August 2005 Archives

This week's bathroom reading is Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain. I'm halfway through with the book, which is surprisingly enough a true story and not fiction, as I'd assumed when I first picked it up; Paterniti wrote a piece about his trip with Dr Thomas Harvey that was published in Harper's, won the 1998 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and turned into this book. I haven't decided whether I really like or just like Driving Mr Albert yet, but I am in all kinds of love with this bit from the chapter titled How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life:

Even now there are doctors who claim in our lifetimes we will see the first brain transplant or that cloning will become an everyday occurence. In essence, they predict that science, not religion, will guarantee us an afterlife. And yet I can't help but wonder what Einstein would make of America if he sat in the backseat now—or, perhaps, what he will make of it when he sits in the backseat again. And I wonder if this kind of afterlife would be so great after all. Einstein's brain in the body of Fabio? Or Einstein regenerated, living a life on top of the life he's already led, doomed by the accomplishments of his former self. A life already confined, categorized, and collated before it's even begun again. What would it feel like to be born with an FBI file already open on you? Or to know you had once revolutionized the world with your work, but then never found true love? Might you try to trade one for the other? Or would you just sit around smoking pot all day, rebelling againt yourself?

Reading that brought back memories of a novel I haven't thought about since I finished reading it as a pre-teen, C.J. Cherryh's Hugo Award-winning Cyteen, in which the protagonist is a clone of a brilliant deceased leader of state, being raised in an environment designed to give her the personality and character of her manipulative and warped predecessor.

I didn't find Cyteen as compelling a read then as I think I might if I picked it up again now, possibly because when I was younger I was more focused on just being myself, whatever I was, whereas now I'm all about figuring out why I am the way I am (and what's broken, how do I fix it, etc). Most of us fit and measure ourselves against our parents and siblings, our friends and contemporaries, people we admire; how much more difficult would it be to deal with other lives we've lived?

Anyway, 2005 marks a full century since Einstein's annus mirabilis, the year he published the four papers that catapulted him from clerk at the Bern Patent Office to international superstar. Three ways to celebrate:

1. Read Alan Lightman's excellent novel Einstein's Dreams, in which we get a glimpse at 30 dreams about time Einstein might have had in 1905 while working on the theory of relativity.
2. Watch I.Q., one of my favorite romantic comedies, in which Walter Matthau's Einstein matchmakes his brainy niece Meg Ryan with Tim Robbins's sweet mechanic. My favorite exchange:

   Einstein: "The problem is she would never go out with a guy like you."
   Ed: "Well that's easy. Lend me your brain for a while."
   Einstein: "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
   Ed: "Now what are the odds of that happening?"

3. Buy this Albert Einstein Action Figure:

More Einstein: fantastic Wikipedia Entry (did you know the photo of him with his tongue out was taken on his birthday in 1951?), Albert Einstein Online (a great collection of links), the American Institute of Physics' site on Einstein's Image & Impact, and Nova's Einstein's Big Idea special which premieres on October 11.

More Michael Paterniti/Driving Mr Albert: Excerpt from Driving Mr Albert, Paterniti reading from Driving Mr Albert as RealMedia & mp3 from Salon and RealAudio from BoldType, Interview from Interview in 2000.

Now, I love my almost three-year-old Powerbook dearly, and I'm a bigger Apple apologist than most, but my love for the boys in Cupertino faded a lot^* the day that both hinges on my Powerbook snapped. It'd cost me almost as much money to have the hinges fixed as it would to just buy an brand-new iBook, so even if I had the money to spend I wouldn't do it; now my screen has to be propped open against something at all times.

Crappy as the situation is, snapped Powerbook hinges turn out to not be uncommon: they recently happened to my friend Manlio (see photos) as well as Dens's brother Jonathan, who had this to say about the whole deal:

I purchased my first car when I was 17-years-old for $2000. It was seven years old at the time. I used it for two years. I purchased my Powerbook for $2500, and used it for the same amount of time - two years.

Never once did my doors snap off my car when I tried entering the vehicle. And if they did, you'd probably say that's totally absurd. I'm not saying that my laptop is a car by any means, let's face it, I'm way too tall for it. But when you lay down $2500 for a piece of hardware, things like this should not break after normal use.

Plain and simple, I think Apple should stand behind its products. It's one thing when you break something out of neglect or misuse. But when something is such an obvious manufacturer's defect, you've got to make things right.

Word.

^* Already faded from the two times my Powerbook's (very expensive) power adapter's plug fell apart in the exact same way and had to be replaced, also something that happens to a lot of people.

I love me some good science fiction so I've been actively working on reading the classics of the genre over the past decade, and it's always stuck in my craw that I haven't read anything by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. I finally got around to reading his short story collection The Cyberiad last week and thought it was magnificent, especially Trurl's Electronic Bard, in which the constructor Trurl creates a machine that writes poetry. His friend and rival, the constructor Klaupacius, envious of what Trurl has done, tries to confound it by requesting it write "a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."

I loved the resulting poem, but my undergraduate degree is in creative writing—my knowledge of mathematics is almost entirely forgotten from high school and just enough for me to broadly get the jokes within. I decided that wasn't good enough, set myself a-googling (I learned more about math this past hour googling than I did in college) and came up with the annotated version of the poem you see below. I didn't bother to define some terms (I figured if I knew what they meant most everybody else interested would) and others I likely didn't pick the best definition because I didn't know any better, so please feel free to point out my mistakes and suggest better links in the comments. Otherwise, enjoy the annotated Electronic Bard's poem of love and tensor algebra:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a² cos 2 ψ!

More about Stanislaw Lem: official site, Wikipedia entry, great article from The Modern Word. If you don't read science fiction and Lem's name sounds familiar it's probably because his novel Solaris has been adaptated for the silver screen twice, most recently in 2002, directed by Steven Soderburgh and starring George Clooney.

Thanks to Ranjit for lending me the book out of his excellent personal library!

Jason says, "When I saw these Star Trek business cards the other day, I knew that Star Wars ones had to exist. Novelty business cards must have been a popular thing back in the day. Anyone up for making Matrix and LOTR cards?"

Where is Mike Monteiro now that we clearly need him to Photoshop the shit out of some blogger business cards?

Fantastic BBC interview with Tim Berners-Lee on the advent of the read-write web:

Mark Lawson: Because of your invention, I was able to look up every article written by or about you quickly and easily. But at the same time, I was sent several unsolicited links to porn sites. I have to accept that someone in Mexico may have stolen my identity and now be using it. Is the latter absolutely worth paying for the former?

Tim Berners-Lee: That's an interesting question that you ask, as though it's a yes or no answer. As though our choice is to turn off the whole thing, or turn on the whole thing. I feel that the web should be something, which basically doesn't try to coerce people into putting particular sorts of things on it.

I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it, finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don't like, are problems with humanity.

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it's communicating over so many other different media. I think it's a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

I like the part later on where he talks about how blogging is closer to what his idea of the web should be for most people: "When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now [the web]'s gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium." I love how in the decade I've been online, the difficulty level of putting things up online has gone from low to high and then back down to incredibly low again. I hope it stays this way forever.

Ask MeFi: Is it still possible to walk The High Line? I'd love to go up there but my brown ass likes to steer clear of upsetting the NYPD.

What lunch at 6 pm in New York on a day so hot it makes you not want to eat looks like:

Straight out of the pint and into my mouth with a plastic spoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Alison's perfect description of something I've been thinking about lately:

i think my problem is that i'm smart enough for something as mundane as the average work week to make me contemplate the relative pointlessness of my own existence, but i'm not smart enough for someone rich to pay me to spend all day in a studio making things in the hopes that i'll come up with something really cool. i'm not smart enough to be so distracted by my own ideas that i can ignore how stupid everything is, but i'm too smart not to notice it.

Post-grad school malaise, in my case, I think. It's been weird these past few months to see half my school friends just going straight out in the world and doing all these crazy amazing things, and the other half basically using the hot summer months as an excuse to take our time figuring out what we want to do for the next few months/years/the rest of our lives, when the truth is that fall's coming fast and we're mostly none the wiser.

If someone had told me when I started college that a decade later I was going to have a master's from the "Intergalactic Teleportation Program" instead of a JD and a small office in a big firm, I wouldn't have believed them—no one who knew me then would've and yet here I am. Now I think: never mind ten years from now, where will I be in six months?

The Island = The Matrix + Blade Runner + Gattaca + a whole bunch of other science fiction dystopia movies. Pleasantly shallow and pretty and I enjoyed it despite myself. Damn you, Michael Bay.

I'm still not convinced Johnny Depp was the right choice for Willy Wonka as I really didn't appreciate the whole dressed like Anna Wintour meets Prince and talks like Michael Jackson thing, but I liked this movie a great deal, a lot better than I'd expected to. This movie's Charlie has much less depth than the previous one, thanks to the omission of the Fizzy Lifting Drinks scene, but overall it's closer to the book, which I appreciate as a Roald Dahl fan. Danny Elfman's songs were a vast improvement and I will love Tim Burton forever and ever for casting Deep Roy as all the Oompa-Loompas, he was the best thing about the movie.

Okay, so Tim Burton's Batman Returns is still my favorite of the Batman movies, but this came fairly close to unseating it. Katie Holmes has neither the charisma for a leading role nor believability as an A.D.A. but other than that the cast was note perfect, especially Cillian Murphy as the Scarecrow.

Sometimes when you watch a bad movie you think to yourself, I can see what they were trying to do, it's too bad they couldn't get it right. What I appreciated about Fantastic Four is that when you see it you very quickly realize that no, this is exactly what they were aiming for and by golly, they sure did it. Fantastic Four is laughably bad in many respects (trying to pass Jessica Alba off as a scientist, what?) but it's at least balls out bad, and therefore fun to watch in snarky company.

More than anything else Mr & Mrs Smith feels like a remake of the 80s classic War of the Roses, only where that movie had a fairly solid story along with the lovely sexual tension between the leads (Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner), this one substitutes a basic plot and well-choreographed action sequences. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because frankly Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's chemistry could melt solid rock. Sexy, stylish, occasionally funny and a lot of fun.

My favorite thing about this movie is how in the first minute Tom Cruise is onscreen, we get cinematic shorthand for "this character is ultra macho" rapidly telegraphed into our brains: he works what I guess you could think of as an oversized power tool, he's flippant with his boss about work, jokes about chicks having a lot to hate him for, drives a muscle car and drives it fast and hard, and then to top it off a gratuitious topless scene to remind us that hey, this is Tom Cruise and he's not only totally hetero but also totally hot. All that said, I would've been okay with this movie had the ending not been a completely copout. I should've known better than to trust Steven Spielberg to close it out properly.

Thanks to Ranjit, Chris, Donny, Matt S and Michael for watching with me.

See, the way I look at it, the real tragedy isn't that Fergie peed all over herself on stage the other day, but that she peed all over herself on that rare occasion when she was actually wearing something decent, i.e. not being her usual nasty stank ho self. Every single time I see a photo of her I want to rinse my eyeballs out, a reaction previously matched in intensity and consistency only by rotten.com and Tubgirl.

(And don't even try and bring up Lil' Kim, okay? I am more than willing to let her skank slide because a) someone's got to let their ass hang out on the red carpet now that Cher's retired and b) she's actually literally been a ho.)

Title by Andrew. I hate puns, but not as much as I hate the Black Eyed Peas!

On my way home tonight after dinner with Steph, I was walking on autopilot while on the phone with my roommate when I looked up and thought, "Hey, this guy walking in front of me has bad slouchy posture just like C." Then I noticed the hair (carefully product-ed up just at the front) and the (baggy but preppy) clothes and the (plain old) messenger bag, and sure enough, even though we live in different neighborhoods, it was C.

I could've caught up to say hi, I could've kept on walking while once again regretting ever breaking my never fall for a friend rule, I could've freaked out and crossed the street, I could've stopped and watched him walk away. What I ended up doing isn't for you to know, but when do I get to stop wondering about all of my I should'ves?

Setting up the badminton net on the Long Meadow this afternoon, I was marvelling (as I always do) at how I live in a city so big it can have open spaces so wide you can't see one end from the other, or even one end when you're standing in the middle as I was right then, with nothing between my feet and the cool grass.