Author: admin

I have only recently come to realize that I have had the same song running somewhere in the back of my head since at least October. Not the entire song, end to end, only the really catchy bits. It’s funny that I am just now consciously realizing this, after so much time. I supposed this is not the kind of thing one notices right away. Songs that run in the back of your head tend to the subliminal.

In my case the song is “Sugar Water” by Cibo Matto. I have no idea why this particular song has taken such a place of honor in my brain, rather than other catchy songs like “Bad Romance”, or “Rehab”, or even the ever-popular “It’s a Small World” (this may be the first time those three songs have ever been mentioned together in one sentence).

But no, it’s “Sugar Water” all the way. I realize now that the song was playing in my head the entire time I was co-writing “Sun and Moon”. Certainly the song factored into the plot. For example, the lyric “A woman in the moon is singing to the earth” essentially plays out as a major story point in the novel.

Perhaps this was all triggered in September when I rewatched the episode “When she was bad” that kicks off the second season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. The scene in which this song was played is certainly unforgettable. But I’m not convinced that’s it.

No, I think it’s just that a song is a sort of half-wild creature which comes and visits you for a while. Like a stray black cat that wanders into your house one day. You understand that this is a visitor, and you make sure to feed it and set out a bowl of milk at night. Little by little you become used to it, curled up on a chair or purring contentedly in your lap.

Until one day you realize that it has gone.

Her hand was still clutching what remained of the umbrella,
Now all broken metal spines tangled with red vinyl, without sense nor form.
The picture lay on the floor, where it had fallen, still in its frame.
A single crack ran diagonally through the glass, but that was enough.
She doubted she would ever know the whole truth.

And that was just as well.

There were dreams in this room, that once were young.
The rose on the mantel was dry with age yet beautiful, perfectly formed.
Droplets of rain fell upon the white coverlet they’d picked out together.
She reached down to pick up the picture, now yellowed with age.
The crack ran right through his right eye.

How perfect, she thought.

We are all dying inside, she mused, perhaps that is the problem.
She turned the picture in her hands and he seemed to wink.
A trick of the light no doubt, but still she saw her hand was shaking.
There are many kinds of storm, and some winds blow colder than others.
She found herself wondering when their cold wind had started.

Was it before or after the gift of the rose?

If everything goes well, you get about 30,000 days altogether. A pretty generous helping, but not unlimited. If you start in the morning, you can easily count through all the days of your life by the time you retire that night. Although admittedly that would be a silly way to spend a day. As I said, the supply is not unlimited.

Sartre once said “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us” (well, actually, he said it in french). As maxims go, this is not only quite evidently true, but also rather useful, in a prescriptive way. You see, every single one of us (you know who you are) has had the experience, at some point in our adult lives, of dealing with insult or injustice by turning our anger inward. Roughly the equivalent of a child who says: “I’m going to hold my breath until I get my way.” With one crucial difference: We know, in the adult world, that holding our breath will not result in our getting our way.

Back to Sartre and that finite supply of days. What old Jean-Paul was telling us is that the clock is ticking, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The knowledge that one day our very existence will dissolve into utter nothingness is an excellent structuring device, if you see what I mean. And a little structure never hurt anybody.

Bad things happen to you. Events can screw you over, and people you love can get hurt, or decide to stop loving you back. Or sometimes they die. It’s perfectly natural to want to hold your breath until the Universe realizes it is being terribly unfair and agrees to mend its ways. Except for the inconvenient fact that the Universe could care less whether you happen to be breathing. Darn.

Which is where Sartre comes in. Buddhism says roughtly the same thing in a different way, as do many other philosophies. But Sartre doesn’t dress it up in piety. He just lays the cards on the table for you. “Look,” he is saying (I’m interpolating here, bear with me), “You want to be an idiot, fine, be an idiot. But every day you waste feeling angry and hurt because of what was done to you, that’s one day less you get to enjoy the dazzling miracle of one of these 30,000 days.

“That may seem fine to you now, while you’re sitting there holding your breath and feeling miserable and repeating ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair‘ until you’ve managed to drive everyone out of the room. But one day, toward the end of your life, you’re going to think back on how many days you wasted doing that. And then oh boy are you going to feel stupid.”

And that, my friends, was Jean-Paul Sartre’s take on how to be free. I know he didn’t say it exactly like that, but I’m pretty sure that’s more or less what he meant.

A century is not a very long time.

Just enough time for a very few true geniuses to grace this world with their all too brief light. One such genius was born a hundred years ago today.

Wherever you are Mr. Reinhardt, I know I speak for many around the world in wishing you a very happy birthday, and in thanking you for the gift of your music.

There will never be another like you.

As of today, in a landmark 5-4 ruling by our Supreme Court, corporations have the right, under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to spend an unlimited amount of money on ads to support a candidate for office. Essentially, I am free to pay my $50 or $100 to support my candidate, while Citigroup or Exxon Mobil are free to spend their $500,000,000 on the opposing candidate.

For a long time now, human citizens have had an unfair advantage over these poor corporate entities. But this new ruling levels the playing field, permitting a gargantuan money-making machine trying to support its need for profit to compete fairly with individuals who push all sorts of personal and selfish agendas, like a reasonable education for their kids, air that doesn’t eat into everyone’s lungs, and water that’s clean enough not to lower children’s IQ scores by ten or twenty points.

Some people are saying that these selfish individual citizens should continue to lord it over hapless behemoths like Wal-Mart and Bank of America. But in a stirring example of judicial activism at work (some people, like my friend Troy, don’t like judicial activism, but what can you do?) the High Court’s majority has taken power back from such annoying individuals, and given it to giant synthetically constructed entities, where it belongs.

After all, isn’t it a little silly in the twenty first century to think that our elected leaders should be beholden only to those interests that actually reside in our own country? Multinational corporations have needs too, including the needs of their shareholders in places like Romania and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

If the legitimate needs of those shareholders are not being adequately addressed by a candidate for U.S. Senate or, say, the U.S. Presidency, clearly it’s only fair to give that corporation the opportunity to spend a few billion dollars to flood our TVs and other media with non-stop highly polished advertisements featuring beloved actors and top directing talent, so they can state their case. What candidate in his right mind would dare resist such a juggernaut of First Amendment expression at its finest?

Yet one thing continues to confuse me, as our society marches forward into the future, where a corporation can finally be treated under the law like any other citizen. And that is the question of Habeas Corpus — or, as it should more properly be called from now on, Habeas Corporus.

In order to properly discuss this issue, we probably need some new language to distinguish these new kinds of citizens. I propose that we henceforth refer to them as “paper people”. I mean, under the first amendment they are real people, legally, just like you and I, only they are constructed of paper, rather than meat.

And just as logically, we should collectively refer to the older variety of persons — the kind that eat and sweat and perform various other unsightly bodily functions — as “meat people”.

Back to Habeas Corporus. Suppose (to take a random example), Wal-Mart has a little too much to drink one night (who hasn’t been there, right?) and ends up getting thrown in jail. So now you have a major corporation (sorry – a paper person) forced to spend the night locked in some local hoosegow with drifters, lowlifes and other assorted meat people. Who is going to protect Wal-Mart’s rights? Where is the Habeas Corporus?

There is so much uncharted territory here. Can the R.J. Reynolds Corporation be imprisoned for smoking indoors? If AT&T gets put in jail, is it entitled to a phone call? And just how many days in the slammer should General Motors get for driving without a license?

There’s just one thing I still can’t figure out — not to put too fine a point on it, or in any way denigrate a corporate citizen’s right to be treated like any other free individual in this great nation of ours. How do you fit a corporation in a jail cell?

The focus yesterday was on differences between how grownups and kids think.

Which may be why today I had a vivid flashback to my own childhood.

The flashback was prompted by hearing an explanation of the term “angel’s share”. It seems that when wine or liquor is aged in oaken barrels, some proportion of the alcohol seeps through the wood and evaporates into the air. The portion thus lost is known as the “angel’s share”, in hopes that it is being enjoyed by the guardian angels who, with any luck, are watching fondly over the product.

When I heard this I was immediately transported back to a time when I was about six years old, on a day I was taking a walk with my dad. At that age I was full of questions about anything and everything. Day after day, from morning till night, I would lob these wide ranging queries out to the world in a relentless and non-stop barrage. All these years later I still seem to be just as full of questions, but over time I’ve learned how to sometimes keep my mouth shut (alas, not always).

On this particular day I was asking my dad about donuts. When we eat a donut, I wanted to know, what happens to the hole?

My dad had a wonderful answer: “The ghosts eat them.”

I found this explanation to be deeply satisfying. For years afterward, I would feel virtuous every time I ate a donut. I was not merely consuming a delicious sugary fried snack food (or so I would tell myself as I proceeded to polish off an entire box of Entenmann’s chocolate covered donuts in one sitting). With every box, I was feeding an entire family of hungry ghosts.

One of the problems on the 6th grade NY State math exam looks like this:

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What is the value of the expression below when r = 2 ?

          9 – 3r

A   0

B   3

C   6

D   12

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My first thought upon reading this was, more or less: “Nine minus six equals three”. So I looked at the four choices to see where the 3 was (in this case, next to B).

But then, afterward, I realized that what had gone through my mind was really more like this:

(1) Because I had just read `r = 2′, the `3r‘ looked to me just like a `6’. I know it doesn’t say `6′ — it says `3r‘ — but I saw a `6′.

(2) Because I saw something that looked to me like `9 – 6′, I just did the subtraction.

I think the take-away here was that I looked for a way to get rid of the variable r as fast as I could. In this case it happened so fast that it was done before I was consciously aware of what was going on. Something deep in my mind was apparently saying: “Danger, variable encountered! Must be eliminated!”

This reminds me of what we do all the time with natural language — something most people encounter far more often than they encounter algebraic expressions. When somebody says to us: “Wear that tie I like,” — and we happen to know that they really like the pink tie — we might actually end up thinking that they had said: “Wear the pink tie.”

In other words, we substitute the variable right away, as fast as we can, going from the abstract description (“that tie I like”) to the concrete result (“the pink tie”). Except in real life, with real objects, we make these sorts of substitutions so easily that we generally don’t even notice that we’re doing it.

Perhaps mathematical reasoning starts with something as simple as learning to repurpose the ways of thinking we all use for natural language (which is an innate ability), so we can apply those ways of thinking to numbers and variables.

Some colleagues and I have been going over the standard NY State 6th grade math tests, as part of our process at the Games for Learning Institute of trying to understand how to help kids learn this stuff. I hasten to add that learning to do well on these standardized tests is definitely not the same as learning math.

In general such tests aim at only the lowest semantic level, and doing well on them requires mastery of concepts that are only barely removed from plugging in a formula. This is certainly not the sort of generative and multi-faceted view you want kids to have if you expect them even to glimpse the bracing beauty, joyful delight and sheer heart-stopping wonder of the actual mathematical universe.

Nonetheless, I was fascinated by my own process of reading these questions and answering them while simultaneously trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on in my mind. What sorts of concepts did I bring to bear upon reading a problem? When did I solve a problem by transforming it into a different one? How much energy did I spend on solving the underlying problem itself, as opposed to understanding the wording of the problem?

One of the difficulties in addressing these questions is that for most problems the answer just seemed to come to me, all at once. Because I’m not actually still a sixth grader, I ended up going through the steps and reaching a result faster than I could catch what those steps were, so the process often seemed instantaneous (as I suspect it would be to most of the people reading this).

But with a concerted effort I was sometimes able to slow the process down and watch what was going on in my head — a little like watching a film in slow motion. Some of what I observed was very interesting, and some was downright surprising. Over the next days I will try to share a bit what I saw.

The recent bizarre diatribe by Pat Robertson, right after the recent earthquake in Haiti, is generally described merely as “thoughtless”, or “in bad taste”, or “the ramblings of an old man.” But I think there is something much more specific going on here. Read for yourself what the man said:

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got togethter and swore a pact to the Devil. They said we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so the devil said Ok its a deal, and they kicked the French out, the Haitians revolted and got themselvers free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor.”

Context is everything. And part of the context here is that Haiti is the only nation in history that was ever formed as the result of a successful military revolt of black slaves against a white colonial power. This “pact with the devil” myth is an old story. By repeating it now, Robertson is fulfilling a familiar role. Jews know this role all too well from their long history with the myths of the “Blood Libel”.

In the case of the Jews, the essence of the myth is that Jews kill Christian children for some sort of bizarre secret ritual purpose. Of course belief in such myths would give indignant Christians license to deny rights to Jews, or even to kill them outright.

In the case of blacks, the essence is even more insidious. The myth Robertson is repeating essentially says “Those black people could not possibly have won a war against us white people. Since they did, it must have been the devil who actually won the war for them.”

Notice how particularly, pointedly ugly this is. He is very specifically using an occasion of great tragedy to assert a claim that blacks are inferior to whites. Having done this, he is effectively casting any aid or help for Haiti not as a hand reaching across from one nation to another, but rather as a gesture from a superior people to an inferior people.

It is difficult even to talk about something like this. The sheer horror of contemplating minds that can spin this kind of filth is right at the edge of what any sane and reasonable human being can take in.

But it is important, when this kind of naked hatred (which so often disguises itself in one sort of sanctimony or another) shows its true self out in the open, that we look at it straight on, no matter how disgusted we may be.

We owe it not just to the people of Haiti, but to ourselves, to understand the nature of hate agendas, and the ways that those agendas disguise themselves, so that we can be effective in counteracting them. Don’t kid yourself that you are safe from this sort of thing. Sooner or later, no matter who you are or where you live, the people who spread these kinds of monstrous ideas of hate will come after you and your own children.

Suppose I would like to drop into my web calendar the up-to-date price of an AMTRAK train ticket from New York to Boston on February 17 at 5pm.

That sure sounds easy enough, but it’s surprising how hard it is to implement. You can’t just point to some page on AMTRAK’s website. The only way to find the price of a ticket on-line is to enter your start/destination and time/date into a web form. Then AMTRAK then crunches that data for you and generates a page that shows you the current ticket price.

There is nothing in the address field of that results page to indicate which route or date you’d asked for. That’s all done on AMTRAK’s server — the page you end up looking at is custom made for you by that server, on the fly.

I was talking today with Murphy Stein — a colleague and Ph.D. student here at NYU — and we came to the conclusion that it might be possible to solve this problem with a macro capability. In other words, you go through your usual process of entering the data into the web form, but you tell your browser to track what you’re doing, and it stores (somewhere) all the steps you just went through. It also lets you highlight the price on the results page, and it remembers where you highlighted.

Later, your browser periodically goes on a little web crawl onto AMTRAK’s site, entering the same values that you did into AMTRAK’s on-line web form, and then “clicking” on the same “GO!” button that you’d clicked on. Your browser then looks at the place on the results page that corresponds to the number you had highlighted. Unless things go horribly wrong, there will indeed be a number there (although it won’t be the same number if prices have gone up).

Every time you look at your web calendar, you will see an up-to-date price (how up-to-date depends on how often your browser goes crawling for updates).

None of this is sure-fire. For one thing, we are relying on AMTRAK to not change their on-line query form. For another thing, we are relying on your browser being able to find the price on the updated results page, working just from the location of the price you’d originally highlighted. That can turn out to be tricky if AMTRAK hasn’t designed their page sensibly.

Also, of course, AMTRAK might become unhappy if its customers’ browsers keep revisiting its site on their own every hour or so. At some point all of those repeat cyber-visits will start to overload company web servers.

So maybe none of this is practical. But it’s a nice thing to think about — being able to create a live and up-to-date link from anywhere to anywhere else on the web.