Custom-made shoes to fill

From time's deep abyss

It has been more than a quarter-century since I screwed my courage to the sticking point and resigned my sweet and secure civil-service position for a temporary academic appointment. Several people commented at the time that it was a “gutsy move,” and I admit that it certainly felt like one at the time. Fortunately for me, the temporary appointment eventually turned into a tenure-track position, leaving me to live happily ever after (mostly) as a full-time math professor.

My memories of this event were tickled recently while delving into the stacks of detritus that decorate my college office. The semester is over, grades have been filed, and no summer school assignment looms over me. Nevertheless, I have been on campus several days in a row because of a writers' colloquium being conducted by colleagues in the English department. During free intervals I have repaired to my office and sifted through the piles of papers and books, slowly sorting them into stacks destined to be filed, recycled, or shelved. This morning I stumbled across the job announcement that was issued when my state agency was seeking my replacement. It gave me a good chuckle.

The job announcement was drafted by the agency's executive secretary, the semi-competent and ill-tempered appointee who was extremely helpful in increasing the diligence of my job search. Until her advent, I had had a lot of job satisfaction in my position. She injected enough poison into the atmosphere to help me on my way toward the teaching position that I desired. The job announcement was a perfect illustration of the boss's myopia. She created it by simply listing every function I had accumulated in my years at the agency. In effect, she was advertising for someone who was my clone (although preferably without my subversive attitudes and tendencies toward insubordination).

Here are excerpts from that job announcement, shorn of the standard civil service boilerplate and thus reduced to the essentials of the position's duties. It brings a smile to my face when I peruse it:

Description: The Commission has a small, highly specialized staff whose basic missions are (1) to monitor the status of California's General Fund revenues, expenditures, and reserves; (2) to track the collection of federal taxes and receipt of federal expenditures by California and its counties; and (3) to issue regular reports concerning the State's short- and long-term fiscal situation and the impact of federal taxation and spending on the State for use by the Legislature, the Administration, and other interested parties.
The duties of this position are as follows: (1) providing technical advice and support to enhance the Commission's use of its computer systems; (2) being the lead editor of the Commission's publications and being principally responsible for preparing those publications for photo-reproduction; and (3) heading the Commission's legislative tracking system (including the preparation of articles for inclusion in Commission publications on the status of significant pending financial legislation).

Desirable Qualifications:This position provides an excellent opportunity to demonstrate, expand, and apply expertise in the use of computer hardware and software. The position also showcases adroit writing skills, as well as providing the opportunity to identify, research, and describe key issues under consideration by the Legislature. Accordingly, the individual who fills it should:

• have a thorough working knowledge of the IBM AT and the Burroughs B-20/B-25 system used by the Commission. [Knowledge of Basic and Fortran programming languages is preferred, as is familiarity with the Microsoft Word, Lotus 1-2-3, Multiplan, and Ventura software packages.]
• write and edit well
• know how to track legislation, analyze its contents, and evaluate its financial implications.

Therefore, the ideal candidate would be a computer tech support person for multiple platforms who would also be the in-house editor and compositor of  publications (one job or two?), a prolific writer (a third job, or doesn't it count because there'd be much less editing on the employee's own documents?), and a legislative analyst (surely we're up to three by now).

I remember taking the job announcement to a state user group where I knew several members had the necessary computer expertise. Many of my fellow civil servants were unfazed by the necessity of supporting two incompatible computer systems, since many state offices had been infiltrated by personal computers in addition to proprietary networked systems. They nodded their heads when I read the first desideratum. They were less sanguine, however, when I tossed in the part about programming languages and desktop publishing. The writing component made several of them nervous because they knew of my background and did not relish comparisons. However, when I added legislative analysis to the package, groans were heard and questions were asked: “Is this supposed to be one job?” “Who is your boss kidding?” “Is she trying to ensure that the position stays vacant so that she has some salary savings to play around with?”

Of course, in a small state agency where the staff members wear several hats, multiple responsibilities are standard operating procedure. However, these job configurations develop with time and evolve to fit the capabilities of the people who occupy the positions. I certainly had not started mine with the same portfolio with which I ended it. My initial assignment was legislative tracking and analysis, mainly because I had just come over from the legislative staff. While serving in that capacity I acquired a home computer and developed skills that came in handy when PCs began to invade our office. Furthermore, it was during this period that I began to publish magazine articles in computer publications and math journals. This skill set of mine grew as I worked at the state agency and my job description grew with it. No one should expect many other people to stroll in with the exact same experiences and the exact same skill set. That, however, is what my boss was looking for.

The job opening was announced while I was serving out my final weeks on staff. My position remained vacant for a few months after my departure, until someone took a sharp pencil to the job description and made it a little more generic. At one point I met my successor, who was manifestly not doing the same job I had been doing. And neither was the boss, who had been sacked as the head of the agency.

Happy memories!

I miss the symbolism

Not quite perfect

At work I use Microsoft Word, which is installed on all of our office computers. My library of exams, however, old and new, are maintained in WordPerfect format. I've routinely upgraded Corel's product to the point that today I am using WordPerfect Office X5 to write my exams at home, where most of my school materials are prepared. (I've never felt a need to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, and I use enough of its products anyway, whether by my choice or not.)

But now something weird has happened. I replaced my home computer with a newer and faster system, using LapLink's PCMover to migrate my software from the old computer to the new. Unfortunately, on the new computer WordPerfect got balky. I uninstalled it, dug out the original disks, and reinstalled it. The same problem remained: I've lost the gallery of useful special symbols that I used to invoke with Ctrl-W. It's a significant loss, especially now that I have to resort to the equation editor for every little thing, such as merely embedding a Greek letter in text or a prime symbol after a function name.

I am not pleased.

Interestingly enough, the problem has survived a number of attempts to uninstall and reinstall the program. In addition, I now get an error message when trying to implement the Service Pack 2 maintenance upgrade. I'm stuck with the original release version from the installation disks, but without the special symbol feature. Woe and alas!

Gaze upon the stark difference of “Before” and “After”:

Before: The math symbol palette as it should appear.

After: The math symbol palette in its current denatured form

Any bright ideas, anyone?

Root, kit, or die

Don't go there!

You might not realize the extent to which you're living the Google lifestyle until suddenly you can't any longer. It happened to me over a week ago. Google stopped working. The search engine seemed okay, but clicking on a result entailed unpredictable consequences. Most of the time I would not get the webpage I had selected. The results seemed random. It was perplexing. More than perplexing. It was maddening.

If you're technologically savvy, you know that weird computer behavior is a good indication of a viral infection. It wasn't long before I realized that some weird bug was affecting the way Google behaved. Naturally, I quickly resorted to ... Google to figure out what was wrong!

Damn.

It took a few moments to find a work-around. Google was, after all, doing a perfectly fine job of finding websites related to search-engine viruses. Instead of clicking on an individual result and trusting Google to take me there, I instead copied and pasted the URL directly into the browser. Success! After visiting several sites, I learned that my computer had contracted a form of the “Google redirect virus.” Google referrals were being hijacked and directed to sites that were benefiting from extra hits from infected computers.

Example of a rogue page from a redirected Google item

Some of the rogue pages that popped up were plausibly connected to the original Google search, even if it they weren't the pages you asked for. But tell me, would you trust a supposedly anti-virus program that offers itself as a solution to the Google redirect virus if the virus itself suggests it to you? Sorry, Stopzilla, there is no way that I am trying you!

The virus in question creates a “rootkit” problem, where a “rootkit” is a program that gives privileged access to the functions of a computer. Rootkits can be damnably elusive. I've tried ferreting out my computer's infection with utilities from Norton, AVG, Sophos, Zookaware (SpyZooka), Enigma Softweare (SpyHunter), and Kaspersky. Lots of adware cookies were demolished in the process of scanning my computer, but the redirect virus was not caught. Damn. I was especially disappointed when Kaspersky's vaunted TDSSKiller did not track down and kill the lurking rootkit.

My new problem was keeping track of which anti-virus scanner I had used and then disabling or uninstalling those that wanted to fight each other. (You can definitely have too much of a good thing, and anti-virus programs are not fond of polygamy.) I've discovered that Anti-Malware from Malwarebytes is the most active combatant in the battle with the rootkit virus. It often (but not always!) detects attempts to redirect my clicks on Google results and prevents them. I'd much rather, of course, expunge the rootkit entirely and go back to clicking with abandon. But so far it is not to be.

Suggestions, anyone, on the best way to smash a rootkit virus on a PC running Windows 7?

Browser bigamy

Double your pleasure

Firefox knows that I am Zeno, remembers all kinds of things about me in its cookies, and enables me to post blog comments under that name with a minimum of difficulty. I can go traipsing through the ScienceBlogs and the Discover blogs and Facebook with my Internet identity firmly established (an on-line identity, by the way, that actually dates back to the pre-Internet era—no kidding!). My browser's memory preserves my preferences and smooths my on-line excursions.

Except when it doesn't. I need my real-life identity when I check into my faculty website or my personal Facebook page (not to be confused with my blogger Facebook page). Before I hit on a convenient solution, I found myself having to log out of various accounts and log into others. It was a minor nuisance. I especially didn't like it when I would be finishing up a post or comment, only to discover upon trying to publish it that I was operating under the wrong handle. (My students really don't need comments from some stranger named Zeno.)

The solution arose rather naturally. My school district has (big surprise!) standardized on Microsoft Office products, so all of our computers default to Internet Explorer. On my campus computer, therefore, I became accustomed to accessing the college's website using IE. When I finally prevailed upon our microcomputer support people to give me installation rights on my own office computer (not a particularly easy task, by the way), I promptly installed Firefox. While beginning to use it to log in to my favorite sites (like the aforementioned ScienceBlogs, for example), I paused to consider whether to use my real-life persona or my blog identity. Soon I realized it was easy to let Firefox be Zeno's browser while retaining IE as the real-life math professor's browser.

I set up a similar configuration at home. These days it's not unusual for me to have two different browser windows simultaneously open on my desktop. Google Reader tracks my favorite blogs in Firefox while IE keeps an eye on my college pages. Depending on which browser I'm using at the moment, I'm either real-life me or Internet me. I am such a power user!

Um. Not really. A genuine power user would configure different personalities within the same browser program and toggle back and forth at need, but I've never taken the time to learn how to do that. This is as much a story of “good enough for now” as it is a story of browser bigamy. It reminds me of the glory days of Lotus 1-2-3 (remember that?). One of the officers of my local computer club revealed that he didn't have a word processing program. He was using the 1-2-3 spreadsheet to do the job. He'd create wide cells, format them as text, enable word-wrapping, and type each paragraph of his document into different cells. He was very proud of himself, even though it sounded like a cumbersome and jury-rigged system. But what the heck. It worked, and he was comfortable with it. My computer-club colleague and I aren't quite Rube Goldbergs, but we have our delusions of adequacy.

Speaking of which, now it's time for me to pop over to my IE window. I just graded an exam and discovered that one of my chronic underachievers didn't bother to show up to take it. Zeno can't drop him from the class roster, but real-life math professor can!

A twitter-pated pioneer

The first tweet?

I have been wending my way through some of the Jeeves oeuvre of P. G. Wodehouse. The comic misadventures of the feckless Bertie Wooster and his unflappable gentleman's gentleman Jeeves are quite engaging. I was startled, however, to come across a curious concatenation of prose in the early pages of The Code of the Woosters.

Bertie is dismayed upon returning home to his flat to discover that a pile of telegrams awaits him. He has learned from sad experience that such missives are a reliable harbinger of difficulties with his wastrel upper-crust friends or demands from his daunting aunts. Jeeves enters to find his young master brooding:

“Are you ill, sir?” he enquired solicitously.
I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.
“Not ill, Jeeves, but all of a twitter. Read these.”

Imagine my reaction upon reading these lines. Bertie is in “twitter” mode and has lapsed into obscurely abbreviating his prose. The Code of the Woosters dates from 1938, so this is a most remarkable and quite prescient anticipation of today's trendy tweeters.

Of course, I buckled down and began to decode Bertie's hidden message. The “c” could easily stand for coma or catalepsy, but couch makes for a less sensational reading. Then Bertie passes an “h. over the b.” He notes that the “h” is “agitated.” Passing a haddock over a brazier would serve, since that would undoubtedly agitate a haddock that was not quite dead. But perhaps we should content ourselves with imagining that Bertram Wooster was merely passing an agitated hand over his brow.

Right-ho. That's the ticket.

Internet service preventer

Zapped by the Death Star

My day began. It was still dark, but that's winter for you. I tend to wake up rather slowly, so I dragged myself to my computer to check my e-mail. Hmm. Nothing since 1:30 in the morning. Slightly unusual.

Then I noticed the error messages from my e-mail program. They indicated that both my personal and school in-boxes could not be accessed. I looked at the modem.

Rats. The Internet light was out. I rebooted my computer and watched the modem lights start to blink as the operating system reloaded and began polling the computer's peripherals. I relaunched Firefox, which splashed my home page on the screen very nicely, but I soon saw that it was just the cached version. No new information was being downloaded. The modem lights were flickering between red and green. It wasn't settling down to the nice steady green I was used to.

Time for breakfast. Let the modem fuss with its DSL access while I scan the morning newspapers and take on some fuel.

When I returned, my Internet connection was still on the fritz. I powered down the modem, powered it back up, and rebooted the computer again. The very Christmasy red-and-green light show returned, but no DSL.

I called the AT&T support line. A very friendly recorded voice told me the number I was calling from. “Is your call related to service on this phone number?” I replied in the affirmative and entered the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, that constitutes AT&T's automated help system. By answering several questions, I eventually managed to get the system to understand that the problem involved my DSL service.

“I need to run some tests on your DSL line,” it said. “Please wait. This may take a few minutes.” I muttered to myself that “DSL line” was surely a redundancy—like “ATM machine” or “PIN number.” The voice ignored me, of course. A different voice thanked me for my patience and various commercial messages assured me that AT&T could sell me services that were much better than anything I currently had from them. I believed the voices.

“I have finished the tests,” announced the original friendly recorded voice at last. Despite our long-established friendship—or at least working relationship—it could not be troubled to tell me what was wrong with my line. Instead it informed me that one in five connection problems could be resolved by powering down the modem and rebooting my system. Had I done that recently?

Yes.

It suggested I try it again. Grudgingly, I did. With mechanical patience, the disembodied voice waited for me while various commercial messages assured me that AT&T could sell me services that were much better than anything I currently had from them. But I was already quite sure of that.

And it was still no-go. No green Internet light. My life as a denizen of the computer world was in jeopardy.

The recordings suggested visiting a local AT&T store or rebooting my computer. (I did that already! More than once!) It suggested that after visiting a local AT&T store and/or rebooting my computer, I could call back the help line in 24 hours if the problem persisted. Considering the length of time I had been on the line, I wondered if calling back in 23 hours would be considered a trifle hasty.

I hung up the phone and immediately redialed. (Actually, I hit the Redial button on a phone that doesn't even have a dial. Modern life is weird.) The whole process started again, but this time I mashed the zero key for Operator and was rewarded with the digital miracle of a live human voice.

The young woman ascertained that I was having a DSL problem and ran some line tests. She asked me if I had reset the modem and rebooted the computer.

Oh my yes.

She got her test results. She was getting a null response from my modem. She asked which of the display lights were lit up. I looked at the modem again and did a double-take.

Whoa! None of them.

Not even the power light?

Not even that. They're dark. All of them. No red. No green. Nothing.

My modem had gone completely dead. Stone cold. Perhaps the problem was now identified.

The young woman suggested I switch the power cord to a different power source. I did. Still no lights. I reported the same back to her, wondering whether she had put me down as one of those goofballs who don't even notice when they're unplugged. But there were lights earlier. I swear! (The modem had died while waiting in AT&T's emergency room.)

The young woman asked for my Zip code and gave me the addresses of the two nearest AT&T stores, suggesting I take the modem and its power adapter to one of them for testing.

I disconnected the modem from the computer, unplugged the power cord from the power strip, and conveyed the modem and power adapter to the nearer of the two AT&T shops. The assistants looked at my modem with goggle eyes and said, “Oh, we only do cell phones here!”

Uh, thanks.

I went to the second AT&T store. It was a much bigger facility. I took the modem and power adapter up to the counter and explained the situation to a company rep. She carried my distressed equipment to the inner sanctum where they keep their technicians sequestered. A few minutes later she came back out.

“Your modem is fine. The power adapter has failed.”

I felt a sense of relief. Just the power adapter!

“Okay, good. How much is a replacement adapter.”

“Oh, we don't carry those. Power adapters are only sold in a bundle with a modem. Would you like to see our latest modems?”

“You're kidding!”

“Sorry. We don't carry separate power adapters.”

“Thank you for your help. I think it's time for a visit to Radio Shack.”

“Oh, that's probably a good idea,” she admitted.

Soon I had a Radio Shack replacement power adapter, matched to the specs of the original device. Instead of spending $100, I had spent under $20. (I later discovered that the AT&T on-line shop carries the adapter as a separate replacement item for a list price of $10, but the company's fancy service center in my town can't be troubled to have it in inventory.)

Back home, I reconnected the old modem with the new power adapter and was soon rewarded with bright green lights. Hurray! Problem over!

No.

AT&T had reset my password after my service call. After all, my modem had failed and it would be necessary for me to log in as a new user with a new modem and initiate my service anew. When I opened my browser, it informed me that additional log-in information was required before I could access my Internet service. It switched me to an automatic log-in system on the AT&T support page that offered a swift and sure re-initiation process—which failed multiple times. (Perhaps it was upset when it discovered I was using the same old modem.)

I tried one more time, choosing the “manual” mode over the “automatic.” It had me punch in the access code on the bottom of my modem. It asked me for my new password. Did I have one? Was it in the support e-mail that the on-line technician had told me she was sending me (that I couldn't access until after I was logged in)? I dug out my steno pad, where I had been scribbling notes all during the on-line support sessions. (This is one of my very best habits.)

Aha!

In the midst of all the hassles, the young woman had had me write down a six-character network access code. Was that it? I wasn't starting a new account, so I had not worried too much about it at the time. I didn't really expect to need it. But I tried it.

Log-on successful

It was only six hours after the original discovery that my connection was down. Life was good again.

A date with Microsoft

which will live in infamy

Is Bill Gates to blame? I don't know. But the heavy hand of Microsoft Word continues to plague me.

My office computer was recently upgraded (good!), which means I have a system which has reverted to all of Microsoft's defaults (bad!). I had subdued Word 2003 to my grudging satisfaction, but my new copy of Word 2007 has all of the bad habits back in force. The examples are many.

For instance, someone at Microsoft decided that its users really need the copyright symbol more often than they need to enclose the letter “c” in parentheses. Thus any attempt to write “(c)” instantly auto-corrects to “©”—a symbol I need approximately never. I am much more likely to (a) type in a list of items, (b) avoid Microsoft's intrusively clumsy outlining function, and (c) get a copyright symbol when I least want it. Naturally, I go into the auto-correct defaults and rip out the preset substitution for “(c).”

Even worse, though, in my estimation, is Microsoft's insistence on foisting superscripted ordinals on the world (which appears to have happily embraced them). Word won't let you write “1st” without turning it into “1^st.” Ick. Whose bright idea was that?

The Associated Press Style Guide offers straightforward advice about dates: “Always use Arabic figures, without st, nd, rd or th.” Sounds good to me. Those are understood, aren't they? After all, when we look at a date like December 25, do you say “December twenty-five” or “December twenty-fifth”? I think most of us provide the ordinals automatically.

Unfortunately, my more literal-minded colleagues insist on the ordinal endings and—thanks to the default use of Word as their Outlook text editor—I get lots of e-mail sprinkled with dates written in superscripted ordinal form. Oh, good. Then, as is often the case, if formatting is lost in bouncing the message through various e-mail clients and servers, you get default plain-text messages with extra lines embedded to accommodate the ordinal superscripts. And for what? To accommodate an unnecessary formatting flourish, courtesy of someone's decision up in Redmond.

I can't be too harsh on geeks and nerds because that would be to accuse myself, but we do have some excessively soft spots for pointless gimmicks. When I first began to receive letters printed on monospaced dot-matrix printers with right-justified margins, I considered it to be a sign of the Apocalypse. Are you old enough to remember those? The only way to right-justify a monospaced text is to pad the lines with whole spaces to make the right margin come out even. Weird rivers of white space ran through the text as these interpolations were made. People were doing it simply because they could, ignoring the fact that such text was ugly and more difficult to read than ragged-right documents.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Speaking of things I can do ... a few more forays into Word's default settings and I will have ripped the guts out of the stylistic peculiarities that drive me nuts. When it comes to breaking in a new copy of Word, that's always one of the things I do 1st.

The Norwegian blue diskette

This is ex-data

“I knew he was trouble the moment I saw him walk in. It's a kind of sixth sense that you develop when you're in tech support.”

Lawrence and I were sitting in a Sacramento restaurant to fuel up the hour before a computer club meeting. I was a mini-bureaucrat in one of the state's mini-bureaucracies and Lawrence worked for a university. It was 1986 and we had converged on the capital city from different directions for some user group fun. A motley crew of regulars and semi-regulars would convene each month for burgers and sandwiches before taking in the featured speaker of the month and playing the usual “can-you-top-this?” game during the Q&A. Tale-swapping before the meetings was another regular feature and Lawrence had the floor.

I was not immediately impressed with Lawrence's story. Wasn't nearly everyone who walked into a tech-support office an occasion of trouble?

“But you must be used to that, Lawrence.” I said. “Don't you get weird problems all the time when you work tech support? And it must be even worse doing tech support at a university. Lots more opportunity for wacky cock-ups by clever people doing stupid things.”

Lawrence grimaced.

“Well, yeah,” he admitted. “That was certainly the case with this guy. He was a teaching assistant in the economics department and he had a data problem.”

A diskette problem, to be specific. In the high-spirited early days of personal computing, the Apple II and the IBM PC had established the 5¼-inch floppy diskette as the standard digital medium. By the time of Lawrence's incident, the newer 3½-inch was catching on, popularized by the Macintosh and newer model PCs. That's what the hapless grad student had in his hand when he visited the tech-support office.

“Here,” he told Lawrence, handing him the diskette. “I need you to recover the data from this PC disk.”

Lawrence took the diskette and looked it over. There was no obvious damage to it. He carried it over to a desktop computer that sported an array of different disk drives, inserted it into a 3½-inch drive and typed a command to list the disk's directory.

Error message.

That was only to be expected. Lawrence ran Norton Utilities on it. He tried to scan the diskette's sectors for recoverable data. After several minutes with several different diagnostic software tools, Lawrence ejected the diskette and handed it back to the teaching assistant.

“This,” he declared, “is a dead diskette. The directory is nonexistent and the bytes on it are indistinguishable from gibberish. Sorry. I couldn't recover anything at all. That happens sometimes when a disk really gets scrambled.”

The grad student was aghast.

“You don't understand,” the TA said. “You have to fix the disk. It has the gradebook for Economics 101 on it. I need the grades for the professor.”

“Sorry, but perhaps you don't understand,” rejoined Lawrence. “The data has passed on. It is no more. I can't recover what's not there. You are simply going to have to dig up your backup copy.”

A moment of silence became uncomfortably prolonged. Finally the student spoke.

“Um. This is the only copy.”

Lawrence gave him a weary look.

“Okay. Then you have no digital copy. You're going to have to re-enter all the scores from the last time you printed them out and recreate the gradebook from scratch.”

Now the grad student looked completely devastated.

“But there is no print-out! I was using the disk to prepare a grade list to post in the classroom before finals. The professor wanted to let students know their current grades going into finals week. That's when the disk crashed and I got a read-error from the computer. We didn't put up any previous grade reports. There's no other disk and there's no print-out. That's why you have to fix this disk. You just have to!”

Lawrence regarded the graduate student assistant with long-suffering patience.

“This is tech support. We do technical work. We don't perform miracles. I can't recover what no longer exists.”

The TA left Lawrence's office with his head bowed and shoulders slumped, the useless diskette clutched in one hand. A moment later he heard the sudden sound of the diskette's plastic case shattering against the concrete wall of the corridor and the slam of the door behind the departing TA.

“Rather dramatic,” I said to Lawrence as he finished his story. Other people at the table were grinning at its conclusion.

“Shortly thereafter I got a call from the Econ 101 professor complaining that I had failed to help his TA. I had to explain all over to him that you can't get data from a scrambled diskette. He was particularly upset because there was only one week left in the quarter and all the scores from the previous eight or nine weeks had been on the diskette.”

“So what did they do for grades?”

“That I don't know. No one told me. It I were to guess, though, I'd bet there were a lot of students who got surprisingly good grades in that section of Econ 101.”

I thought about it a second.

“Yeah, I wouldn't take that bet. I think you're right. It was the professor's safest option. Generous grades would prevent any student from filing a complaint and causing the department chair to adjudicate the dispute and ask for the grade records. We could have a bunch of econ students out there who got passing grades they never earned.”

And later they all went to work in the financial sector.

LC, R.I.P.

The old order passes

LC knew that he was dying.

We're all dying, of course, but LC had the constant reminder of the oxygen tanks. His lungs were dying faster than the rest of him, but they were going to take him along on their journey into the darkness. LC had no good way to overrule them.

LC had weighed his options and done the math. By husbanding his strength and taking it easy, he could look forward to a few more years of fairly comfortable living, the oxygen tanks notwithstanding. By risking a lung transplant, he might last a little longer. But maybe not. And the regimen of anti-rejection medication would compromise his immune system and put him at risk of being carried off by some opportunistic infection. He conferred with his wife and they agreed. LC would play out the hand dealt to him.

It worked for a few years. He faded gradually, with periods of stability, as his unpredictably progressive condition eroded his lung function in fits and starts. When the end came, though, it came suddenly and without much warning. He stopped breathing and stopped living in the middle of 2008.

I became friends with LC back in the eighties, when home computers were new and exciting and fun. That was the time when personal computer owners would gather together in their Apple clubs, PC user groups, and Mac organizations. LC was one of the few “computer consultants” I knew for whom the label was not just a euphemism for “under-employed nerd.” He was actually making a living at it and not simply cruising on his wife's income from her job in the financial sector.

Many of us geeks and nerds were envious—especially the poseurs who had made their own business cards from heavy paper they'd run through their dot-matrix printers. LC was a genuine professional and we looked up to him.

I had occasion to work with LC in both volunteer and professional capacities. He was a pillar of our computer club who combined both expertise and affability in a package that was all too uncommon within our ranks. I relished the time we spent together because his badinage was not limited to the unsubtle geek-speak of the day. LC was the soul of wit, and most excellent company.

When LC and his wife decided it was time to retire and move to southern California, they folded their tent and left without fanfare. By that time, however, we were no longer in frequent contact. The local computer club scene was a faint shadow of its past (the glory days when Bill Gates would come out in person to San Francisco or Sacramento or Berkeley) and that had been our primary area of common interest. Computers and math, that is, since we both held math degrees, but people don't normally gather to chat casually about math. He was also a rabid car fancier and enthusiastic dog lover, but I was less interested in fast cars or furry pets.

It was easy to stay in touch, though, and we kept up an e-mail correspondence that faded in and out over the years. LC was privy to the identity of the pseudonymous Zeno and would sometimes send me gentle private messages about various typos or other egregious mistakes in my posts. He also brought my attention to the circle puzzle, which we agreed was delightfully misleading.

In March, LC informed me circumstances had taken a turn for the worse:

Although I'm feeling fine, my lungs are giving out at a fairly rapid rate. I can walk no more than 50' without having to stop for breath, even with my oxygen set to the maximum flow I can carry (6 lpm). I am now enrolled in an in-home hospice program, although I'm much healthier (or at least more ambulatory) than most of their patients. They don't know quite how to deal with me. For example, I insisted on switching oxygen vendors because the one they normally deal with doesn't carry the size tanks I like to carry around in a backpack when my wife and I go out to lunch, meetings, movies, etc.

We aren't in denial; we're simply living each day as if there were a bunch of them lying ahead.

---

I sent him some lame words of encouragement. He wrote back saying that he was still checking out my blog periodically:

I've begun making it a habit to check your blog every week or two, although I don't generally read anyone else's (aside from infrequently skimming the Daily Kos).

I consistently come away in awe of how eloquently you write, and how you make choosing exactly the right word seem so effortless. You also seem to find subject matter in a wide variety of places, and you link contemporary and long-past events in unexpected ways.

I recognize that high-end novelists can craft words carefully, but I've always assumed they did so rather slowly, with many rewrites and edits. I cannot imagine someone tossing off beautiful prose like yours as casually—and presumably quickly—as you do, especially not as an uncompensated hobby.

I consider myself a decent writer and a first-rate editor, but reading your stuff makes me want to throw away my Crayolas. Thanks for pointing me to your musings.

---

That left me glowing with pride, since I had a high opinion of LC's prose style and regarded kind words from him as coin of the realm. I sent back my effusive thanks. Then I quickly excerpted his second paragraph and posted it in the blog's sidebar under Testimonials. LC soon noticed:

I see I've gotten my own 15 minutes of fame. I can now claim the distinction of having been cited in a blog testimonial without ever having written line one of my own blog. Does that make me a meta-blogger?

---

No question about it.

The last message I received from him was in May, when he asked me whether John Allen Paulos's Irreligion was worth reading. I suggested he spend his time on more profitable material.

And that was it. The next e-mail was from his wife, reporting he had died quite quickly and without much warning. Or, to look at it another way, with years of warning, but no specificity. She closed her message with these words:

We've known for 4 years that he was terminal, so have had time to plan, do fun things, retire early, and just enjoy each other. Not everyone has such a peaceful ending.

---

So here's to the end of 2008, the year of LC's departure, and to the good friend that he always was.

And is.

Thinking outside the cell

Yin meets yang

He wasn't one of my students, but he knew who I was.

“Hey, Mr. Z, you're a computer guy, right?”

Well, kind of. At least, I was on the college's information technology committee. It was 1990 or so and computers were increasingly percolating into the campus.

“Yeah, I guess so. What can I do for you?”

“I have a problem with my computer and maybe you can help me. Do you use a Mac or a PC?”

“PC.”

“Damn. Okay, sorry to bother you.”

As anyone knows, of course, personal computing is divided between the two great religious sects: Apple and Windows. Or Hatfields and McCoys. Montagues and Capulets? It's difficult sometimes for me to remember, partly because I don't have much patience with sectarian wars or family feuds. The gap cannot be bridged.

“No, no,” I said. “Go ahead and tell me your problem anyway. Who knows? Maybe I can help you.”

He was using the Wingz spreadsheet program on his Macintosh. Although largely forgotten now, Wingz was a powerful spreadsheet from Informix that eventually lost out to Microsoft's Excel (as did all of the other spreadsheets in the world).

“I have a six-page spreadsheet in Wingz but it won't print except for the first page. I've tried printing the whole thing and get only page one. I've tried printing just page two and nothing comes out.”

“Can you edit pages other than the first?”

“No problem. I can change stuff and save the changes, but nothing I do prints out anything except the first page. I used to be able to print it all, but something happened and I'm really stuck now.”

He had saved and reloaded the file. He had rebooted the system. He had done all of the usual jiggery-pokery to get things going again, but he was still stuck.

“Does Wingz have import/export options?” I asked.

“Yeah. Definitely.”

“Good. Can you save your spreadsheet as a Lotus 1-2-3 file?”

“I think so. Yeah, I'm pretty sure.”

“Okay. Save your file as a Lotus 1-2-3 file using the export feature. Then use the import feature to bring it back in. See if the conversion process clears up the printing problem you're having.”

He seemed just a little skeptical, but he said he'd try my idea.

A day later the student caught up with me again in front of the math department building.

“Hey, Mr. Z! It worked!”

“Great! Thanks for letting me know how it turned out. I guess some gimmicks work across platforms, eh?”

Knowledge. More portable than you might think.

Computers. Weird and demon-possessed no matter what the logo.

CPE1704TKS

Thermonuclear war

If you recognized the title of this post, congratulations. You are a true übernerd, a geek among geeks. It's the launch code from the movie WarGames, which Boing Boing reminds me was the greatest geek movie ever and was originally released twenty-five years ago. Did you miss the silver anniversary celebrations in May? So did I, but Wired magazine offers a nostalgic retrospective for all of us who miss the days of 300-baud dial-up modems and 8-inch diskettes.

WarGames was a cautionary tale about artificial intelligence and human stupidity. The sermon was a timely one, albeit delivered in a candy coating of teen angst, love, and adventure with lead roles played by Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. In 1983 the president of the United States actually believed it was possible that Bible prophecy might require him to play a leading role in the battle of Armageddon. Certainly launching a nuclear war would be an excellent way to set off the Apocalypse—in accordance with God's divine plan (and love and mercy and all that). We tended to avoid thinking about it too much back then because it was difficult to function if you were shuddering all day.

I didn't own my own computer yet when WarGames came out, but I already knew about modems and punch cards (almost—but not quite—obsolete then) and computer terminals. The local university had a connection to the ARPAnet, the Internet precursor sponsored by the Defense Department, and my nerdiest friends were on it daily. Although I had my doubts about WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), the computer that could control the entire United States nuclear arsenal, the scenario seemed realistic enough. Yes, it was science fiction, but not beyond the limits of credulity. Suspension of disbelief was all too easy.

That is, until the grand finale. That's the scene in the command bunker where WOPR begins to crack the secret ten-character launch code so that it can follow a teenager's inadvertent command to play out a thermonuclear war. Fortunately for the dramatic impact of the movie, WOPR flashed its progress in code-breaking on the large screens in the command center. Ten-character alphanumeric strings flashed past the eyes as WOPR searched for the launch key. The audience in the movie theater was rapt.

I, however, got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Damn!

WOPR was being allowed to riffle through the ten-character strings without any limitations. There was no one-attempt-per-second rule. No three-tries-and-you're-out. WOPR was jamming through the ten-character strings without hindrance. With 26 characters in the alphabet (uppercase only it seemed) and 10 numerals, WOPR has 36¹⁰ possibilities to check. That's between three and four quadrillion. WOPR was presumably a state-of-the-art military supercomputer capable of sophisticated war game simulation. I imagine it would have had massively parallel computing architecture. If it could crunch billions of possible codes per second, WOPR would crack the launch security barrier within perhaps a year or so by simple brute force. If it could crunch trillions per second, then perhaps hours or minutes. Not very secure.

Even back in 1983 the IBM Personal Computer boasted a microprocessor clocked at 4.77 MHz. Sure, that was just a microchip, but it indicated the low end of the computing power of the day. Yes, I was mildly disgruntled at the ease with which WOPR would be able to crack the code. Not very reassuring or realistic.

But then things got worse. Dramatically worse. Suddenly the first character of the launch code was frozen on the display screen: C. WOPR had figured out the first character. People in the command room were horrified. Then: P. Oh, no! WOPR was getting closer!

Now I was really disgusted. If you were allowed to figure out the code one character at a time, then I could do it myself, in a couple of minutes, without any massively parallel computing power. It's boring, but it's easy. You do it like this, beginning with the first character:

“Is it an A?”
“Is it a B?”
“Is it a C?”

Bingo!

Then on to the second character:

“Is it an A?”
“Is it a B?”
“Is it a C?”

Yes, this one would take longer. If you make it all the way through the alphabet, then rattle off the ten numerals, one after the other.

In a few minutes you'd have the whole thing. Thermonuclear war. Boom!

No, it didn't actually ruin the movie for me, but I was rather disgruntled. To make matters worse, none of my friends cared. Sure, the nerdy ones merely agreed that it was a dumb mistake—but what did you expect from Hollywood, anyway? The less nerdy ones simply pointed out that it made the ending more exciting. Yeah, I got that.

It was probably only the math geeks like me that were really irritated. But we don't count.

Steven Jobs loves you

That's why he hits you

Let us all give thanks that Apple introduced its Macintosh personal computer in 1984. Despite its tiny memory (128K) and sealed case (don't you dare mess with the innards of your own computer!), it was a breakthrough. The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center had invented the future of computing, but the company neglected to market it. Someone had to do it, and that someone was Steve Jobs (along with a gang of people with the talent to do the actual programming and design, once they had seen Xerox PARC's prototype of a bit-mapped graphical user interface controlled by a mouse). Bill Gates at Microsoft knew a good thing when he saw it and quickly tagged along (although not as quickly as he might have liked).

Apple's products are important and influential, but for some reason the company has never gotten the hang of mass marketing. Its share of the U.S. personal computer market is only about 5%. While 5% of so large a market is nothing to sneeze at, it pales in comparison with the market shares of Dell (28%), Hewlett-Packard (26%), Gateway (7.7%), and Toshiba (5.4%). Nevertheless, Apple has considerably more “mind share” than market share. That's probably because the other vendors are all under the umbrella of the Microsoft Windows operating system, setting up a perfect David versus Goliath image that Apple likes to exploit. The only two competitors are thus Microsoft Windows and the Macintosh OS. As we all know, Windows is corporate and clunky (as well as uptight and button-down) while the Mac OS is cool and sleek (as well as laid back and perhaps a bit stoned). Apple works that angle in its advertising and deftly defends its marketing niche. Everyone is happy.

That includes Apple's loyal and much-abused customer base. Apple has a long history of beating up on its clients, but the Apple aficionados keep coming back for more. The sacrifice is worth it—or so it seems—and the customers know it's their own fault. If only they hadn't upset Steve Jobs, he wouldn't have been forced to beat them up. It's the battered spouse syndrome as marketing campaign. And it works! To a degree, anyway.

Frankly, Apple ought to control the personal computing universe while Microsoft subsists on crumbs from the banquet table, but the greatness of Apple products is severely offset by the corporation's casual cruelty to its customer base. Is Microsoft dull and corporate, its enormous success driven by mastery of market-share tactics? Yes. Is Apple clever and innovative, its commercial success held back by its callous and insensitive leadership? Oh, yes!

These claims are based on both ancient and current history. Microsoft got its hooks into personal computing operating systems early and never let go, managing the transition from MS-DOS to Windows deftly (for all that Windows itself was not particularly deft, especially the early releases) and building a monopolistic presence in the corporate world. Microsoft's success with the corporate world was driven by its early alliance with IBM. Microsoft's success in the home market was drive by its willingness to sell lots of units inexpensively. You could get MS-DOS for any cheap PC clone. A million flowers bloomed. Today Windows is readily available on dozens (hundreds?) of different platforms.

Apple, by contrast, jealously guarded its family jewels and did not license its superior operating system for the clone market (except for that brief experimental period when Jobs decamped for a dalliance with NeXT computers). The first Macs were more proof-of-concept machines than usable workstations. Memory resources were so low that only short documents (up to 10 pages, if you're lucky, assuming minimal use of graphics) could be composed on a Mac. It has no hard drive and Apple did not offer one (or even the interface for one). Computer magazines quickly began to publish articles on ways to pop open the Mac chassis and stuff it with additional RAM chips. The modifications voided your Apple warranty, of course, and were sanctioned by the company only after it released the 512K Fat Mac (as most people called it at the time) and then only if you had it done by an authorized (and high-priced) Apple dealer. Apple has always preferred the small-market/high-margin approach to selling its products. It has fostered that approach with proprietary solutions and single-source marketing (Apple being the single source, naturally).

Can you hear me now?

Today Apple is enjoying the success of its new iPhone venture, which looks to be similar to that of the market-dominating iPod. (The success of iPod has even had the effect of buoying the sales of the Macintosh, bringing more customers into the Apple ranks.) Two of my colleagues are early adopters of the iPhone. I often see them playing with (excuse me, I mean “using”) their iPhones. During this month's faculty senate meeting, one of them was browsing his e-mail, his course enrollment rosters, and (for no reason that I could see) viewing his list of contacts. At least he wasn't playing any games. He had also spent a few bucks on an iPhone condom (you know, one of those rubberized sleeves; “for protection,” he said).

Both of my colleagues had bought their machines at the initial price, before Apple startlingly announced a $200 price cut. Apple also discontinued the lower-priced iPhone model less than two months after its release. That's taking planned obsolescence to a new level! Only the act of driving a brand-new car off the dealer's lot can be compared for the abruptness of depreciation. My faculty senate buddy was somewhat miffed about so big a price drop right after his purchase, but he was slightly mollified by Apple's sudden afterthought (in the face of consumer complaints) in offering a $100 credit (for Apple products only, naturally) to early adopters. The grudging rebate is also hedged about with limitations.

Why didn't Apple anticipate the reaction of its customers to the kick-in-the-shins price move? It's probably because Apple has always been remarkably callous about gouging its base and the base has traditionally been quite docile. The company knows its products are really good and that people will generally put up with the abuse. They have in the past, you know. It would have taken only a little foresight for Steve Jobs to have scored a marketing coup with the announcement of the new iPhone pricing. Had he extended the $100 rebate offer to first adopters at the same time that he revealed the $200 price cut, he could have graciously thanked the early adopters for launching the product so successfully, commented that they had no doubt reaped great benefits from having the product before other purchasers, but then noted that Apple was sharing its success with the early adopters by retroactively wiping out half the difference between the original price and the new one. Thanks and thanks again! The loyal customers would have swooned.

But Steve Jobs and Apple never even thought of it.

The glass cubicle

Silicon shackles

The news media can't resist stories with wild claims about our workplace foibles. Such reports are based on the assumption that these matters can be readily quantified and measured.

Did you know that it cost the U.S. economy $788 billion in 2006 because of squandered work hours in the nation's offices? This highly questionable claim was reported in an article by Amy Smith of the Copley News Service. Smith says that office time-wasters will be defeated by technology.

Office time-wasters beware

Computers with online access can be an easy distraction; however, employees may want to concentrate more on work instead of surfing the Internet at the office. You never know who or what may be watching.

BeAware Corporate Edition, which has a “workplace activity management” application, allows companies to keep track of employees' computer history in order to eliminate excessive time-wasting and increase productivity in the office.

At least 13 percent of employees spend more than two hours a day doing non-work-related activities on the computer. Adam Schran, president of Ascentive LLC, says many managers are frustrated with employees' wasting work time. The U.S. economy lost $788 billion in 2006 due to employees' messing around at the office.

---

Where did that number come from? I don't know and I don't care. Such estimates are inherently unreliable and usually offered while pressing a point or—in this case—marketing a solution. Winter continues to transcribe BeAware's sales pitch:

Schran says the program does comprehensive monitoring of both PC and Internet, including usage of e-mails, web-surfing and chat programs. Many different companies purchase BeAware in order to benefit their working environment.

“Our clients have told us that they see unwanted Internet usage by their employees drop as much as 90 percent almost immediately after BeAware is installed,” says Schran.

Managers can keep a watchful eye on the work history of those questionable employees. Once installed in all computers, it generates alerts to managers when employees access specific Web sites or words. Detailed reports enable managers to find the problems easily and efficiently.

---

What is this obsession with counting minutes and making facile assumptions about “lost” productivity? It doesn't make sense to me. Did you empty your in-basket and fill your out-basket? Are you caught up with your tasks? Then it should not matter if you extended your lunch hour for some Internet surfing or checking your personal e-mail. I tend to focus much more strongly on actual productivity rather than obsessing over the number of minutes or hours you were properly on the clock or chained to your desk.

Managers should demote or fire people who cannot discharge their duties and meet their responsibilities in a timely and competent manner. They should not care, however, about the details which seem to fascinate the bean-counters.

The bean-counters should be very happy with modern snoop software for office management. BeAware is designed to provide all the stimulus-response training for employees that Pavlovian managers could desire. If you really lack any people-management skills, you can always resort to reward-punishment enforcement of simple-minded metrics.

The program isn't only used to punish employees; it can also be a rewarding tool by identifying good behavior and beneficial working skills.

“It's now easier, almost effortless, for bosses to help make their companies more efficient and effective,” says Schran.

Schran admits the software is controversial with regard to issues of trust and privacy, but overall he feels it is beneficial to companies. To give the employees a little privacy, the software offers a private-time option. A manager can set an allotted amount of time for employees to have computer time without being watched.

“BeAware increases the whole morale of the team when there aren't people wasting time,” says Schran.

---

That's right. You'll be a happy little cog in micro-managed machine. You can trade some personal privacy in return for the knowledge that no one else in the office is slacking. Sort of like the way we've been trading personal liberty in return for national security. Anyway, weren't privacy and liberty way overrated?

Whoring for jr

Brit has been there before

Reversion to the mean is a phenomenon unhappily familiar to a host of people whose names bear the appendage “Jr.” Just ask the juniors whose names are Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams, or Franklin Roosevelt. When a remarkable talent appears in a family's line of descent, chances are extremely good that the next generation will suffer by comparison. To quote MathWorld, “ [A]n extreme event is likely to be followed by a less extreme event.”

Some people, however, take an extraordinarily long time to recognize when reversion has struck, even when the evidence keeps shoving itself in your face. Brit Hume of Fox News is one such person. It's happened to him at least twice, and both occasions were painfully obvious to disinterested observers. Brit is very good at keeping the faith.

The first time Brit Hume fell at the feet of an unworthy scion of aristocratic descent was in the 1980s. The pedigree could not have been more elevated, but the results could scarcely have been more disappointing. IBM had provided the personal computing industry with overnight credibility when it deigned to enter the market in 1981 with the IBM Personal Computer. For all of its limitations—some of them significant—Big Blue's desktop computer was immensely successful and quickly invaded business offices and homes across the world. After all, the name of IBM conjured digital magic and everyone took it seriously. The pioneering companies in home computing were swept away, with only Apple hanging on as a distant second.

Everyone assumed that the IBM juggernaut would continue with its follow-up products, and to a degree everyone was right. IBM tweaked the PC by adding a hard disk model (the PC XT in 1983) and a larger model with a more powerful microprocessor (the PC AT in 1984), but the real buzz concerned Big Blue's second generation computer—code-named “Peanut.” We who belonged to computer user groups had access to the latest and most lurid rumors: Peanut would be multitasking. Peanut would have a windowing operating system. Peanut would have dazzling graphical capabilities. Peanut would revolutionize personal computing.

The elephant labored mightily and brought forth ... a mouse. The IBM PCjr was an instant anticlimax. The keyboard was an embarrassment (IBM had to redesign and replace it). The graphics were a slight improvement over those of the original PC (more colors, but the same resolution). There was only one disk drive (and it was a floppy, of course). The slots for ROM cartridges had no software except for a few games (and Lotus 1-2-3, the only serious business program ported to the jr). With additional expenditures for add-ons and secondary market products, a user could bring the PCjr up to the level of a regular PC, by which point its modest price advantage relative to the original PC was more than wiped out.

The IBM PCjr was released with great fanfare in 1984 and quietly killed in 1985. Big Blue burned off its large inventory of unsold PCjrs with deep discounts during the 1984 Christmas season. Brit Hume was one of the many people who went for the bait and found themselves cut off when IBM discontinued the product and its support a few months later. He made the best of a bad deal by sharing his observations and travails in articles published in Monitor, the monthly newsletter of the Capital PC User Group in Washington, D.C. Brit's column carried various titles, but the most common one was Living with jr. His running theme was that the jr wasn't that bad. Really.

Once a dupe...

George W. Bush isn't precisely a junior, but reversion to the mean has worked with a vengeance in his case. The end result will be that history will upgrade his father to “the good George Bush” to distinguish him from his successor and namesake. Brit Hume was a sucker for a weakling with a good pedigree twenty years ago, and he remains one today. As a regular apologist for Bush administration pratfalls, Brit was the perfect choice for Dick Cheney's lukewarm and muddled apologia for his clumsy shooting of a hunting companion. The only damage Cheney took from his interview on Fox stemmed from his general incoherence rather than Hume's close questioning. (How many of Brit's questions were written for him by White House flacks?)

Not to belabor the point, I would like to share some of Brit's comments from Living with jr in back issues of the Capital PC Monitor. His talent for making excuses in the face of incompetence and disappointment goes back at least that far.

Take heart, PCjr owners. IBM's loss can be your gain. Contrary to what you may have read about the jr, it has turned out to be one of the great values in the history of microcomputing. (December 1985)

---

And George W. Bush will turn out to be one of the great presidents in the history of the republic.

There are a lot of ways to expand a PCjr, but if you aren't careful, you can end up spending as much as the cost of the computer itself, or more. (January 1986)

---

“Or more”—the mantra of Bush policy toward tax cuts and defense spending, both of which enrich his political allies.

Few people can enter the basement room that houses my home computer system without gasping at the rat's nest of wires that hangs from the rear of it. This is not what IBM had in mind when it designed the PCjr.... (April 1988)

---

All computers are festooned with wires and cables, but it's worse when even basic equipment needs to be installed as add-ons. Making the jr into an adequate computer frequently involved the purchase of a second entire chassis to install the expansion boards that would not fit into the original system unit. I suppose the obvious parallel to try to draw with the Bush administration is to suggest that we need a second president to offset the inadequacies of the one we have... But we tried that with Cheney, right? And we all know how that is working out.

Note: The good old days of personal computer user groups are behind us now. Except for rare survivors like the Houston Area League, most of the clubs are gone or reduced to shadows of their former selves. I joined a number of these groups just to get their excellent newsletters. The Monitor was a prime example. My archive of its back issues probably makes me one of the few people on the West Coast who could have written this article. Once again procrastination in cleaning off the shelves has proved its worth!

Who is Zeno?

Persistence & patience

“Zeno” has been my on-line handle for several years, dating back to the era when electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs) were popular among computer hobbyists. These systems were the forerunners of today's websites and blogs. Users would log on to their favorite BBS to read and post messages, both public and private. Some BBSs offered live chat and on-line games, while others specialized in supporting particular products or organizations. The computer club I belonged to had its own BBS for the dissemination of meeting announcements and user-supported software.

Most BBS users favored anonymous handles instead of their real names, both for convenience and personal security—exactly the same reasons as today for pseudonymous e-mail addresses and user names. I no longer recall exactly how I picked “Zeno” for my handle, but the choice made so much sense that it's stayed with me over the decades. There is more than one Zeno in history that figures into my well-suited pseudonym.

Zeno of Elea

I encountered Zeno's paradoxes early in my career as a math major in school. These conundrums were devised by Zeno of Elea (or “Zeno the Eleatic”) to provoke his fellow philosophers. Zeno and his contemporaries of the fifth century B.C.E. did not have a good formulation of the notion of infinity, which permitted Zeno to stir up trouble. He famously argued that even a great athlete like the warrior Achilles could not win a foot race with a tortoise if the tortoise were given a head start. After all, by the time Achilles ran up to the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise would have moved to a new location further down the track. We are now back where we started from! Achilles is running a race with a tortoise that has a head start. He must run to the tortoise's new location, by which time the tortoise will have moved on again. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat ad infinitum. Obviously the great athlete never overtakes the plodding terrapin.

Except that in real life he does, hence the paradox. Zeno challenged his fellow philosophers to find the flaw in his argument, which they could not adequately do because they recoiled at the notion of infinity. Today we have a much more robust notion of infinity (we know, in fact, that infinities come in different sizes!). It's even built into our system of mathematical notation: the decimal number system.

Even in simple arithmetic, students meet infinity as soon as they begin to work with decimal fractions. They learn that 0.33333... is the decimal fraction corresponding to 1/3 and we teach them techniques to switch between decimal and ratio form. In later mathematics, after we have worked out the properties of geometric series, we see how an infinite collection of numbers can have a finite sum. A good example is 1/3 = 0.3 + 0.03 + 0.003 + 0.0003 + ....

As a teacher, I like to illustrate Zeno's paradox by claiming to my students that no one can leave the classroom. Of course this catches their attention. I tell them to consider that they have to get to the door in order to leave the room. However, wherever they are in the room, they first have to travel halfway to the door. From that point, they have to travel half of the remaining distance. Repeat ad infinitum. To actually reach the door, each student is accumulating a sum of distances: 1/2 of the original distance, then half of what's left (which is 1/4 of the original distance), then half of what's left of that (1/8 of the original distance), etc. What do we get when we try to evaluate the sum 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ...?

We know from everyday experience that we really can get out of the classroom, so what's going on with the “halfway there” argument? If we revisit the process of successive halves, we notice that first we travel 1/2 of the distance, followed by 1/4 of the distance, putting us 3/4 of the way to the door. The next stage is 1/8 of the distance, so 3/4 + 1/8 = 7/8. If we continue adding the individual stages and considering each result, we progress to 15/16 of the distance followed by 31/32, 63/64, 127/128, etc. These numbers are tending toward 1, the entire distance to the door, a finite number. By breaking up the distance into an infinite number of segments we make it appear that it is impossible to escape from the classroom, but by considering the sums we observe that the distance is finite and not the insurmountable barrier we feared.

While some students will remain perturbed by the problem, I tell them it should not embarrass them to be puzzled by a conundrum that used to defeat the best minds of Zeno's day. While this discussion by no means exhausts the topic, it illustrates why I am fascinated by Zeno's paradoxes and borrowed his name for my on-line handle. But while Zeno of Elea appeals to my mathematical side, another Zeno appeals to my philosophical side.

Zeno of Citium

The philosophical school of stoicism is named after the Greek word “stoa” for porch. Zeno of Citium (333 B.C.E.-264 B.C.E.) taught his system of thought from his eponymous painted porch. While porches are out of favor in modern homes, we've all seen that porches are a great place to take it easy. I think it's quite remarkable that Zeno's fame is based on hanging out on the front stoop and shooting the breeze with his buddies. It reminds me of Douglas Adams's characterization of a philosopher from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: “Trin Tragula ... was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.” I don't know whether Zeno of Citium had a wife to rail against him while he expounded on topics philosophical, but I do know that his school of philosophy has left us with a useful adjective: stoic.

I admire the stoic outlook, although I cannot claim to be particularly good at emulating it. Zeno taught that personal tranquility could be attained by a serene indifference to pleasure or pain. That seems to make sense. The devoted stoic steels himself against perturbations of the spirit by even-handedly disdaining the pursuit of pleasure and armoring himself against pain. This is no doubt what Lennon and McCartney were warning against in Hey, Jude (“Well don't you know that it's a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder”). Still, serenity is a pearl of great price, so who can say what someone might pay for it? Zeno is said to have lived an ascetic life, so perhaps he achieved the tranquility he sought. In general, as a fretful and compulsive worrier, I would have to say that I have not. Yet one could do worse than be an aspiring stoic.

Still other Zenos

The thinkers of Elea and Citium by no means exhaust the list of history's Zenos. Check out this Wikipedia page for references to several others. As for today, Zeno is variously a rock band as well as an aspiring model of Italian and Puerto Rican descent. I probably should add that Nikki Zeno (Lowrider cover girl for March 2003) is much too young to have influenced my choice of pseudonym twenty-five years ago and her views on mathematics and philosophy are not an inspiration for the content of this blog. Just thought you should know.