David Byrne's March visit to Dallas (via Unfair Park) makes a point of mentioning the awe-inspiring High Five interchange.

I turned north on Highway 75 on what might be the mightiest and most awe-inspiring interchange I've ever seen. At least five levels of roads are stacked up, all swooping over, under and around each other as if in some mighty concrete mating dance.

Other writers have described it in more medieval terms as a bridge between castle Dallas and the fiefdoms that surround it. Regardless of the metaphor, it's hard to convey how impressive the High Five interchange to people who haven't ridden it. Even harder is to make people understand how miraculous the transformation from dysfunctional eyesore to utilitarian wonder.

This is too long to fit on twitter but I like it too much to forget about it. The word absurd was actually first used to describe irrational numbers.

I'm working my way through a book on all the people that helped or solved problems on David Hilbert's famous list of 23 great math problems.

Many times a solution only presents itself after cultural change. One of the cultural norms that had to be updated to push math forward was the idea that irrational numbers are actually useful.

There was a time when irrational numbers were avoided by mathematicians. This disdain was so strong that the word "absurd" was created to describe how useless people believed irrationals to be. From Yandell's book:

An irrational square root was called a "surd," meaning deaf, silent (expressing the attitude toward it). The word "absurd" was first used in English in 1557, according to Oxford English Dictionary, for the purpose of pronouncing the number 8 - 12 (or -4) absurd.

It's clear to us now how important the absurd numbers are for solving real problems. But for a while math stood still while the culture had to catch up.

As a kid I wanted my life to be different from the one I imagined ahead of me. I wanted to be a master jewel thief or president of a unified North and South America. As I got older the dreams got smaller. I wanted to monopolize America's garbage collection industry. Now they're more abstract. I wish I'd had a comic book like Kick-Ass to inspire me when I was younger.

It's about a high school student named Dave Lizewski who wonders why nobody wants to grow up to be a superhero. One day he decides to put on a scuba suit and fight crime. Mark Millar's writing comes across as authentic and a fresh take on what makes a superhero. The way he integrates ideas from his fans drives home the point that Kick-Ass is something that exists in our world. We should all ask ourselves why we didn't choose to be superheroes.

With every issue I've gotten a little choked up, or felt a rush of excitement. Nothing else, except All Star Superman, comes close to engaging me like this every month. Every issue so far has sold out. Issue 3 mentions that they've started hitting Spider-Man/X-Men numbers with 75,000 copies of the first issue sold. I think this could be big.