A Midsummer Potpourri

 

It has been a while since I last potporried (probably not even a word).

I potpourri for a few reasons.  Foremost is that I don’t really have a topic worthy of a full blog.  So, I write about observations sometimes related, though mostly all over the place.  Secondly, as in this case, I am in a writer’s slump and using the potpourri format to breakout of the slump.  So, here goes.

I watched part of a movie this morning, The House on 92^nd Street (1945).  It is a noirish World War II classic that shows the dedication and efficiency of the FBI in infiltrating and destroying the well-organized cell.  Sure, the Nazi’s were smart and had a well-crafted plan for their espionage.  They were no match for the even more dedicated FBI with righteousness on their side.  As with many of the war times films, this movie was designed to bolster the spirit and war time resolve of the people.  78 years later with all we know now about J. Edgar and the manipulative missteps we have taken since World War II, we look at a movie like The House on 92^nd Street under a different lens.  Casting ourselves as the good guys and those confronting us as the bad guys does not seem as simple as it was back in the day.

It is a gorgeous weekend in Chicagoland.  While the rest of the country is suffering from severe heat and others, like New England, deluged by crazy intense rainstorms, we had a brief drought in May and four days in the 90s last week.  Other than that, it has been a most pleasant summer.  When I first moved here, folks would rave about summer in Chicago.  Having lived elsewhere, I had never heard anyone tout the Chicago summer weather.  Now that I have lived here and experienced it, I have to agree.  For about five months, we have some pretty nice weather.  The difference this year is that our normal summer seem exceptionally good relative to the rest of the country.

It is definitely helpful for the writer’s slump to write these kinds of blogs about nothing.  Well, perhaps not actually about nothing, but more so, a little bit a few to several topics.  They are almost never popular, but for some reason there are a small number of readers mystified by these offerings.  The wonder in amazement how and why I write such “stuff.”  I try to explain.  That is why I use the Seinfeldesque “blog about nothing” explanation.  I also explain that a blog, short for weblog, is an online journal.  The subtitle of mine is, as I often note, is a “Monthly Letter of Musings and Meanderings.”  I emphasize the musing and meandering part… it has no impact on these friends and that’s OK.  For the most part, as they say, they are just busting my chops.

Speaking of weather, it is crazy out there.  Phoenix experienced 30 days of temperatures above 110 with a high of 118 on day!! Las Cruces, NM had 34 days of temperature readings above 100 from June 19 through July 22.  El Paso experienced 27 days of temperatures that warm.  It is easy to say, “But, it is a dry heat,” but we have all heard and read about the dangers of these unprecedented heat streaks.  Most reports are attributing this to climate change.  Fewer are reporting that we are experiencing climate change compounded by El Nino.

I do like to muse and meander…

Motivation Revisited

 

Motivation is a recurring theme in this blog.  How to rev it up?  How to sustain it?  How to take advantage when it peaks.  How to compensate for the inevitable valleys.

Sure, there are motivational quotes, aphorisms, allegories, and any number of thesauric synonyms for quotes.  These can be put on wall posters or cards you can carry around in your wallet.  The can be kilned onto coffee mugs or etched onto any number of desktop tchotchkes.  We can look at them every day.  We can make a ritual of reading a favorite one or several of these each morning over a first cup.

Of course, not all these quotes and aphorisms appeal to everyone.  It is personal.  I know there are probably people who don’t need such things to fuel their motivation.  These lucky folks are naturally centered, rooted, and their motivation is embedded in their philosophy and lifestyle.  Are they everywhere?  Or are they unicorns?  It matters not.  I can say with great certainty that I am not one of these folks.  My motivation flows from peaks to valleys of random heights and depths with the duration of each peak, valley, and the times between them being even more random. 

Motivation and procrastination, at least for me, go hand in hand.  I have developed a deep rooted well-refined habit of procrastination, putting things off, and postponement.  I want to say that I am really good at it.  My motivation comes from waiting until as late as possible to get something done.  When is the last possible moment I can start a task or assignment, work furiously, and get it done on-time.  I see the same in most of my students.  We have trained ourselves to get stuff done with the intense focus and adrenalated frenzy of organized chaos that is bred from chronic procrastination. 

This modus operandi works for most work-related tasks; the short term kind that with deadlines of a few days, a few weeks, or even a month or two.  It is not good for long-term, multi-year, tasks, or projects.  This explains in part why project management is not for everyone.

I recently ran across a great motivational quote on Facebook.  It was not attributed to anyone.  It really resonated with me. 

In 6 months, you will have 6 months of excuses, or 6 months of progress.  The choice is yours!

 It is so… obvious.  It is a huge duh!  It is the Nike slogan:  Just do it.  It is a sort a rephrasing of the well-known Yoda adage, “Do or do not. There is no try.”  It is self-determination.  It is dedication.  It goes hand in hand with another core belief of mine, “Knowing never equals doing.”  I am, after all, a way better knower than doer.

Will this new motto or tenet, this 6 month challenge thing, be the motivational catalyst that helps me master long term planning and achievement of goals?  It makes me think of another core belief:

The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what we want for what we want at the moment. - Suprina Berenyi

 I am not sure another quote will result in the transformation.  It does add to the knowledge base… but there is still the doing.  We will see at the end of 6 months and in day-to-day increments until then.

The Ever-Changing Climate Change Conundrum

 

Global warming is often in the news.  While it seems to me that most folks now believe it is a real thing, there are still deniers around.  The scientific perspective, to the chagrin of many, keeps evolving and seemingly towards the more dire.

This summer, the Midwest and Northeast of the US, and of course Eastern Canada, suffered from the poor air quality, haziness, and the faint odor of burning wood or leaves.  This was due to the huge fires raging in the Eastern Provinces of Canada.  Depending on the wind direction, the fires have made the air quality in American cities, from New York to Chicago, amongst the worst in the world.

For years, we have been hearing about global warming, climate change, the thirty year drought in the Western US, and their role in the increase in frequency and intensity of wildfires.  It was easy for anyone paying attention to attribute the two month long Canadian wildfires to climate change. 

On June 13 2023, The Wall Street Journal had an article:  Canadian Fires Signal New Frontier in Climate Change.  From the article:

“The pattern of a rapid onset of drought, considerable wildfire and then air quality impacts associated with it are all consistent with global warming,” said Justin Mankin, a climate scientist at Dartmouth College, and co-lead of the drought task force at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “This is a pattern we’ve seen in the West.” 

On the same was another article, Canadian Wildfires Came From Rotten Luck, Not Climate Change:  Canadian Wildfires Came From Rotten Luck, Not Climate Change.  Rotten luck?  Not climate change?  The author of this article, Clifford Mass is a professor of atmosphere sciences at the University of Washington.  He acknowledged Quebec has experienced a 2 degree Fahrenheit increase over the past fifty years.  His perspective is the following:

The recent intense New York smoke event is a good illustration of the underlying origins of many extreme environmental and weather events. The atmosphere is a chaotic system, dominated by random natural variability. Such variability is like a game of cards—rarely, by the luck of the draw, one is dealt a full house or a straight flush. Climate change’s effects on weather are relatively small compared to random variations inherent in a hugely complex system.

How could both of these articles, with headlines that give somewhat opposite messages, be in the same newspaper on the same day?  No wonder people are confused by the science of climate change.  We experienced the same thing during the Covid Pandemic.  People wanted simple answers that explain what is going on and what should be done.  We needed more ventilators at the onset.  Then we learned that ventilators increased deaths rather than reduce them.  Science learned and adapted.  Many people were confused.  The void from the confusion was easily filled by the  pseudo-science and wishful thinking of politicians and social media influencers. 

Professors Mankin and Mass both make excellent points.  They agree on the temperature change of 2 degrees Fahrenheit.  The are both looking at patterns.  The article in which Mankin was quoted noted that “an expanding range of insect pests that are making forests more susceptible to fire…”  This makes sense and no doubt a contributor to the fires.  The question is how much of a contributor percentage wise?  Mass’s conclusion appeals to me even more.  There is a lot of variables in the complex system that is geography, ecology, and climate.  These variables are mostly stochastic which complicate any models even more.

 

Addendum:  I could have just stopped with the last paragraph.  But, there was another article I read this week in Scientific American:  Rampant Groundwater Pumping Has Changed the Tilt of Earth’s Axis.  The subtitle of the article is “Human depletion of groundwater has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than four centimeters per year.”

This passage in the article illustrates a bit how scientific thought evolves:

Shifts in water masses can cause smaller but still measurable changes in the tilt of Earth’s axis. Until recently, researchers thought that these water-driven effects would be caused mainly by the melting of glaciers and ice caps. But when Seo and his collaborators tried to model the Earth’s water content to account for how much the axis has tilted, they could not fully explain the data. Adding the effects of changes in surface reservoirs did not help, says Seo, “so I just scratched my head and said, ‘probably one effect is groundwater’”.

Note that quotes are from Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University.

While fires are not as prevelant in the Western US this year due to the voluminous snows in the Rockies this past winter.  But, if the growth in population and farming in the west consumed more water than was being replenished… um… wouldn’t it make sense that ground water was depleted creating a drought and conditions for higher frequencies of wildfires.  It turns out it also contributes to axis tilt of the earth.  Is this tilting of the earth temporary or permanent?  What are the positive or negatives consequences of this?  Basically, we don’t quite know yet.  But, we are learning.

It is clear that the scientific method alive, well, and in-play here.  There was one theory supported by evidence and analysis.  New data and analysis had an expert in geophysics scratching his head and provided evidence that the prevailing theory might not sufficiently explain the physical phenomena.  As a result, the theory is revised and will be vetted through the collection of even more data and analysis. 

The more complex the system, the more often this problem happens.  We learn by bits and bytes and thus are continually cycling through the scientific method. 

Everyone is exposed to this in like 5^th grade but I have a theory that most of us never really full learn how it is works in practice. 

It is just a theory.

Hokas - Pocus

 

For my recent birthday, my sister, Nancy, gave me a gift card for the express purpose of buying a pair of Hoka shoes.  Being a renown track coach at the college level, she was an aficionado of the famed brand that began in France.  She believed that their Gaviota model was perfect for me to help alleviate the pain from my arthritic knees, improve my gait, and help with my overpronation (inward roll).  Per the Hoka website, “The Gaviota 4 contains our J-Frame(TM) technology designed to prevent excessive inward roll, or overpronation, without overcorrecting your gait.”

People that wear Hokas really love them.  They really love them.  They will tell you so with minimal to no prompting.  They say they are the most comfortable shoes they have ever worn and may even say it over and over again using different superlative adjectives and imagery.  A significant number brag that they have more than one pair.  They wear them for running, walking, recovery (from running), and casually.  It is almost as if their lives revolve around their Hokas.  I am certain when I post this, there will certainly have people raving about their Hokas in the comments.

I mostly see people wearing them casually.  They are very easy to notice.  The have very thick, spongy, soles in all white or white and pastels.  Like Nike before it, the distinctive Hoka logo is very visible and immediately recognizable.  The shoes come in a variety of colors trendy and cool colors. 

Other shoe companies now offer models that are Hoka like.  I have seen Nikes, Addidas, New Balance, Merrill, and others.  I even bought a pair of Merrells because they were on sale and had a Hoka like look about them.  They were good shoes nothing like the Hoka testimonials I had been hearing about. 

I went to the Deerfield location of Fleet Feet to get fitted and purchase my Hoka Gaviotas.  The store, as evident by their name, caters to serious runners.  Everyone that works there looks as if they may have run a marathon in the past few weeks or about to run one in the next month.  They were with wearing Hokas or the Nike equivalents.  The young sales associates working there for the summer are all college students who are on the track or cross-country teams.  My guy was one of the summer workers. We related more that he was a business major and that I was a professor of business more.

As it turns out, they did not have any Gaviotas in my large shoe size.  Like many chain stores today, we were able to place and order online and have them mailed to my house.  I was not at all daring in the color scheme and went with the simple black and white which were exactly the same colors of the aforementioned Merrells.

A few days later the shoes arrived.  I open the shipping carton and then the shoe box.  I held my new Hokas.  I might have even raised them to the sky like Mufasa raised the newborn Simba to the sky in the Lion King.  I then, finally, tried them on.  I tied the laces and took my first Hoka steps.  Frankly, I was a little let down.  They were certainly cushy and comfortable.  But based on all the hype and hyperbole of all the Hoka fans who have raved of their life changing transformative Hoka experiences, I expected something… well… more than I experienced.  I thought I might hear a fanfare of angelic trumpets as I took my first step.  I thought I might be overcome with a surge of enlightenment and insight into the mysteries of life.

Oh well.  I was still happy to have them.

After wearing them for a few weeks, I have noticed a difference.  There has been a modest improvement in both gait and ease of walking.  I like my Hokas.  I will wear them often and give a positive review if asked about them.  Rest assured though that I will not promise they are anything more than a good, comfortable, well cushioned, and supportive lightweight pair of shoes.