Your first programming lesson

Dear Js,

I did it. I didn’t think it’d be this soon. You’re not yet three, but you learned how to program.

We were at the Children’s Discovery Museum last weekend. There were two new displays there. They’re basically the same thing. One of them upstairs and the other one is the wet version in the water play area.

When I saw the first one, I did a double take. I knew it was the best interactive display in their entire museum. Whoever got it installed is a genius. I parked myself down on one knee and called you, “Look – I want to show you something.”

For you to get into it, I had to introduce you to the mechanics. I asked, “What is this? How does it stick to the wall?” You stared at this new display you hadn’t seen before with wonder and amazement and said, “MAGIC!” I said no… not magic. MAGNET. (I wondered who would tell you such nonsense. Maybe daycare. Pffft… magic…)

Then I showed you how to move them. I pulled one off. I turned it around. The magnets were heavy, but you refused to let go of the 3 balls in your left hand. You leaned your body to rip them off the wall. Mama said, “you know how he is a squirrel like that.”

Then I rolled a ball down. You got excited. You got it.

First, I showed you a finished contraption. That’s what you see in the picture above. But I intentionally made it sloppy. There were gaps, the chutes were not perfectly lined up, etc. So the first time you tried to roll a ball down, it fell through.

I asked, “What happened?” You said, “It fell.” I could see you almost wanted to think, “It’s broken. It doesn’t work.” But before you decided to leave, I tried to get you to think it through. “Where did it fall?”

You saw it. It happened quickly, but I knew that it wasn’t so fast that you couldn’t see it. You paused to think. You searched your memory. The answer wasn’t there, so you did something amazing. You tried it again. The ball rolled down, and fell through again. But this time, since you were on a mission, you pinpointed, “THERE.”

I asked, “Why did it fall?” You said, “Because there’s a gap there.” I said, “Make the gap smaller.”

Now you were hooked. I could almost see your imagination connecting the dots. You could see the correct outcome, and you were excited to make it happen. You fixed the broken chain. It worked!

We weren’t the only ones there. It was crowded with parents and kids bumping into and tripper over each other. But everyone else walked by this place. No one else saw it as an opportunity to teach and learn. See, that’s why the problem is not schools. The problem is parents outsource their role to less interested people. It’s been getting worse, since birth control and all.

So here we were, we must have spent 15 minutes at this place. While we were there, one kid came by. He looked like a little scientist. He probed and observed. Then his dad came by, angry. “Why did you run away?” I guess he lost him. His dad saw me looking at him, and he bit his tongue, like he was going to yell at him. The dad said, “That’s okay, just don’t do it again” and stormed away. The boy dropped what he was doing and followed.

Then another boy ran into the wall. He tried to move the magnets. But he had no fine motor control. He reached up with both hands and pulled down with all his might. All the pieces of the slide we built fell onto your hands and head. The kid didn’t react. The dad did nothing. I checked your hand to make sure everything was okay. Meanwhile, he pulled another piece down onto your head. My philosophy is always that you can’t change people, you can only control your own thoughts and actions. So I pulled you away from the wall and sat you in my lap. I asked if you were okay and made sure you were okay. I stared at the kid and waited. His dad saw it all happen, offered no apology, and just took his kid away. (People are animals.)

So this next time around, I knew you had enough tools. So I left you alone and just gave verbal guidance. You wanted to make a slide:

You can almost hear the gears turning. And you just pretty much picked up the foundation of programming, or problem-solving in general. I just need to find more opportunities to reinforce it.

(Later, at the water play area, you made another slide. Again, a monkey boy came over and just pulled all the pieces down. You looked at me, confused and upset, “Why did he break the slide?” I said I don’t know. I really don’t know. To make something productive out of this, I asked, “Let’s see what he’s doing.” So we stared. First, his mom came over. Instead of teaching him, she reconstructed the whole slide for him. Can you guess what happened? Yup. He tore it all down again. His mom gave up and stood in the corner, 3 feet away. You tried to play with him, but he put his arms around all the pieces he wasn’t playing, while he fumbled with one piece. For 5 minutes, we stared, his mom pretended she was invisible. Finally, I gave up and said, “Wanna go see something else?”)

Jules you found the new displays at the baby room too. We hadn’t brought J there this young, so it was our first time.

I figured out why new music sucks. And why it will only get worse. Two things: Publicly traded record companies and quarterly reports focusing on short-term results.

Rick Rubin is the man behind mainstream Hip Hop. Before him, rap was an underground culture. It did’t have hooks, verses or structure. While it is common today, he was the first to take rambling verses from rappers’ lyric books and transform them into songs – with the same structure as Beatles’ pop/rock songs.

Rick Rubin started Def Jam records from his dorm room in NYU. Since then, he has launched careers (LL Cool J, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Run D.M.C.), revived aging kings (Johnny Cash, Aerosmith, Kanye West), and single-handedly revolutionized the face of modern music. Scan all the the radio channels today and you can’t escape Hip Hop. Rick Rubin is the reason for that.

So, when Newsweek interviewed him, I had to see what he had to say.

One thing he said explains why new music will always suck:

At Columbia, if Beyoncé didn’t deliver a record a year, for whatever reason, that really affected the whole economics of the company.

I’ll try to explain what he didn’t say between the lines: Columbia is a public company, which means Wall Street and the public demands that Columbia delivers results every quarter — short term gain. How much money the company makes depends on how successful an artist’s record is. The money isn’t all in record sales, but all the revenue-generating campaigns start with and trail a record. No record, and everything grinds to a halt. Even if a record is released but is unsuccessful, it murders all promotions that are scheduled to come after.

The celebrity of the artist is what’s valuable to the record company, not the music. What’s valuable is a story of girl who was raped in the corridor outside her mother’s apartment. Or the overweight singer with a Cinderella story who won American Idol. Or someone whose mother raised him in a trailer park, who wrote himself out of poverty with tenacity through rap. There is NO value in the songs. The songs are interchangeable and can be written by anyone. The value is in who sings the songs.

At Columbia, Beyonce is the biggest celebrity. This means she brings in the biggest trucks of moolah. Either directly, from whatever she sells; or indirectly, from whatever the company sells using her name. There’s no problem with that. The problem is that an entire company depends on her. It is a music factory and Beyonce is their workhorse. Beyonce pays the bills. Beyonce creates and sustains jobs in Columbia. A significant number of employees have salaries that depend on Beyonce bringing in steady trucks of cash.

This means, an artist is forced to produce winning music – consistently. And that’s why new music will always suck. Because when a big record label sets out to make new music, it has two choices: be creative, or follow a reliable winning formula. It will always choose safe and reliable. It has to. Managers exist to minimize risk and deliver consistently improving results. That is their obligation to their shareholders. That’s what happens when art turns into a business.

But there’s nothing wrong with this. Capitalism is a good thing. It’s just hard for art to be created in this environment. Because artists need to make mistakes and they need to fail. Certainly, the company can budget for failure, to take more risks for long term gain. But it won’t… not with Wall Street breathing down their necks.

That’s not to say that art cannot be business. It’s just that a publicly traded business is the most efficient way to murder art.

The silver lining is that there will always be private labels. And independent artists. And with technology giving everyone the ability to publish directly to their own audience, maybe there’s hope yet. But until then, we’re in a bad place where big companies are churning out the nastiest, most cookie-cutter, most unimaginative, most uninspiring — but catchy — music ever.

You’re outgrowing your toys. You are no longer impressed with things for what they are. You are more interested in what they do and how they interact with others. Like roleplaying – we played tow trucks one day. We pretended cars broke down. And tow truck and his friend bulldozer would come help. Sometimes they’d run for gas. Sometimes tow truck would get tired and take a break in the garage. And sometimes they needed to work together, sometimes tow truck breaks down too!

Another day, we played with your dinosaur friends Arnie the Argentinosaurus and Gilbert the Troodon. They are best buds. You usually pick Arnie and hand me Gilbert. They ride trains together. Even UFOs. Gilbert hopped on an orange cube and went PFFFFFF! into the air. You were stunned. Arnie wanted to go too so he hopped on a blue cylinder and went PFFFFFF! Then, when you wouldn’t want to stop playing for dinner, I’d ask, “Arnie, Gilbert, are you hungry for dinner?” You’d say, “YA! THEY ARE!” and walk to the table. They also helped you go for potty time, bath time and bedtime.

After dinner, we re-enacted the hedgehog day at the Children’s Discovery Museum. We mapped out the whole place – the fire truck, the ambulance, the elephant next to the ambulance. Then up the stairs to the baby room to find hedgehog. I tried to lure you to bath time by saying, let’s go to the water play area. We can play with water in your bathtub upstairs.

“No, water play area is not upstairs.” We can play with your spray bottle. “No, water play area is next to the lunchtime place.” We can have water in the bath tub, it can be water play area. “NO daddy NO! Water play area is not upstairs.”

After a few days of this, you now bug me, “Daddy – wanna play with me?” Then one day, you said, “Daddy I want you to play with me in the morning too. Why do you have to go to work?” Mama tried to explain. But the fact that you want to play with me more now shows the kind of play you prefer. Roleplaying.

Then I got carried away:

After showing you my “magic trick,” you now ask me to put them in all your vehicles. I did try to explain in the beginning that I was just pretending. But you didn’t see the “pretend” part. So it looked like magic and I thought I’d go along with it. But then I got tired and I tried to explain to you what “pretend” means. It means it’s not real. So I showed you that I was just hiding Arnie and Gilbert – they couldn’t really go into the cars – they were too small. You didn’t buy that answer. You started crying, “I DON’T WANT you to hide them. I want you to really put them inside.”

It only doesn’t sound bad because a child says it: “Mama, I don’t want you to feed Julie.” You grab her by the cheeks and look her in the eyes – “I want it to be just you and me.”

Love,

Dad

P.S. – Julies, mama texted me this from home: “Orz Joshua caught me watching JLo’s tribute to Celia Cruz and now he loves her….. >.<" Then she called to tell me that J came over to you and said "JULEHHHH" to make you laugh. And you called him JAY JAY! He was smitten and everyone was delighted. You love your brother, even though he snatches all his toys away from you when you try to put them in your mouth. You will cry whenever he cries. Especially if you're asleep. And when he tries to make you laugh, you'll drop whatever you're doing to get close to him. You'll crawl backward, or even throw your body toward him. P.P.S. - Project Achilles is moving along. After the Thanksgiving break, the director will be presenting this demo I made to the entire department. We’re official now. The content itself is drab if you’re not in the biz, but the few “seemingly irrelevant but highly important” touches I added were: 1) a very short story in the beginning to give people some context and tickle curiosity, 2) a picture of me to remind people I’m human like they are and I’m silly, 3) suggest to the audience how to get the most out of the demonstration, 4) before I start each “use case”, I tell a short story that reinforces the value, 5) call to action at the end. The director gave me 3 mins, but even after cutting 10 minutes, I was at 15 minutes. We’ll see if it flies. I’ll let you know how it goes!

P.P.P.S. – Thanksgiving means Black Friday. And animals: