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(5)

For some people, the story of Christmas brings light to the darkness of winter. The reminder of a savior, born in the most humble circumstance -- whose sacrifice would, forty years later, save all mankind from our sins -- is an inspiration to generosity and a source of wonder. For me, it hasn't been that for quite some time.

I don't have any particular problem with other people using the Christ-story to build a holiday which is wonderful for them, but it's not the right thing for me. The innocent child, the prince of peace, lying in a manger has never reduced me to tears -- the story feels a bit, to me, like arbitrary words which translate to "Now it is Christmas; be happy!" And yes, Christmas is a happy time. But I'm not sure I feel it as a meaningful time...

The Secular Solstice was different. It was missing the familiarity built on years of repetition, and the community of people coming-together-once-more (though I recognized many more people there than I expected I would, which was wonderful...). If you've been following along at all, you'll realize that these are nontrivial aspects of a holiday. But Ray told a story -- in one of the darker parts of the evening -- of a world where humans were alone on this rock. Where there was no one to make sure that the world treated us fairly, and no guard rails to stop us from accidentally tripping and falling and scraping our leg and contracting gangrene and dying.

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(4)

Last weekend, I and a few friends traveled to New York to attend a winter solstice celebration. Ray Arnold, who ran the event, did a brief writeup, but I figure I'd put forward (1) my perspective and (2) my thoughts on the event.

What actually happened? Well, it looked a lot like a church service -- some people told some stories and we sang lots of songs together. But the story that pulled us together wasn't "Once upon a time, a virgin gave birth to the son of God in a manger."; ours went something like this: (I'm paraphrasing from Ray's masterful telling at the event itself; alternatively, you can read some of his own words)

Once upon a time, winter was death. The world got cold and harsh, and if your tribe didn't have gigantic stores of food, you starved and died. And no one knew why it was, and no one could figure out when it would come.

So people, hoping against hope that there was some human-like person in control of the weather who was capable of pity, threw a party in the dead of winter. And, as it happens, when you throw a party in the middle of winter, spring comes back several months later. (As it happens, not throwing a party works just as well, but no one would dare risk that ...)

The problem was, no matter how many parties you threw, you couldn't stop winter from coming in the first place. We tried, and nothing worked. People died.

But -- someone noticed, after

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(1)

The other day, a few carolers treated the Eliot dining hall to a rendition of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen":

God rest you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay, for Jesus Christ our savior was born on Christmas Day, to save us all from Satan's power when we were gone astray. Oh, tidings of comfort and joy...

And more recently, this happened:

> Shepherds, why this jubilee? Why these songs of happy cheer? What great brightness did you see? What glad tiding did you hear? Gloria in excelsis deo! Come to Bethlehem and see him whose birth the angels sing. Come, adore on bended knee Christ the Lord, the new-born king. Gloria in excelsis deo!

And in both cases (the first in person, the second when I saw it on the 'tube), I found myself following along with the lyrics. Because these are songs that I've been hearing my whole life, and at this point, can probably sing from memory. Even though it's been a long time since I believed the Christian myth.

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(2)

This year, for the first time I can remember, my family won't be attending Christmas service at the Columbia United Christian Church. And it wasn't until recently that I've begun to appreciate what that annual service has meant to us all of these years, and what my parents saw in that church that I never did, growing up.

The thing about the Christmas

On my flight Boston-Keflavik, I picked up Freakonomics, by Levitt and Dubner. It was a fun read that I highly recommend. But a few things struck me about it, so I figured I'd write them down rapid-fire.

(1) "Despite [his] elite credentials, his approach is notably unorthodox."

I'm not sure what bothers me more: the widespread stereotype that eliteness is inextricable from orthodoxy, or my sinking suspicion that it's not entirely false.

(2) "He is ... an intuitionist."

In mathematics, "intuitionism" is a bit of a dirty word. In layman's term's, an intuitionist rejects the idea that a double negative is a positive, and so considers as invalid the logic:

It's appealing, because disallowing proofs by contradiction of the negation (i.e. the above form) means that every proof of "X exists" necessarily gives a mathematical construction of X. By contrast, traditional, analytic logic sometimes produces proofs that some object, logically, must exist -- but no indication of how one might make/find/imagine it.

It's widely derided because basic logical maneuvers are excluded, and so many 'intuitive' results can't be proven at all! As a professor of mine once lamented: "[Luitzen] Brouwer became famous for his proof of the fixed-point theorem, but then he became an intuitionist and never did anything useful again."

Anyway. Words have interesting meanings in different contexts. More recently: a friend and I were having a discussion about Humanism, and eventually realized

Monday, Harvard saw an unfounded bomb threat from a student who tried to postpone an exam in American Government. Four buildings in Harvard Yard were evacuated and that day's morning exams were, indeed, postponed. Students were given options to take them later that afternoon, in February, or not at all, either electing to be graded on the remainder of the course's assigned work, or on a Pass/Fail scale. But Eldo Kim '16 confessed to sending the emails, and will appear in US District Court tomorrow.

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(1)

A headline like "Harvard Student, 20, Arrested in Connection with Campus Bomb Scare" (from a local paper) feels strangely alien. Of course, I've seen several "XYZ College senior charged with ABC" headlines, and it always felt distant, not like it was real life. In the Harvard Crimson, I'm used to seeing headlines like "Early Action Acceptance Rises to 21 Percent" and "Donning Hats, Capes, and Little Else, Harvard Students Celebrate Primal Scream".

This is, of course, not the first time Harvard has had negative press recently. But stories like "Cheating Scandal at Harvard" and "Harvard Grade Inflation Rampant" and even "Harvard Stripped of Quiz Bowl Titles" seem perversely Harvardian in their accusations: "Cheating Scandal at Harvard -- Even the Best Do It!"; "Harvard Grade Inflation Rampant -- Getting in is the Hardest Part, After All!", and so on. After all, I've complained to more than one friend that "this wouldn't be news if we weren't Harvard".

But "Student Arrested for Bomb Threat"? Today, the

In the wake of the announcement of Harvard's first wave of '18 admits, the Harvard Crimson is reports on the high-school demographics of Harvard's student body. The investigative article sheds some sunlight on just how much inequity exists between privileged "Harvard feeder schools" and the rest of the downtrodden teenaged proletariat.

That is, surprisingly little.

Oh, sure; the graph is concave. That means that...some schools sent more kids than other schools. Huh. How many more? Well, just reading the graph, something like 45% of Harvard students were the only admit from their school, and something like 78% are one of three or fewer kids from their high school. By contrast, the top schools send...15. A whopping five times more. Um. Right.

For contrast, this is what real inequity looks like:

Things on the right are people with obscene amounts of money. For reference, poverty-line America is ~95%tile.

(Yes, they're graphing different things, but the mathematical point remains valid.)

Or, on a brighter note, the cost-effectiveness of different world health interventions:

Things are the right are awesome ideas we can be doing even more of.

So yes, some high schools send ~15 students to Harvard every year. Some send one every ~4 years. The real problem, of course, is the high percentage of schools that never have sent a student to the Ivy Leagues, and never will. Or, for that matter, the gigantic percentage of people in this world who had the misfortune to be born in a place where education through high school wasn't mandatory, easy, or even available. But that, of course, doesn't show up on the Crimson's graph, because that wasn't part of

Today is the would-have-been-107th birthday of Grace Murray Hopper, 1906-1992. If you don't know who she was, then I assume you're capable of clicking the above link, and so you've now learned that she left an associate professorship at Vassar to enlist in the Navy Reserve (only after securing an exemption for being underweight at 105 pounds), co-authored papers with Howard Aiken on the Harvard Mark I, and later declined a full professorship at Vassar to remain a research fellow in CS at Harvard.

When Navy regulations forced her retirement at age 60, she was recalled to active duty, and later promoted to Commodore (or Rear Admiral) by an act of Congress. Why did she remain in the Navy until age 80? Because that's where the most interesting computers were, and damn all the rules telling her she couldn't be there. As an alumnus of my high school once said: "Walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop other people!"'

Today, my office in Maxwell-Dworkin sits directly across from the "Grace Hopper conference room", but her legacy also surrounds me in my daily work: compilers, language standards, and the now-obvious concept that code should be "readable". ("But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!")

Perhaps it's