personal – Page 15

What Carl Sagan means to me

Yesterday I blogged about my 11th-grade math teacher, Mr. Arrigo, one of my greatest teachers ever. But any list of my greatest teachers must include Carl Sagan, even though he wasn’t “my” teacher any more than he was everyone else’s in the whole world.

Sagan’s famous Tonight Show appearances happened right around the time I was old enough to stay up and see them. Early on I remember being annoyed by his criticisms of Star Wars (to wit: that spaceships don’t make whooshing noises in space, that Chewbacca deserved a medal at the end too, etc). But then my mom, who I think had a bit of a crush on him, urged me to read Broca’s Brain, and I was hooked on his brand of science education.

Then came Cosmos, which was eagerly anticipated in our household. We counted down to its premiere for weeks. When it finally aired, the cheesy new-age music and Sagan’s, er, limited acting abilities — the camera lingered forever on what was supposed to be his awestruck face as he sailed through the universe in his kinda lame “ship of the imagination” — left us at first unenthused. But then came his story of Eratosthenes and I got another one of those emotional learning moments that I wrote about yesterday. The following is from Cosmos, the companion book to the PBS series:

[Eratosthenes] was the director of the great library of Alexandria, where one day he read in a papyrus book that in the southern frontier outpost of Syene, near the first cataract of the Nile, at noon on June 21 vertical sticks cast no shadows. On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, as the hours crept toward midday, the shadows of temple columns grew shorter. At noon, they were gone. A reflection of the Sun could be seen in the water at the bottom of a deep well. The Sun was directly overhead. […]

Eratosthenes asked himself how, at the same moment, a stick in Syene could cast no shadow and a stick in Alexandria, far to the north, could cast a pronounced shadow. […]

The only possible answer, he saw, was that the surface of the Earth is curved. Not only that: the greater the curvature, the greater the difference in shadow lengths. […] For the observed difference in the shadow lengths, the distance between Alexandria and Syene had to be about seven degrees along the circumference of the Earth [which] is something like one-fiftieth of three hundred and sixty degrees, the full circumference of the Earth. Eratosthenes knew that the distance between Alexandria and Syene was approximately 800 kilometers, because he hired a man to pace it out. Eight hundred kilometers times 50 is 40,000 kilometers: so that must be the circumference of the Earth.

This is the right answer. Eratosthenes’ only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, and brains, plus a taste for experiment. With them he deduced the circumference of the Earth with an error of only a few percent […] He was the first person accurately to measure the size of a planet.

In the TV show, when Sagan said matter-of-factly, “This is the right answer,” I got a lump in my throat. At once I was propelled farther down the paths of learning, teaching, science, and, of course, Carl Sagan fanhood.

It is more than just a shame that Sagan died before his time of a rare disease, ten years ago today. (This blog post is participating in a Carl Sagan “blog-a-thon” to commemorate the occasion.) There is no doubt that if he were alive today, he would never have permitted science to be debased by politics to the extent that it has in recent years. Sagan knew that we ignore science at our peril and excelled at conveying that message. He saved the world once before, by popularizing the nuclear winter theory of the aftermath of even small nuclear wars, assuring those insane enough to consider such wars that they could never avoid spelling their own doom as well as their enemy’s. Who will take up his mantle and bring the Promethean fire of science back to light a world darkened by his absence?

e to the i pi plus one equals zero

One of the best teachers I ever had was Mr. Arrigo, for 11th grade pre-calculus. He was young, funny, hip, and energetic. It was almost incongruous that he was a math instructor. He seemed more like the big brother who’d already gone off to college. Of course he wouldn’t be one of my best teachers if he wasn’t also excellent as a teacher, which he was.

Throughout the year we covered topics in trigonometry, complex numbers, transcendentals, and logarithms. Little did we know that Mr. Arrigo was working up to a unification of all four.

One day in class he was particularly animated. We had been discussing the Euler formula, which gives this equivalence:

cosθ + isinθ = e^iθ

(Here, e is the natural logarithm constant ≅ 2.718 and i is the imaginary number √−1.) He then asked us to work out the special case where θ is π (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter ≅ 3.14159). The cosine of π is −1 and the sine of π is 0, so Euler’s formula gives this amazing relation:

e^iπ = −1

or, stated just a bit differently,

e^iπ + 1 = 0

When Mr. Arrigo derived this result on the blackboard, he literally jumped up and down as he exclaimed, “One simple equation relating the five most important constants in all of mathematics!”

An xkcd comic

His excitement was infectious. Of course the result above is breathtaking. (If you’re not mathematically inclined, you’ll just have to take my word for it. Imagine being a world traveler collecting random antique curios from cities around the globe — then discovering one day that five of your favorite ones just happen to fit together perfectly to make an exquisite and accurate pocket watch. It’s kind of like that.) But Mr. Arrigo’s passionate presentation made it something more — an emotional highlight of my academic career.

A few years later, in college, I shared an office with my engineering friend Steve. One afternoon his actress girlfriend Amy stopped by and, one way or another, the conversation turned to mathematics. Taking turns scribbling on the whiteboard, Steve and I explained to a willing Amy how it’s possible to derive all the familiar rules of numbers and arithmetic from a tiny kernel of laws called Peano’s postulates. Amy seemed interested, so we pressed on into other topics such as geometry and its cognates, trigonometry and set theory. Thrilled that her interest didn’t flag, I mustered Mr. Arrigo’s passion and derived for her the amazing relationship between e, i, π, 1, and 0.

Soon after that, Amy’s drama-major mind finally had as much math as it could handle and our memorable pedagogical session petered out. But I could have kept going all day. I suspect Mr. Arrigo planted in me the desire to teach. I think Jonah and Archer are getting the benefit today of Mr. Arrigo’s passion way back then, and who knows? I may yet heed the urging of friends and family and become a teacher myself some day.

Not me

When a Terminator comes from the future looking for me (so that in the post-apocalyptic future I won’t write the Emacs hack that defeats the robot AI), this is the guy he may mistakenly blow away first: veteran yoga instructor Bob Glickstein of Maryland.

(Photo credit: Patrick Farrell.)

What brings you here?

Herewith, a selection of search-engine queries that resulted in hits on this blog, according to my server logs.

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Shh

A few years ago we moved into our current house, in a neighborhood surrounded on three sides by wooded hills dotted with houses. In those first days, when Alex woke me up as usual for her morning walk around 6am, I was amazed and delighted to hear a dramatic dawn chorus of neighborhood songbirds. It was like nothing I’d ever heard, loud and irresistibly cheerful. At 6am you wouldn’t expect to hear much else, and yet the chorus competed with another sound. At first I guessed it must be a neighbor three or four blocks away testing a jet engine mounted on a rig in their backyard. At 6am. Soon I came to recognize it as the unceasing whoosh of combustion engines, rolling rubber, and steel slicing through air: the freeway, more than half a mile away. That sound is omnipresent on the otherwise sleepy residential street in front of my house. Perhaps the hills-on-three-sides shape of the neighborhood acts as a waveguide, channeling the noise and making it more prominent than it ought to be. In any event, having once noticed it, I now cannot escape it. About the only time it’s really quiet seems to be around 3:30am on Sunday mornings. (Alex is old and her schedule is less regular than it once was.)

My life has always been noisy. I grew up in an apartment in Queens right under an approach route for LaGuardia Airport. Most days of the week I spend two or more hours commuting in a poorly soundproofed economy car. And of course I am almost continuously sitting at high-powered computers and the constant drone of their cooling fans.

One day I decided to try to find a quiet spot. A really quiet spot, where I could hear no trucks rumbling by, no gas station air compressors, no high school football team; no crashing surf or gurgling brook; preferably not even any wind, or the rush of my own blood in my ears (as when they’re underwater or stuffed with earplugs). I didn’t want to not hear anything; I wanted to hear nothing. I wanted to listen to silence. Obviously no place in or near the Bay Area would suffice, so I located Pine Mountain Lake airport on the San Francisco sectional chart. Of all the places within easy flying distance, Pine Mountain Lake appeared to be the most remote and the most likely to be quiet (once I shut down the Cessna’s engine). My friend Steve came along for the trip. We crammed our bikes into the back of the plane just in case we had to put a little distance between us and the airport in order to find silence. But even on the mountainous roads of Pine Mountain Lake, the whoosh of cars and clatter of trucks are inescapable.

If I were more intrepid and more persistent in this quest I’m sure I would eventually have found something to satisfy me — in the desert, perhaps, or out on a calm sea. But this goal languishes way, way down my priority list. I was glad to see recently that others are more dedicated to the cause, and have been more successful, to wit: One Square Inch of Silence.

That could have been me

Like most of the rest of the blogosphere, I was strangely affected by the plight of James Kim and his family, snowbound in a remote mountain pass for eleven days after a fateful wrong turn during a routine family drive. After several days and an intensive search, his wife and young daughters were rescued from their stranded car, ironically just hours after James struck out on foot in search of help. He never made it.

People die every day. Plenty of stories are sadder than this one. What makes some grab at the imagination more than others? In this case, for me, the answer was pretty clear (even before I knew about my indirect personal connection to the Kims — they’re close friends of my boss, Matt): James Kim could have been me. He was a middle-class Bay Area computer nerd, intelligent and nice, with a young family that liked to take long car trips.

My own experience with being underdressed, underequipped, and disoriented in a snowy wilderness was orders of magnitude more brief and less perilous, but I think it taught me well enough not to strike out across open country under such circumstances. But how long could I resist the temptation to go for help when my family is freezing and starving before my very eyes? Superior, self-appointed survival experts all over the Internet are today pompously pronouncing that James should never have left the car. Easy for them to say. I think he showed more restraint than I would have under similar circumstances by staying with the car for as many days as he did. And after all, there are worse ways to die than by hypothermia (the end stages of which can be quite misleadingly pleasant — you get warm and drowsy — learned that in fifth grade from Tunnel Through Time by Lester Del Rey) while heroically trying to rescue your wife and children, as half the online world prays for you.

Reportedly, the Kims took an ill-chosen alternate route to get from Interstate 5 inland to US-101 on the coast. How many times have Andrea and I spotted a more-interesting looking road on the map and said, “Let’s have an adventure!” (We did it on this road once near Half Moon Bay and almost had a wilderness crisis of our own — on dry roads, near the heart of the Bay Area — when we nearly ran out of gas as night fell.)

Having grown up on the East Coast, I know how treacherous even slightly hilly, slightly curvy secondary roads can be in the snow, so I think I’d know better than the Kims did about choosing that winding mountain pass. But with just a few modifications, the Kims’ plight could easily have been the Glicksteins’.

[This secton incorporates text originally written in May 2004 for a similar topic on my high school alumni mailing list.]

I think I understand the need of some to make those pompous pronouncements. I know what drives the desire to blame the victim.

Several years ago I got involved in flying. A big part of what a pilot does when not flying is to talk about flying. And read and write about flying. Specifically, there are a few flying magazines that many pilots read. You’ve seen them on the newsstands: “Flying,” “Plane and Pilot,” “AOPA Pilot,” “Private Pilot,” etc.

These magazines are highly formulaic and the writing is uniformly awful. Every month it’s the same test drive of a cool new plane, the same product reviews, the same reports of what our pilot buddies in Congress are doing for us, and the same fights between local airports and the noise-averse communities surrounding them. There’s no doubt in my mind that every pilot skims right over all that junk to head straight for the monthly column about some horrible aviation mishap (columns with names like “Never Again” and “I Learned About Flying From That” and “Aftermath”).

It’s a truism that there’s a little nugget of fear somewhere deep inside every pilot. The accident statistics are very favorable, but of course it’s the grisly stories that stand out in one’s mind. So pilots morbidly devour every accident story, mainly looking for reassurance that they’re immune to whatever mistake that poor bastard made. Didn’t get an updated weather briefing before takeoff? Idiot. Didn’t do his weight-and-balance calculations? Moron. Didn’t budget enough fuel for getting to his alternate landing site? Allowed an impatient controller to bully him into a bad decision? Didn’t heed the rough sound coming from the engine? I’d never do that.

I feel sorry for the victims I read about in those stories, but I freely admit to playing that blame-the-victim game as I read. Usually the mistakes are simple and understandable. Sometimes I can’t find any difference between that poor bastard and the cautious way that I fly, other than dumb luck, and that’s pretty unsettling. But sometimes the lapses in judgment are so egregious that it turns any sympathy I may have felt into impatience, even anger, especially when there are innocent victims involved.

Maybe this is something like how the Monday-morning wilderness quarterbacks are reacting to the Kims’ story. To me, the Kims’ mistakes fall into the simple-and-understandable category. (All too understandable.) For others maybe they are egregious. Seems harsh to me, but at least I can understand it as a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind.

In recent years, when contemplating my own mortality, I’ve found that it’s not me I worry about (as it was when I was younger), it’s the people I’d leave behind. This was true even before I became a parent but is a hundred times truer now. As long as I don’t die stupidly, it’ll be without any serious regrets. (Well, I would like to know how the Harry Potter series turns out.) But I have a strong stereotype in my mind about what losing a father at a young age can do to a couple of boys like Jonah and Archer. In that stereotype they become sullen, mad at the world, unambitious, even self-destructive. This more than anything else is why I hope not to die. There’s an alternate stereotype, where the survivors pull together to endure the crisis and emerge more tightly knit for their loss. This more than anything else is what I hope for the Kims.

Random security thought

As I was reading a passage earlier from “The System of the World” (volume 3 of Neal Stephenson’s amazing Baroque Cycle) about 18th-century Londoners taking precautions against highwaymen, a thought struck me: when my credit cards expire, I dutifully cut them up and discard them. Why not instead use them to populate a decoy wallet? That way if I’m ever mugged, I just hand over the decoy wallet containing a few expired credit cards, a few bucks, and maybe a phony driver’s license with a false address.

Eh, I’m not really paranoid enough to put this together (not to mention carry two wallets all the time), but if you are and want to use my idea, more power to you.

(Even better: learn magic.)

East is east and west is west

…and when it comes to varieties of Entenmann’s cakes, never the twain shall meet.

When I lived in New York (now more than half a lifetime ago, egad), my two favorite varieties were “Thick Fudge Golden Cake” and “Filled Chocolate Chip Crumb Cake.” But when I went to Pittsburgh for college, those cakes could not be found anywhere; nor (as I later discovered) are they available in California. This despite the fact that many other Entenmann’s varieties are available nationwide.

As if I have nothing better to do with my time, recently I decided to investigate. The Entenmann’s website sent me to the Entenmann’s distributor for the California region, an outfit called Bimbo’s Bakeries USA in Fort Worth, Texas. (That’s the second thing I’ve run across called Bimbo’s having nothing to do with actual bimbos, which is two more than I would have expected to find if you’d asked me.) I sent a polite and eloquent letter inquiring about the unavailability of these varieties in regions other than New York.

Superpest

Sometimes, achieving a satisfactory outcome required persistence. My mom had it in abundance, as dozens of public-relations officers learned over the years to their occasional dismay. One of her favorite tricks, when on the phone with some peon who was trying to stonewall her or brush her off, was to say dismissively, “You obviously don’t have the authority. Let me talk to your supervisor.” The peon caved in to my mom’s demands nine times out of ten, just to prove her wrong.

In such ways did my mom eventually adopt the moniker “Superpest.”

When I was growing up, my mom was the undisputed champion of writing letters to companies, both to complain and to praise. In those good-old-days of corporate public relations, she almost never failed to receive both a polite, personalized reply and a handful of discount coupons for the company’s products, if not outright free samples. And very often, if the letter was a complaint, the company fixed the problem, e.g. by sending a refund.

These are no longer those good old days. The reply from Bimbo’s stated: “Those varieties are not available in your market.” Yeah, I know, that was kind of the point.

I was planning to look into the matter further, but (a) I do have better things to do with my time, and (b) Amazon.com started selling Entenmann’s products from Gristede’s in New York! So now I can get my old favorites again. Which isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Now if only I can find good Italian ices…

One red cent

I started this blog in July, and in hopes of defraying expenses I added Google Adsense ads to it not long after. (You have to view individual blog posts to see the ads, e.g. by following this link; they aren’t visible on the front page.)

I don’t have the most widely read blog, but I do OK. I get several pageviews a day, amounting to thousands of pageviews since this blog has been up and running. Guess how much AdSense revenue I’ve earned in all this time? (Hint: see the title of this post.)

The Maggie Show

I knew that after stuffing myself into insensibility during last night’s Thanksgiving feast (not without remembering to be thankful) I would have interesting dreams, and they did not disappoint. I remember only fragments of some of them, but all of this one:

I was in an Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool. Also in the pool were my friend Maggie, and the actor William H. Macy. It was Maggie’s daytime TV aquatic talk show, broadcast daily from that pool, and Bill Macy and I were that day’s guests.

Macy did a watery reading of a David Mamet soliloquy or something. My shtick — a bit déclassé after Macy’s performance, but I gave it my all anyway — was to take the deepest breath I could (which, this being a dream, was supernaturally large), submerge my mouth, and blow into the water, producing a jet of bubbles and propelling myself backward, describing an erratic curve through the pool like that of a balloon losing its air.

As soon as the dream was over, I woke up. Even though it was only 4:30am, I was wide awake.

What does it mean?