Unusual

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I scan down the bullet points of my background check form. Its a sad fact that a person as innocent as I am in the eyes of the law finds situations such as these a touch nerve-wracking.

• All previous residences for the past seven (7) years.

I sigh and begin counting on my fingers. I had realized previously that I move around often, but I had not realized how often. Even not counting my bouts of sleeping on friend's couches or being legitimately homeless, I have had no less than 18 changes of primary mailing address over the aforementioned period.

"Well," Bobby laughed, "Guess that sucks for whoever has to process your background check doesn't it?"

I find it bizarre to try to reach back in my mind to my freshman year of college and remember which apartment I subleased a room in for a month between jobs. It isn't long until I am pouring through my inbox to try to find old shipping and billing invoices for online orders. A few addresses still evade my knowledge, and it isn't long after that that I am walking my old towns from millions of miles away in Google StreetView, carefully hoping to locate a house number.

I submit the form only to realize I forgot to list my Hong Kong address but the system is locked and can not be edited.

I can't imagine what this looks like. I'm perfectly aware that I live in a society where we are all boiled down to a calculated risk in all facets of life, and that the mathematically correct thing to do for less certain statistical predictions is to plan for the worst. I'm aware I'm an anomaly and therefore there will be less people who they have data on who are like me, and thus less data to use to make predictions about people like me, and therefore the computer will default to a safe bet of me being high-risk. That might be just as well, as I am not sure many people who walk this particular path come out the better for it. At least they don't know definitively that my population segment is high-risk.

You could consider the whole world a genetic algorithm if you wanted to. Ideas which work get passed on for other people to emulate, and people who try ideas that are too outlandish and dumb don't get an opportunity to try them twice.

This model is nearly perfect, but there is a catch. The problem arises from the fact that people are conscious and aware of the fact that unusual behavior is considered high-risk behavior, and we are living in a time where people go through a lot to avoid such "risky" behavior.

At Torii we are beginning outreach efforts to the local community. I keep bringing up a Tinker School model, and everybody is smiling until the photograph of a 10 year old kid with a power drill.

"You can't give the kids power tools."

"Why not?"

"They could get hurt."

"Can you explain to me how a child will do permanent damage to himself with a cordless drill or a hammer and nails?"

They never can, but the discussion is always closed anyway. Nobody wants to get sued, and everybody believes that if their program introduces engineering with popsicle sticks and masking tape that they will be safer.

"I tried to make a genetic algorithm which would play blackjack in online casinos and make me money while I did my undergrad," the man said. He's sitting at the front desk of the Torii late at night, staring off into the distance a little bit.

"Oh?"

"Yes, I taught it the rules of the game and then programmed them to play against a programmed dealer. Each generation I gave the virtual players 1000 dollars of imaginary money and at the end of each generation ranked them by who had the most money. I took the two most successful ones and one which was dead medium and created a next generation from them."

"And what happened?"

"The computer gave up on beating Vegas. All the algorithms always would stay, they would never hit, and they would bet the absolute minimum bet. They were just basically trying to live as long as possible in a losing game."

He paused, then laughed a little, "I guess I deserved it, what was I doing making a whole new generation of solutions from only three parent ideas?"

This fear ruins the diversity of the algorithm, and as any loser computer science master's student will tell you, this will cause the algorithm to believe it has reached the global maximum when it has in fact settled on a random local maxima. Another way to say it might be that if you want to do better than your average peer, you probably need to do something a little different.

I'll get my background check back in about a week. I can't imagine I'm unusual enough to make myself anything other than a funny little curioisity, but I suppose I will find out.

The Most Important Thing

I read an awful lot of books as a child. When I was in kindergarten my first grade teacher-to-be came for my Waldorf interview and was shocked to find me reading aloud to her from a chapter book. She was upset that I was getting ahead of myself, as the curriculum normally believed that such things would inhibit my imagination and creative side.

The habit of sneaking books continued. I have no idea how many my mother confiscated in an attempt to make me go to bed. I'd often keep two under my pillow so that when she came in to take my book away I could give her one I wasn't actually reading. I positively tore up fiction sections of the school library. I hid books in my desk at school and read during boring parts of class, and at points in middle school I deliberately accrued detention when informed I would be serving my terms in the library instead of attending "fun" portions of school.

For a while I completely bought into the concept that is implicently stamped into so many books: that books are the most important thing, that they are what hold society together, and they are what keep us free and permit the transmission of ideas. From The Giver to Fahrenheit 451 books, and storytelling in general, are projected as the foundations of safety and freedom respectively.

About the time when I finished Witch Week and one of the main characters was going to save the world by telling stories, as if the power to explain why everything is would erase the problems, as if all people who were at odds with one another were really victims of some huge misunderstanding and not persons with competing interests, was about the time when I got thoroughly fed up with this concept. It seemed extremely popular but hopelessly stupid.

***

"You guys are my team," I can hear Crash say to his latest group of students for the summer. He's nearly beside himself with excitement, to the point where I believe he is beginning to alarm some of his workers.

"Everybody's relying on us you know. Communications are the most important part of any project you know, you can have the best machine in the world but if you can't get the data off it you did it all for nothing."

There is a slight pause where the new students look at one another. I turn to Crash and smile a little bit.

"Oh course," Crash adds, thinking he has offended me, "Software is really important too you know."

It's a silly thought. We only put systems on the robots which are absolutely critical and the robot won't work without. Why would anybody pay for a part the robot didn't need to function? All our subteams, by this definition, are critical.

***

"Its going to be really hard you know," he says gravely.

"I'm prepared to work hard," the economist says, "I really believe I have thought up the next great business, and if I need to learn to program to do it so be it."

"It has taken me 10 years to learn to program," another voice joins in, "and I'm still not good at it yet."

I look across the Torii and consider things for a minute. The latest speaker is currently on sabatical at Google and has been involved in a wide array of other impressive things. His modesty is wonderful, but severely alarming to the economist who is progressively looking more and more nervous.

"Don't sweat it kid," I say. "Look, we're programmers. This is our life's work. Nobody wants to believe that their life's work is easy, that they are replaceable, or that their work isn't critically needed. We've worked hard to get where we are. That's what all these stories boil down to; but I believe that there isn't any reason you can't get here too with a little hard work."

Neverending Story

"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.

"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--

"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
Chapter 21

Gemini was cranky. He called for my attention but then couldn't be bothered to look up from his notebook of formulas when I responded. His words were brief. Everybody was glad I was going to a more stable place, but leaving was still awkward. I felt like a dog who, despite a loving family, was being sent to a new home because the new landlord didn't permit pets.

Nearly two months ago I am standing at the entrance to what, in a few moments, will no longer be my apartment. VJ swings one of my suitcases into his trunk and looks up the stairway to see me standing there, staring into the distance.

"Leaving is hard," he says, trying to sympathize.

I look at him a little puzzled. While I will surely never live here again, I will be back in town in about a week.

"It...feels good to be on the road again really."

"Oh?"

Its odd to explain side from one place where I lived for 9 months I haven't lived anywhere consistently for more than six months since I left for college.

We're in the present again now.

"We're going to miss you Pika," he said, giving me a big hug.

"Don't worry," I said, patting him on the back mid-hug, "I'll be back tomorrow for class."

In a sense, this "leaving" seems a bit artificial.

Months ago I tumbled out of a white jeep and turned back to look at Magpie. He's not really one for hugs anyway, although sometimes I wish he was.

"See?" he laughed, trying to make light of the situation, "and this time we didn't even need to call the feds because of bad traffic!"

PJ is probably the greatest oddity in all of this. I don't think I have ever said goodbye to him. The first time we were standing there when I shrugged and laughed about how, even though we had no plans of it, we knew the world was so small that we would run into one another again. Since then I see him about twice a year, just like clockwork. The last few times I don't think I even bothered to say "see you later" when I left.

I'm sitting at lunch in a little Mexican restaurant where my (now former) boss loves to go to to discuss work. It's about a week ago.

"I thought you were kidding when you said you had briefly gone homeless."

I shook my head, taking another bite of my burrito.

"Well I wouldn't have laughed if I had known you were serious."

"Its over now, don't worry."

This weekend we had about the same conversation at a former coworker's housewarming party. It really bothered Crash. His eyes puffed up red and he went into the corner to blow his nose a lot. It wasn't my intention to upset him.

I walked slowly back to the lab on Wednesday, now keyless to collect a last few things. Today Java offered me probably the first compliment I have ever recieved from him.

I watch my coworkers struggle to find a definitive last day to conclude things in the world of a sliding scale relationships. Since I am not moving this time I will remain peripherally involved. If nothing else I will still take classes next door to what use to be my lab. My relationship to this place is changing, but I am not leaving.

The sun is coming up through the front windows of the Torii. I have been here too long. Late nights make the dividing lines between days confusing and arbitrary seeming.

As a matter of fact I have recently begun to struggle with the concepts of the beginnings and endings of anything related to time. The reality is our relationships of all varities do not fit so neatly into the concept of starting and ending on dates unless we choose to abandon them as such.

The human impulse to compartmentalize and consider our lives in discrete chunks is substantial: days, hours, minutes, all these things are artificial constructs we impose on a steady flow of time. The same can be said of phases: high school, college, or a first job. The reality is that this world is built on tiny human connections, and that these connections deteriorate when we stop putting the effort in to mantain them.

"Playlist," I asked, passing him a beer as he sat at the desk in his room, "You're never online."

"Yeah, I hate AIM. You could call."

"What's a good day?"

The idea of these constructs having any meaning at all seems increasingly silly to me as the days pass. After all, will even my life be marked as a little discrete slice? The forces that shaped me, and the impact I leave on the world, faded into existance and will fade out again slowly over a much longer period than my own lifespan. It will not be wrapped up so neatly by the engraving of my tombstone.

I wave goodbye to the Bounty Hunters as they pile into cars to drive breakneck speed to the airport.

"Goodbye!" they call. I hear one voice through an open window, "Hope you get your tranfer to come out with us full time!"

"Don't worry about it," I laugh, "I'll be in touch!"

Bounty Hunters

We're coming up on a week since any of us have slept solidly. I'm luckier than most in getting a bed to spend my narrow slice of downtime in. Pizza boxes are stacked next to the trash can, and the trash bag abounds with old hamburger wrappers. I had real pasta last night, but as nothing has arrived for a while everything we eat now has the stale and slightly soggy taste of being wrapped in foil and thrown in the refrigerator for a few hours.

"Jackie," one my teammates calls, "You ready for another run?"

Bounty hunters have found a rebirth in the modern age. We live in a time where open-ended problems abound. Resources just don't exist for the government and various scientific panels to fund each of them individually. Instead, they flash a huge prize purse to the first team to accomplish the feat du jour, and then they sift through the resulting submitted designs to bring back whatever they believe will solve their problems.

The contestants pour in. They are more hacker than scientist; the kind of people who get a little thrill out of an ominous deadline, tremendous challenges and terrible odds. You'll be pressed to find a crowd who takes caffiene more seriously, and you'd be frightened to think of how much money a bunch of kids are chasing. Some years nobody wins at all, and some years everybody exceeds the expectations and it comes down to who does it best.

Oddly enough when I first met my teammates I already knew some of them. This world is frighteningly small, and good men are hard to come by. We know each other, we know our competitors: both friendly and the enemy who would sabatoge or disqualify us in a heartbeat. (And if you believe scientists are better people than to try to do so, you have another think coming.) Oddly enough, I'd say the hacker part of us is the more civilzed part. It's what makes us family.

"Its jamming again, that rake we put on isn't long enough."

"Fuck it, cut up this lacrosse stick and bolt it on the front."

Somebody's always asleep on the couch, despite the clamor of the voices and the roar of the power tools in the same room. There's more McDonald's monopoly pieces on the wall than I'd care to admit. Half of us are sick and we're still working 18 hour days. The undergrads are frantically copying homework off one another during breaks or over cold french fries.

...and yet, right now I wouldn't trade this for the world. I have been here before and I truly believe that this is where the magic happens: somewhere between the duct tape, the JB Weld, and the warm flat soda at 4AM. This truly is how the world changes.

"God damn," a teammate says, running a dremmel through the casing of a drill battery pack, "I hate it when they try to make shit tamper-proof." The stops come clear and 10 new cells pour from the battery. He gathers them up and lays them on the mat with a few other dismembered drill packs and begins wrapping the cells in electrical tape. "Somebody get the crimps."

So I'm sorry that I haven't written a lot recently. This is where I am. We've not many hours to go and many miles ahead to cover. In the meanwhile...

See you space cowboy...

Viral Media Rewards Absurdity

"I can't believe Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for intentions instead of action..."

I heard the same sentiment expressed with varying levels of clarity and expletives dozens of times Friday. "What on earth has come over the commission?" "Nobel is rolling in his grave," and "They have officially made this into a sham," and "Why the hell would they do this?"

I'll tell you why. I'll prove it on one sentence.

Can you name the winner of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize without looking it up. No? It's Martti Ahtisaari. Here's the sad part: that name probably doesn't help you. A good percent of us could not identify this former President of Finland for love nor for money.

That's alright, lets try again. Can you name any winner of the Nobel peace prize in the past five years? When I tell you that 2007 was Al Gore and some other people for some global warming stuff, you might say "man I knew that," but the recognition on Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank (2006), International Atomic Energy Agency and Mohamed ElBaradei (2005), or Wangari Maathai (2004) is pretty low.

So what's special about this? Well, lets consider this: news is a form of media. Media is an industry. Industries seek to make profit. How does media make money? Media makes money from advertising. Advertising pays more when more people see it more. Media wants to make as much money as possible. Media wants as many people to watch it as possible. Media reports the news which people will watch.

This dynamic is as old as the news as a business is (which some people link especially strongly to the development of cable news stations). The issue is: now not everybody gets their news from the news stations. As a matter of fact the majority of the news which I receive is transmitted to me virally either by a friend in an IM or via an IRC channel.

So what gets transmitted? Mostly it's the inane and the insane, in short the absurd. You know the memes as well as I do. I see easily as many links to the likes of Chris Crocker, various forms of Bill O'Riley expressly because he is losing flipping a shit or making an ass of himself, and Reuters' Oddly Enough as I do to "actual news." Try getting the same sort of stories you get off the BBC on Digg. They are probably there, but they are also probably awash in a great deal of other stuff.

Awash isn't a bad word for this whole situation. We're awash in way more information than we can reasonably process. We rely on summaries of everything, from what our friends are up to to the disturbing little bullet points that accompany a one page news article on CNN because they believe we have lost our attention span so badly that we are unable to finish and analyse a one page news article for ourselves.

And what is coming out on top? Well, your diligent readers will probably pick, choose, and not fluctuate but items which actually go viral reward the news site with a huge traffic spike. Spikes like this are very lucrative both financially. They are also psychologically attractive for the same reasons the lottery is.

Check out what is right at the top of the webpage of CNN, which is generally regarded as a fairly reasonable news site. Will the naked burgler that CNN reports as caught change your life? How about that an "ultrarunner" says shoes are the devil? This stuff is not news, its just a light laugh that sells well.

So if somebody is determined to make the news or "have an impact," they are going to have an easier time doing it if they are doing something that will go viral: the inane or the insane, the absurd. The Nobel Peace Prize, like all Nobel Prizes was founded essentially as a form of activism by the man who invented dynamite as an attempt to recognise those who have helped improve humanity. This was to offset the destructive and warlike ramifications of his own invention. The goal is to highlight and reward those who have done something significant to better humanity.

So how can the people who award the prize make sure the prize has an impact? By making sure everybody knows about who won it. How do they do that in this modern age?

They pick somebody who is doing good, but where the statement is just absurd enough to go viral.

Now I'm not proposing that this is some giant media conspiracy. I'm arguing that this is an unconscious algorithm that evolves from the combination of the strength of viral media introduction, media companies trying to make as much money as they can, and the people who are making news attempting to be sure they have an impact. This is the age that rewards Sarah Palin's cutesy folksy gimmicks, and reactionary "opinion pieces" where people completely lose their shit on youtube.

So, in conclusion, stop linking garbage, go read some damn news, and make the world a better place. Hell, while you're at it you might even give yourself an education. :p

The Fox and the Bear

It may be beyond my skill to describe being a Waldorf child for seven years in a way that will resonate with you if you weren't one yourself. CoLo laughed when I first mentioned it, "That explains so much; I've never met one of you who came out normal."

Lets start with something simple: beeswax. Beeswax is an art material provided to children frequently during Waldorf education. It is made (rather unsurprisingly) from the wax of bees and is dyed a variety of vivid colors. In the warmth of your hands it will become soft and mailable, but when left alone it will cool to hold its form. Its given to children in class and used in a similar manner to clay.

The older kids got to use beeswax, so we all were terribly eager for our first chance. I remember our teacher holding a wooden bowl at the front of the class and tipping the brim forward to show us its contents. Inside were about thirty-five pieces of wax. About half of them were vivid orange and half were a dark, warm, and vaguely royal purple color. The bowl was passed, down one row and up another, as I hungrily watched each student select a piece and pass the rest along.

"What is the difference?" I asked.

"They different colors," my teacher said, and couldn't be persuaded to say any more.

The interest was overwhelmingly in favor of the purple wax, so much in fact that by the time the bowl came to the last row there was nothing but orange left despite the fact that there were easily one and a half times as many pieces of wax as there were students. I remember holding the bowl in my hands and looking at both of hues, thinking that they were both very pretty, but eventually deciding that while the orange was slightly prettier, all of the cool kids were taking the purple and that I wanted to be a cool kid too.

"There once was a fox and a bear," the teacher said, and we all hushed to listen to story time.

"And one day the bear found the fox eating many delicious fish. The bear asked the fox how he caught them, and the fox said that it was very easy. He promised to teach the bear how to fish if the bear promised to listen very carefully to his instructions. The bear agreed and they went to the lake where the fox taught the bear how to make a hole in the ice.

'That was easy,' said the bear.

'Oh yes,' the fox smiled, trying to flatter the bear, 'I am sure for somebody as clever and strong as you it was easy. You can probably do anything, but here is the hard part: you must now sit with your tail in the hole and wait a very long time for the fish to come and bite your tail. Then you can pull up all of the delicious fish and eat them.'

So the bear sat with his tail in the hole all day and all night, and when the sun rose the next morning he thought he felt a nibble so he stood up. However, when he stood he found that his long and beautiful tail broke off in the ice, and now he only had a short stubby one. The bear went home very angry because he had been tricked, and whenever the fox thought of him he laughed. This is why bears have short stubby tails. but foxes have beautiful long ones."

I looked down in my hands at the purple wax and thought for a moment but was interrupted by the teacher.

"Now I want all of you with brown wax to make the bears, and all of you with orange wax to make the fox from our story."

Brown? I looked at the wax again. To a seven year old a teacher might as well be the voice of God himself, and so I immediately and wholeheartedly believed that my beautiful purple ball of wax was brown and ugly. What was worse was I was making the loser for the story. I turned to see the back row of the class grinning because they were all going to make the winner.

One student asked to trade her brown wax for orange wax but the teacher did not permit it. Dejected, I formed the very best bear I could from the wax and placed it on the counter along with all of the other student's work.

The figures sat there for almost a week before we were permitted to take them home, and when my mother asked me about my bear I didn't want to talk about it.

I remember daydreaming in class though and looking at the little figurines. If I do whatever everybody else does, I thought, I will only ever be as happy as everybody else is.

If I want to do better, I need to do something different.