When going through my regular routine, I have these mental "automatic reminders." For example, every time I walk out of my apartment, there's a ding in my mind, and I ask myself if I have my keys, metrocard, CCNY ID, phone, and wallet. Every time I walk into a public bathroom, a ding goes off, and I check that there are urinals, to reassure myself that I'm in the men's room. If you think about it, you can probably come up with some automatic reminders that you have in your mind.
So Friday night I went with my brother-in-law to shul. We arrived a few minutes before kabbalas shabbos, so there really was no reason for me to daven mincha, but my brother-in-law was davening mincha, and there was nothing else to do, so I turned to page 96 and started saying Ashrei. In middle of Ashrei, a ding went off. It was the did-you-have-kavannah-for-"posech es yadech"? ding. I chuckled inside and ignored it.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Friday, December 31, 2010
Don't Stretch My Suspension of Disbelief
Nearly every time I saved a draft of a blog post, it never got posted. So I will try to knock off this entire post tonight, even though I keep telling myself that I should finish off tomorrow. If this post doesn't properly get my point across, n'nu.
I recently watched the movie Pi and was sorely unimpressed. Here's the story in brief: Max Cohen is a crazy mathematician who is searching for patterns in numbers, specifically the stock market and the decimal expansion of (i.e. "the digits of") pi. Max's teacher pressures him to give up his search, comparing him to Icarus (the guy from Greek mythology who flew too near the sun). Max meets this Jew who does mivtzoim like a Lubavticher but is actually a member of some occult kabbalistic group which is looking for the 216-digit number which will tell them the 216-letter name of god. Just to add to the fun, there's a Wall-Street firm trying to use Max's research to make money. His computer is doing some calculations for him (we never find out what) and outputs some outrageously improbable stock predictions followed by a 216-digit number and then dies. Max agrees to share his research with the Wall-Street people in exchange for a new computer chip. He does the calculations again, get the same number, and the computer dies again. The Wall-Street people try to get the information from him at gunpoint, but he is whisked away by the occult pseudo-Lubavitcher, who brings him to the synagogue, where the leader of the kabbalistic group tries to force the 216-digit number out of him. He refuses. He lives miserably ever after.
I understand that when you watch a movie, you agree to "believe" that certain things are possible, even though they're not. So I have no problem that the janitor in Max's building just happened to see Max searching for a computer print-out in the trash and the Wall-Street lady just happened to bump into the janitor to find out about it. It's a movie. The improbable happens in movies.
I also have no problem that the Lubavitcher-numerologist translates "etz hachaim" as "tree of knowledge." That gematria-wise a 216-letter word does not correspond to a 216-digit number is also OK. I'm pretty pissed they thought that members of occult kabbalistic groups try to put on tefillin with wholly uninterested strangers like Lubavitchers do. But I understand that it's a movie. People don't get everything right.
And that the girl next door has a crush on Max even though in real life no girl would get near this guy? Again, it's a movie. The producers needed to throw in some romance to make it interesting.
But there are some inaccuracies that touch the essence of the movie that you cannot overlook. And that's why this movie sucks.
Max is looking for meaningful patters in the decimal expansion of pi. Well guess what, buddy, there really shouldn't be any pattern there. Remember that it's an accident of history that we use a base-ten numbering system. We very well could have had a base-sixteen or base-twenty numbering system in which pi's digits would be completely different.
Mathematicians definitely spend a lot of time searching for patterns in stocks. But they look at the percentages, not at the digits. The digits are completely meaningless. Max resembles an eccentric mathematician (he's anti-social, lightning quick with arithmatic, and obsessive) but he doesn't think like a mathematician. He thinks like a regular schizophrenic.
Max's computer is supposed to compute something (we're never told what) but instead keeps on crashing. We're supposed to understand that it crashes because he was computing something that was supposed to remain mysterious. Computers don't crash when you make them compute something mysterious. That's just not how computers work.
And then the computer spits out The Number, which Max didn't ask for. That's not how computers work. If you ask it to crunch number about stocks, it will spit out stock-related numbers. It won't spit out the number that holds the secrets of the universe.
Oh yeah. We're never told what Max is searching for. What kind of pattern is he looking for in pi and in the stocks? What kind of calculations is his computer doing? What is the 216-digit number supposed to stand for (other than "a string of digits that Wall-Street people and occult kabbalists want to study")? I feel like the meat of the movie is missing.
The response to all this would be something to effect of: the movie is about man's search for hidden knowledge, about the desire to manipulate the world, and about the need to let things remain mysterious.
To paraphrase Rabbi Chanina the Bible-teacher, go outside and tell that to your literature professor. That's hogwash. A good work of fiction creates a fictional world which resembles the real world in important ways to illustrate true ideas about the real world. For example, Brave New World creates a fictional world where people have flying cars, and everybody has what they need. But that fictional world resembles the real world in that people deal with pain, pleasure, religion, and boredom the same way they do in our world. Therefore it's a good book. Another example is Logicomix (which happens to be a stupid book, but that's besides the point). Logicomix is chock-full of historical inaccuracies, but it's about a real person's (Bertrand Russel's) struggle with a real issue (Russel's paradox) with real implications (the foundations of set theory, logic, and mathematics). So it can tell us something useful about the real world. But Pi creates this fictional world in which math is not at all like real math. So what does it teach us?
I recently watched the movie Pi and was sorely unimpressed. Here's the story in brief: Max Cohen is a crazy mathematician who is searching for patterns in numbers, specifically the stock market and the decimal expansion of (i.e. "the digits of") pi. Max's teacher pressures him to give up his search, comparing him to Icarus (the guy from Greek mythology who flew too near the sun). Max meets this Jew who does mivtzoim like a Lubavticher but is actually a member of some occult kabbalistic group which is looking for the 216-digit number which will tell them the 216-letter name of god. Just to add to the fun, there's a Wall-Street firm trying to use Max's research to make money. His computer is doing some calculations for him (we never find out what) and outputs some outrageously improbable stock predictions followed by a 216-digit number and then dies. Max agrees to share his research with the Wall-Street people in exchange for a new computer chip. He does the calculations again, get the same number, and the computer dies again. The Wall-Street people try to get the information from him at gunpoint, but he is whisked away by the occult pseudo-Lubavitcher, who brings him to the synagogue, where the leader of the kabbalistic group tries to force the 216-digit number out of him. He refuses. He lives miserably ever after.
I understand that when you watch a movie, you agree to "believe" that certain things are possible, even though they're not. So I have no problem that the janitor in Max's building just happened to see Max searching for a computer print-out in the trash and the Wall-Street lady just happened to bump into the janitor to find out about it. It's a movie. The improbable happens in movies.
I also have no problem that the Lubavitcher-numerologist translates "etz hachaim" as "tree of knowledge." That gematria-wise a 216-letter word does not correspond to a 216-digit number is also OK. I'm pretty pissed they thought that members of occult kabbalistic groups try to put on tefillin with wholly uninterested strangers like Lubavitchers do. But I understand that it's a movie. People don't get everything right.
And that the girl next door has a crush on Max even though in real life no girl would get near this guy? Again, it's a movie. The producers needed to throw in some romance to make it interesting.
But there are some inaccuracies that touch the essence of the movie that you cannot overlook. And that's why this movie sucks.
Max is looking for meaningful patters in the decimal expansion of pi. Well guess what, buddy, there really shouldn't be any pattern there. Remember that it's an accident of history that we use a base-ten numbering system. We very well could have had a base-sixteen or base-twenty numbering system in which pi's digits would be completely different.
Mathematicians definitely spend a lot of time searching for patterns in stocks. But they look at the percentages, not at the digits. The digits are completely meaningless. Max resembles an eccentric mathematician (he's anti-social, lightning quick with arithmatic, and obsessive) but he doesn't think like a mathematician. He thinks like a regular schizophrenic.
Max's computer is supposed to compute something (we're never told what) but instead keeps on crashing. We're supposed to understand that it crashes because he was computing something that was supposed to remain mysterious. Computers don't crash when you make them compute something mysterious. That's just not how computers work.
And then the computer spits out The Number, which Max didn't ask for. That's not how computers work. If you ask it to crunch number about stocks, it will spit out stock-related numbers. It won't spit out the number that holds the secrets of the universe.
Oh yeah. We're never told what Max is searching for. What kind of pattern is he looking for in pi and in the stocks? What kind of calculations is his computer doing? What is the 216-digit number supposed to stand for (other than "a string of digits that Wall-Street people and occult kabbalists want to study")? I feel like the meat of the movie is missing.
The response to all this would be something to effect of: the movie is about man's search for hidden knowledge, about the desire to manipulate the world, and about the need to let things remain mysterious.
To paraphrase Rabbi Chanina the Bible-teacher, go outside and tell that to your literature professor. That's hogwash. A good work of fiction creates a fictional world which resembles the real world in important ways to illustrate true ideas about the real world. For example, Brave New World creates a fictional world where people have flying cars, and everybody has what they need. But that fictional world resembles the real world in that people deal with pain, pleasure, religion, and boredom the same way they do in our world. Therefore it's a good book. Another example is Logicomix (which happens to be a stupid book, but that's besides the point). Logicomix is chock-full of historical inaccuracies, but it's about a real person's (Bertrand Russel's) struggle with a real issue (Russel's paradox) with real implications (the foundations of set theory, logic, and mathematics). So it can tell us something useful about the real world. But Pi creates this fictional world in which math is not at all like real math. So what does it teach us?
Thursday, December 16, 2010
WHY? WHY? WHY? Whose idea was this?
CCNY is not rich. Despite student protests, they raised the tuition recently. We haven't had working elevators in the science building for around a year. There definitely isn't money to throw around. So why are they wasting $4,400 on a lottery? Do they really have no better use for the money?
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Je Me Souviens
I'm in Quebec, and I've made some observations about the French language.
In America, "dead-end" calls to mind a sad little street that literally dies on you. "Cul-de-sac" calls to mind a nice suburban, residential street which ends with a neat curve, perhaps with some flowers near the curb and plenty of room for a comfortable u-turn. When the bus pulled into its first stop in Montreal, it turned onto a street with a sign saying "cul-de-sac." To my disappointment it was just a plain dead end.
In America the word "overt" is always used to mean "figuratively open," and is often used in a high-falutin' way. In Quebec, stores have signs saying "ouvert" to let people know that they're open for business.
It is a bit amusing to hear Americans speaking French with an unabashedly American accent, as in the sentence "Don't park there! It's an arret d'autobus."
On a practical note, if you ever gain control over a province, don't force people to speak your language. It's not very nice.
In America, "dead-end" calls to mind a sad little street that literally dies on you. "Cul-de-sac" calls to mind a nice suburban, residential street which ends with a neat curve, perhaps with some flowers near the curb and plenty of room for a comfortable u-turn. When the bus pulled into its first stop in Montreal, it turned onto a street with a sign saying "cul-de-sac." To my disappointment it was just a plain dead end.
In America the word "overt" is always used to mean "figuratively open," and is often used in a high-falutin' way. In Quebec, stores have signs saying "ouvert" to let people know that they're open for business.
It is a bit amusing to hear Americans speaking French with an unabashedly American accent, as in the sentence "Don't park there! It's an arret d'autobus."
On a practical note, if you ever gain control over a province, don't force people to speak your language. It's not very nice.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
At Home with the Heisenbergs
Elisabeth Heisenberg: I can't find my car keys.
Werner Heisenberg: You probably know too much about their momentum.
source
Werner Heisenberg: You probably know too much about their momentum.
source
Monday, November 1, 2010
I Miss My Blog
It was nice to be able to write neat little posts, well-written enough that I could be proud of them, poorly written enough that they didn't require much effort. Then y'all would discuss them, and I would feel like my thoughts are worth discussing. Then I would discuss your thoughts on your blogs, and make you think that your thoughts are worth discussing. Then, in the wee hours of the morning, our discussions would degenerate into silliness and we'd go to sleep. But, in the words of Eminem, "those days are gone / they're just memories."
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Never Trust an Activist
Activists get so excited about their cause, that they'll say anything that makes their cause sound more important.
Consider this story on CHI:
Nonsense. If the missionaries think that sending New Testaments to the shluchim was a wise way to spend their money, they obviously don't understand the people they are targeting. We should be relieved and amused. Chillax, Rabbi Kravitz.
Consider this story on CHI:
Shluchim all over the United States received an unmarked package in recent weeks containing missionary Hebrew New Testaments along with other missionary materials.
The packages arrived in non-descript packaging printed with “Wishing you a Shana Tova – a gift from an anonymous friend.”
“These recent events demonstrate that the missionary threat to the Jewish community is more serious than ever” wrote Rabbi Zalman Kravitz of Jews for Judaism, in an email responding to Shluchim who have received these packages.
“I got it, recognized it right away and I threw it into the garbage” said a Shliach.
Nonsense. If the missionaries think that sending New Testaments to the shluchim was a wise way to spend their money, they obviously don't understand the people they are targeting. We should be relieved and amused. Chillax, Rabbi Kravitz.
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