Ken's Blog

A friend and I were discussing the phenomenon whereby people are often more attracted to people who are not as attracted back. I told my friend about the great line by Groucho Marx: “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member” (invoked so memorably by Woody Allen in Annie Hall).

My friend pointed out that this actually makes sense. If some club (euphemistically speaking) is aggressively courting you, then (1) you still don’t know what it’s really like being a member of the club, and (2) you realize the club doesn’t really know who you are either. So much premature enthusiasm can come off as a little nuts.

Which made me realize that feeling wary of strangers who seem to be very into us, rather than being a dysfunctional response, is actually sensible. We all know that sexual attraction has a large instinctive component. On some level, our genetic code is really using us to propagate itself, and our conscious selves are mostly along for the ride (and to be sure, it can be a very exciting ride).

Which means that if somebody is aggressively pursuing you before you think they have any real sense of who you are, then there is a good chance it’s just the instinct talking. And that does not bode well for the long term prospects of a relationship.

Ah, the wisdom of Groucho! And of my friend. 🙂

On the puzzle page of the New York Times, in addition to the daily crossword, are a 4×4 and a 6×6 KenKen puzzle. The 4×4 is simple enough that to make it interesting I do it in my head, and then write down the answers in order (the top row left to right, then the second row, etc).

It has occurred to me that this would make a diabolical secret code to use in a spy novel. Spy number one picks up the daily paper, scans the puzzle page, and then encrypts that day’s sensitive message with some substitution code that uses the sequence 1,3,2,4 or 3,2,4,1 as its encryption key, or whatever permutation of 1,2,3,4 forms the top row of that day’s KenKen.

Spy number two just needs to look at the daily paper, find the same key, and decode the message. Since the code would change every day, nobody else would be able to figure out the coding scheme just by looking at the daily messages that passed between the two intrepid spies.

There’s nothing new about the basic idea. To form a secure code, you and I just need to settle on any key that is known to both you and me, but not to anybody else. There are well-known mathematical techniques to create secure codes, such as PGP encryption, but they generally require access to a computer. There is something charming, in an old-fashioned way, about being able to create a secure message without computation.

So I started pondering, given that you and I both get the daily paper, how we might use the paper as a source for encrypting and decrypting messages, without anybody else being able to figure out our code. We could, for example, agree to use the first line of the second article in the Sports pages.

Yet in this age of search engines, just about any rule that simple could be cracked by a dedicated computer hacker with access to the daily newspaper. Could we charmingly old-fashioned spies, with our copy of the Times rolled up under the arm of our gray-tweed suit, figure out a clever way to use the daily paper as a shared key, without our code being cracked by those young whippersnappers with their infernal computing machines?

In yesterday’s New York Times, an article entitled “A new era of gunboat diplomacy” discussed how various nations of the earth (notably the U.S. and China) have been angling for control of seas that contain oil deposits, in many cases beefing up their naval capacity. Several paragraphs into the article I came across the following little tidbit:

“Several powers, including Russia, Canada and the United States, are eagerly circling the Arctic, where melting polar ice is opening up new shipping routes and the tantalizing possibility of vast oil and gas deposits beneath.”

So there you have it: Global warming causes melting of the Earth’s ice caps, thereby creating new opportunities to extract and burn more oil, and therefore to accelerate global warming.

Isn’t that special?

There is an alarming tendency for pop cultural references to double back on themselves, reversing cause and effect. This is understandable. Pop culture is, by nature, a vulturous beast, consuming gobfuls of source material in its insatiably cavernous maw, as it digests anything and everything in its massive gelatinous path to a soft syrupy pulp.

Which sometimes results in an odd sort of reverse peristalsis. The very food upon which pop culture feeds becomes regurgitated and turned upside down. When this happens, people can become confused.

Case in point: In the era when “Star Trek, the Next Generation” was on the air, that intrepid Starship captain Jean-Luc Picard was the man of the moment. I remember students, upon first encountering the films of Jean-Luc Goddard, being amused that this french filmmaker had the same first name as the captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Of course they had it all backwards. J.J. Abrams and his associates had named Jean-Luc Picard in homage to the great nouvelle vague director, a point that was missed entirely by these students.

Similarly, people who were raised on “Pinky and the Brain” cartoons might be taken aback the first time they see a performance by Orson Welles. “Gee,” they might think, “this guy sounds a lot like that little cartoon mouse.” Same goes for anybody who watched “Ren and Stimpy” as a child, upon first encountering a Peter Lorre movie. Or anybody who sees a film with Lionel Barrymore only after having watched “Underdog”.

People introduced to Bach after hearing the intro to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” might wonder whether this guy ripped off her style. Young people with a bad sense of chronology might wonder whether Dylan Thomas was named for Bob Dylan, or whether Richard Burton, the geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat, was named for Richard Burton, the actor.

And of course, anyone under a certain age, upon visiting a Scottish castle for the first time, will probably be astonished at how faithfully somebody managed to recreate Hogwarts. 🙂

I had a dream last night in which my friend and I happened to be in a sketchy part of town. I was carrying my computer bag under one arm, and under the other arm I had a big box containing the device we had just invented that can be used to predict the future. My state of mind at this point in the dream, as I recall, was one of great excitement and anticipation, as we were just about to try out the device for the first time.

For some reason I needed to put the box down momentarily, and all of a sudden, it was gone! Fortunately my friend spotted a guy running off with the box. We chased the man down, and after a minor confrontation we managed to get the box back.

My feeling of relief at this point in the dream was great, yet short-lived. For in all the confusion I had put down my computer bag, and it too had been stolen away. Whoever had taken it was by now long gone. I thought sadly of all my work still on the computer, work I had not yet had a chance to transfer off, and that was now gone forever.

Then I woke up, and I felt a surge of relief to realize that it had all been a dream My computer bag and its contents were in fact safe and sound.

It took a few moments more for me to remember that the box that told the future was still trapped inside that dream. There was no way now to go back into the dream and rescue it, and I realized with sadness and resignation that my wonderful invention was as lost to me as Eurydice to Orpheus.

The New York Times crossword puzzle today had the black squares forming a giant “11”. I didn’t understand the significance at first, but now I do — it’s a reference to today’s date, November 11, 2011. Today is already quite important here in the U.S., because it is Veteran’s Day. But it is also a date that can be written 11.11.11. And for that distinction it doesn’t matter whether you are in the U.S. (where the month comes first) or Europe (where the day comes before the month).

This is probably the second to last time in your lifetime that you will experience a date with matching day, month and year, the next time being December 12, 2012. Unless, that is, you happen to stay alive long enough to see January 1, 2101.

And this is the only date in any century that can be written using only a single digit.

Once you start looking at the numerical patterns of dates, all sorts of possibilities suggest themselves. For example, if you are in the U.S. (where the month comes first) then November 23, 2058 can be written as 11.23.58, the first six number of the Fibonacci series.

I wonder how many other numerically notable dates there are.

Absolution — The exercise program for priests

Avarice — The preferred snack food for sultry 1950’s movie sirens

Behoove — Motto of the ASPBH (American Society for the Prevention of Barefoot Horses)

Contrite — Greeting cards for that special prisoner in your life

Dictatorial — Instruction manual for budding despots

Eschew — The yummy new candy shaped like everyone’s favorite letter

Gangling — A magazine for the children of Bloods and Crips

Limpid — The singles club for people with no sex drive

Pedantic — A cure for restless foot condition

Penultimate — The perfect gift for the scribe who has everything

Posthaste — For when you need that letter mailed right now

Prowess — The association for transgendered prows

Sibilant — Help for insects with multiple personality disorder

Taciturn — Store that specializes in understated funerary containers

Winsome — Self-help for managing expectations in the casino

I am viewing “Mad Men” on Netflix, spacing the time between episodes, forcing myself not to watch two in a row, trying to drag this out for as long as possible. But I can already see the end in sight, the writing on the wall. I am in the middle of the third season, and the finality of the last episode of that fourth season looms ever more near.

Yes, I understand there is likely to be a fifth season forthcoming, but by then so much will have happened, so much will have changed. This particular moment in my life, the point when I needed this particular show, this exact fix of melancholy reverie, will have passed, and the moment will be gone.

Why can there not be a forgetting pill? I would like to be able to go back to each episode with fresh eyes, to see it once more with its mysteries still intact. If only cursed memory did not leave such a trail of damage, of secrets revealed and endings laid bare, then I could go on forever enjoying the world of Don Draper, and live for all time in a long ago world that somehow, against all reason, never grows old.

If we can have a museum that looks back on bygone interaction technologies, why not museums that look back on other things? For example, well before Freud, people were theorizing about how the mind works. How about a museum of Paleopsychology?

The possibilities are endless. There could be museums for Paleochemistry, with wings devoted to Paleogastronomy and Paleozymurgy (for those museum-goers who want to learn about the history of dining and distilling), museums of Paleogeography and Paleocartography (special bonus: maps of a flat world are easier to exhibit!), of Paleoexobiology and Paleoufology, of Paleocosmetology (just what did those Egyptian women put on their faces?), and a museum of Paleosynectics, so we can learn about how people used to invent things.

Some museums could be a bit meta, like the museums of Paleopaleoanthropology and Paleopaleoichthyology, where you can learn about the histories of how people used to study ancient peoples and ancient fish.

Turning it around a bit, you could see what people used to think the future would be like, by visiting the museum of Paleofuturology (I suspect there already is one of those). And of course there would be the ever popular museum of Paleoerogeny.

It’s possible that people had these sorts of museums in earlier times. To find out, we’d probably want to visit the museum of Paleomuseology. 🙂

Sharon’s comment on yesterday’s post got me wondering what sorts of social interactions have fallen by the wayside as technologies have faded away or have been supplanted.

There was quite likely a rich set of personal interactions in the late nineteenth century around, say, sharing piano sheet music, back when it was a dominant mode of experiencing music. We still have sheet music today, but it is no longer culturally central to the general experience of music.

One could probably fill an entire museum with the interactive media from any given era — the traditions of physical sharing and interpersonal interaction that surrounded traveling, reading, writing, dining, watching a sports game, listening to music, gossiping, gathering for prayer, social drinking, or just the process of getting dressed in the morning.

Some of those bygone ways of being have been represented — often in idealized or altered form — in movies with stories that are set in earlier times. But it’s not clear that the filmmakers got it right (I strongly suspect that the Hollywood version of courtly behavior in the European middle ages is more than a little half-baked). After all, up until the late 19th century we have only drawings, paintings and the written word as our guide — we don’t know how everything moved. It takes serious scholarship to tease out those sorts of details from the available record.

Perhaps the findings of serious scholars would be better disseminated if there were a museum that conveyed what we know of those lost ways that people of other eras used socially connecting technologies. A museum of Paleo-interactive technology.