Readers of this blog — friends, family, acquaintances mostly — know how I bounce from cynical/topical commentary to odd, hopefully quirkily-entertaining features and then to my arcane articles on physical/mathematical topics.
I’ve found there’s no way to predict what topic will resonate with whom. This has led me to more-or-less follow my whims and see what happens. And that, I’ve decided, is okay!
With that, I’m starting a series of posts that are basically links in an adult brag bracelet. Scrapbook items from a seven-decade life. Things treasured only by me, but you get to take a peek.
Embarking on this at my age is what psychologists call life review — except I am not going to get into my shouldas and wouldas with you. Stanford professor William Damon agrees: “Rather than dwelling on past problems, looking forward with a life-fulfilling purpose requires looking backward in an open and receptive way.”*
In his book Wild Problems, recommended by fellow blogger-friend Enrique Guerra-Pujol, Stanford economist Russ Roberts (what, we all work for Stanford now?) states the obvious in a succinct way that is worth repeating:
Human beings care about more than the pleasures and pains of daily existence. We want purpose. We want meaning. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves. We aspire. We want to matter. These overarching sensations — the texture of our lives above and beyond what we call happiness or everyday pleasure — define who we are and how we see ourselves. These longings are at the heart of a life well-lived.
The scrapbook items I plan to share in my life review have the above-and-beyond texture that Roberts alludes to, namely, the quality of mattering, at least to me and quite often to someone or something else besides me.
Mattering is most likely what this blog has been about, all along. So here goes!
A Note from Martin Gardner
I am sure I have mentioned Martin Gardner to you, as he was one of the main influential forces in my intellectual life — and I’m hardly alone saying so. As cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter put it, Martin Gardner’s monthly Mathematical Games feature in Scientific American may have been “about ‘recreational math,’ which sounds frivolous, but in fact the column was about beauty and profundity in math and many other fields as well.”
Gardner’s column, which he wrote until 1986, was always the first thing I read when the magazine arrived, and was more likely than not to be re-read a second, third or nth time.
Having a fondness for numbers and games myself, I got it in my head one day in 1979 to devise a puzzle of sorts which I called the Heisenberg Box. I will spare you all the details, but it basically is a stack of n drawers with n marbles loaded at random into the drawers; the problem is to figure out how many marbles are in each drawer. The catch is, the act of opening a drawer to inspect the contents will (silently) cause one marble in that drawer to drop to the next lower level. The objective is to determine the original configuration of marbles in the fewest possible moves, without destroying information.
I did some exploratory work on the puzzle (true confession: I must have used our office computer for this, and maybe even some of my work time!) and sent a write-up on the problem to Gardner, c/o the magazine. I was impressed that (a) Gardner even took time to read what I had sent him, and (b) that he responded so favorably (see note attached).
Now, Gardner did not actually wind up mentioning me or my puzzle in his columns, but instead suggested that I submit my work to Journal of Recreational Mathematics (which is sadly now defunct). I did so and the journal accepted my article, as they did a few other submissions of mine later on. So I have Martin Gardner to thank, not only for spurring my curiosity and interest in puzzles, but for my becoming a published author of sorts.
In any event, I figured that I possessed something special in my personal, hand-typed and signed note from Martin Gardner, and so I have made sure to hang onto it all these years.
There is an annual conference/event, called Gathering for Gardner, which is convened by the mathematically-inclined friends, admirers and devotees of Gardner. I always wished I were talented enough to attend (potential attendees must be invited or self-nominated), but I just discovered that there are virtual events for the public, which I plan to check out.
So, this forward-and-backward-looking scrapbook page is dedicated to Martin Gardner, 1914-2010, a generous and gifted writer who was not himself a mathematician but whose wide-ranging and infectious interests inspired — safe to say — hundreds of thousands, including me.
________________
I learned of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) when I was maybe 9 years old, courtesy of the go-fish card game 
A year ago here, I posted a “call for contributions” on the topic of shared shorthand. As I described it then, this is where you and your friend or partner use a word or phrase whose context and meaning only the two of you understand. Either of you may invoke the phrase to refer to a current situation, and each of you instantly “get” the association.
My call did not elicit many responses, which is why this “revisited” post is so late to press. Besides the comments from Mary and Guy, I received exactly one other contribution, from a reader named Kevin Miller:
My partner and I were long-distance for the first two years of our relationship. We picked the octopus emoji, basically at random, as a quick text we could send to say “I love you, I’m thinking about you, you’re my person.” To this day (even after moving in together) we send each other octopus-related ephemera from the Internet, and often, just the emoji itself.
This was sweet. I hope Kevin and his partner are still going strong and exchanging octopi.
But I had promised, in that year-ago post, to share and explain a couple of examples of our own shared shorthand, namely The Ashley Principle and The John Sexton Rule. So, in the interest of literary closure if nothing else…
The Ashley Principle
My spouse had to fill in my memories of The Ashley Principle’s 1990s origin. She says: “There was a small china and gift shop in Toronto. [Whose name is now lost to us both.] I originally found the Portmeirion Welsh Wildflowers pattern at her shop, but I thought I could buy them cheaper at Ashley’s. [The William Ashley store on Bloor Street was known for its ‘great wall of china’ and we window-shopped there often.] So I ordered the china from Ashley’s — but then realized that the price at the smaller shop was actually better.”
Now, my spouse’s plan was to walk into Ashley’s the next morning, inform them that the other shop’s price was lower and ask Ashley’s to meet it. I asked, but what if they refuse? My spouse said, I’m not going to go there. I’ll face that if I have to.
This became known as The Ashley Principle: Commit to Plan A. Plan B is a distraction. Handle one thing at a time, and deal with the outcome of Plan A if and when.
As it happened, the Ashley’s salesperson checked with management and agreed to match the price at the other shop. So my spouse did not have to resort to Plan B, which is good, because she really didn’t have one.
These days, we invoke The Ashley Principle as shorthand for, this is too much planning, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s see what happens before we spend a lot of energy on alternatives. I’m usually a planning kind-of-guy but there’s something to be said for this.
The John Sexton Rule
We custom-built our current home almost 20 years ago, our first (and last!) foray into the world of residential construction. John Sexton was the project manager, our contractor’s right-hand man. I respected John, as he had just the right combination of perfectionism and pragmatism needed for building a custom home. And he had also acquired the skills to deal with, fend off and ultimately satisfy the kind of people who want such homes.
But inevitably, there would be a hiccup in our home-building experience: our hardwood floors had numerous visible scratches, due to the flooring contractor’s carelessness with the installation. This was not obvious to us until the final walk-through, as the floors had been covered with paper after they were installed — to preserve the scratches I guess!
In any event, we reviewed the issue with John and said how noticeable the scratches were whenever we looked down. John’s initial, not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek response was, “Then don’t look down.” This became the essence of the John Sexton Rule.
I was floored [ha ha] and said we needed a better solution. Ultimately, the flooring guys replaced the worst of the damaged boards and John and I spent a couple of hours on our knees rubbing out and filling in the lighter scratches.
Our floors got fixed but the John Sexton Rule lives on in our household. It gets invoked — mostly by me and usually ironically — to suggest that one approach to a nagging problem is to stop thinking so much about it. Don’t look down indeed!
• • •
The floor, if you will, remains open for your shared shorthand contributions. Thanks.