Author: admin

Just a few of many…

1844 D’Artagnan
      Porthos
      Athos
      Aramis

1900 Dorothy
      Scarecrow
      Tin Man
      Cowardly Lion

1941 Archie
      Jughead
      Betty
      Veronica

1951 Lucy
      Ricky
      Fred
      Ethel

1954 Frodo
      Sam
      Merry
      Pippin

1955 Ralph
      Alice
      Ed
      Trixie

1957 The Beaver
      Ward
      June
      Wally

1960 Fred
      Wilma
      Barney
      Betty

1961 Dick
      Laura
      Buddy
      Sally

1966 Kirk
      Spock
      McCoy
      Scotty

1987 Picard
      Riker
      Troi
      Data

1989 Jerry
      George
      Elaine
      Kramer

1997 Carrie
      Samantha
      Charlotte
      Miranda

2007 Leonard
      Sheldon
      Howard
      Rajesh

2011 Jess
      Nick
      Schmidt
      Winston

Today it is Pi Day,
It’s your day, it’s my day.
It is quite resplendent
And rather transcendent
With digits unbounded.
It’s very well rounded
(Though sometimes it’s square).
I’m so glad that it’s there.
It’s your day, it’s my day,
Today it is Pi Day!

Today is a Fibonacci day. That is a day in which the month, day of the month, and last two digits of the year are all Fibonacci numbers.

You may never have heard of a Fibonacci day before. That’s because I just made it up.

In the case of today, we are in month 3, day 13, and year 21. These are all found in the sequence of Fibonacci numbers: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,… (The rule is you add the sum of last two numbers in the sequence as the next number. Eg: 5+8=13).

As an exercise, see if you can figure out how many Fibonacci days there are this year.

Here’s an easier one: What is the one date this year that is a successive Fibonacci day? That is a day containing three successive Fibonacci numbers.

And then, when is the next successive Fibonacci day after that? Hint: it’s not this year. That will be an interesting day because it will be the last successive Fibonacci day for a very very long time.

How strange that it is exactly one year since COVID-19 turned life upside down. March 12, 2020 was the first day that I started teaching my classes at NYU over Zoom, and everything has been over Zoom since then.

It has been a very strange and sad year for the world. All we can hope for is that the coming year sees the end of this awful pandemic.

As Joni Mitchell said, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” In addition to the terrible toll in people lost, I think we have all regained a renewed appreciation for the experience of being in the same place with people we love.

Among other things, I will never again take for granted the simple joy of sharing a cup of coffee with friends.

As you scurry, helter skelter
Take some time for rest and shelter
Outside pressures never cease
But inside you need inner peace
Take an hour every day
Just to look inside and say
“This is me, I am here.
If nothing else, that much is clear.”
Always keep your inner view
That’s how you know you are you

I know that it’s a cliché to say “Karma is a boomerang.” On first hearing, it sounds so very fuzzy and far too simple to be meaningful.

Yet there is power in simply giving things away. And that is especially true when you are doing cutting edge technological research.

People often worry that if they simply give something away for free, then they will miss out on a chance to make money. But in many cases — particularly in technological research — the world does not even yet know that what you are doing could be valuable.

Because you are thinking differently from everyone else, you are often years ahead of whatever potential “market” there may be. For one thing, the surrounding infrastructure required for there to even be a market for what you are doing may not yet exist.

But if you give something away for free, people will start to play with it. They will discover interesting uses for it that you probably wouldn’t have thought of. It will become part of new conversations that otherwise may never have taken place.

At that point, you will have been the person who gave this to the world, which gives you an enormous amount of credibility. Eventually the world will indeed catch up to your idea, and somebody with lots of power and money will throw millions of dollars at it.

Entire teams will then be working on it, trying to build that market before their competitors do. And if you are the person who gave that idea away, way back before there was a market for it, those teams will want to work with you.

So there’s nothing fuzzy about it. In fact it’s a very practical idea: Karma is a boomerang.

If you had the option of being able to walk into the movie of your choice, would you do it? On the surface this seems like a very appealing notion.

After all, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to wander through Oz, or Tatooine, or Hogwarts, or the Shire? For many people these would be childhood fantasies come to life.

Yet part of the appeal of these fictional worlds is that we can keep them at a comfortable distance. We ourselves never need to encounter an Orc or a Dementor.

The perils of such worlds are, to us, merely literary devices. They have been designed to give us vicarious thrills at a safe remove.

Perhaps it is good, on the balance, that we cannot literally actually enter into the world of our favorite movie. The safety and comfort of a proscenium may very well be a necessary part of the experience.

Music visualizers have a long and illustrious history, but we tend to think of them as things we see on screens, not in our daily lives. But that may change in a few years.

When extended reality becomes the norm, will music begin to take on more of a visual component? At that point, it will be technologically possible to see melodies and harmonies floating in the air between us, as ever changing three dimensional objects

Will that change the way we think about music? Will it signal the rise of a new art form?

I am looking forward to finding out!

It was rumored today Apple glasses
Will soon be for sale to the masses
    When our students all wear them
    We will need to prepare them
For some new holographical classes

Now that WandaVision is done, whatever will we all do for great television? It raised the bar so high, I fear nothing else will seem all that compelling now.

It’s like when you have the rare opportunity to eat really great chocolate. It’s wonderful, and you are happy you did it, but it ruins you.

All of the chocolate you eat afterward seems second rate. Chocolate that you used to enjoy now tastes like ashes in your mouth.

But you do not regret. You never regret.

Great chocolate is like WandaVision. It needs to be experienced and savored, and then remembered with all due reference and appreciation.