Campin'

Ben, Mickey, George and I went camping last weekend at Cunningham Falls State Park. It was a lot of fun. We went hiking, played D&D, drank beer, and ate a bunch of unhealthy food.

It was interesting watching all of the families with kids at the campground. Apparently a lot of parents see it as a good idea to bring their kids' bikes and let their kids ride around the camp site loop. Around and around and around. There was one girl who rode her pink bike around the loop, wore her pink helmet, and would ding her bell every time she got to the top of the loop. Another boy had some seriously squeaky brakes. So for a while it was, "Ding ding. (Pause.) Squeaksqueaksqueaksqueaksqueak. (Pause.) Ding ding." Repeat.

I never went camping with my folks growing up, so I don't really have a set of expectations for what it's like to be a kid camping. But somehow I'd hope that it would be more exciting than riding a bike around and around in circles. I mean, c'mon, that's what I did at home.

Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming, p. 247

"She tried joining Mensa but was turned off by the bunch of balding men who wanted to discuss nudism, and women who refused to stop punning or laughing at their own spoonerisms."

The Incomprehensible X-Men

I saw the X-Men movie on Monday. Wolverine kicks ass. 'Nuff said.

The movie inspired me to want to start reading comics again. And where better to start than with the X-Men comic book? But which one? I remember enough from my comic book reading days to know that Marvel produces a number of different versions of its most popular titles. So where could I see some of the complex battle of wills I had fun with in the movie? I eventually found a web site giving a guide to the X-Titles. Well, it was clear I'd need to be careful to pick the right title to avoid things such as a time-traveling X-Man from the future -- I was looking for basic, vanilla X-Men.

Further searching turned up the X-Axis, where some Scottish guy publishes weekly reviews of the various issues. Pretty entertaining, even for someone who doesn't read them. But it just confirmed one thing. There are no basic, vanilla X-Men anymore! It's all alternative universe this and space alien that. It's all fiendishly complicated to maintain continuity for some 45-year old guy who lives with his parents and will have a complete fit if something doesn't fit with one little piece of his 20-year collection of X-Men comics. ("But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills, you're from two different worlds.") I don't know, maybe I'm deluding myself into thinking there's somewhere I can go to get interesting superhero comic books without having to become an obsessive reader to understand what the h-e-double-hockeysticks is going on. But it apparently doesn't involve the X-Men.

Tennis Ball Madness

My friend Dave was in town last weekend. Dave is a big baseball fan. When we're at conferences together, we try to take in a game. We went to Fenway at the Fermat conference in '95, we caught the Ottawa Lynx at CNTA '96, and we tried to catch a minor league game in Winnipeg in '99, but it was rained out. So when he came for a visit, it was natural we'd go see a Bowie Baysox. It was a pretty cool game. The Baysox ended up winning in the bottom of the 10th. Cool.

And there were even fireworks after the game. In some ways, they were even better than the fireworks on the Mall on the 4th. They were closer, so we could hear them being fired, and there was a greater variety.

But that wasn't the best part. The best part was...Tennis Ball Madness! For $1, you could buy a tennis ball and throw it on the field after the game. The object was ostensibly to get the balls into some hula hoops which would win various prizes...a dozen bagels, $10 off a lube job... But really, the cool thing was we got to chuck stuff on the field and not get arrested.

Harry Potter and the Goblin of Fire

With 734 pages, it's filled with a story of magic, a fictional world, and so many other things that will make you never want to put this book down. READ HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLIN OF FIRE TODAY!

This review at Amazon.com says it all about J. K. Rowling's new Harry Potter book. Er...what do you mean it's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Oh, yeah, that book.

Anyhoo, I just stayed up late last night to finish it. It was an enjoyable read, although I feel that the ending was a little muddled, but I think I could say that of most of her books.

One thing I've noticed as a recurring theme through the books is people being wrongly accused of things they didn't do. There are lots of examples from earlier books -- Hagrid, Buckbeak, Harry, Snape, etc. -- so I won't spoil anything about this book by giving examples here. I don't even think this book does so more than the others -- it's just something I noticed more this time.

Maybe that's because it's something I've been thinking about myself recently. I'm a very judgemental person. I tend to try to form opinions rather quickly. A silly example follows.

After the TV show Friends came out, Martin called me up and asked me what I thought about it. I started going off on a rant about how it was clearly a slickly packaged attempt to market a certain image of Generation X. Martin said, "You know, with anyone else, I would have just asked, 'How about that great new show, Friends?'"

You know, I was right about the show. But it's also pretty funny (most of the time), a fact I had overlooked in my initial recoil to the way the show was "targeted". It's since become one of my favorite shows. So I do give things (and people) second chances. But I sort of wonder how much I may have overlooked due to unfavorable first impressions. So I'm trying to do better. So if somebody seems like a jerk at first, maybe I give them a chance to prove me wrong. Or prove that they really are a jerk. Which would have me hanging around with jerks more often. Hmm, is it worth it?

Emo

When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked him to forgive me.

The other day a woman came up to me and said, "Didn't I see you on television?"
I said, "I don't know. You can't see out the other way."

I went to see Emo Philips a couple of weeks ago. We sat at a table right near the stage. I was sitting in a chair up against the stage, so close I rested my elbow on stage. So I got to be in one of these:

• "What's your name?"
  
• "Jon."
  
• "What do you do?"
  
• "I'm a mathematician."
  

Emo then told a joke about Stephen Hawking. What I should have said is, "Dude, he's a physicist." Unfortunately, all I could think of to say was, "He's a physicist." At least I was clever enough to realize that wasn't funny enough to say. But while everyone else is sitting there enjoying the joke, I was just sitting there thinking, "I can't believe he's telling a physicist joke. I'm a mathematician." I mean, really.

You Say You Want a Revolution

I went to see The Patriot with George last weekend.

You know that old cliche, "If you only see one movie this year..."? Well, for George it isn't a cliche. He sees one movie a year. Last year it was The Phantom Menace, a few years ago it was Braveheart, and a couple of years before that it was Multiplicity (he had to kill time while getting his truck fixed, and that was what was playing). Anyway, since George does Revolutionary War re-enactment, and since he really enjoyed Braveheart, this seemed like an appropriate choice.

We had settled in for the (long series of) trailers, when one came on for the movie Pearl Harbor. It opened with some kids playing ball, then all of a sudden Japanese planes started streaking across the sky. Scenes from the attack on Pearl Harbor ran while FDR's "Date Which Will LIve in Infamy" speech played. At the end, "Memorial Day 2001" flashed onto the screen. George turned to me and said, "I was afraid I was going to get screwed up."

Back to this year's movie. I found it somewhat enjoyable, although towards the end, it got to be too much, "You Klingon bastard, you killed my son." And this Salon article raises some disturbing questions about certain of the movie's historical inaccuracies. And really, I would have so much preferred a historically accurate movie. George pointed out that the exploding shells in the movie were also anachronistic.

But, still, it was nice going into the 4th to be reminded that Independence Day is not just about fireworks. It honors a sacrifices made in the birth of this nation, too. And I'm sure "Pearl Harbor" will be a good reminder of other sacrifices.

The Big Schtick

When I was in high school, some friends of mine and I started writing a chain story. We would pass it around Mr. Snyder's AP Modern European History class, and each of us would write a paragraph or so before passing it along.

Some time during college, somebody typed it up. I recently pulled it off disk, where it had been compressed with the ZOO archiver and formatted in WordPerfect 4.2. I eventually uncompressed it, converted it to HTML, and fixed some typos.

Ladies and gentleman, I present The Big Schtick. Warning: it is long and weird.

I have recently tried to get some of the same authors to work on a web-based chain story. So far, it's off to a slow start (I blame Paul), but I hope it will pick up.

We All Want to Change the World

I was driving to work yesterday listening to a Beatles album when "Revolution" came on. This ranks right up there with "The One I Love" in the misunderstood songs of all time.

A few years back, when Nike decided to use the song in an add campaign, much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued. I remember in particular an op-ed in the Washington Post bemoaning how a song the author associated with protesting the status quo had turned into a tool of commercialism.

Hint: just because a song has a word in (or as) its title, doesn't mean it's a song in favor of that word. The Beatles could be "conservative," after a fashion. Ever listen to "Taxman"? More to the point, ever listen to these lyrics?

You say you'll change the constitution
Well you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well you know
You better free your mind instead

I remember being in high school and writing a paper on Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange. I needed to incorporate literary criticism into my paper, so I went to the library and found some big honkin' books full of criticism. Wow -- this was exciting. And there was criticism of everything -- even Beatles songs.

One in particular that stuck out was a screed on "Revolution" writted for some socialist worker's magazine. This guy got it -- mostly. He railed against the Beatles as tools of capitalist oppression. Out there, yes, but at least he had a clue (about music). Of course, like a good Red, he wasn't above distorting things to make a point. He took the lyrics

You ask me for a contribution
Well you know
We're doing what we can
But when you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait

and blasted the Beatles for equating "contribution" with "money". In fact, I think that's explicitly not true. They equate "contribution" with "doing what we can." The person they're talking to, by contrast, just wants "money for people with minds that hate." Ah, well.

Anyway, I think this illustrates one of the great lessons of life.

Pay attention!

Redesign!

I re-designed my weblog today to use cascading style sheets. How does it look?

Let me know if you have any problems with it.

The Pragmatist

Last weekend, I went to see a collection of photographs by Glen E. Friedman. He took a number of photographs of skateboarding, hardcore, and rap scenes, and the amazing thing (as mentioned several places in the exhibit), is that he started taking these pictures early -- before these scenes hit the mainstream radar. OK, interesting enough.

But one thing that interested me was the political message underneath the photographs. Friedman seems to feel that each group of people was comprised of idealists; indeed his latest book is entitled "The Idealist". Flipping through a copy of that book, I was treated to an idolization of the idealist over the pragmatist. There, as other places in the exhibit, Ronald Reagan was specifically mentioned as the enemy of the idealist.

Later that evening, I went hope and watched CNN's Cold War documentary on the '80s and "Star Wars" (SDI). One of the things that struck me was how passionately Reagan believed in a missle defense system, and how he risked various arms control agreements that he was interested in, just for the sake of preserving SDI. In fact, the agreements were only signed after the Soviets realized that SDI would never be built as conceived.

So maybe Reagan wasn't a pragmatist (is that what people call idealists they don't agree with?). And I doubt everybody Friedman photographed was really an idealist; in the preface to one of his books, someone noted that the idealism of the skateboarders sounds more like "adolescent dickishness" in retrospect.

But what of this dichotomy between idealism and pragmatism in general? Is it real or is it false? To me, idealism and pragmatism are two balancing forces that need to exist in harmony. If you're an unrelenting pacifist, you may see your entire town slaughtered because you refused to compromise. If you believe that your example will achieve the cause of pacifism, that's one thing. But if you're trying to prevent violence from occuring, well, you lost. Similarly, the pure pragmatist is willing to do anything to achieve...what goals?

In my view, we have a responsibility to be idealists when we choose our goals -- world peace, freedom, etc. But then we have to be pragmatists when trying to figure out how to realize them.

I Can't Dance, But I Can Type

During my recent excursion at Mensa happy hour, the conversation turned to the subject of dance. Swing dancing, contra dancing -- it seemed like everyone sitting near me did some form of dancing. Not me. I am very...uncoordinated? Klutzy? Arhythmic? My last attempt to go out and dance was a very traumatic experience -- for both my dance partner and myself. I just couldn't seem to learn the steps.

So part of what I need to learn to do is accept that I can't dance; there are many other wonderful aspects to my personality. And hopefully the subject of dancing won't come up every time I hang out with Mensans.

And yet, and yet...do I need to accept myself as who I am, or do I need to improve myself? Or both? Always forward I say, so I have strapped on my in-line skates (Rollerblades^TM, for those less trademark-averse) and vowed to do battle against my inherent tendency to fall down.

Skating is easy. It must be. I went to a free skating clinic recently and after minimal instruction, everybody was skating smoothly around the parking lot. Except me (OK, and somebody else, but we'll ignore her since she complicates my point). I sucked. I don't like sucking; I like being really good at things.

So here's my plan: stop sucking. Then transfer my newly found coordination skills to other things that I've hitherto avoided due to my klutziness. Skiing? Roller disco? The possibilities are endless.

Can I pull this off? I don't know. It's been a while since I tried to add a new skill like this. But I remember in 10th grade when I took typing class. I sucked. Partway through the first quarter of it, I was failing the class. So I bought a typing book (the typing teacher was useless), and practiced, practiced, practiced. I brought my grade up to a C for the quarter, a B for the next quarter, and I got an A on the final exam, for a semester grade of "B". Only non-A I got during my Senior High years. But boy was I proud of it. And I spend all day using the typing skills on the computer keyboard (except for the ones involving "correction tape").

So I can type. But I can't dance. Yet. Give me a year. Or two.

Mensa and Transportation

I got my "Offer of Membership" from Mensa today. On the enclosed envelope, do they really need to say "First-Class Postage Required Post Office will not deliver without proper postage." Hel-lo. I qualify for Mensa, remember? I think I could have figured that out on my own. It annoys me when the power company does this; it's just ridiculous that Mensa does.

The letter accompanying the offer encourages me to "contact your local group and begin participating in some of the activities in your area." Actually, I already have. Friday night, I went to Mensa Happy Hour at Zorba's. Following that, the Singles SIG went for dessert and Xando, and afterwards three of us went over to someone's apartment building to chat. At around 12:45, I announced that I had to leave to attempt to catch the last Metro train back home. As I was riding the escalator down into the Dupont Circle station, I heard the announcement that the last Red Line train for Glenmont was now on the platform. Ouch. Too late. I hailed a cab, and as I was riding, wondered how much he was going to charge me. After all, in DC, they have that silly zone system. I didn't know what they did for DC to Maryland trips. Oh, well, I figured, I'd pay whatever it was and next time be more careful, if it was ridiculous. But he checked the trip counter, looked on a chart, and the total came to $20 with a (generous) tip. Not bad.

The next evening I went to a birthday party of a Mensan I had met the previous evening. The party was in Northern Virginia, and I had a choice between driving and Metro. Plus for Metro: I wouldn't have to watch my alcohol intake as closely. Plus for Driving: I wouldn't have to try to catch the last train again. Plus for Metro: The invitation said I had to get a visitor permit, or my car would get towed. Plus for Driving: I'd have to catch a Metrobus. Advantage: Driving.

And when I got there, the advantage seemed to tip even more in favor of Driving, as the birthday girl informed me that since her apartment building was out of permits, they had canceled towing for the night. And, since I stayed until 2, I would have had to take an even more expensive cab ride home. But when I left the building, my car was not where I had parked it. The same thing had happened to a fellow party-goer. Oh, crap. As we walked back into the building, we heard the maintenance guy telling someone on the phone, "I canceled towing for the evening!" He turned out to be very nice; he gave us a ride to the impound lot, and signed to have the apartment building charged for the towing fee until the "misunderstanding" was cleared up. And I made my way home eventually, although not before getting lost and touring parts of DC and PG County I hadn't planned to see (ever).

So despite my problems getting home both nights, I had a good time. As with any group, some people annoyed me, but I found some interesting people to talk to. So I'm accepting the offer of membership. I just hope I don't forget to put a stamp on my reply.

Teevee

Raspberry-flavored wine. It sounds like something Prince would sing about drinking right before he got his freak on.

The latest of one of many pieces at teevee.org that have amused me is Philip Michaels' piece Red, Red Whine. I haven't seen the commercial; let me know if you have.

Trivia

I went out last night with friends to play NTN trivia. On the way home, I thought about coming back and writing about NTN, but I ended up in a traffic jam. (At 11 PM! What's up with that?) When I got home, I was too tired to write about it. Martin wasn't.

Sadly, Themestream is no more, so that link no longer works. -- 24 Mar 2005

Uncle Petros

On my plane ride back from Belgium, I read Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture. For those of you not mathematical, Goldbach's Conjecture is that ever even number greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes. So, for example, 28=23+5. 100=3+97.

Those of you who know me know that I am a number theorist, so it's hard for me to read this book as anything other than a story about number theory. But I'll try. The narrator's Uncle Petros devotes his life to trying to prove Goldbach's Conjecture. Goldbach's Conjecture is one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory (since though it has been confirmed for every number tried, it has never been proven true of all numbers). Though it isn't a central question in mathematics, its proof would undoubtedly be a work requiring many interesting advances; in fact, many interesting advances have already resulted from proof attempts.

There I go, making it about the number theory. The point is, Goldbach's Conjecture is a hard problem. Anyone who solved it would likely be known throughout the ages. And that's part of what attracts Uncle Petros -- the chance for "immortality". But the flip side is that anyone who attacks the problem -- no matter how brilliant -- is unlikely to solve it. So Uncle Petros tries, and fails, and is perceived never to solve anything because he can't prove the one thing he is trying to prove. That, says the narrator's father, is Uncle Petro's problem -- his failure to set "attainable goals".

So in a very simple sense, the book is a cautionary tale...set your sights too high, and you're doomed to failure. I have actually seen this happen far too often in mathematics, and it's one reason I'm a little glad to be out of the academic world. "Oh, he only got a partial result." "Oh, his theorems are just generalizations of others' work." "Oh, he has a tenure-track position, but it's not at Princeton." Sometimes mathematicians act as if anything less than transcendant genius is to be derided.

But it's really not that. After all, if nobody ever tries to prove Goldbach's Conjecture, nobody ever will. Clearly Uncle Petros is unbalanced -- having one impossible goal and being tormented by failing to meet it. So maybe what is need is both unattainable goals and accepting an inability to meet them. Reach for the stars, but be happy with the moon.

D&D Update

In the latest installment, we go deep into the earth to rescue some lost miners.

US 4, South Africa 0

Ben, George and I went to RFK yesterday to watch the US play South Africa in soccer. When George went to get the tickets, he asked for the cheapest 3 seats together you could get. Even though there were $18 tickets, they sold him $25 tickets...which turned out to be great seats. Best seats I've ever had to a soccer game. 10 rows from the pitch, on about the 45-yard-line (if you'll excuse the American football reference). So the extra $7 was definitely worth it.

I figured with the US playing South Africa, the American fans would be the loudest. That's not always the case; when we went to see the US play Jamaica a couple of years ago, the Jamaicans out-cheered the Americans even if they didn't number them. I figure that most Americans aren't interested in coming to a soccer game. But if you're a Jamaican or South African living within driving distance of DC, you're going to show up when your team comes to play. Since there aren't as many South Africans as Jamaicans, US fans did dominate, but there still were a fair number of South Africans. One woman came by waving her South African flag and hit Ben and me with it. I was indignant until a guy dressed in red, white and blue came by with a drum and hit me in the head with that. Yeah, I guess Americans can be even more obnoxious. There were some South Africans sitting behind us yelling all the time in Zulu or some South African language. They'd switch into English every once in a while for obscenities. Or maybe they were swearing in both languages.

The game itself was a lot of fun to watch. I love watching soccer games in person, and it was a nice day to do so. The constant action is hypnotic, and a contrast to most American sports. Most of the game was spent with the US on offense, though both teams had a number of chances to score. The US just had more, and took advantage of them. Cobi Jones was amazing, scoring 2 goals and assisting on the other 2. So we came out of it a winner, and hopefully we'll win the (essentially meaningless) US Cup. I'm really excited about the World Cup qualifying, though. I read that the US may play Cuba at RFK in September; that's definitely a match I want to be there for.

Look here for a summary of the game.

Kevin Smith Chat

"The UPN pitch meeting was classic. We didn't have to pitch. They said, 'Look, we don't care what the show's about. Just bring it here. We need programs.'

We could've 'xeroxed' our asses for a half hour and they would've let it run for at least two seasons. ABC wouldn't let us 'xerox' our asses, so I regret going with that particular network."

If only the 'Clerks' TV show last night had been as funny as this Kevin Smith interview on cnn.com.

Superstar!

I watched Superstar tonight. It is, of course, based on Molly Shannon's Mary Katherine Gallagher character. If you like the sketches on SNL, then this movie is worth your while. It doesn't feel like a sketch gone on too long, but it's instead an absurd gag of a movie. Beforehand, I felt like I had probably seen the funniest parts in the trailer, which showed Mary Katherine french-kissing a tree. But what the trailer didn't show, which was even funnier, was Mary Katherine talking dirty to the tree. 3 stars, but keep in mind there was no way this movie was getting any more than 3 stars. So it played well above expectations.

By contrast, Clerks the TV show was fairly disappointing. I like Kevin Smith, but the TV show just was flat until the end -- the dream sequence and Korean animation really made me laugh. Maybe things will pick up next week.