The Cycle of Grocery Stores

Yet again, I come here merely to point you elsewhere.  Specifically, I direct you to my post on The Post Calvin where I will attempt to woo you with elegantly crafted prose about the Dominick's down the street from my high school.

It's the 19th! You know what that means...

That's right!  Today, The Post Calvin posted a blog of mine that muses about the strange complexity of photographs that both capture and save a moment in the past, and yet most often have as short a shelf-life as their subjects.  I also briefly mention flowers, in case that interests you.

A Brief Overview of Wrapping Gifts, for those of you about to rage-quit Christmas

If you’re a proactive person, this post will be one of those fancy desserts that blends well with the meal that came before it.  If you’re like most people I know, this post will be the burnt English muffin breakfast you almost forgot about on your way out the door in the morning.  Sorry about that.

The concept of wrapping gifts to hide contents and decorate packaging dates all the way back to ancient China when government officials were presented with gifts of money wrapped in paper envelopes.  The Japanese in the Edo period (1600s to 1800s), wrapped gifts in decorative silk cloths in a method called furoshiki. 

Spinning the globe a bit, we come to Victorian era England, where gift giving was a popular pastime, second only to displaying an illusion of wealth.  Over time, the upper classes developed a trend of concealing gifts in wallpaper.  If you’ve ever used wallpaper for anything, you know that it can be a pain to fold, and I can only imagine that the smaller the gift, the more un-Victorian profanity involved.   After paper manufacturers realized that this trend was not going away, they started selling colored tissue paper that was both decorative and easy to manipulate.

Enter the American company, Hallmark.  Almost one hundred years ago, the Hall brothers accidentally invented what is now wrapping paper when they ran out of that fancy tissue paper and improvised by selling pretty print French paper envelope liners.  Those went over so well with Hallmark’s customer base that they began printing their own.

But gift wrapping isn’t just a social nicety we begrudgingly observe a few times a year.  It’s also science!  The “gift wrapping” algorithm is something mathematicians use to find the convex hull of a set of points.  What is a convex hull, you ask?  I’m glad you ask, because I had to look it up.  One way to explain it is if you have a graph full of data points…

…and the convex hull is what would be created if you could stretch a rubber band around the outside edge of all the points. 

The gift wrapping algorithm is used to calculate that rubber band.  You can find some interesting demonstrations of the algorithm in use in 2D and 3D data sets here.

Now that you know more about gift wrapping than you ever knew you wanted to know, you can feel proud of yourself as you either relax on the couch, admiring your handiwork under your tree, or you can go back to procrastinating with my blessing.

Why haven't we paid reparations, again?

Calvin College's History Department just posted a link to this article on their facebook wall.

History and guilt

Can America face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust?

History-guilt is one of those topics that, for me, I can't help but muse about.  As an upper-middle-class white American who happened to take an unconventional course track to achieve an undergraduate history minor, I've faced my nation's (and, though I'm less certain of it, my ancestors') past sins in convicting ways in convicting contexts.  Such convictions are not something I put aside easily.

The above article talks about collective guilt versus collective responsibility, and one conclusion drawn from that discussion is that, while we are not, as a nation, continuously guilty for the atrocities of our nation's history, we are responsible for them and it is morally imperative that we not sweep them under a rug, that we not gild them with narratives of triumph and teamwork, and that we address them in our present and accept them as our past.

The Americas were settled by conquerors, and by the time America declared itself a country, many of those conquerers considered their native enemies to be subhuman pests in need of eradication.  Pre-America Americans treated the native tribes around them in much the same way that modern Americans treat packs of wolves today: as dangerous, incomprehensible, curiosities that might deserve their own place in the world, but only if it does not interfere with our livestock.  It's true that some early settlers of North America worked within an understood peace with Native American peoples, trading with them instead of killing them outright, marrying into their tribes and developing mutually beneficial hybrid cultures.  But for the large part, mutually beneficial relationships were not the ones that formed the foundation for the United States.

While the British still controlled the North American colonies, they used them as penal colonies for their worst criminals as well as their Irish and Scottish rebels.  Indentured servitude was the name of the game, establishing a divide that is still alive today, wherein the working class is often seen as second-rate citizens, as ignorant, and even evil.  This was only intensified with the growth of the popularity of slavery, and as white slavers shipped in foreign workers from Africa (and possibly India), America continued to build itself up on the backs of people whose liberty had been stolen from them.

Our country is a great country.  It could be a better country, I think everyone agrees, though they may disagree on what changes should be made.  Our country is full of opportunity, where people who work hard can often change their stars, where the descendants of Irish immigrants who came here with naught but the clothes on their backs are able, today, to go to college and become doctors, lawyers, teachers, and professionals.

But our country's past is not great.  It is not forgivable, nor has it been sufficiently paid for by those who have benefited from the persecutions of others.  Though our president is African-American*, poor people and imprisoned people are also largely black.  A sobering look at American history shows us that, though there are modern factors at play in those realities, many of the stumbling blocks that caused them were established at the founding of this country and have only grown since.  The real-estate practice of red-lining--keeping black Americans from buying homes in certain neighborhoods--cut off economic opportunity to blacks for decades, opportunity that was open to whites who were able to buy houses and use that capital to lend money to children for college payments, car loans, and even mortgages.  Red-lining was born out of a racism that believed that blacks brought crime with them wherever they went and so would lower property values of any neighborhoods where they lived.  That racism stems from the same racism as slavery, and the same racism as the European conquest of the Americas.

Our country was founded and expanded on that racism.  I likely have many of the opportunities I have because of that racism.  It's not a pretty picture; American history.  But whitewashing it only makes it uglier.  From the above article,

"Rather than looking at the history of Jim Crow, we turn Martin Luther King’s birthday into a national holiday and put his statue on the Mall. Yet we would be disturbed by a German lesson plan that mentioned the Holocaust as a terrible thing, and then went on too quickly to described those heroes — Willy Brandt, Sophie Scholl, Claus von Stauffenberg — who opposed it. With far too few exceptions, America’s history of freedom-fighting — from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall — is doing just that."

Paying monetary reparations, establishing affirmative action, and enforcing strict equal-opportunity laws are important steps for our nation to take in order to accept legal responsibility for its actions.  What does it look like when we, as individuals and as a country, begin to take moral responsibility for our past?  I haven't sold any human beings into slavery and I didn't build my house by bulldozing someone else's while they were still living in it, and maybe if I had done those things in the 1700's, someone today could  make an argument that I shouldn't be held to a modern moral standard for things done earlier than the standard's creation.  But we have the morals now, and that past isn't magically wiped away; we know it, we're still studying it, but we haven't paid for it.  Right now, all the wrong people are paying for it, because those of us who have benefited refuse to look at those who were stepped on to get us to where we are today.

We are not guilty of our ancestor's crimes.  We are responsible for the consequences that still exist today, and we are responsible for seeing that those who suffered are restored.  This is an American problem.  What is the best American solution?