news of the day isn’t going to stick around long if he or she doesn’t entertain the audience (usually at the expense of actually informing them). Advertisers have to consider what will sell, and extend or withdraw their support accordingly.

The result is that people who rely on broadcasters to tell them what’s what, are likely going to end up as #1 on YouTube trying to explain why nobody can find anything on a map.

The first and best thing one can do to take a stand against this kind of ignorance is to subscribe to a weekly news magazine called, appropriately, The Week.  This is no ordinary news magazine.  Its stories are short and well written.  But what makes this magazine stand head and shoulders above any other is that its staff incorporates news stories from a huge range of other publications, and in any controversial issue includes multiple voices from all sides.  There are also excerpts from newspapers and magazines published around the world, so the reader can see exactly what other people think.   “The Week” doesn’t favor any particular point of view.  They do report all sides.  There’s no better way to look at the issues and make up your own mind–and learn something in the process.

In addition, if you’re not a regular reader of daily newspapers, now would be a good time to start.  Newspapers may report the same stories the TV newscasters do, but a newspaper can give you more.  A TV story has to be cut short to fit in the time available.  A newspaper can give you what Paul Harvey calls “the rest of the story.”  Newspapers are not as free of editorial bias as “The Week,” of course.  But they do reflect the sentiments of the communities in which they are based.  And, of course, if you disagree with the paper’s point of view, you can always write a letter to the editor and tell them why.  There’s not much chance of getting your letter read on a newscast, but if you can write a coherent sentence, you stand a good chance of getting published in the paper.

As for getting information from the internet–well, you can find both the best and the worst here.  The ecstasy and the agony of the internet both come from the fact that anybody can post anything they want.  You can find information that comes from the most highly respected authorities in any field, and you can find a lot more information from wackos with axes to grind and tinfoil hats.   And it’s all right there at the click of a mouse.   We can easily find ourselves so overloaded with conflicting points of view that we end up knowing no more than when we started out–and being a lot more confused thereby.

Take a stand against ignorance by refusing to accept the sound-bite or the sound-byte version of any story.  Get the big picture.  You might be astonished by what’s being left out.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.
Previous in series Next in series

December 22, 2007
by infmom
0 comments

Explore strange new worlds

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

There’s an old saying that goes “You learn something new every day.”

Unfortunately, a lot of us don’t learn anything new, for days, even years at a time. This makes us all not only ignorant, but complacently so.

Try making a point of learning something new every day. This doesn’t have to mean taking classes or going to a lot of exertion (although both might well be a good idea to meet the goal). It can be as simple as hearing the name of an unfamiliar place on the news, and looking that place up on a map. There, now you know something you didn’t know before. It can be as simple as finding a “word of the day” web site and checking it. The main idea is to make sure that every day, you acquire some kind of knowledge that you didn’t have the day before.

Learning something new can be as easy as changing channels. Many Sunday newspapers print TV listings for the week. Take the listings, and start looking at the channels you don’t ordinarily watch. Look for the ones that are full of educational content: PBS, History Channel, Discovery Channel, TLC, BBC America, National Geographic Channel… you get the idea. Find at least one show that would teach you something you didn’t already know. If it’s on at the same time as something you regularly watch, or at a time when it’s inconvenient for you to watch, record the show. Then, of course–make sure you make time to watch what you recorded.

Here are some suggestions, but I’m sure you can find plenty of others when you look.

PBS:

  • Nova
  • Nature
  • American Experience
  • Wired Science
  • Globe Trekker

Discovery Channel:

  • Planet Earth
  • How It’s Made
  • Mythbusters

Food Channel:

  • Unwrapped
  • The Secret Life of…

History Channel:

  • Modern Marvels (also on National Geographic Channel)
  • The Universe
  • Wild West Tech
  • Ancient Discoveries

National Geographic Channel:

  • Lost Worlds
  • Is It Real?
  • Naked Science
  • National Geographic Explorer
  • Science of…

TLC:

  • Little People, Big World
  • What Not To Wear
  • Clean Sweep

BBC America:

  • BBC World News

All those shows are designed to be both entertaining and informative. Learning something new doesn’t have to be a chore. Give it a try–make it a habit.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.
Previous in series Next in series

December 21, 2007
by infmom
0 comments

Support knowledge expansion

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

The simplest way we can each take a stand against ignorance is to support nonpolitical organizations whose purpose is the expansion of human knowledge.

For example, you can subscribe to the National Geographic or Smithsonian Magazine or other similar publication (and, of course, read the magazines each month when they arrive). By doing so, you support research and historical preservation and you also have a great opportunity to learn new things.

Get a membership to a local museum or gallery. And visit it often enough to make your membership worth while. You may think you’ve seen the same old exhibits enough already, but you might surprise yourself by looking carefully at what you’d always walked past before–and thus learn something you never knew before.

Join the “Friends” organization at your local public library. If you haven’t been in a library lately you will be amazed at what’s available there these days. And the Friends always get special access and special goodies.

When it comes time to buy gifts for your friends and family, shop from the catalogs put out by those nonpolitical, knowledge-expanding organizations.  Or from places like the Discovery Store, or the Wireless or Signals catalogs, which have a great selection of shows from PBS along with their regular gift items.

If you already have a membership to one or more organizations like that, consider upping your annual donation to the next level. I consider the amount I spend on my Smithsonian Contributing Membership every year to be money well spent, even though it’s been 20 years since I’ve actually been in Washington, DC.

It’s a simple step. You don’t even have to leave home to do it, if that’s your choice. But it says you want to push back the barriers of ignorance in whatever small way you can.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.
Previous in series Next in series

December 20, 2007
by infmom
0 comments

Introduction

Table of contents for 10 Ways To Take A Stand Against Ignorance

  1. The ultimate question, the ultimate answer
  2. The ultimate stand against ignorance
  3. Who’s pulling your chain?
  4. Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching
  5. Go to the source
  6. Check it out. Check everything out.
  7. Your own library
  8. Look at your world
  9. Break on through to the other side
  10. Explore strange new worlds
  11. Support knowledge expansion
  12. Introduction

We seem to live in an age that disdains learning. While this is nothing particularly new (heck, back in the stone age when I was in high school, the really popular kids weren’t always the smartest) it has become apparent that as new discoveries are made around the world, the powers-that-be in the USA are determined to look firmly backwards and resist the progress of knowledge as much as they can.

I’m not that old (no, really, I’m not) and I am dismayed to see us go from the age of Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and (so help me) Wernher von Braun, popularizers of learning all, to the age of George W. Bush and the “gentleman’s C” and the incurious mind.

All of us are ignorant. We can’t help it–there is too much to learn, too much to know, and no matter how much any one person may know on any given subject, guaranteed there is someone else out there who knows more.

But being ignorant is not the same thing as being stupid. There is no limit to the amount that an ignorant person can learn, if he or she refuses to remain ignorant–and, in many cases, has the courage to refuse to remain ignorant in the face of tremendous pressure to stick with the status quo.

The new year is coming, and what better resolution to make than to take a stand against ignorance in the new year? Taking a stand doesn’t need to mean manning the barricades as if it were the Revolution all over again. It just means that we as individuals can encourage the expansion of knowledge and the diminishing of ignorance, both within ourselves and in the world at large.

And it’s not difficult. In the coming series of messages I’ll talk about simple ways we all can take a stand.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.
Previous in series

December 15, 2007
by infmom
0 comments

Thinking about thinking

I recently read a post from a person who claimed to know “all I need to know” about a particular subject. I found this somewhat amazing, given that it was obvious there was a lot this person didn’t know about the subject under discussion.

What is this concept of “all I need to know,” anyway? I’ve most often seen it used in the context of “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with the facts.” Are people really so afraid of finding out they’re mistaken that they won’t learn anything more, lest they find out they were wrong from the get-go?

Jacob Bronowski wrote an essay about the difference between knowledge and certainty in his masterpiece The Ascent of Man. The essay is carefully constructed and not subject to being digested into a short summary, so I’ve always recommended that people read it for themselves. The book is available at any public library, and the TV series based on the book was released on video tape which might be available at a well-stocked public library as well. (At my local library, some of the tapes in the set have been stolen; I’m waiting for it to come out on DVD at a reasonable price so I can buy my own set.)

The Ascent of Man

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue of “all I need to know” (which isn’t all there is to know) and about the ways in which we are all ignorant about a lot of things. I guess the main thing is not to be complacent about being ignorant. We all have the capability of learning. We seldom really know all we need to know.

I’m going to post a series of short essays about taking a stand against ignorance, as soon as I work out what I think needs to be said. Watch this space.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.

December 5, 2007
by infmom
1 Comment

magic kingdoms

Both my kids completely forgot my birthday this year. I am finding it very hard not to brood about this.

However, I did get a good birthday party in the form of F’zer’s company holiday wingding. He works for an outfit that really knows how to throw a party, and we had a great time. I even went out and blew $40 on cosmetics ahead of time, for the first time in years. And was pleased to note that I hadn’t, after all, forgotten how it all worked.

I wanted to go to Disneyland on my birthday during their 50th anniversary year. My mother has always said that I watched the opening of Disneyland on TV, but I don’t remember it. (And I don’t think it was possible, because we didn’t have a TV at that point.) But it makes a good story.

Unfortunately, my father-in-law died in early November of that year, so we had other things on our minds. And last year it didn’t work out for one reason or another. But this year, we got to go. And it was just as much fun as I thought it would be.

Disneyland, when all is said and done, is not exactly for kids. The lines are too long, and some of the rides are all about stuff that kids might have known about in 1955, but not today (how many modern kids have read The Wind in the Willows or Tom Sawyer?) It’s mainly for people who wished they could go to Disneyland when they were kids. There were a lot of us in attendance on Monday, that’s for sure.

We got to see the sights and ride the rides. I liked the changes in the Pirates, not so much the changes in the Haunted Mansion (which I’ve been told are just seasonal). We found the quietest, least crowded, least expensive place to eat lunch–White Water Snacks inside one of the hotels in Downtown Disney–and when we were finished, two marvelous things happened. A calico cat appeared on the patio outside. And a small bird flew in through the open door and then couldn’t get out and smacked into a window. I was able to walk over, cup it gently in my hands, stroke its feathers lightly and then take it outside and release it.

We were on our way out from Disneyland to go to California Adventure when the daily retiring of the colors ceremony started, so we stayed to watch that. And then we got on the train for one loop around the park, and were returned to Main Street just as the parade came marching through. We had a great view of that from the area by the stairs to the train station.

In California Adventure, we took in the two best attractions (Soaring, and the Muppet show) right away, and then F’zer went and did the stuff that scares the crap out of me (the Tower and the ferris wheel) while I stayed happily on the ground and browsed through the shops and watched the Disneyland fireworks over top of the buildings.

We were pleasantly worn out by the end of the day. I was asleep less than an hour after we got home. As birthday celebration goes… it was worth the wait.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.

December 2, 2007
by infmom
0 comments

On the making of wish lists

I learned early on that it wasn’t a good idea to let my parents know what I wanted for my birthday or Christmas.

Seems paradoxical, doesn’t it?  But my parents came from worlds completely different from mine, and making them understand mine was…  well, if not always an exercise in futility, at least frequently not worth the tremendous effort.  Plus, they tended to forget things within minutes after you’d told them, and they were prone to promise things and never deliver.

Thus, better not to say anything and get my hopes up.  Whatever they thought to get would have to be fine.

They did OK, most of the time.   But I never told them about the things I really, really wanted.  And thus my mother was astonished to hear, when I was in my fifties and she was past seventy, that I’d wanted a Vespa from the first day I’d seen it in the Sears store.  What good would it have done to tell her?  Besides the fact that I was eight years old at the time, the Vespa (“our finest motor scooter”) cost over $300 and it might as well have been three million bucks for all my parents could have afforded something like that.  So, it took me 44 years to get the Vespa and surprise the dickens out of my mother.

In some ways, not telling people what I wanted was just an act of self-preservation.  My father tended to laugh at things that were outside his own focus, or that seemed to him to be unsuitable for girls to be wanting.  It’s hard for a kid to want something that your parents think is laughable.   My dad was the kind of guy who would buy me men’s socks with black and red bands around the top, to wear to school.  He meant well.  I rolled down the tops of the socks.

The first really “feminine” present he ever bought me, was a small bottle of Imprevu perfume when I got the second-highest score in the school on the National Merit test.  I still have that bottle, perfume long since gone, carefully packed away as a reminder of something more than special.

But getting into a habit of silence like that isn’t good, in the long run, because then you feel uneasy about revealing what you’d like.  Oh, the Amazon wish list makes it a bit easier, to be sure (and I go through mine on a regular basis and even buy myself stuff that’s on it from time to time) but not every place that has stuff that I covet has a wish list.  So far, Amazon and the Duluth Trading Company are the only ones I’ve made.  And after all these years I can’t just march up to my family and hand them a bunch of catalogs with stuff circled.  I wish I could.  But I can’t.

So I’m still being happy about whatever they pick.  Sometimes that’s easy, sometimes not.  And I just buy myself the stuff I really covet, now and again, when the time seems right.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.

December 1, 2007
by infmom
0 comments

Look for the book!

This book will be released soon. Kythera is a friend of ours, a very talented artist. Even if you don’t want to learn how to draw dragons, the book is worth getting just for the artwork.

Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.