Oliver Steele

We have a No TV in our living room.

Sometimes I think it’s our most valuable possession.

Our No TV gives the whole family somewhere between one and six extra hours every day. It’s hard to add hours to a day, but the No TV does it.

Miles uses the time for making stop-motion movies and Flash animations. Charlotte uses it to read, and write, and compose pieces on the piano. I use it for writing (code), and writing (English), and to teach myself algebra and geometry and management theory and finance. Margaret uses it for her many projects too. We wouldn’t have time for any of this, if it weren’t for our No TV.

Marvin’s birthday cake:

based on Marvin’s book:

and created by these folks.

I think they did an amazing job.

One warm Monday morning last August my father died. The previous Wednesday he had been planning to see March of the Penguins, a movie he probably would have discussed with his grandchildren over the phone and video chat. Instead, that night he was taken to the hospital, after falling down his apartment stairs. Early Monday I leaned way over him in the ICU and held him as tightly as I could, and felt on my cheek his last, familiar, breath.

I know it’s callous, but when I hear about a man in his eighties dying, I picture someone whose life is done. It doesn’t evoke in me the automatic sorrow, the rage against mortality, that comes from an encounter with the death of a twenty year old, or a teen, or a child. I’m less than half of eighty now, and yet I’m older than most people have lived to for most of time: older than the life expectancies of many countries; older than my friends when we were young and promising; older than Mozart, older than Keats. Despite the extended American adolescence, by the time a man is thirty he’s had time to make his mark. Anything after that is bonus time.

Miles told me about the computers at his elementary school:

They’re running anti-virus software, but they’ve installed a virus! It’s called Novell. It makes the computer boot slowly, it does a lot of stuff while it’s booting, and then you can’t log on.

I gave Miles a set of Logo programming problems:

• sv 3 draws a square divided vertically into three columns
• sh 4 draws a square divided horizontally into four rows
• svn 3 4 draws a square with three columns and four rows

(These are going to build towards some work with fractions, but he won’t know that unless he reads my web site. Hi, Miles!)

The first thing he did was place a slider and a button on the screen. The slider ranges from 1 to 10, and the button calls sv with the value of the slider. He used these to test the program while he wrote sv, to quickly try it on different arguments without typing. When he added sh he added another button, and so on for svn.

Double Trouble

In four months Miles will be twice Charlotte’s age. (He will be 10; she will still be 5.) A year ago, he was also twice Charlotte’s age. (He was 8; she was 4.) A year from now, he will have spent exactly one year at twice her age (if you truncate ages to the year), but that year will have been distributed into two intervals, at the beginning and end of a two-year period. See the gray portion of the illustration.

Back to the Future

Miles was recently twice Charlotte’s age (and will be again). But there was a time at which Charlotte’s age was twice Miles’s age. (But there wasn’t any time at which Charlotte wasn’t twice as old as Miles.)

I just got back from a week with the family at Disney World. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The surface part of my mind was completely taken in by the sensation of being in the jungle (at Animal Kingdom) and in a variety of countries (Epcot), while my analytic self was taken with admiration at how well run it was: the depth of architecture, landscaping, design, marketing, and business operations.

These questions came up on a family drive last weekend:

• How many posts does a hundred-yard fence with one-yard beams have?

• What if the fence is circular?

• What if it’s a cross?

• What if it’s a figure eight?

The first question illustrates fencepost error. The second relates to the discovery of the benzene ring.