Author: Captain Obvious

If you talk to anyone involved in politics or senior leadership in companies, you will hear the term intervenors.  These are people or organizations whose role it is to be a public advocate for goodness by watching over businesses.  Perhaps you remember Ralph Nader who was a prominent advocate for consumer protections and environmental stewardship.

The energy utilities typically call these advocates stakeholders, which is a word with natural roots in the concept of “having a stake in the business or concept.”  The roots for this come from gambling jargon we all use like “they have skin in the game” or the ancient roots of owning a piece of property with others… from which we get the idea of claiming your stake.

This rightful balance in perspectives and dialogue in the game of business fairness and societal benefits has now devolved into a form of primitive warfare where each group holds sharp pointy sticks (stakes) and advocates goring the ox of their “adversaries” in life.  Compromise is not their intent, nor is a balanced discussion of any issue.

As proof of my point of view, take a gander at this article about “Big Oil” fighting electric vehicles.  This article is from a major engineering news source in March of 2019.  More recently, the boardrooms of these same big oil companies have been hijacked by environmental advocates in what I would describe as an abdication of leadership from within.  Everyone now is afraid of appearing out of date with this new woke, politically correct group of stakeholders.

This is an excellent article in that it points out how things start out with noble intents and are endorsed by all until someone’s ox gets gored.  We need to put down the stakes we are holding and discuss what is in the best interest of our nation and how we are going to pay for things.

I am sure you have heard the story of three people interviewing for a job each being asked this question.  The first answers two.  The second asks one of what is being added to one of what else?  The third, reportedly a lawyer, draws the blinds down on the room and whispers: “what did you want it to be?

There is also a video circulating on the Internet where the child answers this question with number eleven and the teacher who had marked that incorrect gets into trouble for doing that.

Puzzles like the one shown here are circulating on the Internet, ironically to gather your contact information and friends, because they draw us into the mathematical question.  The one shown here starts with an obvious first equation which implies each cookie has a value of 10.  Few will notice that there are 10 raisons in each cookie so in fact the value of the cookie in the question at the bottom is seven, not 10!  The bananas don’t seem to present any difficulty but the clocks once again can play a trick on you since the two in the third equation are pointing to the 3 position and the one at the bottom points to the 2 position.  So, one plus one might not be two after all unless you define what each one is.

The final trick is to know the rules of math where multiplication is applied first before the addition, so that final line is 2 + 1 + 1×7 for a total of 10.  If you simply went from left to right you would have added 2 + 1 + 1 for a total of 4 then multiply by 7 for a grand total of 28 … which is incorrect if you know these rules.  If you never were taught these rules you might argue you were correct of course.

So, the rules matter, or at least they should matter.  But, what happens when the average person does not know these rules?  They get the wrong answer.  If the person grading the paper doesn’t know the rules, they might be marked correct.  Worse yet, if the person grading the paper didn’t notice the clock face there would be another error.   If any of you have ever tried to explain higher math to people who have never learned higher math you already know where I am going.

The key point with this exercise is that consensus of thought doesn’t matter in math problems.  I frankly don’t care what the average person thinks.   Also, you really have to be sure what and how numbers relate to what you are seeing. The answer is 10 to this problem whether you like it or not.

Today’s society will call me an elitist … a bigot … and a racist.  I am a mathematician and an engineer. Some things in life are best answered with this perspective … if you want to know the truth.

What did you think and feel when you read a title like this?

Did the phrase “cancel culture” conjure righteous indignation about the way moderns seem to be hypersensitive and inhospitable to traditional ideas?  Or, does it more closely express a rightful suppression of ideas that are no longer deemed relevant if we are going to truly eradicate oppressions of the past?

When you read the word “mold,” did it bring to mind the black or slimy green stuff you might find in dark and damp areas of your house or refrigerator?  Or, did it make you think of those childhood days when you played with clay or Playdoh and used “molds” to make little fun objects?

Why did I write this?  We were winding down from a busy week of work with some friends at the country club and one was describing a social interaction he had with colleagues at work.  I could tell he was frustrated by the lack of respect for traditions and the pressure to let teams of immature creative and inexperienced people reinvent the workplace.  He described it as a cancel culture mold he was being forced into.  That caused me to probe deeper.

Just like those pictures where you see either a beautiful young woman or an ugly older one, what you see depends largely upon what you are looking to see in the picture.  The same factual lines on a sheet of paper can bring to mind completely different images.

Did the artist intend to include both points of view in the work?  Probably.  Possibly not, but probably.

Progressives may be working to create a cancel culture mold, but perhaps it is a cancel culture mold.  Read that again in the context of this article …

Time will tell.  It reminds me so much of what Joe Collier, a great leader in the electric utility industry, who passed away about a decade ago, once told me about people in an organization: it is easier to change people than to change people.  He was so right!

Do you ever think about how many freeloaders we have in society today? You can go up to them with a rightful request for them to participate and they will coldly look you in the face and refuse to help because they seem to know others will fill that void.

We came into full realization of this freeloading tendency when the entrance wall of our subdivision was falling down, and we tried to ask the 240 homeowners to help out. Only about 20% of them contribute in any way to the upkeep of the entrance that requires mowing, trimming, lighting, fertilization, irrigation and landscaping.

We do not have a formal home-owners association (HOA), so contributions are completely voluntary. And, the annual dues are now $150 per home, or $12/month, to keep the front entrance area shrubs and flowers watered, weeded, grass mowed, and nighttime lights paid for. And, the average home in this subdivision is worth well over $500,000. It costs about $10,000 a year just to maintain the beautifully landscaped entrance, so all we would need is for about 25% of the homes to pay their dues to keep all the bills paid.

But, no, even after community meetings where we served drinks and snacks, most of the homeowners simply ignored the need. As we showed detailed pictures that the entrance walls were going to collapse, they still wouldn’t step up. Yes, there were about 10% of the homeowners who did, but 90 percent did not.

My wife Susan and a few other leaders in the community debated whether they should put a sign in the freeloader yards indicating they didn’t pay.  We all knew that wouldn’t work and might actually backfire.  So, she and another member of the community Board of Directors came up with a better idea: offer two signs homeowners could put in their front yard: one larger and more colorful one if they paid their dues and contributed to the capital repair budget, and a more plain one those who simply paid their dues.  Pictures of both are shown here.

As you might expect, the results were dramatic with over 65% of the homeowners now paying their dues and/or making donations … they don’t want the appearance of being freeloaders.  Guilt is good!  And, given that about 20% of the homes are vacant and the owners have no idea their property has this image, I am still amazed that about 15% of the homeowners are perfectly fine being recognized as freeloaders, having no sign at all.  Some good news resulting from all this work is we were able to repair the entrance wall that was ready to collapse and looked dilapidated, giving our whole neighborhood a black eye.  The project cost almost $50k, but we raised it and now have a beautiful entrance that makes everyone proud to live here, and Realtors tell us it really improved our home values. The other benefit of the project is it did bring our community much closer as we had a project to work on together.

 

I have found that I can not proofread my own writings. Sure, I can read over what I have written for clarity and basic grammar, but I find I have blind spots … things I skip over, perhaps assuming the reader has my perspective. When I blog here I assume the reader understands the energy industry and works in it as a professional. If not, you would probably come away wondering what I was talking about.

Today’s spell checkers and grammar checkers can catch egregious errors, but we have all learned that the English language has so many words that look very close to what we thought we were writing. However, I am sure I am not alone expressing embarrassment over rereading an old email or blog post only to find that a word or two had been changed by the spell checkers.

My wife does most of my proof reading since she knows what I am trying to express. She is also very sensitive to the readers perspective. But, I wonder who proofed the letters of Paul, Peter, John and others in both the old and new testaments? Did the scribes catch previous errors and correct them?   As you consider the writings in the New Testament, be aware that we are seeing reading that the Church decided are the key documents for our understanding.  Many others were tossed out, often through contentious debate. I like what this author of one of my favorite books in Chemical Engineering wrote as a preface:

“Any living language suffers a battering from the tongues and pens of the common run of its users. It could be said that there seems to be a law of increasing linguistic entropy that makes a language less and less capable of assisting the formulation of clear and precise ideas and of expressing them.

Two of the worst linguistic practices found within any small subject … are ellipsis and jargon. The use of ellipsis can be defended. Among those who know their subject and each other well, a few words can stand for a half hour of argument … but it can be pretty effective at excluding the novice.  Jargon, on the other hand, has no defense. It is a sort of a thieves’ cant used to keep the uninitiated at arm’s length. Like weeds, jargon takes root in a subject and in time becomes ineradicable.” 

                    Blair Kinsman, Wind Waves, Prentice-Hall Inc., 1965 

Yes, the fact that I treasure this shows how much of a geek I am.  But, that all sets the stage for my story about blind spots and attempting to proof your own writing.  It was part of my completion of my Master’s Thesis in Chemical Engineering. My thesis was a real barn burner: The Analysis of the Products Formed in the Partial Oxidation of Dried Sewage Sludge. I know, you never saw that on the required reading list in any discipline and I am sure nobody reading this blog would ever read it.

My advisor did and he really liked what I had written but he said my spelling was miserable. I told him that I had checked all the words I didn’t know … after all, I had to pay a typist to produce the document which I had carefully printed for her. He said I had only misspelled one word, but I had done that the same incorrect way dozens of times in the thesis. What word was that I asked? He said it was the word reveil. Spell check won’t let me type that here. Clearly I had intended to spell the word reveal, but I just couldn’t “see” the error when I wrote out my thesis and the typist merely typed it.

When he told me that I thought for a moment and said: “Oh, how silly of me … everybody knows it is “i” before “e” except after “c” …

Just thought you would get a kick out of my blind spots with spelling …