Category Archives: Education

Guest Post: Ignite Address

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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An address given by Dave Plassman

Originally posted on November 3, 2014 at 5:25 PM

Hi, I’m Dave and I’m a recovering sighted person…

but I try to be at least two things at once! Blindness isn’t generally as much of a barrier for me as what others do with it; the assumptions, sometimes neglecting to notice I’m even there. When I was young, people talked about my vision being restored someday. When I was in grad school a man stated, as if fact, that I was working off a debt from a previous life. A woman I’ve known said we choose our adversities in order to grow spiritually and strangely enough, I think I agree most with her.

No I didn’t choose at age 5 to be blind but I think it’s possible at some point, perhaps elsewhere or elsewhen , I chose life goals which caused me to pass through this process. I’ve always had a sense of destiny; of things I should accomplish, things I should become.

At the University of Washington as the only male member of The Society of Women Engineers, another member asked if I’d help her go through card files (remember them?) in The Dean’s Office to identify female engineering students. I said the spirit was willing but the flesh wasn’t quite up to it. She was embarrassed but I was smiling because she’d forgotten I was blind. My being male was enough to wrap her head around.

On another occasion a member said she didn’t want men coming to a particular event. I asked “What about me?” She said “You’re different. You’re a member.” And yes, I realized, I was. Something of which I’d had glimmerings but hadn’t quite come to terms with, I did in large measure see myself as a feminine person, though others didn’t.

A number of years later, at a gathering of The Center for Christian Feminist Ministry, a Seattle based spirituality group, I sat in a circle of my sisters listening to one then another talk of her poor self-image, her feelings of being devalued, her diminished sense of worth. As I listened I had a strong feeling of love for them and I said “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you, because to me you’re beautiful and worthwhile people.” Since that time I’ve not regretted being blind.

Now in the day to day business of documenting, being in meetings, answering phone calls; the big picture can become blurred but I do try to ground myself every day with my major life goals and I try to bring a measure of that love and the spirit of feminism I shared with that circle, to my work with clients.

I had a preponderantly female case load and when once in a while a woman (though sometimes a man) comments on the Goddess I wear, this is usually someone who’s been abused and has experienced emotional hardship. They tell me they felt safe when they saw The Mother. Whenever I work with a domestic violence or rape victim I tell that person that I am honored to meet and know her (or sometimes him.) When I see my folks in the community they almost always come up and greet me warmly.

There’s a rather humorous side to being ‘Differently Insighted’ you could call it. One day a young coworker came to me. “There’s a guy applying for food benefits and he’s wearing a dress.” I said “yes sometimes that happens and we provide services to him just like anyone else.” “Yes,” she said “but he’s a man and he’s wearing a woman’s dress!” I said what a person wears likely doesn’t prevent us from providing food.

When in 1986 I told Feminist Pastor Jan Anderson I wanted to help abused women in the same way that others had helped me; she said in effect “Don’t come planning to help women. Women can help themselves. Men helping women is the cause of much of the problems we deal with.” (Okay, not what I’d wanted to hear but honestly stated.) At that point I determined to hand people tools.

Hand someone a tool and she can throw it down, give it away, sell it or pick it up and build something. No one is being condescended to. Nobody loses anything. That’s my first take-away point. In January I’m teaching a tool using class for the Grant County Housing Authority and I’ll give away a cordless drill as a door prize.

An engineering prof many years ago, told me “You have a problem visualizing.” I said “No, I have a problem communicating.” I may have an entire machine in my head but I have trouble making You see it.” I think I’ve demonstrated that point. My wife of 36 years and I live on a 3-acre farm where I’ve built fences, chicken coops and a good deal else. I’ve now written a software drawing program which can enable interested blind persons to draw most things they might want to build.

My other take-away today is therefore, if a problem exists it’s nature may not be as obvious as first impressions indicate and what may be a problem in one sense may actually turn out to be a solution to another, perhaps unexpected problem.

I know that had I not been both blind and what I call Gender Different I’d not have the insights I have today. Others can arrive at them too but it’s how I came here.

I thank you for hearing me today.

Elections

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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Originally posted on October 18, 2014 at 3:10 AM

Elections are again on the near horizon. Incumbents are going merrily along as if they should continue in what has become for many, a lifetime subsidy. Let’s not forget that not so many months ago, denizens of both parties paralyzed (our) Federal government due to their obstinate refusal to work together for compromise.

Both parties were and are at fault as well as the President. Both sides have valid points and both have glaring faults. What had been throughout the 20th Century however, an healthy rivalry perhaps with a leavening dash of good old-fashion hatred, has so far throughout the present century turned into a posture of total intractability on both sides of the political spectrum that nothing is being done.

If Senators and legislators could be taken off the clock like most other persons who refuse to work, that might be one thing. I suspect they’d find a way to compromise in order to maintain their privileged existences. Since they make the rules governing their own pay (along with just about everything else) this won’t happen. The only apparent solution is a massive infusion of new blood.

The old system isn’t working. In general I like my U.S. Senators and legislators but nobody in either house deserves much credit for making our government work. Let’s oust incumbents and give new folks a chance. Let’s try more folks from beyond the legal (frarority—cool word what?) Let’s send a strong message that however divided ideologically, our leaders must hammer out compromises or be fired. Also in 2016, let’s try to elect someone with at least Centrist pretensions? The transition from Bush II. To Obama has seen a continual and maintained widening of the political rift, only the polarity has changed. This is not adequate or acceptable!

Scottish Independence

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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Originally posted on September 19, 2014 at 12:30 PM

I should be remiss if I did not offer a few words regarding yesterday’s referendum on the issue of whether Scots should once more have their own nation.  Sometime I;n the early ‘80s I heard the Late Jeannie Redpath perform on the NPR radio show Prairie Home Companion.  I don’t recall what she sang but at one point she said of a particular piece “There are man Versions of this song.  There are English and Irish and Scottish Versions.  So now we’ll start right at the bottom with an English Version.”  This occasioned from her Minnesotan audience a vast amount of clapping and cheering. “Oh,” Quoth Jeannie, “That’s wonderful!  Would you like to come home with me and start the Third Jacobite Rising?”

What what we’ve been hearing about over the past few months, the Third Jacobite Rising with yesterday’s attendant failure?  Not really.  The term Jacobite refers to Jacobus, Latin for James, in this case James II of England and Scotland, one of the last Stewarts to rule.  He was deposed in 1682 in favor of his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange and hence the Irish Orange and Green conflict.  Jacobitism was not only a movement to restore Scottish rule Specifically Stewart rule, but also to restore Catholicism as the faith of the land in Britain.

When in 1707 England and Scotland formed a union, adopting The Union Jack as their common flag, it was done in royal and parliamentary circles with no reference to the peoples of the land Scots or English.  A Jacobite rebellion ensued in 1714 and another in 1745, more royal manipulating to be sure but the outpouring of support they garnered from the common folk on both sides of these conflicts showed the strong feelings of the peoples affected by a system imposed from above.

To be fair, the rebellion of 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Collodon and all that was more of a civil war than a revolution.  There were Scots standing with the British Army and obviously those ranged against them as well.  We sometimes forget that what has been represented as a bid for independence was really an enterprise of Charles Edward Stewart (whose claims appear dubious and his character even more so) to rule both England and Scotland, I.E. to impose Scottish will on the neighbours to the South.  (Sound familiar?)

No, yesterday’s referendum didn’t look anything like a Jacobite uprising, perhaps more like the old Confederacy of the American Southern States, a more idealistic movement and a conflict conducted mercifully without blood.  It failed not because anyone defeated the dream on the battlefield or imposed the outcome from thrones in London and Edinburgh but rather, because Scots themselves agreed to disagree but to accept the will of the majority.

Though touted as a quite decisive victory for the “Nos” the margin of 10 Percent being given by the news pundits, the victory may not be as significant as first impressions might indicate.  Firstly, when we’re told that a measure wins or loses by a margin of 10 percent, it’s not always clear what this means.  Did 10 % more of the voters vote one way than did another, (55 to 45) or were there 10 % more folks voting one way than the other? (more like 52.4 to 47.62.  Let’s be generous though and assume that 55 Scots voted for continued union with Britain against 45 voting for independence or secession.  What does this actually look like?  Shrunk down to ten people in a room we have 5 persons fully for Union, 4 persons for Independence and in between, one person unable to make his or her mind up which way to go.  All’s needed is to change half a mind in order to declare a draw.  Hopefully both English and Scots will bear this in mind because the matter appears closer to me than others may find it.

Though the referendum failed and I must say I am saddened by that; I am in another way cheered because for the first time in 307 years Scots have been given to choose for themselves what the nature of the country in which they will live shall be.  They stay within the United Kingdom by their ayne sufferance, three hundred years from the Great Jacobite rising of 1714 and a decision made without fire or blood or steel.  Scotland forever but also God bless Great Britain!

Glynda Shaw

Matter Transmission

30 Friday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 31, 2013 at 1:25 AM

(Poof! You’re elsewhere!)

Matter Transmission, Matter transfer, Mass Transference, take your pick, has a nostalgic and rather pleasant association for me, with the Holidays. When I was 10 years old I developed the belief that space launches a la Gemini were too large and expensive and an alternative means of getting off earth needed to be found. I had the idea that some sort of energy beam such as a laser might be made to propel a space craft, not by heating a propellant as in the laser rocket concept but perhaps by sending magnetic particles aloft so a ship might be pulled along by the magnetic stream.  When I was flying from Seattle to Michigan on Christmas Eve, 1965 I fell into conversation with a seat mate who first elucidated to me the idea of matter transmission.

My companion explained that someone had proposed that a person might turn his or her body into light for instance and travel at light speed then reconvert to matter. The idea was fascinating and even more so when a couple of days later I watched an Episode of Lost In Space (What there was before Star Trek came along) in which Will Robinson uses an alien matter transmitter to send him to earth and bring him back. He was riding on a “maser” beam (what there was before lasers), and how the outgoing process could be reversed to bring Will home wasn’t ever explained. This was by the way, Lost In Space, Episode 16, Season 1.

I had encountered the concept of sending people through some sort of communication channel on the old 50s/60s TV series Superman in a particular episode where the Professor invents a way to send material bodies over the telephone.  All of the actual matter in a body, he tells us, is less than a pin point so we’re really just empty space and no reason this can’t pass through a wire.  Well, force fields have something to say about all this but Superman wasn’t cutting edge science, nor for that matter was Lost n Space.

Having watched the L.I.S.episode I found myself spending a great deal of time thinking about ionizing matter and sending it’s constituent particles by means of a laser beam from one place to another.  It turns out that subatomic particles and even atoms can be propelled from place to place by laser light but reconstructing the object at the other end is problematic.

In subsequent years I read every matter transmission story I could find.  And of course Star Trek came along to popularize  a matter transmission-related concept in the form of the Transporter.  I say M.T.-related because strictly speaking, people, tools and material aren’t “transmitted” but are teleported by means of a mass-energy/energy-mass conversion process.  We’ll return to this in a minute.

When I was 15 I read Arthur C. Clarke’s excellent Profiles of the Future (Circa 1962) and in one of his chapters Mr. Clarke explained that the essence of transmission is not the sending of sound or light energy but the sending of a “pattern” of information from which sound and pictures can be reconstructed.  The essence of teleportation therefore would be the sending of a pattern of an object or person, from which that object or person could be reconstructed. Now I saw there were actually two types of matter transmission, one in which a solid object is turned into energy, a stream of subatomic particles or copied somehow into another medium such as a forc field so the  object being sent can either be directly reassembled from the original matter or energy, or a sort of “mold” would exist in the transfer medium so the object would spontaneously assemble at point of impact. Isaac Asimov used the force field concept in one of his 1950s short stories in which a human body would be broken down to it’s constituent particles and the pattern of particles would be sent from one place to another as a pattern of force fields.

Returning to the Star Trek transporter which is called in The Next Generation a matter energy scrambler.  (Hopefully not because one would expect the entire process would be carried through with as much “order” as possible.)   What appears to be happening is material objects, including people are being turned into pure energy and photons being held in proximity to one another by means of some influence exerted by the shipboard Transporter device.  The light can be turned back into matter at a distance and the process can be reversed.  The effect can be made to work over a range of about 40,000 kilometers  or about 23,000 miles which is about the altitude of a geosynchronous orbit of earth.  The transporter probably does more to play hob with Star Trek’s credibility as a hard science fiction show than anything else but one would have to admit that few things are more fascinating than the transporter and the show would have a great deal of trouble existing in the form it has without the transporter or something very much like it.

It’s easy to see from E = MC^2 that the transporter beam would need to be so incredibly intense as to threaten much of the continent onto which it touches down upon.  The idea of turning a human body into a stream of particles and sending it along in any manageably-short length of time would also necessitate the manipulation of significant amounts of energy.  It would be cheaper energywise, to invent an inertia-nullifying force field bubble and use a tractor beam to whisk people to the surface and back.

Though today the quantum physicists are learning how to transmit various particles and even atoms via laser beams, we still have the issue of how to put particles back together into a working 3-D solid once they’ve been transmitted.  3-D printers are able to build up particles of metal or ceramic, even living cells into complex three dimensional artefacts, including some body organs but the prospect of actually building up an entire human body with it’s liquid and gas contents is awfully daunting for anything less than instantaneous execution.  The word “instantaneous” is most likely the key if a human or other mammalian creature is ever to be Transmitted.  The operation of any “body” likewise brain, mind personality is a hypercomplexity of energy flows in the form of modulated signals.  They pervade not only the brain but  the entire nervous system.  We can envision a clone or possibly artificial body so constituted as to be able to accept an entire neuronal pattern from a given person.  This body might then be sent to another star system via a “slow route” starship, possibly in cold sleep.  How though could the original nerve energy flow pattern of the original person be gotten into the receptor body, especially at a distance.  Were we to begin scanning at one point in the body, faithfully sending data from this body to that, the pattern would entirely have changed in the original before a small fraction could be scanned and transmitted.

James Patrick Kelly, SF author and Web guru gave me a hint back in the ‘90s in his story Think Like a Dinosaur.  He used nanobots not exactly as I’m about to use them, but as an integral part of a matter transmission process.  I realized that if nanos could somehow be inserted into or attached to each nerve cell in the body, including those in the brain of course and made to record at a signal the present, instantaneous state of each cell then the workings of the “transmitted” person could be shut down (yes, kill the primary) and each of the nanos could be queried for it’s “state” the the data stream could be fed via interstellar com link to the “receptor” body, corresponding nanos could be loaded with the information from the primary.  There is also the issue of the connections previously existing between cells being re-established in the receptor body but assuming the technological achievements necessary to create nanobots of the complexity needed to carry this out, there are ways of recovering the connections.  Our result would be not matter transmission exactly but a sort of transmission and “possibly” the only way a person originally alive on earth might visit a planet in another solar system.  We can say “visit” because if our artificial receptor bodies turn out to be possible at all, there seems no reason that once transmitted the updating mind/nervous pattern couldn’t be recopied for further transmission to either come home again or venture on to some other destination.

I call this potential means of transmitting people “bioteleportation.”  It’s not any good for dropping in on an alien culture from orbit or for everyday commutes to work or school but might help us colonize the galaxy.  Just as enthusiasts of  near-space flight found it necessary to learn orbital mechanics, gas dynamics, thermodynamics and structural shell theory, starfarers or at least those who send them outward will rely upon nanorobotics, autoreplication, neuro science, communication theory, cryogenics and artificial life.

Happy New Year.  May there be many billions to come!

The Problem with Math and Science

29 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by in Education, Glynda's Writings

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Originally posted on August 24, 2013 at 12:25 AM

I’m offering this idea to Junior High Math instructors, Academic program designers or anyone else who may aspire to influence the course of Middle School Aged learning progress. I think there are many students who start out in Grade school, very interested in science but don’t carry through with the interest to the college level. I also think there is a very good, or perhaps bad; reason for this. If you ask a cross section of folks what should a person do if she or he is good in Math, a frequent response will be “Go into science.” The problem is, until one reaches 11th Grade or so in high school, science as generally taught, has very little to do with math.

Science in Grade school and Junior High, is full of fascinating facts, fun experiments and a fair amount of “gee whiz” value. Arithmetic and Mathematics however tend to be fairly dry, unappetizing subjects, satisfying perhaps for those who do it well but fairly deadly for many of the same kids who eat up the science experiments with a spoon, (well, hopefully not in a literal sense.) This tends to set up what we might call an Expectation Gap wherein one starts reading the qualitative science books around third or fourth grade then in high school and college, we can run up against the “Here also be Maths!” disillusionment.

We certainly don’t want to make elementary science less interesting and though many have tried, it’s difficult to make Math quite as yummy as say, Art Class. I think though that the real problem stems from the division of Math and Science early on and the solution may lay in bringing the two subjects together much earlier than is customarily done.

There is a fascinating genre of learning which speaks to both math and science which is simply the realm of Formulae (Formulas) Formulae are in general algebra at an understandable level and convey a great deal of power to those who learn to use them.

Customarily we teach arithmetic then we get into algebra with it’s integers and variables and exponents, it’s Xs and Ys with very little attention given to what we use this stuff for in the long run. Yes there are story problems in grade school arithmetic books and much fewer of them in algebra texts. Still algebra is all around us. We talk about Length and height and weight all the time (L H and W) and every half bright kid knows that H2O = water. Let’s design a course in Formulae pure and simple and let it serve as a pre-algebra course.

One needn’t be a propulsion expert to calculate the areas of rectangles and circles. Anyone who can do multiplication can also calculate the volume of solids such as cylinders, cones and even pyramids.

Simple demos with hollow shapes and graduated cylinders of water could help classes see that their numbers are correct or at least close. Elementary Trig could be done with a board, and angle measure and a measuring tape. How big a board do you need to cover this side of the slanted roof. Clubhouse builders would love it! Starting with cooking recipes we could move fairly directly into calculating how much oxygen you need to combine with two grams of hydrogen to get 18 grams of water. (Basically look at the formula and have a look at the Periodic Table.) Before Course’s end we could be able to calculate things like how much kerosene do you need to burn to heat a tubful of water from whatever the cold tap gives us to a temperature we wouldn’t mind using for a bath. Lots of cool, hands-on stuff here and nothing all that expensive. Kids love knowing how to do things, what things are made of, how to mix things together and come up with exciting new things. Let’s get formulaic and take the myth out of science and the snore out of math!

Glynda Shaw