An urban myth has it that the word “posh” comes from port out, starboard home. On the old steamship journeys between England and India, to avoid the worst of the heat, wealthy passengers would book cabins on the port side going out, the starboard side coming home. What makes the notion fun is the geometric fact that to avoid the sun, you need to be on different sides for the two journeys.

A similar bit of geometry pleases me today. I’m on BA 178, a daytime flight from New York to London. I like window seats, but I hate having the sun streaming in on me, so I arranged to sit on the left side of the aircraft. Here in the morning we are heading northeast, with the morning sun to the southeast. In the afternoon we’ll be heading southeast, with the afternoon sun to the southwest. The poor lubbers on the starboard will be roasting all day long while I sit here in shady comfort, the plane slowly turning to stay between me and the sun. There’s Boston on my left now, magnificent in morning sunlight.

[10 October 2014]

On a New York sidewalk today I passed a stand selling baby outfits with this message printed in big letters across the chest,

“If I don’t sleep, nobody sleeps!”

We have here a fine case study in logic. The negatives on both sides are a tipoff that there’s a simpler equivalent formulation, the contrapositive,

“If somebody sleeps, I sleep!”

So why does this one feel so wrong? It’s the distinction between implication and causation. Yes, if somebody sleeps, that logically implies that baby must sleep. But it doesn’t cause baby to sleep, and indeed it’s baby who must drift off first before anyone else will get a chance. “If I don’t sleep…” says it right because it aligns the logic and the causation. Maybe it adds to the fun that we dimly sense this twist.

[29 September 2014]

There were seven of us at the bar last night, and the bill came to $90.37. We left $100, which amounts to a tip of just over 10%. Out the door we went into the streets of New York.

Across the street, we were chatting before going our separate ways. Suddenly the waitress was there, having run across the street after us! We hadn’t paid properly! She showed us the bill for $90.37 and the $100.00 we had left and explained that this wasn’t good enough, a tip of 18%-20% was customary.

[16 September 2014]

The other day I managed to take notes on a stretch of my stream of consciousness, put salt on its tail. Why am I thinking of asking Kate about Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, I asked myself? I worked backward till I had figured out the chain.

Biking to work, I passed a woman in Indian clothes. That got me thinking about the rape problem in India, which the new prime minister Modi is fighting. How silly it would be if an Indian claimed that the reason for the rape problem is that Indian men have stronger sex drive than others, hence India’s big population! China has grown more slowly, yet China is strong and India is weak; there’s so much more to the power of a country than the size of its population. Britain, for example, was small when it ruled the world in the Victorian era. Remember that headline from the good old days, “Storm in channel, Continent isolated”? But they say the headline is apocryphal. What about this word “apocryphal”? It alludes to the Apocrypha, but where does that come from — is it Greek for “alongside-writing”? The Gospel according to Judas is apocryphal, but something has bugged me about Judas. If Jesus was such a notorious rabble-rouser, why did the Romans need to hire somebody to point him out? I must ask Kate; maybe she will know.

All this happened inside my skull between Meadow Lane and Donnington Bridge, where I stopped the bike and grabbed my notebook.

[31 July 2014]

Jacob and I were discussing material possessions yesterday. To reduce stress in this busy age, should you get rid of almost everything? I realized that for me, such minimalism is not the answer. For me, contentment differs from stress by a very practical factor of 2, which I summarize in this personal version of the Micawber principle*: Drawers half-full, result happiness. Drawers overflowing, result misery.

What goes for drawers and cupboards applies to time, too. If all your hours are scheduled, you’re miserable, but if half your hours are scheduled, you’re stimulated. I don’t want empty drawers and I don’t want empty days. I want plenty of life and plenty of possessions. You just have to keep on top of that factor of 2 to make sure you are the master, not them.

*From David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

[27 July 2014]

When I’m biking, I get aggravated by pedestrians who step into the road without looking and cars that drive into the bike lane without caring.  One day a pedestrian or a car may knock me innocently down.  If they knock me into traffic, I could be seriously injured or even killed.  I feel angry at the stupidity of these dangerous and irresponsible people.

There is something ugly here. Honesty compels me to admit that there’s a part of me that hopes the other guy will misbehave.  If he misbehaved a bit in the last block, I watch eagerly, expecting and secretly hoping he’ll do something even more outrageous in the next block, thereby vindicating my judgement of him as as bad person.  There’s even a part of me that imagines it might not be too bad if an accident happened. Maybe this is the impulse toward martyrdom.

But mostly it’s about ego of the more quotidian variety.  The worse the other guy is, the clearer my superiority. Ugly.

[13 July 2014]

I bought the beautiful second edition of Horn and Johnson’s Matrix Analysis at the SIAM meeting in Chicago last week. This morning I biked in to the office with the book in my bag, looking forward to adding it to my linear algebra collection.

But I had an uneasy feeling. Was it possible I had already bought this volume earlier, and forgotten? It was a relief to reach my office and find that no, it wasn’t already on the shelf. I didn’t own two copies.

Curious, eh? Given a choice between owning two copies of a fine book and just one, I preferred the latter.

[14 July 2014]

Teenagers have always been healthy and beautiful, even in ancient times. But in those days, youth didn’t last long. By 25, the beauty was gone, and by 35, you were old.

Then along came miracles of modernity, and for many lucky people man’s five years of beauty extended to ten, twenty, thirty. Health and vitality became not just a phase but the normal condition of adulthood.

I’ve just spent a week in heartland USA. I saw that teenagers are sexy, just as they have always been. By age 30, though, most of them have sizeable bellies, and a fair fraction are obese. Years of hamburgers and donuts add up, and by age 40, these people are out of the game. Youth is becoming fleeting again.

[30 May 2014]

In America, they say, garages are so big that people store cars in them! Here in England, of course, that hasn’t been the pattern for years. But though our garages are too small for cars, they’re great for tools and workbenches, making perfect male caves. My father-in-law wouldn’t know what to do without his.

We puzzle how the eye could have evolved by natural selection. What use was the first step along the evolutionary path to an eye? You just have to remember that evolution took twists and turns on its way to the present, and if your cave seems too good to be true, it may have originally evolved for quite another purpose.

[8 May 2014]

My life is driven by dual aims: to be conscious, and to be unconscious.

Oh how deeply I want to be conscious! I want to perceive, to understand everything. At heart I believe that if only my perception were complete, I would save my soul and save the world.

So I strive constantly to be hard-working and efficient to make time for those higher perceptions. But isn’t it curious how often my tactic for achieving efficiency is to try to make things unconscious! To get things done without a murmur and without an error, it’s all about  habits. The keys go there, the phone goes there, this and that and a thousand other schemes unthinking. My conscious self would have no chance of maintaining the required level of performance. To exalt my consciousness, I am constantly striving to shift the clutter of my life into the unconscious territory.

[30 December 2013]