Donuts and Data.

Each morning, around 8:45, I walk downstairs to Dunkin' Donuts and join one of the three donuts-and-coffee lines. I choose the same line everyday because the girl at the counter knows me and has my coffee ready at my turn. Normally, I give her $2. The cost is $1.50, she keeps the 50 cent tip.

This morning I had a 5 dollar bill in my pocket. She had the coffee ready, I handed her the five and waggled three fingers at her. My non-verbal communication meant: give me the $3 dollars and keep the change. For a split second she wondered if I meant three coffees, occasionally I do get more than one, but she quickly realized my intent, then smiled and gave me the three dollars. As I walked away I considered some of the calculations she made in that split second, to wit:

• the meaning: three fingers = ?
  
• the expression on my face meant ?
  
• the denomination of the bill = $5.
• my purchase history
• the change is usually a tip.
• the frequency in which I had ordered more than one coffee.
• the other sounds and images in our proximity filtered out.

In addition, she had the pressure of needing to resolve the statement I was making in the finger waggling because of the long line behind me. All of this, and a decision, in about 1 second.

Bear with me, usually (but not always) I get around to a point. It is this:

I keenly dislike the prevailing metaphor of man in our era, i.e, "man as machine." And more particularly, the metaphor of brain and mind as hard-drive or RAM.

It is convenient but inadequate.

What about the source of life itself and the anomalies of the person? What of beauty, courage, selflessness, or of sloth and despair, or romance, where is romance without man "qua" man? What of the unseeable source that enlivens everything? That makes a dead seed "alive." It's not that science has no answers, it is that it has rejected the possibility of the existence of certain knowledge outside of the material. In my view, a mistake of grand proportion.

My three finger message to the girl at the Dunkin' Donuts counter was all that I needed to get the correct result. It was an everyday decision that the mind of a person makes in the midst of everything else that is going on, including all the involuntary actions of breathing, heart rate, etc., and it is fascinating to me.

But, that she said thank you with her smile; that is something only a person can do.

On the Virtue of Tilting

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For some reason I have been been thinking about Don Quixote:

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire,
"Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.
"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."
"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone."

Everyone is understandably concerned about employment, jobs and from where they will come. But let us not forget that the good jobs, the ones we worry about losing today have their origins in the quixotic activity of yesterday's garage and dorm-room inventors. Young men who were told to get a real job, to give up the pipe dream, to accept the status-quo. But they are the guys who founded: Dell, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, not to mention the corporations from the old days, like Hewlitt/Packard, Ford, and GE whose origins are just as humble.

So, if we really want to develop more jobs, I conclude that we need fewer business schools, and more schools with a course on Don Quixote.

"your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions."
Joel

Support the Fort Worth Opera

A little plug for our local Opera Company, one of the 14 oldest opera companies in the nation, and the oldest continuously performing opera company in Texas, the Fort Worth Opera. As of the end of the 2007 Season, the company has produced 219 main-stage operas.

I mention this because the FWO just received a plug in the July, 2009 magazine, Opera News with a headline article featuring our new Director, Darren Keith Woods.

It may surprise visitors to "Cowtown" but little old Fort Worth has possibly the premier piano competition in the world in the Van Cliburn*, one of the top ten music halls in the world**, and an opera company that is serious about bringing top-tier opera to Texas.

But they need your support.

It is a year away but next season features one of my favorites: Mozart's, Don Giovanni. I will be there, probably more than once.

http://www.fwopera.org/

* "The most prestigious classical piano contest in the world..." (Chicago Tribune)

** "Bass Performance Hall is one of those rare halls in which the music heard by the audience is the same as that heard by the performer. The clarity of sound heard throughout the entire range, in addition to the warm, welcoming environment, makes Bass Performance Hall one of the very best." --- Yo-Yo Ma