Yesterday, we flew back from Toronto. The flight was quite pleasant: either the airline or the design of the plane provides a great deal of legroom, even in ordinary "hospitality class" seats. And the movie was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I must say that seeing it for the third time only made me want to see it a fourth time, and on a slightly larger screen than the twelve inch LCD that drops from the ceiling in the plane.

The greatest moment of the flight, however, certainly one of my all-time great moments in flying, came after we arrived. We had checked our bags for convenience. And when we got to the carousel at our destination, my bag was the very first to come around the bend. I had been chosen to receive this precious gift, this friendly nudge that sent me to the front of the line. I felt like I had won the lottery.

Later on, I checked the 6/49 tickets I bought in Toronto and discovered that I had not, in fact, won the lottery. But all the same, fate had found some small way to smile upon me that day.

In case you didn't notice, it had been a while since I last wrote anything here. I feel righteous again after the last two posts, but the fact is that I've continued to be very productive in my research, which gets in the way of my journaling. I'm not complaining, though I would like to make the journaling process a more integral part of my daily routine so that it can't so easily slip off my radar for six days.

I also wanted to warn my readers (both of you) that the dry spell isn't over yet. I'll be on vacation until the end of the week, and it's unlikely that I'll be posting anything between now and then (though it is possible). Mind you, I think that everyone who reads this already knows that I'm going on vacation. For those of you whose towns I'm visiting, I look forward to seeing you all again! For the rest of you, I'll see you in the not-too-distant future.

Have you heard of Mike Daisey? If you haven't, you probably will soon. Mike spent a few years working at Amazon.com, wrapped (rapt?) up in its corporate culture. He escaped with his life, and (eventually) his self-respect. He turned his experiences there and reflections on the dotcom world into a one-man show in Seattle, 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com. The show, which opened the day after Mike's NDA expired, lays bare the inner workings of the Amazon juggernaut, and expresses the complete lack of meaning mike found in riding the crest of the dotcom wave. Naturally, Amazon has made no public, self-incriminating attempt to block or defame 21 Dog Years (though there are rumours of grumbling among the executives), and the show has experienced wild success in Seattle. A front page story in the New York Times business section even used video shot by Mike in Amazon headquarters to attempt to predict their future business decisions.

But the best part, the part that makes this a Tale of Deep Irony, the part that appeals to my obsessive search for self-reference, is yet to come. You see, earlier this year, Mike signed a book deal. He's writing the book of 21 Dog Years, to be published in 2002. The timing is perfect, and by all accounts this book should be a bestseller, propelling Mike into much-deserved nationwide success. And here's the problem: what does Amazon.com do when this book is published? Do they refuse to offer the book on their website? Well, they can't refuse; they have to sell it. But does an Amazon staffmember review it? Do they deliberately not review it? Do they advertise it on their front page? If I look up a different corporate exposé, such as Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, will Amazon tell me that I might also enjoy this book? If many Amazon employees buy the book, will their site proclaim that it's popular in that group?

The outcome of this self-reference is that Amazon.com loses no matter what. They have to tread very lightly. If they block any of their usual features for this book, it'll be noticed and they will be mocked. And so they are forced instead to openly sell a book that mocks them. I can't wait to see how this one plays out.

Last weekend, I saw an excellent concert by folk singer Cheryl Wheeler. She was quite accurately described by friends: "she looks dumpy, talks like a truck driver, and sings like a nightingale". And even that fails to capture the whole experience, her self-deprecating yet compelling stage presence, her tremendous songs.

One of her songs, which I know I've heard somewhere before, is called "If It Were Up to Me". It's about the Jonesboro school shooting, though its message certainly applies to school shootings in general. The song is a list of excuses used to explain why these things happen ("...Maybe it's the magazines, maybe it's the internet / Maybe it's the lottery, maybe it's the immigrants..."), ending with a harsh punchline: "...but I know one thing / If it were up to me, I'd take away the guns."

Apparently, this seemingly obvious advice is lost on many Americans. To wit, the wife of one of the teachers killed at Columbine just launched a class-action lawsuit. She's suing a large collection of media companies, centered upon video game makers (surprisingly, video games aren't mentioned explicitly in Cheryl Wheeler's song). Obviously, video games cause school shootings, and so video game makers should be forced to pay up the five billion dollars in damages being sought by the teacher's wife.

Last time I checked, video games didn't come packaged with guns. Last time I checked, deranged students weren't killing their peers with CD-ROMs. I'm not aware of the statistics on school shootings caused by video game players who don't have access to guns, but I suspect the numbers are lower. But in the United States, they can't interfere with the long armed-and-dangerous tradition, and so they must find other places to lay blame. Video games are, I suppose, an easy target. Certainly nobody would be willing to place the blame on the cumulative idiocy of American culture. After all, who would you sue?

Today, thingo graduated into the world of big-time websites by receiving its first piece of spam email. I checked the thingo inbox this morning and discovered a message asking me if all my laser printer toner supplies were being looked after. I didn't read further (my printer supplies are well looked after, thank you) but I suspect I was to be offered a deal of refilled toner cartridges.

I suppose it's inevitable that ultimately, every email address should become plagued by the social disease of spam. Even so, it's interesting to contemplate how this might have come about for thingo. After all, I never used this email address to sign up for any online services (the most common way your address is sold to the spammongers). That means a robot must have found my page through a search of the web, and extracted my email address from the contents of the page. Which is also impressive, since very few other pages link to this page. Alas, there are legions of tireless robots out there constantly on the hunt for email addresses. I can only hold them off for so long.

Well, at least it's an ad for toner cartridges. The account provided to me by my ISP is subject to a daily barrage of black market Viagra offers.

Right now, as I write this, I am in The Zone. In the bit of research I'm currently doing, I reached the point where all the boring hard stuff pays off and there's a bunch of cool easy stuff that can be done rapidly afterwards. The low-level algorithms work, so lots of great new results quickly come together. It's like a metaphor I read once about mathematical discovery: you're groping around in a dark room. You can get a very vague sense of what's there by feeling for furniture. But eventually your hand finds the light switch. In a flash, a panorama of new ideas is available to you. That's the stage I'm at right now, gobbling up the new ideas as quickly as I can.

Unfortunately, The Zone desires to perpetuate itself. I really need to stop now for the day. I'll probably jump out of bed tomorrow morning to get as much done as possible before other priorities intrude. Furthermore, as you may have noticed, The Zone makes good writing difficult. Thoughts percolate about and refuse to form an orderly line. A great mental state for coding, not so much for exposition or editing. But I did want to get something down on thingo in case I don't have the time over the next few days. And so here is my in-The-Zone offering.

When thingo updates slow to a crawl, you should interpret it as good news. It means that enough other stuff has picked up in the rest of my life that I have less time to sit down and record my musings. Okay, sometimes the slow pace simply means that nothing worth reporting is going on in my life. But this past week has been more busy than boring. I'm leaving shortly for dinner out and Citizen Kane at a friend's house, so I don't have time to work through my backlog of ideas for new entries. Maybe I'll take a crack at them tomorrow in between visits to the laundry room.

Suffice it to say that I've had a busy and productive week. I made progress in my research and I cleared a little bit of the mist from my nebulous future. I also helped the department by hosting a faculty applicant, and was culinarily rewarded for my assistance. I even sent off my tax return (though since my father is an accountant, this involved nothing more than signing, dating and mailing it). And I flossed! Jeez, a couple more weeks like this and I'll have a hard time convincing people that I'm as lazy as I am. Maybe it's time to get cable TV again...

Last week, I won the lottery. Twenty-seven big ones (dollars, that is).

I'm not sure what caused me to buy the ticket. On Tuesday, I was walking over to the coffee shop, which is right across the street from a convenience store. The jackpot wasn't unusually high and I was feeling neither poor nor lucky. Yet on a whim, I ran in and picked up a ticket. Thursday I grabbed the results and discovered to my amazement that I had matched four numbers (a feat that pays off better in Canada, but oh well). No matter how many times I rechecked the ticket, I could not will five or six numbers to match, and so I went later to a gas station and claimed my twenty-seven dollar prize. Well, to come clean, I claimed twenty-five dollars and fresh tickets, deciding to make good on my original decision to invest two dollars in the lottery.

I used to buy lottery tickets habitually, fully aware of the abysmal odds but willing to suspend that awareness as necessary. I clearly remember me and Arj, standing outside the Marché de l'Ouest, trying to find the right combination of scratching implement, scratching order, incantations, and mystic dances that would make the scratch tickets pay off as we knew they ought to. I remember debating which numbers would make the best choices for 6/49. Dates were great, but couldn't be used to obtain values greater than 31.

I no longer play the lottery with any kind of regularity. I bought state lotto tickets here for the first time earlier this year, when the unusually large jackpot made headlines. I still buy 6/49 and scratch tickets when I'm back in Canada on vacation, more out of a sense of nostalgia than an expectation of wealth. And of course, I invest in stocks listed on the NASDAQ, which I have come to realize costs more and (seemingly) offers a lower return on one's investment.

I guess I should believe that the wisdom I have earned in adulthood has allowed me to see the pointlessness of pursuing the lottery dream. I should claim to regard the lottery as nothing more than a "stupid tax", as Nath calls it. Instead, I think I have turned towards a more romantic view of the whole enterprise, a view that permits me to play in moderation. Because, you see, the lottery is a cheap form of entertainment. The entertainment is not in the game itself, but in buying the ticket, in holding it in your hand, in carrying it around in your pocket. I no longer have a realistic expectation of winning, but that doesn't matter -- I'm playing for the unrealistic expectation, the fairy tale I get to tell myself during the interval between the purchase and the drawing. It's entertaining precisely because it isn't realistic. The person who wins with the ticket I'm holding would no longer be me. The present me has no particular need for that much money anyway, but he can enjoy the fiction of it for its own sake. It's a grand show, and the whole thing costs a couple of bucks. Cheaper than a cappuccino and less effort than a stock option. And much lower stress than the NASDAQ.

For the first four months of thingo's existence, I resisted the temptation to monitor visits to the site. This sort of tracking is actually very easy if you know how to write scripts. When you load this web page, a script is run. Part of the input to that script is the address of the visitor's machine and its name (if it has one). If you were brought here by clicking on a link on another page, the URL of that page is also sent to me. I can track visits simply by writing that information to a file when I get it.

I resisted out of some sense of purity and virtue. Before I started, I resolved that thingo's goal would be my own personal expression and nothing else. I would not try to attract attention or drag people to my site. I wouldn't advertise, though if I had some specific reason to tell a person to visit the site, I would tell them. And I certainly wouldn't gather statistics about hits as a source of validation.

I'm not trying to be righteous. I don't disparage this behaviour in others. But for me, it could be the start of a dangerous transition. Yes, I want this site to be public -- my writing is improved by the perception that there's an audience reading over my shoulder. But the process is more valid when that audience is an abstract entity, an reflection of my own internal critic. Knowing my audience too personally conditions me to write for them, to keep them entertained; suddenly I'm no longer writing for its own sake.

Despite these misgivings, last week I began experimentally monitoring visits to thingo. The experience was more or less as I had imagined it would be. I felt rewarded when a sequence of hits was registered. I looked for and recognized the visits of friends and family from their machine names. There were very few surprise visitors, although I was surprised to see that thingo entries are indexed with several search engines -- strangers are finding the site by searching on phrases that occur in old entries!

But the negative aspects of monitoring were just as quick in presenting themselves. I began to think about how to attract more visitors. Again I contemplated registering at an online diary index in order to advertise. And I could see that many of you were visiting every morning, only to discover the same old thingo you had seen the day before. All of a sudden I was burdened in the morning with the weight of your collective disappointment, causing me to rack my brains for a new entry. Obviously, none of you had done anything differently, and I hadn't changed my thingo habits. But the knowledge that hits were silently being recorded and tallied created a sense of urgency that I can just as soon live without. It makes the audience just a little bit too real.

So after less than a week, I declare the experiment ended. I'm turning off the monitoring tool (there -- I just did). I'm sure I'll turn it on again periodically, just to get a general sense of the daily business thingo receives. That sort of information can help me tune the site and make it less of a burden on my generous hosts. Paradoxically, I may yet choose to advertise thingo and draw strangers here. I'm still not interested in collecting them like notches in my virtual belt. Rather, more visits from strangers would perforce render the audience more abstract, blurring away my knowledge of you as individuals. A pure, abstract audience is the true Audience of thingo, and my source of inspiration.

Returning momentarily to the subject of movies and Russell Crowe, I heard an interesting tidbit of news the other day. Crowe was on the campus of Princeton University filming a new movie called A Beautiful Mind. A passing student tried to take his picture, and Crowe responded by flipping the bird at the student.

The "news" story itself is irrelevant. Celebrities pull this kind of crap all the time, and given what my father said about Crowe's attitude at the Oscars, we shouldn't be surprised at his behaviour. Much more interesting are the name of the movie and where it's being filmed.

In 1998 Sylvia Nasar's book A Beautiful Mind was published. It's the non-fiction biography of John Nash, a mathematician who made important contributions in many areas but is most well known for his work in game theory, which earned him the Nobel Prize for Economics. As Nash entered adulthood, his personality disintegrated and he became profoundly schizophrenic. If I recall correctly, he spent decades in and out of treatments and institutions, unable to exercise his considerable mathematical gifts. Later, in the seventies, he was known as a strange old man who haunted the corridors of Princeton's computer lab. Late in life, he finally conquered his illness and was able to accept his much-deserved prize with dignity. The book is wonderful. I recommend it and I thank whoever it was (Zac? Jamey? Brian?) that suggested I read it.

Could Crowe be playing Nash in a dramatization of A Beautiful Mind? The answer is yes. Checking out the Internet Movie Database, you can find an entry for this movie that resolves the issue. Even better, the entry claims that this movie will be directed by Ron Howard. This should be very, very interesting. I look forward to seeing whether Crowe can pull it off.

Gay marriage is now legal in the Netherlands. And I don't just mean legal in some teeth-grinding, barely tolerated, registered-domestic-partner North American sense. No, they changed the very definition of marriage to incorporate any combination of sexes. Right down to the dictionary. Gay couples can now have exactly the same rights as straight couples with regards to legal matters of partnership. And the new law was supported by three quarters of the Dutch population. It's wonderful to hear about some genuine progress once in a while.