Pimp my necktie: If you want to dress for success, nothing says power necktie quite like the necktie the folks at EMPA have developed, a necktie woven of silk plasma-coated with 24 carat gold. Don’t let the price tag of 7’500.- Swiss francs deter you – you’ll be wearing eight grams of gold that glitters in the sun like liquid metal, bound to get the attention of that special someone. If there’s a gift out there for the father who already has it all, this is it: they are manufacturing only 12 this year.
I know it’s a little late for Halloween, but if you like dressing up and the gold necktie isn’t your cuppa, our lab information management system software programmer’s wife sews costumes. Her selling point right now is price, not necessarily perfect authenticity, but if it’s good enough for LARP, it ought to be good enough for Halloween.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about analyzing particles. One important parameter is the Feret Diameter, the longest distance between any two points along the selection boundary, also known as maximum caliper. The other day I came across someone who had called it the Ferret Diameter. Because it would take too long to find a photo of a ferret and draw a diameter, here in its place is a micrograph of Bakelite.
I recently read C.J. Mahaney’s “Christ our Mediator.” The good part: There’s very little beef to have with the book theologically, and it is concerned with a crucial topic. I do have some concerns with his approach to emotion. He spends an entire chapter explaining that belief must precede emotion, and emotion must thus never be a reason for belief. The danger I see is not in that, but in his emphasis that emotion will necessarily follow belief and meditation. It seems to me that thus emotion becomes the end and proof of belief, and that I think is untenable, for if emotion was too unreliable to serve as a foundation for belief, how can it be reliable enough to serve as its evidence?
One of the five love languages is acts of service. I’ve been thinking about that lately: who decides which acts of service need to be done, and how? Clearly, the act of service is a gift, so one would think the giver has every right to decide how to serve. The problem occurs if the giver and the recipient have different ideas of what service needs to be done. If I decide to sort our CD collection alphabetically, that is an act of service, but it won’t mean much to Janet. (If I sweep the floor, that’s another story.) As with most gifts, this one needs to be given with the recipient in mind, and that means letting go of my idea of what ought to be done or how something ought to be done.
Now, talking about a gift before giving it robs it of a lot of its joy, but when you’re getting to know someone, I think that can’t be avoided. Or can it? How?
Have you heard of chemtrails? The first time I heard of it was at the NanoBio conference in Zurich, when a guy reeking of alcohol came in off the street and started telling me how the real nanoparticles were in the chemtrails like those on the conference poster. The idea is that somehow “the government” or “the military” gets regular jetliners to distribute nanoparticles in their wake, thereby changing the weather or raining chemicals on us or otherwise controlling the world. Of course, there’s no plausible way to do that – not that I know of anyway – and condensation does a wonderful job of explaining all the phenomena described. Then why are there more contrails up in the sky than you remember from your youth? Not because chemicals make them more persistent, but simply because flights have increased drastically.
Instead of chemtrail images, have a look at a regular cloud and its odd optical effect!
Thematically related to the above topic is that today is National Start a Rumor Day. I’ll have you know I’ve done my duty.
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#4 – You might be interested in Michael McGowan’s The Heart Has Reasons. I haven’t read the book, only this detailed review from Christianity Today.
#5 – My worries exactly. The same holds true for gifts. There’s something depressing about Christmas lists (and Amazon wish lists and wedding registries). On the one hand, they’re a blessing, because you know your gift will be appreciated for itself and not just “because so-and-so gave it to me” or worse, received with the same joy Ron Weasley exhibits when receiving his Christmas sweater. But (pleasant) surprise adds immeasurably to the joy of giving and receiving, be in gifts or acts of service, and that’s hard to come by if you’ve asked what the person wants. And there’s something sterile about “gift giving” when you buy something from my list, and I buy something from yours, and we exchange them — when we each could have bought what we wanted and saved the wrapping paper and postage.
Ideally, a gift reflects the personality of the giver as well as the recipient, and is something the recipient would enjoy but is unlikely to get for himself. But this requires a lot more time, thought, and effort than choosing from a list; more importantly, it requires knowing the person well enough to anticipate what would be a pleasant surprise, just as you know that Janet would be more pleased by a swept floor than an alphabetized CD rack. And few of us know that well the people for whom we buy gifts, because we are separated from their daily lives. Hence the reason for gifts of money — also sterile, but almost always useful and appreciated.
(Note: no matter what list it shows up on, you’re not getting #1 from us for Christmas. Sorry.)
#6 — I would have thought a “chemtrail” was what your alcohol-soaked informant was leaving behind him. Ditto smokers, even if they only smoke outdoors.
#5 – One biggies is observation. For example, I could take note that maybe Stephan would like the CD’s alphabetized since he mentions it. Observation can backfire, like when the recipient says “Yes I mentioned that but I wanted to pick it myself.” Still, the more you listen and observe someone the more likely you will accurately perceive what’s important to him. That doesn’t make everyone equally easy to give gifts to, and there’s always the problem that we are usually too focused on ourselves to be giving that kind of thought to the person we are interacting with. Then Christmas rolls around and we realize we haven’t been paying enough attention . . .
Ahem. Let me just add that I’m not opposed to getting gifts off my list. I was merely speaking of the theoretical ideal.
#5 – I’ve found that if it really is up there on your love language list, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve had to tell the person. In fact, it can make it better since you know that person has had to make an extra effort because that language is not the one that comes naturally.
#6: Chemtrails are a full-fledged conspiracy theory, albeit less plausible than the 9/11 ones.
#5: Observation is a big one, but observation without any confirmation can also lead astray. Say I borrow your car, observe it is dirty, and decide to take it to the car wash. In 90% of the cases, I’ll have used observation to serve you well and please you. In 8% of the cases, you’ll be irritated at the implicit accusation that you’re too cheap or filthy to take care of it yourself – in which case you ought to learn the skill of receiving gifts well. I’m not sure confirmation would have helped here. In the remaining 2%, there’s a leak in the window or the roof or somewhere else, and I’ll have done damage to your car. These are the cases where it would be good to ask beforehand – a quick phone call from the car wash parking lot – if cleaning the car is a good idea. So, observation goes a long way toward good service, but observation does not lead to immediate certainty. If I know you to be a stickler about keeping things clean, I will be more likely to call for confirmation before washing the car. If I know you to not care so much for appearance or maintenance, I will be less likely to call.
There are also acts of service that don’t work simply because the person serving does them on his own terms. If you don’t clean up my desk the way I’d want it, if you don’t wash the dishes well, if you decide to toss my natty T-shirt that I’m attached to, if I send you to buy wood for a DIY project and you pick a different type from what I specified because you are convinced it’s better, if you improve my computer without telling me, I probably won’t be happy, and the act of service will have lost its purpose.
So, it is sometimes good to ask how to serve, especially if like me you’re not a natural. And Heather is right, it is sometimes good to request a certain service, for service done because it was requested and despite one’s natural inclination is a big deal. But requesting comes with a risk. If my attitude in serving you is wrong, if I serve in a way that continually reminds you that I’m only doing it because you’ve requested it, or if I flat-out call your request silly and ignore it, you’ll regret having asked.