Tact
Dear Paul and Kate, Melanie and Jared, Bridget and Justin, Sara, Ben and Sarah, Heather, Audrey, Rachel, Matt via hardcopy, and Brian,
cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny,
& Maxine Shirts
Welcome to "Thoughtlets." This is a weekly review of an idea,
belief, thought, or words that will hopefully be of some benefit
to you, my children, with an electronic copy to on-line extended
family members. Any of you can ask me not to clutter your mail
box at any time.
"I never have had much tack. Webster's New American Dictionary
defines as: a keen sense of what to do or say to keep good
relations with others. Last Sunday, during my weekly ritual
of calling you (my biological kids, remember Andrea calls my
step-kids and then she tells me how Heather and Audrey are
doing, and then Andrea asks questions until she actually gets
me to talk about how everyone I talked to is doing), anyway,
during my calls last week the comment was made about how much
more the Thoughtlets are appreciated now that I am showing more
tact in what I write. I passed off the compliment off with:
<![CDATA[ `I still don't have any tact, I just have Andrea to edit
what I write.']]>
Well, Andrea is in Utah attending the Utah Summer Games,
helping her Mom, and helping Heather move into an apartment.
When I talked to her yesterday morning, Heather had won a
gold medal for a short race, and was in the middle of the
long race. So, if you happen to be reading what I write
this week, a couple of points up front:
- it will be short; and
- Andrea is not here, so she obviously won't edit it,
and therefore what I write might not come across with tact.
For instance, just think for a second about my topic. Oh well!
Paul laughed when he heard the comment about tact. He told
me his lack of tack has often been pointed out to him.
However, he has been getting better. For instance, some
kids from one of the other wards set up a garage sale on
the church lawn on a Sunday, and the Bishop told him to go
take care of it. Paul mentioned that the families that attend
the wards in his building are mostly in government subsidized
housing, and many of them are mentally challenged. As he
approached the kids, he was afraid that the kids would hate
the church for generations if he said the wrong thing. So
he explained the church would loose it's tax exempt status
if there were commercial activities going on on church
property. The kids understood that the government and the
IRS are something to fear, and so they quickly packed
everything up and left. As Paul and his friend went back
in the building, the other priesthood holder said, you sure
handled that with tact, I would have just told them to get
off of church property. So between these two comments about
tact it set my thought patterns for the week.
My week at work was tied around getting the right data out
of GDC's jRouge database. Every day provided new problems.
At one point, one of the senior employees came in and very
carefully explained to me that the problem was all my fault,
specifically because I did not make the request correctly.
I must admit his lack of tact kind was not well received.
When I was provided another version of the database, I took
the 190 MB file, and cross-plotted RC(0)gas against NIgas
(the Reflection Coefficient of gas at zero degrees, and the
Normal Incidence reflection coefficient), which are calculated
using different equations and which should have the same
values, and made a series of plots which showed there were
still issues with the database. I captured a half a dozen
screen images which showed the issue, and sent an e-mail
specifying that I looked forward to learning about this
technology, but not the shame and blame response to my
efforts. In thinking about it, I'm sure this just further
demonstrates my lack of tact in response to his lack of tact.
Andrea is a lot better at demonstrating tact than I am. For
instance, she felt like she organized her four brothers in
regards to last summer's Shirts Reunion (../0332.html). So
this year she was going to let the boys decide what they are
going to do, and then she will support it. The message
below came in from Robert in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (which is
at the very top of Idaho, close to the Canadian border and
Spokane, Washington) shortly after Andrea left for Utah, using
Audrey's travel pass for parents:
<![CDATA[ `Hi everyone,
Thanks to Steve it sounds like things are coming together.
We were in Boston for a week and had a great time. We rode
public transportation instead of renting a car. It was kind
of fun.
Anyway----here are everyone's plans I have heard from so far.
Steve---He and his family are going as far as Idaho Falls
Sunday night and then will come here Monday. He should get
here late afternoon or early evening. He wants to spend until
Wednesday sometime (depends if I can find him a golf game)
and then drive over to Seattle. That is about a 5 hour drive
from here. He then wants to go down to San Francisco and then
across. Sounds like a fun trip. I wish I was going.
Randy - He and Kathryn are going to fly in Monday about 1:00
and then coming this way. They are then going up to Banff for
a couple of days to come back Friday to be ready for a 7:00 Am
flight out.
That is all I have heard from. Now I need to know what
everyone wants to do. There is hiking, touring a silver mine,
site seeing, water skiing, and as much as you can imagine.
Cast your votes now!
Robert']]>
The Monday through Friday being discussed is the 12th-16th of
July. I do not know our schedule yet, but I expect Andrea,
Matt, and I will be in Coeur d'Alene at least Monday through
Wednesday. I do not expect any of you are available to join
us, and if I'm wrong and you are, it would be wonderful. As
some of you recall, I had big plans for an out-of-the box
sustainability seminar with Todd Staheli and Ken Turner in
conjunction with the 4th or 24th of July Parade in Cedar City
(../0324.html and 0325.html) this summer. There have been a
lot of changes since those words were written a year ago.
Oh well! And as we look towards next year, I probably won't
have enough money to pay for tickets for everyone to get
together. Audrey's buddy passes do not go into effect until
August, and, of course, it is up to Audrey how these tickets
are distributed. Notice how I attempt to write with tact.
Maybe we will have a Nelson/Nielson kids reunion a year from
Christmas when Sara returns from Benin.
I received three (actually four) e-mails this week which I feel
are appropriate to pass on. The first was from Bridget:
<![CDATA[ `Dear Uncle Roice,
Thank you for the postcard - it was a very pleasant surprise
(and reminder). I do have to get my passport ready anyways,
because it still has my maiden name. But I'll start working
on that now. Thank you for getting Grandma's Temple work done.
I wish that I could be there, but I understand that this would
not be possible right now, and it's better to get it done as
soon as we can. Thank you for your updates on the family, I'm
glad that things seem to be going so well for everyone!
love,
Bridget']]>
The second was from Albert Boulanger, and was about some people
doing what sounds like my ideal job:
<![CDATA[ `A Morning With Danny Hillis
Have had a very productive couple of days recently on the book,
talking at length with various folks who in one way or another
have very unique views on the search world. Before I get to
Tim Koogle, who I spoke to this morning, or Shana Fisher and
Geoff Yang (yesterday afternoon), I wanted to talk about my
visit with Danny Hillis.
On Tuesday I flew down to LA to visit with Danny, who founded
Thinking Machines. After that he became an imagineer at Disney
for five or so years ("The best 'real job' you can have," he
quipped). Danny has a million great ideas and is something of a
polymath. He recently founded Applied Minds as a way to put that
skill to work (he partnered with Bran Ferren, himself a scary
smart polymath).
Danny has a lot of things to say about search, it's an area he
finds rich in implications, in particular as it relates to some
of the long-term projects he's involved in, such as the Clock
of the Long Now. We spent some time riffing on the future of
search, and its current limitations, but ... I get ahead of
myself. What I really thought was incredible was the playground
Danny and Bran have created for themselves at Applied Minds.
You pull up to Applied Minds unimpressed. It's in an industrial
area of Glendale (who knew there even were industrial areas of
Glendale?) - windowless one-story warehouses with nameplates
like "Airfoil Distribution, Ltd" or "Light Plumbing Fixture
Manufacturing, Inc." Once inside the non-descript edifice, you're
greeted by a low-ceilinged version of an internet start up - the
requisite espresso maker, late-modern furniture, flat-screen
displays, etc. But really, nothing worth writing home about. In
fact, the place felt a bit cramped and claustrophobic.
That all changed once Danny came out to meet me. After chit
chatting for a few minutes, he took me to a small room - no
wider than my outstretched arms - at the far end of which stood
one of those classic red English phone booths. We stepped
inside - a bit cramped - and Danny lifted the receiver and
dictated a passphrase of some sort. Presto - the rear wall of
the booth opened, and we stepped into - nerdvana.
wonka1 From a cramped phone booth into massive pure-white-lit
space two-stories high, adorned with all manner of things
strange and beautiful. Over to one side stood the Terminator-
like skeleton of a forty-foot dinosaur, it's 15-foot pneumatic
legs gleaming and exposed. Nearly blending into the walls,
itself painted movie-set white, was a tricked out Hummer-like
RV refitted as a communications/command center - complete with
built-in kitchen and bedroom. The space was a great big project
lab, with happy geeks combing over various assemblages of
wiring, motors, processors and plans like ants on a summer
picnic. It's Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for geeks.
Applied Minds works this way: Bram and Danny and any number of
partners contract with Very Large Companies or Organizations to
think outside the box and come up with solutions to problems
they might have. The dinosaur, for example, was a solution to
Disney's problem of overlong lines for its rides (solution: make
the non-ride portions of the park more interesting by having
dinosaurs roaming the streets...). Danny and Bram have, in
essence, created a lab where they get paid to think orthogonal
to a problem, and invent/design/prototype just about any kind
of solution they can dream up. I toured at least four massive
warehouses full of projects (and they have more buildings up
in SF), many of which I am bound to not report upon, but all
followed this basic ethic: let's imagine a new way to approach
what otherwise is an intractable/frustrating/unglamorous
business problem. Clients include GM, Herman Miller, and many
others, including some defense contractors. The company employs
a studio model, with only 50 full time staffers, but hundreds
involved at any given time on dozens of projects.
So one can imagine when Danny and I did sit down to talk about
search, we'd have an interesting conversation. Besides the fact
that his designs for Thinking Machines are now de facto standards
for platforms like Google, we ranged from his idea of Aristotle,
a Primer like AI tutor, to creating an economy of ideas through
a new kind of search infrastructure. It's fun to live in the
future for a while, after so much reporting in the past and
present.
For the details of our talk, well, the book is coming along
slowly but surely...
Posted by John Battelle at June 17, 2004 02:30 PM | TrackBack.']]>
The other two e-mail's came from Steve Joseph. The third was
a political statement, and the fourth an apology summarizing
why the first was not completely true. Because the fourth is
copyrighted and they ask that it not be distributed without
permission, I have included the third e-mail, with comments
from the fourth e-mail interspersed in [brackets]:
<![CDATA[ `Subject: Interesting Analysis
[The e-mail I just forwarded to you is one of those "urban legends".
I'm sorry I didn't check before I forwarded it.]
At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new
constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish
history professor at The University of Edinborough) had this to
say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years
prior. "A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply
cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will
continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that
they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.
From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates
who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the
result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose
fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."
[Likely fictitious. Actual name Lord Woodhouselee, Alexander
Fraser, who wrote several books in the late 1700's and early
1800's. The actual quote could not be found among his writings
in the Library of Congress.]
"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the
beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those
200 years, these nations always progressed through the following
sequence:
> From Bondage to spiritual faith;
> From spiritual faith to great courage;
> From courage to liberty;
> From liberty to abundance;
> From abundance to complacency;
> From complacency to apathy;
> From apathy to dependence;
> From dependence back into bondage."
Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law,
St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts
concerning the most recent presidential election:
> Population of counties won by:
Gore=127 million
Bush=143 million
[appears accurate]
> Square miles of land won by:
Gore=580,000
Bush=2,2427,000
> States won by:
Gore=19
Bush=29
[Appears to have been written before Florida and New Mexico.
Actually 30 for Bush and 20 for Gore.]
> Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Gore=13.2
Bush=2.1
[Wrong. Actually 5.2 for the average Gore county and 3.3
for the average Bush county. Dividing by the number of
people per county, it is 6.5 per Gore county and 4.1 per
Bush county.]
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory
Bush won was mostly the land owned by the tax-paying citizens
of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed
those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living
off government welfare..."
[Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University is not the source
of any of the statistics or the text attributed to him. The
research came from Sheriff Jay Printz in Montana, who did not
do the research either. The legend grew as it was passed from
individual to individual, adding that a law professor did the
research because it sounded better.]
Olson believes the U.S. is now somewhere between the "complacency
and "apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy;
with some 40 percent of the nation's population already having
reached the "governmental dependency" phase. Help everyone
realize just how much is at stake in this Election Year and that
apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom ... get out and VOTE!']]>
There isn't a way to respond to lies and manipulation with
tact. At the same time, it is easy for me to see how people
can be led to make up stories and exaggerate facts because of
how important the message is to get out and vote this year.
There typically is a grain of truth in both the democrat and
the republican political propaganda. Life is all about
recognizing truth, so we can be free, and sharing our insights
with tact and love. I do hope I am getting better at this.
On Wednesday Mike Dunn was talking about where the company is,
the fact Quantum lost a lot of money last month, and that at
the Board Meeting on Thursday the Board might decide to get
rid of the interpretation portion of GDC. It is nice to work
with people who tell things like they are, and it was more
than a little unsettling, after finding a little bit of
financial stability. I didn't tell Andrea about this
conversation until after the Board Meeting, and after learning
there is additional investment money being put in to expand
the work we have been doing. Hopefully this showed some tact.
On Friday Cindy Peevey and I had a meeting with ConocoPhillips
about setting up a GDCMOD database for Nigeria. The two men
we met with are senior executives, and the leader has a very
strong personality. He aggressively challenged several of the
statements I made, and he did this with little tact. I liked
him. Reminded me of myself. And although drained of energy
when we left, I felt like I had made my points, made them with
tact, and he had been receptive to my responses. Time will
tell. I was home early. Rachel and I went out to dinner at
The Saltgrass Steakhouse. It is almost as good as Milt's,
except for all of the people who were there. As I looked at
all of the young couples with young children, I couldn't
believe they could afford to be there, and I wondered why I
seldom take Andrea or you kids out to dinner. Oh well!
I got a phone call from Christian Singfield in Australia about
the work he has been doing in Malysia. I took the call, and
of needless to say was ignoring Rachel while on the phone. By
the time I was off of the phone, Rachel was on the phone, and
she stayed on the phone for about 5 minutes after I hung up.
She was paying her phone bill on line, and demonstrating to me,
by example, that my phone conversation did not show a lot of
tact. Oh well!
Yesterday I went for a run, took Matt to work, got my new
glasses, got a haircut (and was offered a 1/2 hour massage
for $30 or an hour massage for $50, with a tactless promise
`I would really like it'), bought some groceries, did my
laundry, and worked on my Book of Mormon data mining project.
I watched a cowboy movie, The Hoosiers, and 13 Days (the movie
about the Cuban Crisis). I didn't realize before that the
Cuban Missile Crisis happened a week before my 12th birthday.
Matt used the computer when I wasn't and when he wasn't
working on my Book of Mormon project to play some of his
games. Over the last week he has sold 5 of the Shaggy Bag
beanbags, and his commission and check for this next work
period will be about $250. He is saving some for school,
paying his tithing, and using the rest for clothes and movies
and things like computer games. Rachel had a date last night,
and seemed very happy about it. I reminded her about the
Katy curfew as a way to encourage her to be home at a
reasonable hour, attempting to demonstrate some tact.
I talked to Andrea this morning. Heather won the gold medal
for the half hour `Criterian Race,' the silver medal for the
40 mile bike race, and the bronze medal for overall biking.
Heather, it is pretty impressive how there can be good things
come from me not having enough money to buy you a car (or
even to pay for tuition for the last year of your college).
Heather, I'm proud of how you have taken obstacles and turned
them into something you obviously enjoy, and which is good
for you.
In sacrament meeting most of the priesthood in the ward sang
the intermediate song. After sacrament meeting the Relief
Society had three chocolate chip cookies for each priesthood
holder for Father's Day. With little tact, I asked Sister
Salt if she remembered how she felt when the ward handed out
roses to the Mom's on Mother's Day. She said, `I must not
have been here.' I remember years of being there and the
tact, or lack there of, associated with these events.
There were a lot of conversations and thoughts this week
concerning tact. The sad part is I can't remember them.
I asked Rachel, and she couldn't remember either. Maybe
we are both getting Alzheimer's? Oh well! I said with
tact."
I'm interested in sharing weekly a "thoughtlet" (little statements
of big thoughts which mean a lot to me) with you because I know how
important the written word can be. I am concerned about how easy
it is to drift and forget our roots and our potential among all of
distractions of daily life. To download any of these thoughtlets
go to http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets or e-mail me at
rnelson@walden3d.com.
With all my love,
Dad
(H. Roice Nelson, Jr.)