SENSE: A Field Guide to Science & Culture

Teeth Have Legs

SENSE

A Field Guide to Science & Culture
Theory . Storytelling . Transformation

Some of us, some of our ideas, and some goods of the material world have extended use-lives out on the long-tail of the normal distribution, but none of us escape obscurity.

Consider cable TV movies which clearly reveal the Hollywood make-believe lie of celluloid (digital) immortality. Only a few restored films establish themselves out on the long-tail of existence, and most quickly drive to obscurity. Likewise, the 14-C isotope and DNA persist much longer than most entities, but eventually, they too decay or change over time.

Obscurity remains a state of entropy where time barely functions. While obscurity holds no moral primacy, the quality of persistence through time does incorporate a moral dimension when conditioned by human thought and action. Archaeologists find engaging work within the normal distribution and the long tail of persistence. By explicating the quality of persistence through time, archaeologists strive to hold obscurity at bay in order to bring to play the moral dimensions of human life.

Humans and their artifacts have biographies. Archaeological examples of such biographical scientific work include Richard Marlar's work on human myoglobin residues, or Price and Burton's tracing of strontium signatures evident in the enamel of molars (teeth have legs!). In interpreting the facts of these biographies (as Jesse D. Jenninings noted nearly thirty five years ago), the short useful life of any simple hypothesis merely implies that the effort to understand human persistence and character never ends.

Clive Thompson nicely sums up the scientific method: "a system that demands data to back up assertions, prizes transparency, and refuses to take anyone on their word." Thompson calls the scientific method "one of humanity's finest moral products."

sense.editor@yahoo.com

Short War Primer

SENSE

A Field Guide to Science & Culture
Theory . Storytelling . Transformation

Although a majority of Americans have no combat experience, themes of military conflict fill media channels to such an extent that many rush in to voice opinion. In this rising tide, well-informed opinion seems hard to find. The world runs on theory, theory clearly provides the backdrop for armed conflict, and to theory we must turn to more thoroughly understand our happy and tragic human condition.

In the macro-economic and political terms of 2003, some promoted a 'new American way of war' which discounted the the bloody and chaotic realities of war. The strategies used in 1864-1865 and 1944-1945 (e.g., war won by the sheer weight of numbers and awesome destructive power; citizen-soldiers inflicting massive casualties) themselves attrited as 'new strategies' surged to the front (e.g., information technology, speed, maneuver, flexibility, surprise, precision firepower (cheap JDAMS), special forces, and psychological operations).

Yet, three years later (in 2006), critics mull two key points: (1) the American military has turned bigger and heavier than expected; and, (2) the special commando (SOCOM) component of the US Marine Corps "...is now the core of the American military. It is the re-conquest of the Wild West (reference to the Wild West is not an insignificant detail). America's War on Terrorism is really about 'taming the frontier'..."

Not an insignificant detail, indeed.

The use of the unreconstructed 'Wild West' mentality calls for a deeper examination. Anthropologists, historians and politicians have much to say here, and can retrodict and parse the on-going costs and accrued benefits of the many conquests of the American West...

sense.editor@yahoo.com

From Somewhere Else

SENSE

A Field Guide to Science & Culture
Theory . Storytelling . Transformation

From Somewhere Else

Archaeologists find branding in all artifacts, in social disposition, architecture, and in a group's use of space -- think of Clovis or Folsom Points, woven fiber sandals, Puebloan wall construction and kiva designs, pit house construction, weaving, pottery typologies, or the differences and similarities among the Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblos. The races of maize from Mexico clearly reflect style as well as genetics. Ancient styles and brands such as these successfully carried themselves across hundreds of miles of territory and many years of valuable service up to the present. Admitting that the ancient Southwest ran on Capital 'G' globalization changes a lot of old ideas about the lifestyles and material culture found within this part of "Turtle Island." In the Southwest, connection to the larger world clearly dates twelve to fifteen thousand years (with some suggesting evidence for even greater antiquity).

Many aircraft flying into Phoenix from the Midwest and Northeast turn at the Zuni VOR before beginning a descent for landing. Passengers with a dark night view to the south and southeast notice few lights in a pitch-black land. In the imagination, this stretch of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona down to the Mexican border feels just like wilderness, remote, isolated, and almost disconnected from the world. Clearly, however, the history of the area takes a far different path with regard to technology, style and branding.

In Arizona, the telegraphic news of the Bisbee Massacre and a thirty-second gunfight and love triangle-spiced show trial in Tombstone Arizona danced around the world in 1881. A clever editor in New York turned a 'filler' news article into an iconic opinion about continued lawlessness, and Arizona suffered years of delayed entry into statehood because of the reputation of a branded opinion.

On the military side of global communications technology, a 29-station line connected isolated posts such as Fort Bliss, Santa Fe and Fort Apache in the Arizona Territory. In August and September 1881, the telegraph between Fort Apache and Camp Thomas some 90 miles away went down. Cut off from outside communication, the residents and soldiers of Cibeque and Fort Apache turned nervous trouble into a short, messy conflict. Will C. Barnes responded with bravery and later received an iconic brand award known as the Congressional Medal of Honor (also read John R. Welch, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh & Mark Altaha: Retracing the Battle of Cibecue: Western Apache, Documentary, and Archaeological Interpretations, Kiva, Volume 71, Number 2, Winter 2005, pp 133-163). The imagined 'Fort Apache' became an icon of violence, and this reputation brand later transferred to a police desk in the Bronx, a Hollywood movie, and to military outposts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We now know that as branded systems and their associated infrastructure fail or fall, trouble breaks loose.

However, brand and reputation can also free the imagination. For example, most Belly Dancers think Belly Dance in America first appeared at the Chicago World's Fair. Yet Fatima (also known as 'Little Egypt') performed in Tombstone Arizona at the Birdcage Theatre in 1881. Her picture still hangs inside that notorious venue, and her dancing there preceded the Chicago World's Fair by twelve years. Little Egypt’s brand persists today in a melody we all know -- (possibly now playing in your head) -- and in carney barker come-on lyrics such as "She walks, she talks, she crawls on her belly like a reptile."

The Winchester rifle manufactured in New Haven Connecticut, the gun of choice for Western settlers after it was "introduced" in 1866 -- the common man's brand that won the West in the capable hands of John Wayne -- will soon hail from Portugal and Japan. While it seems a substantive change, maybe we fool ourselves to think so. A new lifestyle brand will come along shortly, likely arriving from somewhere else.

The Southwest, always branded from the outside, readily accepts technologies, ideas and people from other places. As in the past, the modern Southwest runs on Capital 'G' globalization. To know that leads to some really good thinking about how we live today and how we prepare the future.

sense.editor@yahoo.com

A Trusty Three-Part Method

SENSE

A Field Guide to Science & Culture
Theory . Storytelling . Transformation

Molecules and cultural practices permeate the reptilian brain stem long before we consciously discover their imperial design. For some, fearful emotions rise from within the amygdala to syncopate aspects of life that seem predetermined. Theory suggests, however, that we need not live in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, for we also retain substantive capacity to learn new tricks that permit freedoms well beyond any limits of dystopian programming. The technologies of literacy and numeracy ('L & N') extend our scope where culture permits reason.

Franz Boas encountered American language and came to believe that the culture and life ways of a people reflected in the language that they spoke. Out West, people speak of the railroads coming and going (Johnny Cash sang 'The L & N Don't Stop Here Anymore'). The railroad pocket watch (an analog expression of literacy, numeracy and networked connection) still keeps symbolic time. The sweep of history informs us that the archetype Ludlow coal miner and the laconic everyman must hop the rail and move down the 'L & N' line under steam and pressure to discover, beyond all expectation, that they can and must address important issues for their communities. Under such deep play, the stakes rise sufficiently to engage irrational men to move past their utilitarian set point.

Three useful hacks supercharge literacy and numeracy to make cultural contests more interesting and useful: (1) the romance of prompt action situated in intimately knowing one's desire; (2) Deep Play; and, (3) an E-prime writing style delivered in a 3-800-1 format (about three paragraphs long more or less - up to eight hundred words - one hour of effort) -- and no more -- get in and get out. Where one can affirm desire and establish a style early in the contest, deep play thrusts its dirty hands into the unequivocal messes that people set for themselves and leave behind for others. Truth may sometimes be the most difficult thing in the world to discover but it exists. The three hacks provide a trusty method to establish reality, verify truth, and express ideas with crystalline clarity.

sense.editor@yahoo.com

Lost & Found: Sweet Dreams And Flying Machines In Pieces On The Ground

SENSE

A Field Guide to Science & Culture
Theory . Storytelling . Transformation

Wrecks litter the West in literal, material, and metaphorical dimensions. For example, consider how old newspaper and illustrated journal articles of pilots 'shooting' desert intaglios from an open-cockpit biplane make the imagination soar. Their historical aerial photos are themselves fading wrecks of preservation that capture the time before the spiteful and uncaring nearly rubbed-out the last of the intaglios.

The story of the 'Pilot Kachina' -- a jokester-perpetrated tall tale about an aviator goggled Kachina Doll carved to honor a dying airman's unanticipated metal bender at the southern edge of Black Mesa when the ground came up too quickly -- makes a delightful aural contribution to the folk urban legend genre of the region.

Likewise, consider the story of Zuni forester Dan Pena. While out marking timber one day in 1962, he heard the Whiting Brothers' Cessna airplane tuck itself into the Mogollon Rim above Colcord. To this day, real pieces of the Whiting Brothers (and parts of their Cessna) still decorate the uplift escarpment.

Then there is Craig Fuller, a fellow who hikes to unanticipated catastrophe -- to places where warriors have thrust their engines deep into the mud of eternity and touched the face of God -- and in doing so, gets the lost to re-register as found.

The sweet dreams of youth and career sometimes crash and burn unexpectedly. When it happens, a brief examination of texts can parachute those at risk to safe haven:

Rebbeca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" notes that the experience of being deeply lost yields transformative advantages -- by getting lost, she writes, one truly discovers found.

For natural scientists who might feel lost or forlorn, Robert Sullivan's "Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants" demonstrates that research projects can conclude well, even in unsettled times, and even despite modern problems like common carrier jihad directed against the unsuspecting. The author devised research (theory, methodology, field observation), and in carrying through to completion, produced a series of unanticipated observations that demonstrated both the common and uncommon sense of his work.

A third book, James O'Toole's "Creating the Good Life: Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness" suggests how lost adults find or rekindle life happiness. Forget the concept of 'feeling' happiness. With Aristotle, happiness unpacks as purposive acts of commission -- the do-ing of the highest orders of one's 'leisure work' while grinding away at it with discipline and excellence.

For some adults, unanticipated wrecks give way to an awakening of spiritual experience. The Buddhist notion of 'sukkha' and the Greek notion of 'eudaimonia' show up in Christianity -- in Aquinas' felicitas and beatitudo -- in terms Aquinas calls "integral human fulfillment" (for Aquinas, virtue reflects "the perfection of human capabilities involved in action").

Remember that in the West, just as elsewhere, women and men of action count. Moreover, knowing that what they seek comes only from within changes everything (according to Tricycle and Killing The Buddha (KTB), the happiness we strive for always resides within).

Despite imagined risks and the observable evidence on the ground, we must take diligent action to find happiness. So get with the doing, crank up the theory in your head and slip the hangar to  start a new journey to a distant vista.

sense.editor@yahoo.com

West of the 100th Meridian

SENSE

A Field Guide to Science & Culture
Theory . Storytelling . Transformation

The Federal government owns 65 percent of all land west of the 100th meridian -- an average of 49.6 of all land in 11 contiguous western states. Such primacy flavors a good many aspects of geopolitical organization, and around this locus of tenure minor demigods swarm. American Indian tribes retain some 53.5 million acres, about 7 percent of the lands in the western states. State trust lands concentrate another 48 million acres of land, while local governments take their dram measure where temperance falters. How private property sneaks into the equation remains shrouded in collusions and mystery. Fact checking search technologies suggest that these numbers vary a bit, mostly by lumping or splitting of data sets. Yet, these numbers don't really mean much until you get out on the land to relish a few life changing experiences. Take time to drive a wagon, a train, a bus, or a private automobile across the West with an immigrant from a distant foreign shore and listen to astonishment short circuit and tear asunder all preconceptions.

The land conditions our socialist bureaucracy with sotto voce modesty where superlatives might otherwise arise. The clever re-direct of control situates power in myth building. Because the land has no meaning unless government can engage people to do its bidding to concentrate power, the West remains a place where government builds moral landscapes and repositions people. Rugged and falsely self-made individuals thrive in the presence of such an absence-feigning landlord, and the mental templates of land 'transfer'(theft), exceptionalism, and triumphalism scale. Wallace Stegner put it mildly when he wrote, "Take for granted federal assistance, but damn federal control. Your presence as absentee landlord offends us, Uncle. Get out, and give us more money."

Most of the land west of the 100th meridian lacks water, and aridity remains the precursor drug of rugged individualism. The side-effects of aridity limit the concentration of people and raise a premium market hurdle which dampens the investment of fungible capital and effort. Still, people snort the dry air and organize themselves for the slightest knock of opportunity.

Before the Civil War, Saint Louis and Cuidad Chihuahua vied for opportunity along the Santa Fe Trail and El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (Historically, what James Wiley Magoffin created in trading empire with Mexico did not last). With the seismic shifting of people, money and transportation technologies, Chicago came to physically organize the infrastructure of West after the Civil War. That locus of economic control lasted up to the conclusion of the Second World War, when people and money shifted yet again. Today, New York owns the money and Washington the political control, while Hollywood film and other media conjure visual and literary preconceptions that feed post-literate, twelve-images-per-second beings who demand their Western experience without discomfort.

Some intellectuals and pundits claim that multi-generational families, long timers, and Natives hold a holistic mind, and thus, ecological advantage over more recent arrivals. Newcomers wonder if the centuries-old, class-based value systems developed merely on myths as strong as those we know we forge today. In the eye of the beholder, authenticity grows only as conditioned by globalized technology. Through it all, the government continues to situate us, yet few pay real attention to the mythic redirect.

sense.editor@yahoo.com

Theory Storytelling Transformation

SENSE

A Field Guide to Science & Culture
Theory . Storytelling . Transformation

This blog offers commentary focused on ideas, places, and things valued by human emotion and intellect. Expect the ping of irrational exuberance from time to time, and unexpected value somewhere beyond common sense. Remember that the knowledge, information and opinion presented here remains imperfect and circumscribed.

Hardwired to seek beauty, we love the symmetry of rules and operations that get expected results. Many efforts begin as an attempt to impress pretty women. Forget it. While we love pretty women, we do this hard work for the sake of joy and aesthetic excellence alone. And still, we have not lost our ancient Pleistocene tastes -- persistent themes call us to story telling. In the realm of ideas, count on economics, the normal distribution, and the social construction of reality (economics trumps social construction). In the domain of place, imagine the West, the Intermountain West, and more tightly yet, the Greater Southwest. In the world of things, attend to dogs, technology, and education -- they reveal the symmetry and beauty of the binary world corrupted and glorified by humankind.

We hope the ideas rendered here can under some conditions transform the darkness of ignorance, more effectively build relationships, and motivate others. The keen works of self-interested individuals building communities and institutions of good habit return the highest values and the greatest satisfactions. These relationships, based in strong ties and the strength of weak ties, scribe a circle unbroken in time.

sense.editor@yahoo.com