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I have been posting daily to this blog every day, without fail, since January 1 2008. I’ve managed to post from India, China, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, all sorts of locations in Europe, and somehow made it work. The number of posts have added up, by my count, to 2899, counting through yesterday.

Today was supposed to be my 2900th post. Because I needed to catch an evening flight, my plan was to take the A Train to JFK Airport, go through security, then write my post at the gate, while waiting for my departure. It’s a ritual I’ve followed many times before. Because I fly out of JFK all the time, I know just how long everything takes.

But I had become overconfident, and fate was not kind. Today the AirTrain was broken, so everybody had to take a shuttle bus, which takes much, much longer.

Once the bus finally arrived at the terminal, I raced to the departure level, whereupon a very nice man from JetBlue got me expedited through security. When I arrived at the gate they were just about to close the doors. I made it with no time to spare.

As the plane took off, I thought to myself that finally, after all this time, I had failed. Alas and alack, I had missed a day. Because this flight would not be touching down until hours after midnight NY time, my perfect streak was ended.

But then, to my surprise, the flight crew announced, after we were up in the air, that JetBlue now has free Wifi. Which I am using this very moment.

And so this blog continues, uninterrupted and undeterred. My odd little run of perfect attendance, quirky as it may be, lives on to see another day.

Continuing the theme from yesterday (sort of), let’s assume for the sake of argument that the Republican National Committee is wrong, and that ISIS is not performing horrific and brutal acts of mass murder around the world just to get gun control repealed in the U.S. So if that’s not it, then just what is it that people like that would want from the U.S.?

I’m sure they would be very disappointed in Obama’s recent speech. Instead of fiery rhetoric, calls for violent retaliation, and blaming all Muslims everywhere for the actions of a small band of extremists, our president is calling for careful steps and well coordinated multi-national response. Total buzzkill, right?

But from the perspective of ISIS leaders, there is one American politician who is doing everything right: Calling for immediate and violent military response, universal registration of Muslim Americans, and banning of travel by any Muslim to the United States.

I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump.

From the perspective of an ISIS leader (as well as we can ever understand such a perspective) the Donald is perfect. He is giving them absolutely everything they want, on a silver platter. The eerie accuracy with which he says exactly what ISIS would most want an American politician to say is uncanny, breathtaking in its precision, eerily efficient in its potential for helping to encourage new recruits to join their insane cause.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say that Donald Trump is working for ISIS. The alignment between his words and what ISIS wants American politicians to say is just that uncannily good.

But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I think he’s just incredibly stupid and irresponsible. Although I wouldn’t be completely surprised if it turned out that there was a hidden ISIS mind control device underneath the man’s hairpiece.

I mean, think about it logically: Why else would anybody wear something like that on their head?

I figured something out that had been puzzling me, and the answer came as a surprise.

President Obama made a speech in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre. During that speech he called for everyone to keep cool heads and not respond by giving in to irrational fear and hatred. It seemed like a sensible, if obvious, thought: Let’s not give ISIS the very thing they want (and in fact, have been saying they want).

I didn’t understand why there was so much vitriolic dislike for the speech from the Republican party, until I actually read the official response of the Republican National Committee. It seems that they believe ISIS is murdering innocent citizens around the world in order to advance a very specific goal: Repeal of gun control in the United States.

I know that sounds crazy. Why would a radical theological sect bent on mass genocide care about our domestic policies half way around the world?

Apparently, according to the RNC, ISIS is killing people in order to goad the U.S. into taking away the rights of its citizens to bear arms. The RNC concludes its argument with these words: “To react by trying to limit the rights enshrined by our Constitution would be a terrible mistake.”

Wow.

This evening I had dinner at Kajitsu, right here in Manhattan. I had not eaten there in years, and I had completely forgotten how amazing it is.

There are meals, and then there are gourmet meals, and then there is Kajitsu. All the food is in the traditional Japanese Shojin style — a unique cuisine that was first developed centuries ago by the Zen Buddhist monks in Kyoto.

A meal at Kajitsu is expensive, but it is completely worth it. There is really nothing that I could say here that would properly describe the experience. All I can say is that you should go there at least once in your life, and prepare to have your mind blown.

Google Cardboard came with my mom’s New York Times several weeks ago. I happened to be visiting this weekend, so I helped her set it up. Soon she was excitedly looking around virtual worlds.

Of course this is perfectly emblematic. VR is now at the point where your mom might be using it. It’s interesting to trace how we got to this point.

In early 2012 a team at USC led by Mark Bolas created the first versions of what we now know as Google Cardboard. They gave it away for free as a set of do-it-yourself instructions. Total cost of materials: a few bucks.

The following year, Alex Kauffmann and others at Google who were inspired by the work of Mark’s team wanted more people to know about this cool device, so they adapted it, rebranding it as Google Cardboard. I suspect they were motivated to work on something fun and goofy as a kind of counterweight to the hype that at the time was surrounding Google Glass.

Now my mom is experiencing virtual reality. Maybe your mom is too, using hardware so cheap that the New York Times can just give it away. This one give-away might very well be having a larger initial impact on wide-spread adoption of VR than everything else going on in the space put together.

One odd thing is that few people seem to know this history. I’ve been told that a number of executives at Google itself even believe that the technology for Cardboard originated entirely within Google itself!

Hopefully people will eventually read an article about it in the New York Times. Maybe with a nice VR supplement.

Every once in a while you have a really good day. A day when everything goes right, personally, professionally, emotionally.

Not a perfect day — there is actually no such thing as a perfect day — but a very very good day nonetheless. When the evening comes you feel balanced, centered, at peace, as though you’d spent the entire day walking through a field of four leaf clovers.

Today was such a day for me. I’m not expecting to have another one any time soon, although I would not complain if I did.

But I am going to mark this on my calendar, just a simple note to remind myself: Today I had a good day.

I am involved in a number of projects at NYU that exhibit a real sense of group energy. That is, they are the result not of the efforts of some one individual, but of a mysterious alchemy between a group of people.

Sure, every once in a while somebody comes up with a spectacular idea — or makes a spectacular mistake — but those events are not essential. What is indeed essential is the cumuluative effect of so many people getting something done by handing the baton back and forth.

I love the way, in certain circumstances, we are able to seamlessly assume a group identity, a sot of collective mind that is neither me nor you, but us. This kind of connection can be one of the most beautiful aspects of the human experience.

Someone told me today that New York City has lots of big server farms. When you first walk into the lobby of these buildings, they look like anyplace else. But then you go up the elevator, and the entire building is filled with rows and rows of compute servers and giant refrigeration units.

Which makes perfect sense, except that when I first heard her say the words “server farm”, my mind jumped to someplace else entirely. I got a sudden fleeting yet vivid image of a place where they grow waiters.

But not just waiters. Busboys, maître d’s, bartenders, barristas, cocktail waitresses and all the rest, neatly lined up in rows upon rows, carefully watered and tended to, gradually ripening until they are ready to be plucked and sent out to serve a waiting city.

I told my friend about this vision. “After all,” I said, “it’s not as though vast numbers of young people are thronging to Manhattan to wait on tables just because they want a career in acting.”

We discussed the importance of proper ripening. After all, you don’t want to send an unripe server out into the world. We’ve all had the experience of getting an unripe server. It isn’t pretty.

I wonder how many other phrases there are like this. If you have no idea what their real meaning is, you can come up with another meaning that is perfectly logical and plausible.

And maybe even accurate, in some alternate universe.

This evening I had an encounter with some art.

I was having dinner in a restaurant with a friend, when I became aware of a framed photograph on the wall, one of a row of framed photographs. But this one was different from the others.

It was casual yet intense, familiar yet eerily exotic, joyful yet strangely poignant. It was seemingly candid yet perfectly composed, utterly natural while being all about illusion, comfortably warm yet oddly offputting.

All through our dinner conversation, which was wonderful, part of my mind kept wandering back to this strangely compelling image. At the end of the meal I walked back to the rear of the restaurant, to check out the book listing the prices of all of the images for sale on the walls. My picture was priced at $200, framed.

Reader, I purchased it.

I then carried it through Washington Square Park, holding it carefully with one hand, my other hand clutching an umbrella to shield it from the perilous New York rain. At last I deposited it triumphantly, undamaged and dry as a bone, inside my apartment.

Now the picture still is sitting — I am tempted to say on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door — and I am regarding it with bemused appreciation. I am not posting a photo of it here, because we need some private time to get to know each other, this picture and I.

Such are the ways of art.

I’m writing a computer graphics software package that I definitely want other people to use. And today I made an unusual decision in its design.

You see, there is one place where all of the standard packages ask users to specify an angle in degrees, so that a full circle is 360^o around. This seems reasonable enough on the face of it. After all, it’s the way most people think about a circle.

But in fact, when people do actual math in computer graphics, they always work in radians, so that a full circle is 2π around (just like they teach you in math class). Hence my dilemma.

Should I go with the same “friendly to most people” standard that the other packages use (degrees), or should I be consistent with the way computer graphics is actually done by people who do computer graphics (radians)?

Eventually, I decided that this is really a political question: When I invite people to use my package, what tribe am I asking them to align themselves with? Because there really are multiple tribes here.

There are the people who say “I just want to call a software package that does stuff for me, and I really don’t care to know how it works.” Then there are people who say “I am using this package as a starting point for what will be my own experiments and mathematical innovations in computer graphics.”

Since I teach computer graphics, I realized that I’m really designing this for that second tribe — my tribe. I want people to poke around inside my code, see how I am doing things, maybe come up with their own way of doing it better. I am making this software available not merely to provide a convenience but to invite a dialog.

In the end I am choosing radians. Which means that I am chosing sides, aligning myself with those people who really want to dive deep and learn all about computer graphics.

Because math, like everything else, is political.