Blogspot, I wrote this entire entry completely wasted.
Several days ago, I had a dream where a medical school admissions committee asked me which flavor of dork I respected most. My subconscious gave an ultra-cogent argument in favor of Sci-Fi geeks. I know some of these people from high school and they are, as a generality, DESPICABLE human beings, but it requires palpable brainpower to think through the plausiblity and ethics of a good space-novel. I respect that, maybe.
When I was twelve years old, TBS acquired the rights to the movie version of Carl Sagan's Contact. In trying to wring the maximum benefit from this investment, the Superstation showed the movie at 8PM at least three weeknights in a row. My mother and I watched it every single night with rapt fascination that, to this day, has yet to be observed again. Despite well-documented inconsitencies in her logic, she was born bound to the romance of science, and I think 1998 have been the last time we ever saw eye to eye on the content of a movie. We fell so deeply in love with Jodie Foster that either of us would have gladly shot Reagan to get her autograph.
(Last year, Leigh and I founded a Jodie Foster Facebook group.)
Since time immemorial, my mother worked at a pharmaceutical company in nearby Summit, NJ. As a responsible member of the immigrant middle class, she was unable to pick me up from school until five. This was not a problem in elementary or junior high, when school was a short hike down a tree-lined street or up a shallow hill, but when I was fourteen years old, I started hanging out in the Ruth L. Rockwood Public Library, a five minute walk from Livingston High School, a forty minute walk from home. There, on the second tier of the fiction mezzanine, I found the book version of Sagan's masterpiece novel. While the movie was Jodie-tastic, the book was so much more.
When I was fourteen years old, I experienced my own geek-analog of awful teenage poetry. While others were beginning to discover the artistic horror of prog-rock and emo, the book spurred my personal infatuation with mathematical coincidence in numbers both rational (Divide one into 243) and irrational (pi/4 = 1-(1/3)+(1/5)-(1/7)+(1/9)...) in the same way that an element might trigger an infatuation in normal kids with, say--Satan. Among the craziest suggestions Sagan made was that pi, by virtue of its ceaseless coda of numbers, would eventually come to represent some sort of message (presumably encrypted by God). So you see how stupid 9th graders are.
It literally took me half a decade to figure out that ANY irrational number (not just pi) will eventually encode some sort of message. Furthermore, a particular irrational number will eventually encode ALL possible permutations of ALL information. Nevertheless, for the five year gap when thoughts concerning unknowably complex mathematics popped into my head, I would be keenly aware of this bizarre quasi-emotion called wonder.
Yay, Joe is back. Let us sleep.
Several days ago, I had a dream where a medical school admissions committee asked me which flavor of dork I respected most. My subconscious gave an ultra-cogent argument in favor of Sci-Fi geeks. I know some of these people from high school and they are, as a generality, DESPICABLE human beings, but it requires palpable brainpower to think through the plausiblity and ethics of a good space-novel. I respect that, maybe.
When I was twelve years old, TBS acquired the rights to the movie version of Carl Sagan's Contact. In trying to wring the maximum benefit from this investment, the Superstation showed the movie at 8PM at least three weeknights in a row. My mother and I watched it every single night with rapt fascination that, to this day, has yet to be observed again. Despite well-documented inconsitencies in her logic, she was born bound to the romance of science, and I think 1998 have been the last time we ever saw eye to eye on the content of a movie. We fell so deeply in love with Jodie Foster that either of us would have gladly shot Reagan to get her autograph.
(Last year, Leigh and I founded a Jodie Foster Facebook group.)
Since time immemorial, my mother worked at a pharmaceutical company in nearby Summit, NJ. As a responsible member of the immigrant middle class, she was unable to pick me up from school until five. This was not a problem in elementary or junior high, when school was a short hike down a tree-lined street or up a shallow hill, but when I was fourteen years old, I started hanging out in the Ruth L. Rockwood Public Library, a five minute walk from Livingston High School, a forty minute walk from home. There, on the second tier of the fiction mezzanine, I found the book version of Sagan's masterpiece novel. While the movie was Jodie-tastic, the book was so much more.
When I was fourteen years old, I experienced my own geek-analog of awful teenage poetry. While others were beginning to discover the artistic horror of prog-rock and emo, the book spurred my personal infatuation with mathematical coincidence in numbers both rational (Divide one into 243) and irrational (pi/4 = 1-(1/3)+(1/5)-(1/7)+(1/9)...) in the same way that an element might trigger an infatuation in normal kids with, say--Satan. Among the craziest suggestions Sagan made was that pi, by virtue of its ceaseless coda of numbers, would eventually come to represent some sort of message (presumably encrypted by God). So you see how stupid 9th graders are.
It literally took me half a decade to figure out that ANY irrational number (not just pi) will eventually encode some sort of message. Furthermore, a particular irrational number will eventually encode ALL possible permutations of ALL information. Nevertheless, for the five year gap when thoughts concerning unknowably complex mathematics popped into my head, I would be keenly aware of this bizarre quasi-emotion called wonder.
Yay, Joe is back. Let us sleep.
posted by Byron at 2:27 AM
3 Comments:
me + you = calculus
these time stamps mean nothing. i wrote this at 4 in the morning.
My dad, The Dude, loves Carl Sagan. He also deeply loves science; I, however, do not. When I got a C+ in perhaps one of the easiest classes I've ever been in, 7th grade science, for receiving the lowest "an animal in their natural habitat" diaramma grade, The Dude was devastated. As more punishment for inheriting my mother's ignorance of science and math than for my utter laziness, that summer I had to sit through the complete oh 10 hour? Carl Sagan documentary "Cosmos." I don't think I love Carl Sagan; although in retrospect, I now find Cosmos to be particularly badass compared to other science documentaries.
I love Jodie Foster.
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