Ken's Blog

Pi — a disk’s circumference, divided by diameter —
Quite likely, said Vi Hart, in iambic pentameter,
Contains all Shakespeare’s works. Now, just to be formal,
This simply means that Pi is perfectly normal.
If so, within its digits, in every variation,
We’d find the whole of Hamlet, in the speech of any nation.
She showed the prince of Denmark as a dog, which is revealing.
Well OK, a little strange, but certainly appealing.
Just one thing about “Dog Hamlet” has been gnawing at my brain:
I wish Vi’s canine hero had been played by a Great Dane.

Today, as some of you know, is PI Day — the day of the year, March 14, when the calendar reaches the digit representation of PI (3.14159…).

In yesterday’s post I mentioned Vi Hart. And today I am pleased to refer to Vi’s yearly PI Day offering — a disquisition on the question of whether PI is a “normal” number — that is, a number which contains every possible string of digits (and therefore not only every literary work ever written but that ever could be written).

I actually wrote on this topic four years ago, in my post All the songs ever written, and one song. But Vi has gone further, by creating a lovely philosophical video essay in which a certain Danish canine asks some deep existential questions, entitled Are Shakespeare’s Plays Encoded within Pi?.

The other day I was describing my little novel visualizing tool to a colleague, and I told him that, like the old game Asteroids, it’s on the surface of a torus. That is, in world that is topologically equivalent to a donut. Or, if you are from New York, a bagel.

In Asteroids, when something goes off the right side of the screen, it reappears on the left side. And when something goes off the top edge of the screen, it reappears from the bottom edge. In other words, the screen wraps both ways.

“Doesn’t that mean it’s on the surface of a sphere?” he said.

I needed a really easy way to explain that it couldn’t be on a sphere, so I came up with this: “If you start in the middle of the screen and draw a horizontal line across the screen, you get a loop, because the left and the right ends of the line connect. Also, if you start at that same point in the middle of the screen and draw a vertical line from top to bottom, you get another loop, because the top and bottom ends of that line also connect.

So far so good. Then I said “the two lines only cross once (at that starting point in the middle of the screen). If Asteroids were on a sphere, the two lines would have to cross twice.”

My colleague (who is very quick) got the point immediately.

The next day I was describing this little exchange to Vi Hart, who said to me “Yes, that’s actually the definition of a torus.”

Huh. When you think about it, that makes a lot of sense.

They have houses here
So much room!! Yet the ocean
Is on the wrong side

In a “denial of service” attack, a web site is taken down by flooding it with requests (generally by software robots that are pretending to be people) until the site crashes from overload.

I was at lunch today with a group of friends, and most of us ordered tea. It came up in conversation that tea is the most expensive item to serve in a restaurant, in terms of time/effort of the server per dollar collected from the customer (there are people who actually study these things).

And it occurred to me that if you really hated a restaurant, and wanted to take it down, you could just get all your friends to go there and order nothing but tea. Eventually, the restaurant would be overwhelmed by the need to serve all those individual slices of lemon, servings of cream, cups, saucers, spoons and sugar containers, and (if it’s an upscale place) little pots of tea and freshly steeped tea leaves.

I’m not saying anybody should ever do such a thing. My heart goes out to poor overworked restaurant employees everywhere just thinking about such a thing. But I wonder — would it be illegal? Or perhaps more interestingly, would such an act ever be ethically justifiable? More broadly, is a DoS attack purely an on-line phenomenon, or are there in fact real-world examples of pre-internet denial of service attacks?

Over dinner recently, a friend told me about someone he works with who is very rational and intelligent, but happens to be highly religious. “It’s odd,” he said, “she is such a logical person, and yet when we were all going out one friday evening, she said she couldn’t join us, because she couldn’t travel after sundown on the sabbath. When I asked her why, she replied that is just the way she does things.”

I told him that all of us have rituals we cannot logically explain, that we do just because that is the way we do things. When he disagreed, I gave him an example.

“Suppose,” I said, “I were to pick up your fork right now off your plate and eat your food. Wouldn’t that be breaking an unspoken taboo with no logical basis?”

“That would be unsanitary,” he replied.

“You know I don’t have a cold,” I said. “After all, a little while ago you and I tasted some wine from the same glass, and you didn’t even think about it.”

At that point he agreed. We are all bound by many little rituals and social constraints that we cannot logically justify, yet which form the very fabric of our social interactions.

I reached into my pocket after lunch today to grab my little case of dental floss. Looking down at my hand, I realized I had actually pulled out my cell phone.

Which got me thinking. Why do we combine some functions into a single pocket-sized box, but not others? We now have one device that handles phone conversations, text messaging, email, and surfing the web to find the nearest restaurant.

Why don’t we have a phone that helps you floss your teeth? Is this merely due to a limitation of technology, or is there some unconscious cultural resistance to taking that final step, one last valiant stand against putting every aspect of our existence into a single miniaturized plastic case?

I have spent most of this past week at the Game Developer’s Conference, and have realized that the main cultural topic of conversation here is “Dammit, we are not movies, we are games. We are, in our own right, a legitimate part of the means of cultural production!” All this accompanied by much indignity and metaphorical foot stamping.

Which is all fine, I guess. But it leave me wondering why such defensiveness is necessary. After all, people in the movie biz don’t spend a lot of time arguing that movies are not computer games.

The only thing I can conclude, if I can make an analogy, is that computer games are to movies more or less what Canada is to the United States.

As I write this, I am attending a talk by Sid Meier, the creator of the game “Civilization”, who is discussing his creative process. He keeps going back to the phrase “find the fun”, as a guiding principle.

I find myself thinking about Robert Sherman, who co-wrote many of the greatest Disney songs with his brother Richard, including the songs in “Mary Poppins”. In particular, I’m thinking of the opening lyrics to “A Spoonful of Sugar”:

In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun.
You find the fun and Snap!
The job’s a game.

Sadly, Robert Sherman passed away earlier this week. Ever since I was a child, his song lyrics have had a special place in my heart. There is a bright cheerfulness to the songs of the Sherman brothers, and yet there is also often a deep undercurrent of sadness running just below their surface, almost a feeling of dancing on the abyss. For example, “Chim Chim Cher-ee”, with its minor key and surprisingly mysterious lyrics:

Winds from the east
Mist coming in
Like something was brewing, about to begin
Can’t put me finger on what lies in store
But I feel what’s to happen, all happened before

seems to suggest an old dark magic just out of frame. And the haunting “Feed the Birds” makes me feel like crying every time I hear it.

In a way Robert Sherman’s work is like that of J.D. Salinger. It’s all bright shiny surfaces and cleverness, yet with a terrible sadness lying just beneath our view, such as the inner struggle of the soldier in Salinger’s story “For Esme, with Love and Squalor”, and the haunting tragedy of Seymour Glass.

As it happens, these two well known wordsmiths, painters of dazzling verbal pictures, had something very specific in common. They were both among the very first Allied soldiers to enter the Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II, suddenly confronted by a nightmare for which they were completely unprepared.

We cannot know in full measure the demons that must have haunted Salinger or Sherman in the wake of such an experience. But it’s not surprising that an individual with the soul of a poet, when faced such devastating horror, will do everything he can to beat back the darkness, devoting his talent to trying, heroically, to find the fun.