I have decided to start counting my age in hexadecimal with this birthday, recycling Jack Benny’s “celebrating my 39th birthday for the nth time” just didn’t cut it this year. It also allowed me to give my boys a brief (at least from my perspective) explanation of the differences between base 10, binary, and hexadecimal number systems. Mark was nonplussed to remain 9 but Max thought 0Ch might be a good year for him.
Lately I try and bear in mind Wynton Marsalis’ observation that “the humble improve.” As for career plans, math and science tend to be kinder to younger men (with George Polya offering a convincing counterexample, authoring a seminal paper that contained his “Enumeration Theorem” at 32h in 1937). Writing is a career you can begin in your forties late twenties-h and still meet with some satisfaction, if not success. Raymond Chandler (a year younger than Polya) didn’t write the Big Sleep until he was 31h, so he is a better model for me in the old age of my youth.
