Seth's Blog

From David Osmond, a failed contestant on American Idol: “I wish I had the opportunity to share what’s inside of me.”

I think that’s exactly the driving force behind blogging.

I used to teach introductory psychology. Large lecture class. I found I could often put whatever I was thinking about in the morning into my lecture. Blogging is easier.

More Jonathan Schwarz puts it like this: We have “desperation to express what our existence is like. Sometimes this comes out literally as singing, sometimes metaphorically.”

I felt a burst of joy when I logged in and saw for the first time the new digital edition of The New Yorker. It looks good and it works. The ads are still there — good, the magazine needs the revenue. The simulation of page-turning has a calming effect. You can easily print stuff to read later — while waiting for BART, say. You can easily go from the table of contents to the articles. You can easily look in back issues.

In Beijing I read The New Yorker online (the free stuff). Mail from America to China is so slow and error-prone it was pointless to have stuff forwarded. It felt fine. Sure, I couldn’t read some of the articles but there was plenty of other stuff to read. My subscription felt worthless. Now it doesn’t.

Maybe magazines aren’t dead.

More When I tried to read an article, big problems arose. 1. It wouldn’t work with Firefox, no matter how many times I reopened it. 2. After reading several pages with internet Explorer, it got into a state with two pages superimposed, making the whole screen unreadable. I couldn’t fix it. I gave up and went to the paper version.

In a Time article about the future of journalism — the problem of course is that it is free online — Walter Isaacson writes:

Others smarter than we were had avoided that trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. “One thing you do is prevent good software from being written,” he railed. “Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?”

Many people do professional work for nothing: the creators of open-source software, for one. Not to mention bloggers who write about their professional expertise (such as me) or my friend Carl Willat (who made a commercial for nothing). Many book writers do professional work (in the sense that what they write is based on their profession) for next to nothing.

According to my theory of human evolution before occupational specialization came hobbies — skilled work done for nothing. The mental tendencies that led us to do hobbies are still within us

Superhobbies.

ROBERTS Did you write in high school or in college?

MLODINOW I started writing in third grade for my school librarian. All I remember about that was they were short stories about dinosaurs and she claimed to love them and that gave me lots of encouragement. I used to love writing little stories; I didn’t do that in college very much, I do believe I did in high school. In college I was just too busy– I had three majors and also got my master’s degree, and I was only there three and a half years.

ROBERTS I didn’t know that. Where did you go to college?

MLODINOW To Brandeis University.

ROBERTS What were your three majors and master’s degrees?

MLODINOW Chemistry, physics and math.

ROBERTS What was the master’s degree?

MLODINOW In physics.

ROBERTS In three and a half years you got a master’s degree?

MLODINOW Yes. I took about double the normal course load. I had to get special permission for that. In the end I was one course short; I had to choose between the master’s and the chemistry. I think I made the wrong choice, I chose the master’s, so I ended up with a double major but I did every chemistry course for a major except one.

ROBERTS Why did you do this?

MLODINOW I didn’t do this to try and break records; I was tremendously interested in things and if I saw a course I liked I wanted to take it. I was like the cliché of a kid in a candy store stuffing his face. I was stuffing my face with knowledge.

ROBERTS Why didn’t you stay longer? Why three and a half years? Why not four and a half years?

MLODINOW Normal is four years and I took a semester off to live in to Israel during the Yom Kippur war, so that made it three and a half. I didn’t think about staying an extra year. I went on to graduate school next so I didn’t leave school. And I’m still doing that–that’s what I do by writing books is just learn things and then write about them.

ROBERTS Yes, I know what you mean. Why did you choose physics rather than math or chemistry?

MLODINOW Chemistry was my love; chemistry and math since I was little and I had the clichéd chemistry set in the basement–blew up myself, burned myself, burned down the house (well, caught the house on fire) and all sorts of things and I thought ‘I will be a chemist’ from the age of, I don’t know, ten. When I got to college what happened was more and more I realized there wasn’t enough math in the chemistry for me so I started out with a math and a chemistry major and I thought the math was so Mickey Mouse in chemistry that I added . . . I learned about physics while I was in Israel in the kibbutz–I talked about that experience in Feynman’s Rainbow–and came back and added the physics and ended up in physics. I’ve always loved math but was not excited by pure math where you’re just exploring mathematics or its own sake. I always liked the applications. When I started learning about curved space it was not because the idea that Euclidian geometry isn’t the only one that excited me. It was the idea that physical space might not satisfy Euclidean axioms that really excited me. That was my proclivity in that direction.

Interview directory.

• tapeworms are good for you
• dirt is good for you
• food with live bacteria is good for you

Thanks to Dave Lull.