The epiphany wasn’t so much remembering what gets me excited – it was how other challenges feel by comparison.  Lately I’ve been considering building another classical guitar project in the wood shop.  I built my last (and first) guitar while still in college 25 years ago.  Guitar building requires extraordinary patience and a high degree of exactitude in certain operations (namely the cutting of frets and placement of the bridge & saddle).  But the rewards are great – the home builder can take the time to fine-tune the sound board and use high quality woods that would normally be found in guitars retailing for several thousands of dollars.  The more I contemplate setting up my shop for instrument building, the more excited I get.

So here’s the epiphany – while there is a personal challenge in rising to the technical proficiency needed to execute another guitar, that problem has largely been “solved.”  Sure, the challenge is new to me, but there are plenty of people out there who know how to build a decent guitar. What I’d really like to do is branch out and explore alternatives to the standard design. Recently some luthiers have tinkered with using space-age composite materials in the sound board, and several now include sound ports on the side of the guitar near the neck, both as “monitors” for the player as well as to enhance the overall tonal palette.  Oh, and let’s not forget “fan fretted” guitars – these instruments look like they were built while the maker was staring into a fun-house mirror. All of these are innovations that solve particular problems of playability.

But… as anyone who has invested years in research will tell you, it takes a long time to become acquainted with a domain and develop that instinct of where the interesting problems (and solutions) lie. As the article cited above points out, most of the time you fail, but you get a little more insight into how to ask the question better, and which avenues might be more promising next time. And researchers benefit enormously from reading about the trials of their peers (I’d argue that we don’t publish enough about our failures – the community benefits from hearing those stories, too).

Will I ever know enough about instrument building to branch out into a promising innovation? It’s a daunting prospect, but then again, what else do I have but time? Bob Taylor in his book Guitar Lessons points out the virtues of getting an early start.  He regretted not planting a particular tree back when we wasn’t sure whether he’d be keeping his current house – had he planted the tree, it would have matured by now and he could be enjoying (literally) the fruits of his labor. Sometimes innovations are begun on a hunch and take 10 years to reach fruition. But if I don’t begin, I’ll never know.

Stay tuned for a progress update as the days grow shorter and I start spending more evening time at the work bench.

That is what recovering from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) feels like.

After a brief false start, I’ve now been on CPAP therapy for about a week.  It truly feels like a second chance at life. I was lapsing into depression, had stopped even trying to exercise after work, could barely drag myself out of bed in the morning… basically, life was a drag. After a week my body is starting to feel like its old self (I put in a couple of intense biking days last weekend), and the rest of my mind/spirit is sorting itself out.  I’m not sure how long full healing will take, but I’m feeling very patient now that treatment is at hand.

People ask how long I’ve been suffering the effects of OSA, and it’s difficult to pinpoint. My best guess is that it started setting over the winter, but the effects can be gradual and cumulative, so it might have been even earlier.  You’d have to ask the people around me – when did I start acting like the walking dead?  ;-)

My enthusiasm for work (both small-w work and the Work of Life) is returning, but I’m still feeling a bit out of sorts. I hope to return to updating this blog on a more regular basis soon, but again, am remaining patient.

It feels good to be back among the living!

I took the home sleep test last week (wired up to a few sensors that all fed into a wrist-watch data recorder), but will probably have to wait another week for results, and then more time to see a doc and get the next steps of treatment rolling.  For sanity’s sake I’ve set July 1 as the day when I’ll be getting a proper night’s sleep again.  I can suck anything up for another month.

I miss writing, and playing music, and having that inner spark that smiles at life. Right now I feel like I’m just existing.  Have to remember that this too shall pass…

Till next time!

What this means practically is that other than work and some exercise, I’ve really been off the grid lately. Whenever I’m even slightly cognitively impaired (illness or fatigue) my writing is the first thing that suffers, so I just haven’t had the juice to blog lately.  I’m confident my energy and writing will come back; I just need to be patient.

This is just a quick post to blow some dust off the blog spot – I look forward to posting more regularly in the future.

I’m not sure what exactly sparked off this latest thought, but I’ve been noticing the distinction between teaching first-hand and second-hand knowledge.  Teaching something we know first-hand is pretty obvious – I can teach a child how to tie a shoelace, or a colleague how to specify a statistical model. I don’t have to draw on external resources to provide the content, although teaching aids (pictures, text books, etc) can help embellish an explanation.

Secondary knowledge is something I don’t have direct experience with, and here it gets interesting.  Most of us adults (who aren’t professional historians) know something of the founding of the United States, the framing of the Constitution, the Revolutionary War, etc.  We can also tell these stories to our children, but how sure are we about the knowledge we’re imparting?  Telling any sort of cultural myth generally entails passing along a story or knowledge that one has not directly experienced; we serve as conduits for a communal story.

Okay, so far no problem – there are things we know directly (and teach/coach) and other things we pass along (such as historical narratives).  Now think of middle school science teachers.  Are they teaching primary or secondary knowledge? It’s an interesting question.  Many are probably generally well-versed in textbook knowledge (they may have even majored in a science), but to what extent have they internalized the knowledge as their own?  I could probably do a decent job of teaching a basic physics class, but I was never really a practicing physicist, and know little beyond the first year college course.  So what would I be doing, other than interpreting/explaining what was already in a text book? What would I add of my own?  And does it matter?

A while back a friend of mine asked me how to get rid of these whitish rings that had appeared on his dining table. I knew I’d read about those in a book on finishing, and sure enough I was able to look it up and respond with a remedy – try mild heat, and perhaps gentle abrasion with steel wool.  But I also warned him that I had never actually tried any of these remedies myself, so couldn’t vouch for them or for unforeseen consequences.  It was an unsatisfying experience.

In a similar vein, I’ve certainly read about wood movement (the tendency of wood to expand and contract along particular dimensions with varying humidity) and how to design for it, but I’ve never actually experienced, say, a panel blowing out of a frame or a drawer getting stuck in its casing.  On the other hand, I’ve both read and experienced what can happen if an off-cut catches the back part of a spinning table saw blade, or what a bowl feels like as it flies off of a lathe and into my face shield. I know that you shouldn’t brake around corners on a fast mountain bike descent, and I know why you shouldn’t do so (having done it and experienced the consequences).

So back to my question: when does it matter that a teacher possesses first-hand, experiential knowledge of a subject, versus largely second-hand, “received wisdom?”  We intuitively prefer the former, and I suspect there are varying degrees of the latter. That is, I was never a math major, but have a reasonable intuition about some aspects of middle- and high-school math.  I certainly know real-number algebra inside-out.  But – although I took a course in abstract algebra as an undergraduate – I know I don’t have the deeper connection to theories of algebras, how systems of domains and operators come together coherently. So I can help a high school freshman struggling with his or her algebra homework, but there are limits to what I can teach.

I’m starting to examine my own balance between first- and second-hand knowledge, both at work and in general life. It’s starting to feel like exploration – we go out and cover some territory, come to know it well, but hear from fellow travelers about what lies over the next hill.  Perhaps we even pass that folklore along to others, along with our own hard-won knowledge of familiar terrain. And we make judgments about risks – the consequences of mis-informing a fellow traveler about the safety of that frozen river, for example, could be catastrophic.

As I wrote, this will become a thread I’ll broaden and deepen; it weaves through a number of areas of my life/experience.

Tonight I was again getting back on the path of reviving my musical interests (somewhere between the paths of hacking and mastery) while my partner was playing on the computer. As I was winding down she joked “how about some Stairway to Heaven?”  The funny thing is, I could immediately play a jazzy improv version of StH, followed by a bluegrassy version, followed by the straight version. It was probably the cleanest piece I played all night. I swear I haven’t played any of those in years, and even then just once in a blue moon while goofing around. Stairway to Heaven was one of the first “real” guitar pieces I learned when I picked up the instrument in high school (and who in my generation didn’t learn that as part of their repertoire?), and I remember drilling away at it all summer, hours on end.

Most of us have probably heard the “10,000 hour rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, based on research by Anders Ericsson. Without picking apart the details, Ericsson claims that one needs about 10,000 hours of focused practice to acquire a skill to the point the rest of us would recognize as “master level.”  I should go back and read Ericsson’s original writings on expertise rather than popular interpretations of his ideas – I’d like to understand more about the, well, recalcitrance (if that’s the right word) of the human brain/nervous system to ingrain new patterns.

Huh. I realize my memory of some basic educational psychology has faded over the years since graduate school (somehow, I can’t recall classic readings on demand the way I can pop up with Stairway to Heaven).  But I remember a more-or-less evolutionary argument for why our systems are biased toward a certain conservatism.  With notable exceptions (e.g., the single trial learning that occurs the first time one encounters a hungry tiger), humans are creatures of habit.  A major section of Alva Noe’s book Out of Our Heads: Why you are not your brain and other lessons from the biology of consciousness dealt with habit, and how we probably couldn’t get through the day without most of our activities being automated, a function of subconscious habit. We simply can’t handle that much complexity in real time without “off-loading” the processing to other, more automatic parts of our brain/bodies. Imagine, to use a really dumb example, what would happen if you had to consciously remember to draw each breath!  Then coordinate – as a toddler – swinging one leg forward, transferring your weight, swinging the next leg forward… and don’t forget to breathe!  Oh, and look ahead!

Hmmm… it’s late and I don’t have a lot of mojo for writing (still on the once-a-week kick, though!), so perhaps I’ll come back to this mid-week.  Mainly, though, I’m seeing that the path of mastery (lots of persistence and focused practice) is rooted deeply in our physiology. Cursing and wishing it wasn’t so… well, that expresses some frustration, and then it’s back to practice.

I do want to hang out with this idea of practice.  There’s an idea from Aristotle that goes roughly “we become that which we practice being.”  I’m particularly interested in the non-school activities of kids nowadays, and what they “practice” throughout the day, both in semi-formal settings (sports teams, after-school clubs, street gangs) and in less well-structured settings. More on that later.

Last Tuesday I went for a trail run (first one of the season). Near the trailhead is a site where the city tree trimmers drop off the logs and limbs from major trees they’ve taken down. Local scavengers (the 2-legged variety) come by to take home some free firewood, while others (like myself) look for wood to squirrel away in our shops.  On Tuesday there were a couple of folks there with a portable saw mill slicing up some nice redwood slabs.  I was limited to what I could physically lift and carry over to the trunk of my car (as well as what I could store in my garage/shop), so I walked away with a couple of pieces of oak, what looked like crotches and other gnarly pieces with severed limbs and knots sticking every which way out of it.  These can often hold beautiful gems of wood grain on the inside.

I split one piece in half, chucked it onto the lathe (without even rough-cutting it into a circle), and started turning away the outer bark. There were some inclusions (bark that had grown inward between the limbs that met in the crotch) that promised an interesting pattern. Of course, they were also structural weaknesses – would the bowl hold once I started hollowing and thinning the walls?  Well, as the pictures below show, it stayed together.

That was a good exercise over the course of a couple of evenings. Having free wood to play with allows me to experiment and take chances with design choices – I have nothing to lose but my time, and even that is in service of learning and improving. As it turns out I might have tweaked the profile of the final bowl just a little, but overall (so far) it looks like a serviceable bowl for serving nuts or snacks at a party.  Whether it survives the drying process (which could take several months) is another question. “Green” bowls distort upon drying, and the structural weaknesses in the wood could decide to give way.  That’s part of the delayed learning process.

So this project was a small learning segment on a much longer journey of mastery. In fact, that’s what most of the week was like: I learned a little bit more about some technical aspects of my day job, had some minor breakthroughs in my relationship, continued practicing music… just staying open and aware and letting the learning happen.

The late George Leonard wrote a book on “Mastery.”  A PDF copy can be found here at scribd. It’s a fun, easy read, and very insightful. A keen observer of human learning (his own and his Aikido students), he’s characterized some typical “paths” that we take as learners. His characterizations have what we in the biz call “face validity” – we recognize the truth in them intuitively.

First up, the path of mastery:

If you think of the vertical dimension as “progress” in a general sense, and the horizontal dimension as time, this is Leonard’s take on the master’s path. It involves lots of time spent on plateaus, simply practicing our practice. Then (although the detail isn’t apparent in this diagram, but I’ve heard him describe it this way), things start to fall apart – there’s a small dip before the growth spurt. Growth tends to happen in spurts, and then there’s a settling back down into another plateau. As they say on the bottle: lather, rinse, repeat. This is mastery.

There are a couple of critical components to this path. The first is that most time is spent making very little discernible progress. That can be very discouraging to people who like instant gratification or quick fixes. The second is the somewhat chaotic nature of the growth spurts. In particular, that sense of things actually getting worse before they start to really improve is paradoxical, but I believe it signifies the beginning of some significant cognitive/neurological/whatever reorganizations. A time of “things falling apart” is emphatically not the time to give up in the pursuit, but to hang in there just a little while longer – great learnings are just around the corner.

Leonard’s three other paths are pathological cases (no pun intended) of how we fall off the path of mastery.

The Dabler

The dabler’s path is to start something with enthusiasm, experience that first rapid growth spurt, but when the inevitable plateau comes around say to oneself “this is it? I’m bored… time to move on”.  Variations on this theme include “I guess I wasn’t cut out for this” or “I guess I have no talent.”  So we move onto different activities or fields, and experience the same dynamic…

The Obsessive

The obsessive dives in 110% to a new activity. S/he attempts to prolong that initial growth spurt through increasing effort, refusing to accept any form of the plateau. “If you’re not growing you’re dying” is the motto.  Ultimately this simply isn’t sustainable – nobody can keep improving at a constant pace forever (I claim that as if it’s a fact, but it’s just a generalization from personal observation. If anybody knows of a counter-example, please fill me in!).  In athletics we see the injury-prone athlete who doesn’t know how to recover or taper effort.

The Hacker

This one is my personal nemesis.  The hacker starts off looking a lot like the path of mastery. Growth spurts, plateaus, more growth spurts. But then there’s that plateau that never seems to end. What’s happening here is the appearance of steady practice, but not masterful practice. And although I cite this as my personal bugaboo, we all probably do all of these in various areas of our lives. I enjoy bicycling, but my mountain biking skills haven’t noticeably improved over the past decade. When I was training for a century I was on a good mastery path, but then ramped down the effort during the fall and winter. My history with music is one of very long plateaus, dropped interest, and then a long time spent regaining the facility I had when I last stopped.

(Well, I guess I found something to write about, even if it’s just reflecting on someone else’s writing)

I’d like to – obviously – stay on the path of mastery in as much of my life as possible. I’m doing it in my primary relationship – I’ve experienced more steady, genuine growth here than in any other time of my life, and have also never worked as diligently at it. I’m trying to stay attentive to my growth in woodworking and woodturning. The challenge for me at the moment (as has been the case in the past) is musical – staying at it when sometimes what I’m playing doesn’t flow very well.

Flow. Leonard cites Csikszentmihalyi’s work on Flow as being a characteristic state of one on the master’s path. In my day job as a researcher I experience flow frequently, getting lost in my work, not knowing where the time has gone.  That’s one place I don’t worry about falling off the master’s path. Similarly in the woodshop – I can stay at a task all day, plodding along at a relaxed pace, engrossed with what I’m doing.  I think the trick for me in music is to find the style and level that lets me flow. I’ve played mostly classical guitar, which is technically demanding and not always the most soul-satisfying genre of music. I’m been branching out more this past year, taking classes in celtic and folk music, trying to find that style that makes it effortless to pick up an instrument and practice on a daily basis.

So there – I found something to write after all.  I do recommend Leonard’s book (available on Amazon and probably still in print at brick-and-mortar stores) as a fun read, particularly for my friends in education. And of course, I’d love to hear your own stories of mastery (and/or other paths) in the comments section below.

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.

*nods head* Seems simple enough. Discovering my world – both inner and outer – that’s what meditation/therapy/research/exploration is all about, so I get that, I think.  Then there’s the call to action:  ”with all your heart give yourself to it.”  That one stopped me in my tracks, when I realized that I had no idea how to do that.

During the post-meditation discussion I brought this point up.  I know how to apply myself to some goals.  Improve my time riding up Old La Honda? A combination of good preparation (training) and knowing when to “kick it” and when to back off cruising up the hills. I know what it feels like to “pour on the effort.”  But how does one “pour it on” when giving oneself to the world?

A colleague reminded me that perhaps the metaphor of “leaning in” or “pouring on” wasn’t quite right. What if we adopted the practice of “opening up the heart?”  Ah!  That brought back memories. I’d started practicing Aikido when I first moved to California, and trained regularly for 4 or 5 years until I started graduate school. One of the basic principles – and one that has to be internalized to the core – is this dual idea of being grounded/centered and being open/receptive. Grounding/centering while being open/receptive allows immense energy (or “ki”) to flow – it’s a feeling of intense aliveness or vitality when one is “in the zone.”

I found this video on YouTube – someone testing for a 4th degree black belt going through the “randori” exercise (defending against a multiple person grappling attack, sort of like being pursued by zombies on speed).

As one can imagine, the energy gets intense when multiple people are coming at you. The examinee has to keep moving, using one attacker to block another, inserting himself decisively when there’s an opening, giving ground when needing to dissipate energy. But if you watch carefully, even on his knees he’s firmly centered, both allowing and controlling the action around him. This is an extreme example of “giving one’s heart to it” without “leaning into it”  (in fact, “leaning into it” is really bad form in Aikido, and is usually an aspect of an attack that’s most readily exploited).

So perhaps “giving one’s heart” isn’t about trying harder or applying oneself more diligently in the classic sense of putting one’s shoulder to the boulder. As I mentioned in the end of my last blog entry, Ecclesiastes suggests that most of the efforts of man are “vanity and chasing after wind.” I’m grateful to be reminded of an alternative way of being fully present and alive – to be centered, grounded, and open-hearted.  That too takes effort, but it’s a very different flavor of effort. For one, it’s non-directional, and non goal oriented.  As I continue to practice and observe perhaps I’ll find better ways to write about it. Personally, the memories of Aikido practice are the touchstone, but other people will have different experiences that resonate.

As for the “discover your world” part of the mission… I’m not sure that’s as obvious as I’d made it out to be, either. I’ll have to keep sitting with that one (which I think is part of the point).

• I was reminded – again – that I have to regulate my media diet. As I posted in an earlier blog about “right involvement,” there’s paying attention to bear witness, then there’s being consumed by the hysteria and hyperbole that passes for political discourse. I’m getting better at closing the browser window when I feel my blood pressure rise.
• I was reminded that it’s possible to improve by being aware of one’s shortcomings, focusing on how to overcome them, and putting that learning into practice. There’s a bowl turning story here I’ll get to shortly.
• After a week of not-very-inspiring work I learned that there are limits on how long I can go without some “juice” or passion in my work day.
• I learned/remembered that the race is not always to the swift, not the battle to the strong.  The American Educational Research Association annual meeting is coming around, and so is ample opportunity to compare my professional life to those of friends and colleagues. I’m getting tired of my inner narratives that say I “fizzled,” or “didn’t live up to my potential” professionally. When I stop comparing, I’m happy with where I am and where I’m headed, and am resolved to use this year’s conference as an opportunity to reconnect with my interests and passions.

I worked on two projects this week that followed different trajectories. First, the bowl project. As I alluded to in my last blog post, I started over with a solid block of wood to keep my design constraints relatively free. Overall, this was a very successful strategy. I turned the outside profile of the bowl, actually finish sanded and oiled it, and turned my attention to hollowing out the inside.  Wham! the bowl (now a solid piece of wood) goes flying off the lathe, into the wall, and onto the concrete floor.  Bruised, but otherwise fine.  Re-mount it, start to hollow… and wham! off it goes again, this time splitting the spigot I was using to chuck it to the lathe.  Uh oh.  Clearly I’m doing something wrong.  So I re-glue the spigot and hit the books.

It turns out that, yes, my approach to hollowing was off in a couple of ways. First, I should have been making steep cuts starting near the center and pushing directly in toward the bottom. That is, I should have been taking shavings “down” the bowl.  Instead, I was cutting “across” the top, which made dangerous “catches” more likely.  Also, I was using way too much force.  So I sharpened up the gouges, re-chucked the bowl, and started making gentle cuts down the center.  No catches!  I needed a lot of patience – it took 2 or 3 hours to get most of the bowl hollowed out – and lots of tool re-grinding (it turns out rosewood is both one of the hardest woods to turn and one that dulls tools most quickly). But I made it through the entire rough hollowing, finish hollowing, and finish shaping without losing it once. I’d actually learned something, and reinforced it through practice.  (Normally I’d post a picture of the bowl, but it’s a gift for a friend, and I don’t want to spoil the surprise. It will make an appearance some week soon)

I still ran into problems – I nearly turned the bottom too thin, and as the walls thinned “chatter” set in and caused some scoring on the inner walls.  It took lots of sanding to get those marks out – I couldn’t manage to do it with a gouge, and had pretty much run out of extra wood to play with (not to self – when I think a bowl wall is a little too thick, it’s probably going to be just right by the time I’m done with finish cuts). But in the end, it’s one of the prettiest bowls I’ve made to date. I took great satisfaction both in conquering my learning challenge and in producing a nice piece.

Now for the second project. A paper for the upcoming conference, that I only reluctantly submitted a conference proposal for in the first place. (Because so many of my projects are collaborative – as opposed to most university work where there’s a single principal investigator and a team of graduate students – I ended up submitting this “for the team”). So from the get go, my heart was not in this paper. I won’t go into a lot of reasons why – it’s enough to say there’s no “juice” in it for me.  But it pays for my ticket to New Orleans next month.

Both projects were struggles this week. The bowl was frustrating and even a bit scary – I just didn’t now how I was going to keep the bowl from detaching itself and launching into whatever happened to be in the way. But taking a break for reflection and re-reading an expert’s writings helped take the mystery out of the problem. I’d probably read this particular book chapter 3 or 4 times, but now (having a specific problem in mind) I paid attention to particular details (the angle of the gouge in particular, and the direction of force) and had an “aha!” moment.

The paper is a struggle in another sense. The only challenge is organizing a very complicated process with lots of moving parts into a coherent narrative. Basically, we’re trying to describe something that on paper appears to be a neat and orderly engineering design/prototyping process, but in reality had lots of fits and starts, a bit of “hacking around” to get us moving, and significant revisions to the original ideas that launched the project.  How to tell this story coherently is a challenge.  It too has some “aha” moments (such as when my colleague helps me remember why we made some decisions that weren’t making sense to me), but it’s not been satisfying to write.

I think it comes down to two qualities, and those are lessons I’ve learned and apparently have to keep re-learning until they become habituated: personal expression and making a difference for somebody.  I get engaged when I’m writing/building/crafting something that has some of “me” in it. The bowl – as simple as the shape was – followed my own aesthetic judgments. The paper feels like a regurgitation of a historical process.  Yes, I had input into that process, and directed portions of it, but it feels like a pretty indirect expression of my ideas.

The bowl is a gift for a couple.  If I’m lucky, they’ll both appreciate it, actually use it, and keeping it as a decorative object will enhance the beauty of their home. The impact won’t really reach beyond them (and their occasional dinner guests). The paper will be read by at least one person (the discussant at the conference panel), and might be downloaded by one or two dozen curious individuals. Will it have an impact on anybody’s (professional) life?  Personally, I doubt it. And if it does, it could easily lead down a path I don’t support (basically, it’s about designing tests for college students, and the last thing we need to do is impose more external testing on institutions).

So tomorrow I’m back to work at my day job, wrapping up this paper and sending it off into the ether. I’ll be in “satisfaction deficit” by the end of this week, and really need to turn my attention to more meaningful work (which, thankfully, I’ll have opportunities to do). I hope to be able to deliver my bowl this week too, and am keeping my fingers crossed that my friends like it. Not for egotistical reasons (although I enjoy a good compliment as much as anyone), but because I genuinely want them to be happy with it. That personal connection means a lot to me, perhaps more than the larger academic audience that might read my “day job” productions.

I’ll close with a favorite line from Ecclesiastes(12:12):

Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

PS:

I’m not a biblical scholar or reader by any stretch, but an old employer/mentor/former book publisher and theologian turned me onto Ecclesiastes.  ”Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.”   Basically, my reading of it cautions against “chasing after wind” – acquiring material riches for their own sake, or spouting off to gain in reputation. Overall, it’s a constant reminder that all turns to dust.  Perhaps this isn’t the intended meaning, but I also take from it the reminder that relationships and love – in the here and now – are precious things. While they too eventually turn to dust, they give our lives meaning and depth that mere “production” for the sake of production cannot.

Perhaps a major reason for the popularity of bowl turning is the belief that you can produce a good bowl without having to do any formal design in advance. The wood is supposed to “speak” to you and thus empower you to free the wondrous bowl hidden within the unpromising blank – I may be deficient in the necessary spirituality, but wood doesn’t speak to me all that often or all that clearly.

Darlow is not exaggerating about the mythos of wood “speaking” to the turner. Many “artists statements” accompanying gallery turnings contain similar language – so-and-so follows the natural properties of the wood and is never sure what is going to emerge in advance. The remainder of Darlow’s book argues that 1) good design is critical to avoid a lot of wasted time (and wood), and 2) the only way to become expert enough to “listen” to wood is to have spent a lot of labor turning out well-designed turnings.

I start with Darlow’s quote because I turned out a very unsatisfying bowl earlier in the week. The sides were too steep, and took a sharp curve into a non-footed bottom.  The shape was, frankly, dumpy.  Too deep for its width, too.  Sadly, I used a really pretty block of rosewood and some uniformly black ebony in the construction – good material gone to a “learning opportunity.”

The shape that I turned out was not the one I intended to make.  I actually did lay out a design and thought I’d dimensioned the critical rings of the bowl blank to fit. It turns out (no pun intended) I made some technical errors in constructing the rings that limited the amount of material I had to work with. Once I knocked the corners off of the wood, I didn’t have a lot of extra thickness left with which to slope the sides. That, and I probably just wasn’t paying close enough attention overall.

So today I decided to start over, and rather than construct a segmented bowl, I’m starting the “old fashioned” way with a solid block of wood (well, actually 3 layers face-glued together – two thick slabs of rosewood topped by a 1/2 inch of curly maple for the rim).  Even for designs where segmentation isn’t used as a decorative feature, I’ve been trying to use a segmented (stacked concentric ring) design in order to save precious wood. The “traditional” method entails using a solid block (or just half a log, sometimes from a freshly fallen tree) and hollowing out the interior on the lathe (as opposed to “designing in” the hollow by building the rough bowl up from concentric rings). This generates an impressive volume of shavings, and when turning large bowls, there’s often enough wood in the interior to create a whole new smaller bowl, if it could be salvaged.

But at this point I’m tired of taking a week to cut and glue the rings (with several overnight drying steps in the middle). I’m going to start with a solid block.  This way I can shape the outer contour to exactly what I’m looking for, and then hollow out the middle to match. I’m not exactly going to let the wood “speak” to me (I know what shape I’m roughly after), but there is going to be some fine-tuning as I look at what I’ve wrought and tinker with the proportions.  It’s also true, as an artist/educator once told me, that one never approaches the canvas with a completely worked out idea of what the painting will be. The partially finished painting “talks back” to the painter, and through this dialog the artist discovers what s/he really meant to be putting down on canvas.

This experience has led me to think through these concepts of design, constraints, and freedom.  By starting with a single block of wood, I’m imposing minimal constraints: the overall diameter and height of the bowl. Wide rim, narrow rim, S-curve, concave, out-flowing… there are a gazillion design choices available with that block. When I sketch an outline and plan the rings of a segmented bowl, I’m pretty much freezing in place the profile I’ve sketched. This is fine, as long as 1) I’m sure the profile I sketched on paper will look good in 3 dimensions, and 2) I don’t make any technical mistakes that result in an altered profile.

Another way to think about this is to ask “when do critical choices get made?”  If I sketch up front and construct rings to match, all of my design choices are locked in before I’ve started to actually see the 3-d product.  If I start with a solid block of wood, I’m making a series of micro-decisions every time I shave a little more wood off the bowl.  Like sculpting marble, this is a “subtractive” process – we can’t add wood back on once we’ve shaved it off. In fact, if I’m puzzling over a particularly important cut, I can stop the lathe, stare at it, or even go take a break and come back.

The price I pay for leaving lots of options open is to waste extra material.  In a sense, I have the wood available to make an infinite variety of bowls, and with each cut, I cut away some of those possibilities until what’s left is my final product. This, then, seems to be the trade-off:  leave my options open, but possibly waste a lot of resources.  Or, plan for efficient use of material, but constrain my choices down the road.

Somehow I feel like this touches a life lesson.  I’ve seen similar issues come up in software design – when do you lock down design choices?  In the early 1990′s Apple and IBM combined forces to create a new operating system by co-founding the Taligent corporation. Taligent eventually folded without ever producing a product, and some of my friends at the time suggested a big part of the problem was that nobody was willing to constrain design decisions. All of the code was to be “object oriented” and fully extensible, to a fault. By leaving lots of room for flexibility in the design, they never actually produced anything (of course, that’s not the whole story, but a relevant part).

In my current work as an education researcher I often see a tension between pre-specifying research questions and a design on the one hand, and desiring fully open-ended exploration on the other. Sometimes when we lay out questions, instrumentation, and samples well in advance, we only discover mid-way through that we should have been asking a different question, or talking to a different population, and by then it’s too late to change course. On the other hand, were we to keep all of our options open, we could potentially waste a lot of money chasing down dead ends, talking to the wrong people, and ultimately never publishing any findings.

So – my thought for the week. Awareness of design choices, constraints, and trade-offs. I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about this – just that I’ve experienced it in art, engineering, and research.  It’s feeling like one of those “universal truths” that needs to be condensed into a pithy nugget (which means somebody has probably already done so).

During a meeting with colleagues we brainstormed some possibly interesting areas of research that would respond to the spirit of the grant. Two ideas in particular were notable for their contrast. One was (broadly) the question of what is gained from having a lot of practical, hands-on experience with mechanical systems. Real robots break and have problem with tolerances; builders need to respect the limits of materials, fasteners, and the laws of physics. Whereas in the 1950′s teenagers tinkered with cars after school, nowadays robots are the equivalent pastime for many students.

The second idea had to do with programming and simulation. Robotics also involves control and planning. In many competitions, the robots have to solve tasks or navigate obstacles without any human intervention. This can require considerable programming prowess to execute elegantly. One colleague (who was an advisor to his son’s team) said kids’ programming tends to be a batch of spaghetti code – long lists of instructions and contingencies sort of hacked together to get the job done.

A colleague pointed out that if we care about kids learning the control/automation side of robotics, then the “messiness” of the physical machines often gets in the way. It’s hard enough to devise an intelligent algorithm for navigating obstacles without also worrying what happens when a wheel inadvertently jams up.  One could imagine kids being overloaded with the frustration of learning to program AND having to deal with clunky hardware (these robots aren’t being designed by engineers with graduate degrees, remember). So he wondered whether a “virtual robotics competition” – where the robots were just simulated avatars a la Second Life – would be an interesting case to study.

On the flip side, others felt that learning about the “messiness” of physical systems, how to improvise solutions, plan for contingencies, etc., were equally valuable lessons, perhaps more important than learning elegant programming habits. Having gotten my start in software engineering, and now being very interested in “learning with the hands,” I could see both sides of this argument. Dealing with physical systems can be very frustrating at times; that was one of the appeals of the “virtual world” when I started in computer science. On the other hand, we live in a physical world, and I wonder what is lost when kids don’t get a lot of experience just interacting with the (non-mediated) world as they grow up.

My thinking is that if you want to teach programming, then teach programming, with or without robotic avatars. Just as we teach Newtonian physics in high school with an emphasis on theoretical models (mechanical systems operating in airless vacuums using weightless strings and pulleys, for example), one could imagine teaching the fundamentals of programming with reference to “ideal” robots or objects.

But to me, there is something special about tinkering with physical systems. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I feel like there are some valuable lessons in there, some of which are shared with the programming world (perseverance in the face of failure and frustration; the need for careful planning; problem decomposition, etc.), but others which are entirely separate from virtual spaces (namely, how gears work, what friction “feels like” on different surfaces, the strengths and limitations of motors, etc.)  Just writing these down, I feel a big “so what” question looming – do we really care that youth gain facility with building drive trains? It’s more than that – it’s a “feel” for mechanical systems. Again, I’m at a loss for words. Maybe I’m just being sentimental. But I know I’m not alone in this. Others have been writing at some length on the need to re-integrate the hands into educational experience (e.g., Doug Stowe’s Wisdom of the Hands blog), and some have designed engineering curricula appropriate for elementary school (e.g., Engineering is Elementary).

Actually, I can think of one lesson that differentiates the physical from the virtual – I’ve written about this in the past. The physical world does not have an “Undo” button. Mistakes have consequences. A piece of bad code can be erased and revised in the blink of an eye, but a badly assembled drive train can mean a week of wasted effort.

A couple of weeks ago we came back from Maui and I was struck by how restful it felt to “unplug” from the news and e-mail. Right when we’d departed for Maui it was clear that something significant was brewing in Egypt – by the time we returned it was in full revolution. Now we see unrest in other countries, and there is a showdown between the governor of Wisconsin (and his multi-billionaire backers the Koch brothers) and the public employee unions.  Oh, and the Republican majority in congress just voted to defund Planned Parenthood, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and a slew of other organizations they politically oppose.

So I sign the appropriate petitions, write notes to my senators and representatives, even make sure I’m current on my donations to the right organizations.  But I don’t get on a plane to stand with the Wisconsin marchers.  I don’t drain my savings and give it all to political advocacy groups. In fact, now the pendulum for me is starting to swing in the other direction – I don’t even want to read the news any more. I feel like there is nothing I can do to alter the outcome, so why allow myself to be repeatedly enraged every time I pick up the newspaper?

And yet… somehow it feels important to bear witness to these events. The people in the streets in Cairo and Madison are counting on the fact that others are watching and holding the powerful accountable. If the rest of us shrug our shoulders and ignore the conflict, the powerful win.

So what is the right balance? I don’t have the answers. Right now “bearing witness” feels right, and I’m trying to do this without diving into the hyper-partisan media sources who (for good reason) are trying to inflame the passions of the readers. Anybody reading this: any thoughts on the matter?

Quick woodworking update: I’m working on what I think will be my last segmented bowl for a while. While the product is pretty, I don’t enjoy the construction/shaping process nearly as much as working from a solid block of wood, so I think I’m going to go back to fancy pens and solid wood turnings after this project.

I was admiring some exquisitely glazed tiles in one shop and then balking at the price. But after leaving and thinking it over, I thought to myself that I should treat the arts like I treat other charitable contributions or uses of disposable income.  I make regular contributions to a variety of causes, and those are budgeted out for the year. Why not do the same with arts?  A single tile for $150 may seem extravagant, but what if I budgeted, say, $500 for good art for the year?  I certainly believe in supporting individual artists – I’m glad such people exist and are able to make a living selling their art. But of course, they can only make a living if people actually buy it, and this can’t be the sole responsibility of “rich people.”

(Incidentally, it was eye-opening to come across a blog discussion among professional furniture makers about how they make ends meet. The consensus seemed to be “find wealthy clients.” Sad that most middle class families can’t or won’t afford well-crafted, timelessly designed furniture that could last for generations).

That’s my thought for the night – to walk the walk and actually commit to purchasing art I like that might seem “expensive” on the surface, but in the long run would make both me and the artist happy.

I’m pretty sure we met the co-founder David during several of our visits. He made up all of the flavor syrups from scratch, using recipes he worked out over the years.  He was particularly proud of a “red velvet cake” syrup he’d invented – “I nailed the flavor!  (not to toot my own horn)” he smiled.  And he did indeed nail the flavor.

Dozens of individual syrups, and then blends of 3 or more into “specials” – combinations that go great together. Like any professional you’d see on Iron Chef, he was an artist with the flavor palette.  It was also clear he loved his work, from inventing the syrups to actually making shave ice to chatting up the customers. It was a joy to see him in his “flow,” and that too is what kept us coming back.

If you’re in the area check out their shop!

I posted a short video in my last blog entry illustrating the problem – I made a heavy cut using a chuck (a device for holding the workpiece on the lathe) intended for light finishing passes. The wood is held on largely by friction against rubber stoppers, and any significant shock will tear the workpiece from the chuck. The first time I made this mistake, the bowl shattered. Episode #2 (in the video) resulted in a gluable crack, but the bowl was saved. Episode #3 (yesterday) was only on a ring segment to a bowl, but the ring was large and thick, spun off directly into my face (yes, I wear a face shield for a reason) before hitting the floor and shattering into 3 pieces. I’m pretty sure I can re-glue the segments without obvious flaws, but that’s yet another side-track on this project.

So why do I keep making the same mistake?  Obviously, the lesson hasn’t sunk in, although I’m hoping the 3rd time is the charm. What has struck me, though, is that all of the bowl turning guides essentially warn against this, and I’ve read them all diligently. Book learning was clearly insufficient to prevent this error, and even repeated experience required, well, repetition.  But now when I go back and re-read the wood turning books, the wisdom in their recommendations makes sense in a way it couldn’t have without these disasters under my belt.

My bible for this project (The Art of Segmented Wood Turning by Malcolm Tibbetts) suggests building up projects from bottom up – true the bottom, glue on a ring, true the ring, repeat.  This keeps the working surface co-planar with the bottom and other rings (as opposed to the method where all the rings are flattened on a sander and glued up in a bunch, as I’ve previously done). I fully intended to use that method on this bowl, but somewhere in my excitement to “keep moving” I decided to flatten the main middle ring separately, and that’s when disaster struck.  Using Tibbetts process, the bowl is very securely chucked with proper fastening – using my “modification”, the ring is only attached with a friction fit, and as I realized in the post-mortem, wouldn’t necessarily be flush against the plane of the chuck, anyway.

Enough of the wood turning technicalities. I’m starting to think about instructional guides and their proper use. I have a colleague who is taking an advanced statistical methods class at Stanford, that on the one hand should be “review” for techniques we’ve all been practicing for years, and on the other is intended to revisit them at a deeper level and highlight some of the essential errors and misconceptions we may be unconsciously carrying forward.  I studied under the same professor and encountered many of the same ideas in my first or second year of graduate school, before I had any real-world experience in statistical modeling. While I could follow his reasoning and nod my head, I didn’t have any context for understanding why these were so important (or just not patently obvious). It wasn’t until I’d been practicing in the field for several years that I saw the seduction of statistical shortcuts or the social pressure to use methods that “everyone else thinks are valid.”  Now I can look over my colleague’s shoulder and have a renewed appreciation for what the professor was trying to impart. This wisdom went over the heads of most of his students, not for lack of ability on the part of student or teacher, but because the students simply hadn’t had the years of experience to deeply appreciate why these concepts were so important.

Experts who write textbooks and instructional manuals have the benefit of hindsight – having traversed the ground and scouted out the best routes, they are ready to provide a trail map to the uninitiated. And this is a reasonable approach based in a desire to be efficient – a student should not have to repeat years and years of trial-and-error that the original researchers encountered on the way to enlightenment. My experience as both a self-taught and instructor-taught guitarist has confirmed what a friend once remarked: you can teach yourself the guitar, but you’ll progress 10 times faster if you have a good teacher.  I’m not dismissing the value of instruction.

However, there is an issue of timeliness – when is a student ready to benefit from instruction? I don’t believe this is a linear sequence – my experience with the bowls shows that reading, practicing, re-reading, practicing, etc., seems to be a proper rhythm. This is the basis of what educators call the spiral curriculum – ideas are re-presented cyclically in a deeper and more integrated fashion as the student progresses in his or her learning. So I first learn about chucking wood on the lathe by reading about devices – screw chucks, face plates, 4-jaw chucks, and the like.  I also learn some basic safety rules for using them. Then I go off and work, and eventually violate one of the rules.  Wham!  Wham! Wham! Three disasters later, I’m ready to go back and re-read what each of these chucks can be used for, and in particular I’m highly motivated to understand their limitations.

At a macro-scale, our education system is not well-suited for the read – practice – re-read cycle. Some of this is due to simple age constraints – if we decide that kids can’t do much useful outside of school for their formative years, perhaps we’d better keep them constantly supervised in “productive” learning environments (not that I’m agreeing or disagreeing with this sentiment – just reporting what I observe). But for adolescents and early adults this argument starts to make less sense. Why go through four straight years of undergraduate work when people are still trying to figure out “what works” for them dispositionally, intellectually, and avocationally?  Why not attend, say, a year or two of “foundational” higher education, and then go work for a while, and then come back and continue education when one has proper practical insight and motivation?  Again, I fully understand the practical constraints – it’s hard to interrupt one’s work/career to go back to school full time, there are financial constraints, wouldn’t we just prolong a period of delayed adolescence, etc.  But our current system of 4 continuous years essentially force-feeds a wonderfully rich meal to youth, and hopes that they’ll be able to digest the bulk of it over time, such that years later, they’ll look back and appreciate the value of what they were exposed to, even if they couldn’t fully fathom it at the time.

Just a thought… I wrote a few more paragraphs about the origins of higher education in the US, but then erased them. I was going too far afield for a single posting. For now I’ll just let this basic idea cycle through the back of my mind – the dynamic of reading/doing (and for many, the third leg is “teaching”). Read/do/teach/do/read/do/teach/do….  Time to re-read and repair my bowl and try again.

Setting aside Sunday evenings for a blog update has one unforeseen (but in hindsight obvious) consequence – I may not always be in a blogging mood at the appointed hour. Or more precisely, I may be having feelings and thoughts that are not as pleasant and well-ordered as I would like when it’s time to put e-ink to e-paper. CS geeks recognize this as “event driven” vs. “clock driven” processing.

It’s been an eventful weekend. The bowl I worked on (at the top of this posting) was finished, but not without some hair-raising moments in the final cuts. Just as with one of the last bowls I attempted (using a similar design), I used too much force for what should have been patient light cuts, and the bowl went flying off the lathe into the wall. Instead of shattering into pieces, though, this one only suffered a crack, easily repairable with some CA glue. You can see the entire episode in the frame below (it only lasts 3 or 4 seconds).

I went to a party on Saturday night to give this bowl to a kind gentleman who had given me a trunk load of walnut about six months ago. He was very grateful and thankful, and other party-goers paid some very nice compliments. So that goes in the “win some” column.

At the same party, the host (my sweetie’s uncle) had asked if I’d be interested in playing my guitar, as there’d be other musicians there and I enjoy such informal gatherings, so I said “sure!”  As Lyle Lovett once noted in a song:   “it was then I knew I had made my first mistake.”  I hadn’t been practicing much, and still don’t have anything memorized.  No biggie, I thought – the NYE jam was low-key enough.

I’d forgotten that Unkie (as he’s affectionately known) is a bit more, um, structured in his event planning than the NYE crowd. Some of his friends are professional musicians (i.e., they make a living playing, composing, and teaching music), others are very serious amateurs, and these were the other folks he’d invited to play as well. This wasn’t just a bunch of people singing along to Simon & Garfunkel while a couple of us strummed guitar in the background – this was me sitting on a chair with a living room full of expectant audience members.  After some very good musicians had already played, some of them singing their own compositions.  Very gracious, kind, wonderful people, audience and players alike. That’s what saved this from being an unmitigated disaster.

Instead of sticking with something simple that I’d have a half-way chance of pulling off under pressure, I went with one of my favorite preludes by Villa Lobos (here’s a YouTube video of John Williams playing it). I knew right off the bat I’d have to modify it to skip the fast middle section, and I set the audience up by explaining I was just getting back into playing, and felt like a guitarist with Alzheimers — I’d be going down a familiar path, but all of a sudden would forget where I was or what came next. I managed to struggle through this with fingers shaking – it frankly sounded horrible, but like the dog walking on two legs, the miracle isn’t that he does it well but that he does it at all.

As Lyle Lovett continues “it was then I knew I had made my second mistake.”  I decided to try another favorite piece that I had once completely memorized – could play in my sleep:  Steve Howe’s Mood for a Day. I got about 35 seconds in and completely fell apart. My left hand just couldn’t remember where the notes were, and my right shoulder was trembling so badly I found myself taking blind stabs at hitting the right strings. So I just stopped, said I was going to have to stop as I clearly couldn’t remember the piece, and bowed out.  Again, the audience was very gracious, and the party went on.   This goes in the “losing some” column.

Today I had periodic bouts of post-traumatic stress flashbacks to how excruciatingly awful it felt to just blow up, publicly.  My friends who are into improvisational theatre tell me that’s an essential part of the practice: to “fail spectacularly” when things go awry. My sweetie (bless her for her support!) told me the Villa Lobos was well received and that I’d made a very graceful exit.

So as I sit reflecting on the weekend, I’m reminded of that central principle of “non attachment” the Buddhists practice. This becomes a profound “easy come, easy go” way of being in the world, not grasping at our “wins” nor regretting our “losses.”  I was happy to make Russ happy by making him a bowl I knew he’d like – my ego was for the most part not involved in that. But boy, I wish I had the same detachment over melting down in a musical performance. I’m having trouble letting go of that one just yet. It’s still painful to remember (which is why I hesitated to keep to my “clock driven” blog posting), but I know I need to sit and process that experience.

Some of the lessons learned are basic – I had no business trying to play for an audience unless a piece had been memorized to automaticity, or unless I had a *lot* of public playing experience.  As with everything else, practice is critical. It was also a good opportunity to experience the “energy” of a situation. When I used to practice Aikido, one of the points of the practice was to make threatening situations (e.g., someone grabbing your arm or collar) completely ordinary, so that one could learn to be present in the situation and respond accordingly. This was done through sheer repetition – thousands and thousands of grab-counter-throw episodes over a span of years. I realize now I should avail myself of more opportunities to play in groups (there’s a local Meetup group of SF classical guitarists who should fit the bill). I need to feel that adrenaline rush, be able to stop, take a deep breath, readjust my posture (I wasn’t sitting comfortably on Saturday, which didn’t help), even ask the group for help as I feel the panic set in.  (It was an uncanny loss of fine-motor control that did me in – it felt like playing a guitar in ski gloves). There’s no way to get better at this than to practice with good guidance and coaching.

Meanwhile, I try to stop beating myself up over this episode. It’s also an excellent opportunity to practice non-attachment and the suffering that accrues from dwelling on the past. My mind knows that’s what I “should” do, but there are some well-worn habits of shame and humiliation that can’t be broken with just a thought. As with all things, practice, practice, practice.

A friend of mine just wrote a “why blog at all” post, and I realized blogging is an odd hybrid of personal journaling and public journalism. Most of what I write is stream-of-consciousness with very little editing. It’s not intended primarily for public consumption, but I’m glad interested others may be looking over my shoulder, too. On the other hand, the deeply personal stuff remains, well, deeply personal and private.

Onward to today’s topic.  This may be in the realm of “personal/embarrassing”. I’ve known for some time that I struggle with what I’ll call “periodic maintenance.”  House cleaning is a good example – I finally gave up a couple of years ago and hired cleaners to come in once a month, knowing that’s about how long it takes for me to lose yet another battle against domestic decay.  (I do manage to shower and brush my teeth regularly, though.)  And regular functions triggered by pain/pleasure responses (like eating and exercise) are no problem.

I tend to have problems with those aspects of life that are, for lack of better words, entropic – situations that naturally decay into a state of disorder.  Dust accumulates on surfaces.  Dirty dishes pile up.  The milk runs out and needs replenishing. What I noticed this weekend was a feeling of – hmmm – grumpiness? irritation? at going grocery shopping.  I mean, come on, my ancestors 10 or 20 thousand years ago spent their day hunting and gathering food, not being sure where their next meal was coming from.  I’m complaining about having to stop by a grocery store for milk and eggs, AGAIN, as if I should only have to buy these once and be set for life.  It’s amusing how the mind works when we stop to catch those little whispers and voices that run around like unsupervised children.

Plants. I haven’t ever kept plants around my house (at least none that I was personally responsible for). Even the simple act of periodic watering and paying attention to their growth is a… distraction?  Not sure. I remember helping my ex wife weed her garden many years ago, feeling good about the progress we’d made, and then being chagrined to discover that after a week or two, we needed to weed all over again. Again, that indignant feeling, like there was something fundamentally unfair about a universe that watches me spend an afternoon pulling weeds and then puts them right back into the garden again.

Animals. Again, when partnered I kept a couple of dogs. Now here I didn’t mind the routine maintenance; in fact I enjoyed it.  I liked the ritual of the morning feeding followed by a walk, even in the pouring rain. Trimming their nails was my particular job. Now that I’m living alone, though, I balk at taking on a dog, even though I love canine companionship (strictly speaking, that’s not a periodic maintenance issue – I’m worried about leaving an animal home alone for a long day).

Cleaning. I’m happy to report that after hearing a thousand times “a place for everything, and everything in its place,” I had a breakthrough this weekend in terms of cleaning clutter.  My problem had been that I didn’t have designated spaces/places for specific things.  I’d pick up something – a guitar tuner on the table – and think “where to put it?” Does it go in a guitar case? On a shelf? Remain on the table? Because it had no natural “home,” it tended to stay wherever I put it last.  Which leads in short order to a very cluttered coffee table.  This weekend I had the micro-enlightenment that a designated place for everything reduces the cognitive load of cleaning clutter. I no longer have to figure out where to put the tuner, the unopened mail, the extra keys, etc., and then move them.  If I designate a “home” for everything, all I have to do is bring the object home. That’s so much easier!  Let’s hope it’s a lasting change. I’m particularly looking forward to de-cluttering my wood shop bench (currently littered with tools and parts from 3 or 4 on-going projects).

Children. I’m guessing that people with children would be shaking their heads at reading this, as young children are all about creating disorder.  I wonder how much this aversion to accelerated disorder has played into decisions to not have children?  It’s certainly a part. I recall commenting to a friend (after watching other people’s children run amok at a party) that I don’t do well with chaotic distractions. She gently suggested that if I viewed children as “chaotic distractions” then perhaps I was making a good decision to not have my own.

So this week I’m going to focus on becoming aware of the periodic maintenance opportunities in my life, and in particular listen for those whispers of old voices that have opinions about such tasks. Somewhere, deep down, I still have a block or an unhelpful attitude around maintenance, and I’d like to discover more about where that’s coming from.

Meanwhile, in the wood shop… two bowls are in progress, both gifts.  I’m still managing to make minor mistakes, and worse, REPEAT minor mistakes, but fortunately I haven’t had any “do-overs” yet.  I’m not sure what will come next – I’m attracted to continuing with more turning projects, perhaps designing a segmented vase next.  I’m also looking forward to trying my hand at “double-cross” pens. We’ll see.

Ebony Ring glue-up

It’s a rainy Saturday, and I’m spending the afternoon prepping some gifts and products for my company’s annual craft fair. The top photo shows a lamination I’m preparing to make a couple of wood pens. Sandwiched between the walnut are layers of veneer (light-dark-light) that will appear as a sort of “pin stripe” pattern in the pen body.

The second photo shows an ebony ring I’ve glued up. This will become a layer (an actual “ring”) in a walnut bowl I’m making. Some of these projects take several days, not because of the total labor, but because each gluing phase that will be subjected to any stress should dry overnight. The ring itself had three distinct gluing phases (pairs of sides, 3 sides into halves, then the two halves), each of which called for a pause.  Multitasking projects (and not letting my workbench become overwhelmed with clutter) is a must.

Meanwhile, I’ve been following Doug Stowe’s blog The Wisdom of the Hands.  If you’re interested in either education or the arts I encourage you to visit.  In addition to being a master woodworker and teacher, Doug has recently been shaping a coherent philosophy of education that emphasizes the role and benefits of “hands on” education.  We’ve had some e-mail correspondence around his ideas; in particular I’d want him on my short list of intellectual thought-partners if I ever decide to study this idea seriously.

Doug and I question what is lost when children do not routinely have a lot of practice manipulating real objects and crafting their own creations. It’s an interesting empirical question. For example, one psychologist has written a book titled Lifting Depression, based on the theory that our hands are hard-wired to the brain’s reward circuitry.  She claims that tasks involving manual dexterity (e.g., knitting, woodworking, etc.) can actually mitigate depressive symptoms. In my experience this idea has some merit; I’ve certainly felt my own seasonal blues recede after a few hours in the shop. So I’m interested in this hand-brain-soul connection. In particular, what happens to a generation that manipulates keyboards and game controllers rather than physical objects?  Perhaps it makes no difference; I guess we’re going to find out.

Being trained as a researcher can feel like a drag on enthusiasm sometimes.  Don’t get me wrong – I love the act of inquiry and shaping ideas. It’s the learned disposition toward skepticism that sometimes puts a wet blanket on creativity, perhaps prematurely. For example, I may have an intuitive sense that kids would benefit from bringing the arts back into education front and center (and arts education scholars such as Elliot Eisner have written thoughtful books on the subject, so the idea isn’t too far-fetched). The educator/activist in me wants to go forth and argue for the arts. The researcher in me, though, wants to gather evidence first.  How do Eisner’s ideas hold up empirically?  Did he base his thoughts on solid evidence? Am I (and he) paying sufficient attention to negative cases, where the arts don’t appear to have the intended effects?

I envy Doug Stowe for not being encumbered by this skepticism. He can see the concrete benefits of his work with students on a daily basis, and this evidence corroborates the ideas of other scholars of the manual arts. He believes in what he’s doing.

So I’m left with this question: what would it take for me to believe in a cause without first doing years of “due diligence” research?

The vase pictured above is a prize-winning example of a segmented turning created by Ken Cowell. It is composed of 2,977 separate pieces of wood all glued together and then turned to final shape.  For the curious, Google “segmented turning” to see more examples, or look at this page on how to construct a relatively simple bowl.

I’ve been wanting to take the plunge into segmented turning for a while now. Last year I turned a couple of relatively simple bowls (literally using only 6 or 8 separate pieces of wood).  Recently I turned my first staved bowl, which had (gasp!) 13 separate pieces of wood glued together.  Right now I’m working on a house-warming gift for a friend that will have (let me think…) approximately 43 separate pieces.

The basic technique for construction involves creating a 12 or 16-sided “ring” by gluing very precisely cut pieces end-to-end. The ring is flattened to eliminate any minor warping, and then glued onto a stack of previously glued up rings.  Rinse, repeat.  For the style I’m working on, I can’t glue up the entire ring in one sitting. For my 12-sided rings, I need to glue pairs first, then 3 pairs into a 6-sided half, then (after some quick sanding to make sure the halves mate properly) a full ring.  Since I’ve been letting the glue dry overnight for each gluing phase, that’s three nights to put together a single ring.

Segue to punched cards.  In the “old days” (1970′s), a popular medium for storing computer programs was the punched card.  The programmer would write a line of code and have it punched out on a card (one column per character); a stack of cards corresponded to lines of code.  When it was time to have the program run on the mainframe, one carried the deck of cards to the operator, who then queued them up for submission.  The deck of cards plus any printed output would be waiting at a pick-up window hours (or days) later.

I’ve written before about how the change from punched card storage to high-speed magnetic storage and personal computing changed the nature of programming. A beginning programmer now can write lines of code, run them instantly, and if s/he made a mistake, immediately fix the error and re-run the code again, seconds later.  In the old days, a mistake meant losing several hours (or days) to a badly run job. Programmers had to double- and triple-check their code before submitting to the machine room; it was the programmer’s version of “measure twice, cut once.”  Nowadays students can “hack” at code (a different meaning of “hacker” from its more nefarious usage) until it works; only when programs grow to several pages do people need to acquire the discipline to design their program up front, break it into manageable chunks, and follow principles to ensure a bug in one section doesn’t require re-writing code throughout the program.

I have never had to write code on punched cards; I came of programming age in the early days of magnetic storage.  But creating a segmented turning is giving me a good taste of what it must have felt like.

I can turn a bowl from a solid piece of wood (a half of a log, for example) in a single evening.  After dinner, a split log.  By bed time, a bowl resting on the bench with the finish drying.  If I make a mistake, it’s usually no big deal – the wood is often found (read: free), and I try to learn from my mistakes. I have to admit, I enjoy the rapid turnaround of an evening-long project. As much as I enjoy the process of turning, I like having something to show for it at the end.  Pen making feels the same way – I can go from raw materials to finished project in an evening.

Creating a complicated segmented turning requires as much planning and prep work as building a house. The “fun part” (the actual turning) is actually relatively perfunctory.  The overall shape has already been determined by the relatively width of the rings – the only point of turning it on a lathe is to smooth over the corners and thin down the material.

So I’m a little torn.  I love the intricacy and beauty that segmented turning opens up. Some of the gallery examples I’ve seen are simply breathtaking. But creating them is literally an act of brick-laying, fitting one piece after another carefully together, layer by layer. I have to say, I don’t really enjoy the execution. The design process is fun, as is the final product, but the middle portion?  Punched-card programming.

Here’s a question I should ask myself – would I have majored in computer science and become a software engineer if I had been introduced to programming on a punched card system? How much of the initial thrill and engrossment of high-school programming was due to the immediate feedback of magnetic storage and a timesharing system?  It’s quite possible I would have found the whole process frustrating and found other outlets for immediate gratification. There are lots of implications in that insight for education in general, but that’s going to have to be a future blog posting.

For now, I’m going to continue to explore the world of segmented turning, and remain mindful of how I’m being in that process. I suspect I’ll only take on an occasional project in this medium, when a particular design occurs to me and I simply have to see what it would look like. What clearly is not helpful is to beat myself up for not having the patience and discipline (if I really want to do a number on myself, I’ll use words like “maturity”) to enjoy segmented turning.

When we last left our hero he was in the midst of training for his first Century ride.  Well, the training went smoothly (with the exception of having my bike stolen a week before the Century ride, necessitating a quick purchase and fitting of a nifty new carbon-frame model), as did the ride itself.  I learned a lot about how my body responds to long rides and about riding a Century in general, and look forward to doing this again. I decided not to tackle another one this year – my knees were starting to bug me by early summer, and the local Century in June was known for its climbs. I did eventually get the knee thing under control (I was climbing too much and at too low a cadence, and my saddle needed to come forward a few smidgeons) and enjoyed a good season on the new bike. My ratio of road bike to mountain bike riding was a lot higher than usual this year – just noting it and moving on.

I had also picked up the guitar again after several years of dormancy and begun taking classes with Carol McComb. And, like riding a bicycle, fingering a guitar is something you never quite forget once it’s in your muscle memory – I’m on my third class with Carol (“Celtic Crossover”) and also re-learning some old favorites. Just last week I went to a Meetup group of acoustic musicians and led CS&N’s “Helplessly Hoping” – my first time playing with strangers in… possibly forever.  Since college, most likely.

I’ve got a backlog of writing/blogging to catch up on: career insights, new projects in the works, etc.  It’ll have to wait for another night, though.  For now I wanted to get back in the saddle of writing (and to see how the links to Facebook are working now).

Training for the Century and working up to some full-length guitar pieces have been fertile ground for reflection on learning.  In no particular order:

I needed to make a commitment.  I rode fairly regularly all last year, but always felt like I could be quite a bit stronger and lighter if I’d been more regular in my practice. Signing up for a 100 mile bike ride and feeling those weeks count down has been highly motivating. Similarly, paying money for a class – and just physically showing up for it – ensured that I’d be playing at least once a week, and after that it was easier to get back into the habit of practicing. What I really should do is commit to fully memorize a favorite piece (like The Clap or La Catedral) by, say, Christmas, and see what that does.

I’m bumping into internalized judgment about mere “physical” learning.  Compared to, say, taking a rigorous academic course, it’s easy to denigrate these learning challenges as “mindless.”  But what does that mean, and where does that attitude come from? I suspect that underneath it is the belief that training for a century or a musical performance is “merely” practice and more practice.  One doesn’t need any special mental talent (so the story goes), just a strong will.

Of course, I realize that reflective practice is cognitively demanding. As soon as I stop and think about it, I see that these practices are far from mindless. On the bike I need to really become familiar with how my body handles various forms of stress – muscle fatigue, back stiffness, oxygen debt, etc. I take mental notes about what it feels like to push a particular hill climb, or how long it takes that Clif bar to break down and provide fuel for my legs. The musical passages have all sorts of mini-challenges as I work out fingerings and the overall musical flow of a piece.

So what?  That last paragraph sounds like a rationalization: “Phew! I’m spending time in cognitively demanding practices after all!”   Why does something need to be labeled “cognitively demanding” to be valued?  While I have quibbles with some of Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” theory, he did popularize the notion that there are many ways to be “smart.”  Still, the “so what” question lingers – why do we need an attribute like “smart” to feel valued?  Why not merely “skilled?”  Put “smart” and “skilled” on a balance scale, and it’s pretty clear which way the scales tip among the intellectual class.

(I should know better than to blog late at night – brain is shutting down). I’m going to continue to ponder this (artificial) split between the cognitive and the physical, the “smart” and the “skilled.”  More to come…

I just trashed my third attempt at a “slim” acrylic pen, a gift for a friend. Some people like their pens slender, and in this particular design you end up turning the material down to barely more than a millimeter thick. If there are any stresses in the material, then taking it down that thin tends to release them, causing buckling or bubbling. And if the material is not glued perfectly to the brass tube in the center, it doesn’t take much for a slight imperfection to catch the blade of the chisel and tear a whole chunk of material right off the tube. In theory, I could have 1) drilled more carefully, and 2) glued more carefully, and 3) taken a very fine cut at the end.  Well, I tried #2 and #3, and I’m not sure about #1.  The material simply deformed, and I have no idea whether the glue could have been strong enough to hold it.

OK, so what is the learning: don’t try to turn down thin pens out of acrylic? Clearly it’s theoretically possible (I’ve actually succeeded once or twice at this). If it was really important to me to continue to produce thin acrylic pens, I’d figure out a better way to do it.  (I really do suspect that a cleaner bore with the drill might have strengthened the glue adhesion…).

Now that I’ve got that venting off my chest…

I’ve written before about how failure – or more precisely, experiencing first-hand the consequences of mistakes – does seem to be a better teacher than hours of reading books. I’m starting to wonder, though, what the counter-point is to the “aversive” learning of failure?  For example, I’ve learned (the hard way) what happens when I run too-thin wood through a planer with dull knives (hint – you don’t want to be standing in the line of fire). A few stitches in my finger tip reminded me to be aware of where all 10 digits are when working around an exposed router bit. These are actions I’m highly unlikely to perform again.

Somehow, the sweet feeling of success doesn’t quite “teach” the same way. When I pop a nicely shaped bowl or pen off the lathe, I’m pretty sure I’m not chiseling a “do this again next time” lesson into my brain. I’m satisfied, certainly, but more likely what I want to do is push the boundaries of what I’ve just done. Can I make a variation? What if I try…  and I’m off again, daring failure to teach me another lesson.

Success is certainly motivating.  My own experience (and there’s a nice line of psychological research supporting this) is that after a series of frustrations, I may dial down the challenge a bit just to experience a confidence-boosting success again. And of course, there is the Zen like idea of pursuing an activity for its own enjoyment (the feel of wet wood slicing away under a gouge is so silky smooth…), not worrying about “outcome.”  Hmmm…  yes and no.  I need to ponder that more.

Then, of course, we have the perversity of school failure. We let kids fail all the time, without paying attention to whether they’re optimally challenged, what might support their successes, etc. In some cases we require failure in classrooms; without somebody failing a teacher may be accused of being too “lenient”, whatever that means. In school failure is often not teaching any lesson other than reinforcing that somebody is innately inept.

So, I may attempt a fourth slender pen, being careful each step of the way to construct it as carefully as possible. Or, I may decide to step back and try an easier variation (using wood instead of acrylic – it tends to bond better to the tube – or trying a design with a little more “meat” on it).

That’s it for tonight. I have more thoughts brewing I want to blog about soon, but they’re not quite ready to see the light of day.

I’ve been tinkering with a design for a pair of candle holders based on the symbol for the Tao (or the “yin-yang” symbol). The two parts are of a light wood and a dark wood, with tea light candles occupying the smaller holes within each half. (By the way, while drawing this out I discovered that I could construct this with only a compass and straight-edge, a la Euclid — the symbol can be drawn entirely with circles and half-circles). There was a bit of a technical challenge in constructing a template for each half so that they mated perfectly in the middle, and having accomplished that, I made a prototype out of some sapwood cherry (light) and walnut (dark).

I showed the prototype to a friend and the verdict came back quickly:  kind of boring.  I should know better than to be attached to an initial design, so after my little flash of defensiveness, I concurred.  The wood itself was not very interesting (no pretty figure or pronounced grain), so what I essentially had was a bare-bones yin-yang.  From a minimalist design perspective it was fine – the plainness of the wood left only the form as an aesthetic quality. But I wasn’t satisfied.

Then the frustra fun began. I thought about sandwiching layers of contrasting veneer to the top (a light layer on top of a dark layer for the light piece) – when the edges were rounded over the dark layer would show through as a dark accent outline. Great idea in theory (and I’d used a similar technique on a guitar head stock a long time ago), but when I ran the prototype through the router it just didn’t look right – the stripe outline wasn’t that pronounced.  The top piece, for one, was too thick (I didn’t use actual veneer, but some left over material from my dining chair splats).  Plus, the color of the top layer didn’t match the main piece exactly – I could tell they came from two different sources.  It was time to put the work down and do something with a higher probability of success, so I turned a nice pen out of synthetic turquoise.

So now that I’m relaxing on the sofa, what do I think of this process?  For one, I’m remembering why group critique is helpful.  I can only have so many ideas, and having a group both criticize and suggest improvements can carry the process forward when I’m feeling frustrated.  There are web sites out there devoted to crowd-sourced critique of each other’s work, and maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and try one.

Another difficulty for me is that this is essentially an aesthetic design challenge, not a functional one. I’ve written in a previous post about how I can feel “aesthetically challenged” at times.  When I’m engaged in functional design (say, a piece of software or even a research paper), I have somewhat clear criteria for what makes it “work,”  even if I’m not always sure of how to get there.  Sometimes on the 3rd or the 9th draft of a paper it just clicks and comes together. If an illustration I’ve created doesn’t convey the right information, someone can tell me that and I’m usually pretty clear on what to do next.

How do I turn something from “boring” to “attractive?”

I thought of drilling a series of decreasing diameter holes trailing the curve of the shapes, perhaps filling them with a mineral inlay. Pyrography to decorate the surface. Those don’t work for me though – the yin-yang’s elegance is in its simplicity.  It’s actually an iconic representation of an idea.  Decorative frills totally detract from that representation.

Hmmm… staring at the image again, I see that the lighter half of the image still has a dark outline – it would have to on a white background, or one would lose the shape.  I don’t think I need to do that in wood… one possibility would be to cut both shapes in dark wood and just add a thin light veneer to the light half…

No, I think I’m going to stick with simplicity.  I’ll try this again using “prettier” woods.  I’ve got some Wenge that is both darker and more dramatic than the walnut I tried, and I think I have some left-over curly maple – it polishes up to a nice, wavy reflective surface. Then, swallow my pride and ask for more critique. How else am I going to learn?

I was totally fascinated recently by a furniture design instructor who told his students to design 3 chairs over the weekend. Not 3 variations on a theme, but 3 totally different designs.  ”Why?” the students cried, “It’s hard enough to design one chair!”  The instructor noted that if they only worked on one design they’d become too wedded to it.  Like Golum’s jealous pursuit of the Ring, they’d be clinging to “my precioussss” and defending against criticism. Having 3 different designs allows a degree of detachment from them. Perhaps it’s time for me to move onto other ideas for candle holders.