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<p>Jon -</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing this bit. I can't disagree that the dynamics
of this list includes orbits into (gross) cynicism. Sometimes I
look away, sometimes i make popcorn and (cynically) watch (my riff
on glen's riff on "gross"), and sometimes i. wax up my metaphors
and throw down, shooting my own curls of cynicism.</p>
<p>I think your humble observation of that without contributing to
it is of direct help to me. It rings with the resonances I'm
feeling/hearing in the aftermath of this Charlie Kirk shooting.
Cynicism is like a horned callous, grown there for a purpose under
chronic insult, but in the way an impediment to most all other
purposes? And occasionally acutely interferes with everything
good.</p>
<p>In my personal life, I'm more prone to the practical than the
theoretical (by a few intervals) than you I think, but I am also
prone to abstraction over grounded concretation. </p>
<p>Sometimes it serves me in the pursuit of noodling out the tangled
web we (I) keep weaving around ourselves as we scramble forward
into the unknown (minimizing surprisal while pushing the knot of
circumstances in it's bow wave?), but as you might be alluding to
(or pointing directly at?) decoupling from *some* honest attempt
at a utility function is perhaps the ultimate fools strategy.</p>
<p>As you know from our visits here, I surround myself with a world
which presents regular puzzles for me to solve just to keep going
in a practical sense... how to stay warm/cool, what to eat (beyond
the eggs myu chickens and the spinach my garden patch gives me,
and whether a given branch on a given tree might serve us all
better as next winters firewood, this summer's shade or a lesson
in humility when it cracks and falls on something else I find
utility in.</p>
<p>To many, these puzzles might be a burden, but to me they are my
saving grace, something to tether the bouyant balloon of my mind
from floating off into the stratosphere well above the clouds it
thought it was rising to dance among.</p>
<p>I just spent a week with two active 9 year olds in Wisconsin, a
few hours with a 13 year old and planning a loooong drive with a 7
year old. I'm envious of those of you who have that kind of
innocence in your lives daily... it has been decades for me and
only now do I appreciate how much it shaped me for the better.</p>
<p>- Steve</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 9/11/25 9:40 am, Jon Zingale wrote:<br>
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style="font-size:small;font-family:verdana,sans-serif;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Well, IDK Lawvere (other than from that category book). But it would be interesting to, while young, formulate the predicates you'd like to satisfy when you're old. Renee' and I regularly marvel that we're still alive. When we were young, we couldn't even imagine we'd live this long, much less imagine what properties we might have. I suppose it's that ugly diachronic/narrativity thing again. Like ChatGPT, we can tell ourselves stories about anything. And we'll even believe them. When I was a kid, "story" was synonymous with "lying". "You're not telling us stories, are you?" - a regular question coming from my parents. My response was literally irrelevant. They already had their narrative of whatever I might or might not have done. Whose telling the stories, here?!?! >8^D</pre>
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style="">He had a great impact on my mathematical life and thought. I considered him a spiritual father and I regret not writing to him before he passed. He was wonderfully generous with his time and his stories were poignant, keeping a target in mind. I suppose I am sharing because it is one of my happiest memories and because I believe the list could use a little less cynicism. There is so much cynicism everywhere.</font></pre>
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style="">As to who I wish to be? I am already so completely different from my earliest imaginings; I wouldn't know where to start. Even as of late, my perspectives and thoughts are radically different from what they were months ago. In some ways, this seems catalyzed by a shift away from pure mathematics and toward developing tools for doing science\u2014catalyzed by the overwhelm I feel when confronted by anything I attempt to build that might stand. The specificity and idiosyncratic nature of the phenomena I am studying does a lot to eat through my theorist leanings. I am not an academic; what I am hoping to build must work. The whole exercise is altering my stance. The past appears as a prelude to much less than I imagined. The toy models I and others seem to carry remind me of the useless idols and charms that died in the hands, or around the necks, of the early Christian settlers to this new world. A child's baseball glove in a box of belongings, carried by a woman on her first day of college.</font></span></pre>
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