Category Archives: Miscellany & Minutiæ

Hey look, new fonts

I’m sure by the time you read this, 5 years from now, I will have changed things 8 to 10 times since writing this, but as of right now… hey, look. Same old site design, but with new fonts!

One new font, actually: Work Sans, in three weights. It’s a great new, no-nonsense but aesthetically pleasing sans serif font that is free which makes it extra nice. (Though I do not begrudge font designers the right to compensation for their work.)

This one initially got my attention by way of a blog post by the great Khoi Vinh. I figured, if he likes it, it’s worth noting.

What hill?

I turn 40 next week. “Over the hill” as they say. For someone who had their first existential crisis at age 5, a milestone like this is huge. Bigger than I want it to be. But with age comes wisdom, and my angst has definitely mellowed.

25 hit me like a freight train. Fortunately I was not literally hit by a freight train, as that is just the kind of untimely end I have long feared most. But I was not expecting turning 25 to trigger the kind of fear and dread I had first felt on a dark night when the raspy voice of death first whispered in my ear as a kindergartener, and had not really felt that much since.

For several months after I turned 25 I felt traumatized by death’s unwelcome return. Eventually I began to develop a new perspective on mortality, and I was at peace with the finiteness of my existence for another 15 years.

But now as 40 approaches I once again find myself lying awake in bed at night, staring into the darkness, grasping in the darkness, feeling each second slip past, gone forever, one fewer remaining between this moment and the last.

As I said, my angst has mellowed. It’s not what it was 15 or 35 years ago. But what it lacks in harshness it makes up for in urgency. It used to be easy to look ahead into the vast distance of my life, recognize that the end was out there… somewhere… and fear it but still feel somehow immortal. (“Learning that we’re only immortal for a limited time,” as Neil Peart wrote in the lyrics to the Rush song “Dreamline.”) But now it feels — it is — closer, more imminent.

The average male life expectancy in the United States is 78 years, which means that, statistically speaking, I’m probably more than halfway to the end. Under the best of circumstances I may live more than another 40 years, but I might suffer disease or infirmity for a large portion of that time. Or, I might die in an accident or of a disease at some point within the next 20 to 30 years. I might die tomorrow. That’s always been true, of course, and in some ways I suppose your chance of dying in an accidental death probably bottoms out around 40 — you’re old enough to avoid Darwin Awards-style poor choices, but young enough to still have your wits and your agility.

The biggest thing I am starting to learn as I approach 40 that is helping me cope with this kind of existential downward spiral is a growing understanding of selflessness. I have always been pretty self-centered, I can admit. But when you’ve lived for four decades you do start, a little bit, to see an arc of time greater than the span of your own existence. (Or, if you’re not a selfish jerk like I am, you’ve probably seen things that way for a long time.) You finally start to really get that it’s not all about you, that you’re lucky to have the time you have, and then you just need to get out of the way for the next generation.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t want to relish every moment I have before they’re gone.

Last, This, Next

As I was folding a week’s subset of my embarrassingly large collection of printed t-shirts, I reflected momentarily on the history of my pixelated Minnesota t-shirt. I bought that t-shirt last summer and wore it each time I went to the Minnesota State Fair last year, as my symbol of “Minnesota pride”.

Then I started thinking about sharing this story, and about referring to the Minnesota State Fair that took place in 2013 as the “last” Minnesota State Fair, and how the one that will take place “this” year, in 2014, is “this” State Fair, and so on.

Frequently conversations between SLP and me have resulted in confusion based on the different possible interpretations of “last”, “this” and “next” when referring to days, weeks, months, years or events. I tend to use “this” when I’m referring to any unit of time that occurs within the same larger unit of time, whether before or after the current one, although I may be likely to omit “this”.

For example, today is Thursday. The Super Bowl (or, if you prefer, the Suberb Owl) is happening in 3 days. It’s happening “this Sunday”. But what if today was (or is it “were”? I never get that right, either) already “Superb Owl Sunday” and I was (“were”?) talking about the 5K race I’m running in 7 days later? “This” Saturday seems a bit far off in that case. But “next” Saturday doesn’t feel right to me either. Or does it? Is it better for “next” Saturday to refer to a day that’s 6 days away, or 13?

As for my confusion with SLP, the fact that she lived her life on the September-to-June academic calendar for much longer than I did only exacerbated the situation. I’ve always been a stickler (to the point of ridiculousness) for precision in dates. The first day out of school isn’t the beginning of summer; the solstice is. The first day back in school isn’t the beginning of fall; the equinox is. And the first day back in school in late August or early September most definitely is not the beginning of the new year. (Although yes, Rosh Hashanah usually does occur in September so depending on the calendar you use, there’s an argument to be made.)

Ironically, it was only after SLP stopped organizing her life around the academic year that I embraced calling any of the days in early-to-mid June when our kids are out of school (but which are still technically in spring) “summer”, but I will never give up the idea that “this year” refers to the 4-digit number starting with a “2” that comes at the end of the current date. “This year,” to me, means January 1 to December 31. Period.

But what do I mean when I say “this winter”? Sure, winter technically only starts about 10 days before the new year, so it’s almost entirely in 2014. But let’s be honest. In Minnesota, “winter” usually starts in early December, or sometimes as early as October. By my logic, “winter” in Minnesota begins on whatever day snow falls and doesn’t melt away. We had a few light snows in November, but “this winter” began on December 2, 2013.

My point is: language is fuzzy. Assigning vague labels like “last”, “this” and “next” to our days and events relies on a great deal of tacit agreement between ourselves over meaning. This particular quirk of our language has been causing me trouble since I was a kid. Back then I had a lot of time, sitting around bored in school (which I didn’t even realize was the case until much later in life), to ponder and obsess over and get annoyed by things like this. I was trying to create in my mind a world of precision and clarity that didn’t, and couldn’t, exist. Our minds don’t work that way, the world doesn’t work that way, and language, a product of our minds used to help us understand and communicate with each other about the world, necessarily can’t work that way.

I didn’t understand that then, and I only barely do now. Each of us carries around an entire universe in our mind. It’s built on a foundation laid by our genes and constructed around our experiences — and our interpretations of those experiences. Our language can only achieve an approximation of a fraction of that universe, and we have to rely on the assumption that our own version of the language we use is a close enough approximation of the same things in our own mental universe as the language, and the mental universe it represents, of the others around us.

It’s a wonder we can communicate at all.

From the Stupid PHP Tricks files: rounding numbers and creeping inaccuracy

This morning as I walked to the studio I was doing what geeks do best: pondering a slightly esoteric mathematical quandary.

Glass Half Full by S_novaIngraining the American spirit of optimism at a young age, and under dubious circumstances, our schools always taught rounding numbers in a peculiar way. You always round your decimal values to the nearest integer. That part makes sense. But what if the decimal is .5 — exactly half? In my education, at least until late in high school (or was it college?), we were always taught to round up! The glass is half full. Optimism.

Eventually — far later than it should have been, I think — the concept was introduced that always rounding .5 up is not really that accurate, statistically speaking. It might be nice in the case of a single number to be an optimist and think a solid half is good as a whole, but in aggregate this thinking introduces a problem.

If you have a whole lot of numbers, and you’re always rounding your halves up, eventually your totals are going to be grossly inaccurate.

Of course, the same would happen if you were ever the pessimist and always rounded down.

The solution, I later learned, was to round halves up or down, depending upon the integer value that precedes them. Which way you go doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re consistent, but as it happens, I learned it as such: if the integer is odd, round up; if it is even, round down.

In my work, I write a lot of PHP code. Most of it is of the extremely practical variety; I’m building websites for clients, after all. But every once in a while I like to indulge my coding abilities in a bit of frivolous experimentation, and so today I produced a little PHP script that generates 10,000 random numbers between 1 and 100, with one decimal place, and then it shows the actual sum and average of those numbers, along with what you get as the sum and average if you go through all 10,000 numbers and round them to whole integers by the various methods described above. Try it for yourself!

Any time the rounded average is different from the “precise” (and I use that term somewhat loosely) average, it is displayed in red. Interestingly, and not at all surprisingly, when you always round halves in one direction or the other, at least one of those directions will (almost) always yield an incorrect average. Yet if you use the “even or odd” methods, both of those methods will almost always yield a correct average.

It’s all about the aggregate.