When a friend told me she saw fifty ochre stars at Rockview, I envisioned a matrix of colorful sea stars, arms spread wide, glinting merrily from the face of the 15-foot tall rock face. It would be like looking at a movie screen, or shopping in the sock department at Target, except I would be viewing sea stars instead of choosing socks.

It wasn’t like that at all. The rock face is very irregular, and the stars had stuffed themselves into crevices, under overhangs, below the waterline, and amid other sea creatures. They were bent and folded, squashed and tangled, in clumps or alone, camouflaged against the variegated background. To find them, I had to peer closely at the rock face, often stooping, while the water level varied with wave action from none to knee high, which meant the bottoms of my pant legs were soaked. I couldn’t actually go as far out as I would have liked since that was the highest soaking I was willing to accept, having come straight from work.

To recap, I had to arrange to arrive before the minus tide, dress (almost) appropriately, spend an hour sloshing about, and still find only part of what I sought, which wasn’t exactly what I sought, since most of the “stars” looked sort of like these, though this picture was taken with zoom and flash:

Not much like shopping. But maybe shopping should be more like tide pooling.

Imagine going to the store and not having any idea where your item might be. There are stores like that, and we modern folk hate them. But I’m picturing something beyond disorganization, sans sales assistants. Say you are looking for socks, and you have only a rough idea of where you have seen socks before, but they aren’t always there, and you have to search in rough terrain for them, and even if you find some they might not be matched, or the right size, or in good shape, or perhaps there aren’t enough of them for your family.

Sounds crazy, right? But that’s how most animals find what they need, including human animals for 90% of our existence.

A slightly related fun fact: In the dolphin pool at the research lab associated with the aquarium where I volunteer, the dolphins are fed between two and eight meals daily, at varying times, so that their experience of eating more closely resembles that of their wild cousins. It’s one of the techniques used to stimulate the animals: managing change leads to cognitive growth.

I’m working again! It’s a temp job, receptionist in a small law office specializing in representing plaintiffs in workman’s compensation cases, so it’s on the bright side of the ethics line. The person I’m replacing won’t be returning, so, fingers crossed, I can keep doing it through Aidan’s recital and my acquisition of a job with insurance.

The lawyers in this office are nice people, and these cases last for years, so many of their clients are quite attached to them. A lot of my job, as well as that of the paralegal in the office, is to find answers for clients, or to relay answers from the lawyers. Because I’m the least busy person there, I get to listen to people’s stories with sympathy and reassurance. I really like that part.

After less than two weeks I have encountered two cases of people reluctant to cash checks. One case was a six-figure settlement, the payment exactly the amount expected. The other was an ongoing series of disability payments. Why not take the money and run?

Because people are honest and cautious. Even after enduring exams and treatments, depositions and trials, people don’t want to take what isn’t theirs, and certainly don’t want to take a chance on taking something and having to pay it back later. The person with the settlement wanted to be sure some of it wasn’t due to the lawyers. It wasn’t. The person with disability had a recent change in employment status, and wasn’t sure he was still due payments. He was.

I am enjoying getting to know these people, though some of their stories are sad, and the wheels of justice grind slowly. Some people have had multiple incidents. Some are young, and struggling with a life of decreased mobility much sooner than they would have expected. Many are anxious to avoid addiction, even when it means enduring more pain.

These unfortunates exhibit so much more grace, resilience, resolve, and acquiescence than the talking heads spewing rancor from “both aisles” of our divided country, it’s hard to believe they belong to the same species.

In case the thought of pundits is raising your blood pressure, please admire these ochre stars–there are at least four in the photo. I saw 25 or 30 during minus tide yesterday. Each has a radius of about five inches.

I am reading The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman, and it is almost as incredible as The Hidden Life of Trees. Almost, because birds are animals. I still haven’t gotten over trees that make years-long fruit-producing plans, keep Grandpa Stump on life support, and kill antelopes.

Birds are also amazing. I haven’t finished the book, and already birds can

• Recognize human faces, including human emotional expressions, remember those humans for years, and describe those humans to each other;
• Create useful, complex tools from another bird’s template, teach their offspring how to make these tools, and retain a favorite tool for years;
• Count, compute, and make decisions based on empirical probability, that last more readily than humans do;
• Discern between painting styles such as Impressionism and Cubism, and sort paintings by whether they contain human figures.

Not to mention solving multi-step problems, remembering hundreds of songs and cache locations, rapidly orienting to their location on Earth from random starting points, and going on strike to protest inequality.

Birds is a short word with a large meaning. It’s a taxonomic Class, meaning there are not only multiple species, there are multiple Genera, Families, and Orders. Our taxonomic Class is Mammalia, so saying birds are smart is like saying mammals are smart, though there are about twice as many species of birds as of mammals.

So some birds are smarter than others, and some are smart in some areas and dim in others.

This book is slightly annoying in that the author both derides and engages in anthropomorphism repeatedly. I remember encountering scientific anthropomorphism in high school, when I became interested in ethology. I thought I would become a scientist, and at first I embraced the idea that attributing human emotions to animals demonstrated a lack of objectivity. As I continued to read case studies, though, it seemed patently obvious that animals do have emotions, and I wondered why it was considered objective to deny that.

Over the years, plenty of scientists have observed animal emotions, from Charles Darwin to Jane Goodall, and scientific anthropomorphism is in decline today, though not expunged. Convincing evidence includes that fact that all mammals, including humans, have corresponding brain regions for emotional response, as well as identical associated neurochemicals.

No one who has owned a pet dog will need convincing.

Humans separated from birds, or rather, dinosaurs, much longer ago, but Mother Nature has a very long memory, and current bird scientists have identified a lot of similarities between bird brains and our brains as well. Speaking of bird brains, they get a bad rap because they are small, but their neuronal density is quite high. Birds’ brains are large in proportion to their body sizes, just as ours are.

I know it marks me as a hopeless snowflake, but I feel we are still learning so much about our world, and there is so much we don’t really understand. How can we so casually destroy it? Offshore drilling is on my mind this week.

Scientific American reports on these terms in the February issue. An objectivist holds absolute beliefs, while a relativist is open to persuasion. All of us are both, depending on the issue. Everyone is an absolutist on the cube root of 27; even if you don’t know what it is, you know there is one correct answer. Most everyone is a relativist on sushi; you may like it or not, but you are willing to believe there are others who feel the opposite, and you probably would not argue to the death that there is no imaginable circumstance on which you would change your viewpoint even a tiny bit. Maybe a new friend persuades a No-Sushi to try veggie sushi, or persuades a Yes-Sushi that it bad for the environment.

Issues that invoke absolutist opinions are often fraught, so I am going to illustrate with what most of you will consider a relativist issue: Pizza My Heart versus Sweetgreen. In the spirit of science, spherical horse-wise, let’s assume PMH only serves pizza and SG only serves salad, and that these are the only two restaurants, period.

According to the article, objectivists on either side would not only eat exclusively at their chosen restaurant, they would be unwilling to room with or even sit near someone who doesn’t share their view. Relativists may occasionally eat at the other restaurant, and are more open to interacting with those who don’t share their view.

If relativists become engaged in a discussion on the topic, they argue to learn, presenting an argument, listening to a counter-argument, and moving toward agreement.

I don’t feel like cooking tonight. Let’s go to SG.

It will be packed. They’re hosting the major’s retirement party tonight. 

Uh-oh. I guess we’d better choose PMH.

If objectivists become engaged in a discussion on the topic, they argue to win, that is, they may provide arguments for their side, but the purpose is to score points, to defeat the other side competitively.

I don’t feel like cooking tonight. Let’s go to SG, where we can eat without fear of a heart attack.

Protein rules! Lettuce is for ruminants!

Die Young, then! All doctors say we should eat mostly veggies.

Oh yeah, doctors are always right. Meat makes me strong!

The conclusions of the article were subtle. In experiments, when people are instructed to argue in one style or another, those who argue to win cement their views and those who argue to learn relax their views, whether they started out as objectivist or relativist. Befriending a relativist is the most common way for an objectivist to convert. That has certainly happened to me. If someone I care about expresses an opinion I would have vigorously opposed, it gives me pause, and makes me think about the issue again.

So think about that. The more we argue to win, the more convinced of rightness we are, while the more we argue to learn, the more ambiguous the world becomes. How one argues has a real impact on what one thinks. Creepy?

When there are no instructions, and no love lost between debaters, one side may argue to win while the other argues to learn. This often happens in a public forum. In that case, the person arguing to learn will usually lose, by legitimizing the other position. Discouraging.

This weekend I finished reading Dave Eggers’ The Circle, an exorbitantly parodic book about a social media company called The Circle with a goal of making every action public: members of The Circle, which is very nearly everyone in the country, are always online, as are videos of every space, indoors and out, private and public. You get a break from video coverage when you’re sleeping, but only because it’s dark, and from audio coverage for up to three minutes, each time you enter the bathroom.

Members of The Circle are called out by social media if they commit crimes, or commit sins, or play hooky from work, or don’t respond to Comments quickly enough, so the ubiquitous observation essentially eliminates crime, including sexual harassment and child abuse, as well as any other sort of behavior people aren’t willing to enact on a public stage. Overwhelming numbers of people accept the tradeoff, though the complete lack of privacy drives at least one character insane. What would you choose? I think the answer may be generational. It certainly sounds horrific to this older person.

I also saw a completely different take on secrets in an Ang Lee film from the 90s, The Wedding Banquet. It’s a funny and poignant story about a gay Chinese man in a serious relationship who agrees to wed a Chinese immigrant so she can get a green card and he can get his parents to stop haranguing him about marriage. The scheme is his partner’s idea. On hearing the news, the parents immediately travel to New York and become the extended house guests of their son and his “roommate” while they plan an elaborate wedding. Complications ensue.

In the movie, people mislead the ones they love in order to keep from hurting them or extinguishing their dreams. I very much appreciate this behavior, but it can turn out to be hurtful in a different way, if the deceit is uncovered or the first lie leads to others. Four of the five main characters in the movie were of Chinese descent, and the desires to maintain family ties and spare the feelings of loved ones prevailed most of the time. I feel that more stereotypical American characters might have been too selfish to maintain the illusion.

Even though it sometimes prevents us from blurting out our feelings or insisting on our way, I think this latter approach is both more human and more humane. Being able to have levels of privacy seems rejuvenating, even healthy. Some actions, thoughts, or experiences are shared with everyone, some with friends, some with with family, some with your intimate partner, and some with no one at all. To do otherwise would remove all differentiation among those groups. How can you identify your closest friends if you relate to everyone in exactly the same way? How can you find out who you really are if you don’t have a private, interior life?

[From the author’s postscript to The Three-Body Problem.]

“There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.

“I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.”

Subtitle: Some Observations about Californians, from the Viewpoint of a Transplant.

Californians support individual freedom of choice. That is, they think that if people want to do something, they should be able to do it. The term chill seems to mean non-judgmental here. If you stand in your yard and sing, or paint your car paisley, or name your dog Shitface, it won’t bother them. In NYC, these behaviors would also be ignored, but denizens would be thinking, What an idiot. Here, no one thinks much about it at all. It’s just a person making a harmless choice.

They all seem to agree that everyone should have access to the ocean, everyone except oil drillers. The ban on drilling is specific, based on some oil spills that were expensive and destructive. Many, many other commercial activities are not only allowed, but welcomed. Californians like to have it all: a humming economy, seafood, beautiful surroundings, and abundant wildlife. They are prepared for natural disasters, but don’t seem to worry about them much until they happen.

Of course there are some behaviors Californians think aren’t harmless. Mostly they think people should know what they shouldn’t do. For example, if driving at the speed limit is dangerous due to weather, you should drive more slowly, and Californians are perfectly comfortable with police ticketing you for not figuring that out. They’re also comfortable with motorcycles driving between car lanes at highway speeds. Can that really be harmless? I’m not sure I have the formula yet.

Driving is one of the biggest differences between here and Massachusetts–though the elephant in the sky is the weather. My husband and I drove home from Mountain View last night for well over an hour in the rain, with heavy traffic. For part of the trip we were in the carpool lane, and it was definitely moving faster. Which is to say, I think people alone in their cars weren’t using that lane, even though the other lanes were much slower, and the cops were pretty busy with accidents. There were also clear shoulder lanes on either side of the highway. Drivers here almost never block intersections, and they wait patiently for signal lights on highway entrance ramps during rush hour.

Not that we don’t occasionally see bad driving here. On the way out yesterday we saw several California-licensed cars bypass a line waiting to enter a ramp, cutting over at the last minute. What do people think about when they do that? It should be, I’m such a jerk!

My California friends would probably tell me those cars were driven by transplants.

I’m reading a book partially set during China’s Cultural Revolution, the time when Mao’s regime brutally purged traditional and capitalistic concepts in order to align the population around Communist ideology. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Highly educated people as a group were first and most severely affected; in order to survive, they had to renounce their incorrect beliefs, confess their wrong-thinking ways, and accept assignment of new vocations, often as field hands or in manual work crews.

Confession and renunciation was usually public, with the target on a stage accompanied by those who enumerate the person’s errors and demand specific confessions. For example, a university physicist was required to renounce Einstein’s theory of relativity because it was reactionary, and the big bang theory because it allowed the possibility of God, a no-no for communism.

Many fought back in the early days, slow to perceive the danger. As the death toll rose, others started to say what was expected, yet without truly believing they had erred. Capitulators were repeatedly questioned and tested; this was not a one-time appearance, but rather an ongoing process, an attempt to ensure abject compliance.

Eventually, some of them started to believe what they were saying, surely a form of insanity.

In the book one person refuses to comply at all, and is ultimately beaten to death by his questioners in front of an audience that includes one of his daughters. His other daughter turned him in and provided damning evidence. His wife, also a former academic, has become insane.

So, pretty intense stuff, right? Now imagine how I reacted when on the news, the news of our actual world today, I heard senior elected officials and political appointees lie under oath about an event with multiple independent confirmations. Of course I speak of the negative comments by Trump about immigrants, particularly the reference to “shithole [SHY thol] countries.”  I was stunned to hear people with expertise and gravitas calmly stating that they did not hear any such remarks. A global firestorm of outrage has ensued, time-critical and sensitive negotiations are derailed, yet these sycophants would have us believe nothing happened.

I doubt these people are being specifically threatened with job loss, but the implication is that they believe this astonishing behavior is expected in exchange for keeping their jobs, or receiving some sort of access to power.

China’s Cultural Revolution was a disaster for that country on many levels. Apparently, we are not as far from making similar mistakes as I had assumed.

In 1944, G. B. Shaw opined, Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. This strikes me as the essence of liberalism, this openness to change, versus conservatism, keeping things as they are. I am certainly not always in favor of change, yet as someone drawn to science and engineering, changing my mind based on evidence and observation is part and parcel of my being.

Notice that I used a 15th-century phrase to embrace change.

Changing one’s mind is the opposite of holding a conviction. In science, a conviction is meaningless, or at least a little silly, without proof. Not that it doesn’t happen. String theory, for example, seems to generate true believers, perhaps because its proposed solutions have been singularly unprovable to date. Some have been disproven.

In social circles, conviction seems important. Evidence of some odd behavior or misstep on the part of one’s closest family or friends likely will not shake your conviction that those relationships should be maintained. Given weaker ties or more dastardly deeds, conviction can be shaken, but that is much less common.

Scientific convictions are impersonal, but relationships are based on interactions. Those in your coterie engage you, and demonstrate how they care for you, strengthening mutual ties. What about political beliefs?

At least one anthropologist, T. M. Luhrmann, believes that those are built up in a similar way. Numerous interactions–with friends, with the computer or the television, with co-workers or co-members of various groups–mesh together to build a conviction in our minds, a worldview, that is hard to shake. When the result is demonstrably false, such as the conviction that Jews were an existential threat to the Third Reich, the mind model is called a paracosm.

Paracosms can take benign form, as in a child’s imaginary friend or an extreme practitioner of Tolkien fandom. They can help someone process a loss, for example by conversing with a loved one who died, or to solve a problem by creating a world that contains the solution. They can even become the plot of that breakout novel. They can also lead to tragic actions, such as suicide or school shootings.

The only known way to exit a paracosm–and even the helpful cases are usually temporary–is to develop a relationship with someone who views the world differently. What a strong argument for diversity! I’m going to increase my engagement with a wider variety of people. Probably my own paracosms will be challenged. Possibly positive change will spread, as bright sunshine dispels the mists of Mordor.

It’s a match made, well, somewhere. I have lived it recently as an occasional writer employed by one of many startups in this technology haven.

Of our fewer-than-twenty people, a handful have salaries and accrue equity. The rest of us are gig workers. I am paid $3 for each short writing assignment. Of course, if our business takes off, the gig folks who contributed to the success will receive additional compensation. That’s obvious, right? Of course that will happen! They just haven’t worked out the details yet.

Though the pay rate per assignment is low, the hourly pay rate is sweatshop grade due to uncompensated work–online meetings, suggested readings, training exercises. The founders, all very enthusiastic and, for the most part, youngish and buckish, knew we would be Fascinated to learn more, and we would Benefit, so it’s not really Exactly uncompensated. The Upside of being an Insider is Unlimited.

At a recent meeting, we learned that the strategy for 2018 is to follow the technology-sales hybrid playbook to develop the everyday habits we need to succeed. These are best-in-class sales habits that we execute every single day.

An actual org chart appeared. Each person was directed to notice which swim lane he or she should be in, yet to realize there is no reason to be completely siloed. We will replicate the positives of best-in-class companies by being unbelievably data-driven, and the most operationally disciplined in the world. That means a laser focus on operational discipline. Hyper operational discipline.

The process presentation was a series of vague bullets indicating that each person would need to completely understand all the touch-points across any given process, when those are available. Processes are location agnostic, and create a flywheel of, well pretty much anything. Productivity? Hyper-efficiency? Bloviation?

Our goal is to be a wild success. That was good to hear. I am pretty sure no one else will think of it, or anything else we covered.

I am not omitting as much substance as you may imagine.

After the meeting, I decided to withdraw my services before the next round of uncompensated activities. If the company hits it big, it won’t be the first tech train that has bypassed me in my career. Meanwhile, my annoyance meter is significantly lower.