Hypotyposis on a Good Day

Turning 40

Two weeks ago yesterday, I turned the big 4-O. I look back on my thirties as a decade that vastly improved on my twenties, which weren't too bad. I optimistically look at my forties as a time for profound growth and change and undoubtedly, deep challenge.

Word for my day: mephitic

Gore Vidal wrote in tribute of the recently deceased Barbara Epstein (The New York Review of Books: Barbara Epstein (1928-2006)):

Ultimately, in fact, she could accept almost anything in the way of a point of view if she was convinced that it was expressed in good faith: needless to say, she had a difficult time dealing with the baroque lies of the neocons which have made mephitic the swamps of bookchat.

I had to look up the word "mephitic," which was Dictionary.com/Word of the Day on June 23, 2001 in dictionary.com. One definition is "offensive to the smell; as, mephitic odors."

Maxwell and memories

Last Sunday, while listening to the sermon at church, I tried to remember Maxwell's equations. Years have passed since I last thought at any great depth about electromagnetism while I was pursuing my Ph.D. in biophysics. Now I can barely remember them. There's no going back, really. Not that want to go back to a career in the sciences. But I do wish to know more about the latest in my erstwhile field. I do flip through Scientific American, Nature, Science, and Physics Today but only sporadically and with little forethought.

Back to blogging

There have been many things on my mind lately, and I've not had the discipline in place to make them flow together coherently. The "bookmarks" I have saved on my del.icio.us account gives some indication of what I've been pondering, but by no means, a complete picture. One thing is for sure: all this distraction has pushed my blogging to the side. Today, I will get back on my blogging podiums to write about both the personal side and the work side of what I've been up to.

On the personal side:

As I jumped in wondering what I should actually write about, I felt instantly pulled in too many directions. Fortunately, I was reminded of the central lessons of the last weeks: that I should start in a place of great stillness, which also happens to be a place of great depth. As I hold myself still, I am able to accept that I am a little human being living in a world with outsized needs, including my own. I remember the pledge I had made to pray for Darfur, and I pause to do so. We put up a display to raise awareness about Darfur at First Pres Berkeley and will host a postcard writing event for A Million Voices for Darfur in early April. I am relieved that spring break is coming up, primarily because it gives my students and me some breathing room for the course.

The absence of activity on my electronic presences belies the churn of words on my computer. Having just read about super-prolific Stephen Downe's recently announced hiatus from blogging to take time to stop and reflect made me wonder whether I'm going in the wrong direction by trying to get back into blogging.

The situations are certainly not parallel. First, I've never been the regular and prolific blogger that Stephen was. I have had lots of time to reflect, though I can stand for more in this time of change, challenge, and opportunity. Most importantly, I believe that regular weblogging would be an excellent discipline for me since it would force me to work in smaller chunks, to begin and to complete manageable pieces of work on a regular basis. Without forcing myself to write coherent sentences and paragraphs, I will generate monstrous lists of suggestive phrases. Writers understand the seductiveness of such lists, which seem to contain more content than they actually do.

On the work side:

There is a huge amount of change afoot in my workplace and in my own professional career. Although it would be inappropriate for me to write about some of these matters, I can certainly write openly about my personal vision for information technology at UC Berkeley and beyond. This is an opportune moment to rethink every aspect of my professional work as I look at the field at large and the challenges, opportunities, and risks before me specifically. The product of my (over?) cogitation has been long EccoPro outlines with phrases such as remix, interoperability, gather/create/share, grids, bibliographic metadata, knowledge repository, seamlessness. My job now is to write these outlines in little essays that make sense to others. time to step back to ponder what we do to best serve the academic and research needs of the campus.

UC Compensation and Drucker: Take One

At a party late last fall, someone asked me what I thought about the stories that were breaking in the San Francisco Chronicle about how the perks that senior administration at the UC system were getting. I expressed my natural outrage at the situation but didn't think a lot more about the matter since I didn't think anything would ever change. (I've gotten sufficiently cynical to expect bad behavior from the people at the very top. Isn't that sad?) Recently, I started to follow more closely the ongoing coverage in the Chronicle (including the latest article SENATORS DEMAND ANSWERS ON UC PAY / Unreported compensation raises ire at panel's hearing ), as well as the PR responses of UC Berkeley and the system as a whole. The more I learn, the more I'm longing for some deep wisdom in this matter. How much I get paid or you get paid or anyone gets paid -- or should get paid -- is a hot-button issue. I've been fascinated by the types of arguments that have been marshalled to justify various positions. At the risk of incorrectly characterizing the debate, it seems that those who are justifying the high pay of senior people argue that we need horizontal parity; UC leaders should be paid at comparable levels to leaders at peer institutions. Those who express outrage at the compensation of senior leaders draw our attention to the lack of vertical fairness; is it right for the pay at the highest levels to be going up, while the rank-and-file (who could really use the money!) are not similarly benefiting?

I know that it's more complicated that what I set out here -- and that's what I'm trying to get at as I sort through the arguments. More fundamentally, I've been searching my own heart on how I currently feel and how I would feel should I ever going higher (or fall lower) down the hierarchy. I keep asking myself to what extent are my views -- and those of everyone involved -- more self-serving than reflective of a concern for others. There's a lot more to say. I will close with bemusement the following quote from the Wikipedia entry on Peter Drucker: Peter Drucker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

His most controversial work was on compensation schemes, in which he said that senior management should not be compensated more than twenty times the lowest paid employees. This attracted criticism from some of the same people who had previously praised him.

(I'm looking for the source for the 20:1 figure and plan to follow up once I find it.)

Rest vs non-rest

One of the things I most love about the early morning is the bit of breathing room it provides for me. I have been saying to myself and Laura that I need to learn how to draw sharper boundaries between work and non-work part of my life. Isn't there something wrong when I resort to calling the rest of life "non-work"? Hmmm....part of my problem comes from not being able to properly conceptualize what I'm dividing my life between. Although I initially rejected the division as that between "work" and "rest", I now say, yes, that's a good way to put it, noting that by "work", I don't just mean the stuff I do professionally or for a paycheck but all forms of striving to be productive. By "rest," I do not mean the cessation of action but the richness of Sabbath. Maybe I should totally take the focus away from work by thinking of my life as "rest" vs "non-rest".

Talking to the great but imperfect

Boy, I wish I could talk directly to Milosz or a prophet of old. As a Christian, I believe that we can pray directly to the One In Charge, the Lord God Almighty. Alas, that isn't enough for me. I want to consult unearthly wise people who had walked before me on this planet, who struggled with pain, doubt, temptation, and defeat. I believe that Jesus did all those things, and hence, God can sympathize with our plight as humans. Yet Jesus did not sin. I want to commune with great but frail people who sinned as I have. I want to ask how they kept going even while they bumbled and messed things up. To his credit, Jesus never screwed up -- he was perfect.

Let there be no mistaking me: it's the greatest news that Jesus was both like us and not like us. He showed us that there is a way beyond our own individual and collective quagmires. I don't need a besmirched Jesus. Yet, even as a card-carrying Protestant, I confess to the appeal of holding up a pantheon of capital-S Saints, those who fall between us and perfection.

Losing courage at night and the importance of stopping

For the vast majority of nights when I turn off the lights for sleep, I have been blessed by a clear conscience. Last night, I started to lose the courage of my convictions, which is a terrible thing to happen when I'm trying to sleep. I need to put a stop to working too late. The demons of self-doubt are strongest when I set out to work on a task that is greater than the time I have before me. It's time to reapply what I learned when writing my Ph.D. dissertation: set a time to stop work well before bedtime (regardless of how much I accomplished or didn't accomplish that day), and honor the Sabbath. When I was feeling most desperate and helpless, working long hours for six days a week, Sundays were the most sweet. I long to come back to that experience of rest and freedom in the midst of busyness.

housing bubble?

TechnologyReview.com - Housing Bubble:

Didier Sornette's and Wei-Xing Zhou's analysis differs from just two years ago, when there was no sign of the faster-than-exponential growth characteristic of a bubble. Their conclusions are strengthened by their successful prediction of a housing bubble in the United Kingdom in 2003, where housing prices began dropping in July 2004. Their analysis is nifty, and the mathematics are simple and straightforward. "Soon" might be a good time to sell.

I'm planning to read Zhou's and Sornette's Is There a Real-Estate Bubble in the US?. I'm really scared to buy a house right now -- but it's also scary not to!