Meetings with Remarkable Men

From 1987 to 1992, I was a programmer at Princeton University and during that time met several Remarkable men and women.

The most noteworthy encounter was in 1991, when John Nash was brought to my office and I discovered a bug in the old Microsoft C compiler on John's behalf: he'd (correctly according to the standard) used 2^31-1 as a limit value but the Microsoft compiler had failed to evaluate the 2^31 value correctly (it was itself using Long precision).

Reflecting that in developing a compiler earlier for Bell Northern I'd hit the same problem, where the compiler has to provide one level of precision ABOVE the advertised limit for the evaluation of constant expressions that go outside precision, I switched Dr. Nash, the real-life protagonist of the movie A Beautiful Mind, to Borland C and his code worked.

The compiler doesn't have to include extra precision. In John's case it appears that the Microsoft compiler was using (signed) Long for evaluating integer constant expressions while the Borland compiler merely used Unsigned.

But I had many other opportunities to encounter Remarkable people.

I was in the WaWa (a New Jersey convenience store) one evening when I recognized the mathematician John Horton Conway, the developer of the Game of Life and serious maths guy, looking at logic puzzle magazines. I introduced myself as merely an early implementer of a Game of Life, for two years after reading Martin Gardiner's article on Life in Scientific American I implemented Life on an IBM 1401 mainframe.

A truly Remarkable man was Cornel West, the African-American philosopher and theologian, who was at Princeton at the time. I also introduced myself and thanked Cornel for his book The American Evasion of Philosophy. We spoke on more than one occasion and Cornel was a real gentleman.

I was for this reason rather put out later on by Larry Summers, a Clinton political appointee (Treasury? can't remember, don't care) who after Bush became President-By-Appointment-For-The-Foreseeable-Future, was Harvard's president.

Summers called Cornel like a field hand on the carpet. It seems that Professor West's academic output included not only several books beyond The American Evasion of Philosophy and Race Matters but also a rap CD made with his brother, a musician.

Summers claimed that this work was not scholarly. Cornel insisted that as a faculty member he had like any Harvard professor a right to self-define the boundaries of philosophical work and practice.

West was right, of course. At Princeton, I'd taken a class in Philosophy of the Behavioral Sciences from Gil Harman who insisted that he define the boundaries of his praxis, which included both traditional pure speculation and a computer lab in which he and his graduate students conducted actual experiments in Lisp and Prolog on philosophical questions. Harman had, in cognitive science, much of interest to say as a result.

And closer to Cornel West's use of popular culture is of course the frequent practice of, ahem, WHITE scholars to "engage", "critique", and "deconstruct" popular culture. When I was a mere adjunct prof at DeVry I had my students in logic and critical writing watch Working Girl and write a paper.

Summers was therefore way out of bounds in calling West in for a little chat. However, Summers' mentor, Bill Clinton, had during the early years of his administration learned how to score cheap political points by showing Sistah Souljah who is Massah.

Another Remarkable man was Ralph Nader who gave a seminar. Nader is an honest man...with negative charisma, probably a good thing.

I attended, also, a nearly incomprehensible talk by Gayatri Spivak, a woman and scholar from India who translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology from nearly incomprehensible French to nearly incomprehensible English in 1976.

Note, however, that I do not share a sort of journalistic vanity in which "nearly incomprehensible" becomes an attribute of, and the fault of, Spivak or Derrida. As the MIT computer scientist Joe Weizenbaum confesses (in his own book, Computer Power and Human Reason), "as a computer scientist, I am extremely poorly educated", something Saint Dijkstra would not admit.

At the time I heard Spivak, I was struggling to engage postmodernism having realized that my business experience as actually lived in the 1970s was completely not understood through any sort of modernist lens. As such, like the Tramp in C. S. Lewis' novel That Hideous Strength, I was content to hear a speech by a real toff and would have been disappointed not to understand it.

In China I am infrequently, but regularly, expected to attend meetings conducted mostly in Mandarin Chinese. As it is, many business meetings conducted in English bore me out of my skull. However, there is a dialectic of boredom.

The dialectic works by sudden reversal: by sudden floods, and fall of waters. In my 30s, with many new family responsibilities, I realized that I wasn't going to meet these responsibilities with my Bad Attitude which was the expectation that work always be fun and entertaining coding and design, and I realized that "boredom" doesn't inhere in a work of art, a narrative, or a business meeting.

It instead describes the RELATION between an audience and a work of art, etc.

My own children would complain to me of boredom and in turn I would feel guilty about being "bored" when attending to their needs.

I realized that only a dialectical engagement with "boredom" would begin to solve the problem and discovered that what people in recovery call "acceptance" is a dialectical act. You meet the syndrome head on and simply see yourself engaging it in the old style, and this frees you to respond to it in a new way.

This allowed me to make something of a game of changing diapers, doing it My Way in which unlike my wife, I could say "what a stench, young brute!".

In meetings conducted in Chinese, I realize that Job One is after all learning how to speaka da local language therefore I listen hard. Language is a Chinese soup after all in which Ten Thousand Things float.

Yesterday, there was a change in management at my company and I was required to attend the announcement (which had been previously made to the foreign team) conducted in Mandarin. I dealt with Bonnie Boredom by acting "as if" and I found that looking alert makes you alert.

"Bonnie Boredom says, collect Boredom Stamps, every day, for stupid gifts for work or play". One of our problems as Americans, and which underlies the foul journalistic-superficial reaction to postmodern thinkers like the late Derrida (who even obituary writers managed to insult in both the New York Times and the Times of London as an incomprehensible French trouble-maker) is that we insist that our being "bored" is always someone else's problem.

I started to engage postmodernism and "boredom" precisely at that point where I was myself a victim of this way of thinking.

I had solved a major client problem in Chicago and, since I actually like to document my own work, I'd written a thorough reference manual for my solution. I walked into the meeting run by a sort of corporate-climber lady who was already known for her savagery in dealing with her competition and the people (especially women) who worked for her.

I handed her my manual, innocently at this distant date expecting Praise.

Instead she said, "Edward, I thought I told you that you are excessively verbose"...in front of ten other people.

This is why I cheerfully attended, ten years later at Princeton, to what Gayatri Spivak had to say, apart from the fact that I like geeky Indian ladies. Much of Spivak's work after translating Derrida had to do with "the colonial gaze", that atomic gesture which replicates relations of subordination and domination in daily life...in what Foucault calls "capillary" action, micro pushing and pulling amongst ordinary people.

What many people still don't realize is that the colonial gaze, the colonial renarration in the interest of control, is no longer the British officer staring at the funny native through a monocle.

It is now the American habit of treating all exchanges as TV in which they have a universal right to hear, not "verbosity", whether my own tech verbosity or that of Derrida, but the Platonic "essence", the snappy "agenda", the "facts", and the Power Point.

[Need I say it? Oh well...I do NOT ask for license to write overly long reference manuals, only to write ENOUGH, not for Ms. Corporate Power-Play but for the next poor slob of a programmer who has to maintain my frigging code. Ms. Corporate Jet had already so arranged things so she got to go to cock-tail parties and play golf with Powerful (if distinctly not Remarkable) men.]

In Chicago, I'd solved, I believe, a real problem (switch billing) with a good solution (simulating the switch) and I'd learned from my nemesis herself that digital switches are computers which can be simulated. With the naivety of the young, which I had in spades at the time, I did not realize that the uncaring founder of the firm was precisely the sort of man who creates a scarcity all around him of simple decency and humanity and thereby creates competition to be on the sunny side of the deconstructive binary opposition.

In Chinese, all that mattered was being Big Sister or Big Brother but unlike China, there was no reciprocity.

This made me realize that when my own defects of character, including but not limited to pride, sloth, lechery, avarice and anger and the rest of the Cardinal sins, were added to this Unhappy Bowl, I was going to go down the tubes, and part of recovery, a small part, was engaging issues including "audience response" on a technical level, reading as is my wont great whacking tomes.

Was this valuable? Certainly more so that using almost any writer on business except Jerry Weinberg, who, I agree with Dan Read, is a guru on these matters.

After my experience in Chicago, I was privileged to meet Remarkable men and women, not just people savaging each other so they could live in Park Ridge like Hilary used to, and from these Remarkable men and women I learned that people who accomplish genuine things, from Nash to Cornel West, are almost always courteous and approachable. I learned also to listen better which was hard for me, since I have always been enchanted with the sound of my own voice.

The Chicago company is still around. It specializes in help desk staffing, for its Maximum Leader discovered that University of Chicago intellectuals talked back, fought for his limited humanity, and stole business when they left. He recently gave an extremely patronizing talk in Northern Indiana praising the conventionality and work ethic of the people in Northern Indiana who, it seems, don't trouble their heads with much of anything except real estate prices, and, historically, making sure their neighborhoods exclude people of color.

Anger remains one of my Cardinal sins. But one advantage of being a Flaming Liberal is that it allows you better to deal with your anger, and to recognize that there is real unfairness in society, which acts by capillary action as we all strive to gain the favor of an uncaring pseudo-elite.