Movement and Stillness

We saw a doe and a fawn slowly emerging from the cornfield the other night on our bike ride: watchful and beautiful; tentative and somehow poised at the same time. They stopped to look at us and we stopped to look at them. After a few moments and a little encouragement from us, the two deer bounded up toward the road. A car came from around the corner, and the two deer ran back toward the bike path and cornfield (A tricky thing: what is a road to a deer? What is a car?), then turned again and crossed the road, away from us and safely into the thick understory of a grove of trees.

Running and standing still are the two tools at their disposal to deal with the problem of how to respond to something they don’t recognize or understand. A small set of sharp tools, carefully honed, they complement each other nicely. Stillness lets them accurately observe movements of other animals (bicyclists, and motorists in this case). Quick acceleration and remarkable speed and agility leave potential predators behind.

Hummingbirds are magnificent examples of this in the extreme: they can suspend themselves perfectly in place, then fly across the yard like a dark green, feathery bullet. They occasionally stop to consider us as we work in the yard or stand looking about. They are curious, not really knowing what to make of us. 

I am curious, too; marveling at them. The tips of their wings moving impossibly fast; the tip of their beaks impossibly still. Both of us quiet for a few moments until something sets us in motion again. For the hummingbird: the business of drinking nectar, perhaps. For me: the departure of the hummingbird.

Movement, stillness, movement. Repeat.

Surface

During normal operation, our kayak is situated at the interface of wind and water and subject to the influence of both. The water and the wind are not always in agreement. The waters and their waves have their own ideas about where things are going. The wind is an invisible but independent, insistent current at and above the water. 

Without sails, the wind is simply tolerated. Our hats are pulled down tight against our heads. We squint our eyes, as if the wind were a bright light.

The water can be navigated, of course, but not simply through brute force. Water has gravitas and power, but it can be bargained with. An arrangement must be negotiated: playing for a minimum of friction and a method for force production. The paddles provide leverage and the water provides purchase. The hull and the water seem to readily conspire to grant buoyancy, but awkwardly and grudgingly offer slipperiness.

It doesn’t require much effort to balance—only to sit upright—but more to command where the boat points. It can be like a compass needle searching for North, except North continues to move and drift. The flow of the river might be the boat’s True North at any given moment, but the wind, waves and wakes are like nails and magnets scattered around our two-person kayak-compass: jangling and pulsing, pushing and pulling the needle. (The ducks don’t seem to notice or mind any more than the sunlight reflected on the water does. Show-offs, they are perfectly at home in both the water and the wind.)

The interface—the meeting place of these two elements—is where we sit and paddle. That slightly convex surface is where we brace ourselves against the pedals inside the hull and move from our core. Our core is the only part of us strong enough to brace us against and heave us through the wind and the waves. Movement, intention, resolve, efficiency come from the center, from the core. A kind of understanding about the water, the wind and the kayak must also come from the core. Or maybe that’s just where it’s focused, where it naturally concentrates. Maybe wisdom and understanding work their way in, bit by bit, from the outside and gather there, where the currents sink deeper down, growing in strength and finally providing stability; a place where we can mark our current position at the interface of things.

We Are All Programmers Now

Every once in a while you hear about an accident someone has using a spreadsheet. One of the more recent and frightening ones involved the British NHS Covid-19 tracking spreadsheet that lost a lot of data. But other (hopefully less serious) stories regularly involve the corruption of data like messing up pasted-in Greek letters or mis-interpreting some numbers for calendar dates. 

These accidents are kind of like autocorrect (which should perhaps be renamed “overcorrect”), but instead of automatically changing the spelling of a word, it changes the numbers and other data you might type or paste into a cell. And you might not notice.

Microsoft Word and other word processors are expecting you to input text. Whether it’s a love letter or a resume or a grocery list, it assumes you’re typing words into it. You might also paste a picture or two, but it’s still only trying to figure out where to display it in relation to the text. It doesn’t claim to know anything much about the words you enter except how to spell them and some pedantic grammar rules. Excel, on the other hand, isn’t a tool for merely displaying and printing out nice, neat tables: that’s just a by-product. The real job of a spreadsheet is to do math, and we don’t realize that whenever we type numbers or words or other symbols into Excel, it’s fully expecting to do mathematical things to them. Whether you know it or not, you’re programming a computer. Excel gives you the settings and tools to specify exactly what kind of numbers you’re typing in (e.g. money, percentages or text) but most of us go with the default setting.

So using Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets to make a quick table of words and numbers that you just want to read might be a bit like using a blender for a flower vase: it will hold whatever you put in it even though it might look a little awkward. And it might do something unexpected and violent to its contents if you’re not careful.

Berries

We picked black raspberries on a morning walk this weekend. The berries were wet and sweet and full of tiny seeds; the thorns along the canes are sharp, but not particularly aggressive. They are plentiful on the edges of the woods: enough sun, but not too much. The dark, ripe fruit released with a gentle pull and sometimes fell off with just a touch. The berries are considerate enough to grow at heights that I don’t often need to stoop or squat to reach them (though squatting is a good way to spot those I might have missed), but not quite considerate enough to grow right next to the mowed paths.

We worked our way around and through the understory, trying to avoid burrs and being careful not to step on the raspberry canes themselves or too many other plants. I found myself standing on one leg a few times, looking for an opening on the way to the next group of ripe berries, like an elegant and majestic crane slowly making it’s way through tall grasses. (Well, maybe more like an ungainly and awkward industrial crane just…standing there, wondering what to do.) In any case, it was a good reminder that simply standing on one foot is a nice movement, too: improvised tree poses among the trees.

Warm, humid and drizzling; it was the kind of warm summer rain that soaks you completely a little at a time without ever giving you a chill. Listening to the light rain and searching for ripe fruit, I noticed that I wasn’t noticing much else. I heard the occasional runner or dog-walker on the paths, but never really looked up. Other animals browsing in areas like this would be pausing frequently to glance around to see who else might be approaching. We’re a bit more focused and goal-oriented, I guess. But at the same time I can’t help but think that that kind of focus when one is out-of-doors is somehow inappropriate; arrogant, even. Or maybe it’s just a little rude to be so absorbed in my own activity that I don’t bother to look up into the canopy to appreciate the cardinal that’s singing.

Eye of the Tiger

I awoke to a noise at 5am one day last week and immediately became aware of two things, one completely understandable and one utterly inexplicable: the first was that the smart speaker in the kitchen was playing music, the second was that the song was “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. I fumbled with my smartphone, first laying on the nightstand, then held by both puzzled, drowsy hands until I could turn it off.

The complexity and brittleness of today’s modern technology didn’t allow me to immediately rule out a purely modern technological explanation for the music playing, e.g. a brown-out, an obscure firmware glitch or a faulty TCP-IP packet. But I had other suspicions, confirmed once I inspected the kitchen: items disturbed in the area of the speaker, and a small amount of cat vomit containing plant matter which matched the plant sitting next to the speaker.

The smart speaker has a capacitive touch control on its top surface, allowing the user to pause/play and increase or decrease the volume. It is rather a sensitive interface, as most smartphone users will acknowledge, that is easily—and not infrequently—inadvertently activated by attempting to wipe off it’s dusty surface with a sleeved arm, or accidentally brushing against it while working in the kitchen.

One of our cats can sometimes become particularly restless early in the morning, and the evidence points toward his foraging on the counter (because he cannot possibly learn to not eat the damn plants that always, always, always make him puke every single time), accidentally activating the smart speaker and then fleeing the scene, knocking over the items during his escape.

“Eye of the Tiger”, indeed.

Checking In

Nothing seems to help confirm that you’re tired better than sitting still for a few minutes. A glass of water and 10-20 minutes can disprove the feelings of hunger. And 3 pages of writing without any regard for coherence or convention can help unearth latent ideas.

Sometimes checking in on things works best when you’re not trying to do it directly.

Cinematic Journey

I’ve been missing films lately. We’ve watched plenty of them over the course of the last year or so, but I’ve been missing seeing them in theaters. Oddly, I’ve been missing the drive to the theater, walking in the entrance, and the walk to the seats. The anticipation builds as all the cues are registered by my senses: the smell of movie theater popcorn, the vast expanses of carpeted areas, the increasing darkness as you move closer to the theater.

This nostalgia is triggered in part by the fact that this week is the beginning of a long-running, local, annual film festival, and this year (like last year) it will be virtual. There will not be inconveniences of weather or travel or trying to get something to eat quick between films. There will not be any standing in line, filing into the theater or running between theaters to catch the next film during a day packed with films because, of course, when everything is streaming, there is no real schedule. Beyond the week-long window for watching the films, the festival is—similar to how much of the rest of our lives feel—at once strangely convenient and out of time.

And I guess I just miss traveling to and arriving at the destination where I get to go on another journey.

Layers

Among the many fascinating and clever things Samin Nosrat writes about in her amazing book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is the idea of using those four elements at different times during the preparation of a single dish. She uses the term “layering” to describe the approach of building complex and satisfying flavors this way: layering salt by using it not only to brine, but also to season and finish. Layering acids by using one to marinade and a different one later to drizzle. These layers add depth and dimension to food.

Physical layers create interest and satisfaction as well. Croissants and baklava are famous for their delicate layers. Pizza can be thought of as a large, round, layered dish. And sandwiches aren’t just convenient to make: by stacking ingredients on top of each other they provide contrast in texture and mouthfeel. A sandwich presents with a certain amount of order that we can investigate not only with our eyes but with our mouths: we know a sandwich by the biting and chewing of it.

But the finest example of layering, both in terms of preparation and assembly is the taco. The preparation of the meat involves seasoning with acid from a few tomatoes, salt and of course the heat of the pan sizzling the fat. A bit more fat in the form of cheese or avocado toppings, and likewise a bit more acid in the pico de gallo. Maybe a little more salt in the Tajin sprinkled on top or on a hard taco shell. The physical layers of ingredients, themselves layered with flavors, create one of the most fun and satisfying meals of the week: taco night—or as we like to call it, taco fiesta.

Spring Force

Spring moves quickly. Saturday morning we stood in a friend’s yard talking about lawns and trees and plants, shivering just a bit in the breezy shade of tall pines. Later the temperature rose to 82F and Sunday it was 81F; a sudden heat wave after a cool April. It felt hot, even though wasn’t hot by our summer standards; you could feel the coming heat of summer from the sun like a memory.

We haven’t had much rain, either. The air has been dry and has slowed down the sprouting plants and parched the soil with stiff, steady breezes and gusting winds. You can feel the dryness in your eyes after spending a day like that outside. Sometimes even drinking water doesn’t quite quench your thirst; it merely postpones it a bit as the sun and the wind take back their share from breath and sweat.

Today it will rain and cool off a bit. I can already smell the rain, even though it hasn’t started yet. The trees and plants know it, too, because they have been waiting; they can sense the speed with which summer is approaching. It’s in the air.

Reheat

I’ve taken to smelling my plate of food when I take it out of the microwave. This isn’t merely to enjoy the aroma (although frequently that’s part of it), or to elicit smart-ass comments (although somehow they arise from this) but to sense how thoroughly and evenly the food has been heated.

I can’t smell heat (and neither can you), but our noses are sensitive to differences in air temperature. Just like you notice the difference when when you step outside into a chilly morning, you can sense the difference between warm, moist air rising from hot food and the cooler, drier air above cold food as you breathe in through your nose. Briefly nosing around the plate can give an indication of whether or not it needs a little more time in the microwave.

The Name of the Color is Red

We finally went for a walk, now that the intense cold has retreated a little. Bright white snow still covers everything but the well-plowed streets and some sidewalks. Bright white, contrasting with the dark tree bark and the shadows that they cast on the snow. Looking across one of the fields we pass by, the snow cover formed a sharp, clean line that the forest edge met: bright white, thin line, dark trees.

As we walked through a woods, two bright red Cardinals flew across our path—two flashes of color in an otherwise dark and light scene—and then were gone.

In winter, it’s easy to imagine why languages that have only two color terms those words translate as black and white, or dark and light. The world in winter seems to lose most of its colors. They seep down into the Earth to hibernate; they fly South until Spring.

To be fair, the sky remains blue (“azure”, if you’re fancy), but so often it’s gray (or “grey”, if you’re British). And when the sky does happen to be clear, as it can be on those bitterly cold days, it can be so bright that it’s hard to look at.

And then there are evenings—especially it seems during colder weather—when the sky is clear and the color of the sky forms a breathtaking gradient. During twilight the sky runs from light blue near the horizon, where the sun hasn’t yet fully retreated; to navy blue; to the deepest midnight blue, where you can begin to see the stars just before the sky fades to black directly above you. (I exclaim this out loud Every Single Time I see it, which has justifiably earned me gentle teasing.)

So it’s a bit of a puzzle to me why it is that languages that have only three color terms, universally that third term is “red”. Sure, it kinda makes sense: ripe fruits, blood, dangerous animals and signs that say “DO NOT ENTER”. It just seems like blue should maybe have been given a little more consideration. In any case, light and dark, then red:

Languages, if they have additional color terms, go on to add either green or yellow (or vice versa):

Then blue:

Then brown:

Then gray, purple, pink, orange… (It’s kind of a free-for-all after brown, to be honest.)

There have been some interesting studies done in this area to try to figure out why cultures develop and use color terms in what appears to be a rather strict progression. The evidence seems to point to the way that sensitivity to small differences in color vary over the spectrum of visible light. (My own very intuitive, completely unsupported, non-sensical just plain wrong hypothesis is that the color terms are developed in the order of decreasing wavelength, just like a rainbow.) 

See how they kinda line up with the rainbow?

But if it ever turns out that the color terms are related to the change of seasons, it will not surprise me. After all, here in the upper Midwest in February, the world seems like it’s still stuck with only light and dark. It was nice to see the Cardinals add their statement of red, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of the color terms return to the landscape.

Matching

Your mouth is a rather abrupt opening in your face that sounds can emanate from. It is not shaped like the bell of a trumpet or a tuba, which would be more acoustically efficient. Cupping your hands around your mouth, you can form a kind of megaphone that helps your voice carry across greater distances (or noisier environments) than usual. Your ears (at least the weird-shaped fleshy parts on the side of your head) are shaped a bit like the bell of a trumpet or a tuba (on a very bad day), which is very important for hearing. Even so, cupping your hand behind your ear does something similar: it funnels more sound into your ear, helping you to hear even better.

Well, it’s not actually the case that your voice or quiet sounds are amplified or even “funneled” by your hands. It’s more accurate to say that your hands help your mouth or your ear to be better matched to the way that sounds travel through the air. Your cupped hands form an additional interface; a bridge that sound can more easily travel over.

Our hands aren’t optimized for this, of course. They’re not intended for this purpose; our hands are optimized for handling (Ha!) things, not sound waves. Our hands can reach both our mouths and ears and they happen to have useful acoustic properties—even if they’re not really megaphones or ears. It’s interesting that our hands can do this; that we somehow learned to do it at all and that we learn how and when to do it from each other. (An admittedly brief search did not turn up any evidence that other primates do this.)

In any case, cupping our hands can also be a visual cue to others. Holding one cupped hand behind our ear, perhaps craning and turning our head slightly conveys that we’re trying to listen; it’s a universal sign that means, “What? I can’t hear you.” Likewise if someone sees you looking directly at them with your hands cupped around your mouth, they might pay closer attention. (Or even cup their own hand behind their ear to listen!)

Getting your hands involved in this way when we’re trying to be heard or trying to listen necessarily also creates a different posture in us. It focuses our own attention even more because we’re physically more engaged than if our arms simply hung at our sides.

Just as the shape and placement of our hands helps to better match the acoustics of speaking or listening, our posture—our gesture—becomes more of what we’re trying to do. It reinforces the signal being sent to ourselves and others.

Bodies in Motion

There is something about the swing of a pendulum or the sweep of a second hand. You know that there is a machine at work, but it’s still relatable. After all, we’ve chosen to call the pointy things on analog clocks “hands”, not “pointers” or “indicators”. (I might have chosen to call them “arms”, since they’re much longer than they are wide, but no one asked.) Those kinds of clocks have faces, too.

Lots of things have anatomical names: tables and chairs have legs and a back (OK, everything seems to have a back—it’s usually on the other side of the front), hammers and nails have heads, bread can have a heel, bolts can have shoulders and roofs can have hips. It’s easy to think that when we needed to name these parts or features, perhaps the thing that came to mind was the body part it reminded us of. Everybody knows what an elbow is, so if you’re looking through a pile of plumbing parts…

Digital clocks are minimalist information displays: compact and efficient. Four or six digits that change abruptly, a little punctuation and maybe an “AM” or “PM”. No second hand, whether a continuous sweep or discrete movement. No movement through space, however confined, to trace the passage of time. No face, no hands—no features that I would be tempted to name after a part of my body or anyone else’s. (No, “colon” doesn’t count. And stop giggling.)

We have an intuitive grasp of mechanical movements, since we are very much physical beings, and we can often imitate them. We have an appreciation for the qualities of acceleration and speed, precision and tempo because we recognize them as desirable.

But a mechanical clock or analog gauge isn’t an organism. It’s something less than a tree, but something more than a carefully placed stick casting a shadow on the ground. It’s sophisticated and tangible, and we can see something of ourselves in its features and behavior, even if we have no need to name it.

Scenery After Sunset

We began a longer than usual walk while it was still light. It was sundown about the time we were at the halfway point and nearly dusk by the time we got back to our car. It was cloudy, and the half moon only cast a faint, dull glow on the grass and the path. With the exception of some birch, the trees were black.

It’s an interesting transition, going from daylight to sunset to dusk. As the light fades, so does our ability to discern color. The color receptors of our eyes need much more light in order to function properly than the “black and white” light receptors. What’s more, our ability to see fine details is quite limited in low light: the part of our eye that focuses on small features—the part that we use when we look carefully at something—is made almost completely of color receptors. When it’s quite dark, we really only see dark shades of gray and shadows, and not very crisply at that.

Near the end of our walk, three deer crossed the path and stood in the field to our right. I only saw them because I wasn’t looking directly at them. Our peripheral vision is quite sensitive to movement and happens to be where the “black and white” receptors are, which is valuable for detecting predators and automobile traffic, if they are different.

As the deer stood in the field, watching us watch them, the irony struck me again. Because our nature is of course to focus on something that grabs our attention, we end up being able to see it less clearly than if we looked just off to the side of it, where our vision is more sensitive under low light conditions. (I suppose that’s part of why we’re not nocturnal animals. If we were supposed to be very active at night, we’d have eyes more like cats or owls or deer, which gather more light and use it more efficiently.)

It’s a strange but illuminating kind of effort to look not-quite-at something in order to see it more clearly.

Deep Dive

Somehow SCUBA diving came up in a conversation a long, long time ago. I was in the Netherlands for work and the client was kind enough to spend an evening entertaining me during my visit there. He told me that apart from the obvious dangers of being underwater and surfacing too quickly from too great a depth, SCUBA diving had a more subtle danger: hypothermia. Since I don’t do diving of any kind (SCUBA, sky- , platform, spring-board or dumpster) this was new information.

But first, a diving joke:

Q: What’s the difference between SCUBA diving and skydiving?

A: If you’re SCUBA diving and you run out of air, there are some strategies and techniques you can use to help you survive. If you’re skydiving and you run out of air—you’re simply out of air.

Hypothermia made some sense, since being in very cold water can certainly be a serious hazard, but a lot of people dive in warm water, wearing wetsuits or drysuits. Heat loss through contact with the water is still happening, though. Consider that if you dive for work, say, doing underwater construction, you probably have to wear a heated suit and mask to keep from getting too cold. A further complication is that when you get out of the water and you sit in the boat with a wetsuit on, the evaporating water removes an enormous amount of heat from your body.

But the really difficult issue is that you’re breathing cool, compressed air or, if you’re diving deep, a compressed mixture of oxygen and another gas like nitrogen or helium. In any case, it’s already cold (since it’s in the water) and when it comes out of the SCUBA tank, it expands and as it does so its temperature drops even more. (This is described by Boyle’s Law, well-known by chemistry students everywhere.) You’re losing heat through your lungs with each breath.

So you’re in water that’s most certainly colder than your skin and the only “air” you have available is quite chilly: You’re getting colder from the outside-in and the inside-out.

Our bodies will begin to shiver involuntarily if we become cold, but this is a little tricky, too, because our skin is really only good at detecting relative changes in temperature. You can slowly get very cold without starting to shiver or even feeling very cold. And on the other hand, it can be very challenging to successfully re-warm a severe hypothermia victim: if they suddenly feel warm and cozy inside a rescue blanket, their body may actually stop shivering and subsequently freeze to death.

It’s strange to think that the obvious problem—breathing underwater—is in some ways rather straightforward to deal with, and that hypothermia is more serious. Some hazards are more dangerous simply because they can happen slowly, and some solutions are dangerous if they’re applied too hastily.

What is Subtlety For?

If you drink a glass of orange juice and it tastes like really good orange juice, you’ll be pleased. (If you just brushed your teeth, you will have ruined your day. Don’t.)

If you drink a glass of orange juice and it tastes really good, but you notice something else in the background, under the sweetness and the rounded acidity; a sharper flavor, but slightly spicy and earthy… cardamom?

An abundance of cardamom would loudly declare its presence and you would know it immediately. (“Who the hell put spices in my orange juice!?”) A little cardamom lets you consider the flavors and wonder—and then you recognize it.

That’s what subtlety is for: a chance to notice something small, something delicate in the background. Not for any particular reason, but perhaps to be “in on the joke” or as an homage to the effort that went into putting it there.