Rotary Club of Owego, NY ROTATELLER
Tuesday, May 24, 2005 Gary Williams, Editor

GUESTS:

• Jose Bojalil, from Mexico
• Andres Tejada, from Bolivia (and STAC doubles tennis champ with Keith West)
• Miquel from Venezuela
• Amy Vivian, guest of Maria
• Parrish Bridges, guest of Fred. Parrish is the minister at the Presbyterian Church and is interested in joining the club and following in the tradition of Edgar Frank, John Mahler, and Bill Findlay

BIRTHDAY:

Richard is older than me for the next few weeks. He also reminded the Club, which I have been remiss at not doing, that it is in the tradition of the Club to give a donation to the Club on one’s birthday.

MUSIC:

Carl and Wilma led us in, "Wait ‘til the Sun Shines, Nellie"

Jose and Andres went to Cedar Point Amusement Park in Ohio with Laura and her husband. They had a great time. Jose was will Andres for the last few days. They will be getting together with the outbound exchange students this coming weekend.

Judy’s quote of the year: "We have slain the railings dragon!" There were about 37 people there on Saturday, including 10 – 11 from Lockheed Martin who were recruited by Carl. Laura did a great job with the food and Carl did an excellent job with the photos. I got to sit with Judy today. Another very busy and successful Rotary year. Thank you, also, to Barb Fink for arranging for the porta potty.

Judy also thanked Carolyn Galatzan for the wonderful job on the Paul Harris Dinner. There were 50 people there. Carolyn thanked those who helped her including MC, Richard, Annette, and John Spencer.

Highlights of the May 19, 2005 Owego Rotary Board of Directors meeting

• April attendance was 75%, with 24 members having 100% attendance. A birthday check was received with thanks from Fred Beaudry.
• Newest board members attended meeting: Carole LaPlante, Merlin Lessler and Wilma Betcher. They will replace Ed Kuhlman, John Spencer and Kay Murray for two-year terms.
• Officers for 2005-2006 were elected: President – Orv Wright; President-elect – Al Bingley; Vice-president – Matt Adler; Secretary – Carolyn Wright; Treasurer – Jan Nolis. (Taking the remaining one year of Matt Adler’s board position will be Mychael Willon.)
• Contributions approved:
• $500 - Head Start’s magnetic letters program for use by families over the summer for students going to kindergarten in September.
• $250 - New Hope Center as sponsor for walk to be held in August.
• Centennial projects wrapping up. Bob Kingston will head the BBQ pit committee; the village has approved permanent basketball hoops to be installed at Marvin Park. Village crews will install the equipment. There may be a project to paint lines in the future.

The next board meeting, including all new and present members, will be Thursday, June 16, at 7:30 a.m. All club members are always invited to attend. It is also a regular meeting time of the breakfast group.

FINES: Bill Moon

• All those who did not help with painting the railings
• All those who did not attend the Paul Harris Dinner
• Laura and Mike for their photos in the paper for Leadership Tioga
• Carolyn, for getting here after Harry
• John Spencer, for being the best painter

We may be on television!

PROGRAM:

Harry introduced Susan English who is a partner in Coughlin & Gehart. As we found out a couple of months ago, Susan has an interesting background from a farm in Montrose. She has impeccable educational credentials, is the current president-elect of the Broome County Bar Association and has served on the Board of Directors of Literacy Volunteers of Broome and Tioga Counties for 10 years.

Susan spoke on the Living Will. She brought samples from PA and NY and I have attached the model from NY if you can open it. There are three parts of estate planning:

1. Will – in which trusts and guardians may be set up and requires an attorney
2. Power of Attorney (POA) – which is for business matters and expires at the person’s death
3. Living Will – which states how you would like situations to be handled when you are not capable of directing them yourself. A Health Care Proxy may be chosen to answer questions that are not clearly answered by the Living Will, when you are incapacitated. It can only be a single person, but you can have an alternate. In this area, there is a lot of crossing of state lines for health care and Susan is sure that documents from other states would be honored. There should be multiple copies. Your physician should have one, as should relatives, and you should have a copy for yourself. If you have one which has not been up-dated for a number of years, it would be a good idea to up-date it. You need two witnesses, neither of which can be the person who would be your health care proxy.

Do not resuscitate is a different document. People can choose to be organ donors and it should be on your driver’s license.

This was an informative and timely program.

There will be a breakfast meeting this Thursday.

50/50 Bob Kingston

While this is already long, I will attach some excerpts from Intuition: Its Power and Perils by Donald G. Myers. It is interesting to see how we make our decisions, how we can be tricked, and the flaws in our memories.

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted," said a sign in Albert Einstein's office.

"The first principle," said Einstein's fellow physicist Richard Feynman, "is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

"There are trivial truths and great truths," declared the physicist Niels Bohr. "The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true."

The history of science is a story of one challenge to our intuition after another.

"Science," said Richard Feynman, "is a long history of learning how not to fool ourselves."

Michael Gazzaniga concludes that the left brain is an "interpreter" that instantly constructs theories to justify our behavior. We humans have a quick facility for constructing meaning.

Wilson surmises that we're often unaware of why we feel as we do. Reflecting on the reasons for our feelings draws our attention to plausible but possibly erroneous factors.

The amygdala sends more neural projections up to the cortex than it receives. This makes it easier for our feelings to hijack our thinking than for our thinking to rule our feelings, note brain researchers Joseph LeDoux and Jorge Armony.

Indeed, we know much that is too complex for our conscious minds to understand.

As this illustrates, memories are not copies of experiences that remain on deposit in a memory bank. Rather, like scientists reconstructing dinosaurs from bone remnants, we construct memories as we withdraw them from storage.

Our passions infiltrate our intuitions. When in a bad mood, we read someone's neutral look as a glare; in a good mood, we intuit the same look as interest.

"We don't see things as they are," says the Talmud, "we see things as we are."

This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imaging that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.

The hindsight bias experiments show us the impossibility, once we know an outcome, of simply reverting to our former state of mind.

It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so. Artemus Ward

Observing Cinderella cowering in her oppressive home, her family and neighbors infer that she is timid; dancing with her at the ball, the prince perceives a suave, glamorous woman. Cinderella knows better; depending on the situation, she is both. This bias - to underestimate the situation and overestimate inner dispositions when explaining others' behavior - is almost irresistible, especially for those of us socialized in individualist western countries.

An overstated Chinese proverb has the idea: "Two-thirds of what we see is behind our eyes."

Both groups readily accepted the evidence that confirmed their view but sharply criticized the evidence that challenged it. The result: showing the two sides an identical body of mixed evidence increased their disagreement.

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