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.

From Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. [link goes to the free preview page that has the quote on Amazon]

Where someone manages to commercialize a tribe's gift relationships the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed.

I have yet to read Lewis Hyde's book but I'm already hooked from the free pages on Amazon. He starts off illustrating one of the fundamental differences between the Native Americans and the Europeans that invaded: a gift culture. Native American tribes would exchange gifts of equal or greater value. The purpose being to continually gift the item to others. It created social bonds between tribes. Europeans followed a capitalist model where they warehoused those gifts and used them for production to enrich themselves.

I wonder how this fits in with Robert Putnam's research in Bowling Alone. On the surface it makes Putnam's phrase "social capital" sound like an odd match. But I realize the term social capital could refer to the gifts we exchange to build our bonds.

I really enjoy reading Grant Morrison. I can think of few writers who really grok the power of storytelling to change our reality like he does. I've learned a lot about the power of the written word from reading his comic books. What surprises me is when I come across those ideas in much older works, like the Bible.

Numbers 5:12-31 is about how husbands can force their wives to submit to an abortion if they merely suspect their wife has cheated on them. They go before a priest goes who has God curse some water before the wife drinks it. The cursed water causes her to miscarry and renders her barren if she cheated on him.

What fascinates me about this is the manner in which the priest creates the magic abortion potion.

The priest is to write these curses on a scroll and then wash them off into the bitter water. He shall have the woman drink the bitter water that brings a curse, and this water will enter her and cause bitter suffering.

The priest is literally writing out what he wants to happen. Then the ink from those words is mixed with water that the wife is to drink. The written word has magical properties here. The priest is able to alter reality by writing a new story.

To further my point about the power of perception imagine a different story with the same facts. A woman is pregnant, but not by her husband. However, in this story she tells it as immaculate conception.

Something I regret not doing when I was younger is chasing after the things that I thought mattered. I either let my interest wane, or listened to the tut-tutting of others that said it was a waste of time.

I'm reading a book that examines the Interactive Fiction (IF) medium called Twisty Little Passages. Interactive Fiction is the dressed up word for text adventures. I feel as though hours of my youth spent playing these has been vindicated. I should have pushed for it to be considered Summer Reading.

...works of acknowledged literary quality, such as Robert Pinksky's Mindwheel and Brian Moriarty's Trinity...

It's neat to see a classic Infocom text adventure right alongside work created by a former US poet laureate. Moriarty's Trinity was the first time I ever came across a Klein bottle and the word perambulator.

I'm really digging the Doctor Fate part of the eight issue Countdown to Mystery series. Steve Gerber's writing and Justiniano's art are my favorite comic book read right now. It reminds me of my enthusiasm in the early issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

I came in with almost no familiarity with the helmet of fate. In this series Kent V. Nelson is a disgraced, divorced psychiatrist living in Las Vegas, NV. (Yeah, not Gotham, Metropolis, Central City, etc.) He's homeless and pulling in money from bum fights. After losing a fight he's thrown into a dumpster and discovers the helmet of fate. From that point the series has explored Nelson's past, through multiple planes of existence. The helmet allows him to alter his perception.

In issue three Nelson visits what appears to be an occult bookstore in the mundane world but is a stygian wasteland when the helmet alters his perception. Physically he never leaves the bookstore, he's only viewing it through a different set of symbols. The lady at the occult bookstore offers him a book to teach him how to use the helmet. The book is written in this Visual Basic like pseudocode. I really liked the explanation the lady at the occult bookstore offers about why that works for him:

Every era, every culture develops its own incantatory idiom, its own language for establishing contact with the unseen world. To anyone with any sensitiviy, it's obvious something has changed in the domain of magic, and the idiom is changing with it. The book I pulled for you proposes a programmatic paradigm for accessing the beyond — and the within.

I like the comparison between programmers working with an unseen world inside the computer to alchemists and magicians. Culturally Gerber is right on here. The old term Unix wizard fits this notion perfectly.

After he reads one of the subroutines, chosen by fate, he finds himself in the stygian wasteland. It's nothing but gray sludge as far as the eye can see, with a lazy river ambling by. (There is a viscious but funny commentary on consumerism as well) He sees a boy on a raft floating down the river.

The boys vernacular recalls Huck Finn. Nelson even addresses him as such, but also realizes that he's not a literal Huck Finn. He's really just a symbolic representation of Nelson's own guilty conscience about a patient of his that died. In fact it turns out this plane of existence is a symbolic representation of Nelson's conscience. The fact that Huck Finn is just a symbol is driven home by the artwork depicting Huck as an empty shell.

They float down river and Nelson struggles with the meaning of it all. In the midst of dreary grey spires they reach a crystalline complex that is built with perfect, clean angles and no curves. It's a bulwark of rationality against the dreary, crumbling spires everywhere else. Naturally it's where they are headed.

Inside he meets the King and Queen. Most likely they represent Nelson's anima and animus since Jung is explicitly mentioned earlier. They're dressed in clothes that look like Louis XIV meets Japanese Noh masks. The fact that everyone is wearing a mask or has no face isn't lost on me. The King introduces himself to Nelson:

We are the King. This is our Queen. That is our whipping boy. You will address us as "Your majesties." You will not address that at all, for that possesses no identity — no persona, no self-concept. That exists to be broken.

The whipping boy is a groveling lump of flesh on the floor that is vaguely human who jumps up and rips Nelson's face off. Nelson comes to the realization that the whipping boy is him. The King and Queen also represent him (his anima/animus). The gloomy underworld is his own creation because he's been beating himself up for mistakes he made. In lesser hands this whole sequence would have been pretentious but it's handled with a directness and a sincerity that makes it work.

You just don't find stuff like this in any other DC/Marvel comic books right now. For me this is a lot of what comic books are all about. They reflect our own world back at us with the symbols changed around. This gives us a new way of looking at ourselves and our society. Grant Morrison is particularly adept at doing this but this is different. Gerber is doing his own thing and it's excellent. I'm a little worried though. Gerber is ill and waiting for an organ transplant. I can't believe he's writing through that. I have to wonder if his writing for Doctor Fate is somehow informed by his illness. It can't be just coincidence that both of them live in Las Vegas, NV.

Over the past year I've spent a lot more time reading and studying comic books and cartooning. The history has been far more interesting than I ever expected.

Percy Crosby creates the Skippy cartoon in 1923 and builds it up into a $3 million business by 1932. He goes after FDR and the New Deal for being communist. Then his woes begin.

By 1964 he's dead in an insane asylum after a war with the IRS and their alleged corporate proxy, the Rosefield Packing Company. The Rosefield Packing Company takes the Skippy name and creates Skippy peanut butter.

The Savage Critic has the details

Programming Collective Intelligence has me excited about web development in a way I haven't been for a few years.

Even got me doing stuff in python.

Love animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble their joy, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their happiness, do not work against God's intent.

Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to animals: they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you. Fydor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881) THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV via Moscow Animals

50 years ago the USSR sent a dog into space to die in the hopes of scoring a propaganda coup. Laika was the first animal to orbit the planet. I have a hard time reconciling what should have been a great milestone in space travel, with the fact that it was created as a pointless exercise in marketing. Nick Abadzis' new book Laika covers the story in more detail than I'd seen before. Apparently he even researched the phases of the moon and angles of inclination to maintain fidelity to the story. The moon after all was the big prize in the space race.

His illustrations are wonderful. He captures a Russian character in the faces of the people. The energy and warmth of the dogs are expressed in their poses and lines. My only gripe is that I wanted more with Korolev, the Chief Designer of the Russian space program. The book starts off with Korolev being released from the Gulag and having to find his own way back to Moscow in 50 below weather. There is some nice character development here, but Korolev mostly disappears after that. It's too bad because the groundwork he lays is interesting but never really explored after that. I'd love to see a companion book go into more detail about Korolev.

I couldn't help myself. I knew the ending but it was still devastating when it came. Mankind's ability to sabotage our own greatness is a frustrating lesson of history. There is an interesting moment in Laika. Three pages carry a yellow background instead of white. They setup a key theme of the story that nothing lasts (Korolev's time in he Gulag, Laika's friendships, USSR's dominance in space). On the next page is a three quarter page panel highlighting the greatness of Korolev's achievement with Sputnik I. A moment that would be undercut by the tragedy of Sputnik II and designed by Korolev himself.

Every day, every moment is a frontier to a country that, once crossed, can never be returned to.

...But, once you understand that nothing lasts...everything's all right. Laika

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which I shared some love for earlier, won Best Reality-Based Work. Another title I was pulling for American Born Chinese won for Best Graphic Album - New. It's nice to see an industry award the great stuff unlike say the Oscars, Emmys and Grammys.

And my favorite writer, Grant Morrison, picked up an Eisner for Best Continuing Series for All Star Superman. I'm glad that Morrison and Brian Bendis keep things interesting at DC and Marvel.

2007 Eisner Winners

I picked up a copy of W. Somerset Maugham's book The Razor's Edge from the library this weekend. I really enjoyed it but this quote stood out as particularly wicked and clever:

D'you remember how Jesus was led into the wilderness and fasted forty days? Then, when he was a-hungered, the devil came to him and said: If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread. But Jesus resisted the temptation. Then the devil set him on a pinnacle of the temple and said to him: If thou be the son of God, cast thyself down. For angels had charge of him and would bear him up. But again Jesus resisted. Then the devil took him into a high mountain and showed him the kingdoms of the world and said that he would give them to him if he would fall down and worship him. But Jesus said: Get thee hence, Satan. That's the end of the story according to the good simple Matthew. But it wasn't. The devil was sly and he came to Jesus once more and said: If thou wilt accept shame and disgrace, scourging, a crown of thorns and death on the cross thou shalt save the human race, for greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Jesus fell. The devil laughed till his sides ached, for he knew the evil men would commit in the name of their redeemer.

The author/narrator follows it up later with this explanation of why self-sacrifice is such a powerful temptation:

I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.

I have to wonder if Ayn Rand ever summed up this idea as cleverly since it was one of her shibboleths.

After books like this I lament my lack of a silver-tongued gift for persuasion. I'm robbed of the secondary pleasures of waiting for a friend to read it and hoping they feel the exuberance and tenderness I felt as I reached the end. The book is a memoir of Alison Bechdel's youth in a rural Pennsylvania town and her father's death while she was away at college. It opens with her and her father playing airplane as she recalls the story of another father and child, Icarus and Daedalus.

She circles through her story repeatedly but peels away new insights each time. Each time through she finds a way to fit the details of her life into a literary or historical narrative. Sometimes she describes her family life with passages from Proust. Sometimes her story finds resonance in Nixon's resignation. But the larger narrative that all the stories fit into is one dealing with Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. A device that could be pretentious but isn't because she carries the novice reader into those stories at the same time. It also makes practical sense that the daughter of an english teacher and actress would frame her narrative with those books.

Her illustrations carry on the same narrative. A snake devouring its own tale reminds us of the narrative circles. Book titles casually appear in the background to clue the reader in to what is happening. Pop-up Video style balloons call our attention to minute details that add color to the story (is this subtext?). The image that will stay with me the longest is her and her father silhouetted by a setting sun as they stand on the porch of the family's Gothic Revival style home. She is playfully hanging off a column, and he's standing in quiet reverie watching all the colors mix.

What charmed me the most is how honestly she comes at the story of her youth, which is apparently the story of her father. She chronicles the highs and the lows without melodrama. She doesn't hesitate to offer up her own conflicted understanding. The literary devices she does use she is almost apologetic for and reminds the reader that it isn't pretension but these are the tools she was brought up with for understanding her world.

After the strength of this and fellow Eisner nominee American Born Chinese I am sure to check out the other Best New Graphic Album nominees.

Bloom points out in The American Religion that Mormonism, in the early days especially, was driven by a dialectic between the need to create the new Kingdom on Earth, but to also remain outside the mainstream. This conflict powered the growth of Mormonism.

I'm seeing this same dialectic play out in the comments on Free Republic about Reverend Falwell. Here are some relevant comments:

Hatred of Falwell by those on the left illustrates just how effective he was. The darkness hates the light.

A man is sometimes honored by the number and passion of the enemies he makes.

This is exactly what the Bible warned would happen. Right[e]ous people WILL be persecuted, even after their death.

A large number, perhaps a majority, of the comments are concerned with how their political enemies are responding to the news. Every time an outsider to their world condemns their icon they post how it renews their faith and vindicates their beliefs. Their faith would apparently suffer if they were completely mainstream and did not have a political enemy to struggle against. Yet to be the mainstream is what they want! Apparently there is no condition where both parties can win, and they can sustain their beliefs.

What surprises me is how little they seem to be celebrating specific things that Falwell did. I really haven't seen any posts praising his segregationist views, anti-homosexual views, Christian Zionism, etc. There has been praise in general for his good works but really only in generalities. That may be a fault of the the Free Republic forums. Their forums tend to only contain short snarky or pious comments and don't reward more in-depth posts. A condition that is common across all forums on the Internet, not just Free Republic.

Harold Bloom in The American Religion (1992):

Fundamentalism, the great curse of all American religion, and of all religion in this American century. Fundamentalism [...] is an attempt to overcome the terror of death by a crude, literalization of the Christian intimation of immortality.

As Bloom puts it all religion comes from our apprehension of death. I guess this is why science is so lousy at explaining death. I wonder what comes from our celebration of life?

There are some books that have chased after me for years. They pop up in conversations with other people over and over. Details of the plot leak into my head and I start thinking about how they work. But I never read them. Then I yield, read the book and understand why the book chased me all those years.

I finally read Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, and I wish I had read it when I was younger. I might have had the courage to make different choices. I found it comforting to find someone else who thought like me and wanted to love his friends and family but felt alienated because of his responsibilities. That closeness with the main character is what made me really appreciate the last few lines of Card's introduction to the book:

The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.

I picked up C.B. Cebulski's Wonderlost and I hope he puts out more issues and everyone buys one. In the first issue he tells six stories, each illustrated by someone different, about teenage love, relationships on the cusp between friends and lovers, and the moments after it all falls apart.

He writes with an authenticity that brings filmmaker David Gordon Green to mind. Although he might capture a bit more of life's humor than DGG. The stories are tight. The dialogue, narration and paneling don't have any wasted effort. Perhaps what impresses me most is I'm so caught up with the characters I don't have any time to go second guessing their behavior when they make bad decisions. I saw my own choices in life echoed in Wonderlost's characters. Sometimes that was a punch to the gut and sometimes it made me smile and get all nostalgic.

It's also the only comic book I've read that comes with a mix CD track list at the end.

You can read one of the stories, Make Up, online. Here are pages 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 .

I'm reading Rory Stewart's book The Places in Between about his walk across Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. I laughed out when I came across this entry from his stay in a small, remote village in the Ghor region.

A Bill Gates speech on American policy toward technology monopolies was being translated into Dari. The men listened intently. I wondered what these illiterate men without electricity thought of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

In reading it I must admit I'm jealous. In a different life I would have walked all over the world and been content.

Finished The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan about the Great Dust Bowl and have come away humbled by the scope of the disaster and mankind's tenacity in the face of horrible conditions.

There are two parts that seem so cinematic I'd love to see them in a movie. The first is the great dust storm on Black Sunday. Something I hadn't realized before is these storms create static electricity. People would try to leave town only to have their cars short out. They could see the electricity sparking inside the car. If people touched each other they could be knocked to the ground by the static discharge. Blue electricity would sparkle off the barbed wire fences. Trees would be blackened by sparks of electricity. Of course, this is just the prelude to the big act when hundreds of tons of dust would blot out the sun and plunge the world into darkness. One dust storm dropped more tons of dirt in a day than all the dirt that was moved to create the Panama Canal.

The other scene would be with Big Hugh Bennett the soil expert that FDR would count on to find a way out of the disaster. Bennett plans a Senate hearing to plead his case that soil conservation is the only way to stop the dust storms and that they need to fund conservation programs. He comes in with charts, graphs and mountains of data but the ace up his sleeve is that he knows a giant dust storm has hit the Midwest and that this one is big enough to make it to D.C. If he times it right the storm will darken the windows of the room as he makes his case and leave D.C. covered in dust. Twice aides come in to update him on the status of the storm as he stretches for time. He pulls it off and finally Washington understands what is going on in the Plains.

Overall the book is a sober look at how unbridled capitalism and poor government planning can wreak unbelievable havoc. The end has a teaser that there may be another great story to tell about the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer by large corporate farms and poor water conservation policies. The Ogallala spreads out beneath eight states from South Dakota to Texas and is being emptied quicker than it is replenished.

The invention of text broke the monopoly that priests had on the collective story. Armed with a 22-letter alphabet, a ragtag bunch of Hebrew slaves went out into the desert and rewrote their reality from the beginning...

Douglas Rushkoff

I was browsing through the comic book store when I came across a new series written by Douglas Rushkoff called Testament. He's using stories from Old Testament as a mythological basis for stories in a near future where everyone has RFID tags, the US is always at war, and the draft is about to be reinstated to preserve our freedom.

The narrative in the book moves back and forth between the future and the Old Testament past. The first volume brings in the story of Akedah where Abraham almost sacrifices his son Isaac and then retells it in the near future as a scientist who works for the government and has to make his son eligible for the draft.

They do some neat things with the panels. Gods exist outside the panels, and the humans only exist inside them. When the gods do break through the panels to interact with people their finger might transform into a pillar of fire.

The book definitely has some Grant Morrison type flourishes in the writing and the art. I could easily see The Invisibles working in the near future story line. I'm really excited to see where this series goes.

I've been reading about mathematical geniuses the past few weeks. I read Simon Singh's book "The Code Book" and that sort of got me started. I owned an unread book on Kurt Gödel called Incompleteness that I started reading after that. That's lead me to G.H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology and a book on the Indian math genius Ramanujan called The Man Who Knew Infinity. All illustrate (1) how hard it is to be a genius (2) that even other geniuses will misunderstand you and (3) how ordinary and unimportant everyone else is.

In Hardy's case he tried to commit suicide when he realized he didn't have the mathematical creativity of his youth. (It's an old rule that nobody over 40 discovers anything significant in math) His friend C.P. Snow encouraged him to write a book explaining why he loved math, which he did. After it was published he succeeded at killing himself.

All of them had it easy. Try going to a jobby job 40 hours a week and being aware of your own mediocrity. I'll trade all of that for the cushy life of an Oxford prof who was only the fifth best mathematician in the world, or an intellectual in the Vienna Circle.

Still it is exciting to read about their struggles to refine their big ideas, or the enormous ramifications of something like Gödel's Incompleteness proof. I only wish we spent as much time on mathematicians and scientists in history class as we spent on politicians and generals. The mathematicians and scientists have a bigger, longer term impact on how the world works. I can't believe I came out of high school knowing more about Eli Whitney than Wittgenstein, Gödel or Euclid. Learn about Kissinger or Nash equilibriums? Hands down I'll take Nash equilibriums. They offer me a model for understanding foreign policy. Kissinger's realpolitik is just another vocab word.

I'm frustrated that an overpriced school book for a computer class is written using a crappy monospaced font for the programming examples. The lowercase L looks the same as the number 1.

I'm no designer but I do like it when things actually work. I've found Andale Mono on Windows or Monaco on OS X seem to be good monospace alternatives. Sometimes I wish I lived in the Netherlands or Sweden where good design seems to be a national point of pride. We Americans waste a lot of time on poorly designed crap.

After reading Josh's entry about Google book search I wondered if the name Matt Midboe was ever used in a book. I was surprised to see a book personally mention me in the acknowledgments.

It turns out I had corresponded via email with the books author/editor, Victoria Brooks, about Paul Bowles and to my surprise this warranted a mention. She had been a delight to correspond with and her enthusiasm about the project really came through. The book is called Literary Trips and is about great authors and the places they lived or found inspiration in. After Paul Bowles death in 1999 she published a shortened version about her trip to Tangier to meet Paul Bowles.

I never made the trek to see my literary/cultural hero Paul Bowles. It was nice to be a small part of the trip of someone who did.

I'm a latecomer to the Grant Morrison oeuvre. I enjoyed Arkham Asylum when it came out. However, I didn't get around to reading The Invisibles until last year. That one blew my mind apart. Today I read through his latest The Filth and what a hoot. The opening pages of the book start out with a sort of Patient Information warning like you see on medicine.

What is The Filth? The Filth contains the active ingredient metaphor.
The rectangular, multicolored comic books marked "The Filth" contain 500 mg of active visual and thematic metaphor per issue. Comic books also contain the inactive ingredients paper and ink.

From there the book goes ten different directions at once. You have the story of one sad and lonely guy who likes his porn and his cat. Although he may or may not be the parapersona of a special agent working for a secret society that maintains the Status: Q. The authorship of the book comes into question many times as different characters write their own sections, or leave the confines of 2-d space entirely. One character develops "A consciousness so focused and disciplined, it can actually manifest words in a cloud above my head." These words appear as thought bubbles above his head in the panels. Which gets back to the bigger theme of the struggle between the self and society for control of one's life.

The playful meta-narrative and traditional plot lines would have left me amused but ultimately empty if I didn't dig out a deeper meaning that made it relevant to my life. I really came away touched by this guys love for his pet cat, and his struggle to find meaning in loving and taking care of his cat. I've had that crappy job. I've had those moments of wondering why am I here? I never had a communist chimpanzee assassin, bio-engineered porn stars with black semen, person/anti-person complexes, pissed off robo-dolphins, superheros like ultra humanitarian, or i-life to help explain it though.

My touchy-feely reading about "meaning" is a bit misleading. The book is infused with a great deal of violence and bizarre sex. The pages fly by at a hectic pace. There is also a near constant need to reorient yourself between realties as you try to keep your head wrapped around the Filth. This is definitely one I'll have to read a few times. That's one thing I really like about Grant Morrison's work. It promises and then delivers layers of meaning and humor.

I'll mention one more patient warning:

When must The Filth not be used?

• If your doctor has advised you to avoid the use of metaphor.
• If you refuse to acknowledge the mocking laughter of the Abyss.
• If you cannot face the fact that your entire immediate environment is a seething battlefield of microscopic predators, prey and excreta and, simultaneously, a rich and complex metaphor.
• If, without understanding how it happened, you have found yourself in a dark room breastfeeding two elderly men you hardly know.
• If you are taking certain "dumb" antibiotics present in most media.
• if you are allergic to comic books or any of the ingredients they contain.
• If you take high-dose vitamin A supplements or have high levels of cholesterol or triglycerides (a fat-like substance) in your blood.