A Little Measure Theory

I really liked "How Will You Measure Your Life". I'm so glad that Alvin recommended it. I'll give some of my own thoughts on what I found meaningful in the book, but first I'll try to answer a few of Alvin's questions.

(Q) What are you hiring this blog to do?
(A) I often feel stifled when I try to discuss the sorts of issues we talk about on this blog with other people. Never in my life have I found a group of people with whom I can have such a good discussion (excepting Cami, who isn't really a group anyway). I hired this blog because I felt the need in my life for those enriching discussions.

(Q) How can we increase the motivators?
(A) Unfortunately, despite my recognition of the need for these enriching discussions, I find it terrifically hard to actually engage in them. It's so much easier to simply throw a movie or tv show up, or bury myself in a book. I don't know that there's some motivational magic that can be worked to incentivize me to post more often; it's more a matter of my fundamental lack of self-discipline to do things I know will bring me happiness, but which require effort on my part.

(Q) What was the take home message for you? What were you inspired to do better?
(A) Without fail, I found the suggestions made in the book both trenchant and insightful. If I had to choose one lesson, it might be the one under the title 'sending your children off in Thesus' ship'. The idea being that eventually your children will leave your immediate control, and that the social norms you have endowed them with while they were in your home are what will protect them throughout their lives. Those norms form a family culture, on that can only be developed through repetition and routine. So now when I question whether we can skip family scripture study today, or family prayer, I have this vision of my children leaving on the ship without my having instilled the reflexive need for those things. I still struggle with frequently trying to be 98% obedient rather than 100% obedient (another lesson from the book), but it was a good reminder of what these little daily decisions add up to.

(Q) Is your career deliberate or emergent?
(A) Probably a bit of both. My intention for quite some time has been to become a Professor. I am not a Professor. In that sense, my current research job was not what I'd planned. However, that Professor job still seems on my horizon, I still hold on to the possibility of getting it someday, and so the choices I've made have, to a significant degree, been calculated to achieve that. So it's deliberate. My chosen field is something I've always found interesting and which I've felt good at, so my chosing it was deliberate. However, when I came to BYU as a Freshman I was undecided between a couple of majors, both of which I enjoyed and thought I could do well at. In the end, I chose engineering because of the free internet access through the CAEDM lab (as I recall, otherwise you had to pay $3/month for access at the dinky Route Y terminals). So in that sense it was emergent. I think it's pretty inevitable that you're future is shaped both by plans and by chance or fate.

(Q) How will I measure my life?
(A) Abstractly, I would say the amount of love I create in my family, the strength of the bonds that unite us. That's a lousy measure, though, because it's not one that can be easily taken. A more pragmatic answer would be the number of hours I spend directly working on my family relationships.

I think I covered a lot of what I had to say in these answers, which probably means that Alvin did a good job of coming up with interesting questions. As a closing thought, I wanted to write a little (without knowing exactly where it's going) about Measure Theory.

I took a class in Measure Theory a few years ago, and I think one of the most valuable lessons I learned was that there is room for style, taste and judgement in the formulation of measures. In my opinion, the best measures are those that lead to increased light and knowledge, that manage to take abstract objects and generate order. A good example might be Google's invention of a measure for webpages. By creating something that matched so well our intuitive sense of what was important and what was not, Google not only made its founders loads of money, it dramatically increased the ability of people around the world to function at a higher level.

I'm not sure what lesson that lends to taking the measure of a man. I guess it's two-fold: (1) don't be afraid to let personality influence how you choose to measure; it's inherent, objectivity is unachievable, so just accept your biases and let them be reflected in your measure, but (2) you should strive to find that measure compatible with your values that best brings further illumination to you and those you share it with.

On the PVS reunion, I'm all for it. I don't know about holding it in Provo, though. We could rent out a beach house somewhere, or a cabin in the woods, or take a cruise together. It would require a bit higher level of commitment, but I think it would really increase the value we got from it.

Omaha, home of the College Baseball World Series

I thought that title would at least draw Alvin in to reading this post.
Actually, his interrogation of where I am and what I'm doing made me realize that I haven't kept you guys up to date on the latest progress (at least I hopes it's progress) in my life.

On Aug 20th I signed the contract for the job in Omaha. We finished packing and put stuff into storage on August 22nd, visited Omaha from the 23-26th to look for housing, returned to Columbia and closed on the sale of our house on the 27th. On Sept. 3 we drove up again to Omaha, and I deposited Sara and the girls at a hotel and then I drove back down to Columbia. On the 4th I pulled a couple of mattresses out of storage, along with some boxes of kitchen stuff and toys, put the items into the minivan, and again drove up to Omaha. The following morning (the 5th, I drove out to Curtis, NE for several days of training at the technical college where the veterinary technology program is housed. The week of September 10th was essentially my first week on the job in Omaha, though I took the day off on the 12th when the moving truck finally arrived with all our furniture and other household items.
Most of my waking hours during the past month have been consumed with preparing curriculum, visiting other colleges to get to know faculty and administration while promoting the forthcoming comparative medicine vet tech program, unpacking, and trying to study for the laboratory animal medicine board exam.Somewhere in there I managed to finish writing my dissertation, which now is sitting on my advisor's desk waiting to be read.

Well, that's about it. Baby Eleanor is doing well, as are the rest of the Jacksons. I hope you are too. Feel free to come visit us sometime.

17 Years After the First Symposium

Staying out of Jail

Clayton Christiansen starts his book by talking about Harvard Business School class reunions.  At first everyone was happily achieving their life ambitions, but by 25 and 30 years, many had failed marriages and one had ended up in jail for his role in the Enron scandal.  The last of the three sections of the book is about how to stay out of jail.  All of this leads to two natural questions

1) When is the next PVS reunion? 

2) At our 30 year reunion, who is the most likely to be in jail?

I tried to envision people from Merrill Hall going to jail and what crimes they might commit to get sent to the slammer.  IF one of us ends up in jail (unlikely), here are my top 10 guesses for who and why:

• Jared Hansen - Needing blood for a Halloween costume and tired of punching himself in the nose decides to punch the neighbor kids
• Ronald Elia - Accidental manslaughter from hugging someone too hard
• Jesse Barnes - Embezzlement of investors' funds
• Scott Poelman - Embezzlement of investors' funds combined with indecent exposure
• Christopher Beesley - Convicts a criminal who decides to come after him and his family.  In defending his family, he underestimates his own strength, hurting multiple people.
• James Nuttall - Being in the wrong Southeast Asian country at the wrong time
• Karl Rees - Getting caught up in some anti-protest protest against some ridiculous California thing
• Rob Christiansen - In post-freshman year BYU days, he earned the nickname Mythical Rob.  Perhaps real Rob creates a Mythical Rob that lives in the Bahamas or Switzerland through whom he launders loads of cash.
• Doug Larsen - Running away (barefoot) from the cops as they try to force him to pay medical malpractice $$$ for a mistake he didn't make
• Paul Lattin - Decides its OK to make the roller coasters he's building crash, as long as he's smiling and announces 'Crash!' when it's happening.
  

If Tammy ever dies, don't underestimate my ability to do something crazy enough to merit jail time, like nudging a cyclist out of my lane with my car or using a semi-automatic weapon to decrease the local geese population.

Who among us do you think has the most criminal potential?  Which crime are you most likely to commit? 

What did you hire this blog to do?

You are giving of your resources (i.e. time) to read this blog, and as such, you are expecting this blog to do something for you. 

What are you hiring this blog to do?

a)      Entertain you

b)      Keep you up to date on your widespread BYU friends

c)       Give you a forum to express your thoughts

d)      Other

I’m guessing that you have hired this blog to do a) and b).  For me personally, the content of this blog, when there is content, does a fair job of meeting these goals.  Unfortunately, we do not have a very good system for providing sufficient motivators to you readers to create additional content. 

How can we increase the motivators?  (And don’t say $$, because if you’ve read the book, you know that money is just a hygiene factor.)

Relationships Matter Most, Even For Analytical Overachievers

The whole ‘people matter more than work’ bit is perhaps a bit trite and overly simplistic, but I liked Christiansen’s spin on the topic.  I do value my relationships.  I value my friendship with each of you.  I hope this book club can ramp back up because I do want to hear from each of you more often.  I also realize how hard it is to remember important relationships and recognize that your book club relationships are not the most important ones in your lives.

My wife and I are introverts that often prefer to spend our date nights at home.  To make sure our date nights were still dates and not just, “Um, what do you want to do?”, we’ve insisted on taking turns asking each other out each week.  The picture below is part of what I made for Tammy (aka Sweet T) for a date where we read this book together and had dessert.

Reading this book together and discussing it helped us to think and talk about our relationship together and how we are raising our children.  Tammy and I are extremely happy, and our lives are charmed and easy.  As perfect as our lives our now, this book makes you wonder if you’re the big company that is ignoring the scrappy start-up.  We can be better in allocating our resources, and we can better at teaching our children processes and priorities, not just giving them more resources.   I loved how the book’s business perspective changes how I looked at raising my family.  It made me want to plan and strategize more, instead of just watching things happen.

What was the take home message for you?  What were you inspired to do better?

My Career:   Deliberate vs. Emergent

I thought the section on finding a career was pretty boring, as I have found a career I’m quite satisfied with and have little ambition for change.   Still, I think it might make for some interesting book club discussion to talk about how we found our careers.

For a class assignment in high school, I had to job shadow someone, and I chose an actuary because they were on some list for the ideal career (lots of opportunity, nice pay, low stress and risk, etc.)  When I went to shadow him, however, he worked in a little cube and did stuff on a computer all day.  Not very interesting to watch, so I crossed that career off my list.  How naïve I was then.

I thought the ideal career would have been to be like Hari Seldon from Isaac Aasimov’s Foundation series.  Seldon uses a mix of psychology and mathematics to develop a formula for predicting the future of large groups of people.  Of course, the formula doesn’t work for individuals, and a generation of young fictional scholars spend their careers making small tweaks to his formula.  However, I didn’t think this was an actual possible career path.

I tried being a psychology major in college, but I found out that psychology isn’t very predictive.  I also discovered that there are more psych majors than any other major, which sent up some warning signals.  I liked that Clayton said being a good manager was one of the best ways to help people because maybe that will keep a few young people from studying psychology just because they feel like they have a ‘passion’ for helping people.  It’s nice to have a passion for something, but I also believe in the practicality of finding a job.

My mission president was a statistician, and I recognized my fascination for looking at his tables and charts.  I took my first stats class when I got back, and I quickly switched majors.  Statistics was predictive of the future!  It also could be applied to a lot of different fields, so I didn’t feel like I was pigeon-holing myself too quickly.  After undergrad, I applied to graduate programs, only intending to get a master’s degree, but I found I was eligible for scholarships if I enrolled in a PhD program so I did.

Upon “finishing” my PhD, I interviewed at a wide range of different companies, and I got two offers, one with Capital One’s credit card division and one here at the FDA in their medical devices division.  I have been very  happy with my choice.  So happy that I hope to never have to make another similar choice again.  My job  has, in my opinion, the perfect mix of motivators and hygiene factors. The decisions to pursue a PhD and to work at the FDA were both emergent (not planned, for those of you who haven’t read the book), but it’s easy/necessary to follow emergent paths when you don’t have a really clear vision of what you want.

How did you end up in your current job?  Has your career path been deliberate or emergent?

Culture: Family and Church

My Grandma and Grandpa Cutler, like the Christensens, believed in a culture of hard work.  They decided to buy/plant an orchard for the sole purpose of teaching their boys how to work.  (My mom, being one of the oldest of 10, missed most of the orchard work.)  But I think most family cultures develop in the pattern of their parents.  If mom and dad don’t outsource too much, as Clayton warns against, then you’ll see a lot of the qualities of the parents mirrored in the family culture.  For example, Tammy’s parents never focused on developing a culture of hard work, but they both just worked very hard and all of their children have adopted that.   

My family, on the other hand, is a warning signal of what can happen if you don’t deliberately plan your family’s culture.  We spent a lot of time in family home evenings and family councils.  As bored teenagers, we found that a great way to get attention in such meetings was to say something funny.  I think part of the culture that sprang up was an importance of being funny.  My parents are not funny, and even though they didn’t outsource, qualities developed in their children that didn’t come from them.

Because my parents are not funny, they have a bunch of kids with a desire to be funny and no natural talent for it.  It has led me to participate in an inordinate amount of ward and work talent shows, one brother into being a middle school theater teacher, another to try to write movie scripts, and another to be part of USU’s Improv comedy club.  It also led to my little brothers making jokes at the expense of my older brother’s son that has Asbergers, which is partly responsible for the alienation of my sister-in-law.  In fairness to my parents, the gospel was also part of the culture and all 8 kids served missions and none are in jail yet.

The idea that you can create a culture that imbues characteristics that you yourself don't have gives me some hope.  I have certain characteristics that I don’t want my children to have, but maybe if Tammy and I start creating the right culture in our family then we can create super-children that don’t have these weaknesses.   

 That being said, IF I am successful in forming these super-children, I hope I will l like to spend time with them, even if they don’t have a weakness for Cardinals baseball.  Or more importantly, I hope these super-children will like me (even as I spend my time in the nursing home managing my fantasy baseball team.)  Notice how I'm talking myself out of creating a better culture even as I write?  Sigh.

If you have any doubts about the power and self-enforcing nature of cultures, I think it is interesting to look at church culture.  I know that there are some among you that like to hate on many parts of LDS culture, such as Michael McLean and CTR rings.  Personally, I’m a big fan of church culture.  I think Joseph Smith was inspired to encourage the saints to tell their stories of trials.  In focusing on Pioneer stories, Mormon culture has developed to value thrift, industry, sacrifice, etc.  Much of what I enjoy about being a member comes from this culture.  Of course, there are also perhaps bad sides to the church culture like valuing dessert and perhaps a tendency to compare, judge(?).

Are your kids old enough to recognize what the culture is in your family?  Are you consciously trying to build a family culture?  Whether or not you appreciate church culture, what can we do to influence or improve the culture in our wards?

How Will I Measure My Life?

I haven’t put the same deep thought into deciding how I will measure my life that Clayton Christiansen has, at least not yet.  But I admire what he’s done, and I plan to do some more of this deep thinking.  For now, I will measure my life by either:

a)      The proportion of my children that I like and that like me when I’m old or

b)      The number of fantasy championships won by me and my posterity

Whichever makes me look better.

PS I'm serious about the PVS reunion.  Anyone up for a 20-year reunion in Provo in 2015?

The Righteous Mind and Measuring Your Life

I've requested How Will You Measure Your Life from my local library, but I don't think it'll be available for another few weeks. Maybe Jesse would be willing to drop by Brother Christensen's house and get the inside story on the book, for those who aren't able/planning to read it.

I did just finish an interesting book called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The author, Jonathan Haidt is a Professor of Psychology at UVA. His research has focused on how we make moral decisions, and he summarizes what he's learned in his career. It's fairly standard social science written for a broad audience.

The three core principles he attempts to establish are:
- Moral 'reasoning' is really moral intuition followed by logical justification, which is why debate and dialogue so seldom sway people's opinions.
- Our moral senses have many dimensions, but (industrialized, Western, educated) society only recognizes a few as valid bases for moral judgements.
- While we usually consider moral judgements individually, occasionally we can be turned to a 'hive' view, with a more group-level perspective.

In all, I found a lot of the book to match very well with my own feelings about how and what we choose to value, as individuals and as a society. I particularly liked Haidt's attempt to broaden the moral matrix (2nd point above); this is something I think rationalists in both parties largely neglect. Liberal (or libertarian) legal justification admits only 'harm' as a valid mechanism for determining whether something is 'right'. Haidt began his research by relating stories to college students, narratives which most people would agree were 'wrong', but which couldn't be categorized as such by an appeal to them having caused harm. Repeatedly, students would attempt to introduce new elements into the narrative, in order to inject some harm, in order to provide what they felt was a justifiable reason for finding the behavior in the narrative immoral. Haidt's prescription, and I think I agree with him, is that we should recognize that our moral vision is much broader than can be encompassed by the concept of harm, and that we should be moral 'pluralists' in the sense of recognizing the varied mechanisms by which we deem things 'immoral'.

To that end, Haidt established a website called yourmorals.org. You can go and register to participate in a variety of questionnaire-based studies. The primary study, called the 'Moral Foundations Questionnaire', asks you to rate how much or little you take various things into account when making a moral decision, and then provides a personalized 'rating' based on five moral dimensions identified by Haidt's research, as well as providing comparison to the average ratings for self-identifying liberals and conservatives. You should all go do it; it doesn't take long and I think it can provide interesting insight. Here are my scores:

Harm - 2.7
Fairness - 2.8
Loyalty - 3.3
Authority - 3.5
Purity - 3.3

Jackson 5

It’s been a good day. New little girl (#5), my first author manuscript was accepted by JAALAS, I got a phone interview invite for a civilian position with the Army (Aberdeen Proving Ground), and I finished my summary/future studies chapter in my dissertation. What should I do next?

Christopher Beesley and the Return of the PVS Bookclub

Greetings and salutations!  I just got back (about an hour ago) from Southern California.  I attended a stats conference in San Diego, where I had the chance to visit with the one and only Christopher Beesley.  While he claims to have gained and lost a lot of weight, he still looks like the same Christopher we all know and love, with the addition of a few gray hairs and perhaps even more solid muscle.

The gray hairs likely come from being bishop and having to preside over 20 funerals in 4 years.  Incredibly, Christopher is bishop of the ward he grew up in, and he appears to love every minute of it.  I think he secretly gets the most joy out of the combination of bishop and ward music chair and ward organist, which allows him to move back and forth between the pulpit and the organ requiring the ward to sing whatever hymn suits his fancy.

Christopher and his amazing wife, Mary, were incredibly accommodating, feeding us, chauffeuring us around town, and even giving us their guest passes to the San Diego Zoo.  Their four kids (ages 2 to 11) are all well-behaved and appear to be quite smart.  No surprise there.

Christopher shared the story of his faith and bravery in following a prompting that led to his dream job of playing Javert, and prosecuting criminals (or at least shooting down their appeals) from the comfort of his desk.  At night he sits on the board of directors of his children's German immersion school.  I tried working on getting him to participate in the PVS book club, but he has some legitimate claims on his free time.

I am so grateful to Christopher for his help this last week and for his example of happy service, self-discipline, and seeking after things that are good and praiseworthy.  I'm also grateful for a network of friends around the country.


With all of that preamble, I would like to take the initiative to choose a new book. 

I've really enjoyed some of Christensen's talks/articles, and I've been waiting to get this book from the library for a long time.  Before it came, my mom sent me a copy in the mail saying she wants all of her children to read it.  I think it has advice for your careers as well as your personal life, so I think it would be great for even you really busy people.

Can we kick the discussion off on Labor Day weekend?  Is that too soon?  Let me know if you want more time.

Unemployment rate versus employment to population ratio

Given the tepid new jobs numbers out today, I got interested in private sector versus public sector job growth over the past several years. I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, hoping to get a handle on to what degree the storyline of recovery is different for the two sectors. I wasn't able to find any obvious numbers on that question, but while I was playing around with their data tool, I found something else interesting.

This is a plot of the unemployment rate over the past 6+ years. It topped out at 10.0 in October 2009 and has been falling fairly steadily since and is now around 8%.

This is a plot of the ratio of employed persons to the total population. In October 2009, when the unemployment rate topped out, the employment/population ratio (as a percent) was 58.5. However, while the unemployment rate has declined, the ratio of employed to population has remained static. Since October 2009 it has fluctuated between 58.7 and 58.2, and is currently at 58.4. So the only reason the unemployment rate has gone down (and Republicans have been saying this for a year or more) is because people have stopped identifying themselves as job seekers. I can think of several plausible scenarios in which that might happen:

1) Older workers who planned to retire in a few years but who have become unemployed choose to retire early rather than look for a job.
2) Students choose to pursue further education, delaying entry into the job market.
3) Dual-income households shrink to single-income households.
4) Discouraged unemployed workers decide to depend on welfare and charity rather than work.
5) Employees shift to unreported employment.

There may be other explanations that I'm not thinking of, but it seems to me that all five of these have significant downsides and only a couple of possible upsides. (1) probably means that people aren't sufficiently prepared for retirement financially, and will put an even greater strain on the Medicare/SS system. (2) means that a large pool of job seekers will hit the market at a future point, pushing the unemployment rate statistic back up. (3) means families survive on decreased income. (4) and (5) represent failures of the state, either to encourage productivity among the populace or to fairly distribute taxation. On the other hand (2) means a better educated workforce, which I think is generally a good thing (although not always) and (3) potentially means greater availability of parents to children.

I guess I'm wondering whether this divergence between the two numbers is temporary (in which case the media focus on the unemployment rate leads to a wrong impression of the true state of employment), or whether there's been a permanent shift in the percentage of the US population participating in the job market (in which case I'm unsure, but generally have a negative feeling about, the long-term implications).

Euclid and Me

Numerologically, Peter = 28 (Perfect number). Also, Camille = 28. Coincidence? Yes. Also, 28 is a pretty likely outcome for any names of 5-7 characters. But I guess it still gave me a kind of thrill.

I didn't feel the same love for Euclid that Glenn did. I thought it was interesting and enjoyable to read, but I was bothered throughout by little things I felt like Bellos explained poorly, or just got wrong. This seemed to get worse the further into the book he got. There were several things in the chapter on probability that I think were at least misleading, if not incorrect. The section on countable and uncountable infinity was okay, but I think he missed the real meat of the concept, which has to do with being able to order sets. It's there, but he didn't really bring it out (I felt). Also, perhaps the 'c' and 'd' notation is standard in the UK, but in my measure theory class the cardinality of an uncountably infinite set (his 'c') was denoted aleph_1, and similarly his 'd' was aleph_2. Which makes more sense with the countable infinites being denoted aleph_0.

I thought he was strongest at narrative and characterization, rather than exposition (which may explain why he became a writer rather than a mathematician). His vignettes of intersting characters were always fun, and always fairly well put together. I also thought that his deciphering the historical clues around various base systems was great, and I liked his "stick this in your Frenchie cigarette holder and smoke it" defense of non-metric measurement systems.

He seemed to spend a lot of time investigating the intersection of math and mysticism. His bit about the Pathagorean secret society, and numerology, and all that. People who feel uncovering the 2 billionth digit of pi is be like touching the face of God. It was very foreign to me; numbers don't excite me in that way at all. They seem like useful tools, but I am seldom awed by numbers in and of themselves, even though (or perhaps because?) I work with them all day, every day. I don't find myself sharing in the sense of awe, even worshipfulness, that some people seem to feel toward numbers. But then, I find I lack that sense of profunditry for lots of things other people find awe-inspiring: astronomy, evolution, Alvin's physique.

I was a bit bummed the story ended with Cantor (who is a fascinating figure in the history of math). I would have liked a chapter on Gödel, who disproved David Hilbert's hypothesis by showing that no complete system can be self-consistent. It would have given the book a nice, conflicted ending to recognize that on an ultimate level math's logical foundations are grounded in their unprovability. In a way, it's the completion of Euclid's story, showing that while you can prove many wonderful results from a small set of axioms, those axioms are by the nature of the system unprovable and must simply be taken on faith.

Do we have a selection yet for the next book?

I Am Number Sixty-Six

And so is my wife's maiden name. "Density. I mean, destiny."
Our numbers don't quite add up the way Alvin and Tammy's do. I used the system of "professional numerologist" Jerome Carter, who used the pythagorean numerology chart.



Now, 66 isn't a master number (though both my wife's middle name and my own each add up to master numbers), but it is a pretty cool number. Another cool number "coincidence" is the fact that my first name has 5 letters in it (a prime number), my middle name has 6 letters in it (a perfect number), and my last name has 7 letters in it (also a prime number), making my name a numerical series! What is perhaps even cooler is that using the pythagorean numerology chart, GLENN adds up to 25, the square of the number of letters in the name, making it perhaps the awesomest name in existence (except perhaps Glennjamin). It's a good thing more people don't know about numerology, or everyone would be naming their kids Glenn (yes, I'm looking at you, Glenn Close).

Numerology aside, this book was sooooo much fun. It doesn't read like most other books which is great. It wasn't a book that can be rushed through, but one that must be savored, and enjoyed, like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
And it's hard to pick a favorite part. I could flip open to any page and find something interesting and enjoyable to read. It was fun sharing what I was learning with my wife and kids, though they sometimes gave me strange looks (except my 3-yea-old who just smiled at me as though she understood completely).

My least favorite parts would probably be number series and infinity. The number series, though perhaps not as much as numerology, often seemed as though people were "finding" patterns that weren't really there, like seeing George Washington's face in a Chicken Nugget. The series were often fairly abstract, which strained my brain, as does the concept of infinity. Infinitely more mind warping than infinity is the idea of an infinity bigger than infinity. When I read the Hilbert Hotel parable I tried arguing with the author, attempting to come up with arguments that would parry his attack on reality. I thought, "Well why doesn't he just make everyone move to the next room up, like he did before to make a vacancy for his invented number?" But though I can't quite say his logic was hermetically sealed, I did see his point. Still, as perfect as my name is, I'm not ready for the mental rigors of godhood.
My favorite parts of the book were the discussions on numbers in games, mental acrobats (like anzan participants), and base number systems. I thought the old british counting system was hilarious (tan-a-bumfit!?!), and the 12-base system was simply awesome.

The book rekindled my love of geometry, it's simplicity and beauty, and makes me want to get a compass and a copy of Euclid's The Elements, and introduce my kids to the greater wonders of math.

Taking refuge in Numberland's abstract beauty.

I was not surprised when my name's numerological sum wasn't the same as my wife's, but the difference between them is 7, which happens to be the number of people in our family. I take that as a sign from the gods.

I love series. My favorite quote from the chapter: “the land is dying, even the oceans are dying, but one can take refuge in the abstract beauty of sequences like Dion Gijswijt's A090822”.

This is the second PVS book in which Thorp's Beat the Market/Dealer have been referenced. I looked to see if I could check it out from the library: lots of copies of Beat the Dealer, but no copies of Beat the Market in Las Vegas--figures. It's nice to know to stick with the Kelly strategy when at the tables.

We spent a family night exploring the Pythagorean theory—glue and scissors, etc. Our 3-year old liked using scissors; our 9-year old got the concept but was underwhelmed. I still think it is magical.

I also liked the chapter on hyperbolic curves and Infinity. Since God is infinite, is he aleph or c or d? Does this fit into our theology?

I'm with you Alvin—this book reminded me how much I like math. I kind of gave up on math in college when we got into vector spaces and things I couldn't visualize, but thinking about it now, all math (or at least algebra) is an abstraction, right? Numbers are so much fun.

By the way, one of the chapters is titled "Life of Pi". I'm sure everyone's read it, but it is one of my favorite books.

How Numerology Shaped My Eternal Destiny

A Riddle

Before jumping into my post, see if you can name the following figure:

A L U P
P U L A
L A P U
U P A L


Answer at the end of the post.

Numerology and Me

I loved the section on Numerology, even though most of it was a bit ridiculous. It makes it seem like the numerologist was behind Puff Daddy/P. Diddy's name change, though a quick Google search did not confirm this.

When Tammy and I were dating, she was teaching elementary school, and she did a math lesson where she had all the kids add up the letters of their names (A=1, B=2,... ,Z=26). So we decided to add up the letters in our names (first and middle names), and Alvin Cutler and Tammy Lynn both add up to the same number: 137. And that number is prime! (For those non-readers out there, a long section was devoted to prime numbers.) It's an obvious sign that we were meant to be together.

My roommate at the time was a computer science major, and after learning of our connection, he wrote a program to calculate numbers of different names. Then he fed the ward list from our singles ward through his program. His number didn't match any of the girls in our ward. Not surprisingly, he did not marry any of them.

Hopefully, your name/number matches that of your wife, but if not, I guess not all of us are lucky enough to marry our soul mates.


Short Thoughts

Did you know that the British title for the same book is Alex's Adventure in Numberland? I like the American title better.

I thought I understood the China-men puzzle when it was described in the book, but when you see it in action, it's much cooler.

I have never used or even seen a slide rule before, though I'd heard lots of old people use it as a reference for how old they are. Slide rules are really quite ingenious. And for as often as I use the log function in my work, I have to admit that I really didn't understand it very well before reading this book.

I have mixed feelings about an American getting credit for the original Sudoku puzzle because Sudoku is one of my least favorite kind of puzzle. They're very tedious.

The world is a big place with lots of people in it. If you search hard enough, you can find a cult following (and an ensuing competition) in anything. Abacus using championships, recognizing random sequences of 50 digits from pi, ability to multiply large numbers in your head, etc. Apparently you can also find people that literally don't have numbers in their vocabulary.

The first couple chapters I had to stop every couple of pages and tell Tammy what I was learning. I loved the history of numbers, explaining why we have 60 minutes in an hour, etc. It's amazing how such elementary mathematical concepts took the most brilliant minds in the world thousands of years to discover.

Overall, I thought the book was very interesting. I agree with an assessment Glenn sent me via email, "fascinating, fun, and frictional (it slows me down to the point where I have to stop reading and think)." Not a breezy read, but good nonetheless.

Riddle Answer

It's a Lattin Square!

Get it? A Latin square with Paul's name in it. Feel free to ROFL.