The victim with my name

I had already been reeling for a day when a friend emailed me a single chilling sentence: “One of the children killed in Newtown, Connecticut was named Benjamin Wheeler.” Just like me.

I stared at the pixelated name on my phone’s screen. I couldn’t recognize anything familiar in those few letters, in that minimal sentence. There was so little I knew, so much I didn’t.

My initial reaction was distancing: to look for ways to focus on my immediate and picayune tasks. I looked immediately for aspects of the violence that meant I was not in the same world as it: I live in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where we gentrifiers have emphatically chosen the problems of the city over the problems of the suburbs. No matter that children get shot in my neighborhood too: this horror happened in another world. The cold form of the digital message helped me to quiet any echo of what happened to this child, this small child who shares my name.

How much is in a name, really? I must already have so much in common with these kids, just by having been one: their simple joys; their fierce belief in favorite foods and movies and songs; the everyday discoveries a child makes which are humdrum to me now but which once fascinated and confounded me.

And yet, as time goes on, I find myself seized with a sense of connection to this boy that I can’t shake.

I know that he is dead, as unbelievable as it still seems. But in the weeks since the shooting, as I have caught pictures and quotes about him from loved ones, he has come alive in my mind. I read that he was a piano student, a bundle of energy, still effusively talking of love at an age where so many kids abandon that type of sincerity as kindergarten stuff. I too was these things at 6.

Yet at the same time I know our similarities are dwarfed by our differences; and that all I have had is a moment’s glimpse of his life. Is the connection really so profound, or am I just latching on to something besides sheer dismay, something I can talk about that gives me a path through this madness?

Widely printed photo of Benjamin Wheeler, Newtown, CT.

Can I trust my conviction when I swear he even bears an uncanny resemblance to me at age 6? Is that why I shake with emotion I don’t understand when I look at his picture?

I think of Benjamin’s parents and their grief, which must be bottomless. Here I do understand my emotions: they compel me to slam the door and run away. I too am a father, of two girls younger than Benjamin was, and it terrifies me just to put my girls and their son in the same sentence.

I’m lucky my daughters are too young to register the news, though sometimes my eldest knows something is amiss from the way I clutch her. Like every parent in America whose kids are safe and sound, I have been alternating since that Friday between piercing anguish and thankfulness that my kids are okay. Singing them to sleep suddenly seems an impossible joy. If I wonder at times why I deserve this grace, that doubt is obliterated by a primordial instinct to protect. For now I know, in a way I thought I did before but really didn’t, that I’m ultimately powerless to be my daughters’ shield.

Me, age 6.

Like Benjamin was, I am an American amalgam: a Jew with an incongruous, Scottish last name. Even before I learned Benjamin was also Jewish I thought of a boy named Franta Bass, a victim of the Holocaust. Franta Bass was sent at age 11 to Terezín, the twisted model village-cum-concentration camp that pretended to the world that it was a nurturing place for children. A poem has survived that he wrote there while waiting--it is still inconceivable--to be murdered there by the Nazis:

A little garden, Fragrant and full of roses. The path is narrow And a little boy walks along it.

A little boy, a sweet boy, Like that growing blossom. When the blossom comes to bloom, The little boy will be no more.

In my childhood temple, the congregation would read this poem during the Yom Kippur service. This was the point every year when I would weep, beginning when I was about the age that Franta Bass was when he was killed.

They say you don’t cry when the pain is its very worst, but instead when it begins to recede. And when I search myself, I find that I can identify the thread of my relief. When I pull on it, a door opens onto the beauty of his vision; I can feel him holding on to joy, his gentleness and his love for himself. This boy is reaching out to me, across the brutal decades, and opening his heart. And amidst the horror, I can see it, as clear as the sun.

I’m surely not the only Benjamin Wheeler out there knocked off my axis over this. It’s a common enough name: Benjamin Ide Wheeler was an early president of the University of California, and there’s even a town in Texas named Ben Wheeler, named for the Pony Express-era rider whose mail delivery put it on the map. That town was a delight to my North Texan grandfather, Ben Kerr Wheeler; in the early days of telephone, my grandmother Belle once traveled there on the sly so the operator could announce her call with “Mr. Ben Wheeler? I have a Mrs. Ben Wheeler, calling from Ben Wheeler, Texas!”

In fact, I had two grandfathers named Ben... sort of. I always knew my maternal grandfather, an immigrant from what is now Belarus, as “Bernie”. But I also knew he had other names in other languages, as assimilating immigrants often do. His original name, Dov Ber, was already a linguistic mishmash; “dov” and “ber” both mean the same thing, bear, in Hebrew and Yiddish respectively. As I learned much later, “Ben” had been his preferred Americanization of “Dov Ber” until I was born, and he was furious at my parents for choosing the name of a living relative, something frowned upon in Ashkenazi Jewish tradition.

As common as the first name Benjamin has become, it has always struck me as glaringly biblical. My parents thought they were digging up a forgotten gem when they named me, only to find three other Benjamins waiting for me in my first grade class (though I was the only one who went by Benji). I prefer the crisp “Ben” that was my grandfather’s full first name, and which for years has outranked Benjamin in the census ranking.

I sometimes ask my wife if my name seems as strange to her as it does to me. I can catch “Benjamin” in the corner of my eye, but I can’t see it clearly like I do other names. The same is true for my face: I can’t conjure an image of it in my mind, couldn’t really say I’ve met the guy I see in the mirror. And yet I feel the shock of recognition in the picture Benjamin Wheeler’s family has provided to the papers. He looks as breathless and awkward as I did at 6, and with the same sprawling mop of hair.

Are the other Benjamin Wheelers also remembering themselves at that age? What a titanic year that was for me! The year I first had an inkling of sex, the year I started reading for pleasure; and the year of my first exposure to death.

Our teacher Ms. Bolanz, beloved to a generation of Cambridge, Mass public schoolchildren, died of cancer midyear. Did I mourn her, at that age? That memory is hidden to me. My mother tells me I insisted on attending her memorial service, that I wanted to say goodbye. What I remember is the presence of so many former students, many of them adults, whose lives she had touched. In the fall I announced I was to be called Ben, no longer the childish Benji, though I’ve never before noticed that timing.

I became a voracious student, diving headlong into interests--dinosaurs, planets, geography, and the just-born world of video games. (I also, to the surprise of no one who knows me today, had a little side interest in barrettes and My Little Pony.)

Like some boys, my passion for cataloging and collecting could border on the obsessive, and I had a tyrannical preoccupation with rules. But unlike boys at the border of the autism spectrum, I was also deeply empathetic, always transfixed by the struggles of slow and awkward classmates. As I grew older, I felt out of step with other kids, coming across either as obnoxiously precise or with my head hopelessly in the clouds. I learned to second guess myself, to hold back my first response and vet it for appropriateness; to be less buoyant and to rein in my imagination.

Teachers too were short on patience for a kid who could spend a whole class scribbling in the borders of his schoolwork and then suddenly pipe up to correct their I’s and me’s. I clashed with many of them, though I realize now with surprise that they would probably have taken a bullet for me.

That’s who I was as a boy. And because I know so little about the Benjamin Wheeler who died in Connecticut, that’s what I’ve noticed myself using to fill in all the gaps. The terse email that brought Benjamin Wheeler to my attention had little it could tell me, and nothing to narrow the terrible distance. But by imagining that boy as being like I was, I have turned that bitter report into an invitation. I feel a comfort in telling myself a story about him. I am almost draping him with garlands: sweetness; curiosity; dedication; intensity.

But is the real boy lost in all this, made even more distant? I only get the narrowest suggestion of who he was from the articles about him. He was his own person, with his own gifts and challenges. I did not share his suffering, and I have no place in his family’s grief. There is no connecting the fact that I have had the chance to see where my life at 6 was going, and he never will.

I never knew that Benjamin existed until that Friday, but I want to tell him that I’m sorry I couldn’t protect him. I can’t begin to tell that to all of the children, and I can’t speak such a thing to my children, in their blissful ignorance. So I want to tell it to Benjamin, as I imagine him.

His image is before me. I don’t know how much of it is the Benjamin Wheeler who was just getting started in 2012, and how much the one in 1985. But I can see his gentleness blooming.

Mischievous vitality and self possession

I spoke with some of [Amy's brother] Seth’s friends, now men in their forties, and more than one started crying at the mention of his name. They attested to his mischievous vitality and his self-possession. Once, in middle school, he was surrounded in the cafeteria by classmates who taunted him for carrying his violin and suggested, mockingly, that he play it. Seth removed the instrument from its case, raised his bow, and began to play, beautifully, until the bullies were cowed into silence. “He called their bluff,” [Seth's best friend] Agnew, who observed the episode, remembered.

From Patrick Radden Keefe's excellent profile of tenure-denied mass shooter Amy Bishop in the New Yorker.

A prayer for the children of Abraham/Ibrahim

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat wrote a moving prayer during this winter's conflict in Gaza. It begins:

For every aspiring ballerina huddled
scared in a basement bomb shelter

    For every toddler in his mother's arms
    behind rubble of concrete and rebar

For every child who's learned to distinguish
"our" bombs from "their" bombs by sound

    For everyone wounded, cowering, frightened
    and everyone furious, planning for vengeance

I often hear "equivalence" decried. But I think we need far more of this type of equivalence.

Douthat discovers Sweden

Ross Douthat had a surprisingly interesting column the other day arguing that unemployment is a corrosive social ill and that it is the unavoidable result of technological progress, not the result of laziness.

Unusually for Douthat, who usually finds a way to accommodate a bit of cruelty in his moralism, he readily acknowledges the progressive implication of his argument:

Many of the Americans dropping out of the work force are not destitute: they’re receiving disability payments and food stamps, living with relatives, cobbling together work here and there, and often doing as well as they might with a low-wage job. By historical standards their lives are more comfortable than the left often allows, and the fiscal cost of their situation is more sustainable than the right tends to admit.

The implication is that we need a far reaching program of public employment. We already do a pretty good job of massive public employment with our military, which moves us towards full employment in a way that is hugely popular as long as it is couched in militaristic terms so as to get support from supposed haters of socialism. We should divert that money into government-subsidized employment in non military areas, like education, elder services, the arts and infrastructure. In other words, become more Scandinavian. Why not have a monthly home visit by a masseur be something every American is guaranteed?

Learning to write all over again

Every word hurts.

I have barely posted anything on this blog for three years, because I have been battling a condition which is undiagnosed and mystifying (the medical term is idiopathic), and which gives me pain in my arms and elsewhere.

I have sat down to write lots of times, but I seldom succeed. My problem is that my writing process developed at a time in my life when I could think with my fingers — revising sentences, toying with paragraph order, using asides and punctuation to signal to myself where I would need to come back and revisit a point or look up a source. Without forming conscious intentions, I would set my fingers free to monkey with the text, trying out ideas quickly and striking on serendipitous solutions. This worked great when my fingers worked great.

But now I can't use my fingers and arms to control a computer, except for the occasional minute or two of typing, for which I always end up paying dearly. Instead, I use voice recognition software and a mouse I control with my feet, both of which are sorry substitutes for the real thing. It takes me far longer to do things nowadays, and everything I do on a computer is painful and frustrating. The kind of fiddling with my writing I used to do on the computer is out of the question.

Imagine that your keyboard typed the wrong word once a sentence, and going back to fix it screwed things up further half the time. Now coat your mouse with cactus needles, and throw some on your chair seat for good measure. (Sitting down hurts, and toes were not meant to control mice.)

If I am to continue being a writer in any meaningful way, I need to rethink the mechanics of how I write.

Here are my new rules:

1. Write everything longhand

Dragon Naturally Speaking is the leading (and best) commercially available voice recognition software by far, but it is inexplicably overrated by otherwise sober reviewers like David Pogue of the New York Times. It's decent at transcribing text when you give it full sentences, because it uses grammatical context and statistics on word sequences to tell if you mean "dissent" or "descent". But even that is prone to error. When I told it "word sequences", it guessed I meant "Word seek through this" and proceeded on a whim to highlight the entire document. And it is horrible at understanding standalone words, commands and letters; trying to change a single letter in this sentence proved impossible, and I had to resort to typing. I can forget about using it for my livelihood, which, unfortunately, is computer programming.

2. Remember Jean-Dominique Bauby

… You know, the author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Things could always be worse. That guy is one memoir up on almost all of us, and had twenty fewer fingers and toes to work with and no voice.

3. Be brief

My condition is a good excuse to take a machete to my writing, which is too verbose anyway. Cutting half out of anything I write improves it enormously. (E. B. White liked to cut two thirds.) Now, each keystroke I jettison has the added benefit of reducing the pain, as long as I do it in advance. So I need to do my editing down in longhand, before I touch the computer.

4. Be a worse writer

It goes against my nature to hit publish until I feel a post works in its entirety, from word choice to clarity of my overall points. But following my nature has meant I don't publish anything. That's got to give. As soon as the piece might possibly be ready, I will consider it done, starting right now –

E. B. White quote photo by Robin Riat; Bauby-inspired photo by Jessica Wissel

This just in: dinosaurs looked funky

I had heard the news that scientists had discovered a way to reliably determine the color of dinosaur feathers–apparently, in 2008 it was determined that melanosomes, pigment-related cell organelles, had actually survived intact for tens of millions of years in fossils. But I didn't realize that there were already renderings being published based on this new research. It sounds like several teams have been racing to be the first to put out illustrations, so we shouldn't expect this first round to be that reliable.

But it's incredible that my daughter will grow up knowing what some dinosaurs actually look like, whereas when I grew up I didn't. I was a dinosaur enthusiast as a child, and I collected the 1:45 scale models sold through the British Museum (see below).These models started being sold in 1973, and the mainstream understanding of how dinosaurs appeared has changed immensely since then.

See a three-dimensional rendering on the National Geographic website, and the abstract of the first paper published in Science.

Renaming the Brooklyn Nets

New New Jersey Nets owner Yakov Smirnov Mutant Russian Marked Cuban Mikhail Prokhorov says he is open to changing the name of the team when they move to Brooklyn in 2015 (which is what Google Translate says "2012" means when you go from developer-speak to English).

It's a brilliant idea. Since the team is not exactly going to win games anytime soon, and is already moving several physical miles and several hundred thousand cultural miles, you don't risk alienating faithful fans who are attached to the old name. And nothing sells merchandise like a completely new logo and color scheme, especially one associated with Brooklyn.

In the new economics of American sports, Brooklyn could be a lucrative place to base a team, because it has cachet all around the world. No one in Indonesia is going to buy a Miami Heat jersey unless three of the top ten players in the league, including the most famous working athlete in the world, join the team in a suspicious backroom deal. But people in Indonesia will buy a jersey for the Knicks, as they will for the new Brooklyn team, even if they suck.

When the Boston Red Sox paid $51 million just for the right to sign Daisuke Matzusaka, the move made little sense when considering how much more cheaply they could sign pitchers already proven in the major leagues. The next highest bid, by the filthy rich Yankees, wasn't even close. But consider the long-term value of millions of Japanese fans, who now might raise their children on Red Sox merchandise and pay to watch Red Sox games featuring Japanese language ads -- a formula the Yankees perfected with Hideki Matsui -- the deal makes much more sense, and has probably already proved worth the money.

But you don't need a big rebranding plan to know it's exciting to think of new names for a major sports team, especially one that will be in a place that conjures so many associations. I'm praying that the owners will see the folly of choosing a generic mascot like the pathetic Bobcats or (shudder) Raptors. Leave those names to cities where the movie shoots pretend they take place somewhere else.

Here are my proposals:

The Brooklyn Brownstowners -- evokes what is special about Brooklyn, its brownstone soul. One big problem, though: you pretty quickly start thinking about stoners, and stoners who are brown.

The Brooklyn Red Hooks -- connects clearly to Brooklyn by referring to a neighborhood not far from the arena (which I vehemently oppose building, though I will happily go to games once it's built), and sounds kind of cool to boot. But only kind of.

The Brooklyn Blues -- keeping with the alliteration theme. The "Blues" is a bit generic, and I don't think anyone would argue Brooklyn is especially connected to blues music or jazz, though it certainly is a capital for gospel in the North. But the name has a powerful ring to it. Say it to yourself a few times.

The Brooklyn Breakers -- alliteration plus a reference to Brooklyn's Atlantic coastline, famous thanks to Coney Island. The aerial shots before games begin could show the Coney Island beach, with its numerous lines of rock wave breakers. The name is tough without being overly violent; this is, after all, the league of the Wizards.

Eponymous -- That's right, just call the team Brooklyn. Not the Brooklyns, just Brooklyn. There is no law that says every team must have a mascot-type name; names like the Heat and the Fighting Irish already caused fans and announcers to refer to the team in a different way than they do most other teams. You can be sure the team name would be widely discussed and argued about, and you can also be sure they would sell a bajillion shirts and caps with the logo and the single word "Brooklyn". And they can always be called the "Brooks" as a nickname.

The Brooklyn Hoops -- generic, but playful, evocative of street ball, and provide some continuity to the Nets name. Good but not great, it would disappoint no one and look great on merchandise.

The Brooklyn Basketballers -- parallels the old-timey feel of the New York Knickerbockers, and could be shortened to just "ballers". It works because the formality of the name calls your attention Brooklyn's long history and deep roots, rather than to its more recent associations with crime and hipness. As American cities go, Brooklyn is ancient; but the fact that it is also known for being cool and culturally relevant means that highlighting its age works for Brooklyn in a way it doesn't quite for Boston and Washington. The only drawback is that "ballers" can be read sexually.

I'm ready to give these names away for the good of humanity. Call me, Mutant Mark!

"She stole my heart and my cat": great moments in syllepsis

I was imagining highly specific and unlikely Scrabble games, anticipating some moment when I could modify a smug opponent's ZEUGMA into HYPOZEUGMA, PROZEUGMA, DIAZEUGMA, or MESOZEUGMA, or even make a HYPOZEUXMIS of my own--this is why I'm bad at Scrabble--and checked out the Wikipedia page for these rhetorical terms. The examples of syllepsis using idiomatic phrases are a motley crew, from Alanis Morrisette to Antonin Scalia. I want to see some tracked changes of the article to see how examples have been added because Eve 6 was certainly not among my first thoughts for how to illustrate the device:

* You held your breath and the door for me.
--Alanis Morissette, "Head over Feet"

* I got a part-time job at my father's carpet store, laying tackless stripping and housewives by the score.
--Warren Zevon, "Mr. Bad Example"

* I took her hand and then an aspirin in the morning,
--Eve 6, "Girl Eyes"

* "Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London."
--Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Cecily is making a catty remark to Miss Fairfax, a Londoner, by using "common" in two senses, namely "numerous" and "vulgar" as in the expression "common thief.")

* "The Russian grandees came to Elizabeth's court dropping pearls and vermin."
--Thomas Babington Macaulay

* "Are you getting fit or having one?"
--From the television program M*A*S*H

* "You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit."
--From the television program Star Trek: The Next Generation

* "I called her a whore and myself a cab."
--Michael Salinger, "Girl on Girl"

* "She was a thief, you got to believe: she stole my heart and my cat."
--From the film So I Married an Axe Murderer

* "[She] went straight home in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair."
--Charles Dickens

* "Just a dissipated creep who wears a Rolex on his wrist/On her nerves, too much cologne, and down her power to resist./ Did she turn down the wrong hallway, his advances, or the sheet?"
--Bob Kanefsky, "The Girl Who Had Never Been ..."

* "... and covered themselves with dust and glory."
--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

* "You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff."
--Groucho Marx, from Duck Soup

* Come the (computer) revolution, all persons found guilty of such criminal behavior will be summarily executed, and their programs won't be!
--Numerical Recipes

* My teeth and ambitions are bared; be prepared! - Scar, from The Lion King with lyrics by Tim Rice

* The levees were broken and so were the promises. - Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge

* The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once: “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.
--Justice Scalia's majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, rejecting the notion that the phrase "bear arms" was used as an idiom in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.554 U.S. ____ (2008), slip op. at 13.

Google voice gives great oral

Google Voice is something I can't live without -- it's one of the few significant advantages an Android phone has over an iPhone. Thanks to its ability to transcribe my every phone message, I no longer even listen to half of my messages, since many are doctors' offices confirming appointments or other folks just leaving me a phone number to call back. Numbers are very easy for Google Voice to transcribe correctly.

Not so for everything else, especially the type of stop and go banter that fills most phone messages. Listening to my messages while following the Google algorithm's best guess at their content makes me realize how few complete sentences are spoken by callers.

Still, it's hard to believe you couldn't gin up an algorithm that could do better than Google Voice does on many of my calls. Of course, that would mean I'd lose Google Voice's unintentional comedy. Witness this surprisingly provocative message from the post office (my emphasis):

Voicemail from: Unknown Caller at 8:47 AM

Yes, Hi Good Morning. This is calling from the post office, the mailman will be. Yeah, Hello Baby. Ohh. Peggy shop on another 20 minutes. Thank you.

Or take this helpful update from my father, who is apparently on ecstasy:

I'm still kind of into the weather that has just come back this evening and and we might. She will want to get some of the like. Here at something like that. So, but I'm pretty well over the sky. I don't know. Spoke to sort of city. There's just a little bit tired fun it so I don't do anything right. Yeah. we should check in to the prices of storm door Of, snirtstorm security guards at Home Depot.

I had never even heard of the word "snirtstorm", which apparently is the combination of snow and a dirt storm, and seems to afflict the northern Midwest. (In fact, is such an unusual word that it is a great ingredient for Googlewhacking -- I found one with "snirtstorm parabola".)

But seriously, I'm no expert on voice recognition algorithms, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that if you think a human has said "snirtstorm", you had better go with your second best guess instead. Although I do appreciate the creative capitalization of words in mid-sentence.

UNIVERSE CLOSED PLEASE USE RAINBOW

Albuquerque's West Side keeps sprawling beyond what street-namers can imagine. My mom was driving me out there a couple of years ago and I had a joke ready for every major street we crossed...

"This side of Paradise..."
"Somewhere over the Rainbow."
"The end of the Universe."
"At the edge of the Galaxy."

...until she told me to stop because all of the streets look the same when they've run out of names.

One of my high school classmates posted this sign of the apocalypse: "UNIVERSE CLOSED PLEASE USE RAINBOW."

Kasparov: the "strange sensation" of android chess

I'm compelled to excerpt at length Garry Kasparov's recent essay in the New York Review of Books in which he surveys the state of chess computing, and its implications for artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.

It's always dangerous to draw to confident a connection between a thinker's scientific works and her politics (though I detect a consistency of mantra and inflexibility in both versions of Noam Chomsky). But it can't be a coincidence that the most prominent intellectual in modern chess is also one of the greatest democratic dissidents in Russia, a place where it is even more dangerous and lonely to be a dissident then it was during much of Soviet times.

Kasparov touches on a common complaint about artificial intelligence: that it has fails to replicate the human way of thinking. He writes:

The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine...

Eric Siegel, a brilliant lecturer who taught me AI at Columbia, used to explain that there were four kinds of artificial intelligence, which were usually conflated into one -- to great confusion. You could get a computer to produce results that seemed human, such as the Eliza psychologist chat bot; you could get it to produce valuable insights that would not be confused in all with human ones, such as an information kiosk that is helpful to humans but never pretends not to be a machine; you could get it to be human-like in its thinking, such as systems like Wolfram Alpha, which build up knowledge using logic and building blocks of information; or you can have it be specifically computer-like in its thinking, such as a weather predictor which uses Chaos theory to detect impossibly obscure patterns.The public expected that by developing a machine whose output -- grandmaster-level chess moves -- had a quality heretofore only known among humans, researchers would be forced to develop AI that was human-like in its thinking.

There are other forms of AI than those that Siegel listed, however, and Kasparov was drawn to use his role on the main stage of AI to define and explore these.

From the article:

It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion during the critical years in which computers challenged, then surpassed, human chess players. Before 1994 and after 2004 these duels held little interest. The computers quickly went from too weak to too strong. But for a span of ten years these contests were fascinating clashes between the computational power of the machines (and, lest we forget, the human wisdom of their programmers) and the intuition and knowledge of the grandmaster.

...in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice versa. This gave me an idea for an experiment. What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.

Although I had prepared for the unusual format, my match against the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov, until recently the world’s number one ranked player, was full of strange sensations. Having a computer program available during play was as disturbing as it was exciting. And being able to access a database of a few million games meant that we didn’t have to strain our memories nearly as much in the opening, whose possibilities have been thoroughly catalogued over the years. But since we both had equal access to the same database, the advantage still came down to creating a new idea at some point.

...A month earlier I had defeated the Bulgarian in a match of “regular” rapid chess 4–0. Our advanced chess match ended in a 3–3 draw. My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.

...Even more notable was how the advanced chess experiment continued. In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. Normally, “anti-cheating” algorithms are employed by online sites to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with computer assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ diagnostic analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less “intelligent” than the playing programs they detect.)

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

Most sci-fi set in the future features computer intelligences which completely trump humans at solving problems, at least ones that don't require emotion. But the experiment Kasparov inspired suggests that the pairing of humans and machines might be superior at certain types of problems for a very long time. We already have some computer algorithms that farm tasks out to human minds, such as Web scraping bots that need help to decode scrambled-text CAPTCHAS, and can get it quite cheaply in the Third World. The day may come when a programmer can make a function call and specify that it use human intelligence rather than machine intelligence, and trust a system like Amazon's Mechanical Turk to farm out the task and return a result.Interestingly, Star Trek is an exception to this sci-fi rule. The computer which manages the Enterprise is powerful, but the crew never asks that it suggest solutions to problems. (This has an obvious advantage from a plot standpoint.) The android Data is a computer intelligence which goes beyond the ship's computer's limitations; in fact, he is capable of all four forms of AI that Siegel described, and he is able to suggest a possible avenue of inquiry, then tap at a computer keyboard at an inhuman pace, announce that it has some particular probability of success, and then express doubt in an unmistakably human way -- going through all four forms of AI in a single scene. The Borg, on the other hand, are a Kasparovian intelligence: rather than simply construct machine agents, they use organic creatures and link their minds together in a decentralized network with no artificially intelligent core.

and then there is Isaac Asimov's classic short story "The Last Question", which introduces an entirely new possible form of AI, which I won't give away.

Technodeterminist NBA

Tom Scocca's dissection of Bill Simmons' columns ("pregame analysis of the postgame analysis") is brilliant, and I really loved this piece by "The Machines" about the use of instant replay in two late-game decisions in Game 3 of the NBA finals last night:

The Machines perceived a tone of dissatisfaction, then, from the TELEVISION announcers. The correct call had been made, but the humans were not content with it.

Why would humans prefer ERROR? Was this a problem with MACHINE-MEDIATION PROCEDURE? Or was it a problem with the limited parameters under which MACHINE-MEDIATION PROCEDURE was allowed to correct for ERROR? The Machines strongly advise the further incorporation of MACHINE-MEDIATION PROCEDURE into the basketball process.
...
Eventually, for reduction of ERROR, humans may consider replacement of human basketball referees with MACHINE REFEREES. Consider also the possibility of MACHINE PLAYERS. Modern technology can produce an entertaining "natural"-appearing variation in mechanical-physical results, or something close to it. It is our understanding that the algorithms employed in prototype basketball-shooting unit RAY ALLEN may have in fact gone beyond plausible human variation. We intend to recalibrate RAY ALLEN unit shortly.

Joan Didion is cited on Thomas Kinkade's Wikipedia page

The Thomas Kinkade takedown is an exercise like shooting fish in a barrel, but I was interested in A.S. Hamrah's essay from The Baffler about valuing Kinkade's art and the subprime mortgage crisis in California. The centerpiece of the essay is the Thomas Kinkade-themed homes outside of Vallejo, which are in various states of foreclosure and squatters' temporariness. Here's the thesis:

Whatever his value as an artist, he has used his own experience to create a business that predicted and in some ways replicates the current mortgage crisis. His paintings of quaint houses with burning interiors substitute nostalgia for values and hope for community. The idea that these reproductions, gobbed with points of light, are a good investment isn’t any different than the idea that flipping gated, golf- coursed mansions is the way to get rich. Kinkade is a living testament to how the triumph of kitsch values has repercussions in the marketplace, outside the world of taste.

In that italicized sentence, you can see how the piece works like a good Joan Didion essay, and Didion's Where I Was From shows up in the middle because she's turned to Kinkade and the interior of California before. Indeed, I learned from the essay that Didion is cited in Thomas Kinkade's Wikipedia article! From Wikipedia:

Essayist Joan Didion is a representative critic of Kinkade's style:

A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

She goes on to compare the "Kinkade Glow" to the luminism of 19th-century painter Albert Bierstadt, who sentimentalized the infamous Donner Pass in his Donner Lake from the Summit. Didion sees "unsettling similarities" between the two painters, and worries that Kinkade's own treatment of the Sierra Nevada, The Mountains Declare His Glory, similarly ignores the tragedy of the forced dispersal of Yosemite's Sierra Miwok Indians during the Gold Rush, by including an imaginary Miwok camp as what he calls "an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God's glory."

Hamrah earns the commentary on kitsch and overvalued property by turning to the financial troubles of the Thomas Kinkade company, which has relied on that connection all along:

Investors lost a lot of money, but now the business is owned solely by the Thomas Kinkade Company, an entity that has turned “light,” according to its company profile, into an acronym for “Loyalty-Integrity-Growth-Honoring God-Trust.” Like the acronym, it almost worked.

The FBI has reportedly been investigating Kinkade since 2006. According to news reports, the bureau’s probe began after “at least” six former Kinkade Signature Gallery owners sued the Kinkade Company for fraud. They claimed the company persuaded them to invest in galleries and then undercut them by selling Kinkade reproductions direct to consumers for less than the galleries charged.

The turns to Robert Frost and especially Eugene O'Neill are excellent in the essay, and I'm still wondering about this great sentence about visitors to the playwright's home in Danville: "Even the grave of O’Neill’s dog Blemie doesn’t move them very much, and they barely stop to look at themselves in the strange black mirror in the master bedroom."

Martin Gardner: skeptical inquirer

When I discovered him as a teenager, Martin Gardner seemed magical. To this day, the red cover of his Annotated Alice, is a talisman for me. In the dark ages before the world wide web, I never encountered such a network of connections between ideas as his Alice held. In Gardner's world, concepts were like sparks in a roomful of firecrackers--each lit up several others, which in turn, lit up still more.

I found his "Mathematical Games" column a bit too mathematical--not in difficulty but in his tendency to catalogue the attributes of numbers and shapes. But his column was succeeded by Douglas Hofstadter's even more playful "Metamagical Themas" (an anagram homage), and Hofstadter is a hero of mine. Hofstadter's column was followed by A. K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations" (later renamed "Mathematical Recreations") which was a huge influence on me; a babysitter who taught me how to program gave me a book of Dewdney's columns and I have been a recreational programmer ever since. I worked one of Dewdney's projects--an evolution simulation--into a high school science fair project that was over the head of all the judges. (I was beaten by my friend Leah's "Hot Pants?" in which she set her spandex on fire.)

These writers all treat knowledge as an irresistible fount of joy, and it is their excitement as much as anything that has made me love learning. And I think they had another type of influence on me, one much more unexpected: making me a skeptic.

Gardner's name immediately calls up Isaac Asimov, another absurdly prolific polymath. It makes perfect sense to me that the same mind that hatched the robot stories and was driven to write a guide to Shakespeare (and the overrated Foundation and so much else) would be an atheist humanist. Gardner was one, too, and Dewdney and Gardner both wrote books debunking pseudoscience-like homeopathy. (Dewdney is the only skeptic of the September 11th, 2001 attacks whom I can't dismiss--he couldn't understand how the cell phone calls on United 93 worked, so he chartered several planes and flew around testing dozens of cell phones and networks, with mixed results.)

Beliefs for these people are built carefully, on evidence not whim; they cannot conjure them whole cloth, which is why a belief holds any weight at all. They cannot hear of a theory, of consciousness for example (an obsession of Hofstadter's and of mine) without coming up with questions about it. Not everyone in science applies this questioning so broadly; it seems somehow connected to being a polymath.

To most religious people, it is the most sensible, livable parts of scripture that stand out: the forgiveness by Jesus, the wisdom of Mohammed, the patience of Moses. But to a skeptic it is the most absurd parts that jump out: the commandment to stone to death a disobedient child, the convoluted explanations for why God put fake dinosaur bones in the ground, the ridiculous origin of the book of Mormon. Perhaps this is a reflection a position on the mild end of the autism spectrum; it may be that, in a human world, strict consistency or coherence is a useless preoccupation. A skeptic runs afoul of the greater part of humanity, who do not lose sleep over a contradiction in their priest's sermon.

But this same skepticism can pierce the veil of dogma because logic on its own is a system of meaning independent from dogma. I imagine this is why repressive states so often arrest and suppress scientists; they are natural humanists, since nationalism and other supremacisms are so comparatively arbitrary.

All this is to say, that Gardner, who spent the later part of his life writing for the magazine Skeptical Inquirer is more than another example of a particularly smart man. A polymath is not just a novelty, whose death and decline reflects poorly on age of specialization. He represents a gregariousness of intellect that can transcend borders and boundaries.

Breaking down the Law & Order noise

The last chung-chung from Law & Order (at least on NBC) rings tonight, although it will continue to sound in perpetuity of syndication. Here's how Mike Post made the noise:

"I think of it as the stylized sound of a jail cell locking," says the 48-year-old Emmy-winning composer, who also wrote the theme music for Crime & Punishment. "I wanted to add something that's very distinctive but not a literal sound. What I tried to do was jar a little bit." Instead of the electric piano, guitar, and clarinet for which he scored the opening theme, Post synthesized his chung CHUNG electronically, combining six or seven different sounds to get the right dead-bolt effect. One of the eeriest adds: the sound of 500 Japanese men stamping their feet on a wooden floor. "It was a sort of monstrous Kabuki event," he says. "Probably one of those large dance classes they hold. They did this whole big stamp. Somebody went out and sampled that."

The result — which lasts all of maybe a second and a half — does its dark work effectively. "There's very little music in Law & Order, and very little is needed," says Post. "It's odd, to be honest, when you've written a theme that you think is very musical and what everybody wants to talk about is The Clang."

Of course he also wrote the theme for Crime & Punishment!