OF A GOLDEN AGE

When you have downtime, what do you do?

Five Favorite Timekillers:
1. Doodling
2. NYT crosswords online
3. Nanaca Crash! or Text Twist
4. Thinking of trivia questions
5. Math

Yeah, that’s right. Math. I have a reputation as something of a word nerd, which is completely true, but no, I don’t sit around and invent things to copy edit or think judgmental thoughts about other people’s grammar. Making corrections in a vacuum is unsatisfying; the good stuff comes when someone asks you for help as they write an essay or a resume or other actual product, and you can help that person more accurately portray him- or herself.

But you know what always hits the spot? Long division.

Here’s one I just did.

1623988872 ÷ 2 = 811994436
811994436 ÷ 2 = 405997218
405997218 ÷ 2 = 202998609
202998609 ÷ 3 = 37666203
37666203 ÷ 3 = 12555401
12555401 ÷ 17 = 738553 and . . .
738553 is a PRIME.

For more on division, you may want to check out Dr Math’s reference list of divisibility rules. He does 11 a different way than I learned, but as long as it works, right?

This weekend, Speaking of Faith reran a 2008 interview with John O’Donohue, Irish poet, former priest, and Hegelian (What an array of descriptors!), done shortly before his death. This moment took me aback:

Yeah, I feel like in the book I wrote on beauty, I was trying to say that one of the huge confusions in our times is to mistake glamour for beauty. And we do live in a culture which is very addicted to the image, and I think that there is always an uncanny symmetry between the way you are inward with yourself and the way you are outward. And I feel that there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times. And that we need to draw back inside ourselves and that we’ll find immense resources there.

We have largely evacuated interiority, at least in my portion of the Western world, and I can’t think of a better way to phrase the situation. One of history’s favorite literary zingers is from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

We are all large and should contain multitudes, which is, I think, why O’Donohue suggests we “draw back inside ourselves” — plus, a nice Hegelish note there when Whitman expresses himself as the combination and synthesis of his own contradictions and dualities.

Stanley Fish really stirred up some murk last week with his column advocating a limit on curiosity. Fish himself is a source of controversy and I find it hilarious and awkward that anyone accuse this bastion of individual thought and intellect as a curiosity-hater — seriously? Someone widely revered or reviled as the best or worst kind of rhetorician or theorist, who makes his living in the world of higher education?

This is Fish’s thesis in the column, an idea originally situated in the Garden:

The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything.

I think that Fish views destructive curiosity as the end of wonder and humbled awe, the kind of smug quest for “understanding” that characterizes literary examples Faust and Frankenstein, among others whom Fish does not cite. It is the product of two competing but parallel forces: First, that we are not grounded enough by our families, communities, or otherwise to ever have reason to stop the quest for new knowledge; and second, that we arrogantly assume this quest will lead us to something better, bigger, greater.

But more importantly, as Fish’s weekly column is aptly titled, he simply encourages us to Think Again, to not evacuate our interiority.

One of Andrew Sullivan’s substitute bloggers posted an excerpt from Mark Oppenheimer’s excellent feature on two prominent Holocaust deniers.

Oppenheimer’s final paragraph is the most provocative moment in what is otherwise a triumphant, thoughtful piece. The money thought (emphasis mine):

I remember what the theologian Stanley Hauerwas once told me about premillennial dispensationalists, those fundamentalist Christians who extrapolate from the Bible extremely complicated, unbelievably detailed, scenarios about the end times, like those in the Left Behind novels. “They’re very smart,” Hauerwas said. “You can’t be stupid and come up with that. God gave them minds, and they need to use them.” In other words, forbidden by their religion from developing real intellectual curiosity, they turn their brainpower toward half-baked biblical exegesis that makes sense according to its own hermetic logic. Weber and Smith are trapped like that. Holocaust denial is, like more benign species of fundamentalism, a well-furnished playground for immature and sometimes deranged intellects. It isn’t necessarily about Jews, or even about the Holocaust; it’s about finding something to do with one’s mind.

Ernest Hemingway friend-cum-memoirist and allaround talented good guy A.E. Hotchner has an ethically shocking editorial today. Apparently the new edition of Hemingway’s final (posthumous) book A Moveable Feast contains extensive edits by a family member:

[Hemingway's] grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

Hotchner presents a narrative about his friend Hemingway working on the book over time, sending manuscripts to his publisher, and so forth. The San Francisco Chronicle tells the story flatly without mention of the editorial wherewithal of son Patrick or grandson Sean Hemingway. The Boston Globe criticizes the rearrangement of and additions to the text but in a less pointed way.

So who has the higher ground? The children and grandchildren of Hemingway’s second wife, who began as a mistress and, Hemingway wrote in the original Moveable Feast, homewrecker? Or Hemingway’s peer who seeks to do honorably by his friend’s memory and legacy?

Graphically, here’s the breakdown of the lowest and highest meat contents from the study I previously posted.

2.1% meat, 48.4% water, 49.5% other:

14.8% meat, 37.7% water, 47.5% other:

Even in the best case, 47.5% of nonmuscle tissue forms the largest portion — fatty, connective, bone, and the not-insignificant plant matter found in both of these examples.

Marty beat me to the punch with a post on gross food secrets, in his case calories and fat content at chains. It’s my own fault, I bullied him into posting. He even took my hamburger study link LIKE A JERK.

McDonald’s restaurants nationwide are throwing a “recession buster” deal today, so if you want 49c hamburgers and 59c cheeseburgers, make your way to a nearby location. (Even 15 years ago a hamburger was 59c and a cheeseburger 69c. I have no idea what the prices are now.)

On the surface this sounds like a good deal, but then I remembered this study (links to PDF) from December 2008’s Annals of Diagnostic Pathology. Of course, all fast food restaurants want to upsell you on beverages* but the study highlights that the meat content of fast-food burgers is low enough that they likely turn a profit even on the cheapest dollar-menu burger item:

Meat content, as evidenced by the presence of skeletal muscle, occupied a small amount of the cross-sectional area (median, 12.1%; range, 2.1%-14.8%) as determined by light microscopic examination; most of the content of the hamburgers were made up of other tissue types and water.

OH BUT WAIT, there’s more!

The water content, as determined in this study, comprised nearly half (median, 49%) of the weight of the hamburger. [ . . . ] Some of the other tissue types [ . . . ] adipose tissue, blood vessels, connective tissue, and peripheral nerve . . . are not unexpected findings. Bone and cartilage, observed in some brands, were not expected [ . . . ] Plant material, observed in some brands, was likely added as a filler to give bulk to the burger.

The upside was that none of the eight burgers contained brain matter, which would move beyond gross findings into palpable health risks like mad cow disease. All of this leads me to believe that even the fattiest ground beef you buy at the store (note: I did not say the cheapest) is better for you in terms of identifiable, likely fresher foodstuffs. When you grill a burger, you also don’t add any fat beyond what’s already in the meat, unlike the mystery-greasy flat top in fast food land.

After all . . . the burgers from one of these chains contained only 2.1% meat.

* When Hank Venture’s yard-sale grinder business fails, he castigates Dean for going easy on lemonade sales.

Cynthia Ozick’s novel The Puttermesser Papers is a lovely, strange, and descriptive account of a woman apart. I loved Puttermesser and picked up Ozick’s more recent novel Heir to the Glimmering World with trepidation.

There was no need, because it is just as descriptive and lush but with a wider array of characters to examine. Ozick falls in the category of “college fiction” in my mind because she isn’t what I’d call summer beach reading, and I’ve never run into anyone who’s read her outside the context of school or literary criticism. But what’s wonderful about her style is that the bones of the plot are easy to put down and pick back up, while actually reading her prose for a minute or an hour is equally rewarding. Her words fill your mind up.

The mentally ill matron of the German family, as described by the American nanny:

But I wondered still whether she was truly mad, or whether her madness had itself come into being on some scientific plan. World-upheaval had capsized and stupefied her. Then she must answer! Answer disorder with disorder, fracture with fracture; she must refuse and refuse. Once or twice, having refused, she recanted. She had refused her shoes — but now she wore them. She had refused the language of exile — but now she was in thrall to a narrative wherein mind was governance, and a nation was stable, and disorder and fracture were tamely domesticated. She did not protest the language of exile; she was immersed in it, captivated. True madness, I thought, does not reverse itself. True madness, I thought, does not reverse itself. True madness will not recant.

Reed College, in need… — Reed now costs $50 thousand a year, has an endowment of more than $350 million, and will not be accepting students who need too much financial aid. This is need-sensitive as opposed to need-blind, which the New York Times stupidly describes this way:

… accepting students based purely on merit, without regard to wealth, and still meeting their financial need. Only the nation’s richest colleges do that.

My alma mater, Beloit College, was need-blind until some point in the last few years, with a student body similar in size to Reed’s and an endowment of, wait for it, about $100 million. I call bullshit on this Reed debacle. Moreover, Beloit sure as shit didn’t cost $50 large a year, and only around one third of students paid the ticket price of around $35 thousand — most were accepted on an assumed discounted tuition rate (myself included), with variable aid on top of that depending on academic performance and other application factors.

Reed is the Harvard of weirdy schools, and many Beloit students either longed to go to Reed or had friends who ended up there. The last thing weirdy schools need is to have even wealthier student bodies.

After I glimpsed Pekar at the book fair (see previous post), I stood at attention for the next hour and a half knowing he’d eventually be back. The coordinator came back to ask if I wanted to be rotated, but of course I was waiting to see Harvey Pekar again. She said, “Oh, come upstairs and meet him!”

Pekar and his editor, Paul Buhle, were in the hospitality room and we talked for a few minutes before they had to go downstairs for their panel discussion. I also met Bucky Halker, a Wisconsin-born singer-songwriter and labor academic who reminds me of Jeff Bridges circa Fearless (tall, thin, runaway hair, piercing blue eyes) and serves on the Woody Guthrie Foundation board.

At past Printers Rows, Studs Terkel presented his own program, but at this first one since his death in October they invited Pekar and Buhle to discuss their recent graphication of portions of Terkel’s most famous book, Working. Really, Pekar and Terkel are cut of the same cloth: both are magnetic personalities (though Pekar has great social anxiety) who spend their lives discussing the overlooked “ordinary” people who populate most of the world. By holding these people’s stories up to the light, we can give them the attention they deserve — not by romanticizing, or making them unhealthily famous (Cough . . . Susan Boyle?), but by acknowledging that everyone plays a part.

Because of the draw of Studs Terkel (especially in Chicago) and Pekar’s elevated profile since 2003’s great movie adaptation of American Splendor, CSPAN’s Book TV broadcast the panel live. In this context I felt more self conscious as the loudest laugher. Whoops.

One of my former math professors, Paul Campbell, teaches an all-levels course on the CBS show Numb3rs. At the time, I hadn’t seen the show and knew only that it starred the dreamy tag-team of Northern Exposure’s Rob Morrow and ubiquitous-but-underused David Krumholtz, plus Judd Hirsch.

People complain that the mathematics used on the show aren’t totally sound, or would only suggest a LIKELY answer rather than a certain one, and so on and so on. I don’t give a crap about that, because almost every television show demands a certain suspension of disbelief — does the legal world reflect Law & Order, does high school reflect Gossip Girl?

Plain and simple, it’s awesome that a show in the formulaic crime genre has chosen mathematics as its bread and butter, both glorifying the role of mathematics in our society AND hyping up whatever the future has in store. I really love it.