Author: Jonathan Mitchell

I buy mens jeans from The Gap – because I’m a man – and yet every day brings me more emails of leggings and cute tops. I appreciate the photos of lovely women but I don’t think that’s their intent.

I do. Here’s an example: reading, hearing, and watching the ‘Tom Brady hand’ story, I just can’t stop myself from believing it’s gamesmanship. Why do I keep thinking, ‘sure there’s a kernel of truth in there but they’re playing it up as cool as they can?’ It’s not entirely rational to believe something with no evidence beyond conclusions drawn from my appreciation of the characters. But I trust my intuitions and today I had that tingle of feeling completely right when I heard Tom’s answer to the question ‘will you play Sunday?’ He said ‘we’ll see’. He’d never say that if he was actually hurt because then he’d be intent on making it seem completely sure he’s fine, that there’s no doubt he’s playing. In other words, you lie when you’re hiding something. But you also lie when you indulging in gamesmanship because then you’re hiding nothing and you want to conceal that you’re actually holding nothing, that you’re bluffing, that it’s a trick. So you lie to create doubt about whether you’re playing when you know you’re playing. And you lie to create certainty that you are playing when you actually aren’t (or are limited).

This is actually a meditation on the meaning of irrationality: the actuality of irrationality is that it’s rational in the opposite perspective, not the negation but the complement. The complementary pair in this case is the lie told to protect something and the lie told to protect nothing. They both lie and each lie is rational, so what makes one irrational? The belief in one means the other is irrational. That is if you take one perspective, say that he’s hurt, then my prediction is different from what he said, which means I’m attributing a hidden identity or layer of meaning to the actual words said, as defined by a context I’ve constructed about Tom’s intelligence, Bill’s intelligence, the nature of the Patriots’ will to win, the importance of the situation, the opportunity to play with an opponent’s head within the rules. The other perspective to me, the negation, is that his statement reflects genuine concern or an inability to answer whether he’ll play or not. This makes sense in the story that he’s hurt and this is all too real. The problem I have then becomes obvious: I don’t accept he’d say that if he were hurt because he would and Bill never would give information to the opponents. I’d go further: they will absolutely minimize useful information transmitted to the opponent and will absolutely maximize tilting that to their advantage. So I would say that my belief is a) irrational in the perspective of ‘this is real’, b) and rational to a certain percentage, meaning the actuality of my belief is that it’s complexly rational and irrational, that it’s like two mixed colors, some percentage of true in this and true in that perspective. Neat thing is we’ll know in a few days! I kind of feel that way about a lot … we’ll know soon.

At the risk of losing myself – first, as an aside Reputation is such a massive step forward in manipulation stretched across a vast range of production techniques that it’s startling. It will take years for people to realize the extent to which she’s pulling and pushing you into specific moods, emotions, ideas, feelings, and so on … it reflects astounding depths of growth within her, developing layers of identity and expressing them in highly controlled soundscapes. The irrational and rational parts of her are very complex. I just love the way she adds a slight warble with so much emotional shifting in – well, at 2:30 in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, she plays with her voice and alters the soundscape within two seconds. I count multiple layers in the shift because she is able to compress huge amounts now into small bits; she’s the greatest master of compression I’ve ever heard. I can’t even count the shifts of persona within a single song. Or the way she retains every bit of each note so when that part comes around again she changes it in a way that balances surprising versus continuing in the generical mode. I could go on and on for pages and pages. BTW, you know the song is about herself, right? (Not every reference, but the general idea and how that flows through.) Part of being that complex is breaking up with yourself. She says it so well.

I used to tell people I tried to have ‘an identity crisis a week’ because that’s how you build control of all that you are and all that you have inside you. I have a lot inside me. Took a long time to get control. Took a long time. It’s remarkable that she found the voice that sounds like her true self alone in a room singing to herself. All of her work runs off that simple reality: she has rooted herself in her voice or, rather, she’s found the voice that comes out of her that is true to herself across dimensions from sounding absolutely sincere to enticing siren to so many other identities. She keeps expanding her abilities to express herself in new voicings as they fit in new soundscapes. To explain how hard that is, take me as the opposite: I can express myself in a vast array of voices but it took a very long time for me to find the exact voice that fits me as though I’m alone in a room. Which me is me? Which me is me in this versus that context? I never had the feeling there was something out there which looked like me. To explain, she’s always speaking to someone but I always felt there was no one to talk to at all.

I think reading this kind of ‘thing’ – back to thinking about the ‘Tom Brady hand’ sort of thing – is a lot like hearing harmony. Or seeing a composition. But then I don’t know how other people see. Or hear. That is why I work so hard to understand. I realized when I was very little I couldn’t understand how people function. Since their behavior often didn’t make sense to me – and my own behavior often made even less sense to me – I decided I should try to figure out how I work and how they work and how ‘it’ works. By my own behavior, imagine that you’re me and you were lied to by your mother and taken to the doctor to accompany your brother and then you’re told you’re getting a shot. I reacted by fighting. And then of course the shot was over and it was fine. Within the context, what set me off was being lied to – just tell me what’s happening – all for my own good of course, which I think set me off even more because I have always resented being controlled through withholding of information. My parents withheld information as a matter of course, though I suspect they were much better than their parents, who I’ve heard generally acted as though caring means criticism. My parents tended to withhold criticism, even as they were highly judgmental through what they withheld. So in context to me, right after the fight over the shot, my thinking was: that was stupid, why did that happen, how can we avoid having that happen again? I’m glad to report my doctor would always say ‘this is going to hurt and then it’s going to hurt more when I press hard’ and I would try not to show pain because he told me what to expect. Perhaps because they’d been warned! It wasn’t about ‘pain’: I have such a high pain threshold that I had nearly all my teeth filled without anesthesia. That not only hurt but the sound of a drill when you’re not numbed is intense, with all the extreme highs accented. I try to believe it helped my hone my sense of really high pitches, though sometimes I wonder if I just made a bad decision and stuck with it out of self-spite. Dr. Weine would offer and I’d say no, and I’d hear the voice of ‘you should’ but it only won the one time when they told me being numbed was necessary. I had a lot of fillings.

I lost myself in an aside about Reputation. Note I don’t use her name. I find that typing her name carries all the weight of Reputation when I mean the complex being which uses that name. Much of my work involves labels – for points, for shapes, for processes – and labels are names, generally names with meanings specified for a use or context. I think a lot about names. What about the cat? What does the cat think? What are you communicating to the cat? What is the cat communicating to you? What’s the cat’s name? I say Billy or now Bilbo because it seems nicer and there’s a process in the making of Billy into Bilbo (Bagcat Baggins on his way to Basketboy). What does the cat think when it hears these sounds? How does the cat hear meaning when I know it hears meaning because it traces prey with its ears? How does the cat name things? How does the cat name me?

These are our terms of endearment. Adam named the animals not just to sort them in a taxonomy of physical attribute but in taxonomies of meaning: this one can be eaten, this not, this one can be helpful, this one deadly, and so on, all the way to this one can curl up next to you and hang out because he wants to sit near you. I’ve had some interesting conversations with the wild pigeons: they watch me to see if I’m throwing out seed and swoop in and they gauge eat or flee based not on my threat to them but in how I convey to them whether there’s a threat. That’s a trust level: they rely on me to tell them there’s a threat as they focus on eating. It isn’t that they ‘trust’ me explicitly but that they gauge their reactions by trust in my reactions. If I move quickly or speak suddenly, they take off, which also shows the limits of the trust level: they over-read me because it’s safer to assume I’m communicating a threat than to trust deeper into finer movements and finer intonations of voice. They can be trained to respond to smaller, less visible and less audible commands, up close, just as they can be trained to appear at the same time each day.

I refuse to give up: I will at some point remember to finish the thought I was pursuing! It’s interesting to note the extent of irrationality in a person, group, region, culture, etc. I’m trying not to talk about cultural or personal irrationality. I’m thinking about the voice that says, ‘you’re right’, versus the voice that is urging you on or the voice that’s telling you to stop. Let’s say there are two directions: yes and no, where yes means continue and no means stop or change. As you count yes, yes, yes, you or no, no, no, that creates a mathematical bias, a form of inertia in thought, toward the next result, as I noted when discussing a color test. I find it hard to say this in simpler words: the sorting methods run bidirectionally until all the layerings of each square’s identities line up properly. It isn’t just that you count back and forth across the space, but that each counting layers on top of all the other countings in a lattice. When you arrange the colors, you actually arrange all the layers of the colors as they fill each square. If that doesn’t make sense, realize that a color is not a single frequency but a whole mess of frequencies, so the interplay between a mix of frequencies that are themselves a mix of frequencies can sort through each square depending on how the square is approached. (I never though I’d ‘work’ today but I guess I am.) To simplify, think of a color as a list or table of values, where each value in the list or table is also a list or table, so this much blue refers to the meaning of blue in the color you’re referencing. If you enter the list or table at this point versus that point, then you go to the next square with emphasis on that entry value. This occurs multiple times in both directions.

Why not calculate for all? I mean why not wait at each square, figure out its idealized, perfect value and rank those one by one? Because you are actually pulling apart the value as you sort back and forth. You can treat the final result as having waited and figured it all out, if you treat the final result as 1! To connect this to me, since I’m ‘working’ and that’s part of ‘work’: the fight over the shot while I was in the process of fighting stands in sharp contrast to my judgement of that process, of that event, as I processed it immediately after and then over the intervening years. I eventually reached the point where I was both wrong and right: right in the context in which fighting occurred and wrong in the context of whether that made sense given the shot didn’t hurt much, certainly didn’t kill me and I got the fucking shot anyway, meaning in the context where I lost the fight! This is how blinders are removed, isn’t it? You chug along on a path, being urged along by whatever is pushing at you, pulling at you, often despite your own objections, and then you realize: oops, I didn’t see that at all because I was caught up in the wave carrying me forward. I can describe how that wave actually works. To restate, the paint thing: imagine you have a list of values of paint, and then you have a list of the reference colors, so this blue-red contains this much blue of this type. What that really means is you are calculating to and from that reference color, from the blue-red to the reference color and from that reference color to the blue-red. This is also true for the red. I’ve built an entire model off such simple observations: bidirectional counting from two ends. That defines identity as layered. I say that identity is multi-dimensional.

A final Patriots note for the day, the concept of ‘the best team we’ll play this year’ plays on the idea that it’s the last surviving team so therefore it can be labeled ‘best’ even though you don’t believe it deserves that label. I think the Patriots believe Jacksonville is not the best team they’ll face. That remains to be seen, but I don’t think they are either. The question to me is whether the Patriots grab the opportunity that presents. That is what makes a ‘champion’ over repeated seasons: you grab the opportunities as they present themselves and if fortune favors you with an opponent you can beat then you really should beat them. The Patriots should have lost to Pittsburgh. They rose to the occasion in key areas in a very tough game that I think hurt Pittsburgh immensely because they played after that without the focus they showed when they were winning that game. What I saw against Tennessee was a Patriots team that had developed a killer instinct, that realized over the course of the first quarter that they were locking in. This game means dynasty because in the NFL 3 Super Bowl wins in 4 years is a dynasty: think Dallas in the 90’s, think Patriots in the 2000’s. This game pushes them up a level in the history books. It means Belichick and Brady would have done a dynasty twice, two separate decades. They want this. And then they want to see if they can win 3 in a row because that’s just about impossible. My guess is the team sees this in front of it and they’re totally focused on winning, all the way down to each player being wholly there in the moment.

I believe you can see teams in moments. Remember how Kansas City looked when they stomped NE in the season opener? KC was totally into the flow of their play. That could not be sustained: that level of concentration, of speedy reaction in tune with your teammates and the coaches calling the plays exactly to fit the flow of the moment, can’t sustain. This is why Belichick builds teams over a year: they should be a work-in-progress at the start because they should learn how to be a team together, given their individual abilities and restrictions, and how the teams are playing them this year. It took a long time for this team to focus. They were carried at times by the offense, which in turn was carried by game plans that expanded the offense in multiple ways to make up for the loss and change of receivers. They had a ton of injuries. Here, I’m going to summon the ghost of Richard Feynman: he talked about how they got great results at MIT because they had to fiddle with the equipment a lot. Similar thing with injuries: you try a bunch of different people in different roles and not only do you see what emerges but you may create an atmosphere in which you’re all trying to work together. A great coach can make that happen. The players become a team. I used to watch John Wooden sitting on the bench in his suit with his program neatly rolled up as his supremely well-coordinated teams made their opponents look silly. Wooden’s teams always knew what to do. They rarely lost their cool or their focus, though sometimes they were less talented. Bill Belichick standing on the sidelines in his hoodie. One was better dressed, but then Tom Landry did the suit thing so well … Bill realizes he’s never going to look dapper on the sidelines.

Final note: I read a Quora answer about why the meter is yay-long and the answer was totally wrong. The meter isn’t an accident: it was an attempt to define a universal metric or way of counting. One of the first real measures is the swing of a pendulum over a bit of time. I should write about this another time because I have to explain what a second represents, but to tease the idea a bit: the swing relies on gravity, which changes relative to mass. You can adjust relatively over frames from gravitational frame to frame and, as relativity says, that makes a relative change between frames. That doesn’t mean a meter in one place is different but that a meter in one place differs from a meter in another place by a relationship. That’s not arbitrary. I think people believe the definition is arbitrary because it became a 10millionth of the distance along a meridian from the North Pole to the equator. Even that misses a basic point, which I don’t feel like talking about today, that it’s still a 10millionth, which is really little relative to the frame. In fact, it bothers me people don’t seem to grasp – I’m not sure if this is true, so I should say I hope I’m wrong about this – the full implication of a meter as the meaning goes through to space-time, read length-time, read ordering of action principle, etc. I don’t know how to say this nicer, which bothers me, but space-length-time means ordering from the frame to a small enough meter that events within the frame, following any and all pathways, fit the geometry as we know it. That’s another way of saying what’s real is real. This raises a bunch of questions about what ‘actual value’ actually is, but I’ll stop for today

This story says that UNH is non-renewing 18 lecturers in the liberal arts to cut costs. Non-renewal of contracts isn’t a story. Maybe the number is a story. But if you read to the 4th paragraph, it says nearly half teach ESL. That’s English as a second language. In a university. Half of me is thinking it’s odd to have ESL in a major university, while the other half is split between figuring out when that’s appropriate and wondering if universities have been so money-hungry they’ve been bringing in foreign students who aren’t qualified.

This color test has you arrange 10 colors to count across from fixed colors at both ends. This tests whether your brain can see each color as they mix one into the other in both directions. You need to do it both directions because if you count across in one direction, you make errors toward the other end. You need to count from one color value, meaning you subtract more and more of it. If you keep going, you approach the other end having subtracted most and then all that’s visible of the original color. When you counted away nearly all of a color, then you’re trying to count whatever the other color is, but that’s a bit nothing in one view and a bit of something in the other. It’s easier to count a bit of something than a bit of nothing, so you’re more likely to commit an error if you try to count bits of nothing. So you need or at least should count in each perspective. But you also need to count in both because you need to combine them to answer close calls. This is a learnable skill. It requires focusing on the amounts of color in a square in each direction and then combining them, repeating until the sorting is optimal. This is why pianos use equal tempering: if you try to tune this or that key to perfection, then other keys will become too imperfect – they sound bad – so you temper the notes, meaning change them, so they’re equally out of tune in every key. What’s ‘equal’ is the amount of error added to each note, made by dividing up all the error and allocating it across. By that I mean you take the furthest key, meaning the one that sounds the most off, and that is now an endpoint. You count in each key from that key’s perfection to that key’s furthest. That gives you allocations across the notes for every key. Then you reallocate at that level so the aggregate is not only that each key is a bit off but that it’s a bit off in every key. The neat part is that tempering is the same as temperature, meaning it’s the combination of cold to hot bidirectionally. (Bidirectionally means in each direction and in both directions.)

As a note, I got a 0, which is perfect. That takes me back to when they gave us a very short test to see if we could or would be in ‘band’. They played 2 pairs of notes and asked which of each was higher/lower. I’m terrible at that, but I can order intensely detailed, barely separate pitches when they occur in a flow, even if that flow is irregular and extends over a fair amount of time. I can hear a pitch difference a long ways apart as long as I can see the thread that’s making the pitches. It can be music or a book or life itself, but when notes are taken in isolation and played for me then I need to put them in motion in my head – playing them out, etc. – and can’t say higher or lower with certainty.

This story of Tom Brady hurting his hand in the days before the big game: is it believable? It is in one sense: maybe it happened exactly as ‘reported’. Or maybe there was a ding and thus a chance for a bit of gamesmanship: Tom whacks his hand and he and the coach think this is a great time to get some precautionary x-rays because that will be reported, and the other team will read that and part of them will think Tom may be hurt. This kind of thing has happened so many times in the past: the boxer who ‘falls’ or ‘slips’ in training, while skipping rope or sparring, and that becomes a bit of a show in which maybe he’ll be unable to fight or he’ll at least be a little bit off. What’s the idea behind this kind of gamesmanship? It’s not enough to say you’re messing with their heads: you are trying to decrease their focus by making them either be over-confident or maybe more determined than ever not to be suckered into thinking you’re hurt. That mouthful means whatever the result, it’s different from their optimal focus, from the most efficient way for them to see and react on the field. It makes them think a bit more than they should be thinking about stuff other than what’s directly in front of them on the field.

I bought a cheap non-stick pan and I’ve been learning how to get the most of it when not using any oil or spray or butter. That means a different process: start with the eggs in a relatively cold pan because they won’t hit and stick, then turn up heat a bit when the eggs start to congeal, ideally just before they stick but that’s not super-important to get right. Then move the eggs around so they make curds but have a lot of moisture left. I find rolling first to one edge and then back gathers them up so I can then roll them gently again into the final shape, and the mass holds together with the minimal skin. Dumped today on a half-pita that I’d covered in smoked fish spread and smoked onion mustard. It was extraordinary. The process needs to be different, btw, because in the normal way you are heating the pan to add the oil or butter (people tend to spray in a cold pan for safety and convenience). That oil or butter (or spray) keeps the eggs from sticking when they hit the hot pan. The issue with a non-stick pan is the coating loses effectiveness when it’s heated beyond a fairly low temperature. I’ve tried heating the pan more and then adding eggs, but the pan then wants oil or butter.

Yelling louder often means you’re going to lose or you fear you’re going to lose so you yell louder in the hopes that yelling will terrify the enemy. If you’re confident you’re going to win, you ‘speak softly’ because you ‘carry a big stick’. This form of yelling louder is exactly what PA President Abbas is doing. That has particular resonance in the Arab mind: you not only yell louder the more you are threatened with actual defeat, but the more absurd you become. That may sound mean. It is mean, in a sense, because I’m describing a cultural trait – not something built into them as humans but a cultural trait passed down through generations – which places tremendous value on what the group thinks of you. I’ve talked about this many times: the honor codes, the sexual codes, the controlling of women, all these and more define a set of expectations that people internalize. They feel a need to conform to those rules, the same as kids feel a need to like Star Wars because so many others do (and then you like Star Wars too and you’re sometimes not sure why you didn’t before). It isn’t that Abbas is becoming irrational but that his behavior is entirely rational in the context of a culture where evading responsibility. That’s where this gets interesting to me: the room of responsibility, the one that runs from acceptance to evasion of responsibility. You can accept lots of responsibility for things you didn’t do, while evading responsibility for all the things that didn’t work out. You can accept responsibility for your own actions, but not for the actions of others, so you evade those. This means you can say, ‘I had a great vision’ to accept responsibility, with the caveat that ‘but they ruined it’ or some other version of evading blame. In a society which believes in success, which is knocking out walls for an open concept, accepting blame can be a good thing because blame means you recognize a wall has been knocked down both in you and perhaps in larger society. In a restrictive society, one where your daughters’ sexuality reflects on your status, accepting blame is much more difficult because you have obligations to the group, things to do that are necessary to restore your status. That can include child murder, which is one of my favorite bits again: that the actual message of the Abraham/Isaac story is ‘don’t kill your children’ and specifically ‘don’t sacrifice your children; God doesn’t want that’. That this has become ‘be steadfast in your beliefs’ has twisted the meaning so it can be used by the best and the worst to justify their behavior. Back to Abbas: think of Saddam’s ‘Mother of All Battles’ line. He meant that if he lost, if they lost, it wasn’t their fault because they were overwhelmed in the mother of all battles. This means you can tell the story as a great resistance in the face of overwhelming odds – which is how Arab losses to Israel are turned into victories. It also means if you win, then you’ve claimed the most responsibility imaginable: the drive to over-state is fueled by both the responsibility you can attain and what you can evade. I’d take this not so much as Abbas losing his mind as Abbas losing, realizing that’s what’s happening, and wanting to evade the responsibility for the loss. He also wants to exaggerate his claims for specific responsibility: how he has not only fought against the greatest odds one can imagine but he has taken this struggle all the way back through history to claim a link in the chain of battles – all of them defeats, btw – to ancient Canaan. This is rational behavior. It’s insane outside the culture, but perfectly sane within it.

The idea is to play up the threat, not play it down. I understand that. So to play it down just because all the articles play it up … in 2007, the teams played in the last game of the season. Rather than lie down and rest for the playoffs, the Giants and Patriots fought it out, with the Patriots winning by like 37-35. That loss lit the Giant fire, getting them focused for the playoffs. They won both of the playoff games on the road. Even then, it was familiarity with the Patriots that gave them extra in the Super Bowl. It’s hard to beat any team twice in a year, and very hard to beat a good team twice. In 2011, the blunter reality is that the Patriots weren’t expected to reach the Super Bowl. They weren’t that good, especially on defense. Now to play it up … the reason the Giant did well is that against the Patriots they didn’t screw things up. They did against other teams while Coughlin coached, but his super attention to detail style – being on time to a meeting is late to him – brought out focus against the Patriots. Hard to say why other than that as stakes rise and focus becomes more important then his teams did well. To play it down … Coughlin isn’t the coach. He’s only been there a year, and most of the roster by far was there already. It’s really the coach Doug Marrone. Look at his record: he did well his 2nd year in Buffalo and then opted out, joined the Jaguars, took over in December of last season and has done well this season with a roster that clearly underproduced last year. So can Jacksonville win? Sure: they’re one of the two teams playing. That’s why Tom Brady is comfortable saying they’re the best team he’s faced: they’re the only other team still playing in the AFC! It’s weird having this kind of silly stuff to think about: 7 straight year the Patriots have been in the AFC Championship Game. That’s almost another entire season! Add in the Super Bowls and it’s more than a season. So many players never get to the playoffs, let alone a Championship Game, let alone a Super Bowl, and they’ve been to 3 (out of the 6 played of the 7), and won 2. I saw today there are 19 players who started their careers with the Patriots – meaning never played anywhere else – who’ve never not been in the AFC Championship Game.

This story is about a sort of denunciation of Aziz Ansari for being sexually aggressive on a date. The unawareness is that it talks about the story in reaction to stories talking about how the story isn’t a good example of sexual assault and/or anything, and further that exposing this crossed a line of privacy that isn’t appropriate for a non-assault. I’ll be explicit: the argument being made is that cases like this which devolve into arguments about whether this is or isn’t appropriate to talk about, appropriate to bring out in public, may have some benefit in drawing the line about what actually is sexual assault and what is something ‘private’ that should be talked about in public without violating privacy … but only if you recognize that’s what’s happening. There’s no sign of that at all: it’s a piece about why this story should be talked about, why it is assault of some kind, as opposed to a recognition that, yeah, this is pretty obviously either on the line or right next to it. That’s a deep form of self unawareness in which you don’t recognize what you’re talking about because you’re so busy talking about it as though you know what you’re talking about.

It interests me that states have filed recently to block federal authority, both in executive orders (e.g., repeal by Executive Order of DACA, which was imposed by Executive Order) and agency rule repeals. See this about net neutrality rules. It’s interesting because the more typical case is governments resisting the imposition of federal rules, not resisting their removal. It’s also contradictory to argue that government can impose rules that states must follow but that government can’t repeal or change those rules. There’s always an argument about ‘capriciousness’ in administrative decisions, but administrative law is pretty basic and agencies have, generally, to be shown to not have followed their own rules. I seriously doubt that’s the case with net neutrality, so this would be an argument that somehow this has a different meaning of ‘capricious’, one that means ‘I don’t like this change so it’s capricious.’ I don’t see that as a viable legal standard.