Mathematics After The Fall

I got my XO laptop from One Laptop per Child yesterday. It’s really cute. Unfortunately, it takes a little work to connect to an Airport network, and the instructions on The Getting Started page aren’t great. Until they get improved, here’s what I did.

After opening the laptop (you need to turn the antenna pretty far around to get space to open the case), go to the neighborhood screen. It’s the one with a circle of eight circles; you can push the button on the top row of the keyboard. If you have an open network. Just find your network, click on the circle, and wait 10-15 seconds until the outside ring turns white.

Assuming you have security, the ring will not turn white; you’ll have to enter your passcode first. You need to know the type of security. Airport networks can have WEP or WPA. If you don’t know, there are lots of ways to check. I use the widget Air Traffic Control, which is also good to find networks on a Mac. If you have WEP, you’ll need to enter the hex code. There are two options to get the hex code. If you have AirPort Utility and the password for the base station, you can start AirPort Utility. Then, select your base station and click on Manual Setup. Then, on the Base Station Menu, select “Equivalent Network Password”. If you just have the password, go to Core Coding’s page to enter the password and get the hex code. This is a DIFFERENT link than the one on laptop.org’s page; their link is for WPA. Core Coding will give you two possible keys, one for non apple computers and one for apple computers. You, of course, want the Apple password.

[This section was expanded on 21 December. Hopefully it's a little clearer.]

Once you get the password, you’ll have to enter the password each time you start the XO and connect. The XO does not save the password. When the password box appears, if you have WEP, the top drop down box will be called “Key Type”, and the option “Passphrase (128-bit)” will be selected. For Key Type, choose “Hex (40/128 bit)”. The bottom box, below the white space to enter digits, is called “Authentication Type”. Instead of “Open System”, which is there, Choose “Shared Key.” If you have different options in the drop down boxes, you have WPA, not WEP. These instructions won’t work.

In the white space, enter all the numbers and letters, then click OK. You should have either 10 or 26 characters, because your WEP password should be either 5 or 13 characters. The OK button will not light up unless you have 10 or 26 entered. The inner circle will blink three to five times, then the inner circle will become solid and the outer circle white. You’re connected!

Also, you may have an extra level of security called a MAC address. If you do, go to OLPC’s question page and search for “airport”. The information is near the bottom of the page. WPA appears more difficult, because as the page states, the connection is not automatic. If I get that going, or find a good set of directions, I’ll post again.

Here are two book reviews. Neither book is particularly great, terrible, or long, so I’ll just combine them into one post in my reading log.

The oldest published is Liar’s Poker, written by Michael Lewis in the late 1980s. It’s one of the best stories of Wall Street in the 1980s, when the boom began and avarice became normal. Wall Street, Barbarians at the Gate, then this. Mr. Lewis is a good writer, even though he’s a Princeton man. I can’t quote much from this text, though, because it’s colorful and vulgar. So is the Wikipedia summary. The book contains profanity because traders were profane people, in both the non-sacred and language senses. From the people I knew who went into trading in the late 1990s, traders are still profane people.

Mr. Lewis does a good job of describing the situation as it existed. The new traders in his training class were scourges, the stuff of teacher nightmares. One of the bad signs for a company is when employees don’t care, and these men (and a few women) didn’t care. Eventually, that leads to trouble. Unfortunately for my sense of righteousness, that trouble comes after they have received - not earned - piles of money. I had a chance at that. Instead of that life, I sit here in a $20 floor chair from Target. And it’s partially broken. I can always wonder. Overall, this is a quality book, but not life-changing. It gets a 3 out of 5.

Today’s other book is Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert of danielgilbert.com. (The book has its own site.) He and I both have blogs.  But he’s been on the Colbert Report and I have not, so he’s ahead. Plus, he’s a full professor at my alma mater, while I’m an assistant professor at a small school in Louisville; he’s ahead there too.

The book summarizes lots of research on how we humans imagine the future. Not surprisingly, we make errors, particularly on what makes us happy. We add details to complete memories, but often those details are not what happened. We rely heavily on current mood, meaning the future and past look more like the present than they will or did. Initial impressions matter too much, and final rememberances hold in the long time. A pattern of improvement makes a situation appear better; people often prefer a worse situation overall that improves to a constant one. There are lots of sources, and lots of studies, and lots of tales. I recognized one of the studies, because I met the author and some of the workers while at Chicago. Social psychology has many, many results to share, thanks in large part to a captive test pool of undergraduate students.

Dr. Gilbert has a good plan. He even knows enough to include some diagrams to break up the semi-academic text. As I’ve gotten more into education, and the learning styles of students, I have increased my appreciation of the visual. Visual learning differs from verbal; people trying to inform should use both. Unfortunately, the images appear not often enough, and I had trouble slogging through some chapters. And I’m an academic! Scholarly journals have almost no white space or pictures, because every page costs money. On the other hand, in a public book pages are relatively cheap. This book cries out for better pacing. It makes it less than great.

There’s a larger problem beyond pacing. Stumbling on Happiness suffers from an world-weary author. This book needs a positive tone, a positive approach, It’s about happiness, after all. Instead, Dr. Gilbert is smarky, a modern cynic. Though he wrote science fiction in the early 1980s, now he’s with the people that form modern literature, the mostly men of the Harvard Faculty Club. I don’t fit into that crowd, as I think more in terms of positivity and nurturing. (For more about my thoughts on the tone of literature, scroll over to First Meetings.) I think more about happiness. Dr. Gilbert writes more about stumbling. That’s an error, and leads to my rating of 2 out of 5. 

Following up on my earlier reading about the Ender’s Game universe, my fiction reading turned again to Orson Scott Card. First Meetings contains four short stories from various timeframes, ranging from Ender’s father through the Xenocide years. The stories vary in quality. My favorite’s when Ender’s parents meet, because I like intelligent flirting. The first story I enjoyed least. The most interesting from a literary standpoint is the thirty year old original short story of Ender’s Game. In the real war, Ender had his old toon leaders as assistants, not other army leaders. There’s much less tension, and substantially less need for backstory. The book Ender’s Game shows marked improvement from this first work. I want to thank Mr. Card for thinking as an instructor and showing us the older version, letting us see the changes on how an above-average author develops his work. The book as a whole gets a 3 out of 5; the shorter stories don’t suffer from Mr. Card’s tendency to pad plots to reach book length.

Another of Mr. Card’s efforts at being more than an author is hatrack.com, his Website. I enjoy the interesting name, though twelvefruits.com is still better. He publishes essays and writes columns for his local paper. He and I disagree on some things, since he’s a Mormon Republican, very Republican. I’m a Catholic without a party, though more anti-Republican than anti-Democrat.

That said, I fully agree with many of Mr. Card’s thoughts on writing. He and I both believe in the value of For instance, this quote from his November 29 column in the Rhino Times describes the appeal of the film Enchanted, though it could apply to many types of art.

The sweetness of strong or delightful stories to lure us in and hold us; the light of truth to make our understanding clearer and encourage us to be better people. Hollywood disdains the idea, even mocks it; but aren’t these the movies that we look forward to watching again and again?

A more pressing problem is that what falls under “Literature” in bookstores, and that taught in writing schools, is terrible by intentional design. Mr. Card has written and linked about this consistently, though more recently, it seems. It’s not surprising that people buy relatively few copies of literary fiction, and that section of Borders is shrinking. Instead, more shelves hold classic, romance, and science fiction books. I almost fully recommend the long webpage by Dave Wolverton. (Unfortunately, he likes Shakespeare.) Mr. Wolverton dissects the ideas behind modern literary fiction, with historical context. Literary fiction, the stuff of book reviews and the “Literature” section of bookstores, is designed under constraints that make it terrible. Here’s a good quote summarizing the situation.

By insisting that we write elitist fiction with powerful images, opacity, and a distinctive poetic voice; by insisting that the tales lack form; by limiting the types of characters, conflicts and settings; by favoring political correctness over other types of honest questioning or exploration of themes; and by insisting that tales lean toward existentialism rather than some more affirmative world view; a very restrictive genre emerged.

Unable to explore setting, conflict, characters or themes in their fiction, the mainstreamers wrote more and more eloquently about nothing at all.

Nothing at all leads to nihilism. No, it is nihilism, isn’t it? That will not do. I thank the owner of the hatrack for not just working against this end, but arguing as well. As he said, just because we disagree on some things doesn’t mean I can’t respect him and form an alliance on others.