Author Archives: JohnM

About JohnM

Academy Founder

Punch List for America– A Tool for Focusing Our Thinking and Conversation

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Our civic time is a scarce resource. How do we allocate it? The norm, in my observation, is to defer to the media to decide what is most worth thinking about on any given day. What is the media bias? To get our attention by maximizing fear, by exaggerating the significance of something of marginal if any importance. It’s time to take control of our civic time allocation. How?
Turn off the media. Find a quiet place and a quiet time. Take out a pen and a piece of paper. Or open a word document and create a blank table or matrix with four columns
and seven rows.
1.) What issues matter most to you? These should be the row headings listed in
order of importance. Prioritization is everything in life. Civics is no different from
any other sphere. But prioritization is tough.
2.) The following question may help in this prioritization exercise: what is the biggest
gap between America as it is and America as it should be?
3.)That biggest gap should be the first row heading. The second biggest
the second and so on.
4.)  The column headings should be three categories of solutions:
say short term, medium term, long term. Or governmental, for profit, or non-profit.
Or federal, state, and local pending legislation. Or personal, family, community.
Or conceptual (re-framing), practical, fantasy. Or Best Idea, Second Best, Third Best.
Or Biggest bang for buck: #1, #2, #3
YOUR TURN: let’s trade Punch Lists. Let’s encourage our family members to
do so. Let’s set up Thinking Citizen Clubs in our communities where
Punch Lists are exchanged with a regular periodicity.
These constantly revised and edited Punch Lists should replace
media agendas as our algorithm for the allocation of our limited
civic time.

The Miracle of the Car – Part Four – The Miracle of Oil

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THE MIRACLE OF OIL – Bringing Light Where there was Darkness, Bringing Warmth where there was Cold, Shrinking Time and Space
1.) In this era of climate change, it’s easy to forget the miracle of oil – how it brought light where there was darkness, warmth where there was cold, how it shrunk time and space to bring needed goods to the needy faster and cheaper than before
2.) Energy density is at the heart of this remarkable story: gasoline has an energy density of 46 (MJ/kg) versus 16 for wood and 24 for coal. (And just for a fun comparison: 3.9 MM for uranium 235).
3.) The eye-popping, page-turning history of how oil came to supplant coal and wood is told in one of the greatest books of the last 50 years: The Prize by Daniel Yergin.
4.) And, thankfully, this long, engrossing book was turned into a fantastic PBS documentary, narrated by Donald Sutherland.
I INVITE YOU TO READ OR TAKE A LISTEN!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prize:_The_Epic_Quest_for_Oil,_Money,_and_Power

How can you tell a passage is by Shakespeare, Hamilton or Madison?

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1. Apparently the best way to distinguish between a text by Hamilton and one by Madison is the use of filler words like “on” or “upon” – words that appeared independent of the content. The latter appears in 1 per 1000 words in Madison but 6 per 1000 in Hamilton. This discovery was made by Frederick Mosteller, the founder of Harvard’s Statistics Department.

2. By contrast the cleverest tool used to authenticate a Shakespeare text is to count the number of words in the text that appear no where else in the Shakespeare canon. The more such words, paradoxically, the better evidence that the text is genuine.
Shakespeare’s 884,640 words included 31,534 distinct words with many occurring three or fewer times. Source: Michael Starbird, Meaning from Data.

3. Have you ever been struck by an author’s obsession with a word that appears an inordinate number of times? The most memorable instance for me was the use of “mild” by Herman Melville in Moby Dick. I wrote a paper about in graduate school. “It’s a mild, mild wind and a mild-looking sky. It’s on such
a day I struck my first whale…”

YOUR TURN: What’s the neatest trick of textual analysis you ever learned in a literature course?

Squash: Video, Exaggerate, Dance!

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1.) Video: you might not be doing what you think you are doing.

The most shocking moment of my squash life was watching myself playing on video tape for the first time. I had been playing for decades. Who is that guy? He’s not bending his knees.
He looks so awkward. Oh, no, that’s not me is it? And sure enough.I thought I was bending my knees but I wasn’t. What to do?

2.) Exaggerate – just a little! Every shot say a little more. Bend those needs a little more. Hold the racket a little higher. Put in a little more torque! Make the swing a little looser!

3.) Dance! Make sure you split step after every single shot! If you do you will feel like you are dancing. You feel the rhythm throughout your body until the music stops. Every drill is a chance to feel the rhythm and the dance.

YOUR TURN: Have you ever recorded yourself playing a sport? Did it help you?

Bronze Doors: from the Supreme Court of the United States to the Gates of Paradise of the Baptistry in Florence

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1. The doors of the Supreme Court of the United States were designed by Cass Gilbert and John Donnelly, have 8 panels depicting the following scenes: the shield of Achilles (two men debate a point of law the winner receiving two gold coins), the Praetor’s edict, Julian and the Scholar, Justinian Code, the Magna Carta, the Westminster Statute, Coke and James I,
and Marshall and Story. How many college graduates know who Story is? Should they? How about Julian? Coke?

https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/bronzedoors.pdf

2.) The Gates of Paradise of the octagonal Baptistry in Florence: Ghiberti’s masterpiece Named by Michelangelo “the Gates of Paradise”Ten panels depicting scenes from Genesis: Adam and Eve, Noah, Jacob and Esau, David… Each is a masterpiece of perspective and detail. The most analyzed of the panels is that of Jacob and Esau. The Baptistry was where all Florentines were baptized. How many college graduates know who Jacob and Esau were? Should they?

YOUR TURN: What are your favorite doors, bronze or otherwise?

https://www.khanacademy.org/…/scu…/v/ghiberti-gates-paradise

Picking the right metric is everything – the case of railroads

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Metric #1 – ton miles: miles x weight  – really important. Railroads carry more freight than any other mode of transporation – 41% versus 40% for trucks.
Metric #2 – tons (tonnage), not so important: 15% v 70% for trucks.
Metric #3 – value of freight: even less important 4% versus 70% for trucks.
Another example – valuing companies. Perhaps the most common metric is the price-t0 earnings ratio. But this says absolutely nothing about either the balance sheet or the quality or sustainability of earnings. A good metric adjusts for all these factors.
YOUR TURN: Can you think of other examples?

The Miracle of the Car – Part Three – Transmission – boring? No way!

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1. When your car accelerates from 0 to  60 mph, your wheels turn from zero to 1000 revolutions per minute, but your engines crankshaft operates in a range of 800 to 6000 rpm. Gearing is necessary to coordinate them. This is the job of the transmission.
2. Gears trade torque for rotational speed the way a lever trades force for distance.
3. Flywheels are the part of the transmission that smoothes out the jerky pulses of the engine.
4. The clutch disengages the engine from the transmission when the car is still or gears are being changed.
5. In a front engine rear-wheel drive car the driveshaft connects the gearbox in the front to the differential in the back. The latter divides the force in half passing it on to each of the wheels, then increases the gear ratio by a factor of 4, and allows the two wheels to spin at different rates to negotiate a turn.
6. Driveshafts are hollow because paradoxically a hollow tube is stronger than a solid tube in bending and torsion.
7. Universal joints give drive shafts the necessary flexibility.
8. Other amazing parts of the transmission system are the dog clutch, the lay shaft, and the syncromesh which I will leave to others to explain the marvels of.

YOUR TURN– THE TRANSMISSION CHALLENGE: poets, musicians: please turn this amazing story into a sonnet, rap, ballad!

Demographic Denial – Automation, Ecological Catastrophe, Aging and a Falling Fertility Rate

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DEMOGRAPHIC DENIAL – Automation, Ecological Catastrophe, Aging, and a Falling Fertility Rate
1.) The specter of mass unemployment driven by automation and of environmental catastrophe driven by overpopulation have grabbed many headlines of late. The threat of aging and a falling fertility rate less so. This may be a serious mistake. So argues the author below in an article from the Boston Globe.
2.) Current estimates of the unfunded liabilities of the US government may be hugely underestimated based on outdated assumptions with respect to both longevity and declining fertility.
3.) Women in the US are now having fewer babies than they want (1.77 versus 2.77).
How has this happened? What is to be done? A challenge for policy makers and individuals.
4.) Standard explanations of slowing economic growth from the right and left tend to ignore the impact of demographics.
5.) Is Japan our future? Japan’s population has been declining since 2011.
6.) For a long term global historical perspective on demography see the riveting Rosling
videos below – one uses fancy digital graphics, the other primitive analogue technology
from Ikea. The paradoxical key to containing global population growth is raising the child survival rate in poor countries to 90% which is done by raising the standard of living
(and the education for women).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Six problems with comparing student performance across boarders…

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1.) ethnic heterogeneity (many of “best” systems in world are ethnically homogenous)
2.) US emphasis on “well roundedness”  (eg. sports and other extra curricular activities).
4.) US does less tracking than many other systems.
5.) All other systems are national rather than local.
6.) In top performing school systems, teachers come from the top 10% of their classes
not the bottom 30% as in the US.
What do you think about comparing student performance?

The Miracle of the Car – Part Two – The Seven Subsystems of the Internal Combustion Engine

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SHOULD EVERY 8TH GRADER KNOW WHAT THE SEVEN SUBSYSTEMS OF THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE ARE?
Yes. From an ethical perspective nothing is more important in life than appreciating the world around you. That world includes both natural systems and engineered systems. Neither should be taken for granted. No engineered system is more ubiquitous
than the automobile. Nothing is more intriguing to children than cars. What a perfect way to teach science?
In Part One of this series on the car we discussed the miracle of 132 molecular bombs exploding per second under the hood. But this generates a huge amount of heat that must be dissipated through the cooling system (eg. coolant, radiator, fan), as well as a huge amount of exhaust which must be cleaned up in the catalytic converter and expelled through the tail pipe, and a huge amount of sound that must be muffled, a huge amount of friction that needs lubrication, a very precise opening and closing of valves that is accomplished by an ingenious contraption called a camshaft driven by a timing belt attached to the crankshaft, then it needs a very precise mix of fuel and air provided once by the carburetor and now by a fuel injection system, which must be ignited by a spark
plug jolted by high voltage from an electrical system which includes a battery, an alternator (a generator tied also to the crankshaft), and an induction coil (transformer) to boost the voltage. Alternatively, combustion can be achieved without a spark plug via compression alone (as in diesel engines).
A thing of beauty or what? Analogous to the orchestration of strings, winds, percussion, brass, vocalists. The work of thousands of nameless scientists, engineers, and tinkerers over generations. Honor them!
Next time: the miracle of the transmission system.
Experts, YOUR TURN: please correct, elaborate, elucidate.