R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 115

Locusts

The science fiction author Jerry Pournelle has been keeping a blog on the internet since before the word “blog” was invented. He simply called it a journal and it is located at www.jerrypournelle.com. Every so often, he’ll comment that “my day was devoured by locusts.” The phrase itself is derived from the Bible, specifically the book of Exodus. After several of the plagues had devastated the country, locusts beyond counting descended, eating everything that hadn’t been destroyed by the earlier disasters.

Jerry Pournelle is not suggesting that his day was a disaster when he writes that it was consumed by locusts. Instead, he means that his plans for the day—writing—never came to fruition. Instead, his day was taken up with one distraction after another.

Every so often I have a day like that. Take a certain Monday not all that long ago. Not much of a surprise that a Monday would be consumed by locusts, since Mondays are the days that murder the weekend.

Who likes Mondays?

I had good intentions for getting a bunch of writing done, despite the rejection on a short story over the weekend. Even published authors will still receive rejections. In fact, my rejections come nearly as frequently as they did before I got published.

If you’re an unpublished author, disabuse yourself of the notion that publishers will swoon over your every word just because you got a positive response from one editor. There are still hundreds of other editors who have never heard of you. They don’t care about your past success. All they care is that you give them something they want and need today. And it’s really all about the individual editor’s requirements just now: they need to fill a hole in their magazine that is 1200 words deep. If your story is 2000 words, guess what? You’ll get rejected. Your story simply didn’t fit. It had nothing to do with talent. But the editor won’t explain why you got rejected. You’ll still get the standard form letter.

In any case, my head was not in the best place that Monday morning. I had just sat down to start writing when my wife sent me a text. She had forgotten her lunch. Could I please take it to her?

So, up I got, put on my shoes, and headed across town to her school.

An hour later, I was back at my desk.

Then my daughter called. She didn’t feel well. Did I have the phone number of the doctor?

I looked it up. Just because my children are not at home, just because they are in college or high school, does not mean they cannot interrupt my day nearly as frequently as they would if they were home. They have cell phones.

Once again, I turned my attention toward my computer. The phone rang. It was my mother-in-law. She needed to tell me about a strange phone call she kept getting. “It’s some 800 number and they never leave a message. They must know when I’m at home because there were no calls like this when I was out of town.” Um, you were out of town. How would you know?

She wanted to call her phone company to see if they could do something about it. But she didn’t have their phone number. So could I find it for her?

She has a computer, but she doesn’t really know how to use it. And she knows I’m good at finding things like that, so a phone call to me was easier than using Google on her own.

Before I knew it, it was lunch time.

After lunch, I suddenly had emails that needed my response. Then there were more phone calls. Then the dog needed me to let it into the back yard so he could bark at the neighbor’s dogs. Then the dog wanted to be inside instead. After that, the cat decided that she didn’t have enough food in her bowl—she could see the top edge—so she meowed loudly and plaintively until I made it mound up again.

She has me well-trained.

Then I remembered that my other daughter needed me to wash her bedspread because the cat had thrown up on it last night.

There is more to writing than just pounding at the keyboard. Interruptions are deadly to the creative process. One needs to collect one’s thoughts, and formulate the words. It takes some doing to get oneself into the state of mind where writing happens. A certain amount of uninterrupted time is vital for the words to solidify in my thoughts and make their way from my brain to the computer screen.

But on this Monday, the locusts kept swooping down and eating the words. Every time I was about to write, an interruption chased my thoughts away.

On a good day, a day not consumed by locusts, it is easy to write my normal goal of two thousand words. On a day of locust swarms, I’m lucky to make even two hundred words.

By the time the locusts were finally gone, the day was also gone. I had to get in my car and go pick up my children from school. My wife would be home soon. And then I would have to make supper.

That particular Monday wasn’t a bad day. There were no disasters.

But as far as writing was concerned, as far as fulfilling the goals I had for the day, it just didn’t happen. Jerry Pournelle’s locusts were fat and happy. Me, not so much.

Dwarf Planets

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other word would smell as sweet.

—From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

As we contemplate the fact that Pluto is now to be classified as a “dwarf planet,” becoming one of a class of similar objects beyond Neptune, some people may feel a bit sad. The reality, of course, is that Pluto has not gone anywhere, and nothing has changed in the shape of our solar system. The astronomers are simply changing and clarifying how we classify the objects that make it up.

Consider the story of Ceres. It was discovered on January 1, 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi. With a diameter of about 590 miles, Ceres is by far the largest and most massive body in the asteroid belt: it contains approximately a third of the belt’s total mass.

Initially, Ceres was classified as a planet. In fact, it held that classification for nearly fifty years. Eventually, however, as other objects were discovered littering the space between Mars and Jupiter, it was reclassified, joining this mass of rocks as simply the largest of the debris that fills that region of space. Ceres did not suddenly vanish in a puff of pink smoke. It simply was reclassified, to make better sense of it, to put it into a category in which it better fit.

Likewise, Pluto has not suddenly vanished. The New Horizons space ship on it way to Pluto has not been recalled because of its new designation as a “dwarf planet.” But it is a reasonable reclassification which helps us better understand the structure of our solar system. As more and more observations of the edge of our solar system have been made over the last decade, astronomers have found a large number of objects out there, all of which are similar to Pluto, and many of which are nearly as large—or, in the case of UB313, nicknamed Xena, actually larger (though both are considerably smaller than Earth’s own moon). These objects are called Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs).

The first astronomers to suggest the existence of this belt were Frederick C. Leonard in 1930 and Kenneth E. Edgeworth in 1943. In 1951 Gerard Kuiper suggested that the belt was the source of short period comets (those having an orbital period of less than 200 years). More detailed conjectures about objects in the belt were done by Al G. W. Cameron in 1962, Fred L. Whipple in 1964, and Julio Fernandez in 1980. The belt and the objects in it were named after Kuiper after the discovery of (15760) 1992 QB1. Although no known object in the Kuiper belt is a possible candidate to become a comet, the name Kuiper for the region has stuck.

And like Pluto, these KBOs orbit the sun in highly eccentric orbits between 30 and 50 AU from the sun (AU is “astronomical unit,” the distance from the sun to the Earth, about 93 million miles). Pluto has a highly elliptical orbit that sometimes brings it closer to the sun than Neptune. It is canted to the ecliptic—the level at which the eight planets orbit the sun—at a 17 degree angle. UB313, which also has a highly elliptical orbit, is canted at a 44 degree angle, and is sometimes further from the sun than Pluto, and sometimes is closer than Neptune. Other major objects out on the edge of the solar system include Sedna, Ixion, Varuna and Quaorar, all larger than Ceres. All together, more than 800 of these Kuiper belt objects have been discovered; astronomers anticipate finding thousands more. Given their size and relationships, thinking of these objects as “planets” like the other eight seemed unreasonable to the astronomers gathered in Prague in August, and so Pluto, as being an obvious member of this group—simply the first one of them to be discovered—needed to be redesignated.

Our solar system is simply a far more interesting, wonderful and complex place than people first thought in the early part of the 20th century and the classification—or reclassification—of the objects within it, is simply a way of helping us more easily comprehend and organize it in our minds. Designating Pluto, and the other distant bodies like it, as “dwarf planets” makes it much easier than trying to memorize a planetary list which otherwise would have grown to the hundreds, if not thousands. Chances are, in the future, we’ll have to make more adjustments in our thinking, too, especially as the details of other solar systems around neighboring stars become clearer.

Living With Mental Illness

In many respects, living with and caring for a mentally ill person is like living with any chronically ill individual. The condition does not change much from day to day, and they require constant attention.

Some chronically ill individuals are bedridden. Extra effort is required to ensure they take their prescribed medications. Some need help with even the most basic activities: bathing, feeding, brushing of teeth—even going to the bathroom.

A friend of mine was a live-in caregiver for a bedridden woman who was very old; when he first started working with her, she could get around with a walker. Soon, she became confined to a wheelchair, though she could move it herself. But as the years went by, she became increasingly immobile, while the other things she could do for herself became ever less.

Until the end, she was able to feed herself, but my friend became responsible for making sure she could get to the toilet, could get from her chair into her bed, and even to bathe.

For a few years, he was able to take her with him to baseball games—she was a big fan of the Dodgers—and to a few other events, such as weekly church services. But eventually, she could no longer go anywhere. By then, because of her condition, he could leave the apartment for only very limited periods of time. Occasionally he could get a day away—but only when he could get a substitute care worker to take his place. Otherwise, he was limited to brief trips to do the grocery shopping or the running of a few errands—and never for much more than an hour.

Other people with chronic illness merely need to be watched and sometimes directed; or given extra aid now and again: perhaps picking them up and taking them to weekly physical therapy sessions or other appointments, reminding them to take their medications, and checking to make sure they are eating properly.

My youngest daughter, a teenager, is now on an antipsychotic medication. She is not bedridden. She can visit friends, do occasional sleepovers with them, or have them come and stay with her overnight. This is an improvement on where she was two years ago. Then, she could not be left alone at all; in fact, it was hard to even go to sleep at night because of her tendency to sneak out of the house. In contrast to my friend’s elderly patient who steadily declined, my daughter’s condition has improved and continues an upward path. Her psychiatrist is pleased with her progress.

My daughter now sleeps through the night and no longer tries to sneak out or run away. But she really cannot take care of herself; and because of her emotional volatility—much better and less extreme than it used to be thanks to the medication—we still cannot leave her alone for more than two or three hours at a time. Sometimes she is stable and patient and clear thinking and all is well; other times she explodes in an extended rage over the most minor of inconveniences, such as misplacing her iPod or simply being asked to take an empty glass back to the kitchen. She is not always very good about distinguishing between fantasy and reality. She’ll start perseverating on a topic, making up scenarios and events that never occurred in her attempt to explain her situation or emotional state. She’ll invent memories of incidents that never occurred. She is quick to assume that a missing item has been stolen and to assume that those around her are purposely trying to make her miserable.

Thankfully she is no longer violent. Since being placed on her current medication she no longer breaks out windows or punches or kicks holes in the wall; she no longer hits me or kicks me or bites me. However she is periodically verbally abusive, prone to cursing, and prone to fits of raging and yelling. These verbally violent outbursts, with an occasional slammed door sometimes arise from no discernible outward cause. Her reactions are beyond anything a normal adolescent would experience; given that she has two older sisters, we well know how teenagers can be. How my youngest daughter behaves is something else altogether.

She cannot go to school because she cannot cope with the social interaction. She is incapable of distinguishing between a genuine friend and those who wish to exploit and harm her. She has no ability to properly judge character and tends to believe whatever someone tells her. Her anxiety in a normal classroom escalates to the point she cannot function. Therefore, she must be on independent study at home. She gets work from her high school each week, relies on me to help her, and then goes to the school only once a week to take tests.

Living with a mentally ill person is stressful and exhausting. It is rare that we get any break from it. Our hope is that the improvements we are continuing to see, and the ever longer periods of normal behavior, will continue as she matures, as she maintains her therapy and psychiatric treatment, and as the medications do their work. It is likely, however, that she will have to take these medications for the rest of her life, much as a diabetic is forever dependent upon insulin injections.

History of Star Trek from Space.com

Source: SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

August 1914

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s historical novel August 1914 recounts the beginnings of of the USSR. The novel centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership of Czarist Russia, and how a series of mistakes led to the end of Czarist rule and allowed the rise and victory of Communism in Russia. The book was never published in the Soviet Union. It instead appeared first in France in 1971, before being translated into English and other languages.

Ironically, it was twenty years ago in another August—this time in 1991—that the Soviet Union whose birth Solzhenitsyn had chronicled—began to come to a sputtering end. Only after the Soviet Union was no more, would Russians at last be able to freely and easily read what Solzhenitsyn had written.

The Fall of Soviet Communism did not begin in August 1991, however, any more than its rise began in 1917 when Lenin proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat. The fall of Communism began nearly two years earlier: in 1989.

Following World War II, the Soviet Union had managed to take control of Eastern Europe, picking up the flaming wreckage of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and the eastern part of Germany among other nations such as Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. But by 1989, the economies of the Soviet Union and the eastern European nations were a shambles. Mikhail Gorbachev, who had become the sixth General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, was forced by rapidly deteriorating circumstances to attempt structural changes in the Soviet Union. He completely failed to staunch the decline and instead hastened the destruction of what the American President Ronald Regan called “the Evil Empire.”

The authoritarian systems in the Eastern European nations soon began to break apart. Strikes in Poland led to the collapse of the pro-Soviet government and the Soviet Union was now powerless to do anything about it. Soon, Hungary underwent a similar change—and the unrest in the remaining Soviet-dominated nations exploded.

By November 9, 1989 the East German government felt compelled to announce that its citizens were now free to visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans crossed and climbed over the Berlin Wall, joined by West Germans. Over the following weeks, people began chipping the wall apart, hauling it away for souvenirs. Ultimately, the bulk of it was then torn down with industrial equipment by the German government. Less than a year later, on October 3, 1990, East Germany ceased to exist when formally unified with West Germany.

By the summer of 1991, Eastern Europe had completely moved beyond communist control: the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet’s answer to NATO was formally dissolved on July 1, 1991.

Terrified of what was happening across their former empire, the communist hardliners in Moscow staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the head of the Soviet Union and placed him under house arrest on August 19, 1991. Instead of stabilizing the USSR and maintaining the communist system, their action led to its almost immediate demise. Within 72 hours, the coup had collapsed, and with it, the Soviet Union itself began falling apart. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, took over the running of the nation.

On August 20, Estonia declared its independence from the Soviet Union, followed the next day by Latvia. On August 24, Ukraine declared its independence, followed like dominoes by the other constituent republics that had made up the old Soviet Union. By December, ten of the republics had declared their independence and so on December 8, 1991 Russia, Ukraine and Byelorussian republics signed a treaty declaring the end of the Soviet Union.

On December 21, 1991, representatives of all member republics except Georgia signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, in which they confirmed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That same day, all the former Soviet republics agreed to join what they called the Commonwealth of Independent States, with the exception of the three Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and Georgia.

The Alma-Ata Protocol authorized Russia to assume the Soviet Union’s United Nations membership, including its permanent membership on the Security Council. The Soviet Ambassador to the UN then delivered to the Secretary General a letter informing him that, in virtue of that agreement, Russia was the successor state to the USSR for purposes of UN membership.

In the early hours of December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR, declaring the office extinct and ceding all the powers still vested in it to Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Republic. That night, the red communist flag with the hammer and sickle came down for the last time from above the Kremlin. The next day, the red, white and blue tri-color flag took its place for good.

The Soviet Union—and with it, Communism as a viable system—came to a surprisingly peaceful end.

Murphy’s Law

Just about everyone has heard of Murphy’s Law: “If something can go wrong, it will.” And then there are the various well-known corollaries: “Murphy was an optimist.” And, “If something goes wrong, it will happen at the worst possible moment.”

According to Arthur Bloch’s book, Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG, published in 1977, the law’s namesake was Captain Ed Murphy, a development engineer from Wright Field Aircraft Lab working at what is now Edwards Air Force Base in 1949. Block published a letter he had received from George E. Nichols which stated that Captain Murphy was frustrated with a strap transducer that was malfunctioning because of an error in the wiring of the strain gauge bridges. He remarked, according to the letter, that “If there is any way to do it wrong, he will” in reference to the technician who had wired the bridges. Nichols said that he assigned Murphy’s Law to that statement and all its associated variations.

Murphy’s law grew out of frustration, and it is usually cited with amusement when something gets messed up. It is a mistake, however, to take the law seriously. It shouldn’t even be taken as a rule of thumb. Because if Murphy’s Law were really true, if it really were one of the laws of physics, then nothing would ever go right. Life would be one huge snafu. Airplanes would not fly, and if they did, they’d fall out of the sky or run into mountains every time they did get off the ground. Cars would never start, and your computer would never boot up right and if it ever did, it would crash and lose every document and every bank transaction that you ever made–especially those that were most critical. Your bank account would then be drained of all its funds by Nigerian princes. Those Nigerian princes would, of course, immediately go to jail—since their attempt at amassing wealth, following Murphy’s dictum, must fail. And then those Nigerian princes would escape the prison, since that would be the last thing their jailers would ever want. But then, those escaped thieving Nigerian princes would promptly fall off a cliff and be consumed by ravenous wolves–who would immediately keel over from food poisoning. And so on.

Murphy’s law is easily falsifiable. For instance a friend of mine about three years ago asked me to build a computer for him. This necessitated a trip to Fry’s where we succeeded in getting all the parts needed to build a computer: a motherboard with CPU, a computer case, memory, graphics card, sound card, hard drive, DVD-RW drive and so on. With the purchase of the CPU, we were able to get a copy of the latest version of Windows on disc at a discounted price.

When we got back to my house, I assembled the parts easily, and then turned the new machine on. It booted up fine. The disc that came with the hard drive did its job of preparing and formatting the new hard drive for use and then the computer assigned the normal C and D drive letters to the hard drive and DVD-RW respectively.

When I put the Windows disc in the drive, the computer found it easily enough and began the rather lengthy process of installing the Windows operating system. It proceeded smoothly, without a hiccup, locating the sound card and graphics card and installing the right drivers for both. After the various reboots that Windows does during an install from scratch, the system came up and worked just as it was supposed to.

In putting a new computer together from scratch, the number of things that can go awry is rather high. When installing Windows, many glitches can easily occur. And yet, on this occasion, nothing went wrong and everything went right.

In science, when experiments are done it is not to prove theories right, but rather to prove them wrong: to falsify them. And all it takes for a theory to be falsified is for it to be wrong once. People were certain all swans were white. But it could not be proven true, since one could not examine every last swan in existence. But it was easily shown to be false when the first black swan was seen in Australia.

Thus, Murphy’s law is falsified every time something goes right: when you stop in time, instead of running into the child chasing the ball into the street. When the Dodgers win a baseball game. When the Clippers don’t lose. When you repair a lamp without electrocuting yourself. When you still have a job at the end of the week. When you pay off a debt. And so on. In reality, most of the time, things do not go wrong.

That’s why it’s news when there’s a school shooting, instead of when there isn’t.

WISE

Go outside tonight after the sun has long set. Find a place where there are no streetlights and you haven’t a flashlight or match. Choose a night when the moon is not up and its cloudy. Now, toss your car keys a few yards in front of you and try to find them. While you’re at it, attempt to make sense of the gloomy shapes around you: the bushes and trees, the rocks, any nearby or distant buildings, and that mugger waiting to attack you. Can you trace out the shape the mountains on the horizon?

Probably you’ll have trouble locating your keys or discerning any details about the landscape around you. Good luck identifying that mugger in the police lineup.

But now pull out your night vision goggles—surely you have a pair on you, right? Thanks to their ability to let you see the infrared wavelengths of light that are invisible to your naked eyes, the world will suddenly become bright and clear. You’ll find your keys and running away from the mugger will be a snap.

On Monday, December 14, 2009 a space probe was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the coast of California that was designed to do much the same thing for our view of the universe as those night vision goggles would do for you in a scary back alley. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, also called WISE, is a telescope with a sixteen inch diameter mirror designed to survey the entire sky in the infrared-wavelengths of light. It was launched from Vandenberg rather than Cape Canaveral in Florida because it was placed in a polar orbit—so that it circles the Earth north and south instead of east to west like most satellites. It operated until it ran out of hydrogen coolent in 2011.

WISE took a total of 1.5 million photographs—about one every eleven seconds of its ten month mission. It was many times more sensitive than previous infrared satellite telescopes. The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) both conducted full sky surveys back in the 1980s. IRAS used just 62 pixels to cover four infrared bands, while COBE had but a single pixel per band. In contrast, WISE covered a million pixels per band. The difference between the previous orbiting infrared observatories and WISE was like the difference between a poorly photocopied impressionist painting of a forest and what you see on your high definition TV when you watch a Blu-ray disc of a forest.

The images that WISE took contained data on the local solar system, our galaxy, and the universe as a whole. The discoveries from this mission were unprecedented. Scientists discovered thousands of new asteroids and comets, including many of the kind that swing close to Earth called NEOs (Near Earth Objects). Given that asteroids have struck our planet with devastating results–most recently the close call in Russia–finding them beforehand is valuable. In June 30, 1908 a small asteroid estimated at only around 300 feet across exploded in the air about 5 miles above the surface of Siberia, near the Tunguska River. Estimates of the energy released by the explosion range from 5 to 30 megatons—at least 1000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The Tunguska blast devastated an area of 830 square miles, flattening 80 million trees. Had the asteroid exploded over a city like Los Angeles, the death toll would have been in the millions.

WISE is found many new brown dwarfs—balls of gas more massive than Jupiter but too small to have become true stars. Astronomers also discovered a lot of new, dim stars called red dwarfs. They believe that it is entirely possible we’ll discover one or more that are closer to our solar system than the currently known closest star, Proxima Centauri, which is about four light years from us. Thus far in analyzing the data, scientists have discovered one previously unknown Red Dwarf only about 10 light years from Earth, currently designated WISE 1049-5319. WISE was not able to detect Kuiper belt objects, since their temperature is too low. It was only able to detect objects warmer than 70–100 Kelvins. A Neptune-sized object would therefore have been detectable out to 700 AU, a Jupiter-mass object out to one light year (63,000 AU). A larger object of 2–3 Jupiter masses was visible to WISE at a distance of up to seven to ten light years.

WISE was also capable of imaging any ultraluminous infrared galaxies that are out there, up to ten billion light years away.

All the WISE data has been publicly released, but the analysis of the mountains of data it beamed back will take years. Many more discoveries are yet to be announced.

So the portions of our universe, both nearby and far off that before WISE were dark to us, hidden by the shadows, are finally starting gleam brightly.

Saying No

For most of my life I’ve found it very difficult to tell people no. No matter how busy I might be, I seem to always want to help my friends or family if they need something done. When I was in college I discovered the hard way that saying no is sometimes the right thing to do.

Back in the dark ages before computers, we used these large bulky and noisy devices called typewriters. I had come to college with a nice electric one and I made it a point to get my papers done early so that I would not have to stay up late the night before, unlike so many of my fellow classmates. Toward the end of the first semester of my freshman year, I was quite proud of myself for having my paper for biology class done a week early. I congratulated myself on how I’d get a good night’s sleep while I listened with little empathy to the other students moaning about how they were going to have to pull “all nighters” in order to get their papers done.

One of my classmates had asked me to type up his biology paper for him. I offered this to my friends for a nominal fee, far below the going rate, more as a favor than as a means for generating income. He assured me he’d have the paper to me early in the afternoon a day before it was due. I typed fast, so it wouldn’t take me much more than an hour, if that, to type up his ten page paper, with footnotes and bibliography.

Unfortunately, I discovered that this particular friend was a procrastinator. He gave me the first four pages of his handwritten paper about eight o’clock the night before it was due, assuring me as he gave them to me that he’d have the rest to me within an hour.

Hah.

His optimistic pronouncement was inaccurate. Instead, he delivered the paper to me a page at a time, dropping off the last sheet about four in the morning.

Instead of getting a good night’s sleep, I very nearly ended up pulling a dreaded “all nighter,” catching an hour here and there as I awaited each page’s delivery.

From then on, for any future papers, I insisted that he give me the entire thing, not page by page—and he had to have it in to me by six PM the night before it was due or I simply wouldn’t type it for him. I had learned to say no, at least to him, from that night on.

He actually didn’t ask me to type papers for him very often, as a consequence. But I got a lot more sleep.

The lesson to sometimes say no didn’t really stick. After college, I’ve generally said yes to my friends and family members who request help from me. I’ve frequently helped people move, a task that I positively despise, whether it is moving an entire house or just helping someone relocate a refrigerator. I’ve helped people install various electronic gadgets, from televisions to stereo systems to new computers. I’ve even built new computers or cobbled together machines from random scattered parts.

A few years ago, I helped my wife’s parents do some more renovations on their house, which included installing new ceramic tiles in their bathroom and laundry room. One very long weekend, I pulled up the old linoleum in their upstairs bathroom in preparation for eventually installing tile in it. That same weekend I also replaced the corroded valves under their bathroom sink, and I replaced the old sink with a nice new one. This required removing the old sink, its pipes and its faucets. Then I had to cut the opening in the fake marble top to accommodate the new sink, since it was a couple inches bigger around than the old sink. I quickly found myself and the bathroom coated with white plastic dust.

Much of the weekend’s labor consisted of trying to find the parts and tools in my in-laws’ messy garage, or making trips to Home Depot to pick up what they hadn’t already purchased. Late that Sunday night, still dirty and smelly, I finally left for home just moments after I had finished with the sink. I had a two hour drive ahead of me.

Within moments of walking through my front door–still coated with white plastic dust and wanting nothing more than to take a shower–the telephone rang.

On the other end of the phone was a friend who was having trouble with her computer: it had gotten infected with a bit of malware that was blocking her ability to install a new anti-virus program. I spent about a half hour on the phone diagnosing things and finally told her to bring it by in the morning. This despite the fact that at the time I was under deadline for a book. Only then, did I finally get my shower.

Monday morning, after about an hour’s work, I was able to solve her problem and get rid of the virus in her computer.

If I know I can fix something, or do something, to help someone, I’m generally not willing to say no. Besides, I still managed to work on my book and I remained on schedule. Despite rarely telling people no, I still somehow always get my own work done on time. Showers and sleep, however, are another thing. Perhaps someday I’ll learn to say no. Probably about the time I learn how to overcome feeling guilty from knowing I could help someone and then turning them down.

Managing Time

At the tiny seminary where I sometimes teach, we have both on campus courses and online courses. Most of the online courses are taken care of by a man who lives in Tennessee, even though our campus is in southern California. It’s the wonder of the modern connected world. Periodically, he sends me a short email, just to ask me how I’m doing.

Not so very long ago, I got such an email. Rather than just respond with a short, “I’m fine” I decided to rattle back a list of the stuff I’m up to.

It took me longer than I expected.

When you discover just how overloaded you are, how many things are waiting for your attention, you might think that maybe one of those time management books might be helpful. I know, I’ve had that thought.

But what I’ve discovered about such time management books is that they tend to work very well for people that are already organized and detail oriented. Such people don’t really need that sort of help; they already manage things fine. It’s in their nature.

For the rest of us? I have yet to transform my life through reading about time management, or installing a time management app on my phone, or getting a day planner. Setting goals, visualization, checklists—none of them have been transformative. Instead, day planners and list making become another to do item that I’m trying to cram into my already over crammed life. And so I get to feel guilty about something else I’m not getting done.

In the end, I’m not sure that there’s a solution beyond just continuing to slog on as I’ve always slogged.

Back to my response to my colleague in Tennessee. Telling him all the stuff that I’m doing and need to do turned out to be somewhat encouraging to me. It explained to me why I was feeling so tired and overwhelmed. Thanks to the request, I took the time to take a step back. Plato wrote that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” And so I suddenly had to examine what I’ve been up to. It was encouraging in a “wow, no wonder I’m feeling overwhelmed” sort of way.

Despite what the movies or TV may indicate, the life of a writer is not nirvana, paradise, or the promised land. It is simply life. Making books, writing essays, or creating short stories is just a job, with no more reward than any other job, and perhaps less, since you’re alone most of the time, no one is looking over your shoulder, and even your pay is intermittent and hard to come by. It resembles being unemployed, but without the perk of extra free time.

Then there are the normal sorts of things that happen: cooking dinner, cleaning the house, doing dishes, laundry, mowing the lawn, doctor and dentist appointments, grocery shopping, and occasional maintenance around the house.

So how do I manage my time? I just work on one task after another, and do whatever most needs doing at any given moment. There are twenty-four hours in a day. Theoretically, eight of those I will spend sleeping, but in reality I’ve not been sleeping anywhere close to that lately. Some half hour or so of my day will be spent traveling from place to place—I’m an author, so that means trips to my coffee pot. There will be some time taken by eating. The rest of that time is what is somewhat in my power to manage. And I’ve learned not to feel guilty about taking a break: websurfing has its place in my life. I only feel guilty when it takes up all my controllable hours.

Do You Want Fries With That?

Had I been interested in becoming wealthy, I suppose I might have made different educational choices. As an undergraduate, I went to a small Christian college, a liberal arts institution, where I majored in history because I was fascinated by the topic, not because I thought it had great career possibilities.

I did very well in college, becoming but the third individual in the school’s fifty plus years of existence to have graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA. My advisor encouraged me to go to the University of Chicago to pursue a graduate degree in history. However, my interests had shifted to field of study with even poorer job prospects: the study of ancient dead languages, specifically, the Semitic languages. After having spent two summers working on a kibbutz in Israel, three years studying Biblical Hebrew and Old Testament, I decided that studying the languages and literature of the Ancient Near East was the thing for me.

So I applied to and was accepted into the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. I chose to major in Semitic languages.

I was expected to focus on three language areas. Two were required: Hebrew and Aramaic. For the third language focus, I had the option of choosing either Arabic or Akkadian. Given that my reason for learning these languages was my fascination with the Bible’s Old Testament, I of course opted for Akkadian, the dead language that dominated the ancient Near East rather than the living language that dominates it today.

What’s Akkadian? It is better known by its two dialects, Assyrian and Babylonian and was spoken in what is today Iraq from about 2000 BC until around 600 BC.

Once you’ve learned one Semitic language, the others are relatively easy to pick up, since the basic grammar and vocabulary is mostly the same for all of them. Sort of like how knowing Spanish makes learning Portuguese, Italian and French relatively easy, since all those languages evolved from Latin. Likewise, all the various Semitic languages descended from a common root.

Nevertheless, Akkadian is a bit trickier to learn than the other Semitic languages. Not because the grammar or vocabulary is any tougher, but because of its nightmarish writing system. Whereas Hebrew and Aramaic are both written with a 22 letter alphabet, Akkadian is not. Alphabetic writing systems allowed for widespread literacy. The Akkadian writing system, in contrast, made literacy rare and ensured the continued employment of the scribes who alone could read and write. Akkadian uses a writing system originally developed for a different and unrelated language: Sumerian.

The writing system that the Sumerians developed and that the Akkadian speakers adopted is known as cuneiform. It was written on mostly pillow-shaped clay tablets that could be easily held in one hand. The scribes used a wedge-shaped stick to make impressions in the clay, leaving wedge shaped marks (the word cuneiform means “wedge writing.”) The cuneiform writing system is incredibly complicated. Each symbol represents either a whole word, or for a part of a word—a syllable. Reading cuneiform is like reading a rebus, where for instance one might write the phrase, “I believe” by drawing a picture of an eye, a bee, and a leaf. Thus, the first picture is a homonym of the pronoun “I,” while the word “belief” is represented by symbols that individually could be understood as an insect and a part of a tree, but in this context represent the two syllables of the word “believe.” The entire Akkadian writing system functions in this way, so that every tablet you read is a complex puzzle.

It gets worse. There are about 650 different cuneiform symbols. And each of them is polyvalent—that is, each symbol can be read more than one way, with some having upwards of twenty or more possible readings or meanings. And you thought English spellings were hard! Understanding what a given cuneiform symbol means is dependent upon the historical period when it was written, its genre (that is, whether it is a religious text, an economic text, poetry, or history), and the context of the symbol—that is, what are the symbols around it. So for instance a symbol that can represent the name of the goddess Ishtar, might also be read as the word “god,” “heaven,” “sky,” or simply as a syllable in some other word.

Akkadian was but one of the thirteen languages I ended up studying during my graduate program at UCLA. Not all were Semitic languages directly related to my major. For instance, I took two years of Sumerian and a couple of quarters of ancient Egyptian just because I had the opportunity. I would have enjoyed studying more Egyptian, but the class conflicted with Ugaritic, which was a required course for my major.

Obviously learning all these peculiar languages was hard—especially given that I was also working 40 hours a week driving a shuttle bus at the Burbank Airport. And often I was studying four or more languages at the same time.

No possible job achieved as a consequence of studying these dead languages could ever come close to making me rich. Had I wanted to be rich, I should have studied engineering, science, or medicine—or maybe majored in business or economics. My educational choices were about as economically reasonable as betting the rent money on a game of three-card Monte. On the bright side, I do know how to ask, “do you want fries with that?” in several languages…that no one speaks anymore.