Today, the 20th May, we celebrate Bernardino of Siena, the patron saint of public relations.
The Millennium Problems
On a recent visit to the library, Lissa picked up The Millennium Problems, by Keith Devlin, thinking I might find it amusing. I do. It is the story of a set of seven mathematical problems for which the Clay Foundation has offered million dollar prizes.
Devlin offers up for himself what he acknowledges at the outset is an impossible task – to explain to us, dear readers, that which is not reasonbly explainable:
For the most part, I do not aim at a detailed description of the problems. It is just not possible to describe most of them accurately in lay terms – or even in terms familiar to someone with a university degree in mathematics.
This does not make the book, at least so far, any less enjoyable for the knowledge that when I’m done I won’t understand the problems. I’ve become comfortable with black boxes, with knowing that there are thinks I won’t understand, and don’t need to. As long as one carefully circumscribes the box and understand its place in the system, one can get by quite nicely as long as one can place trust in the box builder. A lot of my science writing falls into this realm. In some cases I understand the box’s inner workings, but leave it as a box for readers. In some cases it’s a box in my own mind.
Think of the boxes as functions, a concept I take for granted in writing computer code but that was a thoughtful innovation a century-and-a-half ago. Quoting Devlin here, if I may be tricky and self-referential:
A function can be any rule that takes objects of one kind and produces new objects from them. According to this new conception, the rule that associates with each country in the world its capital city is a bona fide function (albeit a non-mathematical one.)
Mathematicians began to study the properties of abstract functions, specified not by some formula by their behavior.
So my black boxes are functions:
capital = f(country);
If I want, I can look at the way the author of my library (I slip into softwarespeak here) has written the function to return national capitals. Or I can trust the library, and treat it as a black box, thinking instead about the context rather than the ugly details.
Years ago, I was visiting my friend John in Olympia, Wash., and he took me for a late-night hike down through the woods to the water’s edge. It was pitch black, and for the first mile or so I was incredibly frustrated and on edge as I tried to peer down through the blackness to see my footfalls. After a while, though, I realized I could just unfocus my eyes and fix my gaze on John’s white T-shirt ahead of me and just follow it. And then I was fine.
Sometimes you have to just let go of the details.
Xpath
I’m adding an xpath example to my libxml tutorial. Draft posted here.
Spanish Broom
One man’s flower is another man’s weed, apparently.
Our neighborhood is alive right now with the fragrance of the lovely yellow-flowering Spanish broom – Spartium junceum L.. Here in Albuquerque, it’s lovingly cultivated for its lovely open green stems and wild yellow blooms. We’ve had one for several years on the mound in our front yard, next to the cactus. It’s always muddled along, but never really bloomed until this year, when we gave it its own dedicated drip water supply. Now it’s on fire.
It grows well here in gardens, but doesn’t spread much on its own. Not so elsewhere. Apparently in some wetter climates, Spanish broom is considered a Class A Weed.
Picasso
It is over between Pablo and me.
It has been a long time coming, such a passionate thing cannot be without unpleasantness. His talent is so magnificent, all stark erotic power. I will never forget the moment I turned a corner in the National Museum to see a sketch from Les Demoiselles, and I was moved beyond all measure. But Picasso he was such a boy, always. “Look at me!” every brush stroke seemed to cry out. I am older now.
The screen does do not justice to this, but when I saw it today I was again moved. There were three side by side (this was to its left) and they seemed to me to carry the weight of the modern on their shoulders, the heavy lifting already done, only Pablo’s shouting left to announce it to the world.
I walked back into the room full of Picassos next door, feeling a bit sullen, then back to the Cezannes, then back to the Picassos again. They have lovely big piece he did in 1906, in that breathless moment before Les Demoiselles, a harem of images of his beloved Fernande. But he never loved Fernande, or me. He loved only himself. I can see now what a fool I was.
Baseball Diaries
Kid a couple of rows in front of me at the Jake: “Dad, we got Ichiro out!”
The Seattle superstar had just grounded to Cleveland shortstop Omar Vizquel to start the game, and the kid’s dad had been down getting himself a beer and his son, probably nine or ten years old, some peanuts.
It was the last time the kid could say that all evening. They had left by the eighth inning, but if they were still there they would have seen Ichiro get his fourth hit – he was four for five on the night, with three singles and a double, a perfectly Ichiro-like performance.
It was cold out at the park – in the 50s, but windy, and I had to wear all the clothes I brought with me to Cleveland. But it was lovely nevertheless, another major league ballpark to add to my list.
Vonnegut at 33,000 Feet
Saved again by literature on a trip from hell. Well, not hell yet, just some upper circle of purgatory in which severe weather rumbles out through the U.S. air traffic system in search of victims. My purgatorial circle was a runway hold in Albuquerque, followed by the resulting travel carnage at O’Hare. In this case, my rescuer is Vonnegut, a gift from Nora on the occasion of my 44th birthday.
She’s given me Vonnegut before, and seems to grasp his significance. On Christmas round about 1973 or so, my sister, Lisa, gave me Breakfast of Champions, which changed my life in unaccountable ways. I holed up with the book all afternoon Christmas and into the next day, and came out the other side convicted to writing.
I gave that book away – to Lisa as a wedding present – so Nora a couple of years ago gave me a new copy of Breakfast of Champions, and I read it fresh with whatever wisdom I’ve acquired in the decades since. It held up well. I ended up thinking Vonnegut is wrong in fundamental ways, all dark determinism I simply can’t embrace. But he is funnier, if anything, than when I read him a quarter century ago, and the funadamental insight I had then endured, richer for the years.
The insight is this: The written word is written by someone. The book has an author. A writer has a voice.
The book is a collection of early Vonnegut short stories, and it is interesting precisely because it does not have that voice I came to know so well. There are sparks of it here and there, but it is mostly just workmanlike prose, solid and often funny, economical and sometimes imperfect – a writer in the process of acquiring the voice that later so change me.
I finally made it to Cleveland. And so it goes.
Cleveland
Assuming the weather cooperatres, I’m off to Cleveland for the week to the International Science and Engineering fair, where high school students show off their best work to the world. Should be fun.
lesser goldfinch
Lissa and I were visited this afternoon by an elegant little lesser goldfinch, first sitting on a sprinkler head, then perched on the iceplant picking out some sort of meal. We had them last year, light enough to perch on the sunflowers and eat their seeds, but we’d both forgotten, and had to pull out the bird books to identify him. I’ll have to put out sunflower seeds for him. Hope he hangs around.
names
Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.
This whole naming thing is incredibly important.
I do not write fiction, but if I did, here is what I would write. It’s a story about a lonely middle-aged man who lives in a little town in the desert of California. These are pathetic towns, where the marginal go to live, all real estate fantasy and sad tourism. Imagine an old weed-grown miniature golf course that no one’s played on in years. I once sat in a McDonalds in Yucca Valley and saw a poor old leathery woman buy a small cup of coffee, drink it half down and then fill the empty space with those little plastic things of half-and-half. Food.
The man befriends a desert rat of a woman, and they sit in her backyard on spring days and she teaches him the names of the birds that frequent the feeder she lovingly stocks with seed. Knowing the names of the birds becomes incredibly important for the man, where knowledge is dominion and the name is the token of the knowledge.
I do not know my Bible well enough to be sure, but that’s what I think is going on in that passage of Genesis I quote above. God bids Adam name things, and therein lies the human’s dominion over every beast of the field, and the fowl of the air.
I love to learn the names of things.