gee bobg

It’s 100 days until my birthday! (And how cool that the hundredth day before my birthday is Bastille Day! Well, it’s a little cool. Oh, OK, it’s a meaningless coincidence.)

To goose my weight-loss regime, which appears to have stalled once again — though I am holding my own against the “Google 15” — I am adding a daily exercise regimen for the first time, inspired by hundredpushups.com: each day I will do one more push-up than the day before, starting with one today and culminating with a hundred push-ups by my birthday.

If I keep exactly to that plan, the total number of push-ups I’ll do is 5,050 — one today, two tomorrow, three on Wednesday, four on Thursday, and so on. The sum of the first N numbers from 1 through N is, in general,

(N+1) × N/2

an elegant intuitive proof of which is as follows. List the first N numbers, let’s say 6 for this example:

1 2 3 4 5 6

The sum of the two “outer” numbers is 7:

1 2 3 4 5 6

Removing those, the sum of the next two “outer” numbers is also 7:

2 3 4 5

Removing those, the sum of the final pair is also 7:

3 4

That sum — N+1 — is repeated N/2 times, giving rise to the formula

(N+1) × N/2

“Wait a minute,” I hear you say. “What about when N is odd? Then there’s one extra innermost number with no partner.” That’s true. In that case, the number of pairs that add up to N+1 isn’t N/2, it’s only (N-1)/2:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Here N is 7, and there are 3 pairs that add up to 8 — 1 and 7, 2 and 6, 3 and 5 — and 4 is all alone in middle. So the sum is:

(N+1) × (N-1)/2 + the middle number

But the middle number is always (N+1)/2, so this becomes:

(N+1) × (N-1)/2 + (N+1)/2

which is the same as

(N+1)/2 × (N-1) + (N+1)/2

which can be read as adding one more (N+1)/2 to a collection of N-1 of them, for a total of N (N+1)/2’s:

(N+1)/2 × N

which is the same as

(N+1) × N/2

which is the same as the original formula above whether N is odd or even. QED.

OK, let’s get this regimen started. Rrrrrnnnnngghh — one. Whew.

[This post is participating in Culture Snob's Self-Involvement blog-a-thon.]

Culture Snob has asked for blog posts about movies that elicited very personal reactions, a subject on which I’ve written at great length here at gee bobg. I don’t have anything new to write on that subject right now (except to publicly recite my mantra for upcoming movies that look cool: “Dark Knight, please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck”), so instead here’s a short retrospective of things I’ve said about how movies have affected my life.

To begin with, there’s Star Wars, which enveloped me in a miasma of intense fandom from age 10 to about age 20, at which point the mist began to clear and I finally started being able to think critically about it.

I had already developed the odd habit of recording, memorizing, and reciting the dialogue of miscellaneous TV shows when Star Wars came along and spurred me to perfect that strange hobby. Thanks to that (and to obsessive audio-recording of movies on HBO) I became something of an expert in verbatim, memorable movie dialogue, which contributed to the initial courting of my wife — I presented her with a transcript of The Princess Bride, written from memory, which amazed and delighted her (and which she still keeps handy) — and led me to a unique and lucrative entrepreneurial adventure.

(It was not my first movie-based entrepreneurial effort.)

Then there’s Koyaanisqatsi, the movie that was the first one I ever watched with my later-to-be-wife, and the strange way that came full circle when the aforementioned lucre ultimately got us invited to the gala premiere of the final film of the “Qatsi” trilogy.

More recently I’ve been better able to appreciate the message that some films have for parents and those facing middle age. Which is not to say I don’t sometimes return to those few films that transport me back to childhood by evoking New York the way I remember it.

Here’s an excerpt from a message I sent to my wife on March 13th of this year:

As you know, e-mail is a long-established standard, but there’s one piece missing from it, and that’s a standard way to be notified when new mail arrives. E-mail clients are required to “poll” e-mail servers for new mail periodically. Most polls reveal no new mail to download, and so are a waste of bandwidth and computing time. It’s a negligible waste to a single user, but if you’re an ISP with millions of polls happening every minute, it really adds up. [...]

Something similar is true for RSS feeds, which are getting more and more popular. You subscribe to someone’s blog posts, or to a news-clipping service, or whatever, and your feed reader shows you the new articles as they become available. But there again, the feed reader is required to poll all the sites to which you subscribe; there is no standard way for those sites to notify you of when there are new messages available. [...]

The arrival of new mail or the appearance of new blog posts are called “asynchronous events,” meaning that they happen without regard to whatever you may be doing at the moment. Most of the time, our computing infrastructure is obliged to use synchronous methods (like polling) to check for whether any asynchronous events have occurred lately. But that doesn’t have to be true. You could arrange for an asynchronous “listener” to be notified of asynchronous events and then take appropriate action. [...]

I went on to describe an idea for an Internet-based service that delivers asynchronous events. I started working on a prototype. But that was around the same time that I left my job at Danger and was busy looking for a new one. There was also a birthday party to plan, and a family trip to New York, and another birthday party, plus a consulting gig and the beginning of a new job at Google. My asynchronous-event-delivery service went near the bottom of my priority list.

Then just a few days ago I learned about Gnip, a brand-new venture-funded startup that is the exact same idea, right down to hosting it on Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure for scalability. To add insult to injury, their clever name — “ping” spelled backwards (to “ping” a computer on the network is akin to polling it) — could not have been more perfectly chosen if their aim was to highlight my slowness off the mark.

This is not the first time I’ve been beaten to the punch with a clever online business idea. It’s maddening.

It’s all downhill from here: according to How long will I live?, a free online life-expectancy calculator, my life expectancy is almost exactly twice my current age. Which means I can now say that I’ve worked myself half to death and mean it literally.

[This post is participating in 12 Grand In Checking's New York In the Movies Blog-a-thon.]

There are endless numbers of movies in which New York City is the star: New York as we’ve always imagined it; New York as we wish it really was; New York as we fear it actually is or might become. This is not about any of those movies.

I grew up in New York City, and by the time I left it to go to college I had an ample collection of authentic New York experiences under my belt. I explored every nook and cranny of the subway system. I told a cab driver to “step on it” and then hung on for dear life. I ate at Horn & Hardart’s. I outwitted muggers. I hung out at Greenwich Village coffee shops past midnight. I rode my bicycle hell-for-leather through midday traffic. I took my prom date on a horse-and-buggy ride up Sixth Avenue and through Central Park. In the middle of a discussion with my friends of the parallels between The Warriors (a New-York-as-we-fear-it-actually-is movie) and Homer’s Odyssey, a complete stranger joined in and explained that the more apt classical comparison was with a work called Xenophon’s Anabasis.

So when I got to college in Pittsburgh I felt smugly cosmopolitan. Pittsburgh was a podunk backwater by comparison, and the people I met there — the first people I ever knew who weren’t from New York — were country bumpkins sorely in need of being edified by me about the marvels they’d been missing by lacking a big-city upbringing. Honestly, it’s a wonder I made as many friends there as I did. For a time I was insufferably superior about having come from New York.

One day, I made a remark along these lines to my friend Mike, something about how he, being only from Rochester, NY, should take my word about something or other since I was from New York, NY. It wasn’t the first such remark I’d made, but it finally crossed the line for Mike, and he called me out. I wish I had a transcript of exactly what he said. I remember it both as very perfunctorily putting me in my place and also as encompassing all of the following points:

• Though New York City may contain many things to see and do, they are still only a small fraction of all the things there are in the world to see and do;
• Though growing up in New York City may provide a broader perspective on the world than growing up elsewhere, it is still only a single perspective;
• Though very many people live and work in New York City, it is still only a small fraction of all the people in the world; and
• Most of the other people in the world don’t go around saying that they know better than everyone else just because of where they’re from.

I don’t know if this was the first time my arrogant attitude was directly challenged, or just the first time that it got through to me. Either way, it had the desired effect, and then some. I recognized the validity of Mike’s criticism and took it to heart. No one ever heard that sort of elitism from me again — an improvement in my personality for which I will be forever grateful to Mike. Moreover, I began to open up to the charms of Pittsburgh. Before long I felt completely at home there, where previously I had only ever measured it against my memories of New York and found it wanting.

All of which is just preamble to the point I want to make about New York. When Mike gave me that much-needed dressing down he made me feel distinctly provincial, which at first struck me as an odd way for someone from The Big Apple to feel. The City That Never Sleeps! Gotham! But I had to admit that my worldview, and that of most of the other New Yorkers I’d left behind, was as insular, as parochial, as uncultured in its way as that from any one-horse hick town.

And that’s when my idea of New York began to change. It wasn’t really the teeming, glitzy metropolis that everyone always claimed, any more than Norma Jean was really Marilyn Monroe. At heart New York City was actually the world’s biggest small town — or rather, the biggest collection of small towns, jammed close together.

It’s hard to nail down just what I mean by that, but that’s where movies come in. Offhand I can think of a few films that capture the Norma Jean face of New York City, so you can see what I mean without my having to strain my writing muscles.

A movie like Woody Allen’s Manhattan does not capture it, because it makes the city bigger than the people in the story. It’s a New-York-as-we’ve-always-imagined-it movie. A movie like the little-seen Rich Kids, on the other hand, does. It can be set in no place other than New York, but not because New York makes the characters be who they are — the characters make New York what it is.

Neil Simon was good at this kind of New York story, and ironically the main characters in his best one, The Goodbye Girl, aren’t even New Yorkers! Marsha Mason’s character is from Cincinatti; Richard Dreyfus’s is from Chicago. But their banter is a big part of what makes New York the city it is. Quinn Cummings, even more so.

Martin Scorsese’s movies almost qualify for inclusion but rely too heavily on the violent (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver) and the bizarre (Taxi Driver, After Hours) to really capture my New York — the real, personal, cozy New York of my youth, the New York made primarily of neighborhood people and not of melodrama. On the other hand, Eyewitness and Dog Day Afternoon do qualify. Even though each contains some melodramatic crime and violence elements, they are both populated by actual New Yorkers: outspoken, ethnic, irritable, big-hearted in spite of everything; people who thoroughly inhabit their own small communities that form the patchwork quilt of the city.

It’s strange: Hero At Large captures my idea of small-town New York, but Turk 182! does not. Both are lighthearted comedies about anonymous heroes whose exploits capture the imagination of the entire city, but it’s instructive to see how Timothy Hutton and Robert Urich, the brothers in Turk 182!, fail to embody the things about New York that I’ve been talking about despite their obvious efforts at characterization, while John Ritter and Anne Archer, whose acting skills are blander, nevertheless succeed in Hero At Large on pure heart.

I’m sure I’ve failed to convey my point very well, but if you watch some of the movies I’ve named, maybe you’ll understand what I mean. Or maybe it’s only possible to understand that feeling about New York if you grew up there in the 1970’s, when giant retail chains did not yet dominate the landscape and perhaps it really was more of a small town than it is today.

I recently started a new job at Google — specifically, at YouTube, which Google owns. Near my desk there is a break room with some musical equipment, including electric guitars, keyboards, and amps. It’s called the Guitar Room. What a stroke of luck — I’ve been wanting to learn the guitar but it’s hard to get practice time at home with the kids always clamoring for attention (and me so willing to give it). I sent mail to my new co-workers asking whether anyone was able to give me lessons during lunch a couple of times a week. Someone suggested, “Why not try some of the ten million ‘Learn to play guitar’ videos on YouTube?” So I found some that look promising and now I’m using YouTube to learn guitar in the YouTube Guitar Room.

Once in a while I toy with a blog post for a long time before publishing it — sometimes many months, as in the case of this one. I knew that I wanted to tell the story of The Grape, tie it together with my interest in flying and in computers, and prognosticate about similar leanings in my son Jonah, but as sometimes happens, the ideas didn’t quite gel, meandering aimlessly in search of some relevant point to make.

And then, as also sometimes happens, current events provided the frame for my story. So, let’s begin with The Grape:

When I was about five years old, my mom brought me and my sister on a routine trip to the local supermarket. As we entered the produce aisle we found to our delight that grapes were in season again. Immediately my mom plucked a grape from a bunch on the shelf and popped it in her mouth. She gave one to my sister, who did the same. She gave one to me and I stared at it, aghast. “I can’t eat this,” I told her. “We didn’t pay for it!” My mom patiently explained that it’s OK if people take one or two grapes as they walk by. “But that’s stealing!” I protested. “If everyone did that, there’d be none left!” Other shoppers turned to see the little boy making accusatory sounds at his mom. “We’re going to buy some anyway,” my mom said, still holding out a grape to me, “so it’s OK if you have one.” No, I insisted — we had to wait until they were paid for. Losing her patience, my mom uttered through gritted teeth the punchline of one of my family’s most-retold stories about me: “Eat. The. Grape.” I flatly refused, and she pointedly fed more grapes to my sister. We went home sore at each other, and for the rest of her life, I would express dismay at her occasional willingness to commit (very) petty larceny, such as taking home a hotel towel or an interesting salt shaker from a restaurant; and she would come back with, “Eat the grape,” which became her shorthand for my irksome excess of honesty.

A few decades later, on a visit to Tucson for a wedding, I decided to find an airplane rental club and spend a morning exploring the local airspace. I tried to persuade my friend Bruce, also visiting Tucson, to come along for the ride, since he’d expressed an interest in learning to fly and had tried it once or twice. In the conversation that ensued, he told me his interest had flagged: “I just want to fly. I got bored with all the rules and procedures you have to follow.” “Are you kidding?” I returned. “That’s the best part!”

The words sounded strange coming out of my mouth — what a bizarre thing to admit enjoying — but it was true, I enjoyed the arcane radio protocol, I enjoyed filling out navigation logs and filing flight plans, I enjoyed checklists and weight-and-balance computations…

In fact, I enjoyed flying (it occurred to me) for the same reasons that I enjoyed road rallies. In Pittsburgh in the late 80’s and early 90’s, my friend Steve and I participated in several amateur road rallies of the “time-speed-distance” variety, where the goal is not to run the course in the shortest possible time but to follow the route — mostly picturesque rural roads — as accurately as possible, armed with a sometimes deliberately misleading set of “route instructions” devised by a more or less devious rallymaster, and a complex set of regulations for how to understand them. (To this day, one of the top Google hits for “road rally” is a document that I helped to write long ago.) The pretty scenery, for me, was secondary to the intellectual exercise of driving in a rally — just as I considered the rules and procedures to be “the best part” about flying. (True to his nature, the one time Bruce tried a road rally, he grew impatient with the route instructions, tossed them into the backseat, and struck off at random into the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania — with the enthusiastic support of his equally bored rally partner, Andrea. “And today that woman is my wife.”)

Rules — I love ’em. I love the way simple ones gives rise to complex behavior, whether it’s a game of Go or the orderly society that emerges from (for instance) people paying for their produce before eating it. It’s no wonder I was drawn to a life of writing computer software, where rules per se achieve their purest realization. A computer program is nothing but rules, after all, and with some care and some artistry it can be made elegant and simple and still create a very rich set of behaviors.

Obviously not everyone is as enamored of rules as I am. So what’s the attraction? It must have something to do with a need to impose order on a bewildering and uncertain world — bewilderment and uncertainty that comes from the irrational behavior of other people. This is a common bit of pop psychology. Being unable to fathom irrational behavior, and withdrawing from even trying, explains, for example, the popularity of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock (who, interestingly, is a hero especially among computer programmers).

My son Jonah seems to be like this. He is always keenly aware of the rules in any situation, and alert to anyone not following them, or to any other source of unfairness, and quick to call it out. Most of his friends are not so preoccupied about fairness, but one is: his friend Ethan, who is paralyzed by fits of red-faced outrage whenever anything doesn’t go according to the rules.

Having witnessed a couple of those fits, and thinking back over my own life, I’ve lately come to think that those who love rules are at a disadvantage to those who can abide their neglect, who can tolerate ambiguity better. Mr. Spock was only the first officer aboard the Enterprise, after all; it took the greater resiliency of James T. Kirk to be the captain. And while Ethan is pitching a fit, his friends are still running around and having a great time, completely unfazed.

This is what brings us around to current events. This week the U.S. Senate will debate the so-called FISA bill that, among other things, gives retroactive legal immunity to the Bush administration and to various large corporations for illegal warrantless wiretapping activities dating back to before 9/11, and prohibits any details of those illegal activities from ever coming to light. You could have been the subject of illegal surveillance, and if this bill passes, as it is expected to do, you would have no legal recourse for finding out about it, ever. Does this sound fair? Of course not, and those who love playing by the rules have been up in arms about it — red in the face and all but paralyzed, like Jonah’s friend Ethan. As DailyKos’ Hunter writes:

So, why have activists spent so much effort opposing retroactive corporate immunity as part of new FISA legislation, when there are so many other things in the world to be outraged about? [...] It demonstrates a complete lack of regard for the law

and

We were never told why it was so all-fired important [...] the only rationale available seems to be the most cynical one — it is merely doing the bidding of companies that provide substantive campaign contributions.

So we citizens can believe all we like that everyone’s equal before the law, but in fact if you’ve got pockets deep enough, you can buy whatever kind of law best suits you. Very likely this has always been the reality in America (as it has throughout human history), but all past attempts to tilt the playing field in favor of the powerful and the well-connected at least pretended to be for the common good. This bill does not, and that’s what’s so jaw-droppingly wrong with it: it says that the vaunted “rule of law,” the very bedrock of the Enlightenment and the principle that has always guided America no matter how far she’s strayed from it, is now officially just a fairy tale, and only fools will henceforth strive toward that ideal. If you’re wealthy, go ahead and break whatever laws you like; your pals in Congress will patch things up later.

How many generations will it take for America to recover from abandoning even the pretense of fairness? How much civil unrest? How much political violence?

This is another reason people like me love rules — we can see what life would be without them. But if the rule of law is just a fantasy and always has been, then laying it bare like this might be just the thing we need. Give everyone else a chance to see what life is like without rules. In the end, I predict, though the cost may be high, everyone will love them like I do.

Last year I wrote,

I know and accept the reality of age-related hearing loss, especially in high frequencies [...] Can it be that we’ve had silent mosquitoes flying around? Is it possible I lost my hearing at only the precise frequency that mosquitoes emit?

Would that I had! Mind you, I’m not saying I want to be deaf. But last night, around 2am:

eeeEEEEEE!

A mosquito in my ear! In two seconds flat I was on my feet and wide awake, a process that usually takes two cups of coffee and about three hours. I turned on all the lights in the house and hunted the mosquito, hyperalert. (It was a warm night, so Andrea and the kids were sound asleep in a tent in our backyard; I was indoors because I worked at the computer late into the night.)

I got one glimpse of the mosquito but couldn’t kill it, and after a fruitless half hour of stalking it I did the only thing I could: turned off all the lights, smeared citronella oil all around my head, and got back into bed, eyes wide open and muscles tensed to leap from bed once more and deal hot mosquito death.

By 3am I was asleep again, finally. The box of citronella wipes said they last for about 3 hours, and this morning at 6am:

eeeEEEEEE!

I’m afraid to go to sleep tonight. If I am again awakened by a keening whine in my ear I believe I’m fully capable of doing a Harry Caul on my bedroom in search of that damn bug.

Joseph Costanzo, Jr. and infant Jonah
at The Primadonna, October 2002

I’m not the only one who started a new job this week. I have company in the person of Joseph Costanzo, Jr. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, once lionized (including by me) as the region’s greatest restaurateur, then disgraced, now resurgent with the opening of his new restaurant, Cafe Costanzo, in the “Uptown” neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Buona fortuna Signore Costanzo! I will keep my promise and visit your new restaurant soon.

[This post is participating in Cerebral Mastication's Indiana Jones blog-a-thon.]

As high school wound down for me in the spring of 1984, my class load was pretty light and I put in more time at my afterschool programming job in the Flatiron district. My occasional wanderings in that neighborhood — running errands, finding lunch, etc. — took me past several wholesale import shops, some with large storefronts displaying selected items from their stock in the window. One day as the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom grew near, I passed one such store and saw something that gave me an idea.

Two years earlier, my friends and I had attended a sneak-preview screening of E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. When the house lights came up at the end, we noted with amusement two manly men seated a couple of rows away, complete with Caterpillar trucking caps, too overcome with emotion to get up and leave the theater right away. “This is going to be huge,” we predicted. And we had an idea.

A few months before that, New York magazine published an article about our school called “The Joyful Elite.” It inspired equal measures of pride and outrage: pride because it said we were some of New York City’s smartest kids, and outrage because it said we acted like we knew it. The school was in an uproar for several days because of it; and so my friends and I capitalized on that. In those pre-Zazzle days we found a novelty printing shop in the Yellow Pages (called “Abat,” which I’ll never forget because of the memorably gruff way the owner answered the phone: “’Lo, Abat”) and ordered a large batch of “Joyful Elite” buttons. When we got them a couple of days later, we carried our supply through the hallways between classes, selling them to students and faculty for two dollars apiece. They sold like hotcakes and we made hundreds of dollars! (A big deal, in high school in the 80’s.)

So when the lights came up after E.T. and we knew it was going to be a hit, we saw a profit-making opportunity. We had Abat print up a batch of “I ♥ E T” buttons and congregated outside a big midtown theater on the film’s opening day. Aware that we were crossing some sort of a line with respect to merchandise licensing, we prepared a story to tell any law-enforcement official who asked that the buttons meant, “I love Edison Tech,” our (made-up) alma mater. Fortunately no law-enforcement official ever required us to test the quality of that lie — perhaps because we sold a grand total of two buttons to exiting moviegoers. Our immediate post-mortem explanation for our failure was that everyone who sees E.T. leaves the theater too verklempt to engage in crass commercialism. On further thought, a button was not much of a way to commemorate the E.T.-viewing experience; but at that time the only tool we had was a hammer (the hammer of printing novelty buttons) and every problem looked like a nail. The excess inventory, a cartonful of “I ♥ E T” buttons, sat in my mom’s apartment for decades. If only we’d had some sort of item to sell that was more subject-matter-appropriate.

Anyway, when I passed that importer’s storefront two years later — with the opening of the first Indiana Jones sequel just a few days away — and my eyes alighted on bagsful of six-foot-long imitation-leather bullwhips for a dollar apiece, I snatched up several dozen.

I brought them with me to the premiere showing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I arrived early enough to be near the head of a line that eventually wound from the box office of the Loews Orpheum (then on 86th Street — where I also lined up early for the premieres of Return of the Jedi the previous year and The Empire Strikes Back three years before that), down the block, and around two corners. I set a big bag of bullwhips on the ground by my feet. When my friends arrived later to hold my place in line, I made periodic forays along the ever-lengthening queue of people to sell my bullwhips for five bucks apiece, and I cleaned up. Many eager purchasers wanted to know why I wasn’t selling fedoras, too. (Answer: I’d thought of that, but they were too expensive.) A cop came and tried to shut me down but I talked him into accepting a free bullwhip instead and he left me alone.

I made hundreds!

Update: I’ll be damned, it looks like Abat still exists.