Author: Alesh Houdek

Why?

So, earlier in my high school career I’d done pretty well at chemistry and AP physics, so in the 12th grade I enrolled in the AP chemistry class. Well. I was out of my depth in a way I’ve seldom been since, and I transferred out of that class after the first week, and been generally humbled the memory of that week since.

I forget the teacher’s name, but there were two funny things that he’d say that have stuck with me. First, when someone got a correct answer, he’d tell them they probably made two mistakes. But even better was his rule that “we don’t answer questions that begin with the word ‘why.’”

Which after you think about it makes perfect sense in chemistry — atoms and molecules do what they do; to get into the reasons is to dive into a realm (particle physics) that is much more technical and difficult than chemistry when it’s understood at all, which often it is not.

But the truth is that “why?” is a funny question anytime. Contemporary psychology shows us that we rarely understand our own motivations for our actions, so even asking “why did you do that?” is an invitation to fabrication.

Well, earlier today Kottke posted Richard Feyman’s explanation for why trains stay on tracks (it ain’t what you think!), and I started clicking around watching all the other Feyman videos on YouTube, until I stumbled across one where the interviewer asks Feyman why magnets attract each other, sending him into a prodigious rant about why we don’t answer questions that begind with the word ‘why’!:

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Twelve virtues of rationality

“It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study. The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.”

— From Eliezer Yudkowsky’s twelve virtues of rationality (check out #12 — it makes no rational fucking sense!).

Teach statistics

Teach statistics: Arthur Benjamin argues that there is a fundamental re-orientation necessary in the way we teach math. Currently, the classes students take through middle and high school are like a ladder, each one building on the previous, with the ultimate apex being calculus (“the laws of nature are written in the language of calculus”). But for today’s world, what should be at that apex is statistics. Calculus is essential to certain branches of engineering and science, but statistics would be helpful in understanding our information culture for the average person on a day-to-day basis — a society would be improved by having a citizenship that is comfortable with the language of statistics. I love this idea.

Weekendly clickables XII

Nikon F3

Nikon F3 The F3 is Nikon’s top professional camera from the 1980s. I picked one up on ebay recently, mainly because of how absurdly inexpensive they’ve gotten. It was only a couple of years ago that they routinely sold for $500. But despite a resurgent interest in 35mm film equipment from some quarters, I was able to get this one for $130. A perfect little 50mm f/1.8 will set you back another $50 or so, or you can go the way I’m doing, and get top of the line lenses for completely absurd prices (this 180mm f/2.8 cost $127; similarly performing modern lenses cost ten times that).

On the minus side you’re going to be spending money buying and developing film. This runs about a dollar per every three or four shots. (Drop your film at any drugstore, and they’ll develop it and burn you a CD in an hour, which you can then load into your computer just like any digital camera.) Then there’s the matter of focusing, which if a big deal to adjust to if you’ve been shooting with digital cameras.

But as in the year with a Leica, this way of making pictures is revelatory. The F3 has aperture-priority automatic exposure, which means that you set the aperture on the lens, and the camera comes up with a shutter speed (of course you can also shoot in manual mode, where the shutter speed is just a recommendation). In other words, you have hands-on control of the basic elements of what the camera is doing. Same difference as driving a car with manual transmitting — it may not be easier, but it is better, in a way.

The other big benefit is the pleasure of using something that is the best of its kind. You can see that my F3 is pretty well beat up, yet it works more solidly then any of my digital cameras. Then there’s the magical quality of film images. Even scanned and seen on screen, there is something unmistakeably analog and delicious about them.