Blayne Sucks

I don’t really have the opportunity to watch as many movies as I once did, but I recently saw The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky whom you might remember from Pi or Requiem for a Dream. At 96 minutes long The Fountain is an incredibly descriptive movie that says quite a bit more than movies nearing twice that length of time. It was billed as a movie about living forever, and if you aren’t in the mood for a thinking movie, then you should probably pass because this one will seem entirely pointless. However, if you are in the mood to watch a movie that might force you to reflect on what it means to live, then you definitely will enjoy this.

Most of our lives consist of a frenetic discord of which we may not even be fully aware, but if you are able to find stillness in the noise you can see the underlying harmony to be found simply in living. Sometimes, I think the Biblical message about the rich man trying to enter heaven is overly specific, but metaphorically correct. It is not simply wealth that prevents people from understanding our purpose in life. Those who have great wealth, responsibilities, or addictions can’t hear the harmony of life as easily as those without.

In some ways, this is a sort of existential crisis. If you spend your entire life working for the wrong things, then you’ve essentially done nothing with your life. However, if you spend your entire life searching for the right thing to do and not acting, then you have also done nothing with your life. How then should one go about living? Perhaps the best plan is to achieve a system of checks and balances to act and then review consistently. The Fountain certainly makes the case that it is essential to take a few moments from time to time to listen for harmony.

This movie is about a man’s recognition of the harmony of life through his wife’s illness and despite his “richness.” He is a doctor researching a cure to cancer or some similar ailment. He is obviously talented and has obviously worked very hard throughout his life, but it appears that his work takes on new meaning when his wife becomes ill. This story is interlaced with an older story of a Spanish Conquistador who has similarly worked very hard, but finds his purpose in life takes on new meaning when the Queen of Spain is threatened. This shows that the problems we have with finding this solace within our own lives are not new.

I won’t give away more of the movie even though I’m not sure there’s really a secret to give away. There is a lot of symbolism in the movie and with its short duration it would certainly make for a great discussion afterwards. Some of that symbolism is Christian, and if you are a member of a Bible study, I hope that your group would be open minded enough to talk about such things rather than institutionally ignore them. I recommend that you rent it or add it it to your Netflix list. It’s definitely worth the price of admission.

For many people the idea of reading a book about a mathematical proof right after finishing a semester in a Computer Science graduate program would be an apt definition of torture. First, I am not one of those people. Second, Fermat’s Enigma really isn’t a book about math so much as it is a book about determination and history. Third, it’s only a three hundred page book.

For those who may not be familiar with Fermat’s Last Theorem, it is one of the most famous problems in the history of mathematics. Many incredibly smart mathematicians worked on it and failed to solve it. Eventually, it was solved in a truly extraordinary fashion by Sir Andrew Wiles, who worked in isolation on the proof for seven years and then had to endure another year working to patch a flaw in the proof with the intense heat of the international spotlight on him.

Probably the most amazing thing about Fermat’s Last Theorem is that it was so simple to explain. The Pythagorean Theorem states that the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle squared equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It’s a formula usually written as: x^2 + y^2 = z^2. Fermat’s Last Theorem states that this formula doesn’t have any non-zero whole number solutions for powers larger than two. More formally x^n + y^n = z^n where a, b, and c are whole numbers doesn’t hold for n > 2. Sounds pretty basic, and yet it took over 350 years to solve.

The book is made of two parts. First, it is part history of the problem and people who attempted to solve it. Second, it is part inspirationaly story of determination. The characters in the book are larger than life. There are some incredibly strange confluences of events that affected the people who were involved in Fermat’s Last Theorem. In particular, I thought the story of Sophie Germain was quite moving. I also found it personally amusing that the book discussed the Königsburg bridge problem since it was covered pretty early on in my Graph Theory course this semester.

Overall, I highly recommend the book to anyone who has a passing interest in mathematics or history. There’s plenty to go around. If you loved the book or the movie A Beautiful Mind, then you should not pass on this book! Of course, if you simply have something against reading, you can watch the PBS show about the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem called The Proof, but really, the book is short and exceedingly good.

I am beginning to slowly comprehend the extent to which Randy Pausch is sneaky smart. Maybe. I honestly don’t know, but he’s absolutely got me enthralled in a riddle.

If you don’t know who Randy Pausch is or you haven’t already read my previous posts about Dr. Pausch’s “Last Lecture” and about his Time Management Talk I would recommend you at least read those posts to fully appreciate this enigma.

Now, there’s only one truly important item in this post and it’s not the riddle. The riddle is amusing and I’ll discuss it in a bit, but I want the focus of this post to be clear.

I consider myself a rather introspective person and as a result I’m always trying to improve my abilities by setting aside a little time to think about my approach to things. It seems like a natural extension to my engineering instincts to look for a way to “engineer” the way I get things done. In that spirit, I first watched Dr. Pausch’s Time Management Talk about a month ago on the hunch that he was an excellent presenter for the “Last Lecture” and I thought it might carry over into his time management talk.

I was impressed enough to add it to my blog, which was not something I did for any of the previous time management techniques I have tried with varying degrees of success. I didn’t have a particular reason except that the field of personal productivity is, well, personal. There are a lot of different approaches because there are a lot of different people, and I figure what worked for me might not work for very many others. I once heard or read (I can’t remember where, but I think it was Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk) that the art of time management was essentially “Advanced Common Sense,” which is the best three word description I could give to Dr. Pausch’s talk. So I posted it.

I can’t impress upon you strongly enough that even if you saw the previous Time Management Talk I linked, you should watch the new version. It has been updated after ten years of practice, insight and feedback and I guarantee you the return on investment in watching the talk is worthwhile. In short, it is fantastic. I have embedded if you want to watch it right now or you can find it online here and watch it when you have an hour. Please set aside some time to watch this video. It is the best thing you can find in this post.

Now with the really important stuff covered, I can delve into the riddle. When I finished watching the original time management talk I thought to myself that I would try to implement a few pieces of it for a month and then take stock to see how it worked out. I was able to do some of it exceedingly well, and I was unable to do some of it at all. That’s sort of the point though. If you make incremental improvements you’ll eventually become fantastic at managing your time.

Fast forward to today. It’s “dead week” here at NCSU, which has traditionally been one of the most hectic weeks of the year, both for me and for many other students, in terms of time management.

(Are you ready for the riddle yet?)

I got an email from Randy Pausch to notify me of the updated version of the talk and compliment me on a couple of posts.

First, I need to tip my hat to Randy for the heads up and for the lecture. The new lecture should be required viewing for, at the very least, all graduate students.

My initial thought upon seeing the email was that someone was using his address to spam people in the hopes that they would read it, but once I read the email I was utterly blown away to find that (it appears) he actually emailed me. I mean, how freaking cool is that?? Of course, when I really thought about about it I found some serious weirdnesses. Here’s a brief list:

1. The fact that it had been almost exactly a month when he contacted me, which was the deadline I set for myself to review how some of his techniques worked out, was eerie coincidence.
2. Despite what some may claim, the path to fame and fortune is not to create a blog. I don’t get gobs of fan mail complimenting me for my blog posts, so getting an email from a recognized expert about something I posted on my blog is highly unusual and arguably a first for me.
3. I’m a computer science graduate student. I spend much of my time trying to get useful information out of computer science professors, so getting an unsolicited email with useful information from a computer science professor is highly unusual and absolutely a first for me.
4. If there is humor in extremes, the fact that Randy Pausch emailed me about my blog is comedic gold. The readership of my blog is pretty small. I am pretty sure the list of people who *don’t* read my blog includes my own mother and my PhD adviser. The exposure that Randy Pausch’s site and talks have deservedly earned is enormous. His story has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and Oprah.
5. While watching the new version of the talk, around minute 52, the camera pans into the crowd and lands on Mark Sherriff, a fun-loving recent PhD graduate of NCSU’s Computer Science Department now a professor at the University of Virginia. I worked in the lab with Mark over the summer. I was at a party with him last Friday night. He did not mention the talk to me and yet Randy Pausch did!

I could continue with this list, but I think I will move on to the riddle: First, how? How did he find my blog post on the topic? Second, why? Why email me? I’m hardly all that important. Why email anyone? His press basically is writing itself. In fact, there’s already a book deal in the works.

Perhaps there is a sort of Randy-esque nature to it though. Each of Randy’s talks has a central theme: get more bang for your buck. You only have one spin on this merry-go-round, so you might as well go all out. Now, I have only had a day to think about his email and I haven’t met Randy, but maybe he came to the realization that people don’t affect real change by screaming into a megaphone so much as they can by whispering into someone’s ear. Maybe he figured that calling the national media doesn’t really change as many minds as simply sending out a few emails to a few bloggers.

I have been blessed to have many gifted teachers. All of the best teachers are able to teach you something without even making you aware that they are teaching you. Randy talks about this as a sort of a head fake in his “Last Lecture.” Maybe this was another head fake. Maybe I will never know the answer to the riddles of how or why he emailed me. Maybe I’m simply over-thinking this whole scenario. Maybe he sent out dozens or hundreds of emails like the one he sent me. Maybe it’s actually best that I don’t know the answers to this riddle because for a curious mind, there’s a magic in not knowing why things work the way they do. All I know for sure is that he really got me thinking about life and if there was any planning that went into this at all, it was sneaky, sneaky smart.

A few months ago, I made a few predictions about the CNN – YouTube Democratic Debate. This past week saw the CNN – YouTube Republican Debate actually come to pass. I have to say that I was disappointed. One of the predictions I made was that there would be 30,000 videos submitted. I was way, way off. There were about 5,000 videos submitted. This was in spite of the fact that the debate was delayed as the Republican candidates couldn’t all get on the same page about when to have the debate.

I also commented that I felt in the Democratic debate that the format hearkened to Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason in that it was an example of how the Internet can restore democracy in America. I’m not sure I feel quite so strongly about it now. They did have two thirds again as many videos submitted, so the format was obviously popular and growing in popularity. However, since the folks at CNN were picking the videos to use, there’s still a lot of corporate influence on the actual content used. I think it’s a step in the right direction, but certainly not as big of one as I felt it was after the first debate.

As for the actual debate, I was again disappointed. I wanted to see a question about healthcare, but there wasn’t one. I wanted to see a question about public education, but the only education question was about college tuition. I wanted to see the questions make a distinction between themselves and George W. Bush, but there really wasn’t a whole lot of that either. The best question in my opinion was about the national debt:

Unfortunately, later in the debate there was a very similar question about repaying Social Security. I thought that one of these questions should really have been replaced with something else – healthcare, the environment, electronic voting, privacy, whatever. There were a lot of things that weren’t covered.

I still like the idea of the debates. The format is he best one we have these days (though it doesn’t replace actively researching a candidate’s positions yourself…). However, we could make a few changes that would improve it. I would introduce a voting system that would allow people to vote on a few questions to make sure they were included. I would also try to eliminate questions that are only answered by one candidate. I think the kinds of things that should be asked are the kinds of things that require debate, not the kinds of things that can be handled in an interview.