Category Archives: Life

Twilight Time

Posted on by

Daybreak is some people’s favorite time of day. It’s peaceful but promising. It’s when journeys so often begin:

When the rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, we drew our ships into the water, and put our masts and sails within them…

When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, Ulysses put on his shirt and cloak…

Personally, I avoid dawns and daybreaks whenever possible. They tend to be too early in the morning.

Twilight, on the other hand, is wonderfully appealing. The day’s work is done. The sky explodes with color. Who knows what the night will bring?

Yet this most evocative time of day is often the saddest. It’s natural to feel a sense of loss when the sun disappears. There’s darkness ahead. Loneliness too.

1024px-Baker_beach_at_twilight_41

But cheer up! There’s twilight music – and some of it’s even upbeat.

Electric Light Orchetra, 1981:

The Raveonettes, 2005:

Elliott Smith, circa 2002:

Antony and the Johnsons, 1998:

The Platters, 1958:

It May Not Be Absolutely Good, But It’s Pretty Darn Neat

Posted on by

Philosophers disagree (as usual) on whether there is anything in the world that is absolutely good. By that, I mean “good, period” or “just plain good” or “not good for any reason other than its very nature”. For example, some philosophers have argued that pleasure, knowledge, beauty, virtue, friendship or human life are absolutely good.

Immanuel Kant thought that the only thing that is absolutely good, with no qualification at all, is a “good will”. Not a “will” in the legal sense, of course, but in the sense in which a person can will to behave in a good way. That sounds circular, since one might reasonably ask: “Aren’t you defining a good will in terms of wanting to do good things?” Kant’s answer, however plausible or not, is that a good will is one that conforms to the “Moral Law”, which can be expressed this way: 

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

According to Kant, following that rule will guarantee that you have a good will, and having a good will is the very best thing in the whole world. 

Now, I’m only bringing this up because I bumped into something a few days ago that impressed me so much that my almost immediate thought was: “That is such a good thing that maybe it qualifies as absolutely good.”

Unfortunately, my less than immediate thought was “No, it’s not really the kind of thing that could be absolutely good, but it’s still awfully damn wonderful”. That is, it’s only good in the sense that a hammer or a bag of popcorn can be good – it’s a terrifically good thing of its kind because it serves its purpose really well.

And here it is:

It’s called Departure Vision. Our local commuter railway, New Jersey Transit, now has a simple webpage that allows you to see the very same departure screen that in years gone by you could only see right in the train station! That means you don’t have to pull out a big folded paper schedule or use your phone to peruse the full online schedule when you want to see when the next train is. You simply bring up this Departure Vision page, select the station you’re traveling from, and there it is:

NJT-Secaucus-Upper-Lvl-Departures-big

My semi-sincere apologies to anyone who thinks this really good thing is extremely disappointing or anti-climactic. Clearly, you don’t know how often I and thousands of other people have wanted to know if we had enough time to catch the next train. 

Much more seriously, writing this post about a really nice, relatively simple thing some unknown people did has allowed me to avoid thinking about Ukraine, the Gaza Strip, the House of Representatives or other bothersome subjects for a fairly substantial period of time. Maybe reading it (and visiting the Departure Vision page) has had a similar benefit for you. I hope so. That wouldn’t be absolutely good, and it clearly wouldn’t be as good as Departure Vision itself, but it would still be pretty good in a small kind of way.

new_dv

How We Wasted Time Before the Internet – Mathematics Edition

Posted on by

Or more precisely, how I wasted too much time long before the Internet. Here’s the picture:

SquareWhen I was a little kid, somebody, probably my father, drew a picture like that and challenged me to draw the same thing without lifting my pencil from the paper. That seemed like a pretty easy thing to do. It wasn’t.

Many years passed before my first and last attempt. Not that I spent days and nights continuously working on this, but there were a lot of classes and then some meetings to sit through. And I guess I was competitive, stubborn and/or obsessive.

But one thing that kept me going off and on through the years was the belief that I had successfully met the challenge once, couldn’t remember how I did it and should be able to do it again (too bad I didn’t keep notes).

Of course, I eventually concluded that this was a false memory. The thing cannot be done!

What brought all this back to me was an article at Three Quarks Daily called “A Square Peg for Every Round Hole”. It’s about mathematical puzzles, the most famous being Fermat’s Last Theorem (“I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain”). In particular, it’s about 

another enticing mathematical morsel which is still unsolved: the Square Peg Problem (SPP). The history is a bit murky, but it is generally credited to Otto Toeplitz in 1911. The SPP is the conjecture that if you draw a curve on a sheet of paper without picking up your pencil and which begins and ends at the same place, then you can find four points on the curve which form the corners of a square. 

For example, I drew this wavy curve in black and was then able to overlay a square with its four corners intersecting the curve. 

Square 2

(Ok, I cheated and put in the square first and then drew the curve. The other way may be mathematically possible in every case (or not) but it’s not that easy and my little obsession lies elsewhere.)

Maybe mathematicians proved long ago that it’s impossible to draw a picture like the one at the top of this post. Maybe there’s even a name for this particular “mathematical morsel”: the Square With Lines Around It and a Cross in the Middle Problem (SWLAIAACITMP).  

On the other hand, if you know a way to draw the damn thing without lifting your pencil or pen from the paper or your index finger from the mouse – or know why it can’t be done – please let me know.

Update: That didn’t take long. A person going by the name of “X” gave the answer in the comments at Three Quarks Daily after I described the SWLAIAACITMP problem:

This is a cool problem called “Euler Paths”. You can prove it’s impossible for this graph because there are too many vertices with an odd number of edges coming out of them. So there will always come a time when you go into a vertex and can’t get out. This page has the rules: Euler’s Graph Theorems.

Thank you, X, whoever you are.

Mainly On Not Writing a Novel

Posted on by

Many of us have the urge to write a novel, or even more than one. I’ve thought about writing one, but have never begun the process, for two reasons. 

One, I don’t have a story I want to tell or characters I want to write about. That’s kind of held me back.

Two, I’d probably lack the patience to develop a novel — I’d want events to move along, so any novel I wrote would end up as a short story. (An English teacher once told me I had a “spare” style. For a couple of reasons, I don’t think she was comparing the story I handed in to one of Hemingway’s.) 

The Spanish novelist Javier Marias has written several novels, including successful ones. Nevertheless, he’s also written an enjoyable little article for the Threepenny Review called “Seven Reasons Not to Write Novels and Only One Reason to Write Them”. It’s worth reading, even if you’ve never had the urge in question. Having been surprised and impressed by the single reason he gives for writing one, I may reconsider.

Five Bad Men Screw Us Again

Posted on by

I didn’t want to write about the Supreme Court decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores. That’s the recent case in which the Republican majority ruled that a corporation can refuse to provide health insurance for certain kinds of contraception on religious grounds. However, one way to stop thinking about something is to write about it, and this is not a subject that’s fun to think about:

1) It’s no coincidence that the five Republicans on the Supreme Court are prone to rule against and ignore the rights of women to end or prevent pregnancies. Those five Republicans are all Roman Catholics.

2) Having previously declared that corporations should be allowed to spend on political campaigns because they have the same right to free speech that people do, the Republican majority has ruled again that corporations are no different from people. The law at issue in Burwell vs. Hobby states that the government should not “substantially burden a person’s religious beliefs”. Although corporations are treated as persons in some legal contexts, and it’s proper for the government to respect people’s religion up to a point, it makes no sense to ascribe religious beliefs to a corporation.

In addition, people’s right to practice their religion as they wish does not give them the right to harm other people. According to the majority opinion, however, a corporation can not only have religious beliefs, those beliefs should be honored even though acting on those beliefs negatively affects the corporation’s employees, their families and the rest of society (one of the majority’s suggestions is that taxpayers pay for contraception if corporations won’t – as if the Republicans in Congress would agree to that). 

3) Religion can be a wonderfully flexible way to justify all kinds of behavior. In this case, the corporations claimed that dropping all health insurance coverage for their employees, so that their employees could instead get insurance through the government-run exchanges, would also infringe on their (the corporations’) religious beliefs, even though allowing their employees to use the government exchanges would save the corporations money and benefit their employees. “It is our firmly-held, specific religious belief that you should get your health insurance through our company instead of a government website, but it shouldn’t cover certain kinds of care.” Right.

4) Allowing employers to dictate which health insurance their employees have, on religious or any other grounds, is yet another reason the United States should join the rest of the industrialized world and adopt taxpayer-supported, government-regulated, single-payer health insurance.

5) The idea that the owners of a business shouldn’t be forced to spend money for something they don’t like assumes that the money in question is theirs, just like the money in your checking account is yours. However, economists have found that the money a company spends on health insurance would otherwise generally be paid to employees as wages. After all, health insurance is a form of compensation and businesses tend to offer as little compensation as possible (except for senior management, of course). As Uwe Reinhardt writes:

Evidently the majority of Supreme Court justices … believe that the owners of “closely held” business firms buy health insurance for their employees out of the kindness of their hearts and with the owners’ money. On that belief, they accord these owners the right to impose some of their personal preferences – in this case their religious beliefs — on their employee’s health insurance…. [But research shows that] the premiums ostensibly paid by employers to buy health insurance coverage for their employees are actually part of the employee’s total pay package — the price of labor, in economic parlance – and that the cost of that fringe benefit is recovered from employees through commensurate reductions in take-home pay.

6) This is a case in which religion is being allowed to trump science. These corporations object to particular kinds of contraception on the grounds that they are equivalent to having an abortion. But medical researchers have shown that the methods in question (certain intrauterine devices and the “morning after” pill) don’t actually work that way, as discussed here:

The owners of Hobby Lobby told the Court that they were willing to cover some forms of contraception but believed that the so-called morning-after pills and two kinds of IUDs can cause what they believe to be a type of abortion, by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall or causing an already implanted egg to fail to thrive… The scientific consensus is against this idea…Most scientists believe that [these methods] interfere with the ability of sperm to get to an egg in time to fertilize it before they die….Research does not support the idea that they prevent fertilized eggs to implant.

If a religious belief is based on faulty science, that belief should be given less respect by the rest of us. It’s safe to assume, for example, that even this Supreme Court would have ruled differently if the religious belief in question had been that certain kinds of contraception cause droughts.

7) There have been a lot of dumb arguments in favor of this decision or suggesting that it’s not a big deal. The truth is that this decision could set a very bad precedent, opening the door to other claims for special treatment, especially given the Republican majority on the Court. In addition, trying to find a job with another company isn’t a great option for many people; getting pregnant is a very big deal; IUD’s are among the most effective form of birth control; it can cost some women a month’s pay to get one; the morning after pill is an important option for women; and choosing to have sex shouldn’t disqualify people from getting appropriate medical care (people also choose to smoke, spend a lot of time on their couches and eat at McDonald’s). As the saying goes, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

8) It’s been clear since their decision in Bush vs. Gore, when the Republican justices decided that we didn’t need an accurate vote count in a Presidential election, that lacking proper legal justification for their decisions won’t stop them from advancing their political agenda. All Supreme Court justices issue rulings consistent with their political perspectives, but these particular justices are extremists. They may have some shame, but it’s hardly worth mentioning.