Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Back from the Depths
I missed the snow, the cold, the wind and the ice by hiding out in Rincon, Puerto Rico. Had some wonderfulscuba dives (see photos)and a great chance to try to capture Rincon's incomparable sunsets and the Caribbean Ocean. When I get back to my print shop I'll see if I suceeded. Not only did I have to deal with the cold when I returned but the drive by our new Republican governor to cut the budgets of state universities and social service organizations, while refusing to tax corporations extracting gas from the Marcellus shale.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Let's Hear it for Art and Poetry
Wonderful poetry reading and writing group gathered at our new Highline Cafe in Greencastle with interesting ideas and poems. Came there after attending the miniature art show opening in Chambersburg. Glad to have been juried in to this prestigious show. Tomorrow, another opening in Frederick where four of my prints are included in a group show with the Women's Caucus of the Arts of DC. Art and poetry and the love of family and friends will have to sustain me through these difficult times. Here's what Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Sonnet XXIV:
Let the world's sharpness like a clasping knife
Shut in upon itself and do no harm
In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,
And let us hear no sound of human strife
After the click of the Shutting. Life to life--
I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,
And feel as safe as guarded by a charm
Against the stab of worldlings, who if rife
Are weak to injure. Very whitely still
The lilies of our lives may reassure
their blossoms from their roots, accessible
Alone to heavenly dews that drop not fewer;
Growing straight, out of man's reach, on the hill
God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.
Let the world's sharpness like a clasping knife
Shut in upon itself and do no harm
In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,
And let us hear no sound of human strife
After the click of the Shutting. Life to life--
I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,
And feel as safe as guarded by a charm
Against the stab of worldlings, who if rife
Are weak to injure. Very whitely still
The lilies of our lives may reassure
their blossoms from their roots, accessible
Alone to heavenly dews that drop not fewer;
Growing straight, out of man's reach, on the hill
God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
We Can't Give Up
Election night was not a good night for progressives and Democrats of all stripes. But we can't despair. Instead we have to resolve to keep the pressure on those still in Congress not to compromise on basic principles: health care for all; fair taxation; controls on Wall Street; curbing spending by unidentified donors to election campaigns. If we can do that during this next period, and give President Obama a second term, we'll have accomplished much.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Are You Ready to Vote on November 2?
If you were feeling wishy-washy about the need to vote in Congressional and Senatorial races, I urge you to watch President Obama's speech at the University of Wisconsin. He rallied the troops with an inspiring oratory that let the students know he was depending on them to carry forth his agenda by voting on November 2.
Hopefully everyone realizes that it wasn't possible for the President's administration to cure all our problems in 20 months and beyond that it was impossible to move ahead on all programs with the intractable Republican opposition. But I think the gains that have been made are important. And it should be enough for Pennsylvanians to Elect Rep. Sestak to the Senate and put Onorato in the governor's seat.
You can watch the rally on you tube. Go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2QcLq1ytc
Hopefully everyone realizes that it wasn't possible for the President's administration to cure all our problems in 20 months and beyond that it was impossible to move ahead on all programs with the intractable Republican opposition. But I think the gains that have been made are important. And it should be enough for Pennsylvanians to Elect Rep. Sestak to the Senate and put Onorato in the governor's seat.
You can watch the rally on you tube. Go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2QcLq1ytc
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
What A Dive!
Just back from a seven day scuba diving trip to the Caymans under the direction of the marvelous Blue Marble Divers of Hagerstown Md. What a world I saw and what marvelous fish and animals under the sea. Here's a photo of me with the sting rays. Truly, I didn't like them very much. Eerie, prehistoric creatures, but enormously fascinating.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Why Waste Human Resources?
Once again the nation is plunged into a debate over immigrants. The argument is: how to keep them out, how to send them back, how to keep them from getting "our" jobs. We seem to always fail to recognize how much we gain from each new wave of immigration to this country and we frequently fail to reap the benefit of their human talent. We have done the same to generations of African Americans. One recent obituary struck home.
New York Times July 16, 2010
David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91
By William Grimes
David Blackwell, a statistician and mathematician who wrote groundbreaking papers on probability and game theory and was the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, died July 8 in Berkeley, Calif. He was 91.
Mr. Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker with a fourth-grade education, taught for nearly 35 years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became the first black tenured professor. He made his mark as a free-ranging problem solver in numerous subdisciplines. His fascination with game theory, for example, prompted him to investigate the mathematics of bluffing and to develop a theory on the optimal moment for an advancing duelist to open fire.
“He went from one area to another, and he’d write a fundamental paper in each,” Thomas Ferguson, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Berkeley Web site. “He would come into a field that had been well studied and find something really new that was remarkable. That was his fort
David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Ill. Early on, he showed a talent for mathematics, but he entered the University of Illinois with the modest ambition of becoming an elementary school teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938 and, adjusting his sights, went on to earn a master’s degree in 1939 and a doctorate in 1941, when he was only 22. After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but left after a year when, because of his race, he was not issued the customary invitation to become an honorary faculty member. At Berkeley, where the statistician Jerzy Neyman wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial objections also blocked his appointment.
Instead, Mr. Blackwell sent out applications to 104 black colleges on the assumption that no other schools would hire him. After working for a year at the Office of Price Administration, he taught briefly at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and Clark College in Atlanta before joining the mathematics department at Howard University in Washington in 1944.
While at Howard, he attended a lecture by Meyer A. Girshick at the local chapter of the American Statistical Association. He became intensely interested in statistics and developed a lifelong friendship with Girshick, with whom he wrote “Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions” (1954).
As a consultant to the RAND Corporation from 1948 to 1950, he applied game theory to military situations. It was there that he turned his attention to what might be called the duelist’s dilemma, a problem with application to the battlefield, where the question of when to open fire looms large.
His “Basic Statistics” (1969) was one of the first textbooks on Bayesian statistics, which assess the uncertainty of future outcomes by incorporating new evidence as it arises, rather than relying on historical data. He also wrote numerous papers on multistage decision-making.
Mr. Blackwell was hired by Berkeley in 1954 and became a full professor in the statistics department when it split off from the mathematics department in 1955. He was chairman of the department from 1957 to 1961 and assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1964 to 1968. He retired in 1988.
In 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. ###
* * *
Think of all the students he could have mentored, the colleagues he could have worked with, the ideas he could have advanced in these major institutions that rejected him because of his race. And Dr. Blackwell wasn't the only one. Dr. John Hope Franklin, the eminent historian, waited a very long time before he was admitted to a "mainstream" American university. And shockingly the man who made major advances in oceanic biology, Ernest Everett Just, was rejected from becoming a faculty member at a major university because of his race and went on to found the program at Howard University.
I am baffled that despite all the evidence to the contrary there are some who demonize the "other" because of superficial differences and fail to recognize and take advantage of the strengths of all our citizens.
New York Times July 16, 2010
David Blackwell, Scholar of Probability, Dies at 91
By William Grimes
David Blackwell, a statistician and mathematician who wrote groundbreaking papers on probability and game theory and was the first black scholar to be admitted to the National Academy of Sciences, died July 8 in Berkeley, Calif. He was 91.
Mr. Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker with a fourth-grade education, taught for nearly 35 years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became the first black tenured professor. He made his mark as a free-ranging problem solver in numerous subdisciplines. His fascination with game theory, for example, prompted him to investigate the mathematics of bluffing and to develop a theory on the optimal moment for an advancing duelist to open fire.
“He went from one area to another, and he’d write a fundamental paper in each,” Thomas Ferguson, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Berkeley Web site. “He would come into a field that had been well studied and find something really new that was remarkable. That was his fort
David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Ill. Early on, he showed a talent for mathematics, but he entered the University of Illinois with the modest ambition of becoming an elementary school teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938 and, adjusting his sights, went on to earn a master’s degree in 1939 and a doctorate in 1941, when he was only 22. After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but left after a year when, because of his race, he was not issued the customary invitation to become an honorary faculty member. At Berkeley, where the statistician Jerzy Neyman wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial objections also blocked his appointment.
Instead, Mr. Blackwell sent out applications to 104 black colleges on the assumption that no other schools would hire him. After working for a year at the Office of Price Administration, he taught briefly at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and Clark College in Atlanta before joining the mathematics department at Howard University in Washington in 1944.
While at Howard, he attended a lecture by Meyer A. Girshick at the local chapter of the American Statistical Association. He became intensely interested in statistics and developed a lifelong friendship with Girshick, with whom he wrote “Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions” (1954).
As a consultant to the RAND Corporation from 1948 to 1950, he applied game theory to military situations. It was there that he turned his attention to what might be called the duelist’s dilemma, a problem with application to the battlefield, where the question of when to open fire looms large.
His “Basic Statistics” (1969) was one of the first textbooks on Bayesian statistics, which assess the uncertainty of future outcomes by incorporating new evidence as it arises, rather than relying on historical data. He also wrote numerous papers on multistage decision-making.
Mr. Blackwell was hired by Berkeley in 1954 and became a full professor in the statistics department when it split off from the mathematics department in 1955. He was chairman of the department from 1957 to 1961 and assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1964 to 1968. He retired in 1988.
In 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. ###
* * *
Think of all the students he could have mentored, the colleagues he could have worked with, the ideas he could have advanced in these major institutions that rejected him because of his race. And Dr. Blackwell wasn't the only one. Dr. John Hope Franklin, the eminent historian, waited a very long time before he was admitted to a "mainstream" American university. And shockingly the man who made major advances in oceanic biology, Ernest Everett Just, was rejected from becoming a faculty member at a major university because of his race and went on to found the program at Howard University.
I am baffled that despite all the evidence to the contrary there are some who demonize the "other" because of superficial differences and fail to recognize and take advantage of the strengths of all our citizens.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Recent Recommended Reading
Two books that I've been reading both offer insights on the American psyche and the culture of our nation. They are seemingly unrelated.
Michael Lewis' "The Big Short" is the story of the 2008 collapse of Wall Street's big money "products" and the players themselves. It's told through the histories of some of the players who early on spotted the defects in these financial "products" and figured out how to cash in on them. One is torn between admiration for the criminal ingeniousness of the Wall Street
bonus-fueled workers and disgust with the regulators and the so-called legitimate business organizations that encouraged their greed. But you see an underlying American quality--striving for wealth as a measure of success.
The other side of the coin is the American drive to strive for intellectual excellence as a measure of success. Megan Marshall's historical group biography: "The Peabody Sisters" is outstanding. Ms. Marshall, who teaches at Emerson in Boston, has written a biography of three women (and their extended family which includes Abigail Adams). The book tells the history of these extraordinary sisters: Elizabeth, the unmarried one who by sheer force of intellectual ability and will is credited with the founding and development of the American kindergarten; Mary whose progressive instincts eventually united her with Horace Mann, and Sophia, the artist and sculptor, who married Nathanial Hawthorne. Each of their stories shows how women were chained to narrow choices in the post-revolutionary war society. And how they struggled to use their roles as teachers to study, argue and partner with the men who were playing larger roles to influence the direction of ideas.
It not only offers insights into feminist politics and ideas, but progressive education, the impact of economic change on regional fortunes, the way both men and women earned their livings, the development of transcendentalism from the struggles within the New England church, and more. If you are from the Boston area you will be interested in the rise and fall of the cities around Boston as it finally gained dominance as a commercial and shipping center. If you have religious interests you will be fascinated by the struggles between trinitarians and unitarians and the ultimate rejection of strict Calvinism in New England. And if you are interested in progressive school reform you will find the efforts to introduce humane education to the schooling of children-a struggle we are still waging.
Michael Lewis' "The Big Short" is the story of the 2008 collapse of Wall Street's big money "products" and the players themselves. It's told through the histories of some of the players who early on spotted the defects in these financial "products" and figured out how to cash in on them. One is torn between admiration for the criminal ingeniousness of the Wall Street
bonus-fueled workers and disgust with the regulators and the so-called legitimate business organizations that encouraged their greed. But you see an underlying American quality--striving for wealth as a measure of success.
The other side of the coin is the American drive to strive for intellectual excellence as a measure of success. Megan Marshall's historical group biography: "The Peabody Sisters" is outstanding. Ms. Marshall, who teaches at Emerson in Boston, has written a biography of three women (and their extended family which includes Abigail Adams). The book tells the history of these extraordinary sisters: Elizabeth, the unmarried one who by sheer force of intellectual ability and will is credited with the founding and development of the American kindergarten; Mary whose progressive instincts eventually united her with Horace Mann, and Sophia, the artist and sculptor, who married Nathanial Hawthorne. Each of their stories shows how women were chained to narrow choices in the post-revolutionary war society. And how they struggled to use their roles as teachers to study, argue and partner with the men who were playing larger roles to influence the direction of ideas.
It not only offers insights into feminist politics and ideas, but progressive education, the impact of economic change on regional fortunes, the way both men and women earned their livings, the development of transcendentalism from the struggles within the New England church, and more. If you are from the Boston area you will be interested in the rise and fall of the cities around Boston as it finally gained dominance as a commercial and shipping center. If you have religious interests you will be fascinated by the struggles between trinitarians and unitarians and the ultimate rejection of strict Calvinism in New England. And if you are interested in progressive school reform you will find the efforts to introduce humane education to the schooling of children-a struggle we are still waging.
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