Sunday, October 20, 2013

A pane in the glass.



     This was an assignment. Originally, I was going to focus on the logistics of replacing all the glass damaged at the Garfield Park Conservatory in a massive 2011 hailstorm. But the videographer seemed to capture the workers explaining that aspect, so, with space limited, I thought I would go into some of the history of the conservatory, and how as recently as 20 years ago it was in severe disrepair and some in the park district were ready to see it scrapped. Thank God Chicago managed to save this unique treasure. Though many Chicagoans still don't get to the place  frequently, if at all -- I hadn't been there in more than a decade, since they had their show of Dale Chihuly glassworks. Which is a shame — it's a stunning display of nature, and a historic corner of the city. True, it's in a lousy neighborhood — no. 2 of Chicago's 77 neighborhoods for narcotics and prostitution busts last month. But there's a green line el station directly across the street—the place is only five stops past Clinton— and I felt completely safe traveling there during the day, and imagine that most people would. 

   If you’ve ever fixed a broken window, you know it can be a chore: finding the right glass in the right size, getting the right tools if you’re doing the work, or the right glazier if you’re not.
     That’s for one window.
     Now multiply the problem by 4,000. And put many of the windows 40 feet off the ground in a cluster of 106-year-old structures, some of which need to be almost completely rebuilt. Then jam delicate plants, too fragile to move, directly underneath the work.
     One more thing: welcome the public during the process.
     That’s the enormous task facing the Garfield Park Conservatory since June 30, 2011, when a severe hailstorm broke 70 percent of the windows in the conservatory’s massive greenhouse buildings, sending shards of glass cascading down upon its collection of rare and exotic plants.
     The conservatory consists of eight “display houses” — enormous mounds of steel, wood and copper that Jens Jensen designed, not to look like the chateau conservatories of Europe, but as “great haystacks” evocative of the Illinois prairie.
     After the damage, it was discovered that the structures were badly corroded and needed major refurbishing. But the immediate task was securing the environment inside.

     "Winter comes very quickly," said Mary Eysenbach, conservatory director. "We had to get protective covering in place so we could get through the winter for all the houses that had tropical plants."
     Plastic sheeting kept the cold out, temporarily. The conservatory, which has struggled to keep in the public eye even before it was damaged, couldn't afford to shut down during the lengthy process of planning, financing and performing repairs.
     "The conservatory is open and has been since the day after the hailstorm," Eysenbach said. "People were left with the impression that we're closed until we rebuilt, and that's not true. We've gotten as much open to the public as we can."
     Some $9 million has been spent on repairs so far, with $7 million of that coming from insurance. Two more houses have yet to be repaired, their missing glass still covered with plastic sheeting.
     Even damaged, the houses are in better shape than they were previously. In the mid-1990s, the future for the conservatory looked bleak. News accounts routinely referred to it as "forgotten" and "unknown." A cold snap that had Chicago temperatures falling to minus 10 included winds that rattled panes loose, sending icy blasts onto the tropical plants below. Then a burst steam pipe in the Aroid House on Jan. 19, 1994, caused temperatures inside to plummet to 25 degrees, killing or severely injuring 80 percent of the desert plants there. Workers frantically wrapped centuries-old cycads in plastic to keep them warm.
     Park district officials wondered aloud if the place was even worth saving.
     "The conservatory is just old," Robert Megquire, the park district's director of landscape architecture and management, mused at the time. "The social question is whether or not there is value to society in keeping an old building like this."
     That wasn't a question after the 2011 hailstorm.
     "The park district really rallied together to make sure we protected the plant collection and got the building back in shape," said Eysenbach, noting that the conservatory is not only a gem of the city, but was named one of the 10 best in the world.
     Right now the Show House is in the midst of complete reconstruction, its weight supported by a lattice of screw jacks supporting timbers, while 34 corroded load-bearing I beams are replaced. At the same time, workers remove strips of copper that held broken panes and replace decaying wood.
     The plan is to get the work on this house done by Mother's Day.
     While you might imagine that repairing the conservatory to be an undiluted headache, Eysenbach says it isn't so.
     "The whole project was just fascinating to me," she said. "After I got over the initial shock, of course. I didn't know anything about greenhouses in terms of construction. I have learned a lot about glass houses. Some really cool stuff."
      Such as?
     "When they took all the glass off the Show House, [removing] the weight of the glass caused the side of the structure to lift a bit, and the doors separating the Show House from the rest of the houses fell off. Who would think the glass would weigh that much?"
     Even after the work is done, the challenge is to get people inside. East Garfield Park is one of the poorest areas of the city - 40 percent of its residents live in poverty.
     The conservatory has been trying to draw visitors from outside the area with art shows, performances, public campfires, with a renewed focus on children.
     "Our emphasis moving forward is to really connect kids back to nature," Eysenbach said. "This is a really great, great place, fun experiences in a beautiful, beautiful setting. We are rebuilding this conservatory to last for another hundred years."


Saturday, October 19, 2013

A professional goes home at night.


    Once, years ago, I had the chance to spend some time with Garry Marshall, the TV icon — creator of "Happy Days"  and "The Odd Couple"— and movie director, most notably of "Pretty Woman." 
      He was visiting Northwestern University, his alma mater, and he met with students, as he liked to do. The kids were putting on the Waa-Mu Show, the school's musical and, trying to impress Marshall, told him how they had been up all night, working on the sets.
      "If you were professionals," he told them, "you could go home at night."
      That always stuck in my mind. Not that some evenings you don't have to work late. Not that, at times, work doesn't demand you be away from home—I once spent six weeks abroad for a book. But as a general rule, you do your work, you go home. That's what being a professional means. You do your work when you need to, then you stop working until it's time to work again.
        We forget that with all our devices and constant, 24-hour on-line access. But if you don't pause from working, from time to time, then that will be all you do. Besides, your work suffers then, you burn out, and then you're no good anyway. You lose the thing you're trying to hold onto. 

Photo: The Bar D Wranglers performing at the Bar D Chuckwagon in Durango, Colorado. 

Friday, October 18, 2013

Handy concept #5: False equivalence

Intellectual Toolbox Week concludes with a concept ripped from the headlines. 

    Did the Civil War actually occur?
     Well, on one side, there is an enormous mass of historical documents—letters, photographs, diaries, books—describing the war in enormous detail.
     And on the other side, there aren't any movies of it—you'd think there would be, some news footage of battles, somewhere, if something like a four-year-conflict had actually ripped America apart Nor does any American living today remember it... 
      I could go on, but you get the point. It's stupid, my objection about the movies based on ignorance: motion pictures weren't developed until decades after the Civil War ended.
     But we tolerate other, less obvious ignorance-based arguments. Why? One reason we can dismiss Civil War Denial so easily is there aren't a passionate band of advocates arguing otherwise. Here is where people, who are fair at heart, to a fault, especially the media, screw up, because they accept an argument where none exists. We give the benefit of doubt too easily to crazy people.
     Holocaust denial is the classic example of this. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II through methodical extermination, a fact completely documented, but also one that is uncomfortable for anti-Semites, who don't like to be confronted with the natural result of their hate, nor recognize an event that tends to create sympathy for a group of people they despise. So they argue the whole thing is a lie, scraping together what inconsistencies they can dig up, variance in testimony, in evidence, faltering specific logistics of certain camps, strained arguments, fabrications and speculations. Being able to lie on such a grand scale themselves, it's easy for them to assign the ability to others.
Plaque at the Harvard Museum of Natural History
     For a long time, they got a more respectful hearing than they deserved, from a world used to listening to historical re-evaluations seemingly based on fact. If not respect, then a certain tolerance. An undeserved tolerance; Holocaust denial is not a field of scholarship, but a symptom of anti-Semitism. The media seems to get that, now, generally, and is pretty good about not taking the bait. But it took a while.
    Not so far along are subjects such as evolution, a fact like the Holocaust, as undeniable as electricity. Yet we have serious attention paid to creationism, a fancy word for Biblical doctrine, supported by no evidence at all, whose major rhetorical point is a misunderstanding of the word "theory." 
    Nevertheless, they would teach creationism in public schools, and some places in America actually do. Those who push the creationist viewpoint -- i.e, push their own religion -- try to pretend that these are just different opinions of equal weight, varying theories all worthy of consideration, and that to dismiss their view for the simple reason it's completely untrue by any standard of evidence is narrow-mindedness. Many people buy that.
    We saw false equivalence during the government shut-down, which was engineered and created by the Republican Party. But to say so smacked of the partisan boosterism that is so unattractive on Fox News. So many reputable news outlets -- and I'm guilty of a little bit of this too -- drifted toward "a plague on both their Houses" false balance where none was merited. This is such a problem with the non-right wing media that some have coined the term "fairness bias" to describe it
    Not everything has two equal sides. Sometimes the two sides are the right side and the wrong side. That this mirrors the absolutist logic of deluded zealots is unfortunate, but the alternative -- give folly more credit than it is due out of some misplaced idea of fairness— is even worse. Treating everyone the same only works when there is a certain sameness or when differences are of style, not substance. A roomful of 5-year-olds should be treated equally, their merits and deficiencies set aside, temporarily, in the name of entry-level education. Outside kindergarten, however, in the real world, we are allowed to favor what's true and dismiss what's bullshit. In this case, politeness is overrated. 


Thursday, October 17, 2013

Handy concept #4: Pattern recognition


     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues with a phenomenon which inspires a great deal of American nuttery.

Pattern Recognition 

    A twig snaps. You freeze, staring into the darkness. A form gathers itself into a bear. You run and don't look back.  If it turns out to be a bear-shaped bush that sent you dashing across the savanna, well, you'll probably never know your mistake.  You're gone and, like those with the most acute pattern recognition, you live to reproduce, and pass down your sharp eyesight and honed reflexes. Fear is protective. There's no upside for standing there too long, blinking into the darkness, thinking, "Hmmm, now is that really a bear?"
    Thus human beings are good at finding meaning in patterns, and acting on those meanings, even when the meaning is a spurious one. It worked well for tens of thousands of years.
     Doesn't work so well now.  Modern life doesn't serve up many predators to detect lurking in the shadows. But our complex world still deluges us with information, more so than any rain forest, and people still want to find meaning in their half-seen perceptions and passing glances. 
     Often it's benign. Who hasn't felt a frisson of pleasure, detecting bunnies and ducks in the clouds? Who hasn't gazed at an object and suddenly recognized something hidden, such as the cheerful face in the photo of the red Austin-Healey Sprite above?  There's a harmless pleasure in it. 
     Sometimes the pleasure is not so harmless. The Sept. 11 attacks are among the best documented crimes in modern history, but naturally, a few facts among the multitude don't easily fit, or don't seem to easily fit, and to those of a certain twist of mind, it is natural to apply their finely-honed pattern recognition to that bare framework of inconsistency and then stretch the most elaborate fantasies over it. Suddenly, to their eyes, the official version of what happened is a lie, and this flimsily supported fabrication is the truth. It's as if some viewers convinced themselves that giant bunnies were really lurking in the clouds and started demanding that the Air Force shoot them so we could make rabbit stew.
     Why do people conjure up these conspiracies? Epic events — like 9/11, like the Kennedy assassination—create vast volumes of data, enough to provide grist that some people, inclined to reject the standard narrative by an intrinsic suspicion, can stare into the sea of information and recognize whatever pattern or plot they care to find. They find a validation in it, a false power, a way to elevate themselves among the common herd, who credulously believe that World War II actually happened. Thus every smudge in the sky, every blurred light becomes an alien mother ship, every plausible explanation is discarded for a malign one backed by a few scattered twigs of evidence. That there are actual conspiracies, from time to time, only makes matters worse. Those also back up their belief that they have secret knowledge, and they insist that anyone who questions them is being willfully blind and a dupe.
     There is no question: pattern recognition can be useful, leading us to draw valid insights out of masses of random information, recognizing significant designs and meanings. Sometimes there really is something dangerous in the shadows.   
     More often there isn't, and pattern recognition leads us down the road to over-reaction, self delusion and folly. The key is applying rigorous thought to immediate impressions. Before you bolt, ask: what am I really seeing here? Examine all the facts, not just the ones that line up with the dots you want to connect. Is that really a bear? Or is it a bush? Gather all the facts, don't just cherry-pick the ones  propping up your hunch. Are we seeing instances of a new trend? Or is it the "three examples make a movement" lazy lifestyle reporting you see, even in respectable newspapers?
      The key to pattern recognition is to use it, rather than let it use you. Otherwise, one salient detail pops out and suddenly you're fleeing in misplaced terror across the veld. Some people can be set off by a single observation. They see an inverted triangle, and the epiphany hits them: "Oh my God -- Lou Malnati's ... Illuminati! How clearly do they have to spell it out?!?!" There are a lot of people who think like that; try not to be one of them.








Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Handy Concept #3: Regression to the Mean


     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues with the engine behind many an otherwise inexplicable disappointment in life.

Regression to the Mean

     Let's say you do something excellent: write a best-selling novel, bowl a perfect 300 game, pitch a no-hitter. Congratulations. What do we know about how your next effort might fare? Because you've already proven yourself as capable of something great, will you probably do even better next time? Or will you likely do worse?
     Sorry to report, the tendency is for you to do worse, because of a nagging little reality known as "regression to the mean." It tells us that when there are averages of something -- most books sell crap, most bowlers bowl under 200, most pitchers give up hits during a game—that any exceptional achievement is by definition a rarity and the next attempt will, probably, bend toward the average, as opposed to away from it. A study of more than 4,000 major league baseball players who had batting averages above .300 in a season found that 80 percent did worse the next season.
    The classic example involves military pilots. When trainees would do well in flying exercises, their superiors noticed that if they were praised for their performance, they would do worse on the next outing. So they started criticizing good performances, until they realized that outstanding flying was followed by lesser results whether the pilot was praised or criticized.  
    There is a comforting corollary to this -- just as superior performance will, on average, be followed by something worse, so a really bad job should be followed by improvement, again on average.
    Bearing this in mind helps us grasp specific examples of falling short, which should not be surprises, but expected.
    “Regression effects are all about us," Amos Tversky and Daneil Kahneman wrote in their influential 1973 paper on the subject.  "Most outstanding fathers have somewhat disappointing sons, brilliant wives have duller husbands, the ill-adjusted tend to adjust and the fortunate are eventually stricken by ill luck. In spite of these encounters, people do not acquire a proper notion of regression. First, they do not expect regression in many situations where it is bound to occur. Second, as any teacher of statistics will attest, a proper notion of regression is extremely difficult to acquire. Third, when people observe regression, they typically invent spurious dynamic explanations for it.” 
     That has to be of some comfort to guys like Frank Sinatra Jr. 


Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Divvy Diary: Biking with the mayor

     This was a strange story. At first I was told the press wasn't invited to this ride, but I was, which is the sort of distinction guaranteed to give any reporter pause. On one hand, who'd turn down riding bikes with the mayor? On the other, it's almost like they're saying, "We're barring real reporters, but you're a tool, so you can come along." I don't consider myself a tool, so I went, if only to be there if he pedalled into an open manhole. The whole thing was supposed to be off the record, but I complained enough that parts got nudged back on the record. ("I'm trying to earn a living here," is what I actually said to the mayor). It made it harder to write an interesting piece about a puffball event, but there you have it. The line I use about Rahm Emanuel is that he's so concerned about his image, it makes him look bad. Still, I had a good time, and the mayor seemed at ease. We rode around, and then all had lunch at Revolution Brewing, and he was candid, though also distant, as is his way. Still, compared to the aloof, frozen lock box of a personality of his predecessor, Richard Daley, Rahm is Holly Golightly, so I suppose I shouldn't complain. 

     I had to go to Milwaukee and Wabansia to meet a man.
     Monday was the latest in a string of beautiful mid-October days. A Divvy station is there, so I thought to bike it, my first long-distance — OK, 3 miles — trip on Chicago’s bike system. I left the Mart at 10 a.m.

     The system isn’t intended for long jaunts — you are limited to a 30-minute trip before Divvy starts piling on fees. But I figured, even at my plodding pace, I could make it to Wicker Park in half an hour for my appointment.
     The city was criticized when the program rolled out over the summer for not putting enough stations in the far-flung (and poorer, and minority) areas of the city. But reports from London and Paris, which have similar bike share programs, show that might have been a wise call for Chicago. Paris, which in good socialist fashion scattered its stations evenly around the city’s poorest quarters, is finding big problems with theft and vandalism, problems that London — and Chicago — have so far avoided by keeping the bikes mostly around the city center.
     Heading to meet this guy, I took Orleans north, until it dead-ended at Division Street, then a left, past where Cabrini Gree
n used to be. Times change. Right on Clybourn. I was distracted by a big shrine, pulled to the curb. Photos of a bearded young man, an expanse of plastic flowers stuck into a chain-link fence. "WE LOVE YOU BOBBY" freshly chalked on the sidewalk. A 26-year-old Groupon employee, killed last May, allegedly by a drunken
Mercedes driver. The rider was wearing a helmet. Didn't help. Also on the fence, a poem, protected in clear plastic.
     "I don't want to get on my bike," it begins. "But you, Bobby Cann, wouldn't want that. You would want everyone riding whenever and wherever possible."
     That's all you can do. Sitting on your duff can kill you just as readily as cycling can.
     At 10:22 a.m. I reached Milwaukee and Wabansia. The fellow I was meeting wasn't due until 10:45. My plan was to stroll over to the Chicago public library across the street and poke around. But the library doesn't open until noon on Mondays. Hard times.
      A group of young people were assembled, winners of some sort of contest. Their reward: to meet the same guy I was meeting. I asked one of them to tell me about the event, emblazoned on his yellow T-shirt. "I'm not allowed to," said Brian, 29.
     Here's an idea, not a new idea, perhaps, but a good one: free press. You talk about your event, it gets into print. Think about it.
     At 10:51 a.m. Mayor Rahm Emanuel showed up. The plan, as best I understood it, was to ride our Divvy bikes around the Logan Square area. The mayor likes bikes.
     I expected some kind of Potemkin Village sham, with traffic held back and city workers hastily slapping orange and red paint on fallen leaves. But it seemed fairly straight, with the mayor in the lead, and the young people affiliated with the event following.
     We stopped at a small park that will be an entrance to the new Bloomingdale Trail - nobody is going to call it "The 606," and those pushing the digits ought to give up trying. We stopped at the shuttered Congress Theater, where the city's director of historical preservation, Eleanor Esser Gorski, spoke briefly. She also talked at the Illinois Centennial Monument in Logan Square, which was designed, she said, by Henry Bacon, the architect of the Lincoln Memorial.
     "This is why I love the city," said Emanuel, pedaling a blue Divvy bike, helmetless, along Logan Boulevard. He seemed buoyant.
     Emanuel said that Milwaukee Avenue has the most commuter bike traffic of any road in the country, at some 4,000 bicyclists a day. He is pleased that "Divvy" has so quickly become an accepted verb in the Chicago argot. That won't keep branding rights from being sold—he said for $5 million or $6 million—to pay for upkeep and bike lanes. But that whoever buys the rights will keep the "Divvy" part, and so it'll be "Eli's Cheesecake Divvy Bikes" or whatever. (Citigroup, which owns Citibank, locked up naming for New York's bike-share program, dubbed "Citi Bikes," paying $41 million for five years).
     After lunch, I cast a longing look at the L at California, but figured there will be time for that in winter. Hopping on a bike, I peddled south. Chicago isn't supposed to have hills, but there seems to be one on Chicago Avenue. As I approached the paper, my half hour was running out, so I cut down Kingsbury, I was going to check the bike in and get a new one, starting the clock over, like a Pony Express rider getting a fresh mount. But it felt so good to not be on a bike—I figure I rode eight miles—that I decided to walk, stiffly, a cowboy too long in the saddle, back to the paper. New York gives you 45 minutes.


Handy Concept #2 — Cognitive Dissonance



     Intellectual Toolbox Week continues, with a concept that is something of a flashlight, to help understand a woefully common condition. 

Cognitive dissonance

"A man with a conviction is hard to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point."
                                   -- When Prophecy Fails
     Cognitive dissonance is why you should never argue with Tea Party members. 
     It is the established psychological phenomenon that, in the face of being shown to be wrong, many will cling to their error even more tightly, and shut out the conflicting information, to avoid the grating clash of having their core beliefs scrape against reality (hence "dissonance.")
     “Presented with evidence unequivocal and undeniable” that a certain belief is mistaken, they nevertheless “frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than even before," wrote three psychologists from the University of Minnesota, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter in their classic study, When Prophecy Fails. 
     Published in 1956, the book was written by researchers who infiltrated a cult led by an Oak Park housewife, Dorothy Martin, who believed—and convinced her neighbors to believe—that the world would end on Dec. 21, 1954, and she and her followers would be swept up to heaven by flying saucers.  You can read my column about the Oak Park doomsday cult by clicking here.
     The world didn't end, but Martin and certain of her crew believed even harder in the saucers, and in a doomsday that had been postponed. In fact, they worked harder to win new recruits. 
    Why? The personalities of many people are closely intertwined with their fallacious beliefs— their faith, their prejudices, their extreme political positions are accepted as givens and beyond evaluation of question. On the other hand, the non-existence of angels, the desirability of a certain policy of the president's, the need for gun laws, are not ideas they can entertain, because to do so would threaten what they see as the core of their existence. It's a matter of pride, and maintaining inner harmony. They'd rather be wrong than admit to being wrong and adjust their attitudes.
     This is why I stopped debating politics with a lot of people. I am not the Idiot Police, and if someone wants to cling to folly, that is their business, their misfortune. Sure, it's tempting to do otherwise—it's our misfortune too, since they often insist their error become our dogma. When you see someone posting on the dangers of vaccines, you want to say, "Surgery is dangerous, too. People die. All the time. Are you against surgery too? What about car travel?"
     It gets you nowhere. 
     By the way, the flying saucer cult that Dorothy Martin founded, the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara, still operates to this very day, in Mount Shasta, California. Delusion takes on a life of its own. You can't stop it, you can only recognize it and try to give it a wide berth.