John Paul Lumpp, whose creativity, energy, and good humor have kept Grow With the Flow moving steadily towards a date with a printing press, has finished final work on the cover, touched up the last illustration, corrected the last typo (We hope!), and added Library of Congress and ISBN numbers to the verso of the title page.

All that is to say that about three weeks from now, we should have right around half a ton of Grow With the Flow ready to ship to the first readers!

On NPR’s Weekend Edition for Saturday, April 16, 2005, Susan Stamberg told how four high school kids from Tempe, Arizona won a major national robotics competition: Students Master Robotics, Beat Odds:

Four high school kids from western Phoenix and an underwater robot named Stinky beat out the nation’s brightest students (including a team from M.I.T) in the 2004 Marine Advanced Technology Education Center Remotely Operated Vehicle Competition. It’s a boost to their college hopes, which had been far from a sure thing due to financial disadvantages.

The journey of the Carl Hayden High School team is chronicled in Wired magazine and raises issues surrounding college funding for the children of immigrants. Susan Stamberg talks to two of the members, Cristian Arcega and Lorenzo Santillan. We also hear from their computer science teacher, Allan Cameron.

Praise for the feature, which tells a great story and raises important questions about inequitable funding, but with a bit of a quibble. Surely, in the sort of open-ended definition of intelligence I espouse in Grow With the Flow, the creative problem solving, knowledge of a subject area, and intense teamwork (personal intelligence) that won this competition represents a high level of real-world intelligence? And at this competition, by definition, this team had more of the requisite package of intelligence than any other team? Then what does it mean to say that this team “beat out the nation’s brightest students"? At that moment, in that setting, they were the nation’s brightest students. They may have beaten the odds, but it seems to me that they haven’t outpaced the assumptions about intelligence that guided that choice of words.

I remember reading a 1992 article in The New Yorker magazine about two remarkable mathematicians, Gregory and David Chudnovsky. (For an article to stick with me that long, it must have been fascinating!)

The article, “The Mountains of Pi,” by Richard Preston, described how the brothers were working to compute the value of pi to beyond 2,000,000,000 places. Pi (π) is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It starts 3.14159… and it goes on indefinitely. It is one of the most mysterious numbers in mathematics. The Chudnovsky brothers were doing this mind-boggling calculaton on their own, homemade supercomputer, which they had built from mail-order parts! You can find the article online in The New Yorker Archives

The Chudnovsky brothers are back in the April 11, 2005 issue of The New Yorker in another article by Mr. Preston, titled “Capturing the Unicorn: How two mathematicians came to the aid of the Met.” The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has a branch, The Cloisters, which houses a variety of medieval treasures, including a series of seven tapestries called “The Hunt of the Unicorn.” Preston says they are “considered by many to be the most beautiful tapestries in existence.” These priceless works of art were taken down to be repaired and cleaned. As part of an ongoing project, they were digitally photographed. The images that resulted weren’t exactly the snapshots you or I might make: It took at least one hundred billion numbers to store the images. I don’t want to spoil the story by telling you much about what happened next, except to say that the mathematical problem that resulted when the Museum tried to build a single composite image needed the Chudnovsky brothers and their computer to solve it. You can find the article on your local newsstand right now, or at The New Yorker Printables.

Well, this is turning into a shaggy dog story, where the tail wags the dog. There was a single sentence in the article which was such a perfect reflection of one of my main points in Grow With the Flow that I wanted to pass it along to you:

Mathematicians, when they work, engage in intensely serious play.

So, when Andy says “Your mind is a playground,” it isn’t just for kids. It’s a way of life, a pattern of work, that is central to the creativity and accomplishments of some of our best minds.

In the previous post about reviews, I said I hoped to review here some books and articles I wished I could have included in Grow With the Flow.

Mike Rose is a professor of education at UCLA. His book, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, is about “the thought it takes to do physical work.” It’s one of the most exciting books I’ve read in recent years: to listen to him describe how a high school carpentry student is learning to think about his work becomes – I don’t exaggerate – thrilling. I’m seeing the world a bit differently than before I read his book.

Well, there’s one problem with reviewing the book: I haven’t actually been able to finish it yet, because I keep loaning it to friends “for a few days.” I just rescued it from my wife’s study, and my son volunteered to buy his own copy, so as soon as I can, I’ll post my thoughts about it here.

Why not buy your own copy now and read along, so you’re ready to comment when I get around to posting my review?

Mike Rose
The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker
New York: Viking, 2004

To write anything which builds on the work of others is to always be behind the times: As soon as you finish a sentence, paragraph, or chapter, along comes some terrific new information that screams to be included. With a book like Grow With the Flow (GWTF), which very much depends on the research and thinking of others, it’s a constant temptation to go back and revise. One day, I noticed that if I kept including good new stuff, I’d never finish.

It was easier to move on because I saw that I could use this Web site, IntelligenceRiver.net, to tell you about some of the good new work that keeps coming along, and show how it fits in with the goals of GWTF. So the first reviews here will all be of books or articles that came along after I made that decision to quit revising.

Maybe they’ll go into a second edition eventually. For now, I hope they deepen your understanding of the ideas advanced in GWTF, as they did mine. Enjoy! And click that “Comments” button!

As we said in our first post, we’ll use The RiverTown News to keep you up to date as we get our Web site, IntelligenceRiver.net, up and running.

My son, Paul Cantrell, who has graciously offered to build this Web site, is visiting Colorado from his home in Minneapolis for a few days, and we’re making rapid strides. This blog is functioning, although we’ll do some more layout work. Exciting!

Welcome to The RiverTown News, the blog for IntelligenceRiver.net!

IntelligenceRiver.net is the Web site that supports Grow With the Flow, the new book that shows parents how to raise children to have a full, natural intelligence that lets them meet their goals in the world.

We’ll use The RiverTown News as our way to communicate with you. We’ll post book reviews, interesting news that relates to the book’s themes, news about this Web site, and news of the Grow With the Flow community. You’ll always be able to comment on the news stories.

As we get IntelligenceRiver.net up and running, we’ll also use the The RiverTown News to keep you up to date on each step forward.