Wow, five years since my last post and, judging from previous content, no compelling evidence in favor of more posts. Just the same, I'm going to give this another go and try to focus on bicycling (or try to exclude a bunch of other stuff).

No pedalling for me today unless we agree to cycle to the gym and leave the car parked. Apparently, not everyone agrees on the benefits of cycling. Apart from the regrettable conclusions about bike CO2 emissions (yes, really) and tax revenues from cyclists that Representative Orcutt arrives at, I can't help but wonder at his sense of scale. In the face of truly massive sources of pollution and the relative number (and potential taxable mileage) of cyclists, what environmental gains does he foresee in dis-incentivizing cyclists and what meaningful revenues does he calculate from this minority population? It's a puzzlement.

Latestest and most newest

Thanks to Lisa for giving me a nudge in the right direction and encouraging me to enter the maelstrom of the blogosphere. The most recent posts are really not new thinking. These are random, sometimes sophomoric, occasionally amusing thoughts that tweaked me over the last couple years. They have been scraped off my web page and deposited here for public target practice.

An existential Roomba?

I'm thinking about the crossing-over point that seems attached to most parts of life. I've been in houses that were no longer decorated but instead became warehouses for decorations. Does this happen to lives? I think so. There are lives that become warehouses of events that themselves lead to no ultimate goal or benefit. I ask myself about this as I become busier and busier. Am I merely stocking my warehouse more quickly? There seems to be a tradition among students to resent the acquisition of facts as irrelevant and needless. When this is placed upon them by teachers who cherish facts as if they were silver dollars, then I think the complaint is reasonable. But there are still a lot of students who find the argument convenient for justifying their own laziness. So, I think that there is a line between information whose value is demonstrated by the ideas it supports and information that is merely decoration. I'm thinking that events that happen in a life might also cross over and become decoration, too. I'm thinking that lives can become as cluttered as curio cabinets filled with porcelain trash, filled with happenings that are fleetingly attractive, laughably similar, ultimately useless. I can throw out the trash in my house and make space for pieces that make it a home, but how do I throw out the trash in my life?

I'm back to questioning my motives

How many of the things that I do are clothed in thick layers of institution? Before there were ever such things as marriage, law, religion, family, economy, we still somehow knew that trust, communication, cooperation and innovation were useful ideas. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a lot of baggage that now is becoming a burden. So much of it is invented consequence, reward or penalty, that seems as needless and mythological as an easter bunny. Lately, I'm looking a little harder for the ideas that are really enduring. Beyond eating, sleeping, eliminating and sheltering, what other activities have come down from our most silent, most distant past? Which ideas are so enduring that they live even longer than the language to describe them? How many of the things that I do right now, would I still be doing if there were no rewards, no penalties? What is the common good?

Five teasers

Why don't construction workers collect royalties whenever someone crosses a bridge safely?

Why do people sometimes stop working to try to prove the value of their work?

How does an element of competition get woven into most of life? And why?

Why does advertising tend to encourage poor people to spend their money and wealthy people to save theirs?

What does it mean to want?

What about culture?

I don't think of culture as a collection of songs, recipes and folktales that are hung on our psyches. Culture is not the wallpaper, but the walls themselves. Culture is the lack of female airline pilots and male secretaries. It is the unspoken fear and distrust of people different from ourselves who have done us no wrong. Culture is a universe of things we want without knowing or wondering why. Culture is all the questions that don't get asked.

More not-so-original thinking

For now, I subscribe to the notion that what I know is not so much like a container that is more full or less full, but rather like a balloon or a soap bubble in which what I know is the skin, the boundary between all that I consciously do not know on the inside and all the rest of existence of which I am unaware on the outside. Whenever I increase what I know, I also increase my awareness of what I do not know. In fact, I am unable to change one without affecting the other. All the while, what is outside the balloon is lessened by only a whiff, if it is changed at all.

Us and . . .

What would happen if
everyone could agree
on a definition
for the word
them?

Why a blog?

The easy answer would be, "I'm the only person left without one." A more truthful answer is that this might help me to inject some coherence into a big collection of random thoughts. For now, expect a low return on investment if you're reading this and you're not me. If you're not me, but suspect that you might be a little like me, check back occasionally to see if the pickings are any better.