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Of course age is a factor. If I were in school right now, I would think that Wolfram Alpha is the greatest thing ever, the savior that would liberate me from the torments of math. Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that solves calculus, physics, geometry, chemistry problems. You type in the problem, press enter, and voila.

But I left school decades ago, when students did their math homework themselves, from scratch. Calculators were allowed only if the numbers were too big or too small, if there were numbers at all. To put it plainly, I feel cheated. . .

Goodbye, Eureka, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain, by David Robson in New Scientist.

Disorder is essential. I’m putting that on a t-shirt.

Putting his, uh, no money where his mouth is, Chris Anderson has made his book Free available for free on the net. You can’t download or print it, but you can read it on the browser.

Update. Several readers have pointed out that there is a geographical restriction on the site. So Free is NOT free to everyone. Oops.

Oddly enough I can see it. Does this mean I’m in many places at once? Haha.

Edsa, Makati, Thursday afternoon.

NYT foreign editor Roger Cohen succumbs to Federer love.

People develop Federer obsessions the way teenagers have crushes. They can’t get the guy out of their heads. The late novelist David Foster Wallace, a devotee, said of one Federer forehand against Andre Agassi that, “It was impossible. It was like something out of ‘The Matrix.’”

The third was the fact that Federer wore a belt — a belt — in his stylish shorts, as if he was ambling through a Calvin Klein ad rather than serving 50 nonchalant aces and putting on a record-breaking athletic display. . .

Roger’s 14th at the French. A clever man knows that if he’s hoisting a very big trophy he can wear his most torn-up jeans.

As longtime obsessions go, this is our least disappointing. Now For The Gloating, in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.

After 48 hours of self-quarantine I went to my lunch appointment at Lusso in Greenbelt 5 (facing the garden, across the pond from the museum). To congratulate myself on not having the flu, I had the Lusso demi-pound burger with foie gras.

It’s eeevil. I recommend it to anyone who likes meat. However, you may have to put off your visit to Lusso. They’re closing this afternoon to repair the air-conditioning and will reopen August 1. Until then the foie gras burger and other items in their menu will be available at Pepato in Greenbelt 2.

As we were surrounded by ladies who lunch, I felt compelled to talk about cosmetic surgery. Specifically, an actor who’s had so much work done, I don’t think he’s a carbon-based life form anymore. And he looked great before the surgery, so what is the damn problem (Vanity, fear of aging, a movie industry and society that prize youth above everything, dismorphic disorder, etc). “Why do people want to look like a spatula?” I asked, when who should walk by but three pretty ladies. It was Rio Locsin with her daughters.

Now she does not look like a spatula. Remember Salawahan, Haplos, Manila By Night? I thought it was 1982 again.

“You were brilliant in Mudraks!” I said with total conviction. Then I remembered that I haven’t actually seen Mudraks, but some bitchier friends said she was great in it. (Which reminds me that the 5th CineMalaya film festival opens at the CCP the week after next.)

I think Rio Locsin triggered puberty in the males of my generation. She is mentioned in the Hotdog song Langit Na Naman; the line ‘Di pagpapalit kahit kay Rio Locsin,’ establishes her as the goddess of that era.

Michael Wood on Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in the LRB.

North by Northwest? Witty, stylish thriller where a man can almost get killed in the middle of nowhere and later scramble about the face of Mount Rushmore? Film where the notion of real-life probability is not just abandoned but lampooned, Hitchcock’s finest attack on the very notion of cause and motive? ‘Here, you see’, he said to Truffaut, speaking about this movie, ‘the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!’ He is saying that the espionage that drives the plot does just that: it drives the plot. We don’t have to know what the spies are after or what’s at stake, even if there is a flicker of a mention of the Cold War in the movie. Do the stolen secrets matter? In the world of actual espionage that would probably be a secret too, but in Hitchcock the answer is a revelation. Of course they matter, even in the entire absence of any content for them. They are the way the film pretends it’s about something.