Saturday, December 10, 2005
A brilliant ad from Old Spice
Like most people, I usually skip over magazine ads without so much as a glance; ad agencies have to be pretty clever to get us to pause in our attempts to get to the next page of an article before we forget the last line we read, and I suspect that they rarely succeed... which makes the occasional ad that's a true attention-grabber something special. I saw such an ad recently in Cosmo; it caught my eye because nearly the entire page is a photo of snowy ground, with a large snow angel mostly above the center line... what the heck could be advertised with a snow angel, I wondered, maybe soup or hot chocolate? The product, a tiny image in the lower right corner, turned out to be Old Spice's Red Zone body wash, with a tagline of "The perfect gift to spice things up." Huh? I looked more carefully at the snow angel, and comprehension dawned; there are 2 sets of footprints leading to it from opposite sides, a bigger set that's obviously male footprints in rugged footgear, and the other set, I kid you not, appearing to be prints from high-heeled shoes, or maybe boots, but definitely with that little hole for each print showing a heel that would be very difficult to walk with in the snow... I know they had to make it clear that one set of prints was from a woman, but did they have to make her a fashion victim, lol? Although it's hard to imagine what sexual act could cause bodies to thrash in such a way as to form a snow angel, much less that could be done quickly enough for the participants to not freeze to death, clearly that's what we're supposed to assume has happened, since there's ONE snow angel, and the 2 sets of prints go off together side by side from its head... and the line about spicing things up has to apply somehow, right? Granted that some elements of the ad are a little goofy, they managed to make me stop and look at it for about a minute, which is a triumph by advertising standards; in addition, I think it'll be effective in demolishing the stereotype of the Old Spice user as being a conservative older man, which was undoubtedly part of the idea.
You can see the ad here:
http://ad-rag.com/1892419a5fe496db0cbc79b16e955623/2004/oct/redzonesnow.jpg
Well, almost; the date shows it as being from last year, and they've altered it since then. In the version you'll see, there are 2 product images rather than the 1 in the newer image, and the footprints are so close together it looks like they must have been walking with their knees tied together, which would make whatever they're supposed to have done to make the angel even trickier; the newer version has about half as many prints, spaced in a more natural way.
Even in the older version, the ad is conceptually brilliant; I bet it's been brought back because it sold more Old Spice than anything else they've come up with. Unfortunately for them, there's no chance whatsoever of my buying any of their products for my husband; my father wore their aftershave.
You can see the ad here:
http://ad-rag.com/1892419a5fe496db0cbc79b16e955623/2004/oct/redzonesnow.jpg
Well, almost; the date shows it as being from last year, and they've altered it since then. In the version you'll see, there are 2 product images rather than the 1 in the newer image, and the footprints are so close together it looks like they must have been walking with their knees tied together, which would make whatever they're supposed to have done to make the angel even trickier; the newer version has about half as many prints, spaced in a more natural way.
Even in the older version, the ad is conceptually brilliant; I bet it's been brought back because it sold more Old Spice than anything else they've come up with. Unfortunately for them, there's no chance whatsoever of my buying any of their products for my husband; my father wore their aftershave.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Some awesome quotes from Laurence J. Peter
Have you ever heard of this guy? *I* hadn't, until I saw that the quote script in my sidebar had come up with the following from him:
"Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame."
If I were going to make a t-shirt for George W. Bush, that's what it would say.
I had to know who'd produced that bit of insight, so I looked him up at Wikipedia and found this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_J._Peter
"Dr Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990) was an educator and 'hierarchiologist,' [a person who studies hierarchical organizations and the behavior of their members] best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter Principle. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and began his career as a teacher in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963. In 1964, Peter moved to California, where he became an Associate Professor of Education, Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Southern California. He became widely famous in 1968, on the publication of 'The Peter Principle,' which states 'In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.'"
Of course I recognized the "principle," which is quoted all the time, so I got even more interested, because this was obviously someone who'd managed more than just one perceptive line. Using the link provided by the script, I went to their site
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/laurence_j_peter.html
and found a goldmine of terrific stuff of his. It turns out that he's responsible for a couple of other famous sayings:
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way. "
"When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout."
Heinlein fans will be reminded by that 2nd one of a nearly identical line attributed to HIM:
"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
Who said it 1st? I dunno; I like the rhyming version better, in any case. Here are my faves of Peter's other quotes:
"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
"A man convinced against his will is not convinced."
"A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know."
"As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't."
"Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder."
"Don't believe in miracles - depend on them."
"Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise."
"Everyone is in awe of the lion tamer in a cage with half a dozen lions-everyone but a school bus driver."
"Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience."
"If you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else."
"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."
"The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure."
"The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance."
"There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought."
These are the absolute best:
"Against logic there is no armor like ignorance."
"Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car."
"If two wrongs don't make a right, try three. "
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. :-)
"Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame."
If I were going to make a t-shirt for George W. Bush, that's what it would say.
I had to know who'd produced that bit of insight, so I looked him up at Wikipedia and found this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_J._Peter
"Dr Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990) was an educator and 'hierarchiologist,' [a person who studies hierarchical organizations and the behavior of their members] best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter Principle. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and began his career as a teacher in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963. In 1964, Peter moved to California, where he became an Associate Professor of Education, Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Southern California. He became widely famous in 1968, on the publication of 'The Peter Principle,' which states 'In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.'"
Of course I recognized the "principle," which is quoted all the time, so I got even more interested, because this was obviously someone who'd managed more than just one perceptive line. Using the link provided by the script, I went to their site
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/laurence_j_peter.html
and found a goldmine of terrific stuff of his. It turns out that he's responsible for a couple of other famous sayings:
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way. "
"When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout."
Heinlein fans will be reminded by that 2nd one of a nearly identical line attributed to HIM:
"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
Who said it 1st? I dunno; I like the rhyming version better, in any case. Here are my faves of Peter's other quotes:
"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
"A man convinced against his will is not convinced."
"A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know."
"As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't."
"Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder."
"Don't believe in miracles - depend on them."
"Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise."
"Everyone is in awe of the lion tamer in a cage with half a dozen lions-everyone but a school bus driver."
"Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience."
"If you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else."
"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."
"The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure."
"The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance."
"There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought."
These are the absolute best:
"Against logic there is no armor like ignorance."
"Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car."
"If two wrongs don't make a right, try three. "
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. :-)
Thursday, December 08, 2005
The "Tom Sawyer's Fence" effect
Nearly every American read Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" in school, so most of you probably know what the title refers to; I don't know if anyone outside of the States would be familiar with it, though, so I found it online for anyone who's curious
http://www.ftlcomm.com/ensign/people/TomNhuck/ted.html
Demonstrating as always an impressive grasp of human nature, in this chapter Twain has Tom, a young boy of uncommon shrewdness, escape having to paint a fence by tricking the other boys of his village into doing it for him; he pretends that he's been given some sort of great honor and privilege by being "allowed" to paint the fence, and that he's greatly enjoying doing it, and the other boys, who didn't just fall off the turnip truck and thus should know perfectly well that fence-painting is a CHORE, a hard and unpleasant one in the heat of a summer afternoon, are totally fooled, and so eager to have a turn at it that they PAY Tom to allow them to do it.
As a kid, I was dumbfounded that something so ridiculous would have been put in a book; I couldn't imagine that even the stupidest child would be fooled by Tom's ploy. I'm older and at least slightly wiser now, and I know that making people want something that they shouldn't objectively want, even something that's clearly contrary to their best interests, is EASY; just ask any advertising executive. I know it... and I still think it's crazy, because *I* can always tell when I'm being BS-ed, and nothing makes ME deviate from applying logic to every choice and decision I make.
You're undoubtedly aware that if someone broadcasts how great something is, other people will usually come charging over to get some... but have you ever wondered WHY people react that way? Part of it is that many people are sheep, er, I mean, humans are pack animals who instinctively follow along after whoever takes the lead, at least to a certain extent, and part of it is nature's way of making sure that primitive humans got to eat; I've seen in lots of nature shows how when a primate finds a bunch of food it makes excited sounds, and the others come running because their instinct tells them that those excited sounds mean food... why would we be any different than the lower primates? We're not at any risk of starving these days, quite the opposite, but we're still overwhelmingly influenced, as a rule, when we see other people seeming to enjoy anything; check out some magazine ads and see how often they have people looking like they're in near ecstasy from trivial things like touching a sheet of the right brand of toilet paper or eating the right brand of frozen veggies, and you'll see how well the ad agencies understand this idea.
What brought this into my head was belatedly reading the November 27th "Baby Blues" comic strip
http://www.babyblues.com/Testing/index.php?formname=getstrip&GoToDay=11/27/05
It shows the little girl eating something from a bowl and going "MMMMM" in front of her little brother. When he asks "What are you eating," she replies "Nothing." He says, "Yes you are! What is it?" and she responds "Just a snack." He asks "What kind of snack?" and she says "It's a type of fruit, but never mind, you're too young." He screams "I'm not too young for fruit! Give me some or ELSE!" and she replies "Okay! Okay! Suit yourself!" and walks away while he's chomping, shoving food in his mouth and going "MMMM!" In the final square, the mother is handing her a dollar and saying "I can't believe you got him to eat prunes!" and the girl responds "Hey, for FIVE dollars I'll have him begging for you to let him clean his room!"... and in the background he's still chomping and going "MMMM."
And the "header image" to the strip shows the little boy painting a fence while the little girl sits on a barrel... with both of them dressed in Tom Sawyer era clothes.
Although there's a facet of human nature involved, we're not monkeys, so we can think, can CHOOSE what actions to take; next time you find yourself about to jump into doing, eating, or buying something new, ask yourself if it's what YOU really want... or what you've been influenced by smiling, excited people, real or faked for ads, to want.
http://www.ftlcomm.com/ensign/people/TomNhuck/ted.html
Demonstrating as always an impressive grasp of human nature, in this chapter Twain has Tom, a young boy of uncommon shrewdness, escape having to paint a fence by tricking the other boys of his village into doing it for him; he pretends that he's been given some sort of great honor and privilege by being "allowed" to paint the fence, and that he's greatly enjoying doing it, and the other boys, who didn't just fall off the turnip truck and thus should know perfectly well that fence-painting is a CHORE, a hard and unpleasant one in the heat of a summer afternoon, are totally fooled, and so eager to have a turn at it that they PAY Tom to allow them to do it.
As a kid, I was dumbfounded that something so ridiculous would have been put in a book; I couldn't imagine that even the stupidest child would be fooled by Tom's ploy. I'm older and at least slightly wiser now, and I know that making people want something that they shouldn't objectively want, even something that's clearly contrary to their best interests, is EASY; just ask any advertising executive. I know it... and I still think it's crazy, because *I* can always tell when I'm being BS-ed, and nothing makes ME deviate from applying logic to every choice and decision I make.
You're undoubtedly aware that if someone broadcasts how great something is, other people will usually come charging over to get some... but have you ever wondered WHY people react that way? Part of it is that many people are sheep, er, I mean, humans are pack animals who instinctively follow along after whoever takes the lead, at least to a certain extent, and part of it is nature's way of making sure that primitive humans got to eat; I've seen in lots of nature shows how when a primate finds a bunch of food it makes excited sounds, and the others come running because their instinct tells them that those excited sounds mean food... why would we be any different than the lower primates? We're not at any risk of starving these days, quite the opposite, but we're still overwhelmingly influenced, as a rule, when we see other people seeming to enjoy anything; check out some magazine ads and see how often they have people looking like they're in near ecstasy from trivial things like touching a sheet of the right brand of toilet paper or eating the right brand of frozen veggies, and you'll see how well the ad agencies understand this idea.
What brought this into my head was belatedly reading the November 27th "Baby Blues" comic strip
http://www.babyblues.com/Testing/index.php?formname=getstrip&GoToDay=11/27/05
It shows the little girl eating something from a bowl and going "MMMMM" in front of her little brother. When he asks "What are you eating," she replies "Nothing." He says, "Yes you are! What is it?" and she responds "Just a snack." He asks "What kind of snack?" and she says "It's a type of fruit, but never mind, you're too young." He screams "I'm not too young for fruit! Give me some or ELSE!" and she replies "Okay! Okay! Suit yourself!" and walks away while he's chomping, shoving food in his mouth and going "MMMM!" In the final square, the mother is handing her a dollar and saying "I can't believe you got him to eat prunes!" and the girl responds "Hey, for FIVE dollars I'll have him begging for you to let him clean his room!"... and in the background he's still chomping and going "MMMM."
And the "header image" to the strip shows the little boy painting a fence while the little girl sits on a barrel... with both of them dressed in Tom Sawyer era clothes.
Although there's a facet of human nature involved, we're not monkeys, so we can think, can CHOOSE what actions to take; next time you find yourself about to jump into doing, eating, or buying something new, ask yourself if it's what YOU really want... or what you've been influenced by smiling, excited people, real or faked for ads, to want.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Different ways of learning, part 2: mechanical vs conceptual
The overwhelming majority of people are mechanical learners; they learn how to do things one step at a time. Show them the steps for a new task, and they learn the task by memorizing those steps; even before they've learned the entire procedure, they can do whichever steps they HAVE learned without difficulty. If you're like most people, not only is this the way you learn, it's the only way you've ever heard of TO learn, but there's a small minority who learn very differently.
The conceptual learner CAN'T learn a task by memorizing a list of steps (other than in trivial cases of few and/or basic steps); when faced with a new task, the conceptual learner is like Teflon, with every instruction they're given sliding off instead of sticking in their minds. When a 10-step process is demonstrated to them, they MIGHT remember the last step, or sort of remember the 1st one, but won't be able to recall more than that, or be able to partially do the task the way a mechanical learner of even minimal intelligence can after being shown something once; their recollection of what they saw will be a jumble. A conceptual learner with any shred of self-awareness KNOWS that this will be the result of anyone attempting to teach them mechanically, and so will often ask questions about the nature of the task, and of the steps, which tends to aggravate the person giving the instructions because it doesn't seem necessary and takes up time... but if they refuse to answer, by demanding that the learner "Stay focused" or "Just pay attention" rather than giving the information, they can demonstrate until they're blue in the face and not get anywhere. What the conceptual learner is instinctively trying to sort out is, you guessed it, the concept behind the task; when they haven't got it, their mind will be a blank in regards to the task, but once the final bit fits into place and the concept is grasped, they go from being able to do and understand nothing to being able to do and understand it all literally from one moment to the next. (This process occurs, not via any effort at analysis, but on a subconscious level, and then pops into the conscious mind like bread out of a toaster; I don't know how it happens, just that it does.)
The conceptual learner looks like sort of dunce so far, right? They need this extra time and info to do what a regular person can jump right into; isn't that awful? Yeah, it is, when you're a conceptual learner trying to absorb the information necessary to do a task from someone who's insisting on teaching it the mechanical way, and you have to struggle to learn something that's comparatively simple for a mechanical learner to pick up. However, many of the things we need to learn to do are NOT simple, especially when they're totally new to us, and under those circumstances being a conceptual learner is actually an enormous advantage; I'll give you an example of this from my own life (you DID know I was talking from experience, right?):
In college, I took a variety of courses that involved complicated and specialized uses of math; in one such course, because the textbook wasn't quite up to explaining things in enough depth for me to grasp the concepts, I was a regular visitor at the professor's office hours, where he'd hold problem-solving sessions. Because he was very young, and this was his 1st teaching position, he was open-minded about how to teach, and when I explained why it looked like I wasn't following him when he started explaining a problem he was willing to play along and see what happened; our standard procedure quickly became him going step by step, carefully explaining everything, with the other kids nodding and me looking blank when he checked over his shoulder to see if we were keeping up with him... and then when the concept clicked into place, he could SEE it, and he'd toss me the chalk and I'd go to the board and crank the rest of it out while my fellow students watched dumbfounded. When I'd finished, I thanked him and left, because I was DONE; the others would have to stay for sometimes HOURS longer, because they had to get all the steps memorized before they could do it, while my grasp of the concept meant that I could construct all the steps in my head automatically and so didn't need to memorize them. I wasn't just done for that day, either, I was done for the entire quarter where that sort of problem was concerned, because I didn't have to keep re-memorizing the steps for solving it for the tests and the final, I just had to keep track of the concept, and that was easy.
OK, you might be thinking, that'd be a nifty skill, but how often outside of college does a person have to learn stuff that's that complicated? Not often, granted, but there are other advantages to conceptual learning that are more widely applicable; one of them is that by allowing a person to quickly see a "formula" for how a certain category of things are done, it provides them with fast mastery over processes that are fairly simple individually but onerous to learn collectively. For example, when I 1st got online, I was part of several different clubs on Excite where people wanted to learn to use html for text formatting of their posts, and when presented with a few commands by more advanced folks, the others had to have a list and keep referring to it until they memorized the commands, and still would often get the syntax wrong, whereas *I* looked at the commands, saw the concept of how they had to be written (the brackets, quotes, opening and closing, etc), and right away could use them all effortlessly, with no mistakes, and without having to look them up... and when new commands were presented, I just plugged them into the "formula" for html and used them, which the others couldn't do even when I tried to coach them because they didn't KNOW the formula and refused to take the extra step of learning it-they needed to go through a new memorization process for every command. Now, granted, those people may well have EVENTUALLY figured out how html code needs to be written, but *I* went from zero to being seen as the html guru (don't laugh, no one any of us knew had any kind of website of their own then, much less knew how to make or modify one the way most of us in the blogosphere can these days) in a bunch of Excite clubs within a few weeks of seeing my 1st html command, and even after a year none of the rest of them were able to do more than a few things without looking them up, no matter how many times I explained the concepts to them. (An example of this advantage for non-tech people is that a conceptual learner could cook any sort of food they liked by sticking different ingredients into their preparation "algorithms," while a mechanical learner would have to memorize a recipe for every dish they wanted to cook.)
The 3rd advantage to being a conceptual learner is that you can look at stuff beyond your level of knowledge or skill and have a pretty good understanding of it; to use another code-related example, someone with no tech background might memorize every bit of html that I know (it wouldn't be that hard, as I don't know that much), but if you then presented them with the source code for a website, with html, JavaScript and CSS, it's very unlikely that they could make any sense of it, much less alter the code... but I, although not knowing any JavaScript or CSS and very little html, CAN usually look at a line or chunk of code and tell what it's doing, and can ascertain how to make the sorts of basic alterations that're in line with what I know-and I can do it better and faster than my husband, who DOES know basic JavaScript and far more programming in general than I do.
The final advantage to being a conceptual learner is that if you ask the mechanical learner to do a known task, but tell them they need to skip some steps and come up with the same end product, or handle some side issues as part of the process, or do something similar but for which few or none of the known steps can be used, or swap out part of the procedure for a new unrelated thing, or any other kind of significant change, you'd better not have your hopes up for them being able to figure it out, much less figure it out in a timely fashion and then do it correctly. For the conceptual learner, however, this sort of thing is trivial; if you give them a problem that has any connection whatsoever to a concept they've learned, they'll instantly see the procedure that needs to be done and be able to do it with no difficulties.
I've got a college example of this one, too; the professor of one of my most challenging upper-division courses approached me after class on a day that we'd been handed back a midterm that many people had choked on, and said he wanted to ask me about my answer to the most important of the questions (which was the reason for the aforementioned chokage). I flipped to the appropriate page, and he said, "You're one of only a couple of people in the class who got the answer to this one; there were a few others who got partial credit for making a good try in the wrong direction, but most people got a 0 for it. I covered it in class a couple of weeks ago, and I KNOW you weren't in class that day, and it's not in the book, so how did you work it out when the people who'd seen it before couldn't?" I explained to him that the problem posed by the question was conceptually identical to something that WAS in the book, and showed him how I used that concept to do easily what the very bright people in the class who'd studied that particular problem couldn't do at all; he was VERY impressed, and probably reassured that I hadn't done some extreme form of cheating to get the answer, which may well have been on his mind given the circumstances.
This final advantage to conceptual learning is the one that I get the most benefit from, and the one that has made my husband's attitude change over the years from "I wouldn't be a conceptual learner for any amount of $" to "given the choice between staying a mechanical learner or switching to conceptual, I'd pick conceptual." Overall I think it IS a better way to learn, but the entire world is set up to accommodate mechanical learning, with no provisions at all for conceptual learning, and it IS frustrating to not be able to quickly pick up a multi-step process for which the concept is as yet unknown, so I can see how anyone not intimately familiar with a conceptual learner might not perceive any value in learning that way... not that any of us have a choice, of course, as this is inborn and not learned or chosen.
Has any of this rung a bell? Are you or anyone you know possibly a conceptual learner? Keep in mind that anyone of any but the lowest intelligence and beyond early childhood can and does learn concepts, and even the most intensely conceptual person learns many mechanical processes (many of which don't HAVE a concept behind them beyond an extremely basic level), so no one's purely one or the other, but there's still a clear line of demarcation; most people learn lots of little steps from which they might synthesize a concept, and a few of us gather data, derive concepts from it, and then see the individual steps as a result. I hope I'll be able to give at least a few conceptual learners a much-needed explanation for the odd way their brains work... and just as importantly, that I'll give the parents, spouses, teachers or employers of a few conceptual learners some insight into what the heck is "wrong" with them. Conceptual learners will do their best learning when allowed at the beginning to have a little extra time and info to get them to the concept, and can be saved enormous amounts of aggravation later on by not being dragged through further mechanical steps that they don't need, or made to waste time "learning" related things that they can figure out immediately using the concept. I don't suppose I should hold my breath for this idea to make it into our schools any time soon, though...
Here's my final thought; can "The Truth" be perceived via a mechanical process, or a conceptual one, or can both take you there? Is the "The Truth" just a string of facts, or is it made of, well, concepts? hmmmmmmmmmmmm
The conceptual learner CAN'T learn a task by memorizing a list of steps (other than in trivial cases of few and/or basic steps); when faced with a new task, the conceptual learner is like Teflon, with every instruction they're given sliding off instead of sticking in their minds. When a 10-step process is demonstrated to them, they MIGHT remember the last step, or sort of remember the 1st one, but won't be able to recall more than that, or be able to partially do the task the way a mechanical learner of even minimal intelligence can after being shown something once; their recollection of what they saw will be a jumble. A conceptual learner with any shred of self-awareness KNOWS that this will be the result of anyone attempting to teach them mechanically, and so will often ask questions about the nature of the task, and of the steps, which tends to aggravate the person giving the instructions because it doesn't seem necessary and takes up time... but if they refuse to answer, by demanding that the learner "Stay focused" or "Just pay attention" rather than giving the information, they can demonstrate until they're blue in the face and not get anywhere. What the conceptual learner is instinctively trying to sort out is, you guessed it, the concept behind the task; when they haven't got it, their mind will be a blank in regards to the task, but once the final bit fits into place and the concept is grasped, they go from being able to do and understand nothing to being able to do and understand it all literally from one moment to the next. (This process occurs, not via any effort at analysis, but on a subconscious level, and then pops into the conscious mind like bread out of a toaster; I don't know how it happens, just that it does.)
The conceptual learner looks like sort of dunce so far, right? They need this extra time and info to do what a regular person can jump right into; isn't that awful? Yeah, it is, when you're a conceptual learner trying to absorb the information necessary to do a task from someone who's insisting on teaching it the mechanical way, and you have to struggle to learn something that's comparatively simple for a mechanical learner to pick up. However, many of the things we need to learn to do are NOT simple, especially when they're totally new to us, and under those circumstances being a conceptual learner is actually an enormous advantage; I'll give you an example of this from my own life (you DID know I was talking from experience, right?):
In college, I took a variety of courses that involved complicated and specialized uses of math; in one such course, because the textbook wasn't quite up to explaining things in enough depth for me to grasp the concepts, I was a regular visitor at the professor's office hours, where he'd hold problem-solving sessions. Because he was very young, and this was his 1st teaching position, he was open-minded about how to teach, and when I explained why it looked like I wasn't following him when he started explaining a problem he was willing to play along and see what happened; our standard procedure quickly became him going step by step, carefully explaining everything, with the other kids nodding and me looking blank when he checked over his shoulder to see if we were keeping up with him... and then when the concept clicked into place, he could SEE it, and he'd toss me the chalk and I'd go to the board and crank the rest of it out while my fellow students watched dumbfounded. When I'd finished, I thanked him and left, because I was DONE; the others would have to stay for sometimes HOURS longer, because they had to get all the steps memorized before they could do it, while my grasp of the concept meant that I could construct all the steps in my head automatically and so didn't need to memorize them. I wasn't just done for that day, either, I was done for the entire quarter where that sort of problem was concerned, because I didn't have to keep re-memorizing the steps for solving it for the tests and the final, I just had to keep track of the concept, and that was easy.
OK, you might be thinking, that'd be a nifty skill, but how often outside of college does a person have to learn stuff that's that complicated? Not often, granted, but there are other advantages to conceptual learning that are more widely applicable; one of them is that by allowing a person to quickly see a "formula" for how a certain category of things are done, it provides them with fast mastery over processes that are fairly simple individually but onerous to learn collectively. For example, when I 1st got online, I was part of several different clubs on Excite where people wanted to learn to use html for text formatting of their posts, and when presented with a few commands by more advanced folks, the others had to have a list and keep referring to it until they memorized the commands, and still would often get the syntax wrong, whereas *I* looked at the commands, saw the concept of how they had to be written (the brackets, quotes, opening and closing, etc), and right away could use them all effortlessly, with no mistakes, and without having to look them up... and when new commands were presented, I just plugged them into the "formula" for html and used them, which the others couldn't do even when I tried to coach them because they didn't KNOW the formula and refused to take the extra step of learning it-they needed to go through a new memorization process for every command. Now, granted, those people may well have EVENTUALLY figured out how html code needs to be written, but *I* went from zero to being seen as the html guru (don't laugh, no one any of us knew had any kind of website of their own then, much less knew how to make or modify one the way most of us in the blogosphere can these days) in a bunch of Excite clubs within a few weeks of seeing my 1st html command, and even after a year none of the rest of them were able to do more than a few things without looking them up, no matter how many times I explained the concepts to them. (An example of this advantage for non-tech people is that a conceptual learner could cook any sort of food they liked by sticking different ingredients into their preparation "algorithms," while a mechanical learner would have to memorize a recipe for every dish they wanted to cook.)
The 3rd advantage to being a conceptual learner is that you can look at stuff beyond your level of knowledge or skill and have a pretty good understanding of it; to use another code-related example, someone with no tech background might memorize every bit of html that I know (it wouldn't be that hard, as I don't know that much), but if you then presented them with the source code for a website, with html, JavaScript and CSS, it's very unlikely that they could make any sense of it, much less alter the code... but I, although not knowing any JavaScript or CSS and very little html, CAN usually look at a line or chunk of code and tell what it's doing, and can ascertain how to make the sorts of basic alterations that're in line with what I know-and I can do it better and faster than my husband, who DOES know basic JavaScript and far more programming in general than I do.
The final advantage to being a conceptual learner is that if you ask the mechanical learner to do a known task, but tell them they need to skip some steps and come up with the same end product, or handle some side issues as part of the process, or do something similar but for which few or none of the known steps can be used, or swap out part of the procedure for a new unrelated thing, or any other kind of significant change, you'd better not have your hopes up for them being able to figure it out, much less figure it out in a timely fashion and then do it correctly. For the conceptual learner, however, this sort of thing is trivial; if you give them a problem that has any connection whatsoever to a concept they've learned, they'll instantly see the procedure that needs to be done and be able to do it with no difficulties.
I've got a college example of this one, too; the professor of one of my most challenging upper-division courses approached me after class on a day that we'd been handed back a midterm that many people had choked on, and said he wanted to ask me about my answer to the most important of the questions (which was the reason for the aforementioned chokage). I flipped to the appropriate page, and he said, "You're one of only a couple of people in the class who got the answer to this one; there were a few others who got partial credit for making a good try in the wrong direction, but most people got a 0 for it. I covered it in class a couple of weeks ago, and I KNOW you weren't in class that day, and it's not in the book, so how did you work it out when the people who'd seen it before couldn't?" I explained to him that the problem posed by the question was conceptually identical to something that WAS in the book, and showed him how I used that concept to do easily what the very bright people in the class who'd studied that particular problem couldn't do at all; he was VERY impressed, and probably reassured that I hadn't done some extreme form of cheating to get the answer, which may well have been on his mind given the circumstances.
This final advantage to conceptual learning is the one that I get the most benefit from, and the one that has made my husband's attitude change over the years from "I wouldn't be a conceptual learner for any amount of $" to "given the choice between staying a mechanical learner or switching to conceptual, I'd pick conceptual." Overall I think it IS a better way to learn, but the entire world is set up to accommodate mechanical learning, with no provisions at all for conceptual learning, and it IS frustrating to not be able to quickly pick up a multi-step process for which the concept is as yet unknown, so I can see how anyone not intimately familiar with a conceptual learner might not perceive any value in learning that way... not that any of us have a choice, of course, as this is inborn and not learned or chosen.
Has any of this rung a bell? Are you or anyone you know possibly a conceptual learner? Keep in mind that anyone of any but the lowest intelligence and beyond early childhood can and does learn concepts, and even the most intensely conceptual person learns many mechanical processes (many of which don't HAVE a concept behind them beyond an extremely basic level), so no one's purely one or the other, but there's still a clear line of demarcation; most people learn lots of little steps from which they might synthesize a concept, and a few of us gather data, derive concepts from it, and then see the individual steps as a result. I hope I'll be able to give at least a few conceptual learners a much-needed explanation for the odd way their brains work... and just as importantly, that I'll give the parents, spouses, teachers or employers of a few conceptual learners some insight into what the heck is "wrong" with them. Conceptual learners will do their best learning when allowed at the beginning to have a little extra time and info to get them to the concept, and can be saved enormous amounts of aggravation later on by not being dragged through further mechanical steps that they don't need, or made to waste time "learning" related things that they can figure out immediately using the concept. I don't suppose I should hold my breath for this idea to make it into our schools any time soon, though...
Here's my final thought; can "The Truth" be perceived via a mechanical process, or a conceptual one, or can both take you there? Is the "The Truth" just a string of facts, or is it made of, well, concepts? hmmmmmmmmmmmm
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Different ways of learning, part 1: memory
Here's something that educators don't want you to hear; alot of what we call "learning" is actually just memorization (as opposed to understanding). There are a variety of different kinds of memory, and each of us receives a different degree of benefit from each of those ways of storing information... but the way we're taught is NOT tailored to the way we'd memorize/learn the best, which is bad news for kids who vary significantly from the memorizing "pattern" that our educators assume will work for everyone. Here's what I've come up with as the different kinds of memory that might apply to learning:
First, there's visual memory; much of how we teach in this country is based on expecting people to memorize what they see, in other words what they read or what a teacher writes on a blackboard. Sadly, most of us aren't really that great at it; aside from those rare folks with so-called photographic memories, most people have to look at written material over and over to even remember the gist of it, and would never be able to recall it all by memory... that's why students have to study rather than just reading the material once.
Next, there's auditory memory; in the classroom, this obviously refers to listening to the teacher drone on ("lecture"). From early childhood, we learn to tune out people talking at length, so it's more common than not for students, who usually make up a captive audience rather than a group of eager seekers of knowledge, to not be paying attention, and, although their brains automatically record everything they hear, they usually don't remember much of it.
I've got no science to back this up, but I think there's a subset of auditory memory that deals with music; it might be connected to how music is sort of like audible math, such that the part of the brain that handles math ability works with the part that remembers what we hear to format or store the sounds differently... in any case, you probably know people who can't remember a conversation for more than 5 minutes, but who can hear a song once and still sing much of it weeks later, and in general it's pretty clear that most of us can memorize a song far more easily than we could a speech of the same # of words. I suspect that those old "Schoolhouse Rock" songs
http://www.schoolhouserock.tv/
that used to play during Saturday morning cartoons, like "Conjunction Junction" and "I'm Just a Bill," were intended to take advantage of "music memory" to teach kids a little something without them realizing it... I haven't heard any of those songs for 30 years, but I can still sing them, and my husband says the same goes for him, so there must be something to it. For obvious reasons, there's unfortunately not much of what's taught in our schools that can be set to music; virtually all American children learn their ABC's with a song (sung to the same tune as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," did you ever notice that?), though, which is interesting when you think about it.
There's also muscle memory; that term is usually used to refer to how it's easier to do a physical activity that you've done before because your muscles (or rather the part of the brain that controls them) remember how to do it, but it can also be validly applied to ANY use of your muscles. I can recall being told by many teachers that it was important to take notes because when you write information down that means that an additional part of your brain is recording it, and that makes it more likely that you'll remember; I've certainly heard plenty of folks say that this works well for them, but for ME it was always the opposite... if I write something down, it removes it from my memory. I was always assured that this was impossible, as if I was hallucinating, so I was excited when I read a quote from Gore Vidal saying that when HE wrote something down it erased it from HIS mind; I marched down the hall to my mother's room and read it triumphantly to her, and although she'd always denied it when *I* said it, a famous stranger saying it stopped her arguments (sigh). Oddly, typing, which is conceptually a version of writing, does NOT erase things from my memory; I wish I knew if it works that way for Mr. Vidal.
I had the occasional teacher try to push me about taking notes, claiming it was necessary if I was to remember what was said in class; in each case, I'd sweetly inquire, "What do you think my test scores show about what I'm remembering from class?", and they'd hem and haw and drop the subject. The most amusing problem I had in this area was when I was new at a job, and the boss gave me an informative talk about all the ins and outs; he tried to arm-twist me to take notes, but when I told him that doing so would guarantee that I forgot everything he said, he dropped it... and then 1st thing the next day, he announced that I'd be tested on what he'd said. To be even more of a jerk, he made a big point of saying, "You can use your notes, so go ahead and get them out... oh, that's right, you don't HAVE any notes, do you?". His smug smile started fading fast when he handed me the test and I began writing rapidly, without needing to pause to think; by the time he graded it and was forced to give me a perfect score, he was stunned and sheepish. With gratifying humbleness, he asked me how I was able to give the correct answers without notes; I replied, "Because I LEARNED what you told me." He kept shaking his head in amazement, telling me that he'd never seen anyone learn the material in one day before, even with notes; my response was that they didn't learn BECAUSE they had notes, because people look at taking notes as meaning that they don't HAVE to learn right then. He quickly interjected that using their notes they could pass a test on the material; I pointed out that all that proved was that they could read their own handwriting, NOT that they knew any of the information. This concept astonished him, but to give him credit he thought about it and admitted I was right, and that he'd seen plenty of examples of how people who tested fine with their notes didn't know the facts when asked about them later... but when I suggested that he try giving talks without allowing them to take notes, he balked-old habits die hard.
Another facet of muscle memory is one you rarely hear about; when you speak, don't you remember what you say better than you remember the things other people say to you? Talking uses many muscles in your jaw, lips and tongue; furthermore, speech has its own area of the brain, and when you speak you use that area in addition to the one associated with muscle use AND the one for hearing, so naturally you remember more. I found this to be helpful to me when I had to memorize a great deal of material in a short time, and came up with the idea of reading it aloud, recording it, and playing it back, which greatly improved my memorization speed; a couple of friends that I persuaded to try it also had really good results, but it was seen as too much trouble, and, more to the point, too "different" for them to continue using it... old habits, again. It's typical for schoolkids to do a certain amount of reading out loud in class, but it's so time-consuming that this potentially useful way of increasing memory retention doesn't get as much attention as it probably deserves.
So, what does this all boil down to in terms of learning? If information is shoved at a kid in a way they can't store it effectively, that's a misuse of valuable learning time and effort, causes frustration, and might lead to the child disliking the subject being studied because it's being made more trouble and less fun that it could be; if information is NOT presented to a kid in a way that they CAN store it effectively, that's a valuable learning opportunity missed. What should our schools be doing about this? Even a well-funded school would be limited as to how far they could accommodate children's different "memory styles," because they'd have to do extensive testing to ascertain what each kid needed to be able to provide it for them, but one simple thing any school could do is give kids the option to do independent learning (monitored, of course) for any classes that they didn't seem to be benefitting from listening to the teacher in; this would not only give those students more learning opportunities, it'd allow the teachers to give more individual attention to those students who DID need to learn by listening, thus accommodating THEM as well. I would've killed to have had that available in my school days; because I have an exceptional ability to remember things I've read, going to classes was a complete waste of time for me, as all the teachers did even in my expensive private school, and later in college, was cover the material that had been assigned for us to read the night before, which I already knew. It used to tick my father off no end when he'd ask me "What did you learn at school today" and I replied, as always, "Nothing"; no matter how many times I explained the situation to him, he never accepted it, never stopped asking, and never stopped raging about why he was spending hard-earned $ on a private school where I wasn't being taught anything... I could have easily lied, told him what material had been covered in my classes and let him believe I'd learned those things from the teachers rather than from my books, but given his evilness I was happy to give him something to stew about. If I'd been allowed to spend my school days reading supplementary materials rather than listening to rehashing, I could have doubled or tripled what I'd learned with my homework rather than just frittering my life away all day every school day; not all kids will vary so wildly from the norm, but still, imagine how much more they could learn if all of them were allowed to absorb material in whatever way(s) worked best with their memories.
You can use your awareness of the different types of memory to help your kids learn, and yourself too if you're taking classes, or just expanding your horizons; it's time for us to stop being limited by traditional teaching methods and start harnessing the full potential of our memories.
Monday, December 05, 2005
A grim case of life imitating art
In the movie "50 First Dates"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=1083372&displayBoxArt=true#Cast
a young woman was in an auto accident that caused brain damage such that her memory "resets" itself every night while she sleeps, so she wakes up the next morning remembering nothing of what's happened since the crash. In 2 scenes at the medical facility for people with brain injuries, we're treated to a patient called "10 Second Tom," so called because that's how long his memory lasts... and it's portrayed as a joke, because who ever heard of such a thing?
Tonight, on TLC, I saw "The Man with the Seven Second Memory"
http://tlc.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=55264&gid=0&channel=TLC
"Once a renowned conductor and musician, Clive Wearing was struck down by a virus that caused massive damage to his brain. Against the odds, doctors managed to save his life but he was left with a memory that spans just seven seconds."
When I saw the title, my 1st thought was of the connection to the movie; my 2nd thought was that, far from being amusing, the real-life version of this affliction would be a fate worse than death... imagine, being hit over and over for the rest of your life by the realization that a few precious moments are all you have, and that they'll be gone from your mind almost before you knew you had them.
He can't read a book or watch a movie, because he can't follow the plots.
He writes in a diary to try to keep track of what he does, but he keeps scratching the old entries out and writing new ones that say the same thing, "I'm awake. Now, I'm awake. Now, I'm really awake"... his own words don't seem real to him, don't make sense to him, because he can't recall writing them.
He talks about not being able to feel emotional pain, because if something causes bad feelings it's gone from his memory before he can suffer; he points out that this is NOT a desirable state of affairs, that not being able to feel is essentially being dead.
The most horrific aspect of this disability was driven home by a story his wife told about finding him crying, and trying to get him to tell her what was the matter, to which he finally replied "I CAN'T THINK."
The vast majority of trains of thought that you have each day last longer than 7 seconds; if you lost all of that, what would there be left? How is it possible to exist in a permanent 7 second bubble, never knowing what's going on, what day it is, what the future holds, living in the eternal now... and knowing that you were once normal, that you were once someone important, and that although your intelligence is still there you can't do anything with it, EVER.
In the earlier years of his affliction, which he's endured for TWENTY YEARS, he was prone to violent outbursts; they said they never figured out why, but how could he NOT be filled with rage and lash out when all he has is 7 seconds at a time?
I can't begin to wrap my mind around the nightmare that is that poor man's life. I can't imagine having to live that way, and I wouldn't want to try; I'd rather be dead. Wouldn't you?
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=1083372&displayBoxArt=true#Cast
a young woman was in an auto accident that caused brain damage such that her memory "resets" itself every night while she sleeps, so she wakes up the next morning remembering nothing of what's happened since the crash. In 2 scenes at the medical facility for people with brain injuries, we're treated to a patient called "10 Second Tom," so called because that's how long his memory lasts... and it's portrayed as a joke, because who ever heard of such a thing?
Tonight, on TLC, I saw "The Man with the Seven Second Memory"
http://tlc.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=55264&gid=0&channel=TLC
"Once a renowned conductor and musician, Clive Wearing was struck down by a virus that caused massive damage to his brain. Against the odds, doctors managed to save his life but he was left with a memory that spans just seven seconds."
When I saw the title, my 1st thought was of the connection to the movie; my 2nd thought was that, far from being amusing, the real-life version of this affliction would be a fate worse than death... imagine, being hit over and over for the rest of your life by the realization that a few precious moments are all you have, and that they'll be gone from your mind almost before you knew you had them.
He can't read a book or watch a movie, because he can't follow the plots.
He writes in a diary to try to keep track of what he does, but he keeps scratching the old entries out and writing new ones that say the same thing, "I'm awake. Now, I'm awake. Now, I'm really awake"... his own words don't seem real to him, don't make sense to him, because he can't recall writing them.
He talks about not being able to feel emotional pain, because if something causes bad feelings it's gone from his memory before he can suffer; he points out that this is NOT a desirable state of affairs, that not being able to feel is essentially being dead.
The most horrific aspect of this disability was driven home by a story his wife told about finding him crying, and trying to get him to tell her what was the matter, to which he finally replied "I CAN'T THINK."
The vast majority of trains of thought that you have each day last longer than 7 seconds; if you lost all of that, what would there be left? How is it possible to exist in a permanent 7 second bubble, never knowing what's going on, what day it is, what the future holds, living in the eternal now... and knowing that you were once normal, that you were once someone important, and that although your intelligence is still there you can't do anything with it, EVER.
In the earlier years of his affliction, which he's endured for TWENTY YEARS, he was prone to violent outbursts; they said they never figured out why, but how could he NOT be filled with rage and lash out when all he has is 7 seconds at a time?
I can't begin to wrap my mind around the nightmare that is that poor man's life. I can't imagine having to live that way, and I wouldn't want to try; I'd rather be dead. Wouldn't you?
Sunday, December 04, 2005
A couple of cool blog additions
If you're a long-time reader, you know that I've gone through several Flash clocks, as newer and cleverer ones came out and replaced the older versions; if you check my sidebar, you'll see my latest one... I think it'll be here for a while, because it's gonna take some doing to beat it. First off, it's uber-cute; after all the modern designs, a retro-alarm style is wildly appealing, it's beautifully done, with its shiny chrome, cheerful colors and a shadow, and it has the day and date too... it was love at 1st sight. Second, when I tried to click on it to see if it was linked to a site, a box with a MENU appeared, which gives the choice of "standard ringtone," "cathedral bells" and "cuckoo," and a control that says "Let it ring now!"; I tried the 1st 2 sounds, and was pretty excited... and then I did the 3rd and noticed that the clock, which was faintly visible under the box, had CHANGED. It took a little trial and error, but I discovered that if you click the control to play the alarm and then move your cursor downwards and off of the image, the clock will perform for you; for the ringtone, the little clapper bangs quickly back and forth as you'd expect, for the bells it swings very slowly, and for the cuckoo sound the entire clock changes, becoming, you guessed it, a cuckoo clock, complete with a birdie that comes out and does its thing. Give it a try; go ahead, I'll wait.
The one problem, and there always is one, is with the hourly chime; I made the choice in my customized code to not have one, but it didn't work... worse, it plays the ringtone AND the bells at the same time, and sometimes the bells and the cuckoo at the same time, which sounds kinda grim. I tried taking out the line of code that refers to the hourly sounds, and that didn't help; changing to a version of the code that's supposed to play ONE sound didn't either. If you happen to be reading on here at the top of the hour in the next few days, you'll hear it if your sound is on; I'm guessing that a fair # of people who come in on other pages via search engines, or visit for the 1st time after new posts have gone up and so haven't read this one, will be in for a surprise if they're here at the wrong time, too. I hope I'm not being overly optimistic in thinking this will be handled in a few days; I emailed the site owner about the problem, and it shouldn't be a difficult fix, but... well, let's stay positive and see what happens. (Update: the site owner replied promptly, and it was apparently just a glitch-it works fine now.)
The other new addition was alot of fun to work on. If you go here
http://www.lintukoto.net/banner/index.php
you'll discover a whole bunch of nifty photos, most of them containing signs of some sort, into which you can insert text to make fun customized images; I tried most of them out, with a variety of messages, before picking the one I thought looked the most like it was "real." Because the proportions didn't seem optimal to me, I had my husband crop it down to look more interesting; I had him put the URL back on there, too, just the way it was originally, because it's only fair to give credit where it's due. Take a look at the bottom of my blog, and you'll see the one I chose... right under the pic of Einstein with customized wording that I made a few weeks ago here
http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php
and just realized that I never posted about. It's too bad I've gotta have 'em way down there where most people won't see them, but they're too big for the sidebar and I don't want them across the top of the page (assuming I could even figure out how to put them there), so I try to think of them as rewards for people who read an entire page of my posts.
I hope you got a kick out of my latest enhancements... although, as usual, *I* probably had more fun with them than anyone else will.
The one problem, and there always is one, is with the hourly chime; I made the choice in my customized code to not have one, but it didn't work... worse, it plays the ringtone AND the bells at the same time, and sometimes the bells and the cuckoo at the same time, which sounds kinda grim. I tried taking out the line of code that refers to the hourly sounds, and that didn't help; changing to a version of the code that's supposed to play ONE sound didn't either. If you happen to be reading on here at the top of the hour in the next few days, you'll hear it if your sound is on; I'm guessing that a fair # of people who come in on other pages via search engines, or visit for the 1st time after new posts have gone up and so haven't read this one, will be in for a surprise if they're here at the wrong time, too. I hope I'm not being overly optimistic in thinking this will be handled in a few days; I emailed the site owner about the problem, and it shouldn't be a difficult fix, but... well, let's stay positive and see what happens. (Update: the site owner replied promptly, and it was apparently just a glitch-it works fine now.)
The other new addition was alot of fun to work on. If you go here
http://www.lintukoto.net/banner/index.php
you'll discover a whole bunch of nifty photos, most of them containing signs of some sort, into which you can insert text to make fun customized images; I tried most of them out, with a variety of messages, before picking the one I thought looked the most like it was "real." Because the proportions didn't seem optimal to me, I had my husband crop it down to look more interesting; I had him put the URL back on there, too, just the way it was originally, because it's only fair to give credit where it's due. Take a look at the bottom of my blog, and you'll see the one I chose... right under the pic of Einstein with customized wording that I made a few weeks ago here
http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php
and just realized that I never posted about. It's too bad I've gotta have 'em way down there where most people won't see them, but they're too big for the sidebar and I don't want them across the top of the page (assuming I could even figure out how to put them there), so I try to think of them as rewards for people who read an entire page of my posts.
I hope you got a kick out of my latest enhancements... although, as usual, *I* probably had more fun with them than anyone else will.
