Death and facebook revisited yet again

So far, two of my facebook friends have passed out of this world, and are beyond the reach of the Internet. Don Fisher and Harold Conrad.

No, this post is not about the passing of friend number three, thankfully. Instead, it is just a bit amusing, in a morbid sort of way.

When I discovered lists in facebook, I created several of them. One I labeled "deceased". My two dear departed friends are alone so far in this list.

With the recent change in the way facebook displays news on my home page, I took advantage of moving the "Status Update" item to the head of the list, and also sometimes use my friend lists to see the additional features missing from the status-updates-only news feed.

When I clicked absently on each list today, I was galvanized by this display for my "deceased" list:

Ouch!

"No recent posts from this list." Not too surprising. They would have to find an ISP in whatever realm* they are located, get an account, a computer, etc. etc.

But what about the suggestion, "Add friends to this list"? No, sorry, I don't want to add any more friends to this list! And, I seriously doubt--if I were led to the dread necessity of doing so--that I would actually "see more posts."

But wait. Facebook can now change such accounts into memorial accounts. I suppose that once this has happened, one could expect new news, due to people writing on the wall of this memorial account.

Apparently, it is also possible for family members to have the account of a deceased relative removed entirely. But, it would seem that this is an arduous process.

*My friend, John Quinley, suggested in conversation that, in Hell, if there were Internet access, it would probably be at dial-up speeds, with frequent outages.

The laws of form and performance

The Laws of Form is a book, written (in 1969) by George Spencer-Brown, which influenced me as a graduate student in the late 1980s. I wrote in (chapter 4 of) my dissertation that it showed "that all of Boolean logic is inherent in the single concept of distinction." In retrospect, I may have claimed this because of a criticism of the book in an article cleverly named "Flaws of Form," in which the authors claim "that Brown's system is [merely] Boolean algebra in an obscure notation." My claim is really equivalent to the detractors' but with a positive spin to it.

Distinction is a powerful intellectual tool. Another is abstraction, but I digress.


This post is about a book that I have just read, entitled "The Three Laws of Performance" (by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan) published this year (2009, forty years after the other book).

What reminded me of the other book is the odd observation that the newer book's title contains the older book's title within it, thus: The Three Laws of Performance [emphasis added]. It is a quirk of my personality that I enjoy such coincidences and word play.

However, there is a deeper reminding, having to do with the power of distinction as an intellectual tool.

The first of the three laws of performance is, "How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them." At first glance, there is no distinction drawn here. However, in the explanatory material following the first expression of this law, the authors speak of what they call the "reality illusion" [emphasis in original].

This is precisely the first great distinction of Popper's three worlds (which played an important part in chapter two of my dissertation).

The "reality illusion" is the distinction between Popper's world one and his world two. This is the distinction between reality itself (world one) and the mental constructs which we create in our minds (world two) about reality, or how we explain reality to ourselves.

The powerful thrust of the first law is that it explains people's behavior: how people behave ("perform") is consistent with ("correlates to") their mental constructs ("how situations occur to them").

Compare my sentence (from the perspective of Popper's three worlds)

How people behave is consistent with their mental constructs.

with that from the (newer) book (and the perspective of laws of performance)

How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.

So that this post is not a plot spoiler (my readers are encouraged to read this new book), I will only say of the other two laws that they recognize that the material, or substance, of our mental constructs is language, and that language phrased in the future tense (declarative language) has greater power to change our mental constructs (than descriptive language, in present or past tense).

If you have a mathematical bent, I encourage you to read Laws of Form.

If you are interested in improving/changing your own performance, I encourage you to read The Three Laws of Performance.

Flashback Friday: Elder Sam Clark

Okay, so I didn't write this on Friday. However, I did think about it on Friday.

A couple of weeks ago, Sara and I arrived late at the Saturday evening session of stake conference, and so we had a comfortable seat on a couch in the foyer. In exchange for comfort, we gave up the ability to see the speakers.

The concluding speaker caught my attention when he mentioned working as a missionary in the France-Switzerland mission. Why did this catch my attention?

I was called to serve in the French East Mission by President Joseph Fielding Smith* but shortly into my mission the name of the mission was changed to "La Mission Franco-Suisse" in French, which, translated, is the "France-Switzerland Mission." This new name only lasted a few months, because at that time the church** standardized the names of all missions based on the city in which the mission home is located. Our mission became known then as the Switzerland Geneva Mission. So, I ended up serving in three different missions, at least as far as the name goes.

So, the speaker, who worked in the France-Switzerland mission, must have been called to his mission during those few months when that was indeed the name of the mission. So, it was probably someone that I knew!

I spent some time that evening thinking about who it might be. Which led me into the "flashback" mode, which finally resulted in this post.

As a missionary, I spent quite a few months in the mission home, working as the mission recorder. Basically keeping track of who was who in church membership within the mission. I also helped the mission printer out quite a bit and really enjoyed that as well. I also did various miscellaneous things, including driving the children of the mission president (Elder Charles Didier) to their music lessons.

One day, Elder Sam Clark, who was a zone leader needed a companion to drive to some city not too far away, and I went with him. Part of the driving was after dark and we got to singing hymns and other songs. After awhile we began harmonizing. It was a lot of fun. And, that's about all that I remember from that trip.

Back to the present, where we got to the Sunday session a bit early, so that I could get a seat near the front. Sure enough, the visiting authority was Elder Samuel W. Clark of the Seventy. The same man with whom I had spent a few pleasant hours harmonizing, nearly forty years ago.

I shook his hand after the session, but don't think he remembered me, because he said that I hadn't changed a bit (and those who have known me for forty years know that I have***). It is a little disconcerting to have someone your same age become an authority. I remember when it happened with my doctor. And then there are the dentists, police, and bosses who are often (much) younger than me.

Anyway, it was good to see Elder Clark again after all these years. Unlike myself, he has changed very little in appearance (in particular, he still has hair).

*I recall being a bit disappointed to have just missed (by a week or so) getting President David O. McKay's signature on my mission call. But, that was my own fault, for delaying nearly a year.

**At that time it was okay to speak of the church as "the church." Now, the church requires that at the first mention of its name, the name be given in full, as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." In the spirit of the "first shall be last, and the last shall be first, I shall use the name in full here, at (as) the last mention.

***For reference, here are pictures of me taken just over 40 years ago, and about two years ago:

Reunion Game

The reunion game was invented by Sara, specifically for one of the reunions we attended this year. Each sibling told stories from their lives, and if a story was new to anyone listening, that person put a jelly bean in the sibling's jar. Even though Colleen was not physically present, she played one of the nights by phone (Skype).

The image below shows the jelly bean jars at the end of the game. It is also posted at http://b1conrad.posterous.com/the-contest-0, from which you can see the full-sized image.

We had intended to play the game for two hours each night, but we only ended up playing two nights. Myrna had to leave early enough on the third day that she couldn't have played. She only played one night, so you can see that she would have given Arlene a good run otherwise. Of the four hours total that we played, Arlene and I were present the whole time, Myrna half of the time and Colleen one fourth of the time. So, you can see that we all had stories to tell.

As you can clearly see, Arlene won the game, and the prize: a Costco gift card shown in the big purple clothespin Sara purchased for the event.

Questions and Answers

Now that I've blogged about it, I don't mind so much seeing the poster in the elevator. You know: the one with the apostrophe error.

Some fun things have occurred to me. This is a series of questions and answers. Of course, each question could have any number of possible answers, some better than others. I will place here sample answers which please me*.

What is the first punctuation symbol in the answer to this question?

It's its apostrophe.

What is the last punctuation symbol in the answer to this question?

It's its period.

No, wait, it's its exclamation point!

What is the third punctuation symbol in the answer to this question?

It's its question mark? No, wait, it must be its comma, as are its fourth and fifth.

Alternatively, why isn't it its question mark?

*Can you see why students just loved my examinations when I was a professor?

The horror of a misplaced apostrophe

The last few days, I've been bothered by a poster in an elevator. Finally, I just had to take a picture of it with my low resolution cell phone camera.

SHOP THE FALL 09' COLLECTIONS AT SHADE CLOTHING

It's a bit blurry, but its text is shown in the caption. Here the apostrophe is curiously placed.

According to the wikipedia article on the apostrophe, "it has two main functions: it marks omissions, and it assists in marking the possessives of nouns and some pronouns."

The omission in the text is clearly the first part of the year 2009. So, it should read, "Shop the Fall '09 collections..." with the apostrophe placed at the place where the omitted text is omitted.

Like quite a few of my posts, this one resonates with thousands of places on the web, including a clever collection of limericks, a plea for correct usage, and even t-shirts.

And for those wondering about its use in one particularly tricky case, it's explained with plenty of examples on writing.com.

Thanks for reading.

Lying to Children

Right up there with taking candy away from babies.

I had a memorable experience in a school science class. The teacher asked us to tell him about the sun. Everyone looked around smugly. This was an easy one. One classmate raised his hand and proudly proclaimed, "The sun is a big ball of burning gases." He looked around, and we all nodded our sage heads in confirmation.

The teacher went on to explain to us that the sun was not burning gases, but rather a thermonuclear reaction. Fusion to be exact, and as Einstein's famous equation helps us understand, a little bit of gas goes a long way in creating the energy that we receive here on the Earth as heat and light.

That was very interesting, from a scientific point of view. Something even more interesting happened during that class, from a social point of view. Many students were upset that this hadn't been explained to us much earlier. Upset that we had been told the burning gases theory. As one student put it, "They lied to us!" And, we were upset that we had believed it so easily.

But was it a lie? Or was it just a simplification?

We all had experience with fire and burning things. Fire also creates heat and light. None of us had any experience with nuclear reactions. So why not teach us that the sun was a ball of burning gases?

Not only teachers engage in this simplification/lying. Parents, too, tell their children all kinds of stories. We know that they are at an impressionable age, an age when it is difficult for them to distinguish truth from fiction.

Consider the so-called fairy tales. We adults know that they are fiction. But do our children?

In a recent facebook exchange, my niece Josie wanted "to point out that Cinderella is living proof that shoes CAN change your life!" [emphasis in original; see below]


Very clever, Josie. I responded with a tongue-in-cheek question, "In what sense is Cinderella living?" Everyone (except perhaps most of the small children in our audience) knows that Cinderella is a fictional character, and therefore does not really "live" as we do.

Note that Josie's friend interjects with what feels like a great deal of passion, "In our hearts!"

Exactly. Notwithstanding her being fictional, Cinderella does live. In many hearts. As a role model. As an example of courage and determination. As a woman who got ahead by wearing the right shoes.

I touched on this kind of reality in my dissertation, while describing Popper's three worlds explanation of those things which exist.

So in a way, we lie twice to our children. First, we allow them to believe that a fairy tale is true, when it is in fact fiction. Then, later, we deny the reality of the fairy tale, saying, "Oh, that's just a story."

It is both more complicated and simpler than that. The story exists in (Popper's) world 3, and in fact, existed there long before we were born, having been created long ago in someone's world 2. It exists in fact in many world 1 artifacts: books, audio tracks, film, television, theatrical productions, etc.

When it was read to Josie, many years ago, there was a book (existing in world1) and a reader (both world 1 and world 2), and especially, a listener (the world 2 of Josie) who incorporated the story in all of its elements into her own very personal reality. The character (existing in world 3) of Cinderella is very real.

So, is lying to children okay, then? Taking candy from a baby could actually save it's life in some cases. Something to think about.