AgPerson

Longtime readers (err…and friends) probably are aware that one of my favoritest things in the world is fireworks. The fireworks I saw tonight are probably the best I have ever seen. Now, mind you, they weren’t as captivating as seeing fireworks at, oh, lets say seven years old up in Lake Arrowhead, but unfortunately (fortunately?) I’m not longer seven, so it’s gonna be hard to top that.

Tzalli and Adam were tasked with buying us a picnic, so they went to Victory and picked up a bag of tortilla chips and some orange juice. The hell? Last time they do the shopping…

Kelli, Dave, myself, and the two aforementioned bad shoppers then drove to Harvard Ave. and took the T to Copley. We staked out some real estate by the Charles at around 2ish. Dave went and picked up Amy for her day off from camp and they (eventually) returned. We all hung out, talked, read books, commented on the people, etc. until 9 or so, at which time Adam and Tzalli, with another burst of genius, picked us up and moved us down to another spot that was about half the size.

Eh, whatever. It was a better view of the sky. So we played some Taboo until the fireworks started. I don’t really know how to describe fireworks. This was a pretty long show with a lot of neat ones that I’ve never seen before, my favorite being (yeah, watch me try to describe this…) a rocket that launches with no trail, explodes into several large blobs of white specks while launching a bunch of little capsules, and then the capsules ignite into a whole bunch of small clusters of which pinpricks, lighting up the sky with a shower of sparks, kinda what I imagine the sky would look like with no atmosphere. Anyway, the fireworks show was awesome, the company was awesome, and good times were had by all.

Oh, and we celebrated the birth of America from the place where a lot of it happened, and all that. Patriotism, yay!

*Edit (6/15/05):* I am not the author of the above photograph, and do not own the rights to it. I didn’t have the right kind of camera back in July to take that photo, not to mention I’m probably not yet a good enough photographer to do it. Looking around online I cannot seem to find it anywhere, although I have a nagging suspicion that I may have appropriated it from the _Boston Globe_. Sorry for the confusion.

Yesterday I drove Kelli, Tzalli, and Aaron to Newport, Rhode Island, where we met up with Adam Batkin and saw a Ben Folds concert. The concert was in a stuffy tent by the harbor, but Mr. Folds was pretty exciting. Having only heard a few of his songs before, I found the whole thing enjoyable, except for the heat and lack of air. We had a nice Shabbat dinner afterwards and then slept in an equally warm and humid house. Well, basically, the whole area was a little warm and humid, but this is New England, so it’s not unexpected.

This morning I awoke early and after sitting around and then browsing the web for a while decided to go for a wander before breakfast. I took some pictures (hopefully to be posted soon) and saw some sights. Came back for a game of “Apples To Apples” followed by a yummy lunch and some more wandering, this time with ice cream! Newport is a fairly small town, with basically every house marked as a historic landmark, and somewhat too much congestion. The parts we walked through were quaint and old but not necessarily entirely upscale, and the appearance of scantily clad beachgoers and noisy motorcyclists did not do much to help the scene. The narrow streets had too many cars and too many people. This is a town that would work well with Segways.

That said, I enjoyed the experience a lot and had fun in the town and with the people. We didn’t really do much today because of Shabbat but did try to get to a showing of Spider-Man 2 at night, however we didn’t get to the theater in time. Probably for the best, since we have to get up early tomorrow to go have some fun in Boston and find a place for fireworks. Six or eight hours of sitting on the grass would probably work better with a picnic packed, but owing to us having been out of town that might prove difficult. Also, I’m out of clothes and need to do wash, pack for the NY trip, etc., and I’m not sure when that can all happen. So this has been and will continue to be an exciting and eventful weekend. 🙂

I remember back in high school myself and many others would often interrogate our teachers about the applicability of what we were learning to “real life,” meaning our lives after high school. I’ll leave aside many years of English class for this entry and focus on mathematics.

The problem was that some teachers, well, all of them, actually, felt it important to at least try to justify to us the use of math in life, perhaps out of fear that enough of this sort of sentiment would get their budgets cut, or whatever. The examples they and the text books came up with were always highly contrived and not very convincing. Things like, well, one day you might need to build a roof, and then you’ll want to know trigonometry, or whatever. Truth is that, unfortunately, most of us don’t build roofs.

Of course the real reason behind the teaching of math in publich schools, or at least what should be the reason behind it, is twofold:

1. Mathematics teaches critical thinking and reasoning skills that will be useful for our entire lives. Math teaches logic, good decision making, etc. Formal proofs show clearly cause and effect, inferance, etc. Math helps us to understand structure. Math helps us understand rules. And society likes rules.
2. Math is beautiful. There is no getting around this. Math distills down the amazing world around us into something rational and expressable. Math is just a really amazing wonderful thing. Geometry is damn cool. Algebra rocks. Calculus, oh man, what can I say.

Is it so wrong to learn something just so that you know it? Is it so bad to teach people things just because they are interesting, inspiring, powerful?

That said, I’m making no excuses for the public school system. Fact remains that I love Calculus to death but continue to be dreadful at it. I guess some of us just aren’t cut out for that sort of thing.

I guess its the mark of a good writer that, five hundred and eighty odd pages into a book, in the space of about three pages he can turn you from loving a character to loathing him, without changing the nature of the character in any way.

Today at their Worldwide Developers Conference Apple previewed their new version of Mac OS X, named “Tiger”, which will be released in the next 6 or maybe 9 months. It looks pretty spiffy, with a slightly tweaked look, some updates, and some nice new tools. Unfortunately, the two coolest tools introducted in Tiger look to be blatant rip-offs of established 3rd party programs.

Apple’s Dashboard software displays “widgets,” which are basically nifty little utilities written in JavaScript. Included widgets are a datebook, stock ticker, calculator, address book, clock, and a few others. This is pretty cool, unfortunately it is very similar, down to the scripting language and the nomenclature, to the wonderful Konfabulator. Their home page says “Cupertino, start your photocopiers,” and I think they have a right to be angry. Apple didn’t offer to buy their great existing software, but simply stole the concept and re-wrote it without giving them any credit (or money).

The same seems to be true for Apple’s new Spotlight feature, which pops out of the top menu bar and allow for quick and easy searching and, one would assume, program launching, because that’s basically what LaunchBar does, another tool that I love, and that I doubt was given any money (or notice) from Apple.

Really Apple, I expected better from you. If others were to do what you’ve done, you’d take them to court. But when its a little developer, you just steal, steal away. This is pretty sad behavior, more befitting Microsoft then such an innovative computer company.