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Greetings
from the SFBS President, Sandeep Karkal
Awards, awards, awards……..
Musing
from the Editor What an odd lot we are! What prompted Mr. Karkal to seek out multi-cultural words for sludge anyway? What’s worse, perhaps, is that this will be of interest to those of the “Club de Sewer” membership! Oh my… God help us! (Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have used the “G” word…) Oh well... So… multi-cultural linguistics. A favorite author of mine, Robert Johnson (a very insightful writer and analyst), speaks about our lack of ‘feeling’ words. Love, for instance. He says that Sanskrit has 96 words for love, ancient Persia, 80, Greek has 3 and English only 1. We can liken this to the word ‘snow’ for Eskimos, who have 30 different words to describe this most critical element in their world. Their very lives could depend on having a succinct and descriptive word for different types of snow. Thus cultures have very descriptive and varied words for those things that are important and critical to their lives. In India, there is a lack of words to describe some of our technological objects. Words such as fuse box, coaxial cable and line voltage! In our culture, the ‘thinking’ function is revered, much more so than is our ‘feeling’ function. Our ability to think rationally, logically, linearly, has brought us incredible and wonderful technological advances. This has brought to us our science and the highest standard of living in the world – the envy of the third world. And, the question is: at what expense? When one side is developed so thoroughly and completely, we all know that the other, opposite side suffers. “Feeling” is the opposite of “thinking”. When I speak of feeling, it is not in the tactile sense of the word, rather it is the non-tangible sense. Close to what we would describe as emotion as in… “I feel joyful”. How many times do we run away from those so-called “difficult” feelings like sadness, loneliness, anger, depression? Instead, we pop a pill or sit in front of the television or overeat. How difficult is it to show and share our emotions with other people; even sometimes with our significant others? How often do we get cranky or lash out at someone for no apparent reason? This stems from the fact that we don’t utilize our feeling world very much. We remain in the more objective and analytical thinking world. We really are mere infants when it comes to knowing and accepting our feelings. I don’t really know what my point is in writing about this in this month’s Inkspot. So, I think I’ll just give myself the leeway to not have a point, how about that? Oh yeah… I like that! I will offer it up as editorial license…
Joint
Meeting Report on the SF Bay Model Last month’s Section meeting was our annual joint meeting with the Redwood Empire Section. About 50 people turned out for the tour and meeting on what was a very hot day. The tour before dinner was of the San Francisco Bay Model and the talk by a Park Ranger who was well versed in the history of the model. The model is a physical model of the bay and delta, complete with water and tides and river outflows. The model was built around 1950, before computers were available to do what it was built to do. The purpose of the model was to see what would happen if a popular proposal (of the time) was to be implemented. The proposal was to build two dams across the bay – one at about the location of the San Rafael Bridge and the other in Redwood City-Hayward area. The dams would create two fresh water lakes that could be used to supply the water needs of the Bay Area. The model demonstrated that the evaporation rate would be so great that the water would have too high a salt content to be used as planned. Since then the model has been used for other modeling purposes and, most recently, to demonstrate what would be the visual and environmental impact of the proposed San Francisco Airport expansion. |
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