Fri, 08 Jun 2001

I've watched Moulton over the years. It's interesting to see how he acquires the practices of each locale and culture he's embedded in.

When Moulton was 12, his father moved the family to New Orleans for a year while he attended Tulane to earn a Masters in Public Health.

It was strange for Moulton to watch his father become a college student at the age of 45. It was cute the way Moulton gave his dad tips on how to take exams.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about today.

What I wanted to talk about was how Moulton adapted to the local culture of New Orleans, especially the speech patterns.

When he first arrived, he couldn't understand a word people said. They talked so different in New Orleans than in Omaha. And 10 months later, when the year in New Orleans was about over, Moulton was talking just like them.

After returning to Omaha, he lost his New Orleans drawl within a few months.

Then he went off to college himself. Not all that far. He only went from Omaha to Lincoln, a mere 50 miles. But oh what a change in culture. Moulton was no longer living at home, but in a house full of other students who brought all manner of different ways of speaking.

One of the features of that culture was teasing and ribbing. It went on all the time, and the only way to survive was to give as good as you got. They had a strange name for it in those days. They called it "pimping" -- I kid you not. In Lincoln Nebraska, in 1964, put-downs were known as "pimping."

I'll never forget the day the girl friend of one of the brothers drops by, and by way of greeting, she says, "Pimp me."

But the problem was, when Moulton went home during breaks, he brought that acid tongue with him. Which his Mother did not like. Moulton himself wasn't even aware of it. "What acid tongue?" he would inquire.

It wasn't until after he graduated and moved on to the next cultural model -- the research lab -- that he realized he had acquired a habit of speech that no longer served him well. And gradually he lost his acid tongue.

Cultures, it seems, are like seawater to a fish. You don't notice the features of your culture until you move to a different one.

Moulton is now a lot more resistant to picking up undesirable features of a culture. Which often makes him stick out like a sore thumb.

It's like going to the beach, where everybody is playing volleyball except this one dude, who is sitting quietly with a sketchpad, sketching pictures of the volleyballers. Of course they don't notice he's drawing pictures. They just see him sitting there, not playing the game.

Pretty soon, one of them throws the volleyball at the guy with the sketchpad, to see if he'll enter the game. But the ball just bounces off him. He ignores it and goes on sketching. Which really irks the volleyballers. Pretty soon a few of them are pelting him with the volleyball, trying to get a rise out him. And he just draws a sketch of them throwing the volleyball at him.

This is how Moulton behaves when he is in a foreign culture.

Is that weird or what?

Mon, 11 Jun 2001

Speaking of foreign cultures, Moulton is on another jag.

He's researching yet another of those ineffable affective emotional states.

He's trying to find out the name of the affective emotional state one experiences when others are behaving like arrogant pompous ass know-it-alls.

Sheesh, what a nebbish.

Why doesn't he just say he feels like calling them arrogant pompous assed know-it-alls. Is that so hard to say?

Trust me on this. Moulton will research this puzzle until he comes up with a clinical term for his affective emotional state that no one ever heard of before.

Tue, Jun 12, 2001 6:25 AM

Moulton seems to be feeling "abraded" by the "abrasiveness" of others. He went down to the basement and got some "True Grit" Coarse Grit Sandpaper and papered a sample of it on the wall of his computer study. Then he labeled it, "Welcome to the Emery Board."

Moulton is weird.

Me, I just feel a little gritty after the affairs of the day.

Tue, 12 Jun 2001

Well, Moulton is fit to be tied today.

He just came home from grocery shopping at the local Stop & Shop.

This week, chicken is on sale. The regular price is $2.99/lb, but this week they are running a "Buy One, Get One Free Sale."

And the ad (both in the store and in the circular) says "You Save $2.99/lb".

Heh. Moulton pointed out to the store manager that his savings was not $2.99/lb but $1.50/lb.

The store manager didn't get it. He assured Moulton that he was saving $2.99 a pound when he bought two pounds of chicken for $2.99 (when Moulton normally would have paid $5.98 for those same 2 pounds of chicken without the sale).

Moulton tells the guy that if he buy 2 pounds of chicken for $2.99, he is paying $1.50 a pound, which is half the regular price, for a savings of $1.50/lb.

The guy just doesn't get it. Moulton is exasperated.

So Moulton comes home and, as he is unpacking his groceries, he turns on the radio to NPR's Talk of the Nation and guess what they're talkin about? Yep. Basic economic literacy and why people can't understand simple marketplace math.

Mebbe Click and Clack should do a Puzzler on this one.

Thu, 14 Jun 2001

Moulton has been thinking about issues of ownwership for a day or two.

He drew a diagram on the board:

A --> B

which he reads aloud as "A Implies B."

Now, here is where Moulton is confused...

If 'A' and 'B' are States of Affairs or States of Mind, such that one person "owns" 'A' and another persons "owns" 'B' then who "owns" the Implication itself, 'A --> B' ?

Moulton is coming to the conclusion that, in Systems Theory, flows in the system are not "owned" by any system component, but are an Emergent Property of the System itself.

What a nerd! Nobody is ever gonna understand that.

The guy oughta go looking for some song lyrics that express that notion.

Sat, 23 Jun 2001

Well, Moulton was in his element this week.

The conference, which was held in the posh Tang Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was called "WET-ICE" which stands for "Workshop on Enabling Technologies -- Infrastructure for Collaborative Environments."

Most of the regular talks sucked, but there were two good keynote speeches, and several good coffee breaks and dinner conversations.

Moulton ran into two old colleagues from a 1995 Mud Workshop and did a lot of catching up with them. Kirstie Bellman is one of the most extraordinary professional women in the business. Moulton is a terrible listener, but he can listen to Kirstie for hours. And he did. Kirstie is joined at the hip to Chris Landauer who documents everything they do. He's cool. Like Esther Dyson, Kirstie is the daughter of a famous researcher who began teaching her how to think at age 3. What a difference it makes to have a parent who bothers to teach their children how to think.

Believe it or not, Kirstie says she has never met Esther Dyson, but they both know it's inevitable. I'd love to be a mouse in Moulton's pocket when they meet. Trouble is, Moulton prolly won't be there when it happens.

Moulton also met several other movers and shakers, including Tom Malone, the best of the two keynote speakers. He wants Moulton to write up the remarks he made after Tom's talk.

Moulton also fell for another researcher from Sandia National Labs. Elaine Raybourn is new on the scene, but smack on target. She's a Sociologist who studies human behavior in collaborative environments.

Well, 'collaborative' is sort of a euphemism here. If you put humans in a collaborative environment they discover ingenious ways to transform it into a war zone.

Which brings me around to Moulton's talk on Friday morning.

What a performance. The guy is practically an evangelist. Barsoom Tork on speed.

Oh, and I was in the talk, too. Yep. He trotted me out for his patented 'Bricolage with Montana Mouse' sketch. But now I have competition from Moulton's new Maxwell's Equation T-Shirt. But I'm cuter.

Definitely cuter than Moulton in his Maxwell's Equation T-Shirt.

Yep. No question about it.

I'm cuter.

Sun, 01 Jul 2001

Moulton was in his element this week.

It was a big week, culminating in a meeting with the Advisory Panel of his big project at MIT.

But the best part was Friday and Saturday. One of the members of the Advisory Panel stayed over to schmooze with Moulton.

They were up half the night trading stories and ideas.

There was Moulton, in his living room, choreographing a scene to explain the fundamentals of electricity to children who would be too young to grasp the usual abstractions. The children would dance a kind of Conga Line that depicted the way electricity moves.

Señor Wences is alive and well, performing in Moulton's living room.

Moulton is a Systems Thinker. There aren't a whole lot of Systems Thinkers in this world. So when Moulton has a houseguest who is also a Systems Thinker, researcher and an educator to boot, it turns into a high intensity seminar.

I couldn't begin to recap everything they talked about. It went on for hours and hours, and neither of them tired of it. It was an astonishing candlelight performance.

Yep. The power went off. There was a huge downpour and electrical storm, and the power went off. Moulton lit some candles and they did all this in the near darkness on Saturday night.

Candlelight dancing in Moulton's living room.

You had to be there.

Mon, 23 Jul 2001

Whew!

It's been a hectic weekend in these parts.

On Friday, Moulton dashed over to the airport to meet Moonbeam's arriving flight. The Red Line was suffering delays, and Moulton arrived at the gate to meet Moonbeam's flight just as she was coming out the door.

But the ride on the T back to where Moulton parks his car was an adventure. It took them 3 hours to go from the airport to Moulton's house.

The big hangup was another breakdown on the Red Line, just two stops short of their destination. The train in front broke down and had to be pushed into the station by the train behind. Phun.

Saturday, Moonbeam was feeling ill, but they went to the Science Museum nonetheless, where Moonbeam spent most of the day sitting in the Volunteer Lounge writing and resting. It has a nice view of the Charles.

Then Saturday night they went to MIT for a picnic. The organizers had moved the picnic, so Moulton and Moonbeam wandered all over campus looking for it. But the food was good.

Sunday they returned to MIT for a marathon workshop that ran for 11 hours with no breaks. It was a good workshop, but Moonbeam was exhausted. The best part of her day was playing Scrabble on a Media Lab machine that is faster than Moulton's antiques.

What a 'Mechiah'!

Fri, 07 Sep 2001

Moulton's been busy of late. So busy, he sometimes forgets me. Three times now he's done his laundry without bothering to remove me from his pocket. It's like going through the carwash in Moonbeam's Zephyr.

Gimme a towel already.

Moulton and Moonbeam finished their reunion with visits to some museums of art and history, and enjoyed some quiet evenings, briefly interrupted by a small crisis or two.

Anyway, Moonbeam headed back to the mountains while Moulton went to Madison Wisconson, on the shores of Lake Mendota, to give a paper on his favorite research subject. And, as usual, he dragged me out of his pocket to demonstrate his ideas.

I must have done a good job, cuz they gave Moulton an award for his talk, and he even thanked me for helping him. I guess that makes up for all those unadvertised launderings.

Then he spent a week and half visiting his family in Indiana. Different members of Moulton's family move at different speeds. His mother, naturally, moves at a snail's pace. His nephew, Bob, who has his own construction business, moves at lightspeed. Bob's speedboat is called "This Side Up" because he flipped the last one he owned.

And his brother and sister-in-law, who were in the process of moving into a new house, move around in circles, tangoing to the music of the sneers.

It was a weird interlude.

Moulton returned to resume his bucolic life at home. He planted 14 mums, 2 pansies, and 180 bulbs in his garden, and resumed his routine at the Museum of Science, with an accasional night out for Dungeons and Dragons.

But wait. There's more.

Then he drove out west. Well to western Massachusetts anyway, to give a marathon guest lecture to a bunch of public school educators who were enrolled in a professional development program at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. It was Show Time again. But no award this time. Just a nice thank you and a drive through the Berkshires.

Now Moulton has a houseguest for the next two months. A young post-doc from Carnegie-Mellon has moved in for a spell to collaborate on Moulton's big project at MIT. Poor Moulton. He won't be able to laze around for a while. There's work to do.

Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2001

I almost got the day off, today.

Last week, one of the other volunteers at the Museum of Science brought in a small Van de Graf Generator. It was in a state of disrepair, which naturally attracted Moulton's interest. He can't keep his mitts off stuff that's broken.

So today being a slow day at the Museum, Moulton had time to fiddle with the Van de Graf Generator.

"What's a Van de Graf Generator?" you ask.

It's a lightning machine.

Well, the big ones are. This was just a little one, so it only produced little sparks, not big lightning bolts.

Sparks are baby lightning bolts. Or lightning bolts are moby sparks.

Anyway, it's a fairly simple machine. There is a rubber belt that runs up and down a vertical tube, about the size of a paper towel tube. At the bottom of the tube there is a little piece of copper wire that rubs against the belt. At the top of the tube is a metal dome, about the size of a small mixing bowl. It fits snugly over the top of the vertical tube.

The belt is driven by a small electric motor. As the belt turns, it rubs against the copper wire and picks up a few stray electrons which are carried up with the moving belt, where they jump to the metal dome.

There they collect and build up a charge of static electricity, which you can feel if you bring your hand near the dome. The static electricity makes the hairs on the back of your hand stand up, and it feels a little like wind on your arm.

Moulton then attached a ping pong ball to a string and suspended it near the dome of the Van de Graf Generator. The ping pong ball would pick up some static electricity which makes it repell from the dome.

Moulton got all this working and spent much of the afternoon entertaining the visitors with the machine.

I almost got off scott free.

But just at the end of the day, he hauled me out to repeat, for the umpteenth time, his spiel on emotions and learning, with me in the ignominious role of "learning critter."

I'd rather have been electrocuted on the damned lightning bolt machine.

Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2002

This has been something of a breakthrough month for Moulton at the Museum of Science.

For years he has been perfecting the art of coaching visitors at the puzzle counter.

Julien is another Science Museum volunteer and part-time staffer who has gradually picked up the art of coaching, much to Moulton's gratification and delight.

About a month ago, Julien asked Moulton if he knew any way to coach visitors to solve one of the newer puzzles in the collection.

Moulton told Julien that he didn't know any coaching technique for the newest puzzle, but his intuition suggested that the new puzzle was similar to the Tower of Hanoi, for which there was a well-established coaching technique that Julien had already mastered. Perhaps, suggested Moulton, the coaching technique for the Tower of Hanoi could be adapted to the new puzzle.

A week later, Moulton came into the Discovery Center to see Julien coaching a young visitor to solve the newer puzzle. Moulton watched in astonishment as Julien led the young visitor to systematically solve the puzzle.

It was a red-letter day. Julien had not just matched Moulton's practice, he had moved beyond it. Julien was not just flying solo anymore, he was now doing tricks beyond anything that Moulton had been able to figure out.

And then there was a touching moment when Moulton went up to Julien to congratulate him on his astonishing achievement. Julien had been the first to prove that others could both master the coaching technique and generalize it.

Yesterday, Moulton arrived in the Discovery Center to find Julien visiting with a parent at the puzzle counter. Julien had drawn a diagram on a piece of paper and was explaining it to the parent.

Moulton looked down at the paper and his jaw dropped.

Julien was deftly explaining Moulton's Four-Quadrant Model of Emotions and Learning to the visitor.

Hallelujah! Moulton has won. Julien, at age 30, has now mastered his own understanding of the underlying theory and is now able to explain that, too.

It's another Mechiah!

If Julien can learn it, so can others.

Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002

Saturday night, after the Museum of Science, Moulton went over to the home of his friends, Len and Roz, who were celebrating the second birthday of their youngest child, Christopher.

To Moulton's surprise, all of Len's family had come up from Connecticut, and Roz' parents were there from Atlanta. The place was packed.

Roz' father, Bill, had bought a puzzle called 'Rush Hour' for 6-year old Michael, the older child. 'Rush Hour' (sometimes marketed as 'Grid Lock' or 'Traffic Jam') is a large sliding block puzzle in a square frame, with rectangular blocks of different sizes. It's not an easy puzzle.

In a matter of days, reported both Bill and Len, Michael had zipped through Levels 1 and 2 of the puzzle and was on his way to solving Level 3.

Len is the oldest of 5 siblings. Len's youngest brother, John, is not a puzzle solver. He's invariably the last member of the family to be found amusing himself with a challenging mind-bender.

But Michael had somehow cajoled John into trying the 'Rush Hour' puzzle. After all, if a 6-year old can do it, how hard can it be?

So here was John, aided by his girl friend, Tara, sweating over this classic, challenging puzzle.

'Rush Hour' is based on 'nested goals'. To solve the main problem, you first have to solve a slightly simpler one. And to solve the simpler puzzle, you have to solve a yet simpler one, and so on. The key idea is to recognize the sequence of nested goals, and work them in reverse order.

It's easy to get lost or confused.

John and Tara were lost and confused.

And then along comes 6-year old Michael -- but not to show them how to solve it. Nonono. Michael understands the point of solving puzzles. It's not to get the answer. Nopenopenope. It's to enjoy the process of discovering the elusive solution.

And there was 6-year old Michael, coaching his 32-year old uncle to think his way through the solution to 'Rush Hour'.

And the best part was that John enjoyed it, and didn't feel stupid or embarrassed to receive help from a precocious 6-year old. John was able to boast that he had solved it.

Moulton was so impressed he awarded Michael an orange Museum of Science T-Shirt.

Why orange?

That's his father's favorite color.

Orange is the color of Amusement.

Date: 10 October 2002

Well, Moulton's gone and done it now.

Last March, he gave a coupla guest lectures at Harvard, which the instructor taped.

Then she had her husband process the tapes into QuickTime movies.

Then she had him burn the movies onto a CD and she gave Moulton a copy.

It was no big deal, cuz Moulton didn't have a machine powerful enough to play QuickTime movies.

So he just put the CDs aside.

But then, the idiots at MIT broke down and gave Moulton a half decent iMac to take home, since his ferchachta old machines were barely able to boot up without falling apart.

So naturally, Moulton needed to find out if the CD player worked.

Yah, it worked. But the speakers didn't. Silent movies.

So Moulton took the bloody iMac apart and soldered up the broken leads on the little printed circuit board where the headphone jacks plug in. Took him all day. Plus he burned his fingers on the soldering pencil.

What a klutz.

But now he had a CD player that played QuickTime movies with sound, and even DVDs. Moulton is not in the stone age anymore.