THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES.  (for context, see this.)

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i had an especially good teacher for intro to philosophy– tom polger, who was a graduate student at the time. i’m tempted to pick up his book, natural minds– even though i’m not sympathetic to identity theory, i’d like to give tom yet another chance to change my mind.

at the time, i was starting to wrap my head around ideas like non-euclidean geometry and the axiom of choice, and i was curious about how far people had gone in terms of exploring the limits of logic and language. figuring that no one takes things father than philosophers, i asked tom if anyone had ever tried to ‘axiomatize the world’, and he took me to his office and showed me his copy of wittgenstein’s tractatus logicio-philosophicus. the title is as long as the book is short– there are seven primary propositions, most of which have numbered subpropositions that are commentary on the primary propositions (this map shows the tree structure of the book).

i was thinking about the tractatus the other day– not so much as philosophy, but as a piece of literature. google searches for various combinations of “deconstruction”, “tractatus”, and “wittgenstein” didn’t turn up anything, which may just indicate that i don’t really get what deconstruction is all about. the brevity of the tractatus makes reading it feel like going through an advanced math proof, where enormous amounts of complex context and background information is referenced in passing. and yet, one of the primary arguments of the book is that philosophy is not like science or math, but rather that philosophical problems and questions are simple misuses of language, such that after you finish the book and understand it, you should throw it away because everything it says is nonsense. it seems like such an odd way to write a philosophy text that argues that philosophy is just a silly misunderstanding– i suppose the idea is that if you’re going to spew nonsense, it’s best to spew as little as possible.

i’ve been toying with the idea of doing a cover of some piece of writing using the literary style of the tractatus. sean suggested “there’s a monster at the end of this book”. right now, i’m thinking “animal farm” would make a good candidate. i’d also like to write up a qad rails app that would facilitate the reading and writing of tractatus-esque pieces of literature. right now, this is all brain crack. it would help if the next time we talk, you ask me about how this little project is going, and then berate me when i say that i haven’t really started it yet. and don’t let me off the hook when i try to claim that i’m busy with finals, that’s total bs.

Labels: math, literature, philosophy

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over the last few months, i have played quite a bit of wii tennis. sadly, i am now at a point where the game no longer provides a challenge. i have achieved the mythical 2301 rating and regularly beat sara and elisa 40-0, 40-0, 40-0. i can take a new character to ‘pro’ status in a mere 5 games.

i’ve started to have this daydream where i’m playing wii tennis against cary elwes, and the match is very competitive. the power serves are coming fast and furious and our respective frontcourt miis are volleying back and forth in the blink of an eye. i dive and miss a cross-court shot, and he wins the first game coming out of deuce.

– ‘you are amazing,’ i say.
– ‘thank you…but why are you smiling?’ he replies.
– ‘because i know something you do not…i am not left handed!’

needless to say, i need to find a new game to obsess over.  has anyone played this new GT racing game?  It comes with a steering wheel that you insert the remote into and looks very cool.

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there’s no way scoble’s second mix07 prediction is serious, right?

the idea is that you’re going to take something that’s slow and put it on top of something else that’s slow and somehow that will magically make twitter scale?

Labels: tech, web2.0

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i feel like my tone has been a little dour of late, so here are a few things that made me happy today:

• this blog now is the #9 result for the google search “random graphs”.  this kicks ass because all of the other first page results are about the mathematical concept of a ‘random graph’, and this blog does not talk about those random graphs at all, aside from the obscure pun in the subtitle.  i would like this blog to become a quiet resting place for weary graph theorists.
• i had lunch at tam’s deli and cafe today– roasted chicken sandwich with the house tea and a cream puff for dessert.  one of the most satisfying meals i have had in a long time.
• i registered dumbandpoor.com, the future home of my social network devoted to those people who, for whatever reason, opted to pass on the chance to work at google before the IPO, or turned down the opportunity to be employee #6 at microsoft.

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i was working on my online profile for one of the social networks i belong to the other day.  like many social networks, this one asks its users for a short block of text that summarizes their essence.  i had no clue how to do this (i don’t think it’s possible to summarize things that you don’t understand), so I read other people’s profiles in order to get a feel for what sort of things i should be saying about myself.

a number of the profiles i read indicated that the person writing the profile hated/didn’t care for writing the ‘about me’ portion.  no one seemed to complain about listing their favorite music or books or movies, so it seems like this distaste for talking about yourself is limited to context-free, blank-piece-of-paper situations.

i think there are two dimensions to this discomfort– internal and external.  internally, we feel like we’re far too complicated and interesting to be summed up in a few sentences.  externally, we obsess over what other people think of us, and desperately try to figure out how to express ourselves in such a way that the people we care about will like us and think of us in the way we wish to be thought of.

as i read, it occured to me that there were a few different broad patterns people used when writing their profiles, and better yet, they could be easily mapped to several of the major post-renaissance art movements.

1. baroque/mannerist:  highly stylized, offers a vision of the writer as a perfect combination of the attributes that they value most highly.
2. realist:  a portrayal of a person as they really are, usually with more emphasis on their warts than is necessary.  often written by someone with a fascinating lack of self-consciousness.
3. impressionist:  vague but pleasing.  when done effectively, allows the reader to fill in what they want to see.
4. cubist:  a sequence of short snippets or references to likes, dislikes, interests, thoughts, or emotions, the thinking being that we get a better feel for who people are by seeing a number of different dimensions in rapid succession.

i suppose it makes sense, when you think about it– as a species, we’ve only figured out a handful of ways to react when confronted with a blank space that we’re supposed to fill in with some piece of ourselves.

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i’m flying to DC right now to see some friends at family, and as I was leaving for the airport this afternoon I had this moment of overwhelming sadness.  i could have chalked it up to a number of things– saying goodbye to indy always makes me sad, both yo la tengo and guster are playing shows this weekend that i’ll be missing– but that’s not really it.

you know those times in your life when you’re somewhere and you feel something, and your memory of the experience isn’t from the point of view of your own eyes, but as a third-person, watching you from some impossibly picturesque angle, so that the viewpoint in your mind evokes the feeling?  it’s like the actual image in and of itself wasn’t enough to capture the feeling, so the emotion modifies/overwrites/remixes the visual.

i was a junior in college, in the international terminal of atlanta hartsfield, with a few hours to kill before i boarded a plane for zurich and then budapest.  if you’ve never been there, it feels like being in a cathedral of light and linoleum, with alcoves all along the sides with small groups of people worshipping london, rio, or hong kong.  giant flags hang down the central aisle in pairs of stained polyester.  it’s unbearably quiet and unbearably empty– far too big a place to be so quiet and so empty.

and then there’s me.  i’m walking down that central aisle with a backpack and a carry-on bag, so small and inconsequential, looking up and to the left at the flags as i walk past them, doing my best to figure out what countries they symbolize, trying any sort of trivial exercise to distract from how lonely i feel.  i’m about to die, and we always die alone.

the process of leaving your life behind always involves a death and a rebirth.  the death is painful in and of itself at the time, though it gets modulated somewhat over time by the quality of the life that follows.  when our rebirth is joyful, we don’t spend too much time thinking about how awful it felt to die; when it’s tragic, we long for the old life that we killed off so recklessly.  in this case– in my case– i had a wonderful rebirth, in this strange country where i didn’t know anyone and didn’t even speak the language.  and so i’ve never told anyone how sad and sorry for myself i felt at that moment, just before i got on the plane.  i’m sure people knew i was sad in my old life– happy people don’t leave their lives behind intentionally– but i wonder if we ever think about how sad dying-as-dying is for the person, even when the choice is their own.

ever since then, it seems, going to the airport is a sad thing for me.  i think commercial air travel is the most death-like experience we can have while we’re still alive– packed tight into a compact space with a bunch of people we don’t know, unable to move or speak or think over the dull roar of the engines, spending most of the time lost in our own thoughts or someone else’s.  it’s as if you can’t die when you’re on a plane, because you’re not really alive.

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