Author: admin

Today is the 143rd day of the year.

When I look at the number 143, my mind immediately converts it to 11×13 (which you can see right away if you write 143 as 130 + 13). And then my mind starts to wonder “what fun things can I do with this?”

Which brings me back to a math epiphany I had when I was twelve years old. It was the first time I’d ever gotten a chance to program a computer, and our teacher said we could write a program to do whatever we wanted.

Being a typical American kid, the first thing I thought of was to find a fraction B/A that was really close to π.

So I wrote a program that tried all values of A up to a thousand. For each of those, my program tried all values for B that were about three times bigger than A. Then I checked to see how near B/A was to π.

To my great surprise, one fraction was vastly more accurate than all the others: 355/113. This fraction gets amazingly close to π — to around one part in four million.

What made this especially cool was how easy it was to remember. I just needed to write “113355”, then chop in the middle to get the A and B for my fraction.

I found out later that this marvelous approximation to π was first discovered in China, by Tsu Ch’ung-Chih, around 1600 years ago. Unlike me, he managed to find it without a computer.

“A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”

— Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Criticism

This morning I showed up at a doctor’s office for an appointment to have some minor surgery — nothing serious or worrisome. But the conversation with the receptionist was interesting.

“I’m here for my 9am surgery,” I said, telling her my name and the name of my doctor.

The look on the receptionist’s face was somewhere between concern and alarm. “For surgery?” she asked.

Oh no, I thought. Ten minutes until my operation and I’ve gone to the wrong building. We stared at each other in mutual dismay.

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll look you up in the computer.”

There was a worried pause while she clicked on a few things.

“Oh,” she said, “You’re scheduled for an office procedure at 9am. Have a seat.”

I was left to ponder this odd little encounter. The receptionist had seemed genuinely confused. Was I naive to assume that when a doctor cuts into you with a knife, it’s always called “surgery”?

Let’s try turning it around: If the receptionist — who was, in fact, extremely kind and helpful — had also been more experienced, would she have understood immediately what was going on?

Perhaps we were both suffering from “a little bit of learning”, as so neatly described by Alexander Pope.

By the way, Pope’s poem references the sacred spring in Pieria, in ancient Macedonia. Maybe somebody who is both artist and scientist could be called a “Pierian”. You could look it up. 🙂

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying J.J. Abrams’ “reboot” of Star Trek. A friend and I just saw the second film over the weekend. It was a rollicking, schmaltzy, action packed space opera in the grand tradition, shamelessly pandering to the faithful. We loved it.

The entire premise of this reboot — placing familiar characters in an alternate universe — is deliciously ripe with possibilities. But these things must be handled delicately, or you hurt the spell (to quote one of my favorite movie characters).

There are definite constraints that must be respected. These constraints are neither physical nor technological — they are constraints of character. There is a certain mix of friendships, rivalries, conflicts and familial ties that constitute the core reality of any fiercely loved fictional place, be it Tara or Tardis, Pemberley or Sunnydale, Shire or Diagon Alley.

You can mess with plot and possibility all you want, and audiences will go there with you. But if you screw up the essential relationships, then no matter how blithely you throw around words like “alternate” or “reboot”, those audiences will turn on you in an instant.

I am happy to report that J.J. Abrams and company do not screw it up.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments on yesterday’s post. As you may have suspected, my argument yesterday was a bit of a red herring. After all, living in Manhattan, I can see quite plainly that the non-drivers all around me do not, as a rule, become helpless alcoholics.

On the other hand, every Friday and Saturday evening, MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village is inundated by young women and men from nearby car cultures. They arrive by bus and by train, and they drink. And drink, and drink, and drink some more. There seems to be an entire “tourist” industry built around getting alcohol into these young out of town weekend visitors as fast as possible. At the end of the evening, they stagger back to their bus or train, and hopefully end up safely at home.

So I wonder — perhaps we here in Manhattan don’t tend to drink excessively precisely because it is all so easy. There is no air of forbidden fruit surrounding the consumption of alcohol. It’s always there, with no particular penalty for having that third drink. So we just don’t bother having that third drink.

Rob’s comment about legalizing marijuana resonates in more ways than one. After all, if a vice is legal and easily available, then there is no psychological — or theatrical — benefit to running out and abusing it.

I happen to live in one of the relatively few places in the U.S. where you really don’t need a car. In fact, you don’t even need to know how to drive. Manhattanites tend to walk a lot, and for those places too far to walk, there is generally a convenient subway or bus at any hour of the day or night.

But most of America depends the automobile to get around. This is a source of one of the great contradictions of life in the U.S.A. You see, Americans like to drink, yet it is illegal in most places to get drunk and then try to drive home. The laws that limit alcohol consumption for drivers exist for a good reason: Automobile related deaths are a large and tragic statistic that our society continually struggles with.

In recent years Google has been funding an initiative that first came out of a DARPA initiative: To create an automobile that can drive itself. Technical progress has been remarkable, and some very smart people are predicting that within the next ten years our nation will switch over completely to self-driving automobiles.

This will immediately remove one of the terrors of our streets and highways — the death toll from drunk drivers. You would think that this is a good thing, right?

Well, hold on a minute. As soon as your car can take you home in whatever state of intoxication you find ourself, there will be no reason for people to hold back. You will be able to get as sloshed as you want, and you will still arrive home safely.

All across America, there may be millions of citizens who, whenever they go out for the evening, are currently making sure to keep their drinking in check — just because there is otherwise no legal and safe way to get back home.

But if you can drink to your heart’s content and still end up safe in your bed at the end of the night, many of those people will no longer have the same incentive to hold back. The total amount of drinking might increase by quite a bit.

And some people who, as a practical matter, are currently holding it together, might tip over to become full fledged alcoholics. The ravages of chronic alcohol abuse might cause those people to die sooner.

So it is conceivable — depending on the numbers — that self-driving cars might end up lowering average life expectancy in our country.

That would be sad.

I was supposed to take a train this morning from Boston South Station to Manhattan. Which I was really looking forward to, because I love riding on trains.

Alas, I received an email saying that train service between Boston and NY had been cancelled, and suggesting that I find an alternate mode of transport. After much patient waiting, I got an actual AMTRAK operator on the line, who cheerfully refunded the cost of my ticket, but all she could tell me was that there was a problem with the tracks somewhere in Connecticut.

I looked around for alternatives, and all that was available was the Chinatown bus — so called because in NY City it deposits you in Chinatown. Did I mention I hate taking the bus? Well, I don’t like riding buses, but I especially dislike the Chinatown bus. You are essentially crammed into a tin can for four and a half hours.

This is in contrast to the glorious train, where you can get up, walk around, go to the Cafe car to get a snack, and in general have a nice relaxing time between your point of origin and your point of destination.

The entire bus ride, I was bemoaning my fate. Oh, why oh why couldn’t I have taken the train?

It was only after arriving in NY City that I heard the news: The “problem with the tracks” was two MetroNorth trains crashing into each other. About sixty people were injured — some of them critically.

I guess one takeaway here is that you should count your blessings.

People who study how games are designed and played speak of the “magic circle”. They are referring to the safe place where a game is played. In the universe of the game, you and your friend might be pummeling each other in a fist fight, or sending opposing armies into battle, but you are doing it inside the magic circle — both players understand that none of this is real.

There is something similar at work when somebody tells you a story. You might be hearing the most tragic story in the world, yet you are able to enjoy the story without feeling fearful or nervous. You are safely inside the magic circle of fictional narrative.

I wonder whether it’s like that for education: Great teachers build a magic circle, within which students feel relaxed and safe and comfortable, and more receptive to new ideas and ways of thinking. Inside this magic circle — if it is properly constructed — learning flourishes.

I attended a discussion panel this evening at the National Academy of Sciences on the topic of how artists and scientists can work together.

Somebody asked “Should artists who want to work with scientists be required to be up on the latest technology?”

I immediately texted my colleague, who was sitting on the other side of the room, to say “Should scientists who want to work with artists be required to be able to quote Clement Greenberg?”

My colleague texted back the deeper point, identifying neatly what had really been bothering me (and him) about the entire discussion: “It’s interesting,” he wrote, “how the idea of having the artist and scientist in one body comes up so rarely in these things.”

I texted him back bemoaning the fact that there is no good word to describe such a person.

A few minutes later, a woman in the audience got up to the mike to speak about her research. She introduced herself as an “artist/scientist”.

Today I was at a meeting where people with various kinds of expertise were gathered around a table to help figure out how we can use to use technology to better respond to disasters in cities.

We were discussing possible scenarios, and somebody suggested Hurricane Sandy. I said I was worried that this was too specific. “There are many different ways,” I said, “that something can put a big foot down on the city.”

Somehow this phrase stuck, and for the rest of the meeting people used the phrase “big foot disasters”.

In retrospect I realize that on some level I must have been thinking about Godzilla, although I didn’t realize it at the time. “Big foot disaster” is an oddly apt term, because it gets at the combination of insult and injury to a city that has been hit by any kind of assault just too big to shrug off.

Now all of these experts may very well continue to use that phrase. It might become part of the lexicon. I think I should be proud, but I’m not entirely sure.

I heard the most wonderful story today, from a colleague who works for a software company that helps optimize work flow.

He was telling us about this one time his company had developed a computer program to help a municipal power utility find the best route for its maintenance trucks. The general idea is that when a work crew goes out on the job, repairing and upgrading things around the city, choosing the optimal route through heavy traffic can save hours — and time is money.

One day he was showing the route his company’s software had calculated to the client’s road crew, when the foreman pointed at the screen and asked “Why does it say to turn left here? It’s a lot faster if we go right.”

He was surprised by the question. “You can’t go that way — it’s a one way street.”

He was even more surprised when they all started laughing. “Why is that funny?” he asked.

“You don’t get it,” the foreman explained, still laughing. “We’re the guys with the orange cones.”