Other Copenhagens
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[…]
Partensky took the job at Mariposa, abandoning an unfinished degree in mathematics, when his wife Laurie became pregnant. I could find no evidence of his ever having complained about the position, though it was far beneath his intellectual capabilities. Likewise there is no record of his ever having agitated for a transfer or promotion. Day after day for seven years he put on his Mariposa vest and drove the company van around the greater Boston area, installing and repairing cable connections for the local subscribers, and neither his customers or co-workers ever suspected the intellect and advanced training he was wasting in the process. He was either one of those men without ambitions beyond the demands of the moment, or one whose ambitions are so large and unusual that they cannot be defined or perhaps even understood in the customary social structures.
[…]
Igor Partensky was the underdog in Mariposa Media Conglomerate v. Partensky, the David to Mariposa’s Goliath. It feels just and right to root for the underdog, and nearly inhuman to root for a “conglomerate”–and all the more so because the underdog in this case was such a character, and such a sympathetic one. In the interviews I conducted, Partensky’s co-workers describe a cheerful bear of a man, forever slapping backs and laughing with his mouth full. His customer reviews are almost uniformly excellent, praising both his expertise and good nature–his lone one-star review coming from a Baptist preacher to whom Partensky apparently offered a swig of vodka from a mayonnaise jar.
Yes, Igor Partensky was an interesting, likable fellow, and an undeniable genius to boot–and it would be all too easy to see him as the hero, or perhaps the victim. But nothing could be further from the truth. Igor Partensky is the villain in this tale, the spreading shadow hoping to prevent the sun god’s gifts from arriving to the earth–the spiteful demon gnawing at the very root of the tree of progress.
From Mariposa Media Conglomerate v. Partensky
Jane Smiley, Witness for the Plaintiff
Ulysses J. Fleetwell, Attorney for the Plaintiff
* * *
Fleetwell: Ms. Smiley, did you know Igor Partensky during his employment at Mariposa Media Conglomerate?
Smiley: I knew his name, certainly–I always had to chase him down on email about his vacations. Field techs are supposed to report their vacation two weeks in advance, and he never would. Sometimes he would actually submit his vacation after he was actually …
Fleetwell: But did you ever meet the man himself?
Smiley: Yes, but only once as far as I recall, when he and Roy Selva came into my office one morning.
Fleetwell: Was that the morning of April 2nd of last year?
Smiley: That’s right.
Fleetwell: And what is your title at Mariposa Media Conglomerate?
Smiley: I’m the Special Manager in Charge of Field Technician Scheduling in the Boston office.
Fleetwell: Can you briefly describe the function you serve in that role?
Smiley: Just like it sounds, I’m in charge of the group that schedules the Field Technicians. We schedule installations and dispatch service calls.
Fleetwell: What happened when Mr. Partensky and Mr. Selva came into your office that morning?
Smiley: It was rather confusing. He kept talking about scheduling and traveling salesmen–but we don’t handle sales, that’s a whole different department. He was going a mile a minute–it was very overwhelming.
Fleetwell: For the record, whose behavior are you describing? Mr. Selva’s or Mr. Partensky’s?
Smiley: Mr. Partensky’s. He kept holding his laptop out in front of him like this, like he was offering me a cigar from a box, and he kept wanting me to look at the screen. He was very insistent.
Fleetwell: Did you look at what he had on the laptop?
Smiley: I tried to, it was hard to understand.
Fleetwell: What was on the screen?
Smiley: Just a bunch of numbers. The font was very small.
Fleetwell: What did you say to Mr. Partensky?
Smiley: Mostly I just nodded and smiled. He was very friendly, just very–excitable, and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then he erased my whiteboard, without even asking, and started drawing on it. I had important work on that whiteboard–I keep the vacation scheduling there.
Fleetwell: What did Mr. Partensky draw, do you remember?
Smiley: A lot of circles and arrows. He talked a lot about graphs, I remember that, but I don’t think he ever actually drew any graphs. I really didn’t understand what he was getting at, and I was upset that he’d erased the vacations.
Fleetwell: How about Mr. Selva? Did he say anything to you?
Smiley: Yes, he wanted to know if I would be willing to reimburse Mr. Partensky’s laptop from my department’s budget.
Fleetwell: Did he say why he thought you might want to do that?
Smiley: He said that the stuff Mr. Partensky had been working on–with the numbers on the screen and so on–was a new way to schedule the field technician calls. A better way.
Fleetwell: What did you tell him?
Smiley: I told him that I didn’t really understand, and that I had a meeting to run to, but that I would call him later that morning to discuss the matter. Honestly I didn’t have a meeting, I was just a little overwhelmed by the whole experience and I wanted my office back to myself so I could redo the schedule he’d ruined on my whiteboard.
Fleetwell: Did you call Mr. Selva later?
Smiley: Yes, I did.
Fleetwell: What did you say to Mr. Selva on that phone call?
Smiley: Well … to be honest, I was a little miffed, and I told him so. I said that I had found the whole visit very confusing and overwhelming, and that we already had scheduling software that worked just fine, and that I didn’t understand why he wanted me to pay for a laptop for one of his field techs. Oh, and I suggested that if Mr. Partensky was interested in traveling salesmen, Mr. Selva should bring him to talk to sales.
Fleetwell: What did Mr. Selva say?
Smiley: He apologized and promised that he wouldn’t bother me again about the matter.
From Mariposa Media Conglomerate v. Partensky
Alan Lightfoot, Witness for the Plaintiff
Ulysses J. Fleetwell, Attorney for the Plaintiff
* * *
Lightfoot: My title is Principal Research Scientist.
Fleetwell: During his employment at Mariposa Media Conglomerate did you ever meet Igor Partensky?
Lightfoot: Yes.
Fleetwell: Can you describe the circumstances in which you met him?
Lightfoot: He came into the research area one morning to show us some work he’d done.
Fleetwell: This was on April 15th of last year?
Lightfoot: That’s right.
Fleetwell: What did he show you?
Lightfoot: It was a clip of “Steamboat Willie,” playing in a loop on his laptop.
Fleetwell: Steamboat Willie?
Lightfoot: That’s the original Mickey Mouse cartoon–Mickey Mouse standing on the deck of a steamboat, piloting it and whistling and, I don’t know, doing his thing.
Fleetwell: Did you notice anything unusual about the clip?
Lightfoot: The colors were wrong. The original was black and white, but the clip was more like green and yellow, and there were splotches of other colors that came and went, like it was from a badly deteriorated print.
Fleetwell: Were you impressed with the clip that Mr. Partensky showed you?
Lightfoot: No. I mean not at first. At first I was worried that he might be crazy. He was kind of crooning to the laptop and talking a mile a minute.
Fleetwell: Do you remember anything in particular that he said?
Lightfoot: I remember he kept saying “Piece of cake, slice of pie!” and laughing as if it were the funniest thing in the world. That’s the kind of stuff that made me think about calling security. But then he mentioned something about Kolmogorov numbers, and some other things that made a little sense, and
that caught my attention. I started listening a little more carefully, and I started to think maybe he wasn’t crazy–just scatterbrained, or really excited. That’s about when the phone rang.
Fleetwell: Who was it?
Lightfoot: It was Roy Selva, from Field Operations. He told me he was sending down one of his guys to show me something–a field tech who happened to have some training in advanced mathematics–and asked if I’d take a few minutes to look at what Mr. Partensky was working on and then call him back with my thoughts. I told him that the field tech had already arrived. He warned me that Mr. Partensky was–in his words–a “live wire but a sweetheart.” So that cleared things up a bit.
Fleetwell: What did you do then?
Lightfoot: I sat Mr. Partensky down and asked him to explain to me, slowly and calmly, what he’d been working on.
Fleetwell: Can you summarize the nature of what he told you?
Lightfoot: It took a while to get him to walk me through it–he was really all over the place–but what he described to me was an algorithm for the compression of data–specifically audio and video data.
Fleetwell: Was this what is known today as the “Slices of Pi” algorithm?
Lightfoot: That’s right, in its basic, earliest form. It works by …
Fleetwell: We’ll have time to get into the gory details, Mr. Lightfoot. For the moment: what was your reaction to this work when Mr. Partensky described it to you?
Lightfoot: My reaction?
Fleetwell: Did it have applications to the business of Mariposa Media Conglomerate?
Lightfoot: Yeah, you could say that–if you wanted to win the award for understatement of the century.
Fleetwell: Can you elaborate?
Lightfoot: What Mr. Partensky showed me did an end run around the Shannon limit–at least theoretically–by …
Fleetwell: In layman’s terms, please, Mr. Lightfoot, and focusing on the impact on Mariposa Media Conglomerate’s business?
Lightfoot: Right, sorry. Um, OK–basically he had found a way that we could push the same amount of data to our customers–the same movies, shows, music, etc.–and spend less money doing it. And he’d made a little proof of concept to show that it could actually work.
Fleetwell: Using “Steamboat Willie” as his example?
Lightfoot: That’s right, he’d compressed “Steamboat Willie” using his algorithm.
Fleetwell: Can you roughly quantify the effect that Mr. Partensky’s work might have on Mariposa Media Conglomerate’s business?
Lightfoot: Sure, let me put it this way, I guess: it could change the fundamental economics of the business.
I mean, this is all a few years away from being practical–the prices of quantum coprocessors have to drop to commodity levels before we can start installing them in customer’s homes, but that’s just a matter of time. And then the impact will be enormous.
Fleetwell: Can you give a ballpark number?
Lightfoot: Tens of millions of dollars a year, at the very least. Maybe hundreds. And the impact won’t be just on Mariposa’s business–there’s a tremendous range of other potential applications. Software updates, satellite communications. It’s hard to overstate the breakthrough that Mr. Partensky’s work might represent. It’s … revolutionary is really the only word for it. We don’t really know yet just how far it will go.
Fleetwell: Did Mr. Partensky seem to understand the potential impact of his work? Did I say something funny, Mr. Lightfoot?
Lightfoot: I’m sorry, it’s just … I don’t know how to answer that. He must have understood the potential applications–I mean, he’s clearly a genius–but he didn’t want to hear any of it. He just sat there drinking something from a jar–I think it was vodka–and laughing at us.
Fleetwell: Can you elaborate?
Lightfoot: While we were throwing out all these different applications–by this time I’d called in a bunch of the other research scientists, and we were all going crazy over this thing he’d done–Mr. Partensky basically sat in the corner of my office and made fun of us for getting so excited.
Fleetwell: Why would he make fun of you for being excited about his own work?
Lightfoot: He thought it was a toy.
Fleetwell: Did he use that term?
Lightfoot: Yes, he said it many times: “It’s just a toy. A child’s toy.”
Fleetwell: Did he explain why he felt that way?
Lightfoot: Yes, he did.
Fleetwell: Can you summarize his argument? In layman’s terms?
Lightfoot: Right, layman’s terms. Basically his work made an assumption: that pi is what’s called a “normal number.” Now most people believe it is, but no one has ever been able to prove it. So yes, from a purely theoretical standpoint, you couldn’t prove that his idea would always work.
Fleetwell: So his work would not be valuable if it turned out that pi wasn’t actually a … what was that term again?
Lightfoot: Normal number. No, it wasn’t even that serious: if pi turned out not to be a normal number, then it just would have meant that in theory there might be videos that his algorithm couldn’t encode. That’s all. But it clearly worked–he’d already used it on “Steamboat Willie.”
Fleetwell: For the layman, please, Mr. Lightfoot: are you saying Mr. Partensky’s work would still have represented roughly the same financial benefit to Mariposa Media Conglomerate, even if pi turned out not to be a normal number?
Lightfoot: Sorry, yes. It really wouldn’t have made much of a difference to the real-world application. It was still this huge real-world achievement, with huge potential applications and financial impact.
Here, maybe an analogy would help. Imagine that we couldn’t prove that airplanes should be able to fly. As a basic, everyday traveler, if you see them taking off and landing every day, do you really care? They obviously can fly–at least in normal conditions.
But I guess that just wasn’t how Mr. Partensky saw it. He was taking a more theoretical or academic approach. He seemed to think that if you couldn’t prove that his approach would always work, in all cases, then it didn’t really amount to much more than a parlor trick.
Fleetwell: How did you leave things with Mr. Partensky that day?
Lightfoot: He gave us a copy of the source for the software he’d created, his proof of concept, and left–to go out on his field calls, I assume. He was still laughing at us on his way out the door.
Fleetwell: Did you call Mr. Selva back after Mr. Partensky left?
Lightfoot: Yes, I did.
Fleetwell: Did you tell him what you’d determined regarding Mr. Partensky’s work? The potential impact? The larger implications?
Lightfoot: Yes, I did.
Fleetwell: And what did Mr. Selva have to say?
Lightfoot: He didn’t really seem all that interested in the applications and impact and all that–he just wanted to know if my department would reimburse Mr. Partensky for 90% of the cost of the Q100 laptop he’d bought, based on the work he’d shown me.
Fleetwell: What was your answer?
Lightfoot: I told him we’d gladly reimburse Mr. Partensky the full 100% of the laptop–we’d have a check cut that same day, if he wanted.
Fleetwell: Did you call anyone else that morning?
Lightfoot: Yes.
Fleetwell: Who?
Lightfoot: Samuel Siskind–our corporate counsel here in New York.
Fleetwell: And what did you say to Mr. Siskind?
Lightfoot: I told him he needed to get on a plane and come talk to Mr. Partensky immediately.
Canceled Check (Plaintiff Exhibit C, Mariposa Media Conglomerate v. Partensky)
Not valid in amounts over $10,000 without two authorized signatures
Pay to the Order of: Igor Partensky
Amount: Twenty-three thousand two hundred and eleven dollars and 12/100ths
Signed: Janet Toth, Controller, Mariposa Media Conglomerate
Signed: Alexander Downs, CFO, Mariposa Media Conglomerat
e
Memo: Reimbursement #1432990
From Slices of Pi for Total Morons
So, you want to learn about Slices of Pi?
First of all, congratulations! You’re about to embark on a journey of discovery through one of the biggest technological breakthroughs of the 21st Century!
Second of all, if you’re nervous that we’re going to throw a bunch of equations and formulas at you, don’t be! We’ll keep it simple, and take it in small steps. After all, that’s the Moron way!
What is Slices of Pi?
Slices of pi is a compression algorithm originally designed by Igor Partensky, and now in wide use in many areas and industries.
(Fun fact: Igor Partensky was just a field technician who installed cable boxes for a living when he had the idea for Slices of Pi–and Einstein was working as a patent clerk when he came up with the theory of relativity!)
OK, Well Then What’s a Compression Algorithm?
Don’t get scared by the big-sounding words: it’s pretty simple. “Compression” means taking data and making it smaller. And an “algorithm” is just a series of steps for doing something.
So when you read “compression algorithm” you can think “a series of steps for making data smaller.”
It’s just that simple!
Why Do We Want Smaller Data, Anyway?
Smaller data means you can fit more photos and songs on your hard drive.
Smaller data means that downloads finish quicker.
Smaller data means your cable company can offer you a wider selection of recorded entertainment–at a lower price!
In other words: when it comes to data, small is beautiful!
From Mariposa Media Conglomerate v. Partensky
Roy Selva, Witness for the Plaintiff
Ulysses J. Fleetwell, Attorney for the Plaintiff
The Honorable Marcus Whitney Bulger, Judge