Sacred economics, and what is really worth something?

PP showed us this amazing video tonight, about what economics is about and what it should be about:

 It is very interesting and great, watch it! 

It questions our current society's focus on money, natural resources, lack of sharing and giving...  I want that Gift Economy that he is talking about.  Maybe, just like Paying it forward, we should be Giving it forward more in our lives.

End of high school - yeah! Congratulations AREA!

So, this is it.

No more high school rules about
- how you can dress (= no spaghetti straps, but of course nobody enforced it),
- how to make up gym class (= hand in a media article on health, doesn't matter if you read it),
- no more crazy snow days (they rarely exist in college, you are simply supposed to be in class)
- strict grading (in college the teachers themselves set the policy, ok, it can be even more crazy...)
- no more hall passes or nurse passes (= go to college class unless you are throwing up)
- no more football games or senior prank days (time for more sophistication or real sports...)

This is it.  End of kid years.  Now it is the real thing.  18 and with a driver's license, no money, but a summer job!  Shape your life, get in the wheel barrow (if you like), and do what you think is important, not what some senior speech girl or guy that goes to Princeton think is important.  It is up to you now (with some help from us).  We think you are amazing.

I think you will struggle with keeping things organized, but that is OK.   I think you will make wonderful things that touch people deeply.  I think you will do great, important things that make the world a better place, and I am not talking about money, creating a new Facebook, or being a new Steve Jobs.  Whatever you do, follow the path that keeps you interested and happy with you.  I love that you care about others, especially in this world.  More teenagers should be like you.

Congratulations, 12 years of regular school is over, and now you get to do what you love (well, mostly...).  Actual, unprotected life is scary, amazing, fun, worrisome, and just how life is.  You can handle it, I know it! Du ar underbar.  Love, Mom/Mamma

A bunch of books...

Do books come in bunches?  Or are they in piles?  Groups?  Heaps?  Anyway, here is a couple of short reviews of books I have read in the last couple of months, from the great to the not so great.  So, the best first.

Tracy Chevalier: Remarkable Creatures.  What a great novel!  It is in the early half of the 1800s and a poor girl gets her living from discovering and selling fossils from the beach by her home village along England's southern coast.  An unmarried woman and her sisters move to town, mostly because it is a cheaper place to live than London, and she befriends the girl and learns about and collects fossil.

They discovered the most amazing fossils of the time, fossils that were bought and transported to natural history museums in London, Paris, Oxford, and so on.  These fossils were fodder for a lot of discussion in this pre-Darwin era, and fueled scientific thinking.  Plesiosaurs, ichtyosaurs...  However, the women didn't get proper credit, since they were women and fossil collecting and science were unwomanly activities. A few of the contemporary paleontologists gave them proper respect and credit, but the divide was enourmous, especially for Mary who started out illiterate and extremely poor.  For example, women were not allowed even into the meetings of the British Geological Society.

The young woman's name was Mary Anning, and her older friend was Elizabeth Philpot, who specialized in fish fossils.  This book tells the story from their viewpoint.  The general story is true, but it is a novel so gaps have been filled in with possible scenarios.  It is a great book that not only describes natural history and its discoveries in historical context, but also highlights and make the inequality come to life. And that inequality is not just between genders but also between classes and religious groups. I highly recommend this book. So, 5 stars.

Sandra Newman: The Western Lit Survival Kit.  This book is fantastic! Well, near fantastic, because sometimes she goes overboard. I read the whole thing straight through, laughed, smiled and took note on which classics that I wanted to read and which ones I never need to open. Actually, I don't feel the need to read any of the classics after reading this book, I have too many books already here at home waiting to be opened.  Probably around a 100 unread books... and only a few of them are classics.  Like Marco Polo... I want to read that one, but I digress. 

Her style is out of this world funny and knowledgeable. Ah, we need to let high school students have a look in this book! The book is exactly what the subtitle says "An irreverent guide to the classics, from Homer to Faulkner". Each classic book is graded on Importance, Difficulty, and Fun, and she of course admits that that is a very subjective scale she has graded these on. She is not always trying to be dead serious, which is what I like, but some other bibliophiles that have reviewed this book have a problem with that. 4 stars.

Jill Ker Conway has written three memoirs about her life as a child in Australia, student, emigrant to the US to study history at Harvard, her scholarly work on women in history, her years as a Dean at a Canadian university, and then as the President of the small all-female Smith College in Massachusetts.  I reviewed the two first books here on this blog, and they are fantastic and refreshing. 

The writing is exquisite, intellectually so rewarding, and she makes you think.  There was much more anti-woman stuff going on in academia going on back then, but some things are still the same.  And many things that we struggle with today have not changed at all, and they are not based on gender.  People unwilling to change, people that want too much change, the will to look beyond what you have learned in the class, the willingness to discuss without arguing, and so on.

I read her third book recently, A Woman's Education, which is smaller and less strictly a memoir in a way.  It describes her years at Smith College, and goes in depth into how it was to administer a small independent school.  It wasn't all easy, not at all.  What infuses the book is her caring about students and their education, on a very deep, serious level. 

I admire her, she has been a big inspiration in my recent work.  She tries to change the view of some older professors, make reformations in educational thinking, and is seen as a rebellion, but it is how things have to be done.  The world changes and so do we and so do how we do things.  This book I am keeping! 5 stars.

Last book in the pile.... Daniel Beard's The Field and Forest Handy Book. This is a reprint of a 1912 book about camping, scouting, outdoor recreation, hiking, etc., and includes great illustrations, which I think were made by the author as well. Daniel Beard was a co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America, and boy, is this a boyish book.  Girls do not exist.  At least not outside any house.  The book is really a time capsule of how things were back then.

There are many useful skills described in here, how to make a raised platform for a place to sleep in a swamp, how to make a logomaran so you can drift down a river (never ever use fresh wood, or you might sink), how to make fire without matches, how to make a play house, what to eat in camp, and that you should bring a flour sack to make into a pillow case.  He even have instructions on how to build a fire engine. Oh, and even how to make a herbarium is in here.

This book is not really about true survival based on old traditional knowledge like the book Wildwood Wisdom (reviewed on this blog), but about fun wild stuff boys can do outside.  Some certainly has survival tones to it, but some is more silly, like How to Play Pirate and How to Make an Aquarium.  Under Novel Food Used in Camp, he writes: "...Wolf meat is said to be sticky and disagreeable.".  Times were different back then.

Grade?  I am not sure.  Maybe 2-3 stars, but it has certainly historic interest and I would have loved this book when I was 12-14 years old. I learned a lot of useful information that I probably won't have much use for in my life, but that is OK. One day it might come in very handy.

OK, that is it for this batch.  If you read all the way to down here, good for you!  Now you know more than before :)

Quote of the Day: calling the smart people at the Collegeboard.com about SAT

I had reason tonight to call the CollegeBoard, the people that administer the SAT, the big dreaded test taken by all American highschool students that want to go to college. These are smart people asking tiny, detailed questions about grammar in their tests.

In the automatic answering system, which guides you to the right place when you call I got this question:

"Are you a parent or a student? Answer yes or no."

OK, I am a parent, but not a student.  Do I answer yes or no?  I bet someone thought this was a very straightforward question, but I don't think so...

Vote for the most bizarre comment from a service tech....

This is from an online chat today that I had with a service tech for an online course system.  After this morning, it was no longer possible for me to upload any files to the course website, and the error message was "the files do not exist or are empty".  They were there and they were certainly not empty. The problem - their system does not support Firefox 7 and now they want everybody to go back to Firefox 3.6.  Ha. Firefox 4, 5, and 6 worked fine, and suddenly Firefox 7 doesn't work, and then they want me to take 3.4 steps back in versions?

So, here are selected quotes from the chat:

1. Abel: I can only tell you what we know.

2. Abel: The decision is yours.

3. Abel: It is a decision above my pay grade. 

So, which one do you vote for in as the most bizarre or weird? I won't tell you my favorite, not yet.

Quote from the news: Tools for kids

From today's New York Times, about girls at Gadget Camp:

“Not letting your children learn the hands-on component of the theory of science is killing us as a nation,” Ms. Sharris said. “You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.” (source)

 I agree.  Is is nothing bad with books, not at all, but when books replace the real things like carving a stick with a knife, make and tend a fire, drill a hole, cut a plank, fill up a gas tank, and dig a hole, then kids get lost.  We need books and tools.  And skills.  Reading a book is just one skill.  If you can do all the things listed above, then you have six more life skills and you will also be more confident and independent.

Before TV and the internet...

big horn sheep in the Rocky Mountains, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

...there was dioramas at natural history museums, and there still are (at least at some). These stuffed animals in their nature-looking environment is so much better at conveying their story than a flat photo or a flat screen. Can't you see how cold they are? How treacherous their environment is? Exactly my point. I hope they restore these exhibits instead of getting rid of them.

Lava and smoke

exhibit about Hawaiian volcano eruption, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

A little corner exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago tried to showcase the lava eruptions in Hawaii using darkness, glow lights and LED lights. Did they succeed? What do you think?

When I was walking these exhibits I was thinking that most of these dioramas are missing the impressions of so many of our senses - there need to be scents, sounds, winds, and the feeling of touch to really get the real experience.

Just looking doesn't really do it. But being in Hawaii and smelling the sulfur, stepping on crunchy lava cinder sand and feeling the warm wind is a different thing. Couldn't exhibits try to invoke some of this too? I am not sure how to do the noise and smell or the warm wind, but I bet in the future there will be movie theaters with smell makers, fans, and boxes you can put your hands into to feel any texture or surface (ick, imagine that, anything slimy or gory...).  Virtual but real.  Still, that wouldn't be the real thing.  But I have always thought that to teach history, an experience such as walking down the street in 1850s New York would tell you a lot more about history than any book. 

I love the animal dioramas with stuffed beasts and painted backgrounds with a few silk flowers at museums, but it only gives you maybe 10% of the experience of being outside in nature. It is great that parents take their kids to museums, but they should even more just take them outside to many different kinds of places (and not be afraid of rain, ticks, dirt, germs, and toxic plants). How can you describe something to a kid that has never had that experience? You can't describe sulfur smell, it is unknown to you until you have actually smelled the rotten egg smell from a stinking boiling pot in Yellowstone. So, let's get out more. And put a sulfur smelling station next to the lava exhibit.

About Focus...

I have been reading a lot about the challenges and opportunities with modern technology and how it affects our education, brain, politics, lives, and everything else.  I think some of the world's upcoming problems are not just climate change, war, poverty, lack of food, and crazy politics, but also just lack of focus due to massive distraction, especially in the younger generations (under 50 or so). Here are some thoughts that I thought were true and interesting:

Filtering, not remembering, is the most important skill for those who use the Internet. 

I see today's Internet as having three primary, broad consequences: 1) information is no longer stored and retrieved by people, but is managed externally, by the Internet, 2) it is increasingly challenging and important for people to maintain their focus in a world where distractions are available anywhere, and 3) the Internet enables us to talk to and hear from people around the world effortlessly.

Read the full article here:  KNOWLEDGE IS OUT, FOCUS IS IN, AND PEOPLE ARE EVERYWHERE by David Dalrymple

Knappar, märken och medaljer

Varje barn i Sverige har nog minst ett simmärke och det verkar som även vuxna sparar sina.
Att ta ett märke är förknippat med en prestation och att ta simborgarmärket är något alla barn i Sverige vill klara. För att ta det ska man simma 200 m, i bassäng eller i fritt vatten och detta märke har funnits sedan 1934. Det har nyligen MH 8 år gjort, till sin och min förtjusning. Att kunna simma är en livförsäkring. Många barn får flera märken, både vid simning och andra sporter.




I Sverige finns en lång tradition att visa sin sympati för något med ett nålmärke på kavajslaget. Därför finns många märken för politiska partier, företag, föreningar mm. Att ge ut ett borgarmärke var ett sätt att främja folkets kunnande vilket ansåg i många föreningar vara en huvuduppgift. Genom att göra ett prov kunde man ta sitt märke, traditionen finns ännu. Därför finns (eller fanns) både hundborgarmärke, skidborgarmärke, ridborgarmärke (tv) simborgarmärke och bilkunskapsmärke. Livräddarmärke och samaritmärken visar att man är utbildad. Troligen får fortfarande sjuksköterskor ett märke vid examen.


Det företag som oftast står bakom de mångformiga märkena är Sporrong. Jag blev nyfiken och det visar sig att Sporrong är ett av Sveriges äldsta företag, verksamheten startade redan 1666 i Stockholm med en Mäster Grau. Då hette inte företaget Sporrong ännu, det kommer först 1842. Mellan tiden 1842 och 1875 heter företaget Sporrong för att därefter heta CC Sporrong & Co. Ofta tillverkades även uniformsknappar, t.ex till militären.
Tillverkningen skedde i flera verkstäder runtom i Stockholm men bedrivs idag i Estland och Finland. Mer om Sporrongs historia här .



Metal buttons, pins and medallions

First picture is a swimming test pin, which many children in Sweden get after they succeed to swim 200 m in a pool or outdoor lake. There are many pins in Sweden that are linked to a personal achievement like riding, dog leading, car driving and skiing. Many are also worn to show support for a specific political party, sports club or hobby club. The company which makes many of these is Sporrong, one of the oldest companies in Sweden, dating back to 1666. For a long time the production was sited in Stockholm but is has now moved to Finland and Estonia.