Service and Tradition

I'm a veteran.

I never served in a war zone... I qualify for the American Legion because I was in the Air Force while the Marines were attacking Grenada, and I just caught the beginning of Desert Shield.

My military service consisted mostly of working in a controlled atmosphere in a very secure area, in a very fun town in the American southwest.

Lots of veterans would laugh, or worse, sneer at my service. But still... but still. I was there. I went through basic training, I stood inspection, I even occasionally got to carry a weapon.

I'm a member of the club.

My family was a military family. Was.... it still is. My son is in the Army, serving overseas. I am so proud of him, and so is the rest of his family.

I don't understand families that hesitate when their kids say they want to join the military. For the last eight years the Commander in Chief was a man that carried very little respect, but that doesn't matter.

It's service. That's what it's about.

Yeah, it's about having a job, it's about college, it's about a lot of things.

But it's really about service.

My great uncle was in the military. When he died, I travelled the 300 miles to be at his funeral. I did this for various reasons, reasons I really wasn't sure about at the time. I travelled alone, without my family, because life goes on.

After the church service I followed along to the cemetary. He was laid to rest there, and I was surprised to see a military honor guard from the local Air Force base.

That was why I went.

That military funeral was real, like many family events are not. I cried... not because of family, but because of the power of tradition. That ceremony connected him and me and my father and every other soldier that served for the last 10,000 years.

I'm a member of that club.

When the service was over everyone walked slowly back to their cars. I stood at my car door, watching the honor guard finish the ceremony. That itself is testament to the tradition: it carried on whether anyone was paying attention or not.

It was a sunny day, and if I remember correctly, very hot. There were no trees in the cemetery and the sun was punishing. I stood and watched and, without thinking about it, came to attention and saluted that casket as it was lowered into the ground.

It was right.

I'm not given to public displays and I was uncomfortable doing it, but I did it anyway. Strangely, if I hadn't done it, it would have been one of those things that I would have always regretted.

I have a relative that served in the Spanish-American War (winning a bronze star) and one that served in the Civil War. My great uncle served. My father served. I served. My son is serving. I have two nephews that are serving. My other son wants to serve. I can understand a lot of points of view, but denegrating anyone because they serve their country? Nope. I won't stand for it.

I'm not saying that every person that serves in the military is a saint, but dammit, they get extra points. That's it.

Geekiness

I just love numbers. Whatever I'm doing, there's always some cipherin' going on.

I am fascinated by units of measure that are based on observerable phenomena, like the month based on the time from one full moon to the next, etc. They connect me to my ancestors and to history in general, and I often try to make up my own. In this I am the very personification of the title of this blog. I am certain that I am coming up with units of measure that have been independently developed a hundred times all around the world.

So, once I was hiking along a trail in New Mexico and wanted to be able to count my steps and figure out how far I had gone. My biggest problem is that counting, say, 2000 steps is hard to do and be able to enjoy the scenery at the same time.

I was walking with a staff (another thing I enjoy, that hunt for a good staff on a trail... that's another post). I noticed that my staff hit the ground every four steps. I have a course that I walk that is exactly 2 miles. I counted my steps on that course and came up with 3980, or 1980 steps per mile. That's close enough to 2000 (within 1%!) for me. I determined that 500 hits with my staff would constitute, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, one mile!

500 Staves (as I immediately dubbed my new unit of measure) are much easier to count than 2000 steps. I only had to count to four repeatedly, and that comes very naturally for me from my musical background (one, two, three, ONE; one, two, three, TWO; one, two, three, THREE; etc). I could even be "aware" of four steps without even having to count them, and soon I got to where counting the Staves was all I had to do. Awesome!

I prefer doing math in my head when I can, and the 500 staves per mile made it very easy to convert any number of steps directly to miles, to whit:

(staves x 2) / 1000 = miles

So, say, 137 staves equals (137 x 2) = 274 / 1000 = .274 miles. How cool is that?

Yes, I know I could just divide by 500, but this formula is easier to do in your head.

Which brings us to... significant digits! Significant digits, in practical use, are a measure of accuracy. The more digits that are significant, the greater the accuracy. This means that 2.00 is more accurate than 2. Zeroes between the last digit and the decimal point don't count, so 4, 40, 400 and 4000 all have one significant digit. That last digit is where the innacuracy lies, so 2.00 really means that you're somewhere between 1.995 and 2.004. 2 means that you're between 1.5 and 2.4. Big difference.

Like I said, I like to do math in my head when I can, which forces me to limit significant digits. Usually one, but sometimes as high as three if I'm feeling particularly hot.

So today I was wondering how fast I was walking. A 20 second count of my steps resulted in 44 steps, so my sun-bright mind immediately determined that I was walking at 2.2 steps per second. To convert to miles per hour I did it in two significant digits and one significant digit, just because I'm that cool.

Two Significant Digits

So, given:

2.2 steps per second, 500 staves per mile, 4.0 steps per stave (or is it staff? I haven't decided yet)

1 step = .25 staves

.25 x 2 / 1000 = .0005 miles

2.2 steps x .0005 = .0011 miles per second

.0011 x 3600 seconds per hour = 3.96 miles per hour

Since we are using two significant digits we must round this to 4.0 mph.

One Significant Digit

2 steps per second, 4 steps per stave

Yeah, 1 step = .25 staves, but we must stay true to the digits, so 1 step = .3 staves

.3 x 2 / 1000 = .0006 miles.

2 steps x .0006 miles = .001 miles per second

again, 3600 seconds per hour, but we must be consistent, so 4000 seconds per hour.

.001 x 4000 = 4 mph!

Now, with two digits we're talking between 3.95 and 4.04 mph, while with one digit we're talking 3.5 to 4.4 mph. A much broader range, but dig this: I have walked at exactly 4 miles an hour on a treadmill, and it's too fast for me. With fewer significant digits, I have, in one sense, been more accurate!

Also, there is another method of rounding where when you round from .5, instead of automatically rounding up, you round to the nearest even number. I would have rounded .25 steps per stave to .2 instead of .3, resulting in an end result of 3 mph instead of 4. So, between 3 and 4 mph is about as close as you can get. Not bad, and good enough for head work.

How cool is that?

I know I lost you a long time ago, but that's cool. It's all part of the fun.

Paganism: Very Serious Silliness

Over at The Wild Hunt they're talking about a witch who is being ridiculed because of her Wiccan practice. There are the comments you would expect: religious persecution, that sort of thing.

Here's the thing though. I have been involved in heathen religion for several years now (though not so much anymore) and have run into equal shares of serious practitioners and utter whackos.

So, the witch on the stand? Her name is (wait for it)...

Vanilla-Clove Moonstone.

Really? You walk into a court of law and expect to be taken seriously with a name like that? I understand all about craft names, and as a general concept I like the idea. But dammit, don't you people read any of the lore from the actual era (if there was one) when your practice was current? I mean, most pagan practices today are reconstructions. I'd get a lot of flack for that if anybody read this blog...

Anyway, craft names are just that. They are used for the craft. They are not public names. Names have power. Tossing them around dilutes that power, and more importantly, lays it out there for anybody to use.

Wise up, witches. You can call yourself Unicorn Horn Peridot around the coven all you want, but in public you are Tom Smith. If you are taken seriously by the world, who knows, they may take some of the woo-woo stuff you do seriously too.

Obama: Just Like Everybody Else

I've spent the last 12 hours straight watching President Barack Obama make history. There's nothing I can say here that so many others have said or will say, so expect no insight.

But I can record my own feelings... for the first time in my life, I have seen a true leader take the office of President. That's what the President is - a leader. There are many leadership styles, true, but I guess for me he's the real deal.

His speech was stirring, as it should have been. I really did expect an "Ask Not..." speech. I am so glad that it wasn't. What it was, was the basic outline of a real program of pulling this country together. There were no great catchlines, but some wonderful ideas.

Hope has been the President's theme from the very beginning, and that is precisely what he has delivered.

I think it's a realistic hope. No reasonable person expects miracles, but it is finally dawning on people all over the country, even all over the world, that change is possible, that things do not have to stay the way they are.

And that family! I guess part of my attraction is that I have been through some things that he hasn't. His little girls are yet to grow up, and I've been there. I understand something on a personal level about the President's life! How cool is that?

I know, I know, they are all human, they all have something in common with me.

I'm gushing a little here. I don't want to finish this post. I keep thinking I'm going to say something profound, but that ain't likely.

So, my Obama post. I am happy, I am hopeful, I am satisfied. So very, very rare.

Nutshell #1

Last Song Heard on mp3 player: Mean Town Blues - Johnny Winter
Currently Reading: Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

A good friend of mine from pulseHEAD created what he called a "nutshell" post: a post where he doesn't have any one thing to talk about, but a nugget or two that he wants to comment on.

I'll probably be doing that a lot.

So, Christian Nationalism. A dangerous little group.

Let me say here, that, although I really enjoy a good conspiracy, and I am gullible to an astonishing degree, I don't really think that any of the strange things I write about will happen, or will have any great effect on the world.

Christian Nationalism is not Christianity, it is a political movement. Its goals, as stated by George Grant in his book "Changing of the Guard":

"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.

But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.

It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.

It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.

It is dominion we are after.

World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish."

These people really believe that our forefathers were devout Christians and never intended to create a secular republic. The separation of church and state, in their opinion, is some cruel twisting of history.

I dunno. When religion infiltrates the state, the state becomes the religion. Crazy.

***
The folks over at Crime Scene KC had this one today. Should schools have the right to strip-search students?

How about, uh, no? Are they kidding?

In a case regarding a female student who was accused of possessing prescription-strength ibuprofen, a nefarious drug to be sure, the school district had this to say (from CNN.com):

... requiring a legal standard of "probable cause" to conduct student searches would cast a "roadblock to the kind of swift and effective response that is too often needed to protect the very safety of students, particularly from the threats posed by drugs and weapons."

What can I add to that? Police require search warrants, but not school administrators.

That makes sense. Because they are keeping our children safe.

This goes to our national need to absolutely elliminate all possible dangers before they manifest themselves.

I'm sorry, but in my opinion, in order to maintain the moral high ground sometimes you have to let the other guy strike first. Then you are within your rights to react.

Of course, the false flag operation is a time-honored method of making it look like the other guy struck first...

Good thing I'm not in charge.

***

Let's finish with a nice quote:

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." -- Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss

Introduction

This is my first post in what I hope will be a long and glorious series of deeply insightful essays.

Not really likely.

No, what this will be is a collection of essays, stories, meanderings, brain-drains, poems, rants, etc.

You know, the usual stuff.

Some of this really will be awkward. I plan on talking about some things that, frankly, I have never talked about with anyone. Anywhere.

Most of it though will simply be my opinions and random thoughts.

I don't, at the moment, plan on using a bunch of links to cite my statements. If you are curious about a source, Google works as well for you as it does for me.

I will try to use public domain pictures, but its not always easy to get what you need. If I use your picture and you want me to remove it, I will.


Let the wandering begin!