Category: autobiography

Early Memories

Posted on by David Bookstaber

My body was born 50 years ago. I know this not only because my parents told me, but also because the government decided its business includes tracking and certifying exactly when, where, and of whom people are born.

My body bears the scars and wear of 50 years of life. The first half of that period it was growing. Then it stopped growing and started down a predictable path of degeneration. (Presbyopia appeared within the last decade, followed by the beginnings of detectable osteoarthritis.)

My mind also bears the scars and wear of 50 years of life. I can trace paths backward in time, but my ability to do that is also only going to degrade as it ages. My memory (like that of most people) is not continuous. I have snapshots of varying length, clarity, and detail. Looking back in time is like turning around and finding most of the path you walked submerged in a dark body of water. The memory snapshots are like stepping stones that have not yet sunk from view.

How far back can I see?

My earliest memory is from just before I reached my second birthday. What I remember is looking out a window where we lived and seeing a snowplow a few houses up the street that was stuck. I was upset and wanted the truck to get help. I was placated when my father said he would go help it. (How can I be confident in this memory? The visual details in my mind are limited, but I am certain I was looking downwards and to the left and the plow was 3-4 houses up the street heading away. Cross-checking with my parents: at the time we lived on the second story of a house that had windows tall enough for a 2-year-old to see out. My father remembers the incident and agrees with the orientation and distance of the plow. Public records note two extreme blizzards in the month before my second birthday.)

Memories that I would call visually “complete” begin by age 4, which I can tell because they occurred around a house we left in my fifth year. Here are some of the more vivid ones:

Rattlesnake in the street: I was playing outside and my Mom ushered me into the house saying there was a rattlesnake and it was dangerous. I watched from a window as my Dad and five other men from the neighborhood formed a loose circle around it, right in the middle of the street. They were armed with shovels and I could see a few take jabs at the snake, but otherwise they were just hanging out, talking. I was a little confused because my Mom had made it seem like a serious threat, but it looked like the men were treating it as more of a social gathering. I finally got bored of watching so don’t know how that ended.

Want to learn violin? My Mom was lying on a bed reading a book. Out of the blue, she looked up and asked me if I wanted to take violin lessons. (What is a 4-year-old in the pre-computer-game era going to say: “No, I have too many other commitments?” Of course I’d like to try a new activity!)

You only get soda if you can do it right: A local kid had a 2-liter bottle of soda. He offered to share it with anyone who could drink without backwashing. I don’t remember the words he used to explain it, but basically if you could pour or sip without putting the whole opening in your mouth, you could drink; if not you only got to watch. He demonstrated, and then invited others to drink. I was so relieved when my lips proved coordinated enough to get soda. I felt bad for another boy failed and was denied.

2025: The End of the Human Polymath

Posted on by David Bookstaber

Born in 1976, I was just early enough to taste pre-internet life. In grade school, on a dial-up 1200baud modem and IBM PC, I was ahead of the curve in actually connecting to primordial pieces of the internet, though they didn’t have a lot of utility outside of academic collaboration. I grew up with a physical encyclopedia at home – the 22 volumes of the 1987 World Book Encyclopedia took up more than 3 feet of shelf space. I wondered how they decided what to include in those books, because I was mostly frustrated to find my subjects of interest barely grazed, if covered at all. In the mid-1990s Microsoft published a DVD to make the printed encyclopedia obsolete: Encarta, which somehow offered even less information but more data because it had “multimedia” – the buzzword for sound, video, and primitively interactive content.1

So what did a curious young mind do back then? There were so many more questions than answers. For a typical How or Why question, your local library might have a book containing an answer, but you’d have to physically visit the library, search their card catalog for books covering the subject, and then physically find potential matches on the shelves and thumb through each to see if it actually provided the details sought. You couldn’t reach out to experts because even if you could find their names you couldn’t easily find contact information. So you were stuck with whatever local adults happened to know. My Dad was very smart, and he had smart work colleagues who could go quite far in some areas of math and physics. What about teachers? Public school teachers were – despite their avowed profession – astonishingly underinformed. (That realization led me to despise them: I did not get along with public school teachers after 3rd or 4th grade when I discovered that, to any random question, I was more likely to have the right answer then they.)

It was a struggle to build a deeper-than-average understanding of the world. I put in a lot of work seeking answers to practical questions, and that gave me a lot of practical knowledge. I certainly had gaps: Pop culture, sports – many obsessions of the average person did not interest me, so I was never going to be a Jeopardy champion. But in the realm of practical and technical knowledge I was exceptional. I read slowly, but have an insatiable thirst for understanding how and why things work. Plenty of people idly wonder. I don’t just wonder: I search. When I had a random question and couldn’t quickly find the answer I would write it down, and eventually I would find an answer and absorb everything around it. Maybe the hunt is why the answers stick in my head.

Now, what search engines started, LLMs have so thoroughly finished that future generations are bound to forget that there was a time when knowing things was not only difficult but also useful.

“Know-it-all” was often thrown around as a pejorative. But, back in the dark ages of the late 20th century, extensive practical knowledge had real utility. It could make the difference between staring blankly at a problem (or not even recognizing the presence of a solvable problem) and jump-starting solutions by drawing on a deep well of understanding how other things work and how they could relate. A know-it-all2 is more likely to:

  • Recognize the absence or presence of a significant problem. (What is that sound, and should I get it looked at?)
  • Flag misleading or false assertions. (Could competitive chess players really burn thousands of calories thinking during a match?)
  • Explain what matters, when, and why. (When do you really need to change engine oil, and should you pay extra for synthetic?)

Even when search engines came along, the human polymath still had value. Answers were more accessible, but you still had to know the right questions. You had to know if a thing was a thing, what terms might apply, and what a correct answer should look like.

Today, it’s over. We have reached the singularity of convenience. This year, as they ironed out the chatbot propensity to hallucinate, the value of the human know-it-all evaporated. Yes, I still catch the bots making factual errors, but if you keep them talking they eventually notice the errors themselves.

I took pride in being the guy to ask, the guy with the notoriously uncanny breadth and depth of knowledge, the guy who – even if he didn’t have the answer off the top of his head – would likely find it faster than anyone else. “Have a practical question? Just ask me. Worst case: I don’t know. More likely: I’ll point you in the right direction.” Now? I tell people to ask the bots. There is no way I can give as quick and thorough an answer on as broad a set of topics as they can.

  1. What was I looking for? Something like a cross between Wikipedia and The Way Things Work. Here’s how I described it in a 1998 journal entry: The Practical Encyclopedia of Technology.  It would contain in applicable form all of mankind’s technological achievements—information I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, like how transmission mechanisms are actually implemented on vehicles, the composition and construction of TFTs, how ball bearings are manufactured.  Every article on a specific piece of technology would be of the following form:
    – Brief theory;
    – References to components (e.g., transmissions would reference ball bearings, metal casting, gears, lubricants);
    – Problems encountered in implementation;
    – Canonical solutions to problems, in sufficient detail to actually implement on that information alone;
    – Other solutions that have been tried, and why they haven’t caught on;
    – References to sources for theory on the subject;
    – Patent Office classification fields of the technology, etc.
    ↩︎
  2. The age of the literal know-it-all – someone who knows everything that is known in a society – ended centuries ago. At least in the developed Western world, that has been impossible since the early 1800s. The title may be hyperbole, but The Last Man Who Knew Everything describes a plausible contender for the title: Thomas Young, who died in 1829. ↩︎

Inkscape vs Adobe Illustrator for Vector Graphics

Posted on by David Bookstaber

I’m about to break 100 figures (that’s photos, diagrams, and combinations thereof) for my book, which in current draft is 150 pages. Whenever possible I create vector images because they scale perfectly. The alternative is a raster (pixel-based) image, which is defined for some number of pixels and becomes pixelated when enlarged. Here’s an extreme example: I drew a simple circle, rasterized a copy of it, and then zoomed in on the top section:

The vectorized version stays smooth at any scale, because the rendering engine is essentially told, “The drawing is a black circle, this size with this line thickness.” (The SVG code is actually <circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" />.) The rasterized version is a fixed rendering of that circle using a specified number of pixels, and that’s as detailed as the image can get.

Raster images are natural for things like photos that begin life as pixel arrays. But computer drawings that are built up using primitive shapes and strokes almost always benefit by preserving that construction. A bonus is that vector files tend to be much smaller than legible raster versions – even in the human-readable Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

I have created vector images directly in Word (more on this later), Excel, and Python (using matplotlib and seaborn). For just $5 I got a Ukrainian freelancer on Fiverr to vectorize a diagram from an old military publication.

Until recently I used Adobe Illustrator to do more serious vector graphics. But my latest copy of that software is from 2007 and doesn’t always work well in Windows 10. (Yes, I got it back when you could buy and keep using an application instead of having to subscribe.) If I did this stuff all the time I would probably subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud. But I don’t, so I took a look around and found a popular open-source alternative to Illustrator: Inkscape. It took a day to get comfortable with it, and now it’s great for my purposes. For example, I liked this drawing from a 2004 dissertation by Jorma Jussila, and he was kind enough to send me the vector image, which gave me a tremendous head start creating this diagram:

How Microsoft Let Me Down This Week

In college (1998) I wrote a graphics-heavy term paper in Word. I had invested days of work, saving frequently (as always). At some point Word corrupted the document, but I didn’t realize that because I had kept it open on my computer and the in-process version didn’t give a hint that anything was wrong. Until I tried sending it to a printer, at which point it crashed and I discovered that none of the files contained much that could be salvaged. It took a frantic day to reproduce the paper.

Well, that summer I had a great internship at Microsoft, and – not one to hold a grudge – I have been drafting my current book in Word. (As of today the DOCX is 100MB!) But I have been frequently creating and checking PDFs along the way. In the course of these reviews I discovered that Word is unpredictable in creating and handling vector drawing objects. For example, adding a bevel to a circle causes Word to rasterize it, but you probably won’t notice unless you make a point of inspecting things at high zoom multiples.

Create a circle in Word and it’s a vector drawing (left). Add a bevel and Word silently rasterizes it (right).

I also discovered that Microsoft’s PDF printers and export engines rasterize everything, which is not only a loss of detail, but also a travesty given that vectors are a foundation of the Portable Document Format. Fortunately there are free PDF printers (I verified both doPDF or CutePDF) that preserve vectors.

Breakfast

Posted on by David Bookstaber

Here is my new favorite breakfast: A chocolate protein smoothie with banana, peanut butter, almond milk, and cold-brew coffee concentrate.

For more than two decades previous my breakfast was half a box of Post’s Great Grains Raisins Dates Pecans. Every few weeks drug stores would put that cereal on sale and I would buy every box on the shelf. (Before COVID sale prices would be $2.50/box. 5+ years ago $2/box. $1.50/box before that, and 20 years ago the (Air Force) base commissary would often sell them for $1/box!) Keeping a stock of more than 60 boxes was not uncommon. Here’s a typical view of my pantry:

My custom is to steep cereal in milk for a few minutes until it gets a little soft. I used to use skim cow’s milk, but some years ago I developed a lactose sensitivity and switched to almond or oat milk.

There was an interlude about 20 years ago after I bought a batch of this cereal that was infested with moths. That took away my appetite for it for a few years, during which I switched primarily to General Mills’ Basic 4 cereal.

In college and earlier my appetite was enormous: In dining halls I would fill my tray with 4-6 bowls of cereal (granted, dining hall bowls aren’t very big), leading people to jokingly suggest that I switch to Total cereal. Total is just boring cereal that General Mills mixes with extra multivitamins. For many years they ran commercials like this showing how many bowls of competing cereals it would take to accumulate those extra vitamins:

Yale Course Critique (A Brief History)

Posted on by David Bookstaber

Spring cleaning my paper files I found copies of the Yale Course Critique from when I was an undergraduate in the 1990s. I wrote for that publication, served as a department coordinator, and was a senior editor 1998-1999.

The Yale Course Critique was a student production, affiliated with the Yale Herald. At the end of each semester, volunteers collected paper surveys and, for those courses with sufficient responses, aggregated ratings and summarized feedback in a 3-4 paragraph blurb. We printed a few thousand copies (sponsored by ads) and distribute them in dining halls at the beginning of each semester when students were trying to figure out which of the ~1,000 available Yale University courses to enroll in.

When I first encountered the Yale Course Critique I knew this was my kind of project: Collecting and disseminating data to help improve peoples’ ability to make important choices? And the university didn’t support this? Sign me up!

But why, I wondered out loud, wasn’t the University itself doing this? Most professors and departments distributed survey forms to students at the end of the semester. Only some agreed to share those with the Yale Course Critique. For those that didn’t, we had to solicit student feedback separately – in dining halls, and even posting volunteers outside the larger lectures to distribute and collect our survey forms from students.

I became a crusader for the cause. First as a “department coordinator” I tried (with some success) to convince individual professors and department heads to voluntarily share their surveys with us. As a senior editor I aggressively lobbied leaders in the Yale College Faculty to make sharing survey data a university policy. We did not succeed in that before I graduated in 1999, but I just spent some time researching this and found that by April 2002 the (student) Yale College Council passed a resolution requesting the university to “create a comprehensive online course critique,” and by November 2002 the Yale College Faculty unanimously agreed.

There has been some subsequent intrigue: By 2014 Yale College, now in full control of the data, tried to limit its use. They threatened students who summarized it on a separate website. In response to that another enterprising student, Sean Haufler, wrote a browser app that produced the summaries directly in client browsers.

I couldn’t find much history of the Course Critique. There is mention of one in 1969. Another shows up in 1985 with a note that none had been published since 1982. The “Yale College Course Critique” I joined appears to have been revived in 1993: The hardcopies in my archive show Volume 3(#2) dated September 1996, through Volume 6(#1) dated January 1999. Not much was captured online. Here are are few pages from fall issues in 1996, 1997, and 1998:

Violin Accessories

Posted on by David Bookstaber

When I resumed seriously playing I had some very old accessories. In the picture below on the right is the old rag I used to wipe up rosin dust, and an old block of rosin, both dating back roughly 30 years.

David Bookstaber's new violin accessories

In addition to new strings I got new rosin, a new dust cloth, and in that little black cylinder next to the violin are concert ear plugs I began to wear in my left ear while practicing to prevent further hearing damage.

I spent some time researching strings to find something that would dampen the excessively bright timbre of this violin. Some suggested getting synthetic core strings, and I now play on Pirastro Violino strings, although the improvement over other strings I tried is subtle at best.

Violin Bows

Posted on by David Bookstaber

When I resumed violin a few years ago and began to study Bach Sonatas I found originalists advocating for playing Bach with an older Baroque style bow. It turns out a decent bow can be had for under $100, so I got one of those – shown at the bottom of this photo.

My violin with a new carbon fiber bow, my old pernambuco wood bow, and a baroque style bow.

I also discovered carbon fiber bows selling under $100 so I picked up one of those as well. I have found the carbon fiber bow to be as good as the pernambuco bow for my style of playing (though as I noted in a previous post my style is not … soft). The baroque bow has also been fun to use: It’s shorter, lighter, and more delicate, so it forces me to practice a more gentle approach to playing.

Violin fitting

Posted on by David Bookstaber

Some classical violinists can play without a shoulder rest or even a chin rest. I was trained to grip the violin between my chin and neck firmly enough to hold it in a proper position without any support from my left hand. Given my long neck this was impossible to do without a shoulder rest, and even with a standard shoulder rest it was always a struggle. So when I resumed violin a few years ago I bought the Bonmusica shoulder rest, shown in the photos below, which was a great improvement. However, even with that adjusted to its maximum height I was contorting my neck uncomfortably to hold the violin in the proper position. Further research led me to an adjustable center-mounted chin rest by Wittner Augsburg. Installing that at its maximum height finally let me hold the violin with my chin in a relatively neutral position. Here are photos before and after that chin rest upgrade:

Playing violin takes a toll. Hearing damage in the left ear is one well known effect I enjoy. I suspect that my posture also cost me a left molar (since replaced with an implant) because I habitually clenched it between my upper jaw and left shoulder to hold the violin.

Resuming Violin – Part 1

Posted on by David Bookstaber

The peak of my violin study was about age 14, before I went to boarding high school. I took my violin to and from school, but I didn’t tackle any new pieces and I played it with decreasing frequency. In my twenties and thirties there were periods as long as five years where I never took it out of its case. It was always easier to sit down at a piano than to open the violin case, attach the shoulder rest, tighten the bow, tune the strings, warm up the muscle memory….

A few years ago a friend who plays in a local church orchestra noted that they could use more violinists. It was a low-key affair – rehearsals once a week, performance in Sunday services once a month, and missing either was not a big problem. I joined a second violin section that varied from 2-4 other violinists. It was fun. And I bumped in to a few very good violinists who inspired me to dust off my skills.

With my violin regularly coming out of its case, I began to spend time working on my technique, instead of just blasting through the canon of pieces I had maintained from my teenage years (e.g., Vivaldi’s Four Seasons). Now in my forties I had a level of patience for technical exercises and practice that was sorely lacking in earlier decades. It was time to tackle something new.

One rehearsal I was talking to the best violinist in the orchestra, who had let his violin practice go fallow for some years as he worked on his legal career, and who said he was also renewing his study. “With what?” I asked. He replied, “I decided to go back to the beginning, so I started with the Bach Sonatas.” Of course!

There are some movements in the Bach Sonatas for solo violin that I have always loved. The fugue in the second sonata (BWV 1001) in particular called to me. In my late teens I obtained the sheet music but I didn’t get more than two lines into it before I gave up. But now … I have patience!

My Verbal Degeneration

Posted on by David Bookstaber

As something of both a thinker and an archivist, I have always felt compelled to commit my thoughts to writing. I began journaling as a pre-teen and accumulated almost half a million words by age 30, at which point I took a friend’s advice and began blogging instead. When I had an idea I usually found it easy to expound it to my satisfaction in short order. But over the last decade this ability has degenerated. Today I have dozens of notes and drafts that have not made it to a finished post. I struggle to organize, articulate, and elaborate my thoughts. They’re stuck in my head in a state somewhere between jumbled notions and coherent exposition. The posts that do make it onto my blogs are usually the less-than-satisfying product of a long struggle at wordsmithing. I imagine that this is what it feels like to have a debilitating stroke: I remember being able to do something with facility that I can now only do with halting effort. I can see that I have become dumb.

When it comes to things like math and computer programming I have always been considered “smart.” When I interact with people who struggle with those activities I have often wondered how much of what we call “smarts” is the presence of intelligence as opposed to the absence of impairment. My skill in those arts often seems like clarity in comparison to the clouds and confusion that seem to beset those who struggle. From that perspective I do not feel intelligent so much as I feel unimpaired.

Looking at the state of my verbal skills I feel impaired. My awareness of this impairment has been piqued as I have begun reading Scott Alexander’s blog: That is a guy who can draw and weave every thread on a topic into a crisp expositional tapestry. Where my thoughts are a jumble of fraying twine he writes with supreme clarity. Another blogger explained better than I could just how brilliant a writer Alexander is:

At his best, he hits some strange triple point, previously undiscovered by bloggers, where data, theory, and emotion can coexist in equilibrium. Most writing on topics as abstract and technical as his struggles just not to be dry; it takes effort to focus, and I need energy to read them. Scott’s writing flows so well that it somehow generates its own energy, like some sort of perpetual motion machine.

https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex