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.

The No TV comes with other benefits as well. It creates a few square feet of floor space. And it pays out a few hundred dollars a year.

In fact, we like our No TV so much, we’ve put one in each of the bedrooms too.

• I have a No TV too

based on Marvin’s book:

and created by these folks.

I think they did an amazing job.

I suggested the “zero to infinity” since it’s what you get if you turn “80″ sideways. I had in mind a “zero” over the “lazy” eight, [tex]0 \atop \infty[/tex], but I think it’s more readable as it was translated through two phone calls into the image above.

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.

But it’s one thing to read “eighty” on the obituary page. Reality is stepping into the place of someone who just stepped out from it, and looking around, and understanding where he’d stood.

For a few days after his death, I was my father. I lived in his house, I slept in his bed. I sat at his desk and used his phone to call his old friends, the ones that I had known as a child. (They aren’t any older now. Seventy to a forty-year-old looks the same way forty did to a boy of ten.) I learned a little bit about the strands of his life, after the fact, in the process of raveling them.

Even at eighty, my father led a more active life than I do now. There were letters on his desk from students, writers, colleagues. One journalist was writing a book about him. Another was waiting to talk to him for a book of interviews about George Plimpton, with whom he co-founded the Paris Review. He had been planning to co-teach a writing course at UNC-CH again this fall; he had been looking forward to teaching again at Bennington. His computer held some words towards an unfinished book.

It wasn’t an old life that I’d stepped into. It didn’t feel like a life that had been winding down. It’s funny to say it about a man in his eighties, but aside from the inconveniences of his eight-year-body, he had been in his prime. I didn’t just miss him as a father and grandfather then. I wanted to see what he’d do next with his life, what he’d write, and who he’d teach. He was a storyteller and a teacher; there are more stories and students, that only he could have taught and told.

Writers and teachers have friends who are writers too. Having a writer and teacher as a father means that his friends can express what I want the eloquence to say. Max’s lifelong friend Daphne Athas wrote me after he died (and I quote without permission, and hope that she will forgive me):

When Bland [Simpson] called the sun had just set, I had just arrived at the Pension room that I stay in, the phone rang, I sat on my bed and looked out at Sphakteria, the island across Pylos Bay from my window where the Athenians beat the Spartans in the 7th book of Thucydides. So do we lose our fathers. But it was a triumph for the Athenians, and Max would certainly appreciate that.

So do we lose our dads.

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.

(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.

This looked to me like some sort of hybrid between test-driven development (with a unit testing framework or FIT), and using the command line. It’s more parameterizable than unit tests, but easier to fit into a development cycle than the command line.

What was really interesting, though, was that Extract Method wasn’t a new concept. The initial implementation of sh@ was copy-pasted from @sv, and svn was copy-pasted from both of them. I started on my DRY lecture — “see how this part of sh@ is the same as this part of @sv” — and he jumped the gun. “Oh, cool, you can use aliases?!” he exclaimed, before I even modified any code.

The analogy is between files in a directory and callees in a method. If directory could transclude its contents — list one of its children’s contents as its own — then the analogy would be exact.

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.)

A Family of Squares

Until today I was the product of my children’s ages, and we are all perfect squares.

The behavior of a capitalist engine when exposed to a huge revenue flux, like the behavior of various geometries in a high-speed wind tunnel, is awe-inspiring in its use of these forces to compute optimal solutions to complex problems, and in the energies it directs against them. When we walked into Typhoon Lagoon, a cheerful employee asked us our zip code, and afterwards, my son asked me why. I explained to him my guess that it was so that they could calculate the sensitivity of regional turnout to marketing dollars. “But that’s an experiment”, he said, “that would take years!” Exactly.

• 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. And the last leads to Euler’s Formula. These three questions are from three different fields (computer science, chemistry, and math), but they’re all variants of the same question. (Of course that question is mathematical. That’s the point of math.)