13

I've heard that 13 is an unlucky number. But I'm not convinced.

Thirteen is the number of ways one can look at a blackbird:

It's a number of ways to look at a novel:

It's the number of days it took Kennedy to avert the greatest crisis of the nuclear age:

It's the number of the day I was born. Friday the 13th, no less.

Needless to say, I am not superstitious about the number 13.

But I do find heartening the convention of not including 13th floors in buildings and foregoing 13th rows in airplanes. The fact that such sober citizens as whatever kind of engineers it takes to design elevators or the interiors of commercial jets comply on some level with the least logical among us gives me hope.

I don't know where our collective fear of the number 13 came from, and I'm not going to google it. One resolution I have for 2013 is to learn things in more meaningful ways, if only to cut deeper grooves into my memory. I think that sounds old-fashioned, but I don't think I care. I'm kind of fed up the access model of education--with the idea that being informed has something to do with knowing how to access the technology that retains information. The sum of human knowledge is floating in "the cloud" (that awful neologism).

To paraphrase a line from a 13th Floor Elevators, we're going to look around in our minds and find that knowledge gone:

Thanks to said cloud, human brains are now free to do things other than be a repositories of information. I joke sometimes about what we might do with our brains now that they no longer need to be receptacles of knowledge.

That joke got a little more serious this Christmas, when my wife gave me an iPad that had this inscription on the back of it: "Saber es acordarse. Aristoteles" My first challenge: Do I plug that phrase into a translation app or do I work it out on my own? I tried to work it out, but the "se" on "acordarse" threw me. Plus, thanks to years of google answering my every query, I have no patience. So I looked it up.

"Saber es acordarse." / "To know is to remember."

To place that sentence as the inscription on an information Pad (that's what the "i" in Apple products stands for, right?) is to compel its user to pause, to commit at least a brief stretch of time to the slow business of thinking, before summoning the awful beauty of big brother tablet and admitting your ignorance.

Which is to say that I might have the only iPad that is also a lesson in humility.