Category: General Page 7 of 116

Christian flew up from Arizona to help us celebrate our 23rd wedding anniversary. We wanted to run up to Washington yesterday, but I had work commitments and we ended up going over to Depoe Bay for lunch. The Oregon Coast is an amazingly beautiful place, the leaves were in their fall colors and the sun was shining. We could not have had a better time. It was great to get caught up with Christian and his research which is now well beyond my ability to understand. I would love to take the time to dive into it, but seems to be getting more complex by the minute–the time commitment to learn it is probably now greater than the time and brain-cells I have left in my entire life.

Betty Blonde #411 – 02/11/2010

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The headline says it all. This article describes something that should absolutely be duplicated around the world and especially in the United States. The article starts out like this:

Many social sciences and humanities faculties in Japan are to close after universities were ordered to “serve areas that better meet society’s needs”.

Of the 60 national universities that offer courses in these disciplines, 26 have confirmed that they will either close or scale back their relevant faculties at the behest of Japan’s government.

Betty Blonde #405 – 02/03/2010

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He liked it!

Betty Blonde #403 – 02/01/2010

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Lorena is in Monterrey visiting family. I am really sad I cannot be there with her. It is especially depressing because there are virtual seas of ripe mangoes in all the stores right now. The price shown in the image is is per kilo in pesos. Unless you have lived the dream of endless ripe Manilas until you get sick (it is worth it), you would not understand.

Betty Blonde #402 – 01/29/2010

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Right after Lorena left for Monterrey, her name was put on the board at our fitness center as one of the most active members in the club! Going to Mexico to eat great Mexican food non-stop with little access to a gym will not help, but she deserves a little break.

Betty Blonde #401 – 01/28/2010

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I read a very interesting blog named the Bayou Renaissance Man. I like it because the writing is great and the blogging approach (if you squint your eyes really hard) is somewhat similar to my own. To say the blog topics are eclectic is a fairly large understatement and there is some interesting windmill tilting crusades going for which I have no dog in the fight, but that are fun and interesting. So today, he had an article titled A Fascinating Look at the Shrinking Value of Higher Education. It makes some comments and points to an article at the Captain Capitalism blog (that I have now marked and plan to visit regularly) titled The Music School Bubble. The posts are a topic that is dear to our hearts, the higher education bubble and the best way to educate one’s self to get a job as opposed to get a degree.

Just last night, Christian and I had a vigorous conversation about this specific topic. He will be in a fairly unique situation in that he is on track to finish his PhD in Electrical Engineering by the time he is 22 or 23. It is not too early to try to figure out what should come next. I have tried to recommend that since he is so young, he expand his education into a completely different area. He has Applied Math and Electrical Engineering so maybe some academic work in Chemistry or Materials Science or even Biology might combine well with that. He countered by saying that classes often get in the way of his learning these days. He likes his classes and the material in them, but believes he can understand it faster by reading the literature and working with people who understand it.

Here is a quote from the article that got me to thinking Christian’s career might be much better served by getting out there and getting going on what he wants to actually do than just spending more time in academia for the prestige of it all:

I believe that being a full time musician who plays live (and/or in the studio) is the greatest badge of honor a musician can bestow upon himself. Why? Because it’s proof you can beat the odds. It shows you have no need for the “stability” of teaching music. See, we all think we need to be teachers because that is what MUSIC SCHOOLS tell us. They have a large stock in keeping interest in becoming a music teacher, for it keeps them employed, and the cycle continues. As of today, it’s spiraled out of control. Our families all want us to be teachers because they figure it’s the closest thing to a “real job” that a musician can have. It’s a lot safer than playing in bars, touring, and all of those “lifestyle” things that many people think are part of a music career.

Christian had the opportunity to go to Stanford or UCSD for that kind of a boutique degree, but chose to go with a professor who had actually worked at the highest levels of his field in industry at a premier research institution, only returning to academia much later in his career.  The higher education is much less pronounced in the STEM fields, but having worked on the commercialization of technology from top tier engineering schools, I am convinced more than ever that the vast bulk of technological advancements in all but a few arenas are coming out of industry, not academia. The knowledge that new engineers coming out of supposedly great school with difficult STEM degrees will need to start from ground zero to be trained for several years before they become useful is disheartening.

These are just observations. I do not know the answer for anyone on any of this. I just know that vast amounts of time and money spent in academia would be much more well spent in the real world if the desired result is to prepare people for jobs, real life and an understanding of how to contribute to society at large.

Betty Blonde #399 – 01/26/2010

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Grandpa Milo was born just a few weeks before the big stock market crash of 1929. He was the eighth of ten children and was born on the kitchen floor of Otis’s and Ethyl’s home in Saginaw, Oregon just a few years after the family had moved out from Lynch, Nebraska in 1925. Grandpa Milo was the first member of the family to be born in Oregon. We plan to pick him and Grandma Sarah up for church this morning (and afternoon) so hope to get a few pictures, maybe even with a birthday cake.

Betty Blonde #385 – 01/06/2010

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We are slowly removing all semblances of our time in Raleigh. Christian got his Arizona drivers license several months ago, but Kelly did not get her Washington drivers license until yesterday. She did not even have to take a written test. Lorena and I will take the Oregon drivers license test either this week or next. That will be followed by the registration of our cars in our respective states. One of the only happy money related events in moving to Oregon from North Carolina is that we do not have to pay any sales taxes on our cars when we change the registration.

The only thing left now is to figure out where we want to live and move our stuff out of storage to wherever that is. This thing of living in a studio apartment has been very good for us. We threw a lot of stuff away when we moved out of the North Carolina house. We will almost certainly throw out a ton more when we move the stuff from storage to our new house. We are getting to the point where we are ready to start thinking about starting to think about looking for a house if we can ever figure out where we want that to be.

Betty Blonde #377 – 12/25/2009

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I always get slightly nervous when Lorena and Kelly hang out too much with my sisters. For the first two years of our marriage in Florida I had Lorena pretty well convinced that Walmart was much classier for shopping than the mall. Julia and Jean completely wrecked her with respect to that within 50 milliseconds after we moved back to Oregon. This morning, they all went down to Biscuits Cafe in Wilsonville together while I had breakfast with Harold and Curt Nichols, Jeff Cloyd and Justin (that, incidentally, was very, very nice). Now I am waiting for the latest bombshell that the J aunts dropped on them. Thankfully, Lorena has figured out that most of the stories told by the Chapmans are only very roughly based on the truth.

Still, Kelly looks entirely too attentive in this picture. She is down for the weekend. She has an old computer that has been dropped, the battery is about dead and a lot of other stuff is wrong with it. I found a Dell Outlet coupon and got her a great computer for less than $600 so that was a very good thing. Kelly has a big meeting with her professor on Monday to show that she made herself useful so far this summer so she is spending the day in the coffee shop studying. In the meantime, Christian has a monster presentation to make to people who are funding his research at MIT Lincoln Labs next Thursday. He has great research results to show them, but spent so much time getting the results right, he has not had enough time to prepare or practice the presentation yet. He flies to Boston on Wednesday, gives the presentation on Thursday and flies home on Friday.

Betty Blonde #373 – 12/21/2009

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Lorena picked Christian up at the train station yesterday. He had gone up to Seattle to visit Kelly for the Fourth of July weekend. The kids have now been paying their own way and living on their own for a year. I think the transition has been harder for Lorena and I than for the kids. It is also interesting to see them create lives separate from each other. The demographics of the people with whom the associate are completely different.

The funny deal is that, even though Kelly is older than Christian, the difference in age between Kelly and the people in her graduate program is quite a bit greater than the difference in age between Christian and the people with whom he works in his research lab. PhD Marketing students tend to start with a Bachelors degree in Business, then go out and get 3-5 years experience followed by an MBA before they apply to PhD programs. That puts most of the ones starting the program close to age 30. The difference in age between them and Kelly is generally around ten years.

Christian works in an important lab where the professor advises both graduate and undergraduate students. With a few exceptions, the graduate students have gone straight from their undergraduate degree to start a Masters or PhD at around age 23 or 24. The undergraduate students tend to be juniors and seniors so they are usually at least 20 or 21. If Christian had taken the normal trajectory, the upcoming year would be his sophomore year as an undergraduate, so he is only one or two years younger than the undergraduate students and four to six years younger than the graduate students.

When Kelly studied Statistics and Christian studied Math and they all knew the same kids at school, their social situations were pretty similar. Now, with Kelly in a Business program and Christian in an Engineering program at schools over a thousand miles apart, their social situations are very different from each other and they are very much on their own. We never thought about it at the time, but the fact that they would lose both the infrastructure of living at home with Dad and Mom and going to school with each other every day magnified their changes.

We have been very pleasantly surprised that this has been a very positive change for both of them. Of course their are hiccups, but they both do well and enjoyed the chance to get together for a long weekend. Still, they were glad to get back to their own lives when it was over.

Betty Blonde #363 – 12/07/2009

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I got a huge kick out of an article in The Daily Beast titled Lakota Warriors Vow to Crush Dirty Rainbow Hippies. It is a story about a group of nebulously organized “free spirits” who plan to descend on Lakota territory in South Dakota. The real free spirits appear to be the Lakota activists protesting the event. There are some quite colorful descriptions of some of the protests in the article. This quote kind of describes the big picture:

The free spirits are planning to dig toilet trenches and occupy the Black Hills at the height of the Lakota ceremonial season. “I’ve talked to several Rainbow people who I believe try to be decent human beings,” Clark said. “And then there’s a whole messload of them who—pardon my language—are totally freaking whacked.”

Swan and Joelle say it’s particularly disturbing that the Rainbow Family has no leaders, and no one is really accountable. They pointed to reports that one of the group’s hippie pow-wows cost taxpayers $500,000 in law enforcement and forestry management in 2013.

To prevent any waves of destruction, the Forest Service sends incident management teams from Washington, DC to the Rainbow Gathering every year to supplement local law enforcement.

The article describes the drugs, polluting, aggravated battery, murder and aggravated assault that appear to have been features of previous events planned by the Rainbow Family of Living Light. My ideas on the Rainbow People are not dissimilar to those of the Lakota activists:

“We’ve gotten some [Rainbow people] saying you need to come out here and experience the hippie love,” the Lakota activist Clark told The Daily Beast. “Peace, love, we want to be your friend and respect your people. No, we don’t trust you any more than the government—possibly less.”

Betty Blonde #359 – 12/01/2009

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I am administering some research my company is funding in the new Robotics program at Oregon State University so Lorena and I ran down to Corvallis this morning. We got there way to early so we decided to run by our old house on Cluster Oaks Dr. in North Albany. We had not been back there for over seven years. The place looks amazing. The trees we planted have shown dramatic growth. The new owners of the house painted the porch posts a really ugly maroon color and changed the fence line, but other than that, the house looks similar to the way it looked when we left. The corner feature to deal with the services in the corner of the property still looks great. We would have liked to see the stamped concrete patio Grandpa Milo put in the back yard for us and also the beautiful kitchen, but we had to get moving to our meeting. The amazing part about the whole neighborhood are all the trees Grandpa Milo gave to everyone. They are growing and growing and growing. It will be even more amazing in another seven years.

Betty Blonde #350 – 11/18/2009

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