Bill Cunningham New York

Yesterday, I went with my adorable fashion designer niece Holly Smith-Smith to see the Richard Press documentary Bill Cunningham New York. Not being a New Yorker and knowing little about the fashion scene, I had never heard of Cunningham. He is best known now for two columns of photos that run in the New York Times. Evening Hours chronicles the mostly very well-to-do New Yorkers at charity events. On The Street features photos Cunningham gleans out hundreds of shots of passersby on the streets of New York every week, which Cunningham then edits to show some trend in the fashions being worn by everyday people.

If I were writing this review hoping to increase business for this film, this would be almost the perfectly wrong time to write it. The movie, which first opened in 2010 on the film festival circuit, has been in the theaters about three months now. It is currently playing on a total of 21 screens across the United States and has barely done $1,000,000 worth of business, a pathetic number for a regular movie but a minor success for a documentary. No date has yet been set for its release on DVD.

So I'm not writing this to tell you to see the film. When it's available for home viewing, I'll put up a post reminding my readers. I'm writing this post to say this film made we want to do something different with my life, to use what few talents I have to create more art.

Bill Cunningham is now in his eighties. As a young man in the early 1950s, after doing a stint in the Army, he became a milliner, but he gave that up. But this was not the end of his love affair with fashion. In the 1960s, he began to take photos of people who dressed distinctively, and at that time that meant the flower children and hippies. He became obsessed with taking candid photos of people out and about who caught his eye. He worked for Details magazine in the early 1980s chronicling the lesser known fashion designers before it was sold to Conde Nast. He refused to take the corporation's money, so never was seen in the magazine's pages since. He sold pictures to Women's Wear Daily of models and everyday women on the street wearing the same outfits, but quit in disgust when captions were added mocking the non-models.

Cunningham is a hermit in the biggest city in the world. He rides a bike around town, bravely sharing the road with the crazy cabbies. He wears the same utilitarian outfit every day. His jacket takes a lot of wear and tear from the camera around his neck, so he repairs it with plastic and duct tape. His apartment is filled with filing cabinets. He uses an old style Nikon camera and gets his pictures developed at a local shop called Photo King. He loves the socialites at the big charity galas every bit as much as he loves the people whose pictures he takes on the street. Several people who know him are interviewed and nearly none of them know much about his life.

Holly had seen the movie two times before and she was happy to see it again. She told me she had an old man crush on Bill Cunningham. It's easy to see why. There are a few pictures of him when he was younger, but now as an old man with a big smile filled with big teeth, he kind of reminded me of Jimmy Carter or Mr. Rogers, not only for the size of his teeth, but that all three men do what they love on their own terms. (Sadly, for Rogers that last sentence should be in the past tense, since he died in 2003.) Carter and Rogers are much more famous and greater successes in worldly ways, but Cunningham may well be the greatest artist of these three.

There are two times I have seen movies that have made we want to create art. After I saw Pulp Fiction, I went home and wrote a short story that had nothing to do with the film. After seeing Bill Cunningham New York, I've decided to buy more Penrose tiles and make some really big mosaics that I will photograph upon completion then dismantle, kind of like the sand paintings of the Tibetan monks.

I do not know how long the inspiration will last. I am not as single minded or talented as Mr. Cunningham, but I do hope to emulate his generosity of spirit in my own life in some small way.

Still playing with the new toys.

I'm still in that lovely honeymoon period with my new toys, the Penrose tiles I bought online at seriouspuzzles.com. With tiles, the "usual" idea is to fill up the plane with patterns, possibly repeating and possibly not repeating. If I put a kite and a dart together like above, I make a rhombus. It's easy to tile the plane with any rhombus in a repeating pattern, and even the non-repeating patterns using rhombi are usually simple variations on a theme.

One way to break away from the rhombus is to make this shape with a dart and two kites, which is really a bigger kite. I started making patterns with this as my main basic shape.



In this first tiling, I started with the nearly round shape in the middle (actually a decagon, a ten sided polygon), and started building out from it using the new big kite shape and the "bow tie", which is a two big kites that share a small kite.



Here I was trying to see what tiles would have to be used if I surrounded one decagon with five other decagons that have a bow tie buffer between them. As you might be able to see, I had to use some rhombi as buffers between the new decagons.

Messing around with even this size of puzzle makes me wonder if I need to buy one more container of tiles.

If anyone knows the name of a local Penrose Tile addiction support group, please send it to me discreetly.


I also did something much simpler on an unusual tack. Instead of trying to tile the plane, I started looking at simple shapes that could be made with relatively few tiles that would use negative space. Here five darts are put together to make a negative space regular pentagon with a pointy star created in purple.

Trying to think of star shapes that have a hole in the center, I thought this kind of looked like a ninja throwing star, known as a shuriken.

I call this the Thin Penrose Shuriken.


This is to distinguish it from a similar idea using the kites instead of the darts, which is the Thick Penrose Shuriken.


With kites, there is a second Thick Penrose Shuriken. To me, this looks more like a rotating gear, so I'm also calling it a Regular Penrose Cam.


This is to distinguish it from a mix and match use of kites, the Irregular Penrose Cam.

I Googled "penrose tiles negative space", but I didn't find anything looking like these last four patterns anywhere on the net. I may have stumbled on a new idea.

Rule of Three? It's more like a guideline.

People have this superstition about the Rule of Threes, that famous people die in groups of three over a short period of time.

Of course, "Short period of time" is incredibly vague, but how about a single 24 hour news cycle?

Since yesterday, we have had the obituaries of four people whose names I recognized immediately. James Arness of Gunsmoke is likely the best known name, especially to older people. Also dying since yesterday are wrongly imprisoned Black Panther member Geronimo Pratt, assisted suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian and former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleberger.

If anyone wants to quibble, I will admit Pratt's name is better known in the San Francisco Bay Area than it is known nationwide. In any case, deaths happen when they happen, and quite often a famous person will die and no one else of nearly the same level of fame will die within a week, and conversely, a passel of famous folks might all die in a couple of days.

A passel is not always three.

Just sayin'.

Eli Pariser on "filter bubbles".

Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org gave a non-political talk at the TED conference about the direction of the Internet and the new trap of "filter bubbles". A lot of the major Internet sites like YouTube keep track of your visits, so the recommended videos for you are not the same as the recommended videos for me. Things are being filtered.

The thing is, Facebook and Google are filtering stuff for us as well and Pariser gives examples from his own experience. The Internet, which was hoped to be a Wild West of information where gatekeepers like editorial boards would lose the power to suppress stories instead becomes a place where algorithms keep information away from us based on our previous click history.

It's a short talk, filled with useful information. Matty Boy says check it out, and thanks to my sister-in-law Janelle for bringing it to my attention.

New toys for Matty Boy! YAY!

Way back in January 2010, when I was still doing my (almost) weekly Wednesday Math posts, I wrote about Penrose tiles, the two shapes designed by physicist Roger Penrose that fill the plane in repeating patterns or non-repeating patterns, depending on how clever you want to get.

I bemoaned that there was no way to get a nice set of reasonably priced Penrose tiles to play with and mulled over the idea of having some made by a plastic fabrication shop.


Well, this is one of those times my natural laziness and broke assedness (which springs naturally from laziness, thank you very much) paid off big time. After putting this on the back burner for over a year, I searched last week and found a company that sold the thing I was looking for at a very reasonable price. SeriousPuzzles.com sells 108 Penrose tiles for $20, and better than that, they come with magnetized backs, so you can put them on your refrigerator or, for us teachers, tack them up on the white board in your class.



My friend Mark was nice enough to hold a pair of these in his hand to give you an idea of scale. They are nice soft bendy plastic, so I would say they are safe for any child who has already learned "Just because I can hold something in my hand, it does not follow that I have to put it in my mouth."


The two shapes are called the dart (top) and kite (bottom). The sets I got came in blue, yellow and purple. They appear to be easy to clean and in my experience, rubberized magnets maintain their stickiness nearly forever. (They are magnets, so tell the kids to keep them away from the computer.)


The angle between the two long sides is 72°, so if I put five pieces together, long side to long side, I can start a tiling of the plane. Five kites make a regular ten sided shape called a decagon. Five kites make a five pointed star, but not exactly the pentagram that we see on the stars of the American flag.



If you put a kite and a dart together on the short sides, they make a rhombus. Five of these rhombi correctly placed can make a regular pentagon with a pentagram in the negative space. The pentagram is the shape of the five pointed stars on the American flag.

Next: Matty Boy has way too much fun with Penrose tiles.

Growing a pattern with Penrose tiles.

We start with a yellow five pointed star.


I add a blue kite into each one of the gaps.


Now, a purple kite and a yellow dart in the new gaps, so that tiles sharing an edge do not share a color. (That was my basic marching order after the very beginning. It's a guideline not a rule.)


Blue kites for the yellow darts.


Yellow darts cap the purple kites.


Purple kites in the gaps.


"Got to have more of that sweet, sweet dart!"


That last caption was for my buddy Abu Scooter. If he didn't read this far, there wasn't much point to that gag.


So now it's growing more or less algorithmically, which is a fancy way of saying "These are the orders architects give to construction workers."


The purple and blue shapes together start to look like M.C. Esher fishies, don't they?


Notice how five straight lines lead out from the middle of the original five pointed star. At this point I thought that was a little too predictable, so I started changing things up.


Once I did that, all chances of tessellating the plane went out the window and I just had fun.

Actually, the whole process was fun for me. I hope my students enjoy it as well this next term.

SkeptiCal 2011

My sister Karlacita! used to be an author of New Age books. In the past few years, she has come to question the things she used to believe and in some ways has become a pariah in her old field. She found some like minds in the skeptical community, so she decided to attend SkepiCal 11 this past weekend in Berkeley. She asked me to come along as moral support, to be that person she could turn to and ask the all important question, "Is it me or is it them? It's them, isn't it?"

I won't say I felt "right at home" in a conference of skeptics, but I certainly had been in similar situations before. It was a nerd herd. It was somewhere between a professional nerd herd and a amateur nerd herd. For me, an amateur nerd herd is a board game convention or about back in the 1990s, a sealed deck Magic The Gathering tournament. Professional nerd herds have been things like the Computer Game Development Conference back when I did that for a living or math symposiums now.

Since the idea of SkeptiCal was plunking down money to hear people talk, it's more like the professional. By that standard, this was pretty weak. I will be kind and name the only speaker worth his salt, while others will be described but not named.

The first fellow was a member in good standing in the skeptical community who had appeared on Survivor a few times. We spent an hour learning about the ins and outs of a show I have never watched all the way through. (Personal note: The last drummer for my old band The Wonders of Science has been on more than one season, and I still haven't watched one full hour of the show in my entire life.)

Here's the inside dope. What you see is real, but it's all about the editing.

Thanks. I already figured that out without watching. I didn't need an hour's explanation of it. (Karlacita! tells me that in the line to the ladies' room after, my feeling about that hour was echoed several times.)


The next speaker was Peter Gleick from the Pacific Institute, a climate scientist who is also a blogger on the Huffington Post, giving a talk entitled Climate Change Misperception. His inclusion on the speakers' list was a source of controversy for reasons I will discuss later.

Gleick's talk was the only one where I actually learned something from the speaker. (I learned plenty from Karlacita!, but that can happen when we're just hangin' out and I don't have to plunk down forty five simoleans to do that.) He discussed several of the critical thinking fallacies - ad hominem attacks, appeal to authority, appeal to consensus, cherry picking data, etc. - and showed concretely how climate change deniers use these tools. He also stated that climate science consensus might look like an argument by consensus, but that it is more that the scientists are convinced by the data and that data forms a valid scientific consensus.

The skeptical community, if one can call it that, is a very contentious bunch and internecine squabbles are common. Gleick showed an e-mail from a skeptic who would not attend because Gleick's inclusion showed the group had obviously caved to the Warmists, as deniers sometimes call the vast majority of climate scientists. This was the last mention of any alleged grudge or slight in Gleick's talk.

There are dozens of tacks the deniers take to poke holes in the climate data. Having only an hour to talk, he only brought up a few examples directly and showed Power Point slides that proved the statements, some of which I had heard before, were egregious examples of cherry picking.

1) Polar ice coverage is not shrinking because April 1989 coverage was less that April 2009 coverage.

Refutation: Yes, April 1989 was less than April 2009, but every other month in 2009 had less ice coverage than 1989, often quite a bit less. Classic cherry picking, especially since there was exactly one cherry in twelve matched pairs of data.

2) Global warming stopped in 1998, even though CO2 levels continue to rise. (I hadn't heard the first argument before, but I had heard this one, notably from George F. Will, who couldn't prove the Pythagorean Theorem with an hour's head start and the address to mathworld.wolfram.com.)

Refutation: Average yearly temperatures go up and down. 1998 was warmer than 2008, but 2005 was warmer than either, and now that 2009 and 2010 data have been added, both far warmer than 1998, this argument is complete bunk, though deniers still quote it.

Again, Gleick's talk was the closest to the quality I would see at a math symposium, most of which are free of charge. (Quibble: everyone who used technology had trouble with it, including Gleick. For most of his talk, the computer resolution was wrong and his slides were cut off at left and right. To his credit, when the problem was pointed out, Gleick is the only one who fixed his technical difficulties.)


You may not have heard of the skeptical community. For example, when Karlacita! told the Gosh Darned Pater Familias about where she was going, neither he or any of his friends had ever heard of people describing themselves as skeptics.

In this small community, the great celebrity is The Amazing Randi, a magician and debunker of paranormal claims. His greatest moment of glory is going on Johnny Carson's show and showing the famed spoon bender Uri Geller was a fake. He is the founder of the modestly titled James Randi Educational Foundation, or JREF.

In December 2009, The Amazing Randi wrote a piece doubtful of climate change, which he has since recanted with a standard non-apology apology. For me the money quotes are using the wry quotations marks around "politically correct" label he gave to the academics who do the hard work he is not willing or able to do and most damningly, the first sentence in paragraph six:

I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid.

For those of you unaware of The Petition Project, climate change deniers got it into their heads to put together a petition of scientists NOT in the field, as though ten sociologists counterbalance one climate scientist. This is obviously both an appeal to completely unearned authority and an appeal to consensus.

Many skeptics fell in line behind Randi and have not changed their position even though he has weakly recanted.

I've seen this before in nerd herds. Way back in the day, a guy named Chris Crawford, a writer of video games that didn't sell well but that he thought were "important", started the Computer Game Developer's Conference (CGDC) to get his ideas out. I had more than a few run-ins with him and his tiny cult, but eventually the business was making too much money to have such a meeting be a yearly pilgrimage to his shrine and he left, though the level of volunteerism in departure is disputed. Once The Great Man was dislodged, the CGDG actually became a Big Damn Deal.

Here's the thing. We can all of us fall prey to these problems with critical thinking. When it comes to hero worship in math, I am honest to Lenny* proud of the fact that I shook the hand of Donald Knuth, the author of The Art Of Computer Programming, and can remember chapter and verse the conversation I had with Frank Harary, the father of graph theory.

Here's my defense. Knuth and Harary actually moved human endeavor forward. As someone who teaches math, it is my job and my glad duty to make sure their names, and more importantly their ideas, are never forgotten.

I cannot say the same for the Amazing Randi.

* For those new to the blog, "honest to Lenny" is my oath to my favorite mathematician in history, Leonhard Euler. Yet another example of hero worship and one I will defend to my last breath.

Here endeth the lesson.