Blank Canvas

1. Thank you to the Parks who allowed my family to invade their space this weekend and were excellent hosts.
2. Thank you to all those who created and maintain the National Park Service. My family had fun on our recent visit to Lehman’s Caves.
3. I’m struggling to avoid making this a backhanded compliment, but I suspect that I will fail. Thank you to the Mormon church for teaching me inhumane standards of sexual conduct. My struggles with trying to comply, the resulting shame and fear, and my eventual escape have all helped me to transcend and become more humane. Without that history, I would be less capable of compassion.
4. Lacey, I may say this a lot, but thank you for living with my quirks, the things that make me unpleasant to live with on occasion. I’m still working on it.
5. I am grateful for the realization that I am mortal, that my life is a finite resource.

Lifeblood flowing through morning arterials, all returning to our places, ready to do our patriotic duty: to keep the machinery of civilization running.

1. Thank you to the folks who take care of the parks where I take my girls to kick around a ball or swing a bat. Your work makes family moments possible.
2. Thank you to the people who grow my food. You contribute to health and well-being.
3. Thank you to my teachers, everyone who has ever taught me anything. I have only risen above ignorance with your help.
4. Thank you to the makers who take satisfaction in creating something of lasting value and beauty.
5. Thank you to the thinkers who have helped me to examine life and see it more clearly.

Do you believe in the color purple?

Obviously you believe in purple because you can see it with your own eyes. It’s part of your everyday experience. What more proof do you need?

It’s not a silly question because purple lacks the same kind of physical existence as other colors.

A prism casts a spectrum of pure light. Where is purple?

Color is how our mind perceives different wavelengths of light. Red light, the longest light that humans can perceive, has wavelengths of about 625–740 nm. Any longer than that and the light becomes infrared, light that human eyes fail to perceive.

As the light gets shorter, it passes through orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet light. Violet light at this other extreme of the light spectrum has short wavelengths ranging from about 380–450 nm. Any shorter than that and the light becomes ultraviolet, again imperceptible to human eyes.

Standard color wheels show purple between red and violet, on the opposite side from yellowish green or orange, but what wavelength can be simultaneously longer than red (i.e. greater than 740 nm) and shorter than violet (i.e. less than 380 nm)? Pick a number less that 380 and greater than 740.

No single wavelength can cause our eyes to see the color purple. It is a non-spectral color created by our minds when red and violet wavelengths are mixed together, a quale representing the presence of two wavelengths. It is a fiction.

Pure purple light doesn’t exist, yet we perceive it like the spectral colors. Our minds are tricksy like that: simplifying reality, presenting a seamless experience to our conscious awareness, and providing no caveats to what we believe is raw sensory data. If we want to know how the world outside of our heads really works, these simplifications make our work more difficult.

What other parts of our experience have our minds constructed?

I leave with another fun color illusion. Do you see green and blue spirals in this picture? Your brain has fooled you again. Both spirals have the same color: #00FF97. The context of the spirals causes our minds to present two different qualia for the same color.

Hot tea, hot breeze,
And the waxing moon rising
Through cloudless lavender skies.
Insects buzz at evening.

Have you ever wondered, if self-help books truly work, why people buy one after another every few months?

I’m participating in a simple study of happiness (which ends 7 Aug 2009 but seems to welcome latecomers) connected to a forthcoming book, :59 seconds—Think a little, Change a lot, which claims to offer simple ways to achieve and feel happy based on research. (via Lone Gunman)

:59 Seconds exposes modern-day mind myths promoted by the self-help industry, and describes hundreds of techniques that help people achieve in minutes not months.

Based on a few conversations that I’ve had, an impression floats around out there that science has nothing to offer those of us seeking happiness. This impression may have its roots in the past where psychology focused on pathology. Only recently has psychology turned to studying human happiness, creating a branch known as positive psychology.

Even though the science looks promising, I doubt that it can deliver a Utopian future. Suffering may be an intrinsic part of human life. Yet I am driven to ameliorate it for myself and for others. Traditional ways of life hold many secrets of living happily, mixed with superstition and folly. I hope that scientific inquiry will separate the wheat from that chaff and provide new insights into what constitutes the good life.

I also doubt that this will be the self-help book to end all self-help books, but perhaps this is part of a nascent trend to subject the self-help culture and traditional lifeways to scientific scrutiny. I believe that will prove to be a good thing in the end.

I freaked out when I woke up. I couldn’t tell whether or not I had killed someone.

The dream that woke me had saturated my mind with guilt and fear. I struggled in the darkness to remember whether or not I had shot a mailman and covered it up for years. I could remember pulling the trigger. That couldn’t be right, but I remembered doing it and felt remorse.

Trying to get back to sleep proved futile, so I got out of bed and shuffled into the living room where my wife was still awake, sewing. I sat on the couch and watched her work. I wasn’t sure whether I should tell her. Even then, in my wakeful state, I wasn’t sure whether the dream were true. It still felt like a true memory. I didn’t want to confess to a crime that would put me in prison if I wasn’t sure it was just a dream.

I decided that I could confide in her. She listened without showing any sign that what I said disturbed her. She showed more faith in my innocence than I felt. She didn’t seem to appreciate my struggle to find a handhold on reality, but her aplomb calmed my mind a little.

The overwhelming remorse for buried secrets felt palpable and real. For all I could tell, I had committed the crime and had evaded detection for years. I thought maybe I had been suppressing the memory, and my dreams had brought it to my conscious awareness.

My wife finished her sewing, and we went to bed together.

I only felt secure in my innocence when I woke up in the morning, though even now traces of doubt flit across my mind. Imagination and memory cannot be fully trusted.

1. Lacey, thank you for being a charitable partner who loves me enough to stay together despite our differences. I admire you for that.
2. Lilah, thank you for being the first child to help me learn to be a father, for opening my heart to to a new kind of love.
3. Eden, thank you for convincing me that I could love more than one child with my whole heart. You have lived up to your name.
4. Thank you to the entrepreneurs and innovators who make my life better through bringing your ideas and expertise to the marketplace.
5. Thank you to all my teachers who have invested part of your lives to brighten my horizons.

Oh! the human irony of following a green Prius with a 2BGREEN license plate as the driver tosses a cigarette butt onto the highway.

I’ve given up trying to be discriminating about who I friend on Facebook. I’m tired of deciding whether or not I can really call someone my friend. Am I the only one who struggles with the implied intimacy of “friend”?

My new standard is if someone took the time to make an overture to me and I can remember who they are, I’ll friend them. That’s what it means to be my friend on Facebook. And I think that’s cool enough.

Do you want to be my friend?

Update: Experts apparently agree that I’m on the right track.