Victims of our weaknesses and passions

[austin_dern]

Needed background for this dream: In The Price is Right's Dice Game, contestants roll a die for the final four digits of a car's price. If the roll doesn't equal that digit, the contestant calls whether the digit is lower or higher than the roll. If all four are correct, the contestant wins the car. Except for a short time after the game was introduced decades ago the digits are from one through six, inclusive.

So. I dreamed I was watching the Dice Game. The contestant rolled a 1 for the first digit -- as good as a match -- and then a 5 (a match), a 4 (lower again), and a 3 (higher, even though 1's and 2's show up often here). Bob Barker revealed, of course, the first and second digits were right, but the third and fourth digits were zeros, so he lost on the last number.

Well. The contestant was disappointed, but the audience was livid. Bob was apologetic but insisted zeroes were valid, so ... This must have been a special event; the seats weren't the usual ones (more like bleachers) and the car was $42,500, about $20-25,000 above normal. I think it was one of those trucks they pretend isn't an SUV to avoid any shred of environmental regulation.

Afterward and still grumbling I ran into Bob Barker, and took no joy from that (!), though he pointed out the contestant was fine, and perhaps I shouldn't be so personally outraged over someone else's honestly minor injustice. Wise words, but the guy was still gypped. They should've said zeros were a possibility, especially after rolling that 1. I think he made it to the Showcase. Then I woke up, and went in to the office.

In spam those marketing folks offered an iBook for my opinions. You'd think they'd have tried the iPod Shuffle before moving into the serious hardware.

Trivia: The Skylab Ground Command teleprinter received transmissions in FM at 450.0 MHz. Source: Skylab: A Guidebook, Leland F Belew, Ernst Stuhlinger, NASA SP-107.

Currently Reading: Flesh in the Age of Reason, Roy Porter.

Comments

[bluerain.livejournal.com]

No, there are a lot of other words, mostly about how and why you can't touch this.

I suppose that makes sense. I am not mathematical and do not dream numerical relationships--but I've dreamed up new songs, before, and woken up unaware of which chords they were but aware of their relationship to each other, sort of.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Weird; I'd have sworn the song was all ``doo-doo-do-doo, dah-doo-dah-doo CAN'T TOUCH THIS,'' repeat one billion times.

Maybe it's just easier to see how things relate to one another in dreams than it is to remember specifics. There's people who assert mathematical and musical ability are tied together, which makes me feel mighty awkward about my own lack of musical ability; I'm not even that good at listening to music.

[bluerain.livejournal.com]

I showed enormous mathematical interest and aptitude, as a hatchling. My mother still talks about my adventures learning fractions as a toddler, in the bathtub with measuring cups, or of my announcing at age 3 that "there are six threes in eighteen" and such.

Something that happened in elementary school killed my interest. Although I've always heard the same thing about music and math, and I wonder if my lifelong interest in playing music is the ghost of that childhood aptitude, still hanging around.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That is a great time for killing interest in mathematics; unfortunately particularly once you get into long division and the hints of algebra there's a focus on the rules and procedures of things, and forgetting the point of things. People who really grok mathematics don't get to do much teaching at those levels, to everyone's loss.

Perhaps coincidentally it was just after elementary school that my interest in playing music diminished. The only objectively observable event I can tie this to is going to a new school where I was demoted from First Violin to Second Violin, but I remember thinking the rather less shallow reason that while I was all right in playing most of the notes on schedule, I was just following procedures (I'm gifted in procedures) rather than playing music, if you get that difference.