Pipsqueak Articles

Posts written by Olga Werby or Christopher Werby

Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Love of Reading

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Monument to Jules Verne

I assume that people who read my newsletters love to read as much as I do. Reading is the best form of escapism. It’s a way of stepping into another life, another world. It can be completely immersive and totally consuming. You can read to match your internal moods or to shift them into a completely different direction. Reading is awesome fun. I’m sorry for those who don’t know this. That said, even some great stories won’t be great for every reader or even be appropriate for a particular time in their lives (or circumstances in the world). I have been reading a lot lately, catching up on the giant pile of books that I acquired during the height of the pandemic but never got around to actually consuming. My pile is still very high, but I did discover some gems and also some books that are simply not for me (or not for me right now). I am getting better at putting those books away partially read — that’s a new skill that I just recently learned. Prior, I felt that I had to read to the last page (appendixes included) once I’ve started a book. Now, I am…

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Newsletter, Perception, Pipsqueak Articles

Stress Response

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Terri the relentless tortoise

Stress is an actor in all our lives. As we grow up, our stress grows too. We perceive that stress as a sign that we are coping with more than our historical share. Every generation believes that their stress surpasses that of the generation before. So it is probably just an illusion — or delusion. What’s most important is how we cope with stress. Not all stress coping mechanisms are learned. Some are probably encoded — they come for free with our genetics. It can be easier to see these mechanisms in action by observing animals — particularly pets, whose behaviors we know intimately. Take, for example, two very different species that we have had as pets over the years — Terri the tortoise and Kushy the ferret. Terri comes from an ancient lineage of chelonians (Greek word for tortoise), who have walked and swam upon the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Kushy the ferret is of the Mustelidae family — weasels and skunks. Kushy was a descendant of a domesticated breed of ferrets that first became pets about four thousand years ago. We bought Kushy at a pet store; Terri was a rescue. Terri’s natural habitat is…

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book promotion, Cultural Differences, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Coming-of-age in the Modern World

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How we see ourselves

There is a whole genre of coming-of-age stories — stories that describe a transition from childhood to adulthood. The transition could be fast, forced by some external events, or painfully slow. And sometimes, it might not happen at all — we all know people who we charitably describe as having “arrested development” issues. This is how Wikipedia defines the coming-of-age genre, too, adding: “Coming-of-age stories tend to emphasize dialogue or internal monologue over action, and are often set in the past. The subjects of coming-of-age stories are typically teenagers.” But is it correct to place teenagers as protagonists in coming-of-age books? In Victorian times (1937 to 1901), the female protagonists used to be about fifteen or sixteen — girls of marriageable age! For these children, coming-of-age meant going directly from playing with dolls and right into a marriage bed. Boys were perhaps a bit older, 17, their swords changed from wood to metal over the telling of their coming-of-age stories. Think of The Vicomte De Bragelonne or The Count of Monte Cristo, written in 1847 and 1844, respectively. The young count and Edmond were just teenagers when their stories got started. Edmond got to live to be an old man.…

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book promotion, My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Emotion Field

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American Mythology: superhero underdogs

I saw a question on Twitter: Can readers become emotionally invested in a story if the main character is interesting but not sympathetic? My answer was that I need characters that I can care about. A superhero that has all kinds of cool and interesting superpowers is ultimately boring unless there is an emotional narrative that I can care about. I think the most important answer an author can give to their readers in the first few pages (or paragraphs) of their book is why they should care enough to read more? And that answer is always why the reader should care. I find that caring about sympathetic characters is easier than for villains, no matter how interesting those villains are. I can go for a story about a young kid who grows up to be a villain because the world forces him to become one — he wasn’t born evil, he was made to be. Villany was forced on an innocent soul in order to survive. But this just means that I’m reading a tragedy. There are lots of different types of stories. It’s never about the genre. Science fiction is just fantasy wrapped up in fancy techtalk. Romance…

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Errors, Language, Newsletter, Perception, Pipsqueak Articles

The Music of Language

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Old World Language Families

The illustration above is created by Minna Sundberg. Unlike pictorial art, music is perceived and processed in time. Complex music — consisting of more than one melody woven together — is even more difficult to process than a single stream. It requires focused attention. It’s more akin to listening to several conversations at once even if they are speaking on the same topic. If attention strays for just a moment, vital data can be lost. Thus music comprehension improves over several listenings. Things like nuance in performance, which ride on top of the basic syntax and message, are easy to miss for novice listeners. Listening, like performing, requires the development of skills. Humans are poor at splitting their attention and multitasking, and thus are prone to missing a lot of details. Language is also much more than a ruled-based string of words. There is a melody to each that varies from language to language. The melody provides the underpinning of emotion to the informational content that words carry. It’s easy to create cognitive dissonance by using the wrong emotional music while delivering a message. People who are good at this are good at manipulation. This is because we listen to…

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Ethnographic & User Data, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Epigenetic Consequences of War

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Mitosis

World War Z is upon us, and it behooves us to consider its consequences carefully. We all understand that deprivations and stresses of war leave scars on the survivors, physical and psychological. Bullet wounds, starvation and malnutrition, exposure and lack of sleep, physical exhaustion and lack of hygiene are but the most obvious horrors of war. And so are the psychological effects of watching loved ones suffer and die, living with uncertainty and constant threat, the fear, the everpresent anxiety, and complete powerlessness over one’s circumstances can cause as much physical damage as a bullet. And, of course, causing harm to another human, killing another being is a brutal assault on one’s soul and not something the perpetrator is likely to ever get over. All the endless wars that we have been fighting all over the world taught just how punishing these conflicts are on civilians and soldiers alike. No wonder we have a suicide epidemic among our veterans. The war for them is not over when they come home… But now consider what wars do to the next generation — not the survivors themselves, but to those who are born to them after the conflict is over. Again, the…

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My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles

Evolution of Empathy

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Cows in Moonlight by Ohara Koson 1927

It’s Valentine’s Week and I thought to remark on empathy. First, a bit of a definition. Sympathy is when you relate to the emotional states of others. Usually, we sympathize with someone’s pain and suffering. It’s common to express (or invoke) our sympathies when someone is in a hospital or when a person we know had died. There is a whole industry dedicated to sympathy expression — flowers, cards, food, etc. Empathy is different. We might express sympathy for someone accidentally hitting their hand with a hammer, it’s a polite thing to do. But when we empathize with that person, we feel their pain. That’s a whole order of difference in our perception and understanding of the emotional and physical conditions of others. We can express sympathy without feeling any empathy. Thus sympathy is a social, cultural construct. Empathy is a true internal emotion. Empathy is something that takes time to develop. Human babies are not born empathizers. But those who learn empathy, somehow, truly become human then. For the longest time, scientists didn’t believe that any other animals other than humans were capable of feeling empathy. Of course, anyone who has ever had a pet or observed animal behavior…

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