Blog About Women Musicians: Speaking of music, womanfolk is a great blog that specializes in news and music samples by great women singer-songwriters.

Why This Blog Will Never Win an Award: I’m honoured to have been nominated once again for a Koufax award (best writing on a ‘progressive’ blog). The problem for me is that only 5-10% of my articles are about progressive political and economic issues. I’ve been nominated for a Canadian blog award (but only 2% of my articles are about Canadian matters), and several business blog awards (perhaps 20% of my posts are business related). I don’t know if there’s an award for environmental blogs, but I wouldn’t win it either, since I don’t give readers the one critical thing that all award-winning blogs need to provide: reassurance. Ecoblogs like WorldChanging and TreeHugger, in addition to having multiple writers, take a very upbeat, “we’re gonna beat this thing”, techno-positive approach to the subject, not the “carry that weight” grim assessment of the chances of all our efforts actually saving the world that characterizes my blog. In my much-cited list of what blog readers want, at the bottom of the right sidebar of my blog, I deliberately chose to omit reassurance — that they’re doing the right thing(s), that they’re not alone in their opinions and feelings, that the problems in the world are not their fault. I thought it might make the list seem cynical. But readers (and not just blog readers) do want reassurance, not challenges to their thinking. And I just can’t, won’t, do that just to make this blog more popular. So thank you, nominators, it is wonderful to be recognized, and pleased don’t get discouraged just because I never win. I don’t.

Peak Oil Was Reached Two Months Ago: A new analysis suggests that peak oil — the maximum monthly global production point, and the point at which more than half of all the oil than can ever economically be expected to be brought online, has been, was reached in December. It’s all downhill from here. Thanks to Dale Asberry for this link and the one that follows.

Our Unconscious Minds Make Better Complex Decisions: A new study claims that when it comes to simple or merely complicated decisions (where the number of variables to consider is finite, and their relationship knowable), we should make those decisions consciously. But when it comes to complex decisions, our conscious minds cannot handle the fact that there are too many variables to assess, and that their relationship is unknowable — they keep trying to reduce the complexity to less than what it is, leading to poor decisions. Better to sleep on it, and let our instincts, emotions, and subconscious minds mull it over. And if you’re an insomniac, this may be the cause — your left brain trying, futilely, to process the infinite and irreducible. Calm it by doing something right-brained (singing, drawing etc.) just before you retire.

Comment corriger des fautes: Il y a un nouveau site qui s’appelle lepatron.ca qui permet d’identifier des fautes d’orthographe et de grammaire que l’on trouve frÈquemment dans les travaux Ècrits des apprenants de franÁais langue seconde. Je vais l’utiliser souvent. (A new site that corrects grammar and spelling of competent, but non-expert, non-native,Francophones).

Delightful bird photo from Kevin Cameron at Bastish.

Here’s a very rude and hugely entertaining test you can try: Eavesdrop on couples in restaurants and, at first, don’t look at them — just pay attention to the tone of voice and the words they are using. You will probably find that (a) there is a substantial dissonance between the words they say and the tone of voice they use (if you wrote down the words and recited them deadpan the meaning would either be very different from the tone they use, or the meaning would be completely indecipherable), and (b) the tone of voice is a lot more ‘articulate’ (apparently closer to the real meaning that the speaker is trying to convey) than the choice of words. Now look at them, and see whether their facial expressions or body language convey something more, or different, from what you picked up from their tone of voice. If the couple know each other well, chances are any differences will be just subtleties of degree, not of substance.

When I’ve done this, it’s been hard for me (and whoever I’m eavesdropping with) not to laugh out loud. Couples in love emit these strange high-pitched sounds (males as well as females) that convey ardour much more clearly than their trite, bland word constructions. When a couple is not getting along, or have seemingly grown apart, their silences speak volumes, as do the sighs. Usually one person (not always the male) is doing most of the talking, and it’s like an agonizing fishing expedition, the talker trying to drag more than monosyllables out of the non-talker. There is an unmistakable distinct tone for: exhaustion, exasperation, nervousness, restlessness, growing interest (in either the conversation or the person with whom they are speaking), and growing disinterest (in groups of three or more that can be masked by silence; in couples the tone that evinces growing disinterest has kind of a choppy quality to it, like a verbal shrug). The fact that all these tones are so apparent despite the propensity of most males to dominate conversations is quite remarkable (women tend to convey tones much more succinctly than men).

I haven’t extended the research to larger groups, or to conversations between two males or two females, but I suspect that the general finding still applies — when it comes to meaning, tone trumps content, and the face and body just restate the tone for greater clarity.

I would also say that males, compared to females, tend to rely more on visual clues and less on aural clues. Most women can convey dripping sarcasm in less than a sentence, while walking away from you. When men try to do this, they sound like William Buckley. Meanwhile, the movements of men’s eyebrows and hands tend to telegraph (sometimes inadvertently) their feelings without even needing to talk. Women seem to have more control over these signals, perhaps because they know how easily other women pick up on them.

And don’t ever try to put one over on the family pet. Dogs can read your tone of voice and your facial expression and body language almost before you express them.

Another interesting experiment is to watch a television drama or comedy, or a movie, with the sound turned off, and then at some point turn the sound on and see how much you missed. I’ve found I laugh more at comedies when there’s no sound — clearly the actors are trying to make the best of generally lame scripts, and the annoying laugh track doesn’t interfere with your appreciation. You miss more in genuine dramas (as contrasted with so-called ‘action’ films, which are mostly cartoons without the clever animation) when you turn off the sound — though I confess that I’ve often found the plot and dialogue I’ve constructed in my head when I’ve turned the sound off, more interesting than the ones provided by the writers. But despite the plot divergence, I usually get the relationship (both its nature and quality) between the characters spot on without having to listen to a word they say.

So in case it wasn’t obvious, the message here is that if you’re trying to convey something important, do it in person, or at least by Skype or phone — and never try to convey criticism, sarcasm, irony (or any other subtle nuance) or bad news by e-mail. It will always be misconstrued, no matter how you try to finesse your message. In e-mail, smileys are just a way ofapologizing in advance for how you think you will be misunderstood.

Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link to the Wired article.

I have resolved to teach three things to the young people I am privileged to have the opportunity to speak with, and perhaps influence a little.

The first thing I will teach them, and perhaps the most important, is my biggest mistakes. As any improv expert will tell you, there is nothing as disarming as disarming yourself, telling some self-deprecating stories, making an unforced confession. Most of us are terrified of doing this (with anyone — employees, family, friends, let alone young people we think we are supposed to be some kind of role models for). Won’t they think less of us, distrust us, find us unreliable, turn away, if we tell them what we have done wrong? My experience has been the opposite. Even on this blog when I get self-critical it seems to endear me to readers more than scaring them away.

I’m not going to tell you, or any young acquaintances, my biggest mistakes in a list (it is a long list). That’s not the best way to teach anyone how to avoid those mistakes themselves. The best way is always by a story. It doesn’t even have to be in the first person, if that’s too embarrassing. My story about the mistakes I’ve made in my marriage was written as fiction, though readers who know me well saw right through it. My story about finally discovering what knowledge management was about (after wasting a lot of time and money doing the wrong thing) takes a half-hour to tell, and parts of it are pretty funny (humour always makes a story better, even if it’s a tragedy). If you’re no good at telling stories, it’s never too late to learn.

Why teach young people my mistakes? Not so much so they’ll avoid them (have you ever really learned from other people’s mistakes?) It’s more so they know it’s OK to make mistakes, that you survive them, that that’s how you learn yourself, that they make you stronger.

The second thing I will teach them are the critical life skills they don’t learn in school:

I don’t really understand why these skills are not taught during all those interminable boring school days we force children to endure indoors, shut away from the real world. There are lots of theories, from a conspiracy to make us all dependent on the corporatist state, to a dearth of competencies in teaching these skills even if there were a will to do so.

But these skills are much better learned hands-on than in classrooms anyway. You don’t shove an article in front of someone and say “Here, read this, it will teach you how to think critically”. These are skills learned by practice. That entails going out and doing something with young people. How often do we do that? Is the aversion of the young to doing things with the old the result of experienced learning, or a fear of the unknown? If the idea of doing this is a little unnerving, if you’re feeling a bit rusty at intergenerational experiences of any kind, you’re far from alone. Use your imagination in picking the experience, and I’ll bet you the young people you share it with will still be talking about it twenty years later.

The third things I will teach them, and the least important of the three, is advice on how to live their lives. It is the least important because no one follows anyone else’s advice. Its purpose is not to instruct, but to show you care, which is even more important. And again, the best way to provide this advice is through stories. Here is some of the advice I will craft into stories to tell to my grand-daughters, and any other young people I can get to listen:

• Learn as much as you can, especially skills that are useful, that make you independent and self-sufficient.
• Love yourself. Give yourself time, space and permission to become your true authentic self. Ignore critics. Don’t be down on yourself for things you can’t control. Don’t judge yourself by others’ standards, or vice versa.
• Even if it takes a lifetime, strive to find work that you love, and that you do better than anyone else — the work that is needed that you were meant to do. Settle for nothing less.
• Don’t look for utopia. It doesn’t exist. You will know your place when you find it. It won’t be perfect, but it will be home. Open yourself to it, your senses, your instincts, and connect with all the life in it. Let it teach you to be part of the whole.
• Love others without limit, without condition, without reservation. You will only be loved as much as you love others.
• Don’t plan too much, or too far ahead. 
• Do something, every day, to make the world a better place. It doesn’t have to be big. Help someone. Say “thank you”. Tell someone you love them.
• Never let urgent things get in the way of your doing what’s important.

OK, that’s pretty simple, right? What’s missing? And why, if it’s so obvious and so important, aren’t we doing it?

Top illustration from the award-winning children’s book  The Salamander Room written by Anne Mazer and illustrated by Steve Johnson

Perhaps that’s we are so distraught at the idea of the individual as nothing but a collection of organisms that have self-organized for mutual advantage, and developed a mechanism (sex), and a code (DNA), that produces similar collections, already partly self-organized, to perpetuate not our species but theirs. The idea that our brain is nothing more than a warning system evolved by these organisms for their own survival is an affront to the idea of who we are. Our mind, science shows us, is just an incidental, our thoughts just ephemeral precipitates of this warning system brain. This sense of self, of one-ness is a kind of delusion, a hallucination, an imagining, and the sense of self-control is even more so. We are self-conscious not because that represents a higher evolution of life, but because it is a convenient mechanism for the protection of the organisms in whose service ‘we’, and that consciousness that we foolishly use to define ourselves, toil.

What madness, then, to believe that what this ‘body’ (this bag of chemicals that ‘are’ us) feels or thinks, can in any substantial way influence or communicate such feelings or thoughts to any other physical body! The 18 ‘conscious’ bits of the total 16 million bits of data that this bag processes each second is so minor as to be negligible. What arrogance to talk or think of ourselves as an ‘entity’, singular, when any idiot would realize that each of us is a collective, and that the part of us which is self-conscious is, in the vast local realm of things, insignificant. Why would we consider the unmusical gibberish of human language of any importance, when it is a mere extension of that warning system to other bags of chemicals, each containing 40 trillion cells and hosting another 40 trillion bacterial cells in a mutual arrangement devised a hundred million years ago, working together in ways that have been proven to work, not for the sake of conversation but for the sake of continuity of each of the 80 trillion co-habitants, three million of whom die or are sloughed off and are dutifully replaced every second?

To keep our brain in line, so it does not get sidetracked from its security work by the hallucinations of separate existence, our bodies wash it regularly in chemicals designed to addict it to the tasks at hand. Here’s how those addictions have played out to those collections of cells, those bags of chemicals, born (in large numbers, as instructed by their parents’ cells to replace the losses of war) as baby boomers:

In the 1950s, our first years, we were addicted to play. The purpose of that play was to discover and coordinate how to carry out our bodies’ instructions without causing unnecessary damage or exposing our collective cells to unnecessary risk. Don’t force us to read, we want to play! We couldn’t get enough of it, and many of ‘us’ still look back fondly at those ‘simple’ years. Nostalgia is, after all, just the longing for things we used to be addicted to, like the ex-smoker’s silent, sighing craving for a single puff, the longing that never really goes away.

In the 1960s, our teen years, we were addicted to love. The purpose of that addiction is to ‘socialize’ us, to ensure that each body stays physically close to similar, selected, healthy bodies in preparation for procreation, and to ensure that each body does not unduly harm other bodies (which could lead to isolation or scarcity of other bodies for procreation). Such intensity of emotion that new addiction brought us! — Will we ever feel that high again?

In the 1970s, we were addicted to sex. Fashion, social mores, everything about the 1970s reinforced this addiction. Its purpose, of course, was procreation.

In the 1980s, we became addicted to work and to self-fulfillment. Two-income families became accepted, and necessary. The purpose of the work addiction is to prepare the nest for the bodies we are programmed to want, more than anything else, to bring into the world, and to be ‘responsible’ for. We can’t help ourselves. Those who instead became addicted to self-fulfillment, having ‘decided’ (as if ‘they’ had anything to do with the decision!) to delay procreation until a better nest was available, found this substitute addiction to fill the void, to further improve their readiness for possible later procreation, or just to pass the time. Crows, other than the breeding pair, also fill their adult barren years with the distraction of discovery and recreation instead of procreation.

In the 1990s, we became addicted to wealth and consumption. There were ominous signs of a long ‘winter’ ahead, and we began to stockpile in preparation. No one seemed to notice that this behaviour was contrary to everything we claimed to believe in during the 1960s. We were under the influence of a different addiction, moved on to a new program. We amassed more than any generation in human history, and as one consequence are now the most unfit and overweight generation in human history. It’s not our fault, we’re just doing what ‘we’ are told.

Now, in the 2000s, having delayed procreation, we have at last become addicted to security. We must now be responsible for the new bodies we have brought into the world, and protect them. Get between us and our fledglings and we will attack without remorse.

All of this behaviour, of course, was designed many millennia ago, and a lot of it is horrifically ill-suited to the realities of the 21st century. No matter — we cannot be other than who and what ‘we’ are, responding to the instructions and addictions that have guided every living body on our planet since the era of the primordial soup. When it comes to impact on our actions, the faint realizations in the ‘conscious’ human brain and the incoherent ramblings of our invented abstract language are no match for our bodies’ stern and relentless marching orders. “Don’t worry your pretty little head“, they tell us, “we’ll tell you what to do. This is a time of great stress, we’re sensing, so go on the attack, against any body that threatens you, and kill off the weaker bodies in the flock so that there’s more for the stronger. And if that doesn’t suffice to ease thestress, then get prepared: You may have to eat your young.”

I wonder, too, whether Americans’ insatiable appetite for more and more violent films and ‘reality TV’ that wallows in and laughs at the most extreme forms of human misery (both of the inflicted and self-administered variety — these ‘idol’ elimination programs revel in cruelty and ridicule far more than they celebrate any kind of talent) are outlets for this growing detachment that requires more and more powerful shocks to register above the numbness. The media pandering to this accelerating tendency seem to be trying to address not attention challenges caused by information overload, but an attention deficit caused, perhaps, by an unwillingness to even register information that is seen as utterly meaningless and relentlessly boring.

A while ago I threw out the idea of a magazine that would suggest possible individual actions at the end of each article and would allow you to detach, organize and file the articles you were personally acting on. While I still see this as valuable for the socially and politically engaged, I now wonder whether half the population would see this as a preposterous exercise in self-delusion and personal hubris.

I find myself suffering from mild symptoms of this attention deficit: Lack of concentration, to the point I now find reading a complete work of fiction intolerably frustrating. And a constant restlessness during social events (I find myself ‘browsing’ the crowd in an often futile search for a conversation that can hold my focus). Some people tell me I have developed an annoying habit of not looking at people while I’m talking with them, as if something more important is preoccupying me. I notice these symptoms, and more pronounced, jarring ones as well, in others, especially young males, for whom conversations seem like a discontinuous mental journey in and out of reality, as if they’re engaged in a constant internal struggle for any kind of connection and attention.

I wonder if this disengagement isn’t symptomatic of a more profound underlying problem of dissociation in our culture. Dissociation is generally a defensive reaction, to trauma or chronic stress or extreme anxiety, a coping mechanism. In advanced cases it can lead to psychopathy, where the person emotionally distances him/herself from the consequences of his/her actions, becoming wildly impulsive, remorseless, deceptive, easily bored, and prone to blame others (this diagnosis has been, quite seriously, made of George Bush, whose inability to string together a coherent sentence is attributed not to illiteracy but to dissociation). Dissociation isn’t always the result of some extreme childhood abuse or injury, or severe post-traumatic stress. It can result from much subtler, but chronic stresses — thekind many of us face in our modern world every day.