{"id":1120,"date":"2009-09-12T11:12:56","date_gmt":"2009-09-12T11:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1120"},"modified":"2009-09-12T11:12:56","modified_gmt":"2009-09-12T11:12:56","slug":"computer-science-love-child-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/computer-science-love-child-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer science, love-child: Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is a continuation of the <\/em>story which began here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>
\nLife for the teenager Computer Science was not entirely lonely, since he had several half-brothers, half-nephews,\u00a0and lots of cousins, although he was the only one still living at home.\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, his family would have required a William Faulkner or a Patrick White to do it justice.
\nThe oldest of Mathematics’ children was Geometry, who CS did not know well because he did not visit very often.\u00a0 When he did visit, G would always bring a sketchpad and make drawings<\/a>, while the others talked around him.\u00a0\u00a0 What the boy had heard was that G had been very successful early in his life, with a high-powered job to do with astronomy at someplace like NASA and with lots of people working for him, and with business trips to Egypt and Greece and China and places.\u00a0 But then he’d had an illness or a\u00a0nervous breakdown, and thought he was traveling through the fourth dimension.\u00a0 CS had once overheard Maths telling someone that G\u00a0had an “identity crisis<\/a>“, and could not see the point of life anymore, and he\u00a0\u00a0had become an alcoholic.\u00a0 He didn’t speak much to the rest of the family, except for Algebra, although all of them still seemed very fond of him, perhaps because he was the oldest brother.
\n
\nThe next\u00a0oldest was either Analysis or Probability, CS wasn’t sure.\u00a0 They were both a lot older than he was.\u00a0 Analysis was\u00a0a half-brother to CS, who visited all the time.\u00a0 He was Maths’ child all right, but CS had never\u00a0discovered who his other parent\u00a0was.\u00a0\u00a0 One of the\u00a0kids at school had told\u00a0him that it was someone called Enlightenment, but CS did not know if this was true.\u00a0\u00a0 Anyway, CS did not like\u00a0Analysis very much – he was very bossy, always telling the\u00a0others in the family what to do and even telling strangers what to do.\u00a0 No matter what the season, Analysis always wore a\u00a0black suit, white\u00a0shirt\u00a0and a thin, black tie.\u00a0 He reminded CS of the painting he’d once seen of a\u00a0mid-western farmer holding a pitch-fork standing with his wife.\u00a0 There was not an ounce of fat on Analysis, since he ran marathons, and he was tall and thin.\u00a0\u00a0 He was always prodding Algebra to do some exercise, but Algebra ignored him.\u00a0 Apart from the marathons, Analysis had no hobbies and did not seem to mix with people much.\u00a0 He used to meet up sometimes with his ex, Economics.\u00a0 In fact, Analysis and Economics, when both of them were quite\u00a0young, \u00a0had had a son, called Mathematical Economics.\u00a0 Lately, though, ME had got himself mixed up with a bad crowd, through his own half-brother Finance, who was apparently now in trouble with the police<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0
\nCS was always a little scared of Analysis, since he had a sharp tongue, and talking with him it always seemed that you had failed him in some way, and he was about to tell you.\u00a0\u00a0 He told anybody what he thought of their failings.\u00a0\u00a0 This was especially true of the twins, AppliedMath and MathPhysics, who Analysis was always berating, both to their face and behind their backs.\u00a0 CS could never tell the two\u00a0apart, and it was always confusing when one of them visited without the other.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They were usually friendly to him, although they were always trying to persuade CS to do little stuff for them, like running to the shop to buy some cigarettes or designing a new operating system for their latest supercomputer, which CS thought a real bore (since he’d now done it so often for them already).
\nHis favourite half-brother was Algebra, who was the opposite in every way to Analysis.\u00a0 Algebra was bald and short and pudgy, and never stopped talking.\u00a0 Yadda, yadda, yadda, all day long.\u00a0 He never wore a suit and tie, only ever a tee-shirt, or when he dressed up, a polo shirt.\u00a0 As far as CS could tell, his only exercise was golf, which he played 2 or 3 times a week.\u00a0\u00a0 Algebra had a son who was only a little older than CS, called Category Theory, although he insisted you call him Cat.\u00a0 Although only slightly older, he seemed way more mature than CS; for example, he smoked dope and had a girlfriend.\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, one time, when Philosophy had taken CS to visit Philosophy’s French friend Existent (“Call me X, daddyo”), who worked in advertisting and listened to jazz, who should they find there in X’s basement apartment but Cat.\u00a0\u00a0 Like his uncle Geometry, Cat always carried a sketchpad and was always drawing<\/a>.\u00a0 But he talked more than Geometry, which he probably got from his father.\u00a0\u00a0 Cat was always friendly to CS, and was the only person in the family, apart from Philosophy, who took him seriously.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Cat was also a very good bongos player, and had even once been to West Africa to learn African drumming.\u00a0\u00a0 He told CS he was planning to go to India to spend a year meditating, but not to tell anyone about this yet.\u00a0 Only years later did CS learn that Cat’s parents were in fact\u00a0Algebra and Philosophy,\u00a0although Philosophy had abandoned him,\u00a0so Cat was both a half-nephew and a half-brother to CS.
\nThen there was CS’s other half-brother, Logic, whose parents were actually Philosophy and Theology.\u00a0\u00a0 Philosophy had abandoned him too, like CS and Cat, while Theology had gone to help guerrillas in South America and was now living in Saudi Arabia.\u00a0 So poor Mathematics, the\u00a0only\u00a0one with a regular job, \u00a0had had to raise Logic too.\u00a0By the time CS was born, Logic had already left home.\u00a0 To CS, Logic seemed like a younger version of Analysis, thin and single-minded, although\u00a0he was much friendlier than Analysis, at least to CS.\u00a0 Everytime you saw Logic, he had a new word puzzle or a card trick or magic trick to show you.\u00a0 He hung out a lot with\u00a0Philosophy\u00a0and even visited Uncle EE\u00a0now and then<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Apart from Philosophy, none of the others seemed to like Logic very much, although CS got along with him fine, and Cat used to visit with him<\/a>.\u00a0 He would always help CS with his homework, and he had clever ways to turn the question the teacher had given you into another question which you could answer using a bit of algebra.\u00a0\u00a0 Sometimes, this even worked in tricking the teacher.
\nThe only other regular visitor to Maths’ house was a great aunt of Philosophy, called Philosophy of Math. Phil, as she liked to be called, wasn’t married, smoked cigarillos, and wore sensible shoes.\u00a0\u00a0 She seemed to have only other single-women her own age as friends, such as her sisters History of Math and Philosophy of Science, and her good friend Epistemology, and CS thought she had a crush on Mathematics.\u00a0 She would always arrive late at night without any warning, and without any definite date for departure, and stay for a few weeks until\u00a0Maths was forced to ask her to leave.\u00a0\u00a0 What upset Maths the most was not that she never contributed a dime to the food bill while she was visiting, or that she never helped with the washing up, but that she slept late each night and did not get up till noon.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This was just the height of idleness, in Maths’ view, wasting the best part of the day.\u00a0\u00a0 Phil kept a diary, which she wrote in before going to sleep every night, and Maths was sure she was writing down everyone’s conversations.\u00a0 Sometimes Phil would even read excerpts from her diary over dinner, particularly if she thought she’d written something witty or clever.\u00a0 This just drove Maths crazy.\u00a0 “Such boring, obvious piffle!”, is what\u00a0Maths\u00a0would say to CS, later.\u00a0 Maths never had the courage to say\u00a0it directly to Phil, though, because she knew word would get back to Philosophy, and all hell would break loose.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Phil always talked a lot with Logic whenever he visited and would ignore everyone else, although lately she’d starting talking to Cat<\/a>.\u00a0 No one knew just how she made her living.
\n(TO BE CONTINUED)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is a continuation of the story which began here. Life for the teenager Computer Science was not entirely lonely, since he had several half-brothers, half-nephews,\u00a0and lots of cousins, although he was the only one still living at home.\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, his family would have required a William Faulkner or a Patrick White to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,26,45,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-computer-technology","category-fiction","category-logic","category-mathematics","p1","y2009","m09","d12","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}