Month: November 2024

Today is the birthday of Jonathan Swift (b. 1667), Mark Twain (b. 1835), Alan Sherman (b. 1924) and Woody Allen (b. 1935). What is it about November 30 that brings out the best in satire?

I know that Jean-Paul Sartre never actually said “To do is to be.” That attribution is found within a piece of graffiti described in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1982 novel Deadeye Dick.

That particular grafitto has a long and illustrious history. It went through many stages of evolution over time, and has a fascinating provenance.

But that’s not the topic of today’s post. Instead, I would like to focus on those actual five words “To do is to be.”

Personally, I find that life seems to have more meaning for me when I am engaged in what feels like a productive creative task. If I am making something, and I believe that it is new and worthwhile, then everything makes sense.

When I am not doing that, it feels as though I am mainly treading water. I can only enjoy things passively for so long. Then at some point I just have to create something.

I can’t say for sure that this is a healthy way to live. But it sure is productive.

I’ve always wondered about the nature of Thanksgiving. There is indeed something wonderful about a holiday that millions of people can share in, regardless of their religion or belief system.

Yet the rather dark and complicated history of Thanksgiving aside — how it began depends very much on who you ask — I can’t quite figure out the exact nature of the current holiday. I mean, that is, beyond the fact that people eat a big meal together on a Thursday.

Ostensibly Thanksgiving is a secular holiday, because ostensibly we are a secular nation. But if it is a secular holiday, then who exactly are we giving thanks to?

Happy erev Thanksgiving everyone!

Yesterday somebody told me that there are only three essential requirements for a cult: Money, Men and Manipulation.

My first thought was that this was a wonderful use of alliteration. In how many other ways, I wondered, could the same thought be expressed?

Let’s start with the letter A. The three essential requirements then become Assets, Assholes and Appropriation.

Moving up through the alphabet, the three requirements are Bounty, Bros and Banditry.

We then get to Cash, Cads and Corruption. Followed closely by Dinero, Dudes and Defrauding.

It’s a fun game to play. How many letters of the alphabet can you use to express the same idea?

Maybe something to try in your church group.

About 1% of whiskey or brandy evaporates in its wooden barrel over time. This lost amount is called the “angel’s share”, out of the folkloric idea that angels are taking their share of the spirit.

In American politics today we are seeing something vaguely similar, although of a different spirit entirely. The creep has been making one ghastly and offensive choice after another for his cabinet, mainly opting for slightly nutty incompetents to serve as obedient acolytes.

But being an experienced conman, he knows that a good con requires a good distraction. Especially if you are filling your cabinet with anti-vaxxers, election conspiracists, rapists, climate deniers, Kremlin apologists, COVID deniers, medical quacks and a puppy killer.

How do you distract people from a rogue’s gallery like that one? Rising to the occasion, the creep nominated an actual child molester for Attorney General.

Of course that one didn’t go through.

It was a brilliant move, in its way — letting one evaporate so all the others can remain. All things considered, you could say it was a sort of “demon’s share”.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the creep is evil — that would be giving him too much credit. I doubt the man could add up a grocery list.

But he is very good at the single thing that he is good at — causing chaos and destruction, then lining his pockets and the pockets of his friends in the ensuing confusion.

I guess it’s always good to have a skill.

When you live in NY City, you become acutely aware that millions of people are living in parallel realities. We each have our friends, our co-workers, the people at the local deli, and a few other people that we interact with. Everyone else becomes a sort of blurred background.

Protocol on the street or in the subway dictates that we politely ignore all of those strangers around us. We do our best to stay out of their way, and if all goes well they do the same.

On a psychological level, it is as though multiple universes are co-existing in the same space, physically intertwined, yet emotionally disconnected. Every once in a while an encounter with a stranger pierces that veil, but for the most part it remains intact.

I wonder what it would be like if we all actually saw each other — I mean really saw each other. Or is such a thing simply outside the capability of a society of humans?

100 years ago today, the New York Times reported Edwin Hubble’s definitive demonstration that Andromeda is a separate galaxy. And in that moment, millions of people began to understand that the Universe was vastly larger than had been generally believed.

Hubble’s observations were made possible by the pioneering innovations of Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She was the first person to demonstrate a “standard candle” — an astronomical object with a known intrinsic brightness. That discovery finally let astronomers calculate how far extremely distant objects are from Earth.

I love the term “standard candle”. Once you wrap your head around its significance, there are so many other ways that this idea could be applied.

With the right standard candle, we can illuminate the Universe.

I spent a good part of my early adolescence pondering the lyrics to the songs of King Crimson. Analyzing them, listening to those albums over and over, searching for hidden meanings, trying to picture the rich worlds that they evoked.

When I was twelve, the lyrics by Peter Sinfield that spoke to me most deeply were the ones that filled me with wonder, and spoke of untold possibilities:

The rusted chains of prison moons
Are shattered by the sun
I walk a road, horizons change
The tournament’s begun
The purple piper plays his tune
The choir softly sing
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue
For the court of the crimson king

Now I find myself connecting more with the lyrics that speak to our own reality. Is the lyric below, from 1969, a better description of our fears of A.I. or our worries about the recent election?

Knowledge is a deadly friend
If no one sets the rules
The fate of all mankind I see
Is in the hands of fools

Peter Sinfield passed away yesterday at the age of 80. He will be missed, but his words will live on.

At NYU we used to have something called a disclosure. When you came up with an invention, you wrote up a document to tell the folks at NYU about it, so that you could collectively figure out whether it was something that should be patented.

Today somebody at NYU pointed out that we don’t need to do that anymore. There is now an automated system. If you publish a research paper, you can just drag that into a form on your screen, and a disclosure is automatically generated.

I found this to be completely marvelous, but I want more. I told the people I was with that I’m waiting for this process to be fully complete.

When I drag my research paper into that form, I would like the computer to also do a market analysis for me, interview potential customers, build a working prototype, and develop that prototype into a finished product that generates revenue.

Not only will everyone make money, but I can also proudly take credit for the result. After all, I’m the one who dragged that research paper into that form on my screen.