A speculative mind

  When I was in my second year in college, I took a class called “General Sociology Through Film.” It seemed like it would be a fun class. Watching movies was part of the curriculum. I like movies. It was a great concept, and a popular class. I am not sure how much actual sociology I learned from that class, but maybe some of it sunk in. The class met on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Monday was a one-hour lecture about some sociological principle. Wednesday was a two-hour period where we watched the film for that week. Friday was a discussion of the film. There were a couple of mid-term exams and a final exam where we could prove that this was an academic experience. As I said, I couldn’t tell you what concepts I learned in the class, but I do remember the movies. Part of the class focused on human development: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, etc.. We skipped early development. For the young-adult leaving home for the first time, we watched Next Stop Greenwich Village . For

  One summer, while I was working for the US Forest Service, I was assigned to do stream survey. The purpose of stream survey is to assess the health of a particular stream or network of streams for the fish population. My partner Ed and I went through training in the Spring and then began our survey of the North Fork of the Yachats River and all of its tributaries. Stream survey is an odd job. Both science and art. One member of the two-person team is designated as the estimator and the other is the recorder. Each day they switch jobs. The river is divided into habitat types of which there are three basic forms: riffles, pools, and glides. A pool is just what it sounds like. The bed is deeper and there is not much vertical drop from the upper side of the pool to the downstream side. Riffles are marked by a steeper drop in elevation and tend to be longer stretches of stream than pools. The surface of the water is rougher in a riffle as the water is moving faster. Riffles can include