Record and Teach

I was recently at a talk at the Oriental Institute on seal images from the Persian empire (4th to 7th century BC). I won’t belabor the role of the Zoroastrian religion in these images -- if you’re interested I suggest you look up the fire altars and the digs at Persepolis. But as the different images were put up on the screen showing people sacrificing animals or tending the fire altar, a comment was made that images show the everyday and writing shows the extraordinary.

The idea is fairly straight forward. Images have to be understood by the viewers, therefore they have to be familiar. Whereas, everyone knows the everyday so when something is committed to writing it is because it is out of the ordinary. I am not sure if I agree. Even from an archeological perspective there are a lot of examples of the everyday that get recorded, mostly in the form of commerce or fiction.

So where do music, science and philosophy fit in? Like fiction they are a dynamic. They can grow and evolve or can die and be forgotten. I think one of the things that our society has going for it is that we have so many ways to record and collect ideas. Maybe this is bad, because everything gets saved and has equal weight to future generations.

For example, the oldest recorded music is a song to Nikal, the wife of the Syrian moon god. -- Ok, maybe not what we think of recording, this song was inscribed on a tablet in Ugarit somewhere around 1400 B.C. and translated by Prof. Kilmer in the 1970’s. http://www.amaranthpublishing.com/hurrian.htm Unlike older verse that has been found, this tablet contained instructions to make and play the instrument. So the musical score was actually recorded even though we cannot hear the original version. But I digress.

We do not know if this song was common of the style and imagery of the day or extraordinary. We know some one took the time to really record the details. So it had some significance. But, what was the other music like?

I am of the opinion, that music, like fiction has to strike a common note that people will connect to it. Or it simply fades away. So if we go to Ras Shamra today will we hear evolutions of the same sound? I would expect that the answer is a “yes,” although we might not recognize it.

Consider “Eyes on the Prize” AKA “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," which is a variant of the earlier "Gospel Plow", aka "Hold On", aka "Keep Your Hand on the Plow" etc… The latest version I heard was from Bruce Springsteen with a large dixi-land style folk band. The sound was fantastic. But it was very different from one man plucking six nylon strings. And, while on the subject of Mr. Springsteen let me say this: as he was doing these old folks songs, he added his own lyrics, contemporized them. So we see the evolution beginning.

Ok so now pull this idea back to science. Do we more often record the ordinary or extraordinary? We tend to skip the ordinary. Pick up any lab book and see how much common knowledge and practice is taken for granted. I once had a technician complain that the protocol was inaccurate, not her, because it didn’t say to cap the volatile solvents. Something I assumed everyone knew.

And do ideas grow, if they are not communicated in a way that the main stream can connect to them? For my part, I think not. Ideas will only live in their isolated community unless they can be put in a way that the society as a whole can grasp. So, in an uneducated society, complicated science will simply die out.

The upshot of this is: record in accurate detail and teach in a way people understand.

I will leave you this morning with Bill Withers. His professional career wasn’t very long only really running through the 70’s and mid 80’s. But in that time he wrote songs that could well find their way into the lexicon of traditional American music in a few hundred years. I realize it’s hard to predict what art will last into the future, but “Lean on Me” had that “always been around” feeling right out the gate. Like most great art it touches a genuine human emotion, and does it in a comforting way.

I expect it will undergo some evolution much like “Keep Your Hand on the Plow" because it is recorded and we all know what it means.

Peace and Happy Holidays,
Charles

Admit Error and Move to Fix

So today I had to apologize to a customer for a late shipment of his order. I know everyone realizes things get delayed some times. Fortunately, it is a rare occasion. But, this is by far one of my least favorite things to have to do because there just is no good excuse.

I mean seriously, do any of us really care why the order is late? No. We order it, pay for it and have the right to expect that it will come when ordered. So, when it’s late we’re upset. And we have the right to be.

So as a vendor, I really don’t know what to say. “Sorry,” is insufficient and I doubt if the customer cares why it was late. Sure you can offer them credit for future purchases, but most won’t order again. And can you blame them? Who wants to deal with bad service? And this is why quality systems should all include a proper failure analysis investigation of any system break down.

I have been around the block enough to know that people always balk at this. Accidents happen. Why point fingers. Etc. Etc. Etc. But the why is listed above. Customers want and deserve good service. Errors left uncorrected will continue.

And yes I know that no one wants to be signaled out as the cause of a problem or have their mistakes highlighted. Believe me I have heard the “its not my fault because…” line so many times it makes my head spin. People are quicker to defend than correct.

But failure analysis isn’t about blame, it’s about cause. If a person in the chain made the wrong decision or did the wrong thing… why? Did they not know the right thing? Was it a careless error? Were they unable to do the right thing because of some obstacle?

You won’t fix what you pretend isn’t broken. So when something goes wrong stand up and admit the error, take your lumps and learn why. Then do your best not to repeat.

So, to the customer who shall remain nameless, should you be reading this, know that I am truly sorry for the service you received. We have already done our internal failure analysis and hopefully no one else will suffer from the same snafu.

Peace,
Charles

Lessons from a Christmas Tree

In November of 1986, my father and I went traipsing through the woods in search of the perfect Christmas tree. And no, it wasn’t for our house. My mother was afraid that live, err formerly live trees would catch fire so we always had artificial trees. (In fact I am still using an artificial tree. Hmmmm…) No, my father wanted to start farming trees. And since pines are amazingly consistent from one branch of their family tree to the next (if you will pardon the pun), he decided, rather than buying saplings, we would find a perfect pine and cultivate from seed.

Of course, we didn’t actually know what we were doing; not at the outset anyway. But we were confident that we could figure it out. So off we went through hip deep snow evaluating the symmetry of tree after tree.

After a few days, on the 20th in fact, we found what we were looking for. The tree was huge, well, tall anyway and nearly perfectly symmetric. So we set about cutting the tree down so we could access the seeds.

Now, normally when you cut a tree, you clear the trees around it so you have room to work. But, we only wanted the one. So we tried to carefully thread it between other trees as we dropped it. At one point the chainsaw got stuck in the trunk and we had to manually push the tree off the blade to get it out. (And the was a very large tree!) But, eventually we prevailed and collected the top for the pine cones. (Actually the real work was cutting the rest for fire wood and carting it back home!)

So we took the tree top back to the house and collected the pine cones. But here we realized that in a healthy tree the seeds are safely locked in the pine cone. And while it seems to be common knowledge that you open pinecones by heating, neither of us knew what temperature safely extracts the seeds so that they would grow.

But you know what? A little deductive reasoning goes a long way. Pinecone release their seeds to replant after forest fires. So, premise one: Ray Bradbury’s novel claims that books burn at 451°F. Premise two: books are mostly wood pulp. Conclusion – If we heat pinecones to 451°F we should have good healthy seeds to plant. Now I cannot tell you if we were right or wrong, only that it worked.

We placed the pinecones on a cookie sheet and placed them on the oven and waited. After a short while, the pinecones opened and the seeds fell out. We pulled the seeds out and the next day went out to plant them.

So now I know what you are thinking. You don’t plant in the winter. Why not? The seeds lay cold in the ground, until spring when the water and warmth would make them grow. Again, I cannot say if this is right or wrong only that it worked. And in spring we had little branches pushing through the ground were we planted.

For awhile we let the trees be. Then when they got to be waist high, we started trimming. My father got us a set of machete length knives. Razor sharp, and balanced like a good sword. And we would go through the woods shaping the trees into the perfect Christmas tree shape so that they would grow and fill out properly. And you know we were pretty good at it. Four swipes and a tree was properly shaped.

There were set backs that make good learning experiences. At one point my dad thought I was making fun of the enterprise and was quite hurt. For the record I wasn’t. But, it did teach me that to really be supportive the other person has to know beyond a doubt that you believe in them.

But of course people are not always supportive. And as most of us well know, no matter how much you do for people they still gravitate to selfish and insensitive. As the trees were reaching maturity, my uncle decided it was easier to cut down nearly an entire ridge to camouflage his hunting blind. My father was furious. Probably no so much at the damage as the disregard of him – and the subsequent poorly executed claim of innocence. It never ceases to amaze me how people will lie to you face and trust that you will accept it so as not risk insulting them. It was a demoralizing moment, and my father wound up letting most of what we planted go for pulp.

A few trees survived. We didn’t bother to continue shaping them. We talked about letting them go for awhile then collecting more pinecones and starting again, but life moved on. Personally I don’t think my father overcame the idea that someone would pull the rug out again. So, in the end we cut a few for use at holidays and that was that.

The last tree we cut, went up at my office. One night working late, before we turned the lights off, I caught a good shot of it on my cell phone.

So now I look at this picture and I think about my Dad, and following dreams. You can figure things out if think logically. You should actively support the people you care about. But you can’t let lack of support, even from the people you support demoralize you.

In the end, we may not have got a tree farm going. But start to finish, that last tree was something we produced together. And it has an enduring beauty that.

Peace
Charles