Millions of dollars each year are spent figuring out how best to position a product within the aisles of a grocery store. For the pleasure of having a rickety cardboard kiosk set up on the corner a company will pay a premium to the store owner, or, in to the drug store chain that Lauren and I were patronizing this afternoon.
Now, as I walked past this kiosk I thought to myself: “This name is horrible, how can I improve this?”.
And then the answer became clear….
Something that’s stuck with me, unlike vinegary BBQ, is this ad on the air of NC TV.
Man, the people in Atlanta dress well - especially the African-American community. Man, great threads, great taste, and worn with great attitude.
I guess it’s what Milan is to us Anglo types.
In effort to contribute something to the internet community more substantial than my musings on music, people in the environment, and a laundry list of “what I did today”, I have decided to undertake ( perhaps ) a series of writings about living with the technology-minded partner. Today I will write on what I have come to call “twitch mode”: what it is, how it affects relationships, and how you and your partner can handle its presence.
Your guy can’t focus on you, your attention is distracted after a day hard at work, everything feels too slow, after juggling chainsaws all day you feel like you’re can’t be involved at home? This entry may help you.
Note: This was originally drafted in early January 2007, but is only now surfacing here.
The Leauge sent in an email to see if I had fallen off the edge of the world. Although it appears irony has fallen upon The League, for as I type this, his web site has, in fact, fallen off the edge of the world: Blogger appears to be down.
I have not left the gravitational field of this big, blue, glob. There’s a bunch of interesting work stuff going on ( more later ), my mom was in town and I started classes at Austin Community College.
I’m taking two classes: Intermediate Algebra and C++.
First, this is the kind of mathematics I learned in high school ( or should have learned better ). I eventually matriculated to the university and there went as far as 2 semesters of business calculus: integration, derivation, the whole shebang. But, after ten ( and I am astounded to type that ) years away from calculus, I’ve forgotten so much. So, here I am, back at square one, learning the basics again. It’s easy to forget a lot because, to answer those kids in high school who asked “when am I going to use this in the real world” the answer, I’m afraid to say, is rarely. So much, that, you’re right, you might be wasting your time. Sorry.
In any case, this time through I’m finding it much easier to learn and encode this information. I’ve thought about why, but I think that my brain must have been conditioned for understanding symbolic and abstract systems through years of programming and a bit of symbolic logic. As is suggested by the action of Snow Crash, I think that the brain arrives with just a tiny bit of software pre-installed. The first several routines (“primary routines”) decide whether or not you will be more or less receptive to new (“secondary”) routines.
The primary routines must be incredibly fundamental. Do you use symbolic language, pictorgrams, pictographs? Using pictographs may disincline a learner from picking up a certain set of secondary routines ( I don’t believe anything is un-learnable, although research shows that past the age of 7 there’s no chance for language acquisition if it hasn’t already happened, sorry Tarzan).
So this secondary routine, algebra, just didn’t stick for me. But I think that I’ve been running secondary programs of an abstracting and variant nature now for so many years that receiving new routines which share similar pathways as other abstracting secondary routines’ function has made it easier to integrate the data.
Or, maybe because my teacher is exceedingly competent. Gustavo Cepparo is one of the best lecturers I’ve had at any school I’ve ever attended. He does not advocate “niceness” he educates giving you an education (although he is very personable). He sees himself as your worthy adversary, trying your skills and, in so doing, giving you an education. Damn straight.
I was discussing this “inclination for symbolic systems” with Lauren who, in her own life, is also undertaking an effort to put some ‘new secondary routine momentum’ into her gray matter. She’s learning computer science and programming. Oddly, when she programs she feels the same structure and scalpel that she came to know doing her literature work: themes, repetition, motifs, it’s all there.
But then we came to a question: Why is it, if you want to go into programming, pedestrian ( or parental ) wisdom holds: “Are you good at math.”
This, parents, friends, teachers, I want to warn you away from asking. The question is not “are you good at math” but do you like symbolic systems, creating them, imagining them, adhering and bending them? That’s the question.
Good programmers are kids who memorize the armor charts to Dungeons and Dragons. Good programmers like to corollate data on baseball cards, they like to organize baseball cards. I’ve seen kids read chess books, or play Magic or play Yu-Gi-Oh, know the Dewy Decimal system, it’s all the same thing: breathing life into internal rules processing machines in your brain, and then using physical ( versus digital ) objects as the inputs to your automata.
So why do kids get asked “but are you good at math”.
Math is a convenient, albeit misleading, question, it’s a forced symbolic system that kids are forced to learn. To this extent, it can be used as a good measure of “will you be a good programmer”. Further, and a child has no way of knowing this, this lazy question implies that “liking math” and “liking the pedagogical approach used by the school board and as practiced by your teacher” are the same. They are wholly different and a child has no way of knowing this.
I disliked most of my math teachers, and the pedagogy was slow, pedantic, too slow to build connections, to sketch an architecture, to paint a direction. Math class, for me, was about exercises and who in their right mind gives a flip about that? I knew math was important, but there was no direction or structure for that statement beyond the obscure “but you’ll need it in college”.
Here’s how I now propose that math should be explained.
I don’t know much more about math than that, but with that framework I could have seen that learning that 3/4 * 4/3 = 1 was something important in the sense that it was as fundamental as learning the crucial verbs to express want or need or identity.
And that, balance, unknown, systems for discovery of unknown, systems for modeling the unknown is incredibly interesting. Had mathematics pedagogy been about systems of symbolic manipulation to discern the unknown versus timed tests and a litany of rules and obscure little “tricks”: loose islands of thought, I feel I would have grasped the beauty of math earlier.
And ultimately this brings me back to the most sublime poem ever written “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Algerbra, comes from the original Arabic book in which its tenets were first set: Science of the Reunion and the Opposition.
Isn’t that a beautiful phrasing for what algebra allows us to do? This is truth and this is beauty.
And hoary old double-entry accounting, it is a science of reuniting the not with the present, the received with the owed. That is truth, and that, to my good accountant friends, is beauty too. I can see why those who ply this craft love it.
And programming, it is the balancing of the abstract concepts against the abstract concepts. In this vacuum, you create, and you create function, and then you create beauty. And that’s why we love it.
And assuredly, if you choose to plumb the deepest depths of that digital reality, you will do a lot of math, but don’t scare off a child from playing in our world of pure abstraction because they mistakenly associate it with the pitiful educational quality in this country or rote, staid, pedagogy.
**I’m posting this, but I feel it’s incomplete, I think I need to read it some more and refine it, so, this content may update. **
At Geekfoolery.com the authors have noted that “LOL” as an acronym has undermined effective IM communication of amusement.
Some things are truly LOL moments: Most things that The Social Bobcat writes fall into this category ( e.g. this very old post of mine ).
Most things are not of this calibre, but a great many people use the LOL acronym to assert that what was said was of this uproarious nature. The Geekfoolery krewe sugest using BNS. Sure it’s a bit, uh, graphic, but after a few months of use, the acronym will take over the component and all we will have two meaningful acronyms for conveying mirth: mere amusement and uproarious hilarity.
I was talking to my girlfriend about this topic and she said this was one of the things she liked best about me: that when we IM’d I only used LOL in truly funny moments.
In the following post I discuss potty topics. Consider yourself warned.
Hey all, after a day of running about and signing a lease for a new apartment and finding out that “Pan’s Labyrinth” was sold out we headed home ( after a quick pop in at Border’s to get the Exam cram guide for the Java Programmer Exam ) and Lauren took another spin at GHII.
As a laughing point for those of us familiar with Spinal Tap, they’re one of the “Encore” songs. The round ends, appropriately, with the drummer spontaneously exploding in true Spinal Tap fashion.
Shortly we’re going to the Hall of Justice to meet up with The League. He had planned a fire-pit evening, but with a winter storm warning afoot, we may have to take a uh, rain cheque on that one.
First things first, there is nothing manlier than the name Cormac McCarthy.
I think if it were that name stitched into a leather belt…
versus
…a Ford F150 with a poker table in the bed around which cowboys were drinking a case of Black Label while arguing over football while getting straightrazor shaved by strippers while puffing on Cuban stogies
…I think the name on the belt may have an edge.
If you have a last name that can bear that manly weight, then I beg you, give us more Cormac-en.
About The Road, it’s an unsentimental and very realistic portrayal about life after a global firestorm. Was it nuclear, asteroid, alien? No one knows, but the earth is now covered with a fine layer of ash which stirs ideograms of desolation into forgotten western landscapes.
A father, who has only bitter memories of a wife that seems to belong to another time, is taking his son down an interstate highway, pushing a shopping cart that carries the only tools that will help them survive.
Unlike Mad Max ( which actually presupposes an astonishingly developed model of civilization ) where Good and Evil face in pitched battle for the right to control the what-comes-next, “The Road” gives no such meaning to the apocalyptic landscape. There is the father, his son, their cart, their plastic tarp and the unending narration of their few miles gained each day.
They’re headed South from North where it’s just gotten too cold. I believe their path to be somewhere in Nevada through Northern California on into the Big Sur region. Along the way there are the inevitable highwaymen ( “road rats” ), rapists, shuffling dead, and agonizing hunger and thirst.
Yet the boy, who never knew anything of the world before, merely trudges on: curious, scared, sick, and gaunt.
The book features no chapter headings and no real sense of time. On this road there is no history of meaning, no future of value, and the present day is a routine in survival and walking.
I was stunned by the bare prose, verging on blank verse poetry.
The layout was also great and thoroughly assisted in the portrayal of the post-apocalyptic, vast, nothingness. With wide margins and ample line spacing the spartan presentation adds to the void and empty prose.
Picture is worth a thousand words:
Invariably I found myself asking what I would do in such a situation. I’ve always been a bit more into eschatology than people should be. When I was still a regular attendant of church services and the preachers were spouting nonsense I usually found myself reading those grim bits of insanity in the last chapter of the Bible. I suppose my Gnostic interests found their root there - in the symbology and transformational hidden content.
Where would one start? It seems that nothing grows? How would one catalyze an agricultural existence? It appears that all the wildlife perished in the great firestorm?
How would you begin? In light of that weight, how would you continue? Would you fight for botulized tins of old food, eat bark and hope not to get murdered in your sleep by roving brigands? What sort of world is that to live, is that truly a life? And what, pray tell, would help you go on?
It’s all very fine, heavy existential work that, as all questions of this sort do, touch on those fine works by Kierkergaard. In all, it was a fine book.
No, there will be no goth poetry in this post.
After watching Reform School Girls you’d have to be an un-curious person to not want to go and find out more about the life and times of Wendy O(rlean) Williams.
This lady was absolutely fearless.
In her death scene, she moves taut sinews and flesh like a wounded animal. In those few seconds she communicates more animal domination and charisma than any pop star Idolette I’ve ever seen.
If you watch a bit of her videos with The Damned on youtube you see the macho, the preening, the presence, you can feel the way she tells you about the car crash that’s coming, crashes the car, and leaves you gaping at what she just made you see.
Wendy took on the male establishment, clothing, and Mrs. Fields ( comparing the snack food queen to a purveyor of heroin ).
She obliterated the dialectic by her sheer daring, by her anti-art band, by her outrageous being.
Wendy ender her life at 48, in the woods, with a very lucid suicide note. It’s in times of truthiness, and lies and lies and lies about what our government is become and what it does that someone like this has the ability to grab eyes and hold them and subvert the normal baseline for society.
Cultural dyanmite: Nietzsche, Williams, bra-burning, the Enlightenment, the printing press, the Gettysburg Address.
The world could have used a grandma-age Wendy, mohawked, fearless, vegetarian, and steely in these times.
Wendy’s video….