unscriptured

I noticed something new this week. There seems to be a fashion now of athletic shoes with “neon” colored piping and matching shoelaces. I think I first noticed this a while back, but on my way in to work today I saw at least three different people wearing them, though to be fair there were only two colors. Two people were wearing day-glo orange and one was wearing ultra-brite green. Okay, I don’t know what actual trademarkable names the companies may have given the colors, but those are descriptive enough for my purposes.

I was wondering if this started as a way to make runners and bicyclists more visible at night, or in other conditions of poor lighting, and so is being sold as a safety feature rather than a fashion feature but God told me if I really want to know I could bother to do the research myself, not just ask him. And he’s right, I just don’t care that much.

What I do care about is that it continue.

I’ve been saying for most of my life that we need more flashy men’s clothing. We need styles that are vivid and interesting without just copying something feminine. This piping thing could be a small step in the right direction. Imagine something like the jacket that Patrick McGoohan wore in The Prisoner but with that bright edging in a hot purple, or better yet, electroluminescent wiring. Now that would be nice.

There’s a class of humor that’s built around misreading things. Not in a deliberate way, though I’m sure there are professionals, and even some amateurs, who exaggerate, stimulate, and even fabricate their own misunderstandings, but in a dyslexic or just tired and worn out way. I’m not going to give you any examples right now, because, well, I’d have to fabricate them and I just kind of said that that’s cheating, but you know the type.

People post online, “Am I the only one that read that as…” It’s a two pronged bid, and for most of the people doing the posting, it’s win-win. Either they were the only one, so they’re unique and special, or they weren’t the only one and so they’re part of a group, they belong. God tells me that she’s the only one she knows that never reads anything the wrong way. I’d add, “not that she’s bragging,” but actually, I think she was bragging.

But for the rest of us, reading “am I the only one that read that as” is usually a cue to cringe, because what follows, nine times out of ten, just isn’t as special as the person posting it thinks. It’s often the ultimate “you had to be there” thing, because the “there” where you had to be is actually in the world inside the person’s head; to really appreciate their misreading you not only needed to read it wrong but you needed to read it wrong with all the baggage that their particular life had placed not only on the word that they misread but on the word that they were supposed to have read in the first place. I posed this theory to God, to see if she thought I was on the right track, and she told me that I was kind of right, but also kind of wrong. See, she does get to be there in people’s heads, she does get to experience the moment with all the person’s personal baggage, and she says that most of the time, it’s still not that funny.

I have this tee shirt. Okay, I have a lot of tee shirts but one in particular I’m going to talk about now. The shirt is emblazoned in large characters with the formula “2 + 2 = 5″ and then, in considerably smaller print, it adds “for extremely large values of 2.”

God scoffs at my shirt.

God says that “2 + 2 = 4″ and will brook now further discussion. So I’m bringing the discussion to you.

I’d actually go further than the shirt, I’d say that “2 + 2 = 5″ merely for sufficiently large values of 2, no need to go to extremely, and certainly no need to push both values as far as extreme.

Really, what it comes down to is just a matter of defining your terms. Or I guess my terms, in this case. And I can do that. The first thing to do is to define what is “a value of” everything else flows from that. So here goes, “a value of 2″ is any number expressed in base ten whose first character is the digit two and who either has no additional characters or whose second character is a decimal point and whose third and higher characters are all digits. I don’t think this is an outlandish definition. Obviously “5″ in the equation can then be understood to be “a value of 5″ and the definition of that would be the same as for “a value of 2″ but substituting “five” as the first character.

Now we just need to define “sufficiently large values” and I’m afraid this is going to end up sounding a little tautological but so be it. Given that the equation has two values of two (that would be “2″ and “2″), and given our somewhat expansive definition of what “2″ is, which I’ll point out is actually necessitated by the later reference of them as “values of 2″ rather than as “just” two, we can readily guess that for them to be “sufficiently” large they are likely to be values greater than merely two. “Merely two” being the same as “just two” which is the same as “exactly two.” In point of fact, we know by simple addition that if they are both “just” two, they will only add up to four, so at least one of them must have a decimal portion. We likewise know, by simple subtraction of two from five that if even one of them is “just” two, than they are in aggregate insufficiently large, because five minus two yields three and three is not “a value of” two. So now we know that both values must be greater than “just” two, so we know that they are each large enough to require the decimal point and some number of digits to its right.

Given all of that, I’m going to now abandon hard numbers and go into the territory of “thought experiment.” We know, and now my knowledge of math is too weak to tell you “how” we know, but I know I understood it in some class somewhere in my youth for at least a number of seconds greater than two, we know that five minus “a value of 2″ is going to yield another “value of 2.” I think I can explain this by telling you that we know that exactly five minus exactly two is exactly three, so if you increase the size of the “two” by any amount small enough to still leave it as “a value of 2″ then you’ll end up decreasing the “three” by exactly that amount, which will make it less than “three” but not as low as ” just” two so it will be “a value of 2,” but not the value of two that is “just” two. Got that? Not too tautological?

Back to defining “sufficiently large.” So given any number that is not exactly two but is a value of two, subtracting that number from five will yield another value of two, but not exactly two. So sufficiently large is any two values of two where one value is large enough to require the decimal point in order to express it and the other value is at least as large as the remainder of subtracting the first value from five.

Which is all a very long way of getting to the point that the “weasel” word here is “sufficiently.” “Sufficiently” is not “a value,” it’s not even quantifiable in the absence of saying what it is meant that it is “sufficient” for. All in all, I think it’s a word that Humpty Dumpty would like very much. And “extremely” which the shirt uses, is no better. “Extremely” pushes the undefined further but still fails to define it.

But it does make for a good tee shirt.

Most of the time when I was growing up I didn’t get a formal birthday party. When I did get one, well it was a mixed bag. None of them were bad, but some were definitely better than others. On the other hand, I always got a cake.

Actually that’s not quite true, but back to that in a minute.

I suppose the cakes were a mixed bag as well. Sometimes they were store bought, though that wasn’t the norm. The norm would have been home-baked but from a mix. I think I got about as many made from scratch, though, as I did that were bought ready made. My memory on this is all rather dim.

But about those exceptions… There were a few times when I was asked what kind of cake I wanted, maybe three or four, maybe five or six, again, I really don’t remember. What I do remember is that two of those times I was actually assertive enough to ask for what I wanted. What I wanted was pie. Cake is good enough, I pretty much never turn it down, but pie is so much better. Cream pies, fruit pies, whatever. Even cobblers and tarts and strudels.

This all came up in a conversation with God this week and he mostly just nodded his head. Then he told me that he’d let me in on one of the secrets of the universe. I leaned in close, and he whispered to me that the reason we decorate cakes is to make up for their inherent inferiority to pie.

It’s a good thing to know, but as “secrets of the universe” go, well, I think that one could use a little icing.

If you’ve seen anything newsish this week you know that a couple of bombs went off at the Boston Marathon. Since then we’ve heard all of the standard lines about how senseless and tragic this was, and the lines are all true and it’s just sad that they need to be said. My heart goes out to the victims and their families.

That having been said…

I told God that this firms up my resolve to never run a marathon. She asked me if that meant that I was surrendering, giving in, letting the terrorists win.

Actually, I just hate running. I tell you what though, if some terrorist bombs Disneyland, I’ll do my part to make their gesture meaningless, I’ll get on down to the park just as soon as I can manage and buy the most expensive annual pass I can afford.

Of course, I may do that even if they don’t blow it up.

No answers this week, just a question I find interesting.

In my reading recently I’ve come across the unsourced statistic that we use up to 80% of our brain for visual processing. Ignoring the weasel words “up to” and allowing that the number as it reached me is likely both inflated and broad in it’s definitions… I got to wondering.

Some other things that I’ve been taught all my life are that people without sight compensate by increased sharpness in their other senses, and that when parts of the brain are damaged other parts are able to reeducate themselves to pick up some of the slack. So it seems pretty obvious that that “up to 80%” gets bored when there’s no visual signal coming in and picks up whatever odd jobs it can find. That’s a potent lot of extra processing power, but that’s not where I’m going.

Another area that interests me is the effects of chemical substances on the human mind. Remember that the brain works by a combination of chemical interactions and electric signals and remember also that everything we think we know about the world outside of our bodies is actually filtered through those chemical and electrical signals.

Now you take those last two paragraphs together and you open huge cans of worms taken straight out of Pandora’s box, but, again, I’m going to ignore most of that.

What it came down to for me was simply, when a blind person takes a so-called hallucinogenic drug, some sort of psychotropic substance that messes with our visual processing, what does it do for or to them? Does the drug mess with a particular type of brain processing, so that the effect just isn’t there on the blind person, or does it mess with particular areas of the brain, so that it has some effect on the “alternative processing” that goes on in the brains of the sightless?

I tried asking God for insight, but he just told me if I cared all that much I could go to medical school and then become a research scientist and figure it out for myself. Needless to say, I’m interested, but I’m not that interested.

God and I have both often heard it said that the secret to humor is surprise. It’s kind of like special sauce, things can be funny without it but with it they can be a lot funnier with it.

But it’s not enough all on its own. I pointed out to God that surprise is also the secret of horror. Not just in a jump out and shout “boo” kind of way, but in a “wow, it never occurred to me that my safety and complacency could be violated that way” kind of way. So we got to wondering just how many things could surprise be a part of. I’ve already noted humor and horror. It can also be a part of tragedy. It can be a part of romance, in fact it probably needs to be. And, of course, it’s a big part of some of the best of science.

So God decided that in the gamut of human experience, surprise isn’t an experience itself, it’s more like a spice, or maybe a condiment. It’s not generally worthwhile on it’s own, but it makes other things so much better. Or, sometimes, so much worse.

So the Chinese curse may be “may you live in interesting times,” meant to show that “interesting” is not always good, but I’d like to offer up the Unsciptured blessing: “May you have just enough surprise to keep life interesting.”

But not too interesting.