Tag: knowledge

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Horton Hears an Owww!

There’s a place in your head where your cranium sits,

And it craniates daily without throwing fits,

But sometime last December, my cranium crashed,

Making thinking as hard as a week-old Who-Hash,

 

There came first a wave,

Pounding hard as it came,

Dimming down all the lights,

Blotting out my own name,

And when the knife-pain came after,

(As knife-pains will do),

I was sure as a Cat with Thing One and Thing Two.

 

“It’s a migraine!” said I, in a voice mighty quiet.

If you don’t know why quiet, I suggest you should try it.

For a migraine’s a headache scaled up just a few,

To the factor of five hundred seventy-two!

 

Had it happened but once, well that might be just life,

But I soon found that daily I met with that knife,

And my doctor said “Hmm,” with that doctorly eye,

“Why not come place your head in this fine MRI.”

 

So it hummed and it thrummed as I lay in the drum,

And I waited to see just what answers would come,

(I also did learn in my lengthy long lying,

I could quote Alice’s Restaurant, without trying!)

 

And my doctor said “Humm,”

And she asked me to come,

To see what transpired in that rumbly drum.

 

And I saw there … a spot.

Really, almost a dot.

In the midst of my brain,

Where a dot should be not.

 

Now a spot can be deadly or nothing at all,

Just a mark of the chalk on your cranium wall,

But as we looked it over, we couldn’t help stewing,

Just what is this dot? What the heck is it doing?

 

 

Is it a lesion? A mark of MS?

A tumor that does who-knows-what-can-we-guess?

Or simply a scar from when really-young Scott

Hit his head? (I’m told that this happened a lot.)

 

I get slightly more anxious

With each passing hour,

I just want to know,

(They say knowledge is power)

As though knowledge would make all my problems go “Poof!”

“Enough with these questions now! Give me some proof!”

 

For we’ve puzzled and puzzed til our puzzlers were sore,

After all, we declare, that’s what puzzlers are for,

It’s hard to admit, faced with puzzling stuff,

We might never know “all” – we might just know “enough.”

 

And if we find something that puts down the pain,

All the waving and stabbing and pounding the brain,

I’ll be happy for now, though I’d still like to view,

Just what kind of dotting that dot likes to do.

 

So we’ll poke and we’ll pry,

Seeing if we can spy,

Things that are so important yet lost to the eye.

 

And if something be seen,

Be it yellow or green,

Or even some new hue, like blue-red-gra-zine,

I’ll tell every fact and I’ll keep you apprised.

(That’s the value of knowing the newspaper guys.)

 

But if you have a spot or a dot of your own,

And you’re longing to see more than doctors have shown,

Take comfort, though comfort may hide far from view.

It can still come to me, it can still come to you.

 

With patience and calm, may we all come to see,

Just “enough” of our needs for a small guarantee,

That somehow our problems may each be turned loose,

Now, farewell – for I’m calling a truce of the Seuss!

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Spoiled Again

By the time this appears in print, I may actually have seen the new “Star Wars.”

I know, I’m just a little late to the party here. By the time I actually walk into a theater and launch into that galaxy far, far away, the rest of my fellow fans will have purchased enough tickets to paper a small moon. (Or is it a space station?) By now, every last detail has been dissected and analyzed, whether it’s the precise dimensions of the new cross-hilt lightsaber or the dents acquired by the Millennium Falcon since its last run in “Return of the Jedi.”

I can’t wait to join the conversation. But I also can’t wait to discover the movie. And that means I’ve been filtering social media like a riverside gold panner, trying to keep from becoming The Man Who Knew Too Much.

One must be careful. The Spoilers are on the prowl.

“Spoiler culture” is a funny thing. In an older time, it was expected that one would know the crucial points of the great stories of the day. Some even spelled out the entire plot in a quick summary right at the start for those who might not otherwise keep up, such as the opening prologue of Romeo and Juliet. (A friend joked that the Shakespearean narrator should begin that speech with the words “Spoiler alert!”)

But something changed in the last century and a half or so. Partly, I think, it was the rise of plots whose dramatic power depended on hiding information until a certain point. Think of Citizen Kane and the need to identify “Rosebud.” Or the plays and novels of Agatha Christie with their hidden twists. Or even the quests of Frodo Baggins or Harry Potter, where the choice that the hero makes is all-important, but it’s not always clear at the start what choice the hero has to make or what the cost may be.

Partly, too, it’s an explosion of novelty and individuality at the same time. The 19th and 20th centuries especially set off an avalanche of stories and plot lines. And while the new mass media could make sure that many of them became community knowledge (is there anyone who doesn’t know how Gone With The Wind goes?), the exact timing would depend on individual choice and budgets and lives. Those who had undergone the shared cultural experience first had an advantage – however temporary – over those who didn’t, and could shape the experience of the “not yets” by what they chose to reveal. (“Don’t tell me the ending!”)

So – you have the spoiler. The information that would reveal a plot’s mysteries and surprises too soon. There’s been a debate over when is “too soon” to put spoiler information out in the open, especially for reviewers: should one wait a week after release? A year? Should the information stay locked away forever, despite all blandishments and temptations?

Some audiences are better at keeping secrets than others – there’s a reason that thrillers like “Deathtrap” retain their power to surprise and startle. And there’s no doubt that some storylines are damaged less than others by a premature revelation. A black-and-white action tale usually has all its cards on the table … and yet, how different is a new viewer’s experience of “The Empire Strikes Back” these days when it’s common knowledge who Darth Vader really is and what he’s after?

Ultimately, it comes down to the individual reader, viewer or listener. It has to. No spoiler law will satisfy everyone or will be perfectly adhered to. Each of us has to decide how much is too much to know, and do what we can to protect our own decision.

And really, isn’t that true with any sort of learning? All the way to the beginning, knowledge has been about choices. What do I need to know? What do I want to know? Sure, some things come in by osmosis (my wife Heather knows any number of movie ‘moments’ that she’s never actually seen), but the best learning is directed learning – making the decisions that will make someone a better student, a better citizen, a better member of society.

Choose well. Choose wisely.

And if you choose to tell me the new Star Wars plot twist before I can get in the theater, then may the Force be with you.

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Lost in Boston

They’re painful. Uncomfortable. Three words that I’ve hated saying for years.

No, not “Tulowitzki’s injured again.”

Try instead “I don’t know.”

As a little kid, I hated saying it to my sister Leslie. So much so that when she asked a question, I would make something up rather than admit I didn’t know the answer.

I still hate saying it now, as a journalist. Though at least my efforts to avoid the deadly phrase now involve frantic phone calls and pushed deadlines rather than outright fiction.

“I don’t know.” Hard words to admit to.

But really, no other words will do this week.

Not after Boston.

***

Like a lot of people, I was in the middle of my work day when the Boston Marathon bombs went off. I’d just finished chatting with an organizer about Longmont’s “hackathon” — a fun story, one that made you feel good – when I glanced at my laptop and saw the news.

Boom. Boom.

Stunned.

Over the first few hours it felt, not like 9/11, but like the old Olympic bombing in Atlanta. It was a similar venue, a similar scale. And with no one racing forward to take the credit, it had a similar, desperate search for answers.

What really happened? Who would do this? And why?

In Atlanta, our need for answers became so great that an innocent man got swept up in them. This time, the embarrassment came not from having the wrong name, but from having no name at all, as CNN jumped on rumors of an arrest – rumors that proved to be as solid as a campaign promise.

As I write this, a zillion theories compete for time. I have my own. If they were any more solid than the rest, I’d put them here.

After all, things are supposed to make sense. Aren’t they?

I don’t know.

***

Turn it around. What do we know?

We know people were hurt. Were killed.

We know that Boston is nearer than we ever imagined it could be.

We know that people need help. Need healing. Need peace.

Most of all, perhaps, we know that people are answering the call.

And how!

Whoever set the bombs, they’ve been outnumbered. From the first moments, there were people running toward the explosions, running to do what they could.

A Florida orthopedic surgeon, Dr. John Cowin, had been in the crowd to watch his daughter. He leaped a barrier at the race to tend the wounded.

A group of 20 active-duty soldiers, there to honor lost comrades, had just finished walking the course. They obliterated a fence and started hurrying to remove debris from victims.

A collection of runners who had just finished running a grueling 26 miles-and-change, immediately ran two more. Just far enough to reach the nearest hospital, and give blood.

I’m sure it doesn’t feel like a lot to them. It never does at the time. But that multitude of small moments, candle flame on candle flame, grows brilliant when gathered together. Almost blinding.

These are the ones who deserve to be remembered.

Not the givers of pain. But the fighters of it.

***

In time, there will be a name. I’m confident of that. In time, some of our questions will have answers. Not all. Never all. But maybe enough.

But that will happen in its time. Not with the speed of a CSI episode, but at the methodical pace that real police work finds. They, too, are lighting candles, though the wicks are slow to kindle.

I’m human. I want to learn more, too. What I don’t know still troubles me.

But what I do know – what I’ve seen, what I’ve heard – has provided more comfort than I could have expected.

They’re still hard words. But ultimately, powerless ones.

No. We don’t know. But we’re learning. And there’s a whole lot of people at our shoulder as we discover it together.

This, we know.

 

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Venus, If You Will

Look! Up in the sky!

Well, actually, I hope you didn’t. I know you value having eyesight and all.

Most of my friends know that I’m a certified space geek. On Tuesday I had an awful lot of company. Around the world, people were looking through telescopes, watching computer monitors or otherwise doing everything they could to safely watch the “transit of Venus.”

It might not sound worth the effort to some. After all, it’s basically the world’s tiniest eclipse, as Venus moves across the sun like a lost penny across a football field. But as the Franklin Mint likes to remind us, rarity has a certain value. You get two of these transits eight years apart – and then you have to wait more than 100 years for the next one.

OK. So it’s rare. Big deal. So are copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special, right?

Granted. But unless you’re into really bad Wookie fiction, I’d pick the transit any day. For a tiny disc, it tends to inspire a lot of frenzy.

The transits of the 1760s may have been the wildest, as European scientists tried to scatter across the world to see if they could record the event from different points – and, incidentally, find out just how far the Earth was from the Sun. And while it was Captain Cook’s 1769 measurements that helped fix the distance (about 93 million miles, for the record), the struggles of those who didn’t quite make it eight years earlier make even more entertaining reading – entertaining, that is, in the sense of “Boy, I’m glad that wasn’t me.”

“Jean Chappe spent months traveling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers,” wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The swelling was due to unusually heavy rainfall, which the locals in turn blamed on the strange man pointing odd objects at the sky.

First impressions. So important.

These days, no one had to be Indiana Jones to measure the transit, but it was still worth measuring. Last time, Venus helped us find ourselves. This time, it may help us find the neighbors. By watching Venus, we know a little more about how to find planets in other solar system, work out how big they are, maybe even piece out a little more about their atmosphere.

Not bad for a view from the cheap seats, huh?

It’s also very reassuring for a teacher’s son. Most teachers have said at some point that there’s no such thing as a stupid question (and almost immediately get students who try to prove them wrong). I tend to believe something very similar – that there’s no such thing as useless knowledge.

Role-playing games taught me how to calculate percentages.

Children’s mysteries helped me learn how to estimate distance.

Even something as light as studying stage dialects has helped with getting Missy to brush her teeth at night. (It pays to use an outrageous French accent to count how much is left to do, even if the giggles do tend to spatter the mirror a bit.)

When everything fits with everything, anything can be good to know.

So watching Venus dance across the Sun? Why not? You never know when it might come in handy.

You simply can’t planet.