StumbleUpon | howardpark's blog posts

http://howardpark.stumbleupon.com/review/12162765/

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:54:04 -0700

Sorry I have not been able to post any updates lately--SU is blocked by my school server! :( I've also been incredibly busy since classes started. My challenge for the year is to set up and run a paperless classroom! Every King's Academy student has been issued a laptop with wireless connectivity, so in my class they do all their work online (on a class wiki). It's the kind of thing I've read about countless times in educators' magazines but never thought I would get the opportunity to try out for myself. So far, it's working out better than I could have hoped, and the results, in terms of effort, engagement, and enthusiasm, are instantly noticeable. On top of that, some personal developments ;) are making this year the happiest as well as the busiest time of my life. I really appreciate the messages of encouragement I've received from SU friends, and I apologize for taking so long to respond. Thanks for visiting and/or writing. Asalaam aleikum! :)

http://howardpark.stumbleupon.com/review/11621608/

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 07:36:28 -0700

My first week in Jordan has taught me that I'm not as well-traveled as I thought. For instance, every place I've been previously uses the same basic weekly calendar. Of course they have different names for the days, but in most countries the work week is Monday through Friday and the weekend is Saturday and Sunday. In Jordan, the work week is Sunday through Thursday, Friday is a holy day when most places are closed, and Saturday is a "normal" weekend day.

A trip into Amman drove the point home even more forcefully. We ran into some Jordanian friends-of-friends who instantly offered to show us around the city. They had an open bottle of vodka in the car and drank freely from it as they maneuvered through traffic, which in Jordan is an adventure even when sober. That was strange enough, but then the thought occurred to me that I was sitting in a Jordanian car next to a couple of caucasian women who were talking in Mandarin about the last time they met in Kenya. I suddenly felt extremely provincial.

As in many non-Western societies, the idea of equal treatment as a policy or principle isn't firmly established. Wasda (personal relationships) often take precedence. Want to transfer some money? You must fill out forms X, Y, and Z. But my uncle is a friend of your father. Ah, in that case, no problem!

Some other little quirks: To turn a light on, you flip the switch down, not up. The landscape is dotted with Bedouin tents and their sheep, goats, chickens, and dogs. These nomadic people are allowed to live anywhere they can, i.e. any place that does not physically prevent them from entering and squatting. Although there are many Western-style restaurants, bars, and hotels, there are also types of establishments that are totally unique, such as the Reem al-Bawadi ("gazelle of the wilderness"), a kind of open-air restaurant situated in a series of huge enclosed courtyards partly covered by tents, with fountains, archways, bridges, low ornate tables, divan-like seats, and a kitchen chimney spewing smoke like a foundry. Each table has a manhole-sized depression in the center, lined with carved bronze, in which the food is served. And when everyone's done eating, they break out the shisha (hookah).

The last few days have been wondrously disorienting, but also auspicious. On my first night in Jordan, I saw the biggest, brightest shooting star I've ever seen. It moved across the sky at such a stately pace that I mistook it for a plane until it finally fell to earth and broke up like a firework.

(The first photo shows men at Friday prayers in the old town of Amman. The second shows the King's Academy campus with some of my colleagues.)

http://howardpark.stumbleupon.com/review/10503175/

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:30:36 -0700

Let me tell you a story about a girl I once knew (some details have been changed). Her name was Naoki, a quite typical Japanese girl's name. She grew up on Long Island with parents who were considered strict and traditional, even by Asian standards. Like many kids brought up under a tight rein, she ran a little wild when she went away to college. She had a wandering heart that took her from one boyfriend to another, sometimes under circumstances that made her seem like a trouble-maker. There was one strange thing about this: none of these boyfriends happened to be Japanese, and all of them happened to be Korean. Naoki's close girl friends happened to be Korean too. But whatever, people are sometimes drawn to people of a race other than their own.

Perhaps that's how she explained it to herself. Then one summer she went to visit relatives in Japan, and in the heat of an argument, one of her cousins let slip that Naoki "doesn't even know who she is." When she confronted her parents about the comment, they had to admit that they were in fact not Japanese--they were Korean. To understand what that means, you have to know a little about the history between Korea and Japan. Korea was conquered by Japan and occupied for 40 years, during which time it was ruled in the same way that European colonies were ruled, by the gun and the prison. Most Koreans refused to cooperate with the Imperial Japanese Army, but a few became collaborators.

After Japan was in turn conquered by America, and Korea became independent, the collaborators realized that they would face retribution if they stayed in Korea. So they moved to Japan, exchanged their Korean names for Japanese ones, and assimilated into Japanese society. The secret that Naoki's parents had been keeping from her was their family's role in oppressing their own people.

Anyway, after several more years of wandering from one guy to the next, she started talking seriously about a guy named Bill. Naoki and Bill went to college together, but other than that, they seemed to have nothing in common. Naoki was athletic, and outgoing, and worldly; Bill was the opposite of those things. Naoki was Korean; Bill was white. Naoki was considered very beautiful, whereas Bill had the kind of looks that made you think he must have other virtues. The problem was, no one could figure out what these virtues might be. Several of her friends openly voiced their concern about the match.

Her parents went even further. They complained incessantly about his various flaws and refused to invite him to family events. That's probably what drove her, their own resistance. Naoki announced that she and Bill were getting married. Her parents cried, screamed, and threatened to disown her. She was resolute. Her parents boycotted the wedding, and before she and her husband moved to California to start their life together, they wrote her a letter saying something like this: We don't understand why you are doing this, but it's obviously intended to hurt us, and we can't take that from one of our own children. We therefore disown you. Please do not contact us again.

Naoki and Bill moved to San Francisco, where they both found new jobs. They got a cozy apartment in the city and started making it their home. Everything was going fine, at least far as Bill knew. He started to think about having kids, but whenever the subject came up, she seemed to get annoyed. Finally, after six months, Naoki sat Bill down for a talk, and she said something like this: I'm sorry but I realize now that I never loved you. I was confused, and it's all my fault, but we should go our separate ways.

Bill was hurt, but amazingly not crushed. He hoped for a while that she might change her mind, but after a year he agreed to a divorce and started seeing someone else. In the meantime, Naoki drifted. She moved in with a friend for several months, until it destroyed their relationship, then with an ex-boyfriend. She became disillusioned with her work. She tried contacting her parents but got no response. Then one day she came down with a really bad cold. It turned into pneumonia. A worried friend flew over from Boston and put her in the hospital, where she died. The friend, herself a doctor, said Naoki "just lost the will to live"--there was no medical reason for her death. She was 34.

When I heard about Naoki through a mutual friend, I couldn't stop thinking about the futility of life. We are each and every one of us going to die. And yet we spend our limited time in a meaningless struggle for money and status; we plan and sacrifice and suffer in the hope of enjoying a future that may never be. If Naoki had known she would have only 34 years, would she have spent so many of them in labor and study? For me, it was like a call to start going out way more often, try all the things I always wanted to try, and visit all the places I always wanted to visit. Thinking about death is also what made me get a job in the Middle East. Before my own number comes up, I want to dip my hands into the very stuff of history.

(Thanks to arjunsharma for this picture.)

http://howardpark.stumbleupon.com/review/10353003/

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 21:20:27 -0700

My brother-in-law Tim and I just had an interesting conversation about aliens. We started off by agreeing that the aliens in most science-fiction books and movies suffered from a serious failure of imagination. "They're just like us... but green." They're large, four-limbed organisms that walk on their hind limbs and use their front limbs for manipulation, just like us. They communicate through speech and gesture, just like us. They live in societies and engage in cultural activities, just like us. Few science-fiction writers have succeeded in imagining anything more different from us than creatures that live with us here on Earth, our own genetic relatives. As an exception, Tim mentioned Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, in which the aliens take specialized, asymmetrical forms according to their caste. I mentioned Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, in which the aliens are a sentient cloud of interstellar gas.

From there, we drifted inexorably toward the Big Questions: Are they really out there? And if so, why haven't we heard from them? To my complete surprise, Tim argued that we are pretty much unique in the universe. Some of his reasons were quite simple, e.g. the fact that we have no evidence to believe aliens exist. Other reasons were more complex: The immediacy with which life began after the formation of our planet suggests that simple forms of life are common; in contrast, the eons it took to evolve something we would consider intelligent suggest that that form of intelligence is rare.

I was surprised because all my other friends believe quite firmly that we are not alone, mostly because every previous claim of human uniqueness now seems short-sighted and rather ridiculous. As for the lack of evidence, many assume there has been some kind of cover-up, from a full-on secret government agency experimenting on captured aliens, to a bureaucratic snafu that keeps scientific research from becoming public. I don't believe in such conspiracy theories myself, simply because I don't think any part of our government is competent enough to keep a secret that big.

To me, the lack of evidence is a simple result of not having looked long enough. Even if there were millions of civilizations just like ours spread evenly throughout the Milky Way, none would be close enough to have communicated with us in the 100 or so years that we have been able to detect such long-distance signals. In that time, even the fastest possible method would have permitted communication within a radius of only 50 light-years--a few dozen stars out of at least 200 billion. But as Tim pointed out, this doesn't imply that aliens actually exist; it only provides a reason (or an excuse) not to lose all hope.

There is no shortage of such reasons (which again highlights Tim's point that people seem to want to believe in aliens, regardless of evidence). The most sophisticated one I have read was in Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco: Although life is common throughout the universe and frequently evolves into intelligent beings, their civilizations are by nature unstable and short-lived. In the pre-technological phase, extraterrestrial civilizations are silent because they lack the means to communicate. In the technological phase, they acquire those means, but they also acquire the power to destroy themselves. Once acquired, it's only a matter of time before the power is used, and silence is restored. From a god's-eye view, communicative civilizations would appear and disappear like brief flashes of light throughout our galaxy, but rarely would two of them happen in close enough proximity to signal each other. Thus, although these civilizations are by no means unique, most, looking out at the absence of anything like them at the moment of their existence, assume that they are.

(Thanks to cedarhag for this picture. It's a lamp.)

http://howardpark.stumbleupon.com/review/9416149/

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:41:23 -0700

Okay, I just Stumbled Upon something that's going to traumatize me for life (involving a squid). The worst part about it is that I can't stop psychoanalyzing myself: Why such a bad reaction? Perhaps you have a deep, unconscious thing for squids? Aaargh!

http://howardpark.stumbleupon.com/review/9124576/

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:12:01 -0700

The Love Song of J. Howard Parkrock (1)

This is the story of a regular guy and his quest to find the girl of his dreams. The story begins in--no, that would take too long. Let's skip ahead to the roadkill:

J.'s love life had become roadkill. You know, the kind that's been run over a couple dozen times, so that it's sort of fused into the road and no one would even think to try and remove it because it's only a slight bump and anyway there's no way to tell where the road ends and the kill begins. J. had been chugging along with this real strong feeling, which he assumed was love, and then--splat!--a brown furry stain. After a while, he stopped thinking about it as something that used to be alive and just drove right over it without worrying about how his tires were going to smell. People get used to anything sooner or later.

So J. got used to being alone. But the great thing is, roadkill eventually becomes road again. Seven years went by and J. forgot where that stain came from. His quest to find the girl of his dreams was back on. There were problems, though. J. had been out of the game so long, he couldn't even remember the rules any more. Plus he was in a different city now and none of his old tactics seemed to work. The one ray of hope that he saw shining down on him was the Internet.

When J. decided to try Internet dating, he had the same apprehensions as anyone else. "What kind of people would use the Internet to get dates (other than people like me of course)? Is it really possible to connect with the girl of my dreams through a computer? Could this whole thing be some kind of scam?" But J. figured he had nothing to lose, so he pointed his browser down the slightly bumpy road and hit the gas.

The first thing J. noticed about Internet dating was how transparent it was. He had been imagining the virtual equivalent of a seedy storefront with no sign, a greasy-looking clerk behind bulletproof glass, and a mysterious velveteen curtain, where you pay up front and take your chances. It wasn't like that at all. You could see the whole site and everyone on it for free. You could post your own profile, describe the girl of your dreams, and even write odes on your faithfulness if you wanted. Money didn't come into it until you actually decided to make contact.

J. spent several days browsing through other people's profiles and thinking about what he might write in his own. But the more he browsed and thought, the more uneasy he became. He began to realize that he could "stretch the truth" about himself; he could leave out certain inconvenient facts, and so could everyone else. And even if everyone told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, J. wasn't at all sure that the girl of his dreams could be identified like a car, by a list of features, no matter how true they were. There had to be a better way, one based on research and accumulated wisdom, like the yentas of old.

Fortunately, J. soon found another site that claimed to be just that. It had doctors, and psychologists, and credentials of all kinds backing it up. And it didn't leave you on your own to make the same mistakes you've always made. Instead, it would figure out your deepest needs and capacities by asking you a whole battery of diagnostic questions, and then, using a complex and highly secret algorithm, recommend people with compatible needs and capacities. At last, thought J., the power of technology would be brought to bear on one of the oldest human problems!

He quickly got to work answering the hundreds of questions upon which the cyber-yenta's assessment would be made. As a psychology major, J. understood that the many redundant questions were necessary to insure the accuracy of the assessment. He worked diligently to answer them all as honestly as possible. After many hours, the questionnaire was finished. J.'s hand was trembling as he clicked the "send" button. An e-mail response would arrive within hours.

The response arrived sooner than J. had expected. It began by thanking him for using their service and boasting of their high success rate. "Unfortunately," it continued, "there is a small percentage of applicants who, based on our research, are not compatible with anyone. This is not meant to discourage you from seeking a relationship through other channels. Good luck in your efforts!" That's when J. heard a rather disconcerting kabump-kabump! and noticed a strangely familiar smell coming from under his car. Roadkilled again.

(To be continued)

http://howardpark.stumbleupon.com/review/8884048/

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 11:39:55 -0700

One of the teachers in my department is a Vietnam War veteran. My first thoughts on learning this were, "My god, the suffering he must have endured!" and "He probably has some powerful stories from the combat zone. I wonder if he wouldn't mind giving a short presentation to my World History class?" I was hoping for something of the sort that Sherman delivered to the cadets at the Michigan Military Academy in 1879: "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell."

But when I sat down to talk with him about his experiences, it became clear that he had never set foot in a combat zone. He had been a B-52 crewman, and his main experience in the Vietnam War had been that of dropping bombs on civilians. Although his "service" was not exactly what I would have called glorious, he was quite bitter that he hadn't received more money and accolades. Who did he blame for this? Not his military masters, who were in direct control of the money and the accolades, but "liberal agitators" who "lost the war for us."

I thought about his comments for the rest of the semester. There was something in them that I couldn't agree with, but it took me a while to figure out what it was. It wasn't the idea that the defeat in Vietnam was a consequence of "liberal agitation." To me, it's quite obvious that when the people of a nation cease to support a war, the war is lost. The thing I couldn't agree with was the "for us" part. Liberals may have "lost the war," but for whom exactly? The United States did not become a victim of foreign occupation, as the losers of other wars did; the American people were not conquered or subjugated. In fact, most Americans were far better off after the defeat than before it. The people who "lost" were the politicians who started the war (deceitfully, I might add) and the generals whose "honor" had been disgraced. When politicians and generals talk about victory and defeat, they are talking about their own fate, not the fate of the people they are supposedly defending.

I dearly want "us" to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible--"us" meaning the corrupt regime now in control of the American government, not the people of United States. The people of the United States will win nothing from any military result in Iraq. We will only go on losing as long as Bush and Cheney keep dumping our tax dollars into the vortex of mismanagement and cronyism that is the Iraq War.