It’s all about the braise

It’s all about the braise

By Bobby Neal Winters

I don’t talk about sports.  This is a handicap of mine.  Everybody needs something that you can talk about that at the end of the day there is not going to be blood lost over.  We rule out politics and religion as topics for polite conversation in broad groups.  This leaves sports.  You can talk about sports if you are a genius or if you are not a genius. I have listened in on these conversations when both ends of the spectrum were represented and neither end had an advantage over the other.  It is democratic.

I have developed a couple of areas that I can go to if I am forced to talk to people:  Netflix and Barbecue.  As not everybody has Netflix, I wind up talking about Barbecue a lot.

Those of you who are broadly traveled will realize this is not as safe as it might sound.  There are schools of barbecue, and, while I do not have an exhaustive knowledge of these schools, I am aware that there is quite a bit of passion associated with some of them.

Full disclosure: my favorite kind of barbecue is whatever is in front of me.  After we’ve talked a little longer, I will give you a more direct answer, but we need to lay a framework first.

Speaking broadly, I am familiar with Southern-style barbeque, Texas-style barbecue, Brazilian barbecue, and Kansas City barbecue.  These are listed in order of familiarity.  Of these types, I have only run into fanatics among proponents the first three. By “fanatic” I mean someone who will say “Only my barbecue is really barbecue.”  And those who say it say it in the same tone a religious fanatic will say “You people are all going to Hell!”

If you have ever been part of one of these conversations, you know that what I say is true.

For the people who take this attitude about southern barbecue, it is all about the meat.  In their metaphysics, one cannot barbecue beef.  Barbecued beef is simply something that does not exist. Barbecue is about pork and chicken.

Texans, by way of contrast, do recognize beef as a barbecue-able meat.  They have some things to say about the sauce and some things to say about the sides. However, in my humble opinion, it is because it is Texas-style that makes it best and they would defend eating human-flesh if that were the Texas-style.

Some Brazilians will dig their heels in about the sauce. “Good meat does not have to have sauce,” they will say. They don’t seem to appreciate that no meat is so good that a good sauce won’t make it better. (That having been said I have eaten some Brazilan picanha that was so good that it made me want to kiss the cow, the only sauce being its own warm blood.)

There are those among the Texan and Southern camp that are militantly against any sweetness in the sauce.

Now I said earlier that my favorite barbecue is whatever is in front of me.  This raises the question, what if there isn’t any barbecue in front of me?

Kansas City.

If Kansas ever has a war with Missouri, it should be to secure all of Kansas City within our borders so that we can claim Kansas City Barbecue as our own.  Burnt ends, in particular, would be worth the bloodshed.  Kansas City-style barbecue is ecumenical enough to embrace all of the other styles I have mentioned.

Within that Kansas City style, I favor Rosedale Barbecue if I am by myself or just with the missus and we are just running in and out. I like either Jack’s Stacks or Smokehouse Barbecue if I am with a group. Jack’s Stacks coleslaw is life-changing. Life-changing.  Formerly Oklahoma now Kansas City Joes is good, but it’s not as good with the standing in line part factored in.  Gates is quite good.  Arthur Bryants is the most overrated but it is still wonderful.  And then there is Q39....

The best thing about people who like Kansas City Barbecue is that the ones I’ve met don’t feel obligated to disparage anyone else’s favorite.  We all worship in our own way: Some with burnt ends and some with pulled pork.

Come to think about it, maybe politics and religion is safer.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

This really isn’t about math I promise

 This really isn’t about math I promise

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve been buying books lately by a man named Donald Knuth.  Before you go out and buy any of these yourself, you might ought to talk to me.  The books are a series of books called the Art of Computer Programming.  They aren’t about art.  Some might argue they aren’t about computer programming.  I look at them and think the title is perfect.  They are art..of a kind.  They are computer programming...from 30 thousand feet.  They are math.

Donald Knuth is an artist if that word has any broader meaning beyond “a painter of canvases.” He’s done much that has shaped computing and through it the modern world we live in.  When he first wrote The Art of Computer Programming, he wrote it out on yellow pads.  When he got the typeset version, he didn’t like the way it looked so he designed an entire new way of typesetting mathematics.  We still use it.

In my life, I’ve been undisciplined.  This is my biggest fault, my biggest sin, my tragic flaw. Two years from now--just a tic and a toc--I will be 60 years old.  They don’t give you black balloons on your sixtieth birthday.  At three-score, you are just a bit too close to the three-score and ten for that.  No, they start telling you--hey, you’re looking good.

Yes, medicine is getting better, and yes we’ve got people in the university who keep working into their seventies.  But that’s not the point.

I’ve been learning the value of discipline.  I look back over my columns.  If was first an occasional drip; then more than occasional.  Now it seems that it is turning into a steady shower: I am preaching on the virtues of discipline. 

Lately this comes from getting serious about computer programming.  I started programming when I was in high school.  McLish public school bought a TRS-80 microcomputer even though it couldn’t be used for sports in any conceivable way.  No one knew how to use one.  Then Mr. Sloan, my math teacher, came to me with the manual for it in his hand and said, “Learn how to do this.”  

And I did.

I’ve only ever had one class, but I’ve returned to programming every few years since. Always in the same spirit: It was something to be learned on one’s own.

I want you to know that I do think the ability to do this is one of my strengths.  I am not afraid to knock things together and figure them out.  Indeed, if no one’s done it before, they don’t know that I’m doing it wrong.

But I guess that in getting closer to 60, creeping closer to that age when my time will be etched unchanging on marble, I’ve realized that I can’t always just figure it out by myself.

And I am looking at my grandchildren, my grandsons though maybe someday there will be granddaughters too.  I got my strength of figuring it out on my own because there wasn’t anyone in the family who knew any differently. When my daughters were growing up, I was still figuring this out. (Something self-referential there.)  

But now with the grandchildren.  Can they be taught it?  What is the best way for them to learn it?

One has to be careful.  Much of the destruction that came from the Sixties was from young people who were rejecting what I consider to be the most wonderful discovery of my...uh... middle age.  Children of men who had learned the value of discipline in WWII, they rejected institutions, threw away discipline, and began hammering on the pillars of the earth.

No.  It is something they will have to choose. 

I am now segueing into my grandfatherly role.  I repair my grandchildren’s tows.  I have projects in the yard that I plan and carry out in stages.

And I buy books.  Books that I will try read but I will never finish.  They will be there when I am gone if my grandchildren want to look at them.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

The Length of the Hypotenuse

 The Length of the Hypotenuse

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is all about language.

And I guess I ought to expand that “it” a little to better make my point.  “It” is “what we know” and “how we think.”  It is all about getting the right words and the right share experiences to go with those words.

This may sound strange coming from a mathematician, but mathematics is just language.  It is a peculiar language with very strange words.  Some of these words we refer to as numbers.

This revelation hit me about the time my oldest grandson was learning to count.  The counting numbers were words that all just came out in the same order: one, two, three, four, and so on.  Whenever grandson stopped counting, it wasn’t because he didn’t understand the math; it is because he didn’t know the next word.  For some it comes after 29 and for others after 999,999,999,999. 

Language has pressure on it to become more nuanced as our experience of the world gets greater.  One can count out pies as one, two, three, but when it comes to dividing the pie, the world gets a little more complicated.  If you have one pie to go among 5 people, what do you do?  Well, you could cut it into fifths--if you are that good with a knife.  More likely you will cut it into eight pieces so that there will be three pieces left over you can sneak back after later in the evening.  But I digress.  You have to invent fractions.

At that point, we have a subtle shift of our mental context.  We shift from looking outward in an unbounded way to looking inward in an unbounded way.  You can cut a pie in half; you can cut the halve in half to get quarters; you can cut the quarters in half to get the eighths I was talking about.  While in practice you will soon get pieces too small for a hungry stomach to work about, in principle this can go on forever.

The Greeks shifted from thinking about pies (or maybe moussaka) to line segments. They were big on geometry as you recall.  They did--in a way a bit different from us--associate numbers to geometry.  To put it in a modern way, they thought about the lengths of lines.

Then one day they started thinking about the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose legs had length one.  They used the mathematical language differently than we do, but when you translate it, they discovered that you cannot express the length of that hypotenuse as a fraction of whole numbers.  New words had to be invented.

The Greeks and the rest of the world for most of human history suffered under the handicap of not having a good way to write numbers.  It was embarrassingly late that the decimal way of denoting numbers turned up in the West.  The change for math was like when we changed from writing words as hieroglyphs to writing them in the letters of an alphabet.

When we refer to our number as the square root of two, it is not only precise, it is exact, but it is not very useful in many contexts.  We can say 1.4, but that is about 2 one hundredths too small; we can say 1.4142136 that is just a tiny bit too big.  But either of these ways of presenting the number will be more useful in a particular context than just saying the square root of two.

Ultimately the most honest way we can present a number like the square root of two is at an estimate plus or minus a margin of error with the margin of error as small as we can get it.  For example, the square root of two is 1.4142 plus or minus 0.00002,  

It is not exact, but it is true in the sense we are letter people know we are off by a little bit.  We are using our language to point at the truth as precisely as we can while letting the world know where we are uncertain and by how much.

This system of language was created by human beings struggling with Nature in order to determine Truth.  It relies not only on ever more precise words but honesty not only to others but most importantly to oneself.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

The Algorithm

The Algorithm

By Bobby Neal Winters

They call it the Algorithm.  By "they" I mean those who watch YouTube and by the Algorithm I mean the computerized way YouTube decides what videos it suggests that you watch.  I have to say it does a fairly good job of picking out stuff for me to watch.

I like to watch videos about science, math, and computers.  This is pretty much what it brings me; those along with some videos on film criticism.  (Please don’t judge.)  But occasionally, the Algorithm will take a notion that I need to watch videos about the Flat Earth.  These aren’t videos about people trying to convince you the world is flat: These are videos about people who spend their time criticizing the Flat Earthers.

And it is my own fault.  I’ve sat through quite a few of these.  I am quite frankly curious about why the Flat Earthers think the way they do.  I’ve tried listening to the Flat Earthers themselves and they are really long-winded.  They truly love the sounds of their own voices and it takes them forever to get to the point.  Those who choose to critique the Flat Earthers condense it down to the point the Flat Earthers are trying to get at.

It makes an interesting study on the limitations of argument in making a point, because...here’s the thing: We’ve been to space; we’ve looked at the Earth; we’ve taken pictures of it.  

It is a ball.

If you are going to ignore the pictures from space; if you are going to ignore the fact that all of the other planets are balls; if you are going to ignore that the moon is a ball; the sun is a ball; then you are not going to pay attention to my arguments at all.  And I am not going to argue with you.  As Tracy Chapman says, “...I'm too old to go chasing you around / Wasting my precious energy.”

I find it peculiar that there are those who do choose to spend their precious energy on the argument.  One could think they were just trying to provide some educational service, to save some brands from the burning.  But often there seems to be a bit of pleasure taken in showing someone to be stupid.   

I guess I have to admit to the fact that I recognize this because I’ve done it myself.  I’ve attempted to show myself superior by showing someone else to be stupid. I suppose I could also reflect now whether I am trying to show myself superior to those who critique the Flat Earthers by writing this.

I will have to think about that.

Thirty years ago when I arrived in town there were debates on The Theory of Evolution still.  Maybe there still are but they are going on out of ear-shot.  In any case, at that time I met a man, a physicist.  He was more actually: He was a musician, a historian of science, a Renaissance Man.  Those who know me will know who I am talking about.

He was burdened by the fact that, after more than a century, the Battle for Evolution had yet to be won.

He’s gone now and has been for many years, but that thought he planted in my mind remains.

It’s more than the Battle for Evolution or the Battle of the Round Earth.  It is the Battle for Handwashing; it is the Battle for Not Throwing Trash on the Street; it is the Battle for Being Faithful; it is the Battle for Being Kind.

These all have to be fought with every generation.  We have to teach our children; we have to teach our students; we have to teach those who watch our behavior rather than listen to our words.

Our Algorithm as humans is to find the True and the Good and take it forward to the next generation.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )