Author: admin

Today, as many of you know, is Bloomsday. On this day every year James Joyce aficionados everywhere re-enact the fictitious June 16 1904 walkabout through Dublin taken by Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s “Ulysses”. It is a glorious tradition, with just the right degree of nuttiness to hold our attention. Any such celebration needs to calibrate its insanity carefully, for as Saint-Gaudens once said: “As garlic is to food, insanity is to art.”

Which is why I am puzzled as to why all famous works of narrative fiction do not inspire similar celebrations. Where are the fans retracing Holden Caulfield’s journey around Manhattan? Why do we not see hordes of young women in little black dresses dining at Tiffany’s at 5am each morning? And why is nobody getting on a raft to follow the path laid down by Huckleberry Finn and his friend Jim?

Wouldn’t it be fun to recreate the journey to the heart of darkness that Joseph Conrad described so vividly — or at least its cinematic imitation by Francis Ford Coppola? And why aren’t football fans everywhere revisiting that Longest Yard? I am referring of course to the real version from 1974, not whatever the hell Adam Sandler thought he was doing in 2005.

Who wouldn’t want to travel from Paris to Marseille, across the Mediterranean Sea to Oran, Algeria, then across French Morocco to Casablanca, only to nobly give up one’s exit visa to Lisbon and the New World? I know I would. If you’re going to hand off the woman you love to some other guy just to show her how much you love her, Rick Blaine was way more practical about it than, say, Sidney Carlton.

If you see what I mean.

There are limits, to be sure. I can see why there is no annual day of re-enactment of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001, A Space Odyssey”. The expense alone would be astronomical. And I am really glad nobody is trying to re-enact the final scene of “Dr. Strangelove”. At least, I hope they’re not.

I’ve been wondering whether it would be possible to write a play in which every line of dialog contains at least one pun. I don’t mean that the characters would deliberately be punning. In fact, they’d have no idea any of this is happening. Rather, as they play out their scenes, controversies, resolutions, shifts in power and allegiance, they would just happen to say things in puns.

The audience would experience such a play on two completely different levels. The pun or puns contained in each line of dialog would be a sort of music dancing around the lyrics of the play. One could imagine dialog along these lines:

…
Character 1: I never thought you’d hatch such a bold scheme.
Character 2: Yes, I’ve decided to come out of my shell.
Character 1: I’m so glad. You’ve always been a good egg.
…

You get the idea. I suspect the above example is too brazen — you’d need to be more subtle about it. If it’s done right, the resulting play might be very satisfying, or it might be unbearably awful. Many members of the audience might not even realize that there was a second “pun” labor to the proceedings.

It’s impossible to say at this point just how such a mad scheme would come across. But it would certainly be interesting to try.

I had always thought of photosynthesis in a fairly simple way: A plant acts as a factory for converting water and carbon dioxide into glucose and oxygen. The plant then converts that glucose into cellulose, starches, and all that other good stuff we get from plants. But now that I needed to know where the mass of cellulose comes from, I had to look more closely at how this factory works.

The weight ratio between single atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are (more or less) 12 to 1 to 16, respectively. So, for example, in a molecule of water (H₂O), almost all of the weight comes from the oxygen. If you’re trying to figure out where the weight comes from in tree cellulose, you can almost ignore the hydrogen — it just doesn’t weigh very much. So the real question is: When H₂O and CO₂ combine to make C₆H₁₂O₆ (glucose), does the oxygen come more from the water, or from the carbon dioxide?

Well, it turns out that a plant is actually two factories. The first factory is in the business of converting photons (which provide energy) and water into hydrogen. All living things have molecules called ADP, which act as batteries. When sunlight hits its leaves, a plant charges up these batteries, pulling the hydrogen out of the water, and adding it to the ADP, which then turns into another molecule called ATP.

Basically, ADP is a microscopic uncharged solar cell, and ATP is the same solar cell, all charged up.

While this first factory needs to be bathed in sunlight (or some other light source), the second factory doesn’t need any light at all. This second factory takes in ATP (those already-charged batteries) and carbon dioxide. From the ATP it gets those charged up hydrogen atoms, and combines them with the carbon dioxide. One of the two oxygen atoms in each CO₂ molecule is released into the atmosphere, and the other one is used to make glucose — C₆H₁₂O₆.

So it turns out that none of the oxygen from the water actually gets used to make glucose (and therefore cellulose) — the glucose contains only the oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

When you add up the numbers, it turns out that only about six percent of the weight of wood cellulose (the hydrogen) comes from the roots — the other ninety four percent of that mass comes from carbon dioxide.

Which means that the wood of even the most massive tree comes almost entirely from pure air.

All of us already knew the basics when we started our dinner conversation about where trees get their huge mass of cellulose. In particular, we knew that water comes up through the roots, and carbon dioxide comes in through the leaves. Photosynthesis uses these ingredients, together with energy from light, to make the simple sugar glucose — which the tree can then further process to make cellulose and other carbohydrates.

Because there is more oxygen in water and carbon dioxide than there is in glucose, photosynthesis has the nice side effect of releasing oxygen into the air (which is quite fortunate for those of us who like to breath the stuff).

We even all knew the formulas when we started talking:

      Water + Carbon Dioxide → Glucose + Oxygen

Or to be more precise:

      H₂O + CO₂ → C₆H₁₂O₆ + O₂

You’ve probably already noticed that there are a lot more atoms on the right side of that equation than on the left side. That’s why it actually takes six water molecules and six carbon dioxide molecules to produce a single molecule of glucose:

      6 H₂O + 6 CO₂ → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂

Now everything adds up: Both sides of the equation have 12 hydrogen atoms, 18 oxygen atoms and 6 carbon atoms.

But now we were stumped. Clearly all of the carbon comes from the air, and all of the hydrogen comes from the ground water pulled in by the roots. But what about the oxygen? Does that come from the air, from the water, or some combination? Until we answer that question, we can’t really say how much of a tree’s cellulose mass comes from the air, and how much comes from ground water.

Maybe all of the oxygen comes from the water, and maybe all of the oxygen comes from the air, or maybe it’s some mixture of these. How can we definitely answer this?

More tomorrow.

Once again I am putting “Attic” temporarily on hiatus, as we ponder the dualism between dream and reality, the eternal struggle for meaning and connection, and why demons so often come in funny colors. Our intrepid friends will be back soon.

Meanwhile, I had an actual non-trivial discussion today about where a tree trunk comes from. In particular, when a tree grows, where does all that huge mass of cellulose in its trunk come from?

We all know that tree trunks are huge, massive things — think of the Amazon rainforest. But the vast weight of cellulose in their trunks comes from the most unlikely of places.

It’s an interesting question partly because so many people get it totally wrong, giving answers like “it comes from the soil”, or “sucked up from the roots”. It’s pretty easy to show that those answers are incorrect, but it’s somewhat trickier to work out the right answer in detail.

This is such an intriguing question that I’m going to hold off giving an answer until tomorrow, to give readers time to think about it.

As part of the research in our Games for Learning Institute my colleague Jan Plass and I have been batting around ideas for making games that do a good job of keeping track of what’s going on inside the mind of the player. The general idea is that as we create learning games, we want to be able to know whether the player is actually “getting it”, or is just clicking around randomly.

To this end, we’re looking at games that ask the player to understand and apply some kind of rule. To get some practice in making these sorts of games, we borrowed ideas from the wonderful card game Set, and combined them with other games like Bejeweled, to create various games where the player needs to understand and apply a rule.

This week I threw together a rough prototype. Since it combines ideas from the games Set and Bejeweled, I call it “Beset”. The game is probably going to change and get refined a lot, but this preliminary sketch is what I have so far.

On the screen you see 81 cards. Any given card can have one, two or three symbols, three possible shapes, three possible colors, and three possible textures. So, just like in the game of Set, there are 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 81 unique cards. The basic idea of the game is that you need to pick three cards that match a rule that’s shown at the top of the screen.

This rule will say that all three cards need to have either the same or all different (1) number of symbols, (2) symbol shape, (3) symbol color, and (4) symbol texture. For each of these four properties, the rule will either say the three cards need to be all the same or all different.

Whenever you successfully apply the rule to match three cards, smiley faces appear over those three cards — and then the rule changes. The goal is to get smiley faces over all 81 cards.

Toward the end of the game, when there are only a few cards left in play, it’s possible to get stuck with cards that don’t match any rule. For that reason I added a “slide smiley face over” feature. You can always slide a smiley face one square up, down, left or right, to bring a card back into play.

I know it sounds a little complicated, but it all makes sense once you start playing. You can try it HERE.

I’d love to know what people think.

Hint: for the first round, try clicking on the three cards that have green striped ovals.

There was a look of infinite sadness on his face. He gazed down upon her, sleeping so peacefully, and once again he was struck by the power of his feelings for her. He remembered back to the time, long before, when he had first set eyes upon her picture, this woman from another world — another universe — and in that moment his entire life had changed.

How can one explain the power of love? By any measure it is a single-minded and insane act of trust. But it was precisely this trust that sustained him, that kept him going. Thinking upon all this, he brushed a stray hair from her forehead.

How could there be such sadness, even in the presence of such beauty? “Amelia,” he whispered. “Amelia….”

There are always two paths. You may not realize this, on any given day. It might very well seem as though the future is an unbroken road, stretching unto the horizon.

Nonetheless, two paths lie before you. The future continually bifurcates, offering challenges, disturbing any placid notions of what is possible and what is not.

Do not get me wrong — I can count upon the fingers of one hand the times that I have chosen that second path. It is not easy to answer the call of the road that leads even deeper into the woods. As soon as you make that turn, you hear the voices behind you start to retreat, to lessen, to fade away.

But what would we be without that call, that unknowable possibility, that moment of choice when the obvious is surpassed by the possible?

“I have a definite feeling about this city,” Josh said, as he took a right turn at the next corner. “I think if we can just take the correct path, then that thing — whatever it is — can’t get to us.”

“I sure hope you’re right,” Jenny said. She noticed that the turns were coming faster now, as they zigzagged their way along one dark and narrow street after another. Over the tops of the deserted houses, she could see that the tower was definitely nearer.

“The kid’s got a good track record so far,” Sid said. “If we wanna stay alive, we all better stick close to him.”

The angry growling now seemed to be consistently off to one side, as though the beast was tracking them, trying to find a way to get to them through the winding maze of streets.

“Can you think of anything that could shed light on the nature of the beast?” Mr. Symarian asked Jenny. “This city, in its current state, appears to reflect your grandmother’s memories in some peculiar way. Is there, perhaps, something you might remember about her that could provide some insight?”

Jenny thought hard, reaching back into her memories from childhood. “Well, grandma Amelia had a dog.”

“Aha, I knew it!” Sid said. “A great big slobbering beast, right? Some kinda guard dog or something. I’ll bet it was a real man-eater.”

“No, actually,” Jenny said, trying to think back. “It was quite a little thing. Very gentle and sweet. And completely devoted to my grandmother. They were inseparable.”

“Well, that blows my theory,” Sid said with a shrug. “Just out of curiosity, did this itty bitty dog have a name?”

“Yes,” Jenny said, suddenly remembering, “His name was Bruno.”

This morning, while tidying up the apartment, I realized that the two CDs sitting on top of my music collection were Schoenberg: The Piano Music and Alright, Still, the 2006 debut album by Lily Allen.

I listen to both of these albums a lot, and suddenly it occurred to me that in a cultural sense there is something slightly odd about that. If you think of music, in its infinite variety, as a landscape, then Arnold Schoenberg and Lily Allen seem to represent two points on that landscape about as vastly far apart from one another as any two points could be.

And yet I love both of these albums, I play both quite often, and both give me enormous pleasure. What is going on here? Am I actually multiple people trapped in the same body? Is Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind” so literally true as all that?

I occurs to me, upon further reflection, that there is actually one principle that unites Allen and Schoenberg, as different as they might seem. Both are deeply engaged in an inquiry into the tension between pattern and chaos, and the pleasures that can be found therein. Schoenberg uses seemingly random collections of notes, and creates great beauty by arranging them into startling chromatic patterns, runs of seemingly random and dissonant chords that form lovely clusters of sonic texture and movement. He creates a sensation of order from the very stuff of chaos.

Allen, of course, works with a much narrower musical palette. Her musical idiom is jazz inflected ska, swinging and brash, pure unapologetic pop. But her breezy vocals capture our attention not for their bright and lovely lilt (and her singing is indeed lovely), but for the things she chooses to sing about. This is happy, snappy music about alienation, contempt, love gone wrong, small random cruelties, and the unfairness of existence. She succeeds by setting up an extreme aesthetic tension between the simple surface joy of pop music and the despair within the average human heart.

I wonder whether I love both of these albums for the same reason: Both operate by keeping their listener on the knife edge between the comfort of an ordered universe, and the chaos of the formless void that lurks just beyond. This tension appeals to something about the way our human sensibility is wired. When we find ourselves walking the precipice that lies between order and chaos, we feel most intensely alive.