I like swimming and track and field, but why should only swimmers be allowed to traverse the same distance via four different methods, and to be able to get a medal for each one of them?

It would be great to have a different medal for each different method of traversing track too, culminating in the 400 m track individual medley, consisting of

First 100m: Backstride

Second 100m: Crawl (knees and hands alternately touch the ground)

Third 100m: Hop (you can choose your leg, but then the other one can never touch the ground)

Fourth 100m: Freestyle (anyway you like).

It sounds weird, but it's no weirder than triple jump.

Many years ago in the past, while running, I decided to try to shut my eyes and see how many steps I could take at the same pace without actually seeing where I was going. I thought of it as a combination of putting faith in my own capacity to run straight and faith in the universe not to harm me, like some kind of mental/spiritual exercise.

If I'm running on the ring road in Central Park, and there are no people nearby to worry about smashing into, I find I can do ten steps easily, twenty with difficulty, and then I start to get panicky. I imagine I'm going to crash into the sidewalk and trip and fall. I've done forty, but feel very unsafe at that point.

Running on the beach I once did 140 steps, but that's cheating a little, since you can feel the surf at the edge of the sea and know which way is too far left or too far right. But even then, at 100 or so I got mysteriously uneasy.

Somehow, at least for me, it's harder than it seems.

when I came here came from one source, a fictional one: the novel "Marjorie Morningstar" by Herman Wouk. It's the story of a young Jewish girl (Marjorie Morgenstern) living on CPW in the 1930s and her break-the-bourgeois-rules affair with a pseudo-Bohemian Jewish Cole-Porter-wannabe named Noel Airman (formerly Ehrman). 'Marjorie Morningstar' is the stage name Marjorie hopes to adopt. It ends in the 1950s with the sad triumph of conventionality. But I and my friends read the book several times in high school, and it left a vivid impression of the charms of a romantic bohemian life. In it I discovered the Village, Riverside Drive, the Catskills, summer camps, Broadway, Central Park, the Bridle Path, and so on. It was made into a not very good movie with Natalie Wood, if I remember correctly, and I bet they gave it a happy ending.

One of these days I have to read it again. But thinking about it, I was struck by how literature has changed. In the 1950s and 60s, authors like Herman Wouk and Irwin Shaw wrote really popular best sellers that were good literature. Nowadays, it seems to me, the literary world has fractured into trashy best-sellers and less popular good books.

Ever since I read Camille Paglia's "Break Blow Burn" in which she comments on 43 famous poems, I've admired her writing. Her commentary is completely transparent; nothing about her or her personal life and sexual preferences gets between the reader and the poem. She almost doesn't exist. It reminds of me an article I once read on meat and vegetable eating by Margaret Visser in which you absolutely couldn't tell whether she was vegetarian or not. (Margaret Visser also wrote a book called 'Much Depends on Dinner' about food which is surprisingly interesting.)

In more political pieces Paglia's written, her personality comes through fiercely, and why not. In commenting on a poem you don't want to overshadow the poet. In commenting on politics, it's fair game.

Anyhow, here's the conclusion of a recent talk that she gave on feminism at some Harvard conference:

"My final recommendation for reform is a massive rollback of the paternalistic system of grievance committees and other meddlesome bureaucratic contrivances which have turned American college campuses into womblike customer-service resorts. The feminists of my baby-boom generation fought to tear down the intrusive in loco parentis rules that insultingly confined women in their dormitories at night. College administrators and academic committees have no competence whatever to investigate crimes, including sexual assault. If an offense has been committed, it should be reported to the police, so that the civil liberties of both the accuser and the accused can be protected. This is not to absolve young men from their duty to behave honorably. Hooliganism cannot be tolerated. But we must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility."

I spent six days in Stockholm at the Nasdaq OMX Derivatives Week. It was a phenomenally well-organized conference, with only 4 or 5 speakers each giving two or three talks, no parallel sessions, relatively relaxed. It's a good if luxurious way to run things, like taking the QE 2 to London rather than British Air. No one does that anymore.

Though I'd been to Oslo and Reykjavik and Bergen before, I'd never been to Sweden. And though I feel like a southerner, someone who likes hot summer climes, there's nothing to beat long summer nights, where, while the western sky still has the afterglow of dusk, the eastern sky is already beginning to lighten. It's astonishing. I wonder if winter is as bad as summer is good.

One of the people speaking at the conference was Bill Sharpe, whom I'd neither seen nor heard in person before. He gave a very impressive talk on utility functions and asset allocation. But somehow, in my heart and maybe my brain too, I can't overcome my kernel of residual skepticism about applying optimization to future scenarios that will not turn out to be what you assumed when you started. Is there any other reasonable quantitative way to proceed in the non-risk-neutral measure?

There are a slew of books on happiness lately: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21197

Many years ago a colleague of mine, dissatisfied about the mismatch between his potential and his actual rank, asked the firm we were working at to give him a coach. This was in the days when corporations enthusiastically hired psychologists of various kinds to help "treat" the organization and its members.

With the permission of my colleague, his coach sent me a multitude of forms requiring me to appraise him (my colleague) on various psychological or pseudo-psychological scales. After I'd completed them, the coach flew down from Maine to speak with me in person. Somewhere into the conversation, the coach told me that if I too was really serious about getting ahead, I too would overcome my reluctance and ask the firm to provide me with a coach.

I know you can get tennis coaching, and it works, though it depends very much upon the nature of the coach. Some of them really have the knack of translating into words the corrections you ought to make to your body as you hit a backhand; others can talk till you're blue in the face and can't quite get their words to transmute your actions. But there is something objective and measurable (if qualitative) about tennis skill and success, and so it makes sense that someone perceptive can teach it to you.

But can you get happiness-coaching? There I'm sort of agnostic:

- It seems reasonable that someone who knows how to handle the complexities of life and interactions can teach you something.

- But anyone sufficiently interested in teaching happiness must have been kind of unhappy to start with. Does a once-bad swimmer make a better swimming coach?

- Being good at being happy is very different from being good at dribbling or topspin -- happiness is an internally perceived state, not objectively measured. It's not a thing, it's a meta-thing.

No conclusions, but I'm somehow reminded of two remarks:

One by Schopenhauer, who wrote you shouldn't read except when you are tired of thinking for yourself.

Another by a physics professor in graduate school who said that he preferred to read the results of new papers and then try to derive them on his own rather than read the paper and its proof carefully.

Unexpected pleasures are always better than expected ones, and occasionally I've gone to see movies that I know almost nothing about except for the fact that something about them grabbed me in the first few lines of the newspaper review, and then I stopped reading it in order not to have the movie spoiled by excess information.

I've had this experience several times: My Dinner with Andre (sorry, it's aged badly), Jackie Brown, and Amores Perros. Recently I had it again with Jellyfish, a (nonpoiitical) Israeli movie that, a little like Amores Perros ,but less brutally, traces three sad intersecting elliptical stories. I haven't seen anything that good in a long time.

Why does using neuroscience to improve advertising bother me? I'm not sure, but here's one argument I came up with.

According to Corinthians (and many parent of young girls in the good old days), the body is a temple. Therefore, it should be entered only for holy purposes -- for healing or procreation or even merely pleasure. Scanning your brain to check out the efficacy of advertising is entry for unholy purposes.

QED

While sleepless and low in Hong Kong at 4 a.m. I've seen several newspaper news reports that don't seem either as dramatically good or bad as the reporters think.

1. Much worse than reported:

The latest thing in neuro.* (excuse the regular expression notation).

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/business/media/31adcol.html?ex=1207627200&en=e1030a056035e50c&ei=5070

Scientists who want to make a buck and the advertising agencies are teaming up to check out what kinds of ads trigger your brainwaves. I know this is old stuff -- see Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders of the 1950's -- but still, it seems truly pernicious to me for people to use science (as opposed to psychology) to figure out how best to stimulate you to buy what they want to sell you. I don't know why this is worse than using sex to sell things, or worse than Google tracking your clicking habits, but somehow it seems to me a deeper violation of something I can't quite name yet, some sort of sanctity. No doubt we'll all get used to it soon. If it works.

2. Better than reported: We'll meet again don't know where don't know when ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/science/29collider.html?ref=science

So the Large Hadron Collider at CERN may produce a mini black hole that will destroy the universe, or at least the earth? Unlikely,but it doesn't seem so bad to me. If we have to go (and we do), it seems not at all a bad exit route, all of us together rather than individually, and preferable to almost anything in the God-Forbid category: disease, radiation poisoning, suicide bombings, SARS, even old age itself. Instantaneous and no-one left behind to mourn or struggle for survival is better.

3. Better than reported:

Roger Cohen on http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/30/opinion/edcohen.php

"HONG KONG: It's the end of the era of the white man ..."

Maybe it's a little sad to think about the expected decline of the U.S and Europe with theirfractional growth rates that can't compare to China and India's double digits, but in the end it's just sentimentality to look at the world in competitive chunks rather than one big whole.

"How is it that this is the only place on earth where people think of what you want before you've thought of it yourself? " Mr Cohen says of Hong Kong and its dynamism.

He doesn't know that Geneva and the designers of the Large Hadron Collider may have thought of what you want before you've thought of it yourself, and may end all blessed eras in addition to that of the white man.

My father knew a man called Mr Gilmour who was an engineer who finally retired somewhere in the late 1960s. In those days you used a slide rule to calculate. (Even in the early 1970s Columbia had a programmable desktop computer made by Olivetti that required you to insert a cassette tape whenever it needed to evaluate a sine or cosine.)

Sometime around 1973 or so, Hewlett Packard produced the first programmable handheld calculator -- you could program it in a sort of assembly code, move things from register to register, evaluate logs and sines, and so on. Mr Gilmour, probably close to 80 years old, went out and bought the $1000 HP calculator he'd always longed for in some form. It was a lot of money, even more so in SA Rand. One evening, during my vacation back in South Africa, he demonstrated it to me. It was amazing. But Mr Gilmour was no longer a practicing engineer and he had no real use for it, other than to demonstrate its miracles. His present and his past wishes overlapped but didn't really coexist any more. It was a little sad, though I don't think he thought of it that way.

The NY Times last week had an article about Eckhart Tolle, a new age guru in the tradition of Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Baghwan Shree Rajneesh and various Buddhists and … who claim that nothing exists except the present, and if you can remain aware of that then all your problems are solved. I looked at Tolle's book in Barnes and Noble, where it's selling furiously, and it's not as bad as it might sound. (Tolle himself doesn't reveal much about his past, but if what he writes is sensible it shouldn't matter what he actually did, you could argue.) Anyhow, it's nice work if you can do it, but who can? Animals without too much difficulty, young children, but not adult humans. And even if you learn to, what about those people around you who can't and are still thinking about the past and future?

I thought about this on an 18.5 hour flight to Singapore today. Getting on an airplane for a long transcontinental flight (on which you don't try to use Word or Excel) is the closest synthetic way I know of for living briefly in the present Within a few hours you lose all track of time, the past recedes a long way, and the future doesn't yet loom. In a very short time you get into a sort of cocooned limbo, cut off from normal life. It's amazing. But then it's over.