Last night I went to a retirement party for a guy to has worked for General Electric for the past 40 years. I’ve known him for the past 15 or so as a ballroom dancer, having met him at a dance that was held despite a major northeast snowstorm. We were among the handful of dance fanatics who refused to let a mere snowstorm keep us off the floor.
Last night, I found out that he has been instrumental in both creating codes for the programs that power nuclear submarines and crucial in the processes for de-bugging codes written by others. He’s a physicist by training and a brillinant programmer by talent and choice. I never knew that. I only knew that he loves to dance.
I went to the party with a long-time on-and-off dance partner, Nat Friedman, who retired last year from teaching mathematics at the State University and who is internationally known as a sculptor and an innovator in teaching how to integrate math and art. Many of our dance friends have no sense of his life off the dance floor.

I know lots of bloggers as bloggers. I know a little more about some of them from Frank Paynter’s lively and probing interviews with them. One of the things I enjoy about blogging is witnessing the continued unfolding of the details that make up the personalities who populate the Blogosphere — especially the ones who are not already well-known as net entities.
All that we are is so much more than we have time to share through our blogvoices.

While it’s not that we bloggers are trying to hide, but let’s face it — most of us look at our blogs as pesonal space, like our own private house made out of glass, where anyone can look in, but we reserve the right to decide on whom to invite in beyond our front door. So this information from b!X disturbs me. I don’t want my personal blog to make me the target of marketers. Of course, I know that it’s started already, with stupid spam irrelevant-to-me emails about making money on the net. That’s annyoying enough.
I like the idea of personal blogs avoiding and ignoring the mainstream activity of the Net, of constantly reinventing themselves, playfully experimenting in some uncluttered corner of the web. I don’t like publicists invading my space. But maybe I have no choice. Bummer.

No, not religion. Blogging. Tom Shugart raises a point in this post that’s been nagging at the back of my brain for a while. He asks:
I wonder–had the internet been available in the ’60’s–would the power of the protest have been deflected by people taking out their outrage in a flurry of blogposts? Would they have had the illusion–and only the illusion–of empowering themselves and changing history through the act of cross-blogging, when, in actuality, the only force that could have changed anything was the years of dogged determination, blood in the streets and campuses, defections to Canada, banishments from the family, willingness to spend time in the slammer?
Most of us use weblogging to create conversations with others who have similar inclinations and opinions. And these conversations give us personal encouragement and sustenance. In some cases, they even give us the support we need to make changes in our personal lives. But I don’t see them making a big difference in the larger political world.
I wonder–if insightful, energetic, and vocal bloggers like b!X didn’t have the Net, would they be actively working with Ralph Nader or with environmental action groups or some similar change-oriented organziations? Like Shugart, I’m wondering if blogging just gives us the illusion of being engaged in changing the world — just a new version of opiate dreaming.

Not that I know much about sailing; I’ve only been on a moving sailboat three or four times in my life, and always as a non-crewing guest. But I do know that when the winds are blowing every which way, you spend a lot of time tacking back and forth.
That’s kind of how I feel as I read Frank Paynter’s post about Tom Shugart’s post about blogging about the war, not blogging about the war, and sometimes finding our little blogboats blandly becalmed.
I, too, get so tired of mentally wrestling with the absurdities and complexities of this War on Terra. That Big Picture is so damned depressing. How much more satisfying to blog about more pleasant things — sweet grandsons and plans to see Bonnie Raitt and Lyle Lovette at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center tomorrow night.
And then I think — this is boring. I’m even bored with myself. Why am I bothering to blog? We all go through these cycles. Big Picture. Little Picture. Boring Picture. Back to Blogging. It’s the flow. We go with it.
I will blog about the war and link to posts that support my convictions about it. I will continue to tell my story. And I will bore myself. I will spend a lot of time tacking back and forth on this vast and windy BlogSea.

Marek left me a voice mail message this evening while I was doing my daughterly duty and getting my mom outside for some fresh air and socializing. He called to tell me that he got the get-well-we-love-you t-shirt I painted for him. He also blogged about it. You’re welcome, Marek. I’m so glad to see you’re out there again blogging those dots for us all to connect. Jeszcze raz!

One of my Blog Sisters pointed to this article about research linking a single gene — that is affected by abuse in childhood — to violent behavior by men.
The article states that The gene’s effects were more difficult to study in girls, because it is found on the X chromosome. Females have two X chromosomes, while males have an X and a Y. Thus, in girls, the version of the gene found in one of their X chromosomes could cancel out the effects of the other. That may help explain why females in general are less prone to violent and criminal behavior, the team said.
What’s interesting about the study is that, while the genetic potential for violence seems to be there in males, that potential needs an early environmental trigger to become active.
As the article explains, Simply having that version of the gene did not guarantee a boy would grow up to be a criminal. According to Terri Moffitt of King’s College London and the University of Wisconsin, who helped lead the study, Its relation to aggression only emerged when we considered whether the children had been maltreated…… This suggests that the best strategy for preventing violence is to prevent child abuse.
Seems like a good example of how nature and nurture are the yin and yang of personality development.

(I also posted this on Blog Sisters.)
The gist of the program was that, according to studies that used MRI technology to track energy surges in the brains of males and females exposed to the same stimuli, the brains of each gender function differently. The result is that we respond to our world-based experiences differently. However, we can learn to find greater common ground. That’s where nurturing, teaching, and modeling come in. I think that we all agree that we can learn to minimize the innate differences between genders so that we can work together to build better relationships and a better world in general; the problem, as many here have verbalized, is getting the guys to figure out how to neutralize some of that aggression-triggering testosterone. (And it’s not that women are not also affected by their own testosterone levels. However women tend to have much lower levels than men.) Again, biology dictates where we begin; but the rest of our brains, in concert with our hearts and souls, can chart a much more positively connected course for our shared lives.

Burningbird (Shelley Powers) has resumed blogging, for reasons as valid and varied as were the reasons she stopped.
What got to me about what she had to say about why she changed her mind were two quotes from well-known bloggers. Comparing those quotes is very telling about the personalities of those who verbalized them.
Dave Winer: From there, I want to start an outline about what a weblog is, because there’s more to say. Maybe it’ll be a three-column table. In column 1, a topic. For example: Fact-checking. In the second column, how centralized journalism does it; and in the third column, how it works in the weblog world. That way, if someone understands how fact-checking works in the print world, they have a basis for understanding how it works when done in the open.
Dorothea Salo: Blog however you want, whenever you want, as often or as seldom as you want. Use as much or as little of the technology as you care to. Adhere to common blogging formats or not, as you choose. Watch the big bloggers or not; pay attention to bloglomerations or not. If you feel you need permission to do any of these things, you