Pink Air

The fate store

 

There are a number of benefits to living in a country whose language is not entirely transparent to you. It’s easier to tune out ambient human noise. Maybe it’s not so much tuning out as changing the station from talk radio to instrumental music.

Sometimes your translation module misfires and produces interesting results. A few nights ago I passed a newsagent with a national lottery sign in the window and the word loterij came out as “fate store”.

You see these orange and blue signs everywhere but the idea of buying fate made me stop and look long enough to realize that my memory of the logo was wrong. I remembered it as a little fish eating a big fish, meaning “Dream big. Yeah, it’s a long shot, but hey, you never know.” (Which actually is the tagline of the New York lottery.)

But the Dutch logo is a big fish eating a little fish which seems like a cold, fishy slap in the face to the irrational hope that lotteries are based on: “Wake up, chum. The reality is, the big fish eat the little fish. That’s the way of the world.” (An idea long familiar to the phlegmatic Dutch.)

There was a California lottery campaign years ago in which celebrities explained their favorite numbers to play. Steve Wozniak said he played 1-2-3-4-5-6 because it had just as much chance as any other combination. I still wonder if he was just trying to plant a rationalist mind bomb by directly contradicting one of the common cognitive biases of lottery players, that winning combinations are more “random”.

State lotteries have been called a regressive tax because the people who play are mainly lower income. If you think the lottery is your only chance at economic success, then it probably doesn’t seem irrational at all. And a recent study indicates that people are more likely to play when made to feel subjectively poorer. The same study also says that people play more when reminded that they have just as much chance to win as anyone else. For someone who feels the world as a whole is unfair, even rigged, the lottery looks like a rare even playing field.

A planner doing research for a state lottery once told me that among poor Hispanics there was a belief that God wants to help you but you have to give him the chance by buying a ticket. That sounds like an incredibly addictive formula, a self-stabilizing system of fate, chance and something like freedom.

None of this, however, helped me to understand the Dutch lottery logo. It turns out that it’s an illustration of a Dutch saying: You have to throw out a smelt to catch a cod. According to my Big Book of Dutch Idioms, this means "to offer up something small in order to get something much bigger in return." The contextual example it gives is from the surprisingly topical area of Dutch drug policy which tolerates marijuana (the small offering) in return for decreased criminality and hard drug use.

But a lottery ticket doesn't offer a reasonable expectation of return. So the small fish isn't the price of anything. It's just an offering to fate.

Sunday night meandering

Since our books are now sorted by color, I spend less time picking things to read before bedtime. I just think, "I'll have a green one." Which is how I started reading The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal. The author, Lynne Kelly, is an Australian science teacher with the best possible attitude for a proselytizing skeptic which is basically, "It would be really cool if ghosts and levitation and telepathy existed, but sadly, there's just no evidence for them. Worse yet, most of the supposed evidence is outright fraud. Believe me, I'm just as disappointed as you are."

One of the few examples that isn't fraud, but just an interesting phenomenon, is spontaneous human combustion. Although it's not spontaneous. Kind of the opposite. In fact, you have to be dead or at least deeply unconscious for it to happen at all. It seems to be the result of a grotesque wicking effect in which a slow-burning article of clothing or furniture draws the fat out of your body and burns like the wick of a greasy, human candle, eventually reducing your body to ash while leaving nearby surroundings (and less fatty body parts like feet and hands) unscorched.

Kelly also describes how paranormal beliefs are reinforced by our tendency to interpret evidence selectively, remembering only positive results and seeing false patterns in randomness. She illustrates this point with a bravura interpretation of Kubla Khan, which not only predicts the war in Afghanistan but reveals exactly where Bin Laden is hiding.

Coleridge's poem is famously incomplete, but I was still surprised that all the versions I found on the Web were missing the section in which the author falls into despair, immortal but frozen in time, ironically trapped inside the paradise he spent his life seeking. Then I realized I was thinking of the song Xanadu by Rush.

Being a Rush fan is pretty much being a nerd and since nerds are now cool, Rush is finally hanging with the cool kids. Yes, the Ayn Rand fixation was almost as tiresome as Rand's novels themselves, but Rush was all about stuff that nerdy teenagers found worth thinking about: technology, freewill, science. The tempo changes were sometimes hard to follow, but what they were saying was always clear and interesting (unlike many of their more proggy brethern who drifted off into vague space imagery).

Rush is the secret nerd handshake. The best research I ever did was a portrait of IT culture for Microsoft. I have a copy of the tape that I still watch today and think, "These are my people. This is my tribe." One of my favorite interviews was with the IT director at a cable network in New York. We were talking about art and music and he mentioned a list of bands, including Rush. I said, "Rush?" He tilted his head to look at me over his glasses, "You like Rush?" It was as if he'd opened the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and two glasses. "I was in an all-Rush cover band. To me, their music is like beautiful code. Tight. Clean." We both nodded, kicking back at La Villa Strangiato, thirty floors above Times Square.

But music is the secret handshake for almost every teen culture, not just nerds. In another interesting green book, Snoop, Sam Gosling describes how undergraduates consistently choose to talk about music much more than any other topic when trying to get to know one another. He then correlates musical genre preferences with actual personality measures in order to assess which types of music actually tell you something true about the people who listen to it. Based on the resulting chart, it seems safe to say that a shared love of Rush probably does reveal deeper similarities than a shared love of, say, Michael Jackson. Though he could tell you something about spontaneous human combustion.

Girls talk

As a rule, middle-aged men (like me) don't read fiction. If we read at all, we prefer history, science, you know, facts. After a certain point, reading about people and events that don't exist begins to feel like, not a waste of time exactly, but it's not "making progress." Deep down, maybe it's a sense of running out out of time, but I feel as though I need to understand "the way things are".

Of course, as all the scare quotes and italics reveal, "the way things are" is a sort of fiction and fiction is about the way things are, but while non-fiction addresses the question quantitatively in a this-plus-this-plus-this sort of way that feels like progress, fiction examines the way things are in a more qualitative way. Non-fiction builds. Fiction soaks. And sometimes you need to soak. Fiction refreshes the parts facts can't reach.

I've been soaking recently, but as I step back, there does seem to have been some progress made. By chance, I read two books told largely from the perspective of tween girls. Both Atonement and Never Let Me Go are novels that expand from explosions within the dense, superheated social imagination of young girls. And both reminded me of Thomas de Zengotita's description in Mediated of tween girls as "impresarios of an evolving social art":

They devote enormous energy to mastering an array of symbols and cues, an interplay of appearance, clothes, accessories, music, slang...They know everything. Every lyric, every gesture, every band, every brand name, every novel expression of approval or disdain. But they know much more than that. They are not mere scholars. They are not pedants. They are not just an audience of passive consumers...They can do it themselves. They are performers.

Of course, all three (five, including me and Dave) of these guys are middle-aged men imagining the world of tween girls, which may be why it sounds like an especially grisly version of Star Search. But it did all kick me back into the world of facts, wondering why fiction is read largely by women and whether it has something to do with whether you see the world of social imagination as fact or fiction.

people:cats::television:people

Despite their loner reputation, cats actually do like being around people. We emit a low wattage, comforting glow that they can bask in without being forced to engage. A cozy social murmur without the shock, effort, or even the possibility of actual interaction. People are warm background radiation, like fire, muzak and television.

By the way, with Halloween coming, now is a good time to re-watch Donnie Darko, peruse Richard Kelly's post-Darko CV and think about Malcolm Gladwell's distinction between early and late-blooming genius.

Party's over

Political fans

What does it mean to be a fan? The fact that the word is short for fanatic is a tip. To be a fan is to lose some degree of objectivity. Jerry Seinfeld once joked that managers and players come and go, so sport fans are really just supporting a uniform or "cheering for the laundry." Reading the commentary on the US presidential campaign, you certainly feel a lot of hot air being blown around by fans of both teams. (Full disclosure: (And isn't it interesting how quickly "Full disclosure" has become an iro comic meme?) 1. I am a registered Democrat and 2. In searching for the Seinfeld quote, I found that I'm not the first person to connect it with the current election. End of disclosure. Back to concealment.)

I've always been comfortable describing myself as a liberal, even though I'm not entirely sure what that means. It feels more like a fuzzy personality description than a political philosophy to me. The correlation between personality and politics is a contentious area. Just saying that there is a correlation draws the criticism that you're trying to "explain away" political beliefs as irrational. But there is a lot of valid, very interesting research in the area, some of which is reported in my friend Sam Gosling's book, Snoop, which you should all buy right now and I'll talk more about later.

On the much less rigorous side, I've been keeping a list for a few years now of gut-level beliefs that I hold (or more accurately, that hold me) that I associate with liberalism and that contrast with stated beliefs held by people I know who describe themselves as conservative. (The fact that I want to insert hundreds of caveats here may be a liberal characteristic, but I'm going to skip it, assuming that you know what they are, would make up better ones than I would or are willing to simply imagine a cloud of reservations swarming before your eyes making the following list hazy, flexible and plausibly deniable.)

Book color distribution

Every so often, I like to sort our books by color. I find the process relaxing and it makes the bookcases less chaotic-looking. This time, I decided to make it even more enjoyable by estimating the distribution of colors. This is a sample of about 10% of our Amsterdam books. I was limited by the size of our dining table, so the long tail of orange (7%), purple (4%), pink (2%), other (2%) and unclassifiable (2%) isn't in the picture.

A good book store is a 3D, immersive search engine and book covers are like banner ads. Each jostles against its neighbors, using its strictly limited area to convince you that it links to something interesting.

How to get on reality tv

Two years ago, a memo written by the casting director of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition surfaced which identified the precise nature of woe they were looking for in candidate families. Most people claimed to be shocked by the creepily specific nature of the show's screening process. But really, how did they think the families were chosen?

The selection process for reality tv shows is one of the inflection points around which the celebrisphere has crumpled and there is no fakeness or realness, only character. Which is why the best piece of advice in How To Get On Reality TV sounds like the bumper sticker next to the Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac: "Be the most real version of yourself." Like hippies, bolsheviks and new age gurus, reality TV encourages the merger of public and private self through self-conscious, self-directed, self sculpting. In this context, authenticity is not a matter of what you truly are, but what you truly want and how truly you want it: to be visible, desirable, memorable. It's a populist, broadcast-based answer to the question of how to be interesting. 

Beyond its therapeutic value, the book is also full of interesting practical details:

• The famous Bunim-Murray screening process, pioneered by the producers of The Real World. It's like the focus group from hell, where everyone knows that hijacking the group is the point.
• If you're on a residential "social experiment" show like Real World, "change your hair color in the middle of the season because then the producers will have to present your experience chronologically." (Is that an issue?)
• To have any chance at getting Pimped, your Ride has to look terrible but must be in running condition. "After all, the show isn't called Repair My Car."

The disappearing nerd

Saturday's lineup for Interesting NY looks great. As a person of Aspergian tendency, I'm particularly interested in Grant's talk on the seeming ubiquity of Asperger's these days. I have sometimes thought that planning and Asperger's are a natural combination, what with the focus on noticing detail and deconstructing the social habits that most people take for granted.

I also wonder whether the characteristics of Asperger's are becoming, if not more prevalent, more visible and valued because of economic and social trends towards tech and the otaku mindset in general. Is it possible that Asperger's has become kind of cool?

A similar thought crossed my mind last year when Russell and I went to the dConstruct web app conference last year. The entry hall was ringed with booths of companies feverishly trolling for employees. And the attendees clearly knew that they were now the stars of the show, trollees and not just trolls. There was no furtiveness to their nerdliness. They were out and proud and apparently, happy. And I had to wonder: are these nerds? Do nerds sip cappuccino, wear expensive glasses and discuss stock options? Are there any nerds anymore or has that ecological niche been taken over by the sleeker, more confident and non-neurotic variant, the geek?

Dream picture

In 1924, the Oakland Tribune and the American Theater invited people to send in their most unusual dreams. The winners got $25 and had their dream made into a short film. You can see one of the winners here. As one commenter writes, it plays like Mack Sennett working from a script by Luis Buñuel. What a great idea. Some media company should do this again.