NerdFather

[kingtycoon]

Correct, that is correct Periodic Table. I beat you. Only one dude can master all the elements. When you commute a lot on bumpy roads in crowded buses, or anyway, when I do, it's nice to have a game to play and I beat this one at last. It was harder than 2048, but less antagonistic to my happiness.


Anyway, I'd like to have things to really report, but I don't. Same-ness is pretty gratifying. Although - last night's lecture was pretty good, I was proud of it. Lecture. Who else wanders around with their kid & gives educational lectures? Probably nobody. Someday she'll have kids of her own & tell them horror stories - "when I was your age, my dad made me walk 2 miles to get movies & pizza and the whole way he'd try and make my schoolwork engaging!" That kid does algebra now - The Jebra - we even talked about that, because she's doing history of Islam, origins of anyway. That's kind of funny to think about - the 6th grade world-cultures classes just do all the religious origin stories. Islam finishes out the abrahamic faiths & she did Hinduism/Buddhism. I'm guessing there's got to be room for one more? Which one I wonder. Anyhow- getting to the bottom of the 5 pillars (she kept thinking no-alchohol was one) I ended up accidentally shaming my Friend Ali at the store - we went & quizzed him, to help with reinforcement, I was all - "Sell me treats & cigarettes, bullshit with me about being a weird outsider in the US & blah-blah - also: What are the 5 pillars?" He and his brother couldn't get it - and I felt bad, but I think she'll have a good mnemonic context when it comes time though - Ramadan! How could you forget? How could you remember? We were all so hungry.

The jebra though. She's not an enthusiastic mathematician, and after school, before dinner she gets a little puzzled & forgetful about stuff she knows, but! Grades are up, she's getting it figured out, so I am proud. "It's your work that's resulting in this. I refuse to take credit for your success, because then I could be implicated in your failures!" My jokes are probably really shitty. I don't know.

"So last year, in the fall, when we started our twice-weekly studies - we began on a day when we'd landed a robot on a comet. It was a significant day - and we talked about how most of the time, people have been cave-men. I mean, they didn't live in caves, but they were not in civilization. If you ate meat, it was that of an animal you had probably killed yourself, if you had water to drink, you gathered it yourself. That was the life of people for hundreds of thousands of years. And then it wasn't. What I think of is stories. How many stories, really great ones are just gone - because the little band of people who told it were wiped out by a disaster, or forgot to keep telling it. How much of what was said around those ancient fires remains? We only know a little, we only know what got written down. The writing down was the big thing. For hundreds of thousands of years we lived and wandered & hunted & gathered, and then we took a short little bit of time & built cities, and nations & spaceships & internets. We did it all in just a short time with our one piece of technology - which is writing. Now we could add all of our knowledge together, we could start with a head-start having learned what the older generations had learned. By the time of Da Vinci a person could learn all there was to know- a person could speak all the languages & read all the books, they could know all the sciences. There wasn't that much - knowledge-wise and what there was, what was collected together into a school - one person could learn it all in their lifetimes. But from there, things began to specialize. They said - I know all about this latin that I can read, but these people in spain speak a different spanish than the others- there's a dialect that's not written down - in a while a person could be spending their whole lives knowing all about the different kinds of spanish - and still not know all of them. This knowledge got written down over and over & we got smarter, all of us together, as one or two people could learn whole huge new things in their lives that they wouldn't have been able to before. So by the time we get to Isaac Newton who writes the Principles of Mathematics - he says - 'we could see so far because we stood on the shoulders of giants.' See all the knowledge adds together and that makes it possible to have new kinds of knowledge. And it is because of writing. Do you know what the Ishango bone is? I love the Ishango Bone so I talk about it sometimes. It's the oldest piece of writing so far discovered. It's tallies on a bone, carved in marks. So people were keeping track of things, counting them. Without counting - you know, people lived in the dreamtime - where time was meaningless, where it just flowed & there was yesterday which was all yesterdays- it's complicated to understand because we know days- but the most ancient people, think of it - did they know how many days there were until winter? Or did they see the birds heading south - the geese leaving & then they'd know it was time to go south too. They'd know all kinds of things based on what they could see, but not a lot about what was coming - without counting. So one day they might worship the goose and say this is our winter-goddess that flies away or drops the snow-blanket & tucks in the world - and later, they could say - there are 75 days until christmas. See, counting made the difference. And while one the one hand, mythologies about magic creatures that explain reality as its observed are different than counting. Can you understand why? Just consider, okay. On one side of the world people speak a language that's different than ours- which one is right? People believe things about gods here that they don't believe there - so they can't agree that one language or one god or one thing is true - except. There's one thing, that underlies everything, one thing that everyone does agree on..."

Here we were close to her mother's house and our time coming to an end. Here I pick up a stick. "They can say in china, and in kenya and in russia and here they can say that one divided by half is two" I break the stick in pieces. "They can say that one stick and another stick is two sticks. In the end you can see that there is a true thing that underlies everything else - because there is this math that describes it all, and that can be proved & is real & is the actual magic that defines things."

Then I kiss her goodbye and go home to eat dinner.

I think to myself though - y'know, self, you deal with simulations all the time - the worlds governed by dice & here there's the fundamental aspect of our mathematical lives, the pi & other irrational numbers that have got the qualities of the random number generator- that seem like the rolling of the dice under the skin of everything. So I get a little dizzy, and a little tired and go to bed and plan to do it all again different somehow today.