Category: fun things

Douglas Adams, one of my favorite authors of all time, was born on this date in 1952. Although he died in 2001 at the much-too-young age of 49, he left behind an incredible body of work, not the least of which were the “trilogy in five parts” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and two books about a “holistic” detective named Dirk Gently. I had the honor of meeting Douglas once at a book signing in the early 1990s. He was a delightful man who shared many of my own interests (Macs, synthesizers, procrastination) and similar views on religion and the environment. I miss him.

I didn’t realize it until today, but Douglas Adams’s ashes are at Highgate Cemetery in London.

Image credit: Michael Hughes [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Springing forward, grudgingly

Ah, the time to spring forward has arrived again. It seems like barely four months ago that we were all falling back, and I was grateful that I could enjoy an extra hour of sleep for one night. And now, just like that, I have to return that borrowed hour this weekend. Spring may be nearly here, but somehow I’ve never been able to reconcile the joyful notion of going “forward” with the reality of losing an hour of my day.

A reader once sent me an email that said: “Falling back can also be related to what, coarsely, in Scotland is called a woman with round heels.” What a great euphemism! (For those who need to have it spelled out: “round heels” implies someone who is prone to supineness—sorry, I couldn’t resist—hence, metaphorically, a woman of loose morals.) I imagine “falling back” could also be extended to someone who is drunk, narcoleptic, or just extremely tired. How curious that on the day we spring forward we should all be less well-rested, and thus more prone to falling back!

The Arrows of Time

I am speaking, of course, of the beginning of what is known in North America as daylight saving time, or DST for short (and not, according to a common misconception, daylight savings time). In Europe, this period begins and ends on different dates and is simply called “summer time.” Many other localities around the world make similar changes to their clocks, on various dates and under various names. But there are exceptions. Even in the United States, Hawaii and most of Arizona don’t participate in daylight saving time, nor do American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, or the Virgin Islands. And my wife reminded me that Saskatchewan, Canada, where she grew up, also shuns DST. Thus begins an annual eight-month period of having to recalculate time zone differences, which are confusing enough already, when planning travel or phoning friends in another part of the world. Who is to blame for this madness?

Well, you could blame Edison, who brought us all the electric light bulb, or his archrival Tesla, who pioneered alternating current electricity. Or the public utilities, or the producers of coal, oil, and natural gas. Or yourself, if you’ve ever complained about your electricity bill. One of the major motivations for daylight saving time was to reduce the consumption of fuel used to create electricity. The logic was that if we can artificially make it stay light one hour later, we’ll stay outside longer or at least use less electricity once we come inside for the night, because there will be fewer hours of darkness before bedtime.

Early to Bed, Early to Rise?

The name “daylight saving time” implies that to sleep while the sun is shining is to “waste” valuable time; being active while the sun is up saves (or, shall we say, makes best use of) time. I take exception to this claim: I do most of my best work after dark, and I quite enjoy sleeping while the sun is shining—the sun, after all, has nothing in particular to do with my profession. But people who really prefer to be awake when the sun is up could simply arise an hour earlier in the summer. So yes, they’d still have to change their alarm settings, but at least it would become a matter of personal preference rather than law.

The first experiments with DST occurred during World War I—in Germany, the UK, and the United States. It was unpopular in the United States but made a reappearance during World War II, as a way of saving fuel. It was repealed again following the war. For two decades, DST was applied unevenly by some localities but not others. As a way of resolving the chaos, the U.S. Congress passed The Uniform Time Act of 1966, which stipulated that DST would run from the last Sunday of April through the last Sunday of October (though states could vote to opt out of observing DST, and some did). During the 1970s, the law underwent several other changes. For example, in 1974, daylight saving time in the U.S. began in January in response to the energy crisis—I remember going to school in the dark that winter and finding it quite strange. In 1986, the Uniform Time Act was amended again, moving the start of DST up to the first Sunday in April. Starting in 2007, DST in the United States was changed again to begin on the second Sunday of March and end on the first Sunday of November.

Overclocking

There is a movement afoot to end DST in the United States, and it’s rapidly gaining steam. The supporters’ arguments are that contrary to expectations, DST results in disrupted sleep patterns, more traffic accidents in the mornings, inconvenience for farmers (who must set their schedules according to the sun, no matter what the clock says), and needless confusion for all concerned—without, they claim, providing any appreciable energy savings, given our modern lifestyles and schedules.

One bold proposal is to conflate the two westernmost time zones (so that the west coast would, in effect, always be on daylight saving time and the mountain region would always be on standard time) and also conflate the two easternmost time zones. The result would be just two (rather than four) time zones across the continental United States—and no one would ever have to change a clock. I think this is a brilliant idea, and therefore one that will never work. Americans, in my experience, embrace adversity (and not in a good way).

Other ideas are more likely to take hold, even though they’ll be more complicated. Several states (including California) have either already passed or are considering legislation to stay on daylight saving time permanently; once any such legislation passes, it must be approved by the federal government before it could take effect. Other states (including most of New England) want to achieve the same end by different means—shifting one time zone to the east (Atlantic time) and then opting out of DST. Then there’s Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, which are all trying to switch to standard time year-round. If all these states have their way, fewer people will have to change their clocks, but we’ll also have much more confusion and less uniformity across the country. (My personal opinion: this abominable practice of adjusting clocks must end, and if it takes wacky time zones to make it happen, that’s a small sacrifice.)

But the real folly, in my opinion, is that we consider daylight saving time, which lasts eight months, nonstandard, while “standard” time lasts only four months. If we must change our clocks, let us at least do it with logic and honesty. Let’s rename the period from November through March “Daylight Squandering Time” and declare the rest of the year “standard” time. I’ll bet Saskatchewan would sign up for that.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on April 2, 2005.

Image credit: U.S. Air Force graphic

Today is the beginning of Daylight Saving Time in (most of) the United States. While you’re going around your house setting all the clocks forward an hour, it’s a good idea to check the batteries in devices like smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and radon detectors. And, you know, any other devices you depend on to keep you safe or enable you to earn a living but which run on batteries that might inconveniently die at the worst possible moment.

Image credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Jonathan Koob

Becoming a modern monk

Thanks to Kathleen Norris, being a Benedictine oblate is almost hip these days. Norris is the author of the critically received books Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and The Cloister Walk. Both tell the story of a literary New Yorker who moved to the Great Plains and found a spiritual life at—of all places—a Benedictine monastery. More than any other person since Thomas Merton, Norris has helped rekindle interest in monastic spirituality among the “thinking crowd.”

While I’d like to think that I became a Benedictine oblate before reading Norris (somehow I think it is morally superior to choose a path before it becomes popular), the truth is that her ruminations on the relevancy of Benedictine spirituality for contemporary life were formative in my own choice. I became an oblate of a small Benedictine community in Oakland, California, in 1999.

The Life of a Saint

So what is a Benedictine oblate? “Benedictine” does not, in this case, refer to the liqueur of the same name (although that liqueur is made by Benedictine monks in France). Rather, Benedictine means an association with the monastic order based on the teachings of St. Benedict, himself worthy of a separate column on this website. St. Benedict was born in 480 CE, 70 years after the fall of Rome. He came from an educated, wealthy family but eventually left that life behind to pursue the spiritual life. Over time, his reputation as a holy man spread, disciples flocked to him, and he eventually established 12 small monasteries.

All monastic communities require some kind of “rule of life” that orders their common spiritual life together. In Benedict’s time, there were several monastic rules in circulation. The most popular one seems to have been a document called The Rule of the Master. Benedict drew from this rule, but with significant changes—mainly in spirit and tone. The Rule of the Master saw monastic communities as a group of individuals gathering around the feet of a sage (usually the abbot), to whom was given enormous power. Benedict, instead, emphasized the relationship of the monks to each other. He saw the monastery as a community of love and the abbot’s main job as tending to the well-being of this community. In addition, The Rule of the Master was harsh and unrelenting in its demands on the monks. Benedict’s rule was known for its moderation, its humanity.

Benedictines R Us

Benedict’s rule ended up having an enormous influence on Western civilization. At the time of Benedict’s death, his rule was one among many. However, within a century or two, the Rule of St. Benedict had become the norm for Western monasticism. And monasticism had, by this time, become the norm for what was left of Western civilization. Monasteries were, by the sixth century, the one vital institution left in the societal breakdown precipitated by the fall of Rome and the waves of “barbarian” invasions. Benedictine monasteries accumulated illuminated manuscripts and works of art, kept the light of learning and scholarship alive, and generally provided order and stability in a chaotic world. As the Benedictine scholar Esther de Waal writes, “To sketch the history of the Benedictines in the Middle Ages would be not only to write a history of the church, it would be to write a history of medieval society as well.” (From Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict, pg. 21.)

Although not as numerous as in their heyday, there are still today hundreds (if not thousands—I couldn’t find an exact number) of Benedictine monasteries around the world. What’s most interesting to me about contemporary Benedictine life, however, is the number of lay men and women who have found spiritual sustenance in the Benedictine rule and in the spirituality it expresses. The test of its popularity? Go to Amazon.com and type in “Benedictine spirituality.” You’ll get hundreds of titles, most published quite recently.

Becoming an Oblate

Which brings me to the second word in the phrase “Benedictine oblate.” In the most general sense, an oblate is someone who makes an act of oblation. (That explains everything, right?) An oblation literally means “an offering.” So an oblate is someone who makes an offering of themselves—that is, someone who dedicates themselves to a spiritual life. More specifically, oblates are lay people who take an abbreviated form of monastic vows (called “promises”) and become associate members of a particular monastic community. The promises are considered to be for life and are not tied to that particular monastic community—so if you move, you are still an oblate, even if you have no regular contact with the monastic community in which you made your promises. No getting out of them that easily!

Oblate promises differ from community to community, but most of them (and this was certainly true of my own) will be based on the three vows taken by all Benedictine monks:

• Obedience. While obedience for monks certainly includes the idea of following the will of an abbot or one’s monastic community, it also means more generally attuning one’s spiritual ear to the voice of God in all people and situations and responding to that call. (In fact, the word obedience comes from the Latin root oboedire, which shares its roots with audire, to hear.)
• Stability. Stability refers to physical stability, meaning that a monk commits to life in a particular community and to not leaving when the going gets tough. However, for the oblate, stability is interpreted more generally as not only keeping one’s commitments in life but also committing to the deeper stability of one’s inner being, to a calmness and peace of mind.
• Conversatio Morum (or, in English, roughly “ongoing conversion”). Finally, the truly fun and scary promise of conversatio morum simply means that one (whether monk or oblate) commits to always being a pilgrim, to remaining ever open to change and transformation.

In addition to the above three ideas, oblate promises would also tend to include some language that says the oblate will follow the Rule of St. Benedict insofar as one’s station in life allows. Now, I confess that to simply sit down and read the Rule of St. Benedict leaves me a little cold. As with the Bible, I need modern scholars to help interpret the relevancy of this book for my life. Thankfully, there are many such books available. My favorite authors are the already-named Norris and de Waal, and also Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun and rabble-rouser. I’d recommend any of their books on the subject.

An Ancient Rule for Postmodern People

One of the things I appreciate most about Benedictine spirituality is its emphasis on moderation and balance. Nothing is to be taken to the extreme. For instance, it recognizes the need both for community and for solitude. As a person brought up in a relentlessly community-minded Anabaptist tradition, I have found this an important balance. I love my community; I also need holy solitude on a regular basis. And while Benedictine life is centered around prayer, it’s understood that this must be balanced by work (with a historic emphasis on manual work) and scholarship. Although this insight may seem rather self-evident, I have found it quite helpful in practice. When I feel out of balance, I ask myself, “What do you need, Soul? Do you need to go out in the garden and pull weeds; do you need to read a challenging book; or do you need to sit down and meditate?” The question is always helpful, and usually yields the answer I need.

It’s fascinating to me that contemporary men and women have a common bond with those first small monastic communities founded 1,500 years ago. Our lives couldn’t be more different, and yet both I (a married, Mennonite woman) and a celibate, Catholic monk of 600 CE have found a foundation for a vital spiritual life in the writings of St. Benedict. In a time when new spiritual fads abound, I find this kind of continuity and stability comforting…and possibly even hip.

Guest author Sheri Hostetler is the pastor of First Mennonite Church of San Francisco. The Benedictine community to which she belongs is called Hesed. It is a non-resident community made up of laypeople from a variety of Christian denominations who are committed to the practice and teaching of Christian meditation..

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on September 1, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on August 12, 2004.

Image credit: Randy OHC [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

One observation I’ve made in my years living on Earth is that nearly all humans have (or had) parents. Those parents also had parents. Indeed, for the entire history of humanity, it’s pretty much been a long series of parents and offspring. What a curious way to run a species, right? And yet many humans have only a passing awareness of their genetic lineage (and the many other people to whom they are related). One would think that is significant information. If you’re a human with insufficient knowledge of your ancestry, today’s a great day to start fixing that, whether through conventional genealogical research or by spitting into a tube, which is apparently what the cool human kids do these days.

Image credit: Pixabay

Diving into the past

At the intersection of the Boulevard St. Michel and the Boulevard St. Germain, in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter, stands a ruin of brick and stone walls, vaguely recognizable as rooms or chambers. This spot was once the site of Roman public baths, a place of leisure for local residents in the first to third century CE. These baths were destroyed in the third century, and the property was later bought in 1330 by the Abbot of Cluny, who built a new structure alongside the ruins. During the French Revolution, the property passed out of the church’s hands, and had various owners (one of whom covered the bath ruins in six feet of soil) before being bought by Alexandre du Sommerard, a collector of medieval antiquities. Today, both of these sites are part of the Musée National du Moyen Age, a museum dedicated to the arts and history of the Middle Ages.

Besides the relative novelty of visiting ancient (and surprisingly intact) Roman ruins amidst the hubbub of a 21st-century city, the baths give a fascinating insight into Roman culture. These baths consisted of a series of pools: the tepidarium (lukewarm), caldarium (hot), and frigidarium (cold). Guests normally moved from the lukewarm pool to the hot pool, then to the cold before retiring to rooms designed for socializing with other guests. Roman baths of this type were open to everyone, and were an important part of life in ancient Roman towns.

Water, Water Everywhere

Almost two thousand years later, in 1896, San Francisco entrepreneur and mayor Adolph Sutro opened his own public baths, albeit on a much grander scale. At the time, Sutro owned almost 1/12 of the land in San Francisco, and he decided to build his baths on part of that property, near his own home on Sutro Heights. Built to house 25,000 bathers, the three-acre complex included three restaurants, an amphitheater, an outdoor tide pool, and five saltwater pools of various temperatures—a design similar to the Roman baths. These pools were filled and emptied by the movement of the tide, the sea water moving into and out of the pools through a large tunnel.

Sutro conceived of the baths as a benefit to the public, much as the Roman baths were intended for everyone. In fact, when he learned that train operators were charging seaside visitors two fares to reach the baths, he built his own rail line to bring people there for the price of one 5-cent fare. This was in keeping with Sutro’s general concern for the public welfare; in 1869 he successfully agitated for the construction of a tunnel linking various Comstock Lode mines in Nevada to ensure better working conditions for miners (although he did also benefit financially from the completion of the project).

Road to Ruins

After its heyday in the first half of the 20th century, the baths fell into disuse, and in fact were in the process of being demolished when a fire gutted the property in the 1960s. This left a sprawling mess of concrete foundations and melted metal. These ruins became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1973. By the time I first visited the site, in the 1990s, it looked incredibly aged, its former bathing pools choked with algae, and its metal pilings eaten away by the tide. But despite this decay, or maybe because of it, the scene was incredibly picturesque, with a gorgeous view opening out onto the ocean, and white calla lilies dotting the upper slopes of the property. At the time I didn’t know the history of the place, but was fascinated by its glorious state of decay.

After visiting the Cluny baths in Paris, I immediately thought of the Sutro ruins, and was surprised to realize that the Sutro Baths appealed to me on the same level as the Roman baths, despite having been built almost two thousand years later. There is something mysterious and melancholy about any place that has outlived its use, and a modern visitor is similarly drawn to imagine what it once was like, whether it has been abandoned for a hundred or a thousand years. On the one hand, this shows the limits of human memory, that anything that occurs before our lifetimes seems foreign and unknowable, but on the other, it highlights our own sense of mortality, and the hope that our works will be remembered and wondered over when we are gone.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on September 5, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on January 16, 2005.

International Women’s Day is a storied holiday, observed each year on March 8. It both celebrates women’s countless achievements and draws public attention to the continuing quest for equal rights, pay, and opportunities. It’s kind of shocking to me that even now, in 2019, we as a society haven’t figured out how to treat women with dignity and respect. Let’s see what we can do to fix that today.

Image credit: Public Domain Files

When liquids behave like solids

Like many people, I’ve tried hard to forget my days in junior high school. That was an unpleasant time in my life for all the usual reasons, and thankfully most of it is now a dim blur. But a few pleasant moments do stand out in my memory. One of those was a report I did for my ninth-grade science class. For reasons I no longer recall, the topic I chose was Pascal’s Law, and I must have prepared well for that 10-minute presentation, because I could probably stand up and give pretty much the same talk today, even though I never went on to study any more about it.

Pascal’s Law describes the behavior of fluids in a closed system, and says, to oversimplify somewhat, that the pressure the fluids exert is always the same throughout the system. This is the principle that enables hydraulic presses to work—a small amount of force applied to a piston pushing down on fluid can exert much more force on a larger connected piston, making it sort of like a liquid lever. The same effect has applications in everything from scuba diving to ventilation systems and dam construction.

Pascal, Meet Fisher

Although that little snippet of knowledge has stayed with me all this time, that marked the extent of what I knew about fluid mechanics until I wrote an article here about Space Pens. These pens, legendary for being able to write underwater, in zero gravity, in a vacuum, or in just about any other situation, use a special thixotropic ink, a substance that’s normally in a gel state but which turns into a liquid when it’s agitated—that is, when the ball rolls against it. It’s liquid just long enough to flow onto the paper, and then it turns semisolid again. (As spiffy as that is, some Space Pen ink turns out to have surprising problems, which you can read about in Space Pens vs. Purple Ink on my blog.)

Back in 2006, some very cool videos started making the rounds: people doing stunts with something called “non-Newtonian fluids.” If you’re not an engineer, that may not sound very intriguing, until you look at guys running across the surface of a vat filled with a solution of cornstarch and water, but sinking into it when they stand still. That’s a real eye-opener. (Mythbusters also did a segment on this phenomenon.) Or some other guys taking a handful of the same liquid goop and slapping it into solid balls, which then turn back into liquid as soon as the agitation stops. These are just a couple of the many wacky properties exhibited by non-Newtonian fluids—substances that change their viscosity in reaction to stress. (See YouTube for a long list of videos featuring non-Newtonian fluid experiments.) And sure enough, the ink from my Space Pen is in the same category.

Non-Newtonian fluids range from the exotic to the mundane. You’ve probably made a cornstarch-and-water mixture lots of times in your own kitchen, and if you made enough of it, you too could walk across its surface. Assuming the proportion of starch to water is right, the solution gets suddenly thick and firm when force is applied to it, as you may have noticed when trying to stir it when preparing a sauce. Stir more slowly, and it flows more easily.

Going with the Flow

But not all non-Newtonian fluids behave this way. Some of them get runnier when under stress, such as Space Pen ink and paints that adhere to a brush when at rest but glide on easily when the brush is applied to a surface. Also in the thixotropic category as well as in your kitchen: ketchup and honey.

There are still other varieties, too, which have different patterns of changing viscosity. Such varied substances as quicksand, Silly Putty, blood, dough, and gelatin fall under the broad non-Newtonian heading. By contrast, Newtonian fluids, or what most people think of as normal fluids, are those (like water) whose viscosity is determined only by temperature and pressure. Sure, water will get plenty firm if the temperature is reduced enough, but no amount of force can make liquid water behave like a solid.

The moral of the story? If you’re stuck in a non-Newtonian fluid—or junior high school—the trick is to remain calm. The more you struggle, the harder it gets.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on February 28, 2007.

Image credit: Rory MacLeod [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

Well, it’s National Cereal Day, where by “cereal” of course the implication is that you should go buy and eat some commercial, boxed breakfast cereal, probably sweetened and with a stupid cartoon character on the box. And, OK, I do enjoy a nice serving of Cap’n Crunch once every two or three years, but today, I think I’m going to rebel with some granola (still “cereal”) or, more likely, a hearty bowl of steel cut oats (also “cereal”). Maybe with some extra oat bran for good measure, because cereal.

Image credit: BrokenSphere [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Civilizing Mealtime

When I was growing up in a large family, my parents instilled in us certain table etiquette—if not for decorum’s sake, then at least to keep complete anarchy from breaking out while we broke bread. Commandments regarding posture (don’t slouch), arm position (no elbows on the table), and eating style (chew with your mouth closed) were familiar refrains around the supper table. I am thankful to my parents for these lessons, and now I teach my own children in a similar way. But after I left home, I found myself in certain dining situations where I did not know the rules, mostly because our family meals did not involve multi-course menus, where it was important to tell the oyster fork from the fish fork. (It was enough that we were not flinging forks across the table at each other.) In these situations, I could always tell myself that these were outdated conventions, and indeed these kinds of customs have mainly fallen by the wayside in our current low-tech food culture. But I always felt a lack, and a secret wish that I could conduct myself in the very highest echelons of society without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Pack The Knife

I therefore find it very interesting that Margaret Visser, in her book The Rituals of Dinner, asserts that it is precisely to forestall violence that such rules of etiquette came into being. She argues that “table manners are…a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question,” and that only later did they evolve into the complex, but mostly banal, rituals we know today. One of her primary examples of how the shared table can be a dangerous place, and why table manners are necessary, is the presence of sharp eating utensils at most meals. When everyone at the table is armed with knives, the most common eating implement in the West until recent times, there was always a possibility that mealtime fights would erupt into bloodshed. In fact, a few hundred years ago, it was the custom for each man to bring his own knife to a host’s table—the same knife he used for countless other purposes.

It may have been in response to the danger these knives posed that the French king banned pointed knives from the table in 1699, replacing them instead with the rounded knives still in common use. Even with such a precaution, it is now still correct etiquette for knives to be placed on the table with the blade facing the plate, and to be replaced in the same position after the meal. And even those of us who do not have a delicate grasp of the nuances of cutlery placement know that it is bad manners to point a knife at someone else or at oneself while sharing a meal.

The Knives Are Out

In contrast to the knife-centered history of the West, chopsticks have been the preferred eating utensils in Japan and China for thousands of years, possibly influenced by the teachings of Confucius, who believed that “The honorable and upright man…allows no knives on his table.” Knives are a symbol of violence or aggression, and therefore were contrary to Confucius’s nonviolent teachings. But even though chopsticks do not have the implied violence of knives, there are still certain taboos about how chopsticks may be used. In Japan there is an aversion to passing food via chopsticks from one person to another while eating together. This action recalls part of the Buddhist funeral ritual, in which family members use chopsticks to pick up bones from the crematory ashes, and pass them from person to person before they are placed in an urn. Also, it is not correct to leave chopsticks sticking upright in a bowl of rice, as this is reminiscent of a tribute to the dead (the deceased’s chopsticks stuck in a bowl of uncooked rice on the family altar).

I guess I always knew that more was at steak (sorry!) than politeness during our family dinner hour. We were keeping our violent tendencies at bay by keeping our knives to ourselves and resisting the temptation to leap out of our chairs at each other. We were, in fact, learning how to peacefully co-exist in a stressful situation (worrying about getting our fair share)—and were following the original intent of table etiquette, if not all of its arcane proscriptions.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on May 20, 2005.

Image credit: Pixabay