A narrow fellow

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

--Emily Dickinson

We met a narrow fellow today while out for a ride on the bike trail. He--snakes are stereotypically masculine, as spiders are feminine--was a really large Pacific rattlesnake crossing the trail. D. thought he was over a meter, I thought somewhat less, though in the way of snakes and memory, he now seems more like four feet. This was a snake that had been having a good year. He had recently shed his skin, and his scales had a beautiful gloss to them. His diamond-patterned body had tinges of yellow, chestnut, olive, and maroon, and his rattle was at least seven segments. Folk traditions speak of snakes mesmerizing their prey, and his progress through the grass was mesmerizing. Snakes sometimes blunder; I’ve seen garter snakes stumbling, which they are clumsy enough to do even without legs. But for this snake, there was no frantic zigzagging or blundering along. He just moved as if he was water being poured through a channel in the weeds. Every so often, on viewing a particularly graceful dancer or skier, I've been seized by desire--not for the person, but for the ability to move like them. I felt the same way for this snake.

Applause! Applause!

Yesterday was the last lecture for my introductory biology class. I finished the day’s instruction (the topic was Eukaryotic cells), and because time was short I finished with a very short exhortation. Nothing near as eloquent as Darwin’s “Tangled bank”, but a short reminder about why biology is so rewarding to study and how they hopefully now have a foundation for their further explorations. The lecture ended, and the class applauded.

This is a curious tradition. It’s odd enough in the concert hall. The conductor Leopold Stokowski (the guy who shakes Mickey Mouse’s hand in “Fantasia”) once chided an audience for applauding between movements: “I have been considering this matter of applause, a relic from the Dark Ages, a survival of customs at some rite or ceremonial dance in primitive times… When you see a beautiful painting you do not applaud. When you stand before a statue, whether you like it or not, you neither applaud nor hiss.” Applause seems even more out of place in the lecture hall. I’ve seen it here at Davis in all the classes I’ve taught, but I don’t recall ever seeing it anywhere else in any of my university experience. Despite the incongruity, I appreciate it. Who doesn’t appreciate some sort of acknowledgement, no matter how pro forma, and I'm certainly not getting that much love from my employer. But it reminds me of how much what I do as a teacher is performance. As a lecturer I cultivate performance skill as well as my knowledge of the subject. When the class ends with applause, I feel that the students are honoring something secondary—the performance aspect of my work—rather than the primary aspect, the learning. I’d happily take stony silence at the end of the lecture in exchange for a class in which every student scored 100% on the final.

This being summer session, an entire quarter has been wedged into five weeks. Quarters are short enough that they feel rushed, so a five week quarter is just absurd. This frenzy of living life at double speed has inevitably affected my ability to do anything else. The garden is run to weeds, I have touched neither the violin that I am building nor the one that I play, and I haven’t seriously played the piano in weeks. Naturally, there’s been less activity here in the wunderkammer. However, things should soon improve all over.

Visitors

We had some visitors to our house this weekend.
If you click on the picture, you'll see the chicks.

We had human visitors too--the parents blew through for a short stay. I've essentially neglected all housekeeping for the last four weeks due to the demands of summer session. So, I spent all Saturday atoning for my sins of omission. Adding to the fun: grading 115 midterms. More fun: one of my TAs and the grader have been sick the last week. I don't feel well-rested, and unsurprisingly, there's no Monday Musical Offering.

Friday Flora

Purple-podded Pole Bean

Second Crop

As noted earlier, there's a second crop of turkeys and quail growing up on the American River trail. We saw one of the turkey chicks today--still a bit fuzzy, but already a good six inches high. It was growing into that ill-defined border territory between cute and ugly. A few days ago, though, we saw the unmistakably cute--a flock of maybe twenty quail chicks that couldn't have been more than a couple of days old. Would that I had a camera! They still had all their newly hatched fuzz, complete with the racing stripes running down the sides. We saw the same flock two days later, and they had all grown a centimeter taller, all of it in the legs. The looked like giant dust-bunnies perched on matchsticks, only very very cute.

updated 23 July--There are reports that fuzzy turkey chicks are definitely citizens of the land of cute when they are back-lit by morning sun as they stumble across the bike trail.

Monday Musical Offering

Another of the Dvorak Humoresques, Op. 101 number 3. My piano teacher related a story about a family friend, a Hungarian, who couldn't stand Dvorak or any Czech music. "Too damn cheerful."



I am slowly working my way through them all, so stay tuned!

"Hey mummy, what is fair? How come I have to share?"

As Ricky Lee Jones’ kid-inspired lyrics suggest, fairness is at least partly a learned quality. A young child doesn’t get fairness at all, and views of fairness change as children mature. I was amused to read a paper by a group of Norwegian economists who were trying to quantify this process.

A classic tool for looking at fairness in human interactions is “The Dictator Game.” The economist/sociologist/researcher gets two people, and gives one of them, the “dictator,” a sum of money. The dictator is then asked to divide up the money as he or she sees fit. Purely selfish people will keep it all, but (reassuringly) purely selfish people are rare. Most dictators give the other test subject some of the money. This is true across cultures and across ages.

But life is rarely as simple as the dictator game. Wealth is, alas, all too rarely bestowed by a rich uncle; it must be earned. But life is capricious—some have wealth due to luck, whether due to a rich uncle or a happy accident. And further complicating things, not everybody needs the same things, so a gift to some is worth far more than a gift to others—a factor the economists call “efficiency”. How does a person’s idea of fairness account for these factors of effort, luck, and efficiency? The Norwegians found that for most people, views of fairness change with age.

The Norwegians modified the dictator game so that the dictator divvied up wealth that was “earned,” in this case by the dictator and the partner sorting numbers on a computer screen for a while. Both dictator and partner were perfectly free to play video games, but most everybody “worked.” The researchers then modified the game—at random, one of the subjects of the game would be compensated for their “work” at a vastly higher rate. Since this was due to chance, the idea was that this would model “luck.” And finally, they modified the game by telling the dictator that every cent he or she kept would be worth one cent, but every cent he or she gave to the partner would be doubled, trebled, or quadrupled. It would be most “efficient,” and result in maximum benefit to society, for the dictator to give everything to the partner.

The Norwegians found that younger kids have, on average, a simple notion of fairness which they called “egalitarianism.” Regardless of effort, luck, or efficiency, the dictator divided things 50-50. As children aged, up to the end of high school, things changed. They steadily became more “meritocratic,” with dictators assigning wealth according to effort. Additionally, children paid more attention to efficiency, but this was a late development. Interestingly, boys (on average) discovered efficiency by age 13, while it took longer for it to be a factor for girls.

It’s not too surprising that most peoples’ views of fairness change as they grow up. A meritocratic view of fairness, accounting for efficiency, requires a certain level of cognitive development. But, as the authors note, this development must be in part driven by society. This study was not done in the United State, the world’s leading light of market-driven capitalism. This study was done in Norway, which is one of those awful European hell-holes that the champions of the invisible hand warn us about, and the toxin of Euro-socialism can’t help but warp impressionable young minds.

However, there is something here for the free-marketers. Besides the egalitarianism and the meritocracy, there is a third view of fairness manifested in this study. The authors call it “libertarianism, which justifies all inequalities in earnings.” Libertarian dictators give themselves all the wealth that is to be distributed. It appears, according to this study, that about a third of children are born libertarians, and since that number remains constant, it appears that the libertarians never grow up.

data from Almas et al 2010

Having interacted with a few libertarians, this is also not surprising.

Ingvild Almas, Alexander W. Cappelen, Erik O. Sorensen, and Bertil Tungodden (2010). Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance. Science 328, pp. 1176 - 1178.