James L Adams—People and Products

My Cup Runneth Over

I figure that I have enough projects to keep me happily busy until I am 150 years old.  But judging from my friends and my body, I may not live to be that old.  Clearly trying to complete them more rapidly doesn’t work, because I am becoming slower.  I am still moving reasonably well.  I am well into becoming better organized (my wife will snicker at this), becoming more embroiled in writing my mythical two books, and catching up on my reading (difficult because excellent new books seem to be coming out faster than I can read).  And I am moving along at restoring stuff .  The photos below show the before and after condition of the McCormick mower I mentioned in a previous post.  It is now working well and I am about to take it up to my son’s farm and let him test it with a couple of his huge horses.

The photos below show the before photo of the high-pressure water pump I included in my last post, and the finished restoration, ready to pump. 

But I am still acquiring outstanding old hardware faster than I can restore it. And the hardware I have restored drastically needs more attention.  And of course there is my growing family,  my old and needy house, my failure to succeed in completely cutting my ties with Stanford, and frequent assignments from Marian.

What to do, what to do?  I am going to devote the next post to a book entitled Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, by Sherry Turkle, one of my favorite authors (Basic Books, 2011).  I read this when it was released, but re-read it when I ran across it recently, and it spoke more directly to me now that I am further behind and my grandchildren are older.  Turkle is a psychologist on the M.I.T. faculty, and specializes in the interaction of technology and society.  This is the fifth book she has written during the “information revolution”, the previous ones being quite positive about computers, the internet, and so forth.  Fifteen years had passed since the last one when she wrote Alone Together, and her daughter was now in college.  This book discusses many worries about what the internet is doing to us and our children, and I will recommend it highly if you haven’t read it.

 In particular, it got me thinking about the increasing chunk of time my computer and the internet are requiring from me.  When I wrote my Good Products, Bad Products book, also released in 2011, my publisher talked me, an innocent, into entering the social networking scene in order to publicize the book.  With some reservations I joined Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in, and started this blog.  I enjoy writing this blog, because it makes me think, but have never really felt comfortable with the social networking sites, with the result that I have neither tried to increase the size of the pool of  people who I presumably interact with, nor have I done a good job of interacting with the people in the pool.

 And like many people, my e-mail has gotten out of hand.  I seem to be showing up on lists faster than I can make filters to stop it—probably partly because of my Stanford connection, the exploding number of overseas students looking for financial aid and admission to college in the U.S., an increase in technical meetings and consulting opportunities, and just plain marketing.

 So during the next week I am going to think hard about my interaction with the internet and digital communication in general.  Some years ago, Don Knuth, author of the set of classic book entitled “The Art of Computer Programming”, informed his friends that he was quitting e-mail, in order to have more time to think deeply and work on writing projects.  Since he is a god in the computer field, this attracted a lot of attention.  I am not a god, but I am feeling the same way right now, especially toward social networking.  I am fortunate in that I have a large number of real friends I love, and am not looking for cyber friends  or contacts.  And my computer is demanding an increasing and already far too much of my time.  I am certainly not alone in this feeling.  People are waking up to the downside of all of these digital miracles. More about this in my next blog.

 

A Very Good Day Indeed

 Today was a wonderful California spring day, despite the drought,  and in fact thanks to day light saving time and the month of April, it was a long one (sunrise at 6:29, sunset at 7:48).  Being Sunday, it began with Marian and my traditional religious service, performed by staying in bed reading the New York Times, drinking coffee, and eating coffee cake.  Upon finishing that, I decided to do something with a relatively small incredibly rusted high pressure water pump I had rescued from a junk pile a bit ago, and that was sitting on a hand truck in a place where I was sure I would receive encouragement soon to do something with it.  The photograph below shows it in its rusty splendor.

  The first thing I decided to do, was to take it apart.  But to my amazement (and pleasure), that required the entire day.  I have been reading a book I enjoy a lot entitled The Swerve, by Stephen Greenblatt, subtitled How the World Became Modern.  It is beautifully written (Pulitzer Prize) and is a wondrous combination of history, philosophy, and stimulating thinking (Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, and does not screw around—41 pages of notes and 26 pages of “selected” bibliography, all in fine print, of course).  So I got to think about stimulating concepts while I took apart my pump, and since a baby shower was occurring in the house (for a friend of our daughter’s, not us ) and males were not invited, I could stay outside and play all day, except for sneaking in and making myself lunch.

 The rusting on the pump was so advanced that I had to heat the “moving” parts of the pump to a red heat to get them to move, and the piston was stuck so thoroughly in the cylinder that I finally reverted to not only heat, but a small sledge hammer (not recommended practice, but I ran through all of the alternatives, and none worked).  Heating rusty joints is a powerful method of breaking them loose, since the metal expands, and the rust layer seems to weaken.  But if not carefully done, the process may result in them never coming loose, so I took my time on the project, and finally got the pump entirely apart just in time for dinner, which was outstanding because it consisted of left-over goodies from the shower, in particular crackers, dip, cookies, cupcakes, ice cream, and other types of health food.  I’ll send you a photo of the finished pump when I am done.

 Now I am catching up on my e-mail, and writing this post, and will soon return to bed and read more of  The Swerve. Looks  like tomorrow will be a beautiful day also.   Can’t hardly beat this.

Matthew B. Crawford, and the Issue of Manual Skills.

In 2006, Matthew Crawford, (equipped with a Ph.D. in philosophy, an obvious fan of working with his hands and proprietor of a small business of restoring/maintaining vintage motorcycles), wrote an essay entitled Shop Course as Soul Craft, which was published in Atlantis magazine.  A friend of mine, Dave Beach, (who has built and is responsible for a very successful and large activity in the Stanford Engineering School called the Product Realization Lab in which students design and manufacture products), and I found out about it and spread it all around the local community.  It covered the advantages of manual skills in life and the importance to individuals, schools, and organizations of encouraging them.  I am one of a large number of people who are believers, and who take great pride in their ability to make and fix things and I have seen the positive effects of doing such things on the lives of many other people.   I depend on such activities for keeping me from occasionally becoming less likeable from lack of quick feedback and an overdose of mental activities seemingly divorced from reality (yes I am a professor). Dave and I are also both believers, along with many other people, in the contribution of such activities to producing products of high quality.

 Crawford's "Shop Course" essay was later developed into a book of the same name, which made a large splash because it made its way to many people of like mind, and coincided with a time of much worry about the inroads computers were making into skilled jobs.  If you haven’t read the article or the book, you can find the article here.

 Now Crawford has written another book entitled World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, N.Y.).  This one is somewhat broader in reach, having to do with our mental attention in an age in which large numbers of individuals and organizations, backed by powerful media, are competing for for this attention, to the point where we may be paying a cost in individuality and in the ability to focus as well on our main interests.  His “Shop Class” book was broader in reach than his Atlantis article of the same name, and this book is broader still.  I read it and loved it, but it is a more difficult read.  Crawford is now a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, as well as being a fabricator of components for custom motorcycles, and I think he is showing the signs of immersion in an academic scene .  It is difficult for academics to write books that are easy to read, because in a university, life consists of communicating with people in similar disciplines and assuming they have similar backgrounds and familiarity with material—in this case philosophy.  The result is an understandable tendency to refer to people and works that the general reader has not met or read, nor will probably ever do so.  After 50 years of fighting this problem, I know it well.  I even run into it at home because I occasionally find myself trying to explain something that is interesting to me, like quantum computing or the working of make-and-break ignition systems or the physical portions of the internet to my wife, who is brilliant, but was trained as an historian, and seems to  have little need for techie jargon and details.

 But the message in Crawford’s book is straight forward and powerful.  He again makes an argument for hands-on contact with the world,  He begins with the attack upon our attention from all sides, from advertising to internet communications and seductive digital toys.  He then goes into the problems resulting from handling an overload of stimulation by seeing it in terms of broad representations and generalizations rather than reality (“the public”, “government”, “farmers”).  He talks about joint, or group attention, its importance, and the increasing difficulty of obtaining it.  He worries that we are  losing the “real”, by dealing with these generalities and stifling our true nature and individuality in the process.  He finishes the main portion of the book by presenting what he considers an example of good focus—an old and traditional pipe-organ company, in which people learn from the experience of others and gain their pleasure from attaining expertise in the building of their products. Once again, the shop. 

This book is especially timely since many college students now seem to be trying to stay in contact with an ever increasing quantity of people and changing information and are planning to start companies even though they are equipped with little experience and with a minimum of skills learned through practice.  Even some devotees of creativity seem to be swinging away from experience and the learning of skills. I wish them luck.  These are invaluable tools in life.

 If you are interested in things controversial and in modern trends, I recommend you read this book and that you discuss it with your friends, especially if you are neglecting hobbies or work you love that allow you to get your hands dirty.  Dirty hands for me seem to result in a cleaner mind.  I recommend them to all.

 

 

 

 

 

Nostalgia

My oldest son has some farm-land in the Sacramento valley in California.  He works at U.C. Davis and is very involved in sustainable agriculture.  He also grows vegetables a well as usual crops such as wheat, tomatoes, etc.  A year or so ago he acquired four work horses (Belgians – about a ton each) and set about integrating them into his farm.  It is close to the farm where I fiddle with old machinery, and yesterday I took a visiting friend up to check out the area.  Bob was spreading manure with his horses (who had produced it) and we stopped by to say hi and maybe give him a hand.  We could not stay long, but it was long enough to help him load a few loads into the manure spreader and ride around with him.

 My grandfather worked 20 acres of oranges with horses in Southern California jointly owned by my parents and grandparent  when I was a little boy,  but  I was so young I don’t really remember much about the horses. But visiting Bob with his horses made me remember much about farming when I was a kid.

 Work horses have some similarity to huge dogs.  They like to be scratched and petted and talked to, eat, and be around people.  But they have differences.  They have been bred to be unflappable, love to pull heavy loads, and are extremely well trained (they have to be, or the owner not only would have trouble doing his/her work, but would probably spend quite a bit of time recovering from bruises, broken bones, and other such inconveniences). 

 Of course the pace of horses is far slower than that of modern tractors. As a result, the pace of farming when I grew up was much slower and simpler than modern farming.  Not only do horses move more slowly, but horse drawn equipment is straight forward to understand and repair should it need it—no panic calls for the repair van.  And riding on the spreader behind the horses on a beautiful day was in many ways the opposite of working inside in a university.  Plenty of time to look at the scenery, think, listen to the birds, soak up the sunshine, and feel like something worthwhile was being accomplished. Although I was too young to become involved with my grandparent’s horses, I did get lots of chances to help spread  sweepings from Santa Anita racetrack stables onto the grove from the bed of the  family Ford Model B 1-1/2 ton truck.  Same thing – no critical deadline, no interruptions from one’s cell phone, no need to be highly visible in the world or have a great deal of money.

I certainly do not want to be a farmer, horses or not.  I fled the bucolic life as soon as I was able.  But I very much like farmland, farmers, and now work horses (although  I have no use at all for riding horses).  And it is interesting to me to recall how two families could at one time live off of 20 acres of citrus (a beautiful, fragrant, easy-to-raise crop that tasted good) when now 1000 acres is considered a small farm.  True, my parents and grandparents had little cash, shared one very used car, and were without such things as TV, computers, micro-wave ovens, air conditioning, and central heating. And since I did not live in town, I was not surrounded by people my age.  And I was definitely expected to do my chores.  But there were advantages to traditional country life, and I am glad my son can experience some of them. And I have to say, horse-drawn equipment was so simple and so well tested, that to me much of it is downright elegant. I finished restoring my McCormick mower (red machine in photo), and it is an example.