View from the Corner

Whew

2009-04-08T23:52:00.002-05:00

Well, I did it. I passed my defense. It went well, with none of the awkwardness of my original proposal talk. I got a certificate that says I have completed all requirements for the PhD, and will be awarded a degree in June. Don't ask me the difference between a degree and a certificate that says I have completed all requirements...

As far as jobs go, I have been incredibly, unjustifiably lucky, especially considering the economy. I applied for 33 positions (I kept count, in an excel file) and then the same company that hired Ken ended up hiring me. That makes everything a thousand times easier, relocation-wise, and it is a very good job. Not a post-doc job, no built-in expiration date.

We have been house-hunting, because after more than a decade of higher education for each of us, and the associated temporary living arrangements, we are ready to move in somewhere indefinitely.

It seems like such a natural happily-ever-after point, after all my infinite anxiety, that it almost demands I end the blog, at least in this incarnation. I wouldn't put it past me to start up another one later. Probably not here, but I'll leave this up, indefinitely, and maybe come back and put in a link, if I start writing somewhere else.

My head's in a million different places, with the stress of finishing things up here, and starting new projects from way behind, and moving, and everything. But I would be a pretty lousy person if I didn't take a moment to count my blessing, and appreciate what I've got. I'm married to the best man I know and I get to work with him every day at doing the kind of work I choose. Life has been more generous to me than I deserve, and I will try, really try, to remember that.

Procrastinatory Post

2009-02-11T08:06:00.002-06:00

It's no good to blog when I am too wrapped up in myself anyway, fretting about the future. (And by "future" I mean, this summer.) I need to be less reflective, not more. I am reading Starship Troopers to distract myself. And I'm not blogging much, as you can see.

I think I'll get around to doing that "25 things" meme, since I've been tagged by two people on Facebook. In the meantime, though, an oddly comforting long view from Roger Ebert.

Ending Up in a Kind of Soundlessly Spinning Ethereal Void as We All Must

And a clip from an Orson Welles film (F for Fake) linked in the comments there:

The 'Chartes Monologue'

Buy This Book

2009-01-28T23:18:00.003-06:00

Gordon Atkinson -- the Real Live Preacher -- is self-publishing his next book.

I've already pre-ordered two copies, one to keep and one to give away. I don't know if I admire Gordon more as a writer or as a person. He's an amazing example of both. His essays are nearly always heartbreakingly honest. They're usually gentle, but occasionally angry. He admits to the kind of self-doubt that most of us are afraid to share even with those who are closest to us. He cares so deeply about the people he writes about that you can't help but care about them too. Just reading his blog makes me less self-absorbed, makes me a better person, I think. And I find myself liking him so much that it's very strange to remind myself, every now and then, that I've never actually met the guy. (Though he does answer e-mails personally, even if the purpose of the e-mail was just a book order...)

Now, normally self-publishing is a good way to lose money. And if someone else makes a lot money off of you in the process, then it's "vanity publishing," and it's a scam.

But in this case, it's different. He's a blog that's maintained a high readership for the better part of a decade. And then consider this account of his previous publishing experience...

FACT: My first book was published by Eerdmans. They sold 3500 copies, for which I was paid $3500. After the 3500 copies were sold, they lost interest in the book. There were 1300 copies left. Even if Eerdmans had sold them, I wouldn’t have made anything on those 1300.

FACT: I bought the remaining copies and sold 900 of them on my blog, making about $9000.

He knows he's got an audience. But he's still too smart to sink a huge investment into a work that might not sell. So he's trying something that I've always wanted to see work: taking pre-orders, and not publishing the book until he gets enough to cover the cost. I think this model could eventually catch on with the recording industry, and who knows, the movie industry even. Decide on a minimum you need to make, and don't publish until you know you're going to make it. Publish a lot of stuff for free first to build a following, like Gordon does on his blog.

Okay, so I'm kind of interested in the publishing model. But I'm a lot more interested in the book, and I want him to reach the target number of orders, which is only 416, quickly, so he can get it into production.

For this reason, and for your own good, I say -- buy this book! Place your orders here.

What I Did on my Christmas Vacation

2009-01-15T00:59:00.009-06:00

I got Presents from Ken and gave him some

And then we flew to Colorado to visit my parents and my sister (who gave us more presents), and then my parents took us on a train

Through the mountains

It was ten degrees when we got off at Glenwood Springs, but we swam in the hot springs anyway.

When Ken and I got back to Minnesota, I tried out the bread machine he got me for Christmas on a deep dish pizza dough recipe.

Not as good as Giordano's, but better than most of what you can get in Minneapolis...

We also ate Colorado Style Pizza in Glenwood Springs at Beau Jo's. Delicious!

It sure was a great Christmas Vacation. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Get me excited about Minne-SNOW-ta

2009-01-07T00:50:00.003-06:00

I bet that title's not new to native Minnesotans, but it was new to me when I heard someone on some '80s game show (might've been "Press Your Luck") use it on game show network the other day.

Anyway, I'm hanging out a lot more often in the Twin Cities area these day, and of course looking for jobs there and preparing to move. And unfortunately, that means leaving Chicago. I love Chicago.

I'm reading a few Minnesota blogs to try to get into the spirit: Minneapolis Metblogs, and News Cut, and Clara's Minneapolis / St. Paul Blog, and taken together they're almost but not quite comparable to Chicagoist.

They have informed me about the St. Paul Winter Carnival, and about the never-ending senate race (I know, I know, an Illinoian is in no position to make fun of Minnesotans for only having one senator...) but while those are good general interest topics, I'm looking for some special interest type stuff as well.

I'm a science fiction fan -- where can I meet and hang out with other fans in the Twin Cities? How about writers groups?

What are the fun parts of downtown, for when you just want a day of pizza, beer, window-shopping and people watching, amateur photography, maybe a free concert or festival in the summer? Ken and I used to take the train to downtown Chicago or Lincoln Park for days like that, but I wasn't so impressed with Nicolet Mall. There must be a park people gather in, no?

For that matter, where is the good pizza? So far as Chicagoans we've been very disappointed.

I'm looking for things to be excited about, in other words. So far we're most excited about the five drive-in theaters in a reasonable radius, but they obviously aren't open this time of year. What else is there?

And if anyone mentions ice-fishing, by the way, they will get a withering glare. I don't ice-fish. (I was pretty sure, until I started going to Minnesota, that nobody did. I interpreted the first couple of suggestions as sarcasm.)

(Summer camping recommendations are welcome, though.)

Christmas Movies

2008-12-22T12:59:00.004-06:00

The longer I go without posting, the more pressure there is to write a post worth reading, when I do. And yet. My ideas for posts are pretty much limited to 1) a review of the quality of various web-based job search engines 2) fretful soul searching about what kind of job I really want, and how much I'm willing to compromise, and whether it's inevitable that women will always compromise more than men 3) that really weird dream I had last night. Y'know, I'm an anxious person. I could fill three blogs with my anxiety. But who wants to read that? Although Woody Allen's made a pretty good career out of it, come to think of it...

Anyway, that leaves me with little to write about besides the Christmas movies we've watched so far this year: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, We're No Angels (1955), While You Were Sleeping. Three movies that manage to be sweet without being saccharine (okay, maybe While You Were Sleeping counts as saccharine.)

Christmas Vacation and While You Were Sleeping actually go pretty well together. The latter is about a lonely woman who wants a family so badly that she's willing to resort to fraud to join one. "Lucy, you're born into a family. You do not join them like you do the Marines."

But the family she's trying to join is almost as ridiculous as the Griswolds of National Lampoon fame. Watching them together makes one really appreciate one's ridiculous relatives and in-laws. (Eddie: "Yeah, I got the daughter in the clinic, getting cured off the Wild Turkey. And, the older boy, bless his soul, is preparing for his career." Clark: "College?" Eddie: "Carnival." Clark: "You got to be proud.")

We're No Angles has a similar theme. Three escaped convicts find themselves caring about a family they'd meant to rob. "We came here to rob them and that's what we're gonna do - beat their heads in, gouge their eyes out, slash their throats. Soon as we wash the dishes." The convicts are lonely.

One thing I see, watching these movies and others like them, is how much harder it is to be "normal" than I thought as a kid. I used to think that getting married, having a house and a family and a decent job was the easy road. Every family I knew had that. Now I see that's because of selection bias. Partly it's that people who've won themselves stable relationships and jobs are more likely to have kids. And then my sample was skewed even further by the neighborhoods I grew up in and the people we knew. Now I know more people, and now I've had a taste of how much work and luck are actually involved in achieving the kind of by turns tedious and ridiculous life. It's sort of the opposite of the message you get from a movie like American Beauty. I sort of want to see Chevy Chase's character and Kevin Spacey's character have a beer and talk about it. They're similar guys, and they both have... fantasies, but ultimately Clark Griswold is happy, despite everything.

A recent New York Times article points out that some of that same tension -- family vs freedom -- is at the core of that other classic Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life.

And I've got one more movie to throw into the mix, with, I think, a related theme: Trainspotting. Just read the opening monologue. So much disdain for the kind of family life that Christmas movies celebrate. But the alternative he gives is heroin addiction, and whatever else the movie does, it doesn't make heroin addiction seem like an attractive lifestyle.

When you're a kid, you can't help but take for granted the kind of life you're born into. If that life is relatively secure, and everyone you know lives the same way, and if you haven't lived long enough to see institutions crumble and to experience failure, then you're not going to understand how small the kind of island of stability that you grew up in probably is. Though it may seem boring, stability is in fact a difficult achievement in a chaotic world. Just ask Zuzu.

Christmas movies seem to be the designated genre for reminding us of this, and I really appreciate them more, as an adult.

Progress of Science

2008-11-23T09:46:00.006-06:00

Science is hard and in general, get two scientists together and you'll have three opinions. But slowly and unsteadily, a consensus emerges, and the human race gets a little wiser.

None of this is news anymore, but I wanted to recognize some really cool results that have come out recently.

One is "just" a simulation -- but a good simulation is a lot of work. This one shows that the ever-victorious Standard Model correctly predicts the mass of atoms within 5% of their measured values. The other 5% is a mystery that those expensive particle collider experiments are designed to solve. The 95% is a pretty impressive triumph for an increasingly awesome theory.

From a theoretical result about very small scales we move to an observational result about very large scales. For the first time, astronomers have succeeded in takingpictures of planets in other solar systems. They're not the greatest looking pictures, but considering that any picture like this was considered impossible a few years ago, I think they're beautiful. We know now, in a visual, almost visceral way, that our solar system is one of many.

I also think it's worth talking about the fact that India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft has successfully entered orbit around the moon. The more active space programs, the better, as far as I'm concerned. NASA desperately needs some competition. And it is a hopeful sign of progress for the human race as a whole when the so-called Western and Non-Western worlds are each capable of and committed to science on this scale. Space exploration should be a human activity, not limited to a specific culture. Practically all science fiction fans agree.

A couple of more links I want to throw in while I'm linking:

Memoirs of a Space Engineer gives a couple of very real, very entertaining anecdotes about the essence of engineering: problem solving.

And The Necessity of Mathematics is an essay by Science Blogger Blake Stacey about the role mathematics plays in science, with some insightful examples that feel like little revelations in themselves.

Mathematical Grammar

2008-11-21T10:37:00.006-06:00

I'm strongly of the opinion that math is nothing more or less than a language. All languages are different, and it's harder to say certain things in some languages than in others. Math is particularly well suited toward making quantitative statements, and it's unusually difficult to contradict yourself in the language of Math... Or rather, it's more obvious when you've contradicted yourself, when you express something in the language of Math, than it is in English.

It takes some work to express qualitative statements like "That leaf is yellow" in Math, but if we resort to less than or greater than signs, or even "approximately equal" signs, we can usually do it:

That may need a little context, but the basic meaning is clear if you speak Math. (I could also have given RGB color values or even hex color codes, but I don't know those off the top of my head. In any case, there are usually lots of ways to quantify a quality like "color.")

Of course, it's usually much easier to understand Math if you provide the necessary context in English or another natural language... Rather like programming languages, which are just a dialect of Math really -- commenting your code makes it a lot easier to read.

But you know, some of the need for context is reduced by certain conventions which are a part of the grammar of Math, but which are rarely if ever formally stated. When students screw these up, it makes their work a lot harder to read or grade. I find it interesting that everyone eventually picks up on these conventions, all over the world, but no one ever really talks about them. For instance, above I used the greek letter "lamda" without saying what it meant. But to anyone who has had any contact with the physics community, "lamda" means wavelength. The fact that I talked about color and gave a number on the scale of the wavelength of light makes the interpretation certain. If you're a physics person, I don't need to tell you that I'm talking about wavelength there, and not some kind of computer color code. I should probably specify that the wavelength I'm talking about is that of the light reflected from the leaf, but the subscript "Leaf" and the context are again probably enough for you to guess that too.

Here are some of the unwritten rules that come immediately to mind:

Letters from the beginning of the Roman alphabet -- these are usually constants, especially if they are upper case.

Upper Case Roman Letters - these also frequently indicate a constant quantity, especially if the letter is from the beginning of the alphabet. Capital "C" and capital "K" are very popular choices to represent a constant because "constant" starts with a "C" in English and a "K" in German. Upper case Roman letters may also stand for matrices or tensors -- Usually you can tell which is which, because if it's a matrix or a tensor, all of the other terms in the equation will also be a matrices or tensors, so that knowing one symbol gives you hints about the others. (Also, I like to put little upside-down caret hats on my matrices. Most people use right-side-up carets, but I like to reserve those for unit vectors.) If you see a capital X, Y, or Z, however, you know it's likely to be a matrix, because those are almost never used for constants. Which brings me to my next rule.

The symbols x, y, z, and t are reserved for position and time - These are pretty much always variables, and nearly always stand for quantities with units of length, or in the case of t, of time. Sometimes students use "x" to stand for other quantities, because it's a popular choice to stand for any unknown quantity in high school algebra classes, but in the world of math-using professionals, this is a bad idea. Using "x" for a quantity that does not have units of length will confuse people unless you make it very clear what it does stand for. And even then, there are usually better, more conventional choices. If, for instance, the quantity is a pressure, use a "p"(preferably lower-case). If it's a temperature, go for the upper case "T," because the upper-case-letter-means-constant rule is not as firm as the lower-case-t-means-time rule. If it's a frequency, use "f" or "nu"... Most things have their own conventional symbols, in other words, specifically to avoid the problem of using "x" for everything. Save that for position. If there really is no conventional symbol for your quantity, use the lower case Greek letter xi. That's one of few letters that doesn't, by convention, already stand for something else (at least not in physics)

If it's a constant with units of length or time, use subscripts -- the unadorned x, y, z, and t are read as variables, but if you stick a subscripted number (not a letter) on them, they will be read as constants. A good choice is x-subscript-0 or t-subscript-1. In fact, almost anything with a suscripted number will be read as a constant, regardless of the other rules in this list.

Letters from the middle of the alphabet are integers -- In particular, do not use upper or lower case "N" to mean something that is not an integer, because it will confuse people. The letter "m", especially in lower case, is almost always an integer too. In computer science, so are "i", "j", and "k". In physics, however, it is not wise to use these symbols for integers unless they are appearing as an index or subscript. That's because these symbols have other meanings already. ("o" is never used because it looks just like zero.)

Lower case i means square root of negative one -- you can't use lower case "i" for any variable, because its meaning is already assigned. (Likewise that of "e" and lower case "pi" which stand for the natural base of logarithms, and the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, respectively.) The exception to the "i" rule is if you are an electrical engineer, in which case you may use lower case "i" for current if you must. (I have no idea why "I" is the conventional symbol for current -- physicists use it too, but in upper case). Electrical engineers use "j" for the square root of negative one. As for "k" -- that is a seriously overused letter. It has seemingly dozens of conventional uses. It is often used for Boltzmann's constant, though I prefer to give it a subscript for that. In my world it is the wavenumber of light. But it may also be the so-called "lattice constant" for a crystal, a related but different concept. People use it for constants because the German "konstant" is spelled with a "k" even though it does not conform to the other rules about constant names. Plus, as I said, it's a popular index name, and used as a subscript usually represents an integer. In short, don't call anything else "k" unless you have to.

Lower case Greek letters are variables -- frequently, but not always. If you're going to use one to stand for a constant, though, I think you should stick a subscript on it, same as with x, y, z, and t. If you're in need of a good name for your variable, pick a lower case Greek letter. Of course, many of them already have conventional interpretations within a given field. As I said, "lamda" is wavlength, "nu" is frequency, "omega" is angular frequency, to me. "Iota" isn't used because it looks too much like "i". Lower case "mu" is a magnetic or electric dipole moment (as well as being the symbol for the prefix "micro"). Both lower and upper case "gamma" stand for decay rates, in my field. Lower and upper case "Psi" stand for quantum wavefunctions. Lowercase "alpha" is an absorption or loss coefficient... Those conventions are specific to my subfield. But there are also some broader rules: "theta" and "phi" are angles or phases to almost everyone. Lower case "delta" stuck in front of another variable means "a small change" in that variable, and upper case delta stuck in front a variable means the same thing, or by itself means "the difference between two quantities" (lower case "d" used in calculus to indicate a derivative.) Epsilon means "a small quantity" usually, as can lower case delta when used by itself. That still leaves a lot of letters, though, and I think most math people in all fields do read lower case Greek letters as variables. Again, I especially like "xi" and "zeta" for new variables I'm introducing because they don't already have conventional interpretations.

Use tildes primes, and subscripts to indicate related quantities -- If you start out with some variable "p" and then you introduce a new variable which is p*e^i*omega*t, a good name for the new variable is "p-tilde" or p with a tilde on top. You can also use "p-prime," which is p with an aprostrophe thing after it, though I prefer to reserve this notation for the derivative of p. A third alternative is to stick a subscript on it. For this example I might use "p-subscript-rot" because I think of this as p-rotating-with-the-field. For some letters you can also get away with switching between a Roman letter and a related Greek letter -- go from "r" to "rho" for instance, or from "b" to "beta."

Capital Greek Letters aren't good variable names -- Okay, you can get away with capital Psi, Theta, Gamma, and a few others, but capital "Sigma" is the summation symbol, and does not stand for a quantity at all. Likewise capital "Pi" (which must be written carefully to distinguish it from lower case "pi") means "multiply all of the terms in this sequence." Capital Delta, as mentioned before can be a variable indicating the different between two quantities, but it is usually a label used before a quantity to indicate a change in that quantity. Many of the other capital Greek letters look too much like their Roman counterparts to be useful.

Then there are all the different "hats" -- vector hats, unit vector carets, dots and double dots to indicate derivatives, bars to indicate averages... And specialized notations like Einstein summation indices, the use of parentheses, square brackets, and curly brackets... I would say these all serve a more or less "grammatical" function. (Then there are things like "bra-ket" notation and quantum field theory's "contraction" notation. Those aren't exactly grammatical, they're just a sort of shorthand.)

I'm sure if I surveyed some friends we could come up with a lot more rules like this, but I don't think anyone ever taught them too us formally. We just learned them, the same way you learn the grammar for any language that every one around you is speaking and writing. The rules are as weird and full of exceptions as the rules of English grammar, which is why mathematicians may not like to talk about them -- they like to pretend math is completely logical. But they serve a real purpose, just like English grammar. You try grading the work of a student who doesn't follow them. It's unreadable.

The Post Copyright World

2008-11-13T23:00:00.003-06:00

So I've thought for a little while that copyright is more or less going away whether we like it or not. How, then, do creative people make money by entertaining us? The same way they did before audio recording or the printing press were invented -- live performances and generous patrons.

But the patrons don't just have to be wealthy aristocrats these days. I think what happens is, you release a couple of titles -- books, albums, whatever, for free. Build up a fanbase. Then you hold the next work hostage. You set a fundraising target, and you release the work once that target has been met. If you have millions of fans, your target can be millions of dollars. All of them will contribute five or ten. If you have a couple hundred fans, your target can be a couple hundred dollars. Someone who's really eager will contribute extra, or talk their friends into joining in, to get the next work out that much faster.

These schemes are starting to show up, and I'm interested to see whether they take off.

Here's a site where you fund investigative journalism. Once a story gets enough funding, the investigation gets done. I might actually try this.

One of my favorite essayists, the Real Live Preacher Gordon Atkinson, has proposed to publish his next book this way.

Maybe I can get research funding this way. Want me to work on this idea for a fiber optic vibration sensor I've got? Send me five bucks. I'll start when I get to $10,000...

Celebrations

2008-11-05T07:35:00.003-06:00

I've been reading comment threads, and at least one person on Metafilter said just how I feel...

"AND THEN THE EWOKS ROCK OUT"
posted by middleclasstool at 8:15 PM on November 4

Also from MetaFilter:

"John McCain should concede more often, he's really good at it!"
posted by finite at 8:25 PM on November 4

"Wisconsin is declared in our hearts."
posted by drezdn at 8:51 PM on November 4

"Gun Owner For Obama!! I'm so happy, I won't even go out and shoot randomly into the air in celebration!"
posted by Balisong at 8:53 PM on November 4

"Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Rest of the World."
posted by hoskala at 8:56 PM on November 4

"Truly the end of an error."
posted by punkfloyd at 5:03 AM on November 5

"...
But I'm still thrilled that he won. We now have a president who said "The Wire" is his favorite show and, for some insane reason, this gives me great hope for the future. Absurd really, the things we pin our hopes on.

Just dear god/cthulhu/fsm, please don't let Obama turn into a Carcetti."
posted by pandaharma at 1:04 AM on November 5

I love The Wire. But I've only seen the first four seasons. So far Carcetti's not so bad. What I can't help thinking of what one of the former Baltimore mayors told him being mayor was like. Something like "Every day you go into your office and eat one bowl of shit after another -- it just keeps coming, in beautiful golden bowls". I'm afraid that's what Obama's got in front him him now...

A comment I left here but want to repeat on my own blog:

I had a cool experience Friday night. I was on an overnight bus out of Chicago, and most of the other people on the bus were black. The driver on the PA system should've been a DJ. He was making jokes, telling stories, and wishing us all a smooth ride... And somewhere in there he said "It's gonna be a whole new world out there after Tuesday, you just watch," and the whole (double decker) bus spontaneously cheered, and the little eleven year old girl sitting next to me was grinning so hard I thought she was going to break her face. And the driver went on about how the city of Chicago was just going to go nuts, and what a great thing it was for the city... But he personally was gonna stay as far away as he could get, because the traffic was gonna be a nightmare.

Late night, bus full of strangers, all so excited, all feeling like the world is about to change, and for once, like they're the ones changing it... Pretty unforgettable.

And Obama himself, as usual, captures the mood:

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, [a black woman who remembers when black people and women weren't allow to vote] touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

Why I like Barack Obama, Part II

2008-11-04T07:44:00.003-06:00

Everything from Part I, which I posted here four years ago(!) still applies. But there's something I wanted to add.

I'm happy that both candidates this year represent a significant improvement over the incumbent. But I'm even happier that one of them is a deeply thoughtful, introspective man. I think it's amazing that this such a man is also the most charismatic candidate in a generation.

I don't agree with Obama on everything. For instance, he favors removing restrictions on abortion. I do not. He favors policies which flirt with protectionism. I think that's a losing battle and hard on the very poor in other nations. I believe the death penalty should be abolished. He believes the system can be fixed. He believes we're going to need to rely more on nuclear power. I'm divided on the issue. I believe it is safe, but we don't really have a solution for disposing of the waste. There's not much of it now, but it's not going away either, and if we rely on it too heavily, it will continue accumulating until it's a problem for our great-grandchildren the way global warming is a problem for us.

But here's the thing. I believe Obama has thought very hard about every one of these issues, and is aware of the other side of the argument in each case. I believe he sees these as complex problems. I believe this because I have seen him reason his way to a conclusion in a debate or a speech (with numbered arguments, no less), and because I have read his first book, which is full of searching and self doubt.

More than I want someone who agrees with me, I want someone who thinks about problems and struggles with them and sees them from all sides.

And that is what I see in Obama. Someone who is not afraid to consider the possibility that he might be wrong. Someone who who would govern with his head, not his gut. I am content to let others make my policy decisions for me, as I must be under a representative government, but I want to know that those people have thought about the decisions they are making more than I have, not less.

And that's what I see in Barack Obama.

More Marathon Thoughts

2008-10-26T16:26:00.004-05:00

Just off the plane from Minnesota. The last two weeks have been totally crazy. But I've already booked a ticket to go back there next weekend by bus.

A short post since I'm just back... I see via shimgray that the marathon I just ran didn't actually work the way I thought it did.

I thought I ran the same marathon as Constantina Tomescu-Dita, the Olympic gold-medalist, and Lidiya Grigoryeva, the winner on the day I ran, but I guess I was wrong...

Apparently the "elite start" group is in a different race. According to a more recent Chicago Tribune Article the non-elite woman (from Chicago) who actually got the shortest time in that San Francisco race was eventually declared a sort of co-winner, with the same prize, but the man who finished with the fourth fastest time here in Chicago will not get the fourth-place prize money. I disapprove.

As for me, my time put me 12,800th or so out of 33,000 or so starters, and 31,000 or so finishers. Not bad, I'd say. Top half - almost top third.

Here's a blog by a person who was out there cheering. I probably saw her. The people cheering us on were awesome. That's a different kind of sports fan, not just motivated by seeing their team win, but by athletic excellence in general. Those people make human being look good, selflessly cheering others on out of pure respect for the sport.

26.2 Miles!

2008-10-12T16:24:00.004-05:00

Apparently my final time was four hours and thirty one minutes. I'm pretty happy with that. It's about the pace that I train at -- just barely under 10 minutes per mile -- but I seriously doubted I was going to be able to maintain that the whole way.

The beginning was so exciting... with the cheering crowds... I felt like a professional athlete. Well, better, because they're used to it. All that enthusiasm directed at me actually choked me up a little.

The first half was a breeze. I flew through it, powered by adrenaline. The next seven miles took us further from the city center, and the sun really started to beat down, so that kinda sucked. But the crowds got bigger and louder again for the final six or seven, which really helped. I was following a guy with the time "4:15" pinned to his back -- a pace runner. He really got me through, especially at the end, and I owe him a big thanks.

But the biggest thanks is to Ken, who was there at mile two, mile thirteen, and mile twenty-six point two. Looking forward to seeing him is what kept me going.

We stayed in a hotel downtown last night, to bypass the traffic problems and to give me a place to shower and crash afterward (they let us check out late.) Walking around taking pictures and getting a drink downtown was a great way to say goodbye to Chicago.

Now... On to Minneapolis!

Race Day Tomorrow!

2008-10-11T17:48:00.002-05:00

We are going to stay tonight in downtown Chicago, because getting into or out of the city is going to be impossible, with 45,000 runners, 10,000 staff and volunteers, plus spectators... And half the roads in the city closed for the race. I'm supposed to be at the start line for a team photo with my fellow Boys and Girls Club team members at 7:15 AM.

After the marathon, we are driving seven hours to look at apartments for Ken -- he's starting his new job next week. Back to Chicago on Thursday so I can meet with this guy who's flying into talk to us about his research on Friday, then visits to friends and family on Saturday and Sunday. Then I have to go give a talk at a conference, so I'll be flying to Rochester, New York on Monday, talking Tuesday, and flying out Thursday to join Ken as he gets moved in...

So the real marathon is only the beginning of the metaphorical marathon. I never imagined it would be like this when I signed up.

One More Week

2008-10-06T09:45:00.002-05:00

Well, I've done my last Long Run.

The longest was twenty-one miles. It was only meant to be twenty, but I missed my turn. I wanted to run to Wrigley Field and back, but that was a little too far. So I gave myself a head start, took the train a couple of miles and then started running. I made my way to Chicago's lakefront park, which runs almost all the way through the city. You can run a long way in the park, with no traffic lights or even stop signs, and a lot of beautiful views. I was so caught up in the beautiful views (well, and in wondering how far the next drinking fountain was) that I didn't notice I'd already passed Irving Park Road.

That lakefront park is bordered by Lakeshore Drive, a busy highway which is difficult to cross for a person on foot. Since it is the easternmost street in Chicago, there's really no need for other streets to cross it. They all dead end there. But every few miles theres an on-ramp / off ramp arrangement, at which points pedestrians can pass underneath The Drive and onto city streets. It was one of these points that I missed, and I was debating whether to turn back when I noticed a small tunnel leading under the street, maybe a half mile past my original turn off. So that's what I took.

I actually know Chicago's streets well enough these days that I recognize the name of the one I ended up on, and took it west until I recognized a major north-south street, which I too back to Wrigley. At that point, slightly less than halfway through my run, I stopped to watch the game through the opening in the outfield wall, for a couple of minutes. It's strange seeing it from field-level. I'd intended to stay for an out or two (and eat the jelly-beans I'd brought to bring my blood sugar back up) but the Cubs scored two runs and got no outs, so I cheered a little with everyone else, and moved on. I was listening to the game on my radio anyway.

I was sore and tired and moving slowly by the time I got back, but I wasn't dying, the way I sometimes have. A good sign.

The last couple of weeks, following the plan, I tapered off my distances. Fifteen miles, then twelve, then, yesterday, only eight. Next weekend -- twenty six point two!

The marathon route goes by Wrigley Field too, but it won't be nearly as much fun this time. The Cubs are out of it. I was going to say I can't believe it, not after they won 97 games, not after they had the best record in the National League, not after they clinched their division a week before the end of the season... But I can. It's the Cubs.

I don't want to talk about it.

The truth about particle accelerators

2008-09-22T07:50:00.004-05:00

Jorge Cham, the genius behind Piled Higher and Deeper recently visited CERN. Because he's Jorge Cham, you know his take isn't going to be another reverent paean to the progress of mankind or more confused mysticism about God particles and accidental apocalypses. Instead, he gets down to the nitty gritty with the scientists who work there, and comes back with insights about what working on a project of this nature is actually like... Less fun than you might think. (Especially when things like this happen.)

The five part comic strip series starts here, and parts 3, 4, and 5 happen to feature a friend of mine who is now a post-doc at CERN. I don't know that I would've recognized her from the drawings alone, but her personality comes through clearly enough for me to easily recognize her from that.

If you're fascinated by particle accelerators, you ought to read those comics for an inside look.

Defending the Thesis

2008-09-14T10:12:00.006-05:00

Well, Ken and I are now "Dr. and Mrs."

Okay, not totally official yet -- he still has to submit the thesis to the grad school, and the university awards degrees only in December and June. But traditionally, defending your dissertation marks the end of a very long process, a last great hurdle. And that is what Ken did on Friday.

It was a two hour long talk of 170 or so Power Point slides, every one soaked in blood, sweat, and tears. (And don't think I'm being figurative about the blood, either. Lab injuries happen all the time.) It was a strangely bittersweet two hours. Even though I'd seen him rehearse the talk a half dozen times, seeing all of those figures and pictures, reliving the past few years in front of an audience, was moving in a way that I didn't expect. A lot of what he, and our lab, had done seems much more successful in retrospect than it did at the time. This stuff is hard -- our advisor even gave a little speech about how hard, by way of tribute. And it looks pretty damn impressive, all piled up together like that.

I can't announce anything yet about the "what next" part, except that it won't be the unemployment line. There are a couple of possibilities, and we should know within the next week or two which one it is.

To celebrate, we bought some fancy beer for the weekend:

An interesting mathematical model...

2008-09-09T09:20:00.004-05:00

I'm of the age now where I have to start actually thinking about how to balance career and family and all that, so I found this mathmatical model of the benefits of having kids as a function of age kinda fascinating. From that link you can download an excel file and instructions on how to fill it out. It has a bunch of curves, representing your professional productivity and social life and "ability to enjoy a child" as a function of age, and takes into the relative importance of family, career, and social life, and the different options -- taking varying amounts of time off or working part time while the child is young. I find it funny that it seems to imply that the "utility" of having a teenager is relatively low. It's supposed to automatically incorporate fertility and medical issues as well. It's aimed at women, but really it seems like the best idea would be for a couple to use it together.

It's a pretty impressive model, I'd have to say, although it can't quite incorporate every factor that comes into play in a real decision -- relationships with your boss and co-workers, how close you live to family, how many kids you eventually want to have, financial considerations... Trying to include everything might make the model unworkably complicated, of course. It is nice that it doesn't just tell you an "optimal age" -- it gives you a graph of "utility" as a function of age.

There's a press release about it that anyone can access, although it doesn't tell you much, and a journal article about the model that you can read here if you have access to academic journals.

I know some people would think this is a ridiculously inappropriate problem to try to solve mathematically, and part of me agrees and finds it a little bit hilarious. But really it's just a more sophisticated version of the old "pros" and "cons" list. If you're comfortable with mathematical modeling at all, it's pretty easy to use. The questions it asks are basically "If you think your professional output will drop when you have kids, how much do you think it will drop? How long will it take to go back up? Will it go all the way back up, or if not, to what fraction?" and likewise for social life, and a few other factors. It's still oversimplified, but it's a nice tool to have, to help you keep all of the effects, over at least a couple of decades, of this kind of big decision in mind all at once.

Old News

2008-09-04T23:35:00.002-05:00

The Chicago Tribune is getting a redesign and it sounds like bad news.

I buy a Sunday Tribune every week from the little grocery store across the street. I read it slowly over the course of the week. First the opinion section. Then the comics. Then the front section. Then the local news and opinion. And then the rest - arts, business, weather, even the featured obituaries sometimes, even the real estate and auto sections.

I'm not the best customer in the world, buying only one a week, and I don't read it so much for the hard hitting news coverage. But I buy the Tribune instead of the Sun Times because I like the old fashioned broad sheet format. I eat oatmeal, watch baseball, and read the Chicago Tribune. I'm boringly traditional, and that's how I like my newspapers.

Sam Zell, the Tribune's new owner, also wants to sell the Cubs, and sell Wrigley Field separately. He was even talking about selling the naming rights, as if anyone would every call it anything but Wrigley.

I don't know. I understand the paper isn't making much of a profit. Is it that Sam Zell is a villain or is it that the world has moved on? Why can't the Trib make money as it is? Is it the internet's fault? But how does anyone make money providing news on the internet -- I don't pay for any of it? Are newspapers doomed? Will there be such a thing as reporters, twenty years from now... Or only bloggers?

I know a lot of journalists have a lot more angst over these questions than I do, but all of the sudden it's striking close to home. No more Metro section to read over my oatmeal. It makes me sad, sadder than I'd expect.

Running Update

2008-08-14T21:36:00.002-05:00

So far my farthest run has been sixteen miles, which I did in New Jersey, along the Ocean City boardwalk. That boardwalk is 2.5 miles long (conveniently labeled with mileposts at quarter mile intervals), so I ran the length of it and back three times, with an extra half mile tacked on getting to and from the boardwalk from the place we were staying.

That was a different kind of feeling. I generally don't like to run past the same point too many times, because it's too tempting to give up early. But the boardwalk had the advantage of giving me lots to look at, and lots to dodge. Other runners, for starters -- we had a whole lane to ourselves down the center of the boardwalk, divided from the bicycle and "surrey" (a kind of pedal car contraption for tourists) lanes by painted white lines, with pedestrians on the outside... At least until the shops opened, at which point all lanes became pedestrian lanes. Bicycles veering into the running lane to pass added a level of interest and difficulty.

I checked out the animatronic gorilla at the the jungle themed putt-putt place, the carnival games, the water slides, the T-shirt slogans at the endless souvenir shops, and still there would be different things to look at on the next pass, the arcades, the ice cream cones, the amusement park rides. (It's a very kid-friendly boardwalk.) And, of course, the beach and the ocean.

Sixteen miles was no problem, but a later, shorter boardwalk run through a raging storm with wind driven sheets of rain left me cold, dripping, tired, and with a damaged iPod.

After that I had to miss a couple of days because there was no place to go from our next hotel, and since we went back to work as soon as we got back home, I had to miss my next long run. So for the one after that, I went only fifteen miles, along Chicago's lakefront.

Hardest. Run. Ever. Two miles into it, I was dying. Miserable, punishing, torture. Left me feeling sick afterwards, and sore for the next couple of days. Why? I have no idea. Maybe I didn't eat enough carbs.

Maybe it was the fact that I was listening to the Cubs take a pounding from the Cardinals the whole time. (But it's okay, we're still 27 games above .500 and leading the division by 4.5 games. Whoo! Go Cubbies!)

In any case, my next long run, this weekend, will be 17 miles. I'll probably build up to about 20 before starting to step them down again to save strength for the real marathon.

What a week

2008-08-06T08:17:00.004-05:00

Whew. That was quite a trip. Ken's dad invited us to share the condo they were renting on the New Jersey shore. We planned to visit other family for a few days in Philadelphia afterward. But this vacation ended up being a lot of work when it turned out he was going to have a job interview on Friday in Philly.

There was a lot of driving involved, none of it by me. There were storms and flooding our first day in Jersey, a day at the beach and boardwalk, and then a lot of frantic studying and trips to the local library to print things out. A night in Atlantic city, losing money as slowly as possible. A long day at the mall for me while I waited for him to finish up his six hour interview. A visit to his grandpa at the nursing home, where we watched a comedy act, and then went on to the off track to bet a little more, and eat hot Philadelphia pretzels. And just as we were getting back into Chicago, listening to the Cubs game on the radio come in better and better, we started hearing tornado warnings. We decided to wait it out in a travel plaza and were very glad we had when we started hearing "abandon your vehicles! lie down in a ditch!" messages. Who wants to be wet, in a ditch? Instead we were gathered with a bunch of other highway refugees and even state troopers at this little rest stop as the sky broke open, and, just for a minute, all the lights went out...

And we went into work the next day. What a week.

Out of Town

2008-07-26T09:06:00.003-05:00

No posting for the next week. We're going to be Back East visiting family and vacationing on the beach.

In the mean time, if you want to know what I do, read this great post about "Electromagnetically Induced Transparency" and slow light. Much more readable than anything I found on the subject when I was a new grad student, but still accurate! Understandable without being dumbed down! A much better post than I think I'd be able to write.

EIT is the basis for most of the experiments going on in our lab...

As Freedom is a Breakfast Food...

2008-07-20T12:56:00.002-05:00

I had another conversation the other day very similar to conversations I've had before. I asked someone who had come to the US from India what his favorite and least favorite parts of this country were. He said his favorite part was the "freedom." I've heard this answer before, from other immigrants. It sounds like what every flag waving patriot would want to hear, doesn't it? I asked, as I have before, what exactly that meant. The right to bear arms? Freedom of speech? The right to peaceful assembly?

No, he said, they have all of those rights under the Indian constitution too.

He meant the right to wait until you're forty to get married, or not get married at all. The right to major in something besides medicine or engineering in college. The right to get a low paying job that makes you happy without losing your place in your family or society. The lack of pressure to conform, he said, culturally, religiously, socially.

I've heard the same answer, in almost the same words, before. It strikes me that this isn't the kind of freedom that Republicans think they're defending. It sounds a lot like immigrants like all of the "alternative lifestyles" available in the US. The right to be gay, maybe, should go on that list. (I asked if my Indian friend thought so, and he agreed that it was more or less part of the same thing, though it made him somewhat uncomfortable when he first came.)

If this really is the freedom that other countries admire the US for, I think we need a different kind of patriotism to reflect that. And I think some flag-pin worshippers ' heads may explode, if they ever talk to any actual immigrants.

Happy Bucky Day

2008-07-13T08:26:00.004-05:00

I have written about Buckminster Fuller before, a list of quotes and an allusion in a little essay I wrote here about faith.

The fact is, a book I read about him when I was in high school made a big impression on me. I wrote up a similar statement about faith, which I was thinking a lot about at the time, just out of Catholic school, to give to a teacher who had, in so many words, told me I was going to hell. In several conversations. Of course, I admired Buckminster Fuller as an engineer and an architect, and I liked his "ventilated prose" (he didn't believe that anything not written in verse should be called poetry.) But what stuck with me was his way of looking at the world as a bunch of patterns. So, in honor of his 113th birthday, I'm going to quote a long section from the book by Hugh Kenner that I read in high school.

"Suppose I have a rope here between my hands..." (Santa Barbara, December 1967, in a TV studio, under the lights, before twenty privileged people. A videotape is in progress for the University archives. He is supposing he has that rope.)

"...between my hands, and I have tied it in an ordinary overhand knot; one rotation of 360 degrees; a second rotation of 360 degrees, one of them passed through the other..."

(The hands whirl, shaping space. Through the new terminology we can see that knot. Tomorrow work with pencil, paper, and string will assure us that the terminology is accurate. One circle, 360 degrees; another circle, 360 degrees; the knot does consist of two circles and they do interlock. And twice 360 degrees is 720 degrees, a figure we shall meet again.)

"And when I pull the ends of the rope, the knot does not disappear. The knot gets tighter. Each loop prevents the other loop from disappearing. So the knot is a pattern in the rope, and it's a self-interfering pattern. The harder I pull, the more the knot stays there..."

It does indeed. Gesturing across his chest, he pulls that phantom knot till in empathy we seem to be pulling on it ourselves. He interrupts himself to remark that he has used this example before audiences many times, and no one has ever objected that there is no knot because there is not even a rope. Something important has already happened, what he calls a first-degree generalization, one step away from every special case. We have each of us, as we watch, a clear and distinct knot in the mind, understood as we may never have understood a knot before. As if by X-ray, we can see through it, think its structure. A knot in a rope would be a model of that mental knot, and a less than perfect model since we should not be able to see into it when it is pulled into a tight lump.

Now, he goes on, we might loosen the knot, and slip it along the rope. We are then slipping the rope through the knot: feeding the rope through a pattern. And if we have a nylon rope, a cotton rope, a Manila rope, all spliced together, these materials will pass indifferently through the knot, so we cannot say that the knot is Manila or nylon or cotton. The knot is a pattern, a "patterned integrity." And the knot isn't the rope. [...]

"... a self-interfering patterned integrity": and we are somewhere in the terrain commanded by Fuller's special jargon. This has gained him something of a reputation for being incomprehensible, as indeed he is if our habit with printed pages is to skim and dip.

Next we are told to imagine the great winds, molecules of air being sucked across the Pacific, and across the California coastline, and into this room, and into our lungs. And out again, after the oxygen exchange. (We have possibly just expelled some molecule that once passed through Julius Caesar.)

Sixty pounds of air each day cycles through each of us, and food passes through us, too, and water likewise. In a lifetime some hundred tons of solids, liquids, and gases will cycle through a man like rope passed through that knot. The man is not yesterday's steak or this moment's lungful or his most recent martini. The man is a self-interfering patterned integrity, like a knot.

[...]

The rope makes the knot visible. The food, the water, the air, make each of us visible, and audible, and heavy. They are not us. They are elements in a flow of patterned transactions, of service to the "phantom captain."

(And what is that steak, incidentally? A knot likewise, tied out of solar energy. Onto Spaceship Earth the light pours, and with it the invisible radiation which we do not perceive as light. Much of it is reflected back into space, for instance by the white clouds. But some is impounded by the green leaves of plants. They are green because we see them by the radiation they reject; they are impounding the red, the hot, and in such quantities that they require to be water-cooled -- if you deprive a plant of water, the leaves burn. They tie the solar energy into self-interfering patterns which cattle -- knots likewise -- transmute into protein we can transmute. We say that we eat steak. Really, we are acquiring knotted sun. We cannot deal with it directly -- except on a limited scale, by taking a sunbath -- but the plants can, and we eat plants, and eat animals that eat plants.)

A while ago he was halting, sentence by sentence. By now the cosmos of recycling patterns has taken possession of him. The voice is rapid, as though seeking means to utter many sentences at once, so doing the cosmos fit homage. The right hand, spread although gripping crystal sphere, is pulling in quanta of sunlight; before his chest, in tense, rapid movement, his fingers fashion intricate knots.

This passage in particular was among a few things I read at that time that led to me majoring in physics (to see how far I could get before I failed.) It also played an important role in forming what passes for my personal spirituality. No doubt it's because I was just the right age when I read it, but it's saying something about Bucky Fuller that he had the ability to inspire young people like that, even decades after his death.

Celebrations

2008-07-08T10:13:00.003-05:00

We had a great long weekend. Fireworks and festival food on Thursday night. Parade and more fireworks on Friday. Saturday I went for a long run, and we spent the evening picnicking and playing catch at the incredibly crowded drive in before watching the double feature of Hancock (funny) and Get Smart (not as funny as it should have been.) Sunday we did laundry, yay! And then rewarded ourselves with a trip to the last day of Taste of Chicago. Had ice cream (me) and bratwurst (Ken) and walked all over the city and came home with blisters, exhausted but happy. Couldn't have asked for nicer weather for the fourth, and the Cubs took two out of three from the Cardinals in St. Louis.

Hope everyone else's weekend was just as nice.

The Horror!

2008-06-30T08:43:00.003-05:00

Well, we had fun this weekend. We went to the annual Flashback Weekend horror convention with Ken's friend Brian and his little boy. I decided to goth it up for the occasion, digging out a black and white dress that I bought for a wedding, originally, a necklace from a renaissance fair, some crazy looking fishnets and some long black boots. All things I own but had never before worn together. I topped it off with green eyeshadow and pink spray-on hair color, and you know, I was the belle of the ball. Got compliments all day, even from the contestants in the zombie pin-up girl contest.

We met local Chicago celebrity Svengoolie, and got him to autograph a rubber chicken for us. Brian's son got a glow-in-the-dark zombie action figure playset. We got to meet zombie movie legend George Romero. We saw (but didn't meet) Elvira. Brian got the autograph of the "Tall Man" from Phantasm, and I bought a CD from our local-access channel horror hosts Undead Johnny and Dementia of the World of the Weird Monster Show. They were great, my favorite part of the day.

Then we watched the costume contest, hosted by Svengoolie, and the zombie pin-up contest (won by the "Saint Pauli Ghoul") and called it a day.

I liked the pink hair look so much that I stopped by the drugstore the next day to get the kind you don't spray in...

What the heck, eh? Might as well enjoy being a student while I still can.

Milestones

2008-06-25T08:43:00.003-05:00

So this weekend had two important milestones for the marathon. The big one was I passed my minimum fundraising goal, thanks to a generous contribution from my parents. Note the keyword "minimum" though... The Boys and Girls Club is an incredibly good cause, and I'd like to raise more than the minimum if I can.

The second involved running my longest distance so far, twelve miles or so, to Wrigley field. I listened to the Chicago Cubs play the Chicago White Sox on my headphone the whole way there, and arrived in the 8th inning, in time to see Carlos Marmol get the second out, though the doorway that was recently cut in the outfield wall. Then I hopped on the train to beat the rush home, because you'd better believe that when the Cubs play the White Sox, the trains get crowded.

Never mind that Marmol had some trouble getting that third out -- the Cubs swept the Sox in three games at Wrigley. And I made it there to see a tiny part of it, to be a tiny part of what most of Chicago was watching. View from the corner, literally. (Also, milestones... Literally.)

Alternative Cinema

2008-06-20T09:22:00.002-05:00

We really like unconventional movie-going experiences, Like, recently we've seen 21 (great), Iron Man (rocked), Indiana Jones, (awesome), The Incredible Hulk (great until the big climax, which was lame), the new Adam Sandler movie (sucked)...

What's so unconventional about those? Well, we saw them all either at drive-in theaters or the local "Brew and View."

At the drive-in, we bring a picnic and a couple of baseball gloves for playing catch.

We take the train to the Brew and View, because driving back would be an issue.

Both let you see two movies for less than the price of one at the local multiplex. Both let you actually connect with the rest of the audience. (A stranger joined in our last game of catch.)

And the Brew and View is actually held at a Victorian opera-house turned concert-venue, where, it so happens, we had seen a concert the night before. The incomparable "Ladytron."

Really stadium seating is nothing compared to having your own table or car. We may never see a movie at a real theater again...

Of course, this might also having something to do with why, in spite of seeing dozens of movies last year, we hadn't seen a single one of the main Oscar contenders...

The Thing About Having a Blog...

2008-06-14T10:21:00.004-05:00

The thing about blogging again is that I sort of feel compelled to comment on stories about forced labor in the US, (although I did read they've now ended their hunger strike) or Supreme court threats to habeas corpus (although they were the minority opinion...) Like -- these stories need more attention.

But I'm not really very knowledgeable, so I think I will simply link to those links and comment on something I really do know a lot about -- kitschy television.

With the new Incredible Hulk movie and the Get Smart movie coming out this summer, two of my favorite childhood TV shows are getting tributes (yes, they were both in re-runs, but that didn't stop me loving them). Add into that the new Indiana Jones movie (which incidentally, I loved), the Bionic Woman revival (which I watched all of before it was cancelled, but couldn't stand) and the new American Gladiators series, and I'm practically reliving my preteen years. I even watched an episode of the new Knight Rider -- I assume that's already cancelled?

Anyway, I think this means two things. One, I am now a part of a demographic that has money and indulges in nostalgia. And two, someone really needs to make movies of MacGuyver and Quantum Leap.

A Geeky Thought

2008-06-10T09:32:00.002-05:00

Something I think about while waiting at intersections -- if two people try to go through an intersection (one going north and one going west, perhaps) then they are both going to have to go through the same point, the center of the intersection. They are both going to have the same "x" and "y" coordinates there.

Now if you don't want them to collide, there are a couple of things you could do. One option is to build an overpass, as people do on highways. Then the two cars can have the same "x" and "y" coordinates, but different "z" coordinates, different heights, and there is no collision. The bridge artificially increases one car's "z" coordinate.

Or, you can put in a traffic light. What does that do? It means that they will both arrive at the center of the intersection, with both have the same "x" and "y," but at different times. I picture their paths plotted on my old graphing calculator from high school -- the paths cross, but in "parametric" mode, you could run a little cursor along the two paths, and show that the "t" value at the center the intersection is different for the two different paths. Same "x" and "y," but by making one car wait, you are artificially increasing the "t" coordinate it has when it reaches the center of the intersection.

Sort of like how the bridge increases one car's "z" coordinate.

Bridge: same "x" and "y," but one car has been raised to a higher "z." Traffic light, same "x" and "y," but one car has been raised to a higher "t".

A traffic light is sort of like a bridge though time!

Training Runs

2008-06-05T08:38:00.004-05:00

It turns out, if you're running a marathon, you're supposed to train.

I'm trying to follow this program, from a guy named Hal Higdon, who, the internet tells me, is not a crank.

It's an eighteen week program, which has you running 3-5 miles most days (this is in line with my normal runs, which are four miles) and then bumping it up for a "long run" once a week, and a medium-length run in between. The long run gradually increases as weeks go on from eight to twenty miles, and the medium run from five to eight.

Anyway, that's all fine with me, and I've been keeping up with the program, more or less. I have so far followed his advice that: "You can skip an occasional workout, or juggle the schedule depending on other commitments, but do not cheat on the long runs.

I have no problem with the runs. The hardest thing for me are the "rest" days.

Now, Mondays I'm usually out at Twilight Tales during my evening run time, so I don't have a problem missing workouts those days. But other days...

I finally made myself exercise consistently only by making it a mindless habit. I discovered, when I started running, that if I ever gave myself permission to sit at home, then I would end up doing it more an more often until my good intentions petered out to nothing. So it had to be an every day thing. No excuses. Automatic. If the weather is really too bad to go out in, or I get home too late at night, then I can substitute the excercise machines in our living room, but not slack off.

Okay, sometimes I'm genuinely sick, but I'm honest enough with myself to know the difference between that, and just normal workday cruddiness, and the latter does not cut it as a reason for missing a workout.

So the whole idea of just sitting at home, resting, scares me. What if I get lazy? What if I get out of the good habits I've formed? Rest? I can't do that! It's against the rules.

So far, with the long runs still relatively short, I haven't really been following that rule. I think it's okay, since the intermediate schedule has only one day of rest built in, and I'm already taking that. (Albeit on Mondays, not Fridays.) But we'll see what happens when I get up to the 18-20 mile long runs...

Reboot

2008-06-01T17:30:00.006-05:00

Well, I'm rebooting the blog for shameless fundraising reasons: I'm going to be running in the Chicago Marathon in October, and I've got to raise money for the charity I'm sponsoring.

So why run a marathon? Well, because right now my life is still in a sort of holding pattern (which was the reason I stopped blogging to begin with) and while I'm waiting to find out where I'll be living and what I'll be doing next, one thing I've got a lot of is time. I probably won't have it, later. I've got my health, too, and I know well enough that it might not last. I've already been running for five years, first to lose weight (it works), and then just because it made me feel better. So, one reason is "Because I can."

And, y'know, to impress myself, and people I know. 'Cause it's a freakin' marathon, so they'd better be impressed.

But I like to think there's a little more to it too.

I say on my fundraising page that living in Chicago has made me a different person. Maybe this is a good place to explain what I meant by that. Living here during the 2003 Cubs almost trip to the World Series made me like sports for the first time, and better yet, like sports fans. It was the sense of community that got me, if I can say that without being a cliche. All of the sudden I had something to bond with strangers on the train over. Riding the "L" here taught me the joys of people-watching and gave me a huge variety of people to watch, not to mention windows to spy into. Running in the lakefront parks let me see people at their happiest and most likable. And then there are the festivals -- Taste of Chicago, free concerts all summer long, the lights and the giant tree and ice skaters in Millenium Park and the Marshall Fields/Macy's shop windows at Christmas time, the giant parties where everyone in the city is your friend.

I joined Twilight Tales and started hanging out in the coolest bar in the city (the closed-for-remodelling Red Lion, in case you're wondering.) And I met my husband here in Illinois. He's taken me to the Air and Water Show and the movies in Grant Park, not to mention all three local drive-in theaters, a whole bunch of sports games, to the Arlington Park horse races this weekend, to the Blue Man Group, and all the best deep dish pizza places, and whole host of other attractions downtown and in the suburbs. Mostly he's made me take myself less seriously, and learn to have fun for fun's sake.

Since I've lived in Chicago, I've become more athletic, less snobbish, more outgoing, less insecure. I'm still socially awkward, but I like other people more, and that makes a huge difference. Chicago unpinched a nerve somewhere in my psyche, and now I'm a much happier person.

But it just doesn't look like we're going to find jobs in Chicago, and so I have to accept that we're going to have to move, probably within the next year or so. And then the life I've been waiting for begins in earnest... My feelings are little more mixed these days. I'm not so eager to get on with "real jobs" making "real money" (although I would really, really like dental insurance) and a nicer place to live and maybe start a family. I still want all of that, but I don't really want this life in Chicago to end. I'm pretty ambivalent about the idea of moving on, right now.

Anyway, the Chicago Marathon struck me as a way to say goodbye to this city. It's an awesome course. They close off streets downtown and you get to start along the lakefront and then run through all the distinctive neighborhoods that give Chicago its personality (sometimes practical, sometimes whimsical.) There will be forty-five thousand runners. That's more people than Wrigley Field holds, even after the renovations.

What a way to make memories, eh? I mean, I never feel I know my way around a place until I've navigated it on foot, so this should help me know Chicago better than ever. I generally am on foot when I'm downtown anyway, but I don't usually go 26 miles.

I got obsessed with this idea all in an instant, and I can't even remember what made me think of it, now. But once I had, I couldn't let go. I waited a few days, to see if I would come to my senses, but I didn't.

The only problem was, it was already too late to register. Who'd've thought an event in October would be booked up by the middle of April. But there was still a way. I could do it in support of a charity.

I researched all the charities they listed, not sure if I was willing to bet $500-$1000 (the range of the required fundraising minimums) that I could do this, and get other people to support me in it. I decided I would only do it if I could find a charity that would use the money to help people in the city who are poorer than me. (No "research" charities for me right now -- not that I oppose supporting my fellow grad students, but this is about saying thank you to the city, where there are people who need help on a much shorter timescale than research requires.)

It did a lot of reading and some e-mailing, looking for a cause that would be worth the risk, worth the effort, and finally found the Union League Boys and Girls Club.

Membership fee:
$5.00. No child is ever turned away for inability to pay—there are several ways for children to earn their membership by helping out around the Club.

That's $5 for the year. And what do they get for their money?

Core program areas:

* Character & Leadership Development
* Outdoor & Environmental Education
* Education & Career Development
* Sports, Fitness & Recreation
* Arts & Cultural Education
* Health & Life Skills

Well, that's pretty vague. It sounds good, but what does it mean?

Well, "Character and Leadership" means teens run a working credit union for other Club members, gaining work experience while their customers learn to save and manage money. At least, that's one of their programs; there are more.

"Outdoor & Environmental Education" means they run a summer camp in Wisconsin, which is the first chance a lot of these city kids have to get out of the city.

"Education & Career Development" means homework help, tutoring, computer training, and job skills.

"Sports, Fitness & Recreation" means:

Kickball, soccer, flag football, hockey, games room and tournaments, penny carnival, back-to-school block party, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas Party, swimming, sports skill clinics, movie time, summer picnics and trips, daily gym, Nike Go Program, urban fishing, three-on-three basketball, intramural sports, varsity teams in football and volleyball, basketball games and tournaments, Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, Teen Center, and much, much more.

"Arts & Cultural Education" means dance, theater, music, talent shows, and painting, sculpture, murals, and print.

And "Health & Life Skills" means they give the kids healthy dinners and snacks at the clubs, which guarentees they're getting healthy food somewhere, at least. And they have basic health training too.

I can't imagine a better way to help make Chicago and the world a better place, than by helping out these guys. Seems to me they do everything you could possibly ask for. And they do it for 10,000 kids, for $5 a year.

So I'm supporting them. And I hope you'll support me. Donate here, and help motivate me through mile 26.

I'll be posting updates on my training (and probably links I find cool and neat things I do on the weekends, because this is still a blog) as October approaches.

Candidacy / Break from Blogging

2007-05-19T07:58:00.001-05:00

Well, I did it. I became a Ph.D. candidate yesterday. For an explanation of what that means, see the post I wrote when Ken did it.

Mine didn't go quite as smoothly, but I don't think it would really be very professional of me to talk about it.

As a matter of fact, I'm having my doubts about this whole "blog" thing right now.

Now that I've done my candidacy, the requirement is that I stick around for at least three more academic quarters before I can be eligable to graduate. That would take me to spring break of next year. For various reasons, I don't want to stay around any longer than I have to. And now that I finally know that I'll at least be eligable a year from now, the chronic case of "senioritis" that I've had since, oh, my second year is going to become acute.

Meanwhile Ken's already been a candidate for almost a year, and his experiment looks to wrap up in the next few months...

So we're at some kind of turning point. Which might make very interesting blogging, except that you just can't talk about this stuff. When you haven't said anything to people at work about what you're planning, what you're thinking, how you're feeling, you can't say anything to the world.

So that leaves personal and professional topics out for blogging right now. But it's personal and professional topics that are obessing me. I'm finding it hard to write (or think) about anything else.

I think I'm going to give up the blog, at least for a while.

It's been fun.

"The Return of Patriarchy"

2007-04-30T08:28:00.000-05:00

An article by that provocative title ran in Foreign Policy magazine. (That link goes to an incomplete version however -- to read the whole thing you'll need to read this post through Google groups.)

What the author seems to be saying is "The system where women and children are effectively the property of men really sucks for everyone, including men. But it is effective from the point of view of producing lots of children, and so, historically, this kind of society tends to win out over happier but less fertile societies, by sheer numbers." He says that religious people in the U.S. are outbreeding the secular, and that in the next few years most people will therefore be descended from religious families. And that religious, patriarchal cultures world-wide are outbreeding western cultures, so that in a few generations, the relative percentage of, e.g. Muslims is going to be much higher. (He summarizes the numbers in a shorter piece for USA Today)

Now some people in this discussion thread interpret this as just a sort of prejudiced fear-mongering. "Oh, no! The brown people are going to replace us! Quick, start having babies!" Others seem to think he is sounding an alarm about the dangers of falling populations overall, in global terms. "But the population can't rise forever," they point out. Isn't it better that total global population should level off through cultural changes than through disease, war, and famine due to over-population?

So some people will probably think that he sounds nationalist and anti-population-control, very right wing.

Others, however, will notice that he seems to think that the return of patriarchy is a bad thing, and that the major religions are all patriarchal. What's more, his argument is essentially an evolutionary one. He's predicting that society is going to get more religiously-conservative/patriarchal based on the fact that religious conservatives produce more children. If you assume that parents pass on their ideas as well as their chromosomes (their memes as well as their genes) to their children, this is straight-forward Darwinian logic. So -- an anti-religious "social Darwinist." Must be an evil left-winger.

Not to mention all of the feminists who are going to be pissed off because he's implying that patriarchy is a winning survival strategy.

I, on the other hand, loved it.

Basically, I'm thrilled to have a logical, compelling explanation as to why women have played the role that they have, in so many cultures, for so many years. Why have they stayed home while men discovered continents and then telescopes and planets? While men wrote epic poems and immortal plays? While men built ships and cities? If it was because men bullied them into staying at home, why did they let themselves be bullied? Women may be physically weaker than men, as individuals, but we are not a minority. We make up half of any given society, and if "society" works a certain way, then women are complicit in making it that way. But why? Didn't women want to participate in the world? Or are they, as Larry Summers would have us believe, just not genetically capable of contributing?

(And I know, there have always been women who did participate. Hypatia and Maria Mitchell and all that. But why so few?)

From the article:

Patriarchy does not simply mean that men rule. Indeed, it is a particular value system that not only requires men to marry but to marry a woman of proper station. It competes with many other male visions of the good life, and for that reason alone is prone to come in cycles. Yet before it degenerates, it is a cultural regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent, while also maximizing parents' investments in their children. No advanced civilization has yet learned how to endure without it.
...
Patriarchal societies come in many varieties and evolve through different stages. What they have in common are customs and attitudes that collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment in the next generation. Of these, among the most important is the stigmatization of "illegitimate" children.
...
Under patriarchy, "bastards" and single mothers cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next generation. Illegitimate children do not take their fathers' name, and so their fathers, even if known, tend not to take any responsibility for them. By contrast, "legitimate" children become a source of either honor or shame to their fathers and the family line. The notion that legitimate children belong to their fathers' family, and not to their mothers', which has no basis in biology, gives many men powerful emotional reasons to want children, and to want their children to succeed in passing on their legacy. Patriarchy also leads men to keep having children until they produce at least one son.

Another key to patriarchy's evolutionary advantage is the way it penalizes women who do not marry and have children. Just decades ago in the English-speaking world, such women were referred to, even by their own mothers, as spinsters or old maids, to be pitied for their barrenness or condemned for their selfishness. Patriarchy made the incentive of taking a husband and becoming a full-time mother very high because it offered women few desirable alternatives.
...
Under patriarchy, maternal investment in children also increases. As feminist economist Nancy Folbre has observed, "Patriarchal control over women tends to increase their specialization in reproductive labor, with important consequences for both the quantity and the quality of their investments in the next generation." Those consequences arguably include: more children receiving more attention from their mothers, who, having few other ways of finding meaning in their lives, become more skilled at keeping their children safe and healthy. Without implying any endorsement for the strategy, one must observe that a society that presents women with essentially three options -- be a nun, be a prostitute, or marry a man and bear children -- has stumbled upon a highly effective way to reduce the risk of demographic decline.

One more advantage, which he doesn't mention but which has occured to me before, is that keeping women at home keeps them safe from physical threats. Lets say you have a war and half your men die. At least in principle, this does not necessarily make the next generation any smaller. If the remaining half are willing to be less than monogamous then the next generation can be the same size as the previous. But if half your women died, the next generation is going to be half the size of the last. Women are the bottleneck in the system. So obviously, keeping women out of harm's way has advantages.

Of course, there's nothing so physically dangerous about learning to read, or studying the stars (although medical and chemical research are dangerous -- consider what happened to Marie Curie.) So this wasn't a complete explanation, to me, as to why women should have done so little. But in combination with the other advantages the article mentions? I think it's sufficient.

It's not that women are incapable of making discoveries, nor that men have evilly oppressed them to decrease the amount of competition. It's just the societies in which women are socially expected to be "reproductive specialists" are those which produce the most kids. So most of us happen to be descended from those societies.

But nowhere does he say that people are happiest in these societies. It's obvious why many women might not be. But the article also points out that men don't necessarily want to have to support a large family. In a society where women don't work and each marriage produces many children, and men are expected to marry... Well, that's a heavy burden. Is that really the ideal life for the majority of men? A marriage of equals, with equal responsibility, is less confining, with much less pressure.

So, it seems that even if patriarchal societies do tend to produce more children, those children tend to set up more equal societies among themselves, if they can.

As the industrial revolution continues to spread (it hasn't reached some parts of the world yet) I think more and more of these societies will be able to afford to change, to become more equal. Lower infant mortality and better prospects for old age mean that you don't need so many children. So even if the author is right that patriarchy is going to expand again in the short term, I think the long term prospects for equality are good. I think we have already taken some steps that will not be reversed.

So all in all, I like the article.

Blog Meme

2007-04-25T18:27:00.000-05:00

For when you're too lazy and uncreative to think of anything to blog about...

Last Alcoholic Drink:

Hofbrau Maibock, last night. That's a beer, and a good one. I'm into fancy beers these days. Although my palette's not as refined as Ken's.

Last Car Ride:

My five minute commute home from work. But before that, it was the much longer ride back from the DMV, where I finally, after four years got a driver's licence in the state I live in. I had to take the written test. Stress-ful.

Last Kiss:

On the elevator this morning.

Last Good Cry:

*Good* cry? None. Ask me about embarrassing, painful, frustrated cries... Actually, don't.

Last Library Book:

"The Hidden Family," by Charles Stross. I lost it, and haven't paid the replacement fee yet, which is why it was my last library book...

Last book bought:

"Old Man's War," by John Scalzi. But before that it was "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang, which was absolutely amazing. I bought it because I liked the way it was written, from browsing a few pages in the bookstore. But the actual story blew me away. I have to admit I had no idea what China has been through in the past century. The author's grandmother was one of the last generation of Chinese women to have bound feet, and was in her youth the concubine of a warlord. Their child (the author's mother) was a a spy at the age of 17, caught up in the invasion by the Japanese and then the civil war which led to communist rule. Both the author's parents were idealistic party members, who were disillusioned by the famines, purges, and political persecution that came later. They eventually became victims of the Cultural Revolution, tortured and exiled. And the author herself, a teenager at the time, was a Red Guard, a participant in that same Cultural Revolution, but less and less a willing one. I can't imagine anything more exciting, or heart breaking. And, as I noticed in the bookstore, the writing is excellent, honest and unpretentious.

Last Book Read:

"Old Man's War." Very quick read, and pretty entertaining.

Last Movie Seen in Theatres:

"300." 'Cause you gotta see that one in theaters, otherwise, what's the point?

Last Movie Rented:

X-Men 3. Huge disappointment.

Last Cuss Word Uttered:

Probably "Damn it."

Last Beverage Drank:

Diet Coke. Because I am an addict.

Last Food Consumed:

Yoplait light yogurt. Because I am an addict.

Last Crush:

Not counting my husband? I did just watch X-Men (all three of them, in fact), so I'm gonna go with Hugh Jackman.

Last Phone Call:

My mother in law.

Last TV Show Watched:

Gilmore Girls. Which no one is allowed to make fun of. I've been watching since the first episode.

Last Time Showered:

Last night. I shower in the evenings, after I run.

Last Shoes Worn:

Dankso walking boots. They have these hard soles, like wearing wooden clogs. But they're supposed to make sure your gait is ergonomically correct. My mom bought them for me. I'm sure I couldn't afford them.

Last CD Played:

K.T. Tunstall, "Eye to the Telescope."

Last Item Bought:

Flosser sticks. I've got a dentist's appointment coming up.

Last Download:

Maybe "Advanced Batch Converter."

Last Annoyance:

Not hearing back from (or being able to find) a member of my thesis committee. I've got to set a proposal date.

Last Disappointment:

The Cubs, this season.

I could give a more serious answer, but I think I'd depress myself. Who needs that?

Last Soda Drank:

Diet Coke. Because I'm an addict.

Last Thing Written:

Not counting e-mails and blog posts, part of a story I'm working on for my Monday night writer's group. It involves a worker's rebellion on Mars.

Last Key Used:

Huh? "." I guess.

Last Words Spoken:

"Yeah, I'm almost done."

Last Sleep:

Last night.

Last Ice Cream Eaten:

I'm gonna count the chocolate dipped frozen banana I had last week, 'cause otherwise I can't remember. I bought a whole box of them, actually.

(Hey, I remember now. The last actual icecream was from an ice cream truck that drove by us... Probably last September or so.)

Last Chair Sat In:

The one I'm in. A wooden one with a vinyl cushion.

Last Webpage Visited:

http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs/

Oblivion

2007-04-14T15:11:00.000-05:00

Okay, I am not your average video game reviewer. Mostly because I suck at video games. It's my total lack of hand-eye coordination and my low frustration-threshold that does it. So what I am, is a video game spectator.

But there's only one game that I've ever asked someone to play just so I can watch. It's called "Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion." And I want people who don't play video games to know what game designers are capable of, these days.

It was this game that actually made us buy an Xbox. My husband had played "Elder Scrolls III" and described it to me as amazing. In particular, he was impressed with the amount of freedom you had. You could walk anywhere you wanted, talk to anyone you wanted, do whatever you wanted, accept a quest, or not, betray your allies, or not. He spent uncountable hours on it, and was willing to lay out $400 for a new video game system in part to be able play the new game, which is even better than the last.

But how can a video game be so entertaining -- so entrancing -- even for a spectator?

It can tell a thousand different stories, each with unique characters and moral dilemmas and particular settings, within its world. It can be visually breathtaking, down to the smallest architectural and botanical details (in this game, you can pick the flowers, or even the weeds.) It can be broad in scope and yet subtle -- six or seven different races sharing dozens of very different cities and villages, all threatened by one supernatural danger, but all facing more immediate problems.

One's character's daughter has been kidnapped by cultists. Another's pets have been killed by an angry neighbor. One character, adopted, wants to know who his real father is. Another is the son of an important official, and wants nothing more than to escape her well-meant protection. One man is going to lose his farm. A woman can't pay off her dead husband's debts. Members of a guild find themselves out of work, and are stirring up trouble. Another group is running a protection racket. There are corrupt imperial guards to catch, and sticky-fingered servants.

There are hundreds if not thousands of stories like this, people who will tell you their problems. You can help all of these people, or not. You can play through the game as a thief, an assassin, a wizard-scholar, or a fighter-for-hire, or none of the above, or more than one. You may end up a vampire, if you fail to take the proper precautions, but being addicted to blood doesn't automatically make you evil -- one of your main allies turns out to be a vampire. This game is rich in shades of gray.

It was last summer that I watched Ken play through most of this, but I still remember characters' names, and stories. Once you've helped them, they don't go away. You will still see them, especially if they live in the town where you end up buying a house. Helping them makes them like you better, and they may give you better deals, if they're merchants or skilled laborers. They'll remember, and thank you. But if you let them down, you feel so bad... To have to tell someone his sons are both dead? It won't interfere with your ability to "beat the game," but you have to reload, and try harder, just to avoid the guilt. Even so, you can't save everyone. The game won't let you.

The main quest has religious themes. It's a made-up religion, to be sure, but the only man who can save the world (it's not you) from the supernatural threat is a priest. He is fallible, full of self-doubt, a little cynical, a little afraid -- one of the best of the many well-drawn characters. And you, helping him, are made to feel the same doubts. The "evil" characters ask you provocative questions. Are you sure you know what "evil" is? Are you sure you're any better than them? Are you sure there's any point in all of this? They reveal information about the world of the game and the gods of its religion that makes you wonder. But you fight on anyway.

After about 130 hours of play over a few months (the game tracks this, along with the number of murders, of items and horses stolen, of days and nights passed within the game world, of hours slept and hours waited) my husband finally finished the main quest, and put the game aside.

But recently they released an addendum, supposedly 30% as big as the original game, with all new characters (each with their own problems) and a new main quest.

It begins with a strange door, which you are asked to investigate. It leads to another dimension, and everyone who comes out of it is insane.

This new place looks very different than anywhere in the original game. That landscape had mountains, plains, and costal cities (each with their own types of architecture) connifer forests and cramped stone streets, but this new landscape looks like Louisiana or eastern Texas. Mossy trees dangling vines, marshy ground, lots of mushrooms. The sunsets are more colorful, and the weather rainier. (Yes, this game has sunsets, and weather.)

This is the kingdom of madness, the "Shivering Isles" and if the main game was full of hard moral questions, the dilemmas in this new game are impossible. You cannot get through it without doing things that shake your self-image as video-game "hero."

And this is something only a video game can do. A book, a movie, a play, can make you identify with people who may be making mistakes, who may be doing the wrong thing, but they can't set up these difficult situations and then force you to make the decisions, and then to live with yourself.

I want to give examples from the game so far, but they're spoilers, so I'll put them in white text -- highlight the text below only if you don't plan on playing "Shivering Isles."

The people here here will ask you to hurt others. The very first thing you have to do is kill a monster using its "mother's" tears, in order to enter. You will then meet characters who say things like "My neighbor is annoying. Will you kill him for me?" And once you begin the main quest, your first task is to re-open a sort of prison facility, where uninvited explorers in this realm are either driven mad by torture or killed outright. The decision is unexpectedly put in our hands. And these prisoners are real characters. You eavesdrop on their conversations. They are not "bad guys" who deserve to die. Their only crime is entering the door uninvited -- the same crime you committed. But you can't get out of this one with your hands clean. You're locked in, and can't leave until they're dead or mad. At the end, you're rewarded with a very powerful sword.

Next, the "Madgod" who created this place (he tells you that you are helping him save it from another kind of supernatural threat -- an invasion by the god of order) sends you to his Duchess, who is paranoid, and believes that there is a conspiracy to kill her. You are supposed to torture her subjects, apparently at random, until one of them confesses to being involved. After seeing a few characters fall to their knees and beg you to stop, insisting that they know nothing, the experience becomes disturbing enough that you may want to cheat (as we did), looking up the answer on the internet. Otherwise you will become paranoid yourself. Some of these characters are lying -- you just don't know who.

Next, you are sent to help a Duke, who wants you to enter a certain cave full of monsters and retrieve an item for him. But to get through the enchanted door, you must take a drug... And the drug is addictive. Your character will initially become stronger, but as the effects wear off, you become weaker, less able to defend yourself from the monsters, and eventually, start losing health points as withdrawal pain kicks in. Wait long enough and it's game over, so you have to spend a lot of your time in the cave frantically searching for more of the drug. Eventually, you don't care about anything else, the prizes you'd normally collect, the mission, the monsters. You have to find more of the drug, or none of the rest will matter.

According to Ken, it felt like a real need. And that's something that no book or movie or play could have done. They can't make you frantic, can't make you search, can't make you hurry. They are passive forms of story telling. Video games can take you further outside of your comfort zone, potentially, force you to make decisions. Force you to do things you don't want to. Make you empathize with people who are in similar positions.

That is what video game designers can do these days. They can create works of art both massive and intricate, visually beautiful and emotionally moving and full of surprises, which unfold over hundreds of hours and involve the audience in an unpredented, deeply personal way. "Oblivion" is a masterpiece.

April Poem

2007-04-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

After the Winter

Claude McKay

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
And against the morning's white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
Have sheltered for the night,
We'll turn our faces southward, love,
Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire to shafted grove
And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
And ferns that never fade.

More 3-D Geekery

2007-04-01T18:14:00.000-05:00

Stereo pair images of Chicago, taken from the Sears tower.

I know it's not very nice to post things like this, because I know more people who can't do "Magic Eye" than who can. It's like posting music that only people who can wiggle their ears can actually enjoy. But if you are good at diverging or crossing your eyes to see 3D, these are a lot of fun. Personally, I have to save them and then resize them in order to do it... And I'm better at the cross-eyed ones. But I love it.

I really want to try this myself, so you might see some clumsy attempts one of these days...

In the meantime, it's inspired me to look up some more links. So here're some beautiful portraits (cross-eyed variety).

And, because we're planning a vacation in the area, canyons in Arizona and Utah (you choose your viewing format with a widget below the image.)

What's a "Spirit"?

2007-03-17T09:13:00.000-05:00

There's been a kind of kerfluffle over at Science Blogs about some posts on a blog I'm going to start reading. Rob Knop, an astronomer, has posted long explanations of what he means when he says he is a Christian, and how it is compatible with his scientific understanding of the history and nature of the universe. (Part 1 Part 2 Part 3) He's managed to get both religious people and scientists angry at him, by describing himself as believing only the parts of each that are compatible with each other.

So half a dozen other Science Bloggers have responded with their own opinions on whether science and spirituality conflict and if so, whether that conflict can be resolved. Can one be a scientist and truly religious at the same time? (One thing's for sure, if you were, there'd be people saying you weren't religious enough on one side, and others saying you couldn't possibly be a good scientist.)

Mark Chu-Carroll of "Good Math, Bad Math," who also describes himself as religious, chimed in with his own definition of spirituality which is very close to the kind of thing I was trying to describe in this post. I said that a mosaic was more than just a collection of stones, and he says that a photograph is more than just paper and colorful chemicals. For him, his spirituality is his awareness of that level beyond the literal, his ability to see the picture, the pattern, and not just the medium in which it is formed.

Another Science Blogger, Mike Dunford, defines "spirtuality" to mean roughly, "sense of wonder."

It's that feeling that you might get watching a new living thing - human or cat, fish or fowl - emerge into the world for the first time. It's the sense that might come when you first pick up a fossil, and realize just how much time - what an unimaginable depth of years - separates you from the living thing that lived and died, and left behind only the fragile traces that you are holding. It's the wonder that might come when you see your first ruined castle, and look at the land that it commanded, and wonder about the people who lived inside. It's the emotion that you might feel when you first see a famous work of art outside of a book. And, yes, it's a feeling that you might have when you walk into the nave of a cathedral. The sensation I'm trying to describe might come the first time you look at the insides of a cell, or watch it divide, or the first time that you look through a telescope large enough to let you see Jupiter as a real planet, and not just a light in the sky.

(I'm going to start reading his blog, too.)

I'm not a Science Blogger (I don't think I could be -- that would require updating a lot more frequently and actually proofreading before posting) but I want to get in on the act anyway.

I think the most useful definition of "spirit" is "that part of the human mind that seeks a purpose."

No one ever asks any of us if we want to be born, or gives us an instruction manual once we get here. We're just thrown into the world, to sink or swim.

If I can carry that metaphor a little further -- others, who've been here longer, can give us tips on how to stay afloat. We learn the skills necessary to survive from parents and teachers and friends and authors and TV actors... They can teach us to swim, but they don't agree on which direction we should be swimming.

You wake up every morning and you have to decide what to do with yourself. What end do you want to work towards? Okay, you have to put a certain amount of your day into doing the things that keep you alive: eating, sleeping, making money. But you still have choices -- at least, if you're lucky enough to live in a first world country, you do. You could make money working on an assembly line, or as a nurse or as a real estate agent, or for a charity, or running one of Donald Trump's casinos. You could try to maximize the amount of money you make, or maximize the amount of leisure time you have. You can choose to spend some of that money and leisure time raising a family, or devote as much as possible to parties, ski trips, cruises, romantic flings, or to creating a work of art, or volunteering.

In order to decide what to do with their days, people have to decide what they want out of life. That's a "spiritual" decision, in my book. A "spiritual" question is one that boils down to "What's really important?" A "spiritual" experience is one which provides some kind of answer to that question.

The reason these topics will always be controversial is that there is no real consensus on the answer, and nobody likes being told that what they've chosen to do with their life is meaningless, unimportant. So the stakes are high when two people who disagree begin to discuss the subject.

The different religions are different answers to this question. The supernatural comes into it because people feel that whatever they do is meaningless if it's all going to be wiped out by their death anyway. Life is so short. What's the point in doing anything at all, if it's just going to be erased immediately? Either some form of eternal life or some omniscient being with an eternal memory, is necessary if their actions are going to be of any real significance. A being with not only a memory but a plan, a greater end for us to serve, which unambigiously defines "right" and "wrong" (and won't ever be achieved within our lifetimes, so that we will never be left directionless) would be even better. It would be nice to think that our suffering isn't pointless even when it clearly serves no human purpose, that it serves something higher.

Any of these scenarios requires something, someone, to exist who is not bound by the laws of the natural world, in which everything that lives, dies, and entropy always increases. But the idea that something could be unbound by the laws of the natural world has a lot of implications. Miracles are possible. It makes sense that such a being should actually be able to control the natural world. And if so, could indeed have created it. After all, it is nonsense to say that the laws of nature require the laws of nature to exist. So what does require it; why do they exist?

This is the sense in which science still leaves room for a creator god, and probably always will, as that which created natural laws. Since they can't explain their own existence, the fact that the universe exists at all has to be seen as a miracle, of sorts.

Of course, there are other alternatives. The existence of the laws of nature might be a consequence of the laws of logic. As Einstein suggested, God may not have had any choice in the creation of the universe. It might be that logic itself (together with some set of axioms that everyone agrees to be obviously true, if we can find any axioms like that) requires the universe to be exactly as it is. But if so, we can't yet prove that -- though many have tried.

And invoking God to explain why the laws the nature should exist doesn't explain why God should exist. It may be the the laws of logic require it... But if so, we can't yet prove it.

And me? I have this tendency to make these posts about science and religion without really taking a position one way or another. I don't want to offend anyone. But I don't want to cop out either. I want to be intellectually honest.

What sense of purpose motivates my decisions, day to day? What keeps me from despairing?

I like to think of the universe as a sort of "being" (whose existence I can't explain, anymore than most religious people can explain God's existence.) This being is not conscious except to the extent that we, humans, are a part of the universe, and we are conscious. When intelligent life came along (a short time ago in the history of the universe, if you count only humans as intelligent life), the universe in some sense "woke up." Individually we are short lived, but as a species we learn, and remember things. I'll be dead someday, but the species will live on.

This, together with my somewhat scientific understanding of time as a "direction," such that the past in some sense exists -- over there somewhere [points in the negative t direction] -- is enough to make me believe that death does not render life meaningless.

And what is our purpose here? Well, if you believe in God, what would you say God's is?

Maybe, to give the universe a purpose?

Without us to care, the universe is nothing but a lot of empty accidents. But if humans care and remember, marvel at the shape of galaxies and the variety of butterflies, then those things do mean something.

So how does this influence my actions? Well, for one thing, it makes me want to be a writer, still, even though I'm all grown up now and I know how impractical a writing career is. Stories are the way we give events meaning and context, and even fictional stories work, because of their usefulness as metphors. I think it was science fiction author Nancy Kress who described art as a way of "turning pain into beauty." That's partly how I deal with pain, by making it into a story in my head. (I also try to take the long view -- how much will this matter in five hundred or ten thousand years? It'll still be there, the way the early chapters of a novel are still there even when you get to the last page, but as a small part of a big story.)

For another thing, it makes me feel connected to the rest of humanity, 'cause I see the whole human race as one thing, in a way, as the brain of the universe. That also means hurting each other, or letting each other suffer when it can be prevented, is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Since we're a part of the same thing. My interest in future generations makes me want to read science fiction, and influences my political opinions for sure: I find it hard to take national borders very seriously, but I do take global warming seriously, along with other long term threats to the species as a whole. It also probably contributes to my deciding that I do want to have kids, to be a link in the chain of generations. And that right there is going to end up determining how I spend a lot of days, over the course of my life.

Finally, this kind of philosophy probably has something to do with why I went into physics, which has determined how I've spent a lot of my days, already. I said that we humans as a species we could learn, and remember things. Well, the knowledge that lasts is knowledge about the things that last -- the laws of nature, the structure of the universe. I wanted to contribute to that, somehow. These days I know better than to think I'm going to discover something like quantum mechanics or relativity, but even if I'm just a memory cell for the species, keeping what we've learned already in mind even as the people who discovered it die, that's a fairly worthwhile thing. Teaching it, or applying it to technologies that make life better for future generations (and make no mistake, the difference between the choices we have in the first world and the lack of choices in the third world is technology, humble things like automatic sewing machines and hygenic food storage) is also worthwhile.

Obviously I don't want to be told I'm wrong about any of this stuff any more than anyone else does. But I admit that I'm guessing. I don't think that the idea of God is ridiculous, as I hope I made clear above. In principle it makes as much sense as anything else, if you start from the premise that the laws of nature could not create themselves. And I'd like it to be true.

I'd hope that even if it were, though, God would have room in heaven for people like me, who are fumbling around looking for their own answers. I don't find anything attractive or believable about the idea of a vengeful, judgemental God. I think the God of C.S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and G.K Chesterton (my favorite religious writers) would mostly be okay with how I'm living my life, even if I'm wrong about everything.

Quickie Links Post

2007-03-07T10:30:00.000-06:00

Busy, lately, and tired, so I'm just now doing last weekend's post. And I've only got a few minutes. Still, I have been saving up links:

A store in Chicago that absolutely does not sell cool spy gear.

How camera lenses are made

Some funny cartoons

Some more funny (and geeky) cartoons.

Interview with Barbara Feldon, AKA Ninety-nine, from "Get Smart." She's hilarious.

Jim Carrey and Conan O'Brien talking about quantum physics.

Okay, that's all I got, for now.

Holographic Dreams

2007-02-24T09:58:00.000-06:00

I had a strange dream last night.

Ken and I flew to Venezuela -- which was, in my dream, a sort of large tropical flea market. I found a display of holograms, and bought one that depicted a shoe. But when you turned the hologram to look at the shoe from different angles, it actually changed subtly, a very old work boot morphing into something modern as you rotated it. I decided, in my dream, that I was going to start collecting holograms. Then the dream got weirder, something about our bedroom being full of flies, but I woke up thinking about holograms.

Back in the early nineties you used to see decorative holograms for sale more often. I had one of a peace symbol that I wore as a necklace, and another one of space-walking astronauts, mounted on a little plastic stand, that sat on my dresser. These days it seems the novelty has kind of worn off, and you only see them on credit cards or as stickers on expensive products, verifying their authenticity.

Remembering my peace symbol and my astronauts, I thought maybe I really would start collecting holograms. I'm sure you can still order them off the internet, at least... Although that does take a bit of the fun out of collecting.

When I was in high school, some people I knew made their own holograms as an independent research project (they got a science credit for it.) I remember being impressed by little glass plates with 3-D coins on them, and by the laser they had set up in sandbox, on a concrete block that, according to the teacher, had its own foundation independent from the rest of the school, to minimize vibrations. These days I work in a laser lab, on, actually, the third floor of our building. The optical tables we use are supposed to be low vibration, if you use the built in hydraulic support system for the legs, but our tables are decades old and the hydraulics don't work anymore. I think my high school had a nicer set-up.

Our advisor has another lab, mostly separate from the one Ken and I work in, which is actually called the "holography" lab. But the holograms they make aren't like the ones I used to buy. They have more in common with DVDs, using a laser to store information and then retrieve it later. But they probably could make a picture of a coin, and I started thinking... Maybe I should ask them to show me how. I mean, will I get a chance again?

So that got me searching for "make your own hologram" kits. Turns out there are a few around these days. I don't have to bug the guys in the holography lab after all.

The only problem is, I think their holograms, like the ones you can make from these kits, would be viewable only in laser light of the same color as the laser used to create them. The kind of holograms I dreamed about collecting are embossed "rainbow transmission" holograms, apparently. All I really know about them is what I just read here. But they are certainly harder to produce, which is why they make good security stickers.

Also unfortunately, as far as I know you couldn't really make a hologram like the one I dreamed about, which morphs as you rotate it. Holograms are generally produced by shining a laser beam on a small object that is physically present. In the case of my astronaut hologram, it was almost certainly some plastic models of astronauts -- that's what they looked like. You can't combine images of different objects onto one hologram -- although you can record multiple holograms on the same piece of film, to be viewed with different colors of light.

So my dream can't exactly come true, even with a home hologram kit, or a whole holography lab.

There are other things holograms can't do. You can't make "true color" holograms that look like photographs except in 3-D, at least not in normal light. You may have seen something like this on a movie poster, but it's not a hologram. It's a "lenticular" poster. This is a completely different process that just makes different parts of a normal image visible from different angles. In general, the secret to making things look 3-D is to make each of your eyes see a slightly different image. But lenticular posters can hold a dozen different images, each visible from a different angle, so that not only can they look 3-D from different positions, they can even move or morph as you walk by. Any image you can print on paper can be used for this technique, physical models not required. So it's actually a more impressive and somewhat more useful technique than real holograms. But not as futuristic. Real holograms look three dimensional because they reproduce the light reflected off of actual three dimensional objects. Whereas lenticular images can show you only a dozen different angles on a scene, a hologram, like a real object, produces an infinite range of views.

What about holograms projected into empty space, like Princess Leia in Star Wars? Also not possible, unfortunately.

About the closest you can come is this arcade game, also from the early nineties. I played it. You really could reach in and put your hand "through" the characters.

But, as that Wikipedia link says, it was only an optical illusion, done with mirrors. Like the "mirage bowl", I guess. (My brother had one of those). The video game's images appeared only inside a sort of box, and couldn't be projected out into the room, the way R2-D2 projects Princess Leia.

More Star Wars-ish technology might be on the horizon, though. A Japanese company has a device that makes air glow in 3-D patterns. Again, not a hologram, but possibly much cooler. It seems to be sort of similar to the kind of "laser etching" used to create 3-D images in these crystals, only using the air itself as a medium. But the air will only keep glowing as long as they lasers are on, and apparently makes quite a lot of noise as it "explodes" from the heat, whereas once you burn a hole in the crystal, the hole stays.

I love this stuff. I can totally see myself accumulating a huge collection of cheesy 3-D toys and jewelry and posters. I'd also want to collect "Magic Eye" stereograms, including animated ones like the ones I linked to a while ago, and 3-D comics that you view with glasses, and probably Viewmaster slides -- I had one of those when I was a kid too.

February Poem

2007-02-19T23:52:00.000-06:00

Street Cries

When dawn's first cymbals beat upon the sky,
Rousing the world to labour's various cry,
To tend the flock, to bind the mellowing grain,
From ardent toil to forge a little gain,
And fasting men go forth on hurrying feet,
BUY BREAD, BUY BREAD, rings down the eager street.

When the earth falters and the waters swoon
With the implacable radiance of noon,
And in dim shelters koils hush their notes,
And the faint, thirsting blood in languid throats
Craves liquid succour from the cruel heat,
BUY FRUIT, BUY FRUIT, steals down the panting street.

When twilight twinkling o'er the gay bazaars,
Unfurls a sudden canopy of stars,
When lutes are strung and fragrant torches lit
On white roof-terraces where lovers sit
Drinking together of life's poignant sweet,
BUY FLOWERS, BUY FLOWERS, floats down the singing street.

- Sarojini Naidu

We Have Liftoff

2007-02-13T21:21:00.000-06:00

Click on the picture. Watch the animation. Then come back.

It's so hard to explain what this little animation means. Just know that it took years of blood sweat and tears to achieve it, mostly Ken's, but mine too, this last year or so. A lot of the saga I described here.

This is our magneto-optical trap. Being launched upward. The things on the sides are the magnetic coils that help hold it up. They are six centimeters in diameter, which should give you a sense of scale. We just need to be able to launch atoms a little bit higher than the top of the coils, because we can put our cavity right above them. This is the whole reason we designed these smaller coils, so that we wouldn't need to launch so high.

The atom cloud actually expands as it rises, out of the cooling beams. The beam we use to light it up so that we can see it is narrow, so you all you see is a narrow, pencil shaped slice out of the cloud as it expands, like the core of an apple. That's why it looks long and narrow toward the top.

These results don't mean we're done. First of all, we might want to cool the atoms a little more, so that they don't expand so much, so fast (although there is plenty of density up there, even as it is.) We are actually doing a slower launch, so that they slow to a halt just at the top of the coils and then fall back down. The slower launch takes longer, so the atom cloud has expanded more when it gets up there, which is why we might want the additional cooling. Also, we need a way to hold the atoms there, once we get them there. We already know how we're supposed to do that. It's called a "FORT" or "Far Off-Resonance Trap." It's easy in theory -- just shine a really strong, really tightly focused laser beam on the atoms, and that should hold them in place for the few milliseconds we need. Unfortunately we haven't made it work in practice yet, at least, not that we could detect. Finally, we need to actually build the cavity and put it in there. We've already built a couple of cavities for this thing, but for various reasons none of them is suitable for what we're trying to do now.

But still, that little blob in that animation looks a little bit like a light at the end of the tunnel.

Links, Life

2007-02-03T08:59:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I missed a week. Here's the thing, I'm really, really busy right now. This post is gonna be half links and half life update, cause those are the laziest kinds of posts (except for Bears-related photos that I upload without further comment, which is the laziest kind of all.)

Life update first: my two classes are kinda kicking my butt. It's been a year or so since I've taken a class, and the last one was taught by my advisor, who thought time in the lab was more important than getting the homework done anyway. It's been four years since I've taken one like my GR class, with twenty students, and homework problems from the end of the chapters due weekly, and midterms and finals and real grades. Just going squeezing the classes into my work days is hard. We're actually making a little progress with the MOT (I said I'd put up pictures of the launching we've done here, and I will, whenever we get the data off of the non-internetted computer it's stored on) but sometimes I'm not there when I'm needed. And when I am, days full of MOT work and school work are very full indeed, long and exhausting. Meanwhile the gyroscope project is sort of in suspended animation as we try to figure out what exactly needs to be done next. With no deadline attached to it, it has slipped to the bottom of my priority list. I am, however, writing a summary of our group's work on this stuff so far, which will probably become my thesis proposal, but which does have a deadline because it's supposed to be published as the text to accompany a talk my advisor gave.

Just writing about all that makes me feel as if I should be doing something more productive than blogging.

But I'm getting an intimidating backlog of links to post and comment on, so let me at least put a few of them up.

In particular, I've come across lot of related stuff about the suburbs, politics, and religion lately.

Slacktivist says the reason we're at war in Iraq is that our urban schools suck. Actually, he just says it's why we're not able to cut down our gasoline use. But we're at war in Iraq at least partly because we're so dependent on foreign oil, that's what makes the region so strategially important. We're dependent on foreign oil because everybody drives rather than taking mass transportation. But many people can't take mass transportation because they live in the suburbs. Why? Because that's where the good schools are.

He also has a powerful argument that the war in Iraq can't be "won" because it was not in our interest to begin with. If we were to invade Canada, what would it mean to "win"? Assuming we succeeded in taking down their government, what would we do then? Occupy Canada? Why would we want to do that? And for how long? Because there would be no reason to invade Canada in the first place, victory is undefinable. Same in Iraq. If there had been WMD to capture, we could've declared victory when we captured them, but since there were not, and since Saddam's government was not uniquely bad -- we have no reason to expect the next one to be better, if we pull out -- how do we know when we've "won"? (And if the real goal was to destabilize the middle east lest it unite against us? Then the war can never be won until we turn the middle east into Canada. So long as they have a significantly different culture and different values than us, some of our leaders will see their unity and prosperity as a threat.)

Meanwhile, back in the suburbs, Chris Hedges says that the reason the country is so polarized by religion is "suburban despair." He says "A terrible distortion and deformation of American society, where tens of millions of people in this country feel completely disenfranchised, where their physical communities have been obliterated, whether that's in the Rust Belt in Ohio or these monstrous exurbs like Orange County, where there is no community. There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again."

I think my "radically" Christian, suburban mother (who reads this blog, by the way-- hi, Mom) might actually agree with his argument, if not the conclusions he draws from it. She grew up not in the suburbs but in a small country town, and laments the loss of "community" every day. She does not find the daily grind of work, commute, TV, commute, work fulfilling either. When people begin to feel their lives are meaningless, religion gives them meaning. I think that is probably the definition of religion.

But I want to own my own home and have a couple of kids and make enough money to buy fancy digital toys and take vacations, too. Almost everybody wants that stuff, especially the people who actually live the furthest from the suburbs, in decaying inner cities and half abandonded rural towns. I think the problem is, what happens when you actually get all that? When you have nothing left to strive for, really? When you've achieved all your ambitions, what gets you out of bed in the morning then? That's the problem people "trapped" in the surburbs have. And that's why many of them turn to religious activism, to give them a purpose, a cause, a mission.

Of course, they also have the leisure and resources to pursue such a mission, which someone less successful, just struggling to make a living, doesn't have. That may be the other reason a lot of this comes out of the suburbs.

I think Hedges (who wrote War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, a book that I found incredibly moving, and who is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School) is more on the money than Tom Frank (who wrote What's the Matter With Kansas). But in another article of his I think he makes the same mistake that Frank did, not taking the convictions of the people he's writing about seriously enough. I mean, I think that a lot of environmental activists are motivated by basically the same thing. They need a mission, and saving the world is a compelling one. But that doesn't mean the earth doesn't actually need saving. It does. And likewise, just because anti-abortion crusaders are motivated part by their need for a mission, doesn't mean they don't have a point. We're a hyprocritical society, aware that nothing magical happens at the moment of birth to turn worthless "tissue" into a priceless "child," and yet refusing to admit it, refusing to deal with the ambiguities or the moral queasiness they bring with them.

So long as we keep in mind that understanding people's motivations doesn't excuse us from taking their messages seriously, I think that kind of understanding is really valuable, and I still really respect Chris Hedges. I also think he's right that the divisions on some of these passionate issues could ultimately tear our society apart, and that some of the less rational religious types, like those obsessed with the "end times", seem to want it that way. And that does scare me some.

But my final link is proof that some people are anti-abortion and pro-environment, believe it or not. Crunchy Conservatives buy organic food and homeschool their kids, wear Birkenstocks and go to Bible study groups. The New York Times says it's "a kind of across-the-board rejection of modernity [...] Crunchy cons disapprove of abortion rights, same-sex marriage, illegal immigrants, public schools, secular liberals and mothers who work outside the home. But they don't like Wal-Mart, McMansions, suburbs, pollution, agribusiness or processed foods, either." I think I could like and even admire people like this, hard working and sincere in living their convictions, but not agree with them. I'm not on board with the rejection of modernity part. I like pop culture and I like technology and I like the idea of women working outside the home. And I like cheap food, and I like government social services, because self-reliance would only work if the world were fair. I'd much rather live in the modern world than fifty years ago or a hundred years ago or more, and I'll resist anyone who tries to turn back the clock.

But still, I respect these "Crunchy Cons," who manage to be both left wing and right wing nuts at the same time, more than people who are merely one or the other.

Superbowl Bears

2007-01-21T19:39:00.000-06:00

from ESPN

(Chicagoist explains)

from Rachelle B

from Flickr

from Flickr

Bear Down!

2007-01-14T21:27:00.000-06:00

Wow, my heart is still pounding. The Bears must have caused at least a couple of coronaries today.

Okay, I know the rest of the country is rooting for New Orleans right now. But I live in Chicago. And the point of sports is to bond with the people in your own community. The Bears unite us. I hear strangers on the El asking each other, "You think they got a chance?" Today a group of people in Bears gear getting off the our train (probably coming back from the game) called out to Ken and me: "Go Bears!" We pumped our fists in the air and echoed it.

I can't betray my fellow Chicagoans. Just as New Orleans loves its team, Chicago loves the Bears. It is right and proper that Chicagoans should root for the home team.

So I hope New Orleans wins the Superbowl -- some other year.

To show my support for the Bears, I spent part of the day on a little art project.

It's one of the those Magic Eye images. So I apologize to those who can't see Magic Eye images. But we were shopping in a book store yesterday, and stopped to look at a couple of books of them, which inspired me to download a program for creating my own
(StereoCreator. Scroll down at that link) And then last night, Ken had a dream that we created a stereogram in which the 3D image moved. I'm sure it's been done before, but I haven't seen it, so I had to attempt it. For that I needed an animated .gif creator, so I downloaded unFREEZ.

Unfortunately, animated gifs with 28 cells are 28 times as large as normal gifs. So I cut down the number of frames and the color density to fit within Blogger's 3MB limit, and now the depth doesn't look exactly right. But still, as a first attempt...

Click on the image to enlarge and animate.

Wondering what it's supposed to be?

Click here.

I might post a few more (non-animated) stereograms if I have more homework to procrastinate on later.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Stereo DDD links to a couple of animated stereograms that outclass mine like Cary Grant outclasses Pauly Shore.

3-D staircase
3-D descent
3-D pink

The "descent" stereogram in particular is really a stunning work of art. Check out this guy's whole gallery.

Physics Classes

2007-01-09T09:30:00.000-06:00

I'm finally taking my last two classes this quarter. After that, I will probably never take another, at least not for credit. I can barely imagine never having to do homework again; I've been a student for so long, my whole life. I observed a while ago that I didn't feel ready to be done, didn't feel like I knew as much as I expected to, with only two classes left. A certain older, wiser graduate student with the initial "K" reminded me that I was supposed to be learning something from the research, too.

Surprisingly enough, I seem to have become a little less cynical since I wrote that last post. Just because you can't learn everything in grad school doesn't mean you learn nothing. And I have gotten a lot from independent study and bull-sessions with my co-workers (especially the one I married. I think we figured out what it meant to quantize the electromagnetic field while driving across France on our honeymoon. This was not as quite romantic as it sounds -- we nearly always get frustrated with each other when we talk about physics. But then, we nearly always understand things better afterward.)

Anyway, my last two classes are relativity, which I have been waiting to take, and the second quarter of quantum field theory. I think people might be kind of interested in what classes like that are like. The topics sound so... Deep. Don't they? Is it a profound experience, learning this stuff? Am I gaining access to the secrets of the universe?

Well... No. Physics classes aren't really like that. I mean, take Newton's laws, right? Everyone learned at least a little about Newton's laws at some point, and learned about gravity. Now, if you take a step back, Newton's ideas really are profound. They're universal. With them we can comprehend the motion of the planets, or how far a flea can jump. The same pattern underlies both. They allow us to build devices so powerful they might as well be magic, and, in the limited sense, even to predict the future.

But when you were sitting in your high school physics class, did it feel like a mystical experience?

Everybody who finds out what I do for a living tells me they hated physics in high school, and guess what? So did I. There's so much notation to learn, so many simplistic and unlikely problems to solve. I felt as mindless as a programable calculator, memorizing equations and plugging in numbers and getting out other numbers. It was dry and difficult and mechanical. Worst of all, the more basic questions that I was actually interested in, such as "Why are these equations true? Where do they come from?" were actively discouraged. Newton didn't know why his equations were true. He was just guessing. He figured he saw a pattern underlying a lot of the dynamics of the natural world, and he tried to describe it. It turned out to be a good description. That is all.

Nowadays we have even more sophisticated descriptions, and we can show that if those equations are true, then Newton's follow. So in that sense, we can explain his equations. But then, we can't explain the newer ones. Why do things obey Schroedinger's equation? We don't know. It's just how they seem to behave. Don't ask. Shut up and calculate.

This pragmatic approach continues to the very highest levels of physics education. You can think about "why?" on your own time. In class, we will address questions we can actually answer. Such as "what is the probability that an electron on a collision course with another electron will fly off at a 45 degree angle?"

Just so you know, when you hear physicists pontificating about different interpretations, "many worlds" theories and so on, those are just their own opinions. You don't learn interpretations in class. They aren't speaking for scientists in general.

I'm guilty of it myself. When I write or talk about science, I try to make it sound more interesting by injecting my own private sense of wonder, my own interpretations and opinions. Like I did up there with Newton's laws. But the day-to-day practice and study of science, in the lab and in class, is much more boring.

Colorado Trip

2007-01-02T09:53:00.000-06:00

I'm late posting because I've been in Colorado, visiting parents and siblings.

As you may have heard, they've had a little snow there, recently.

You can click on the picture for a bigger image. That's not my parents' car, just a random one parked in my old neighborhood, which we visited on a little nostalgia trip. Actually, both my parents have SUVs, of which I've been disapproving, but I have to say they came in handy this year. The city doesn't plow the residential streets (instead they rely on the 300+ days of sunshine Colorado gets to melt the snow for them within a few days.) So the four wheel drives are the only reason anyone was able to make it out of the cul-de-sac they live on for a little while. The neighbors all shared a couple of snowblowers to clear each other's driveways and get rid of the larger drifts, and then drove in each other's tracks to flatten down the snow on the street.

That's what it looked like by Saturday, which was almost a week after the big storm and the cleanup. Of course, during that week, another eight inches or so fell...

As the van picture indicates, our old neighborhood got a bit more, even. Here's the house we lived in during the eighties, from a couple of different angles.

Driving back there took us a little closer to the mountains, so my parents took me into the foothills a little ways for lunch at a restaurant that they remember from when we lived in that old house. And I can't resist including a few pictures of that, because they show the biggest icicles I've ever seen

To get a sense of scale, compare to the doorway.

As for gifts...

From my husband I got a really fancy portable DVD player and earphones (which I used on the plane and in the airport, both ways) and a shoulder massager, and a Bears T-shirt which I am currently wearing, and a movie, "The Ref," which was hilarious and has nothing to do with sports and was perfect to watch on Christmas Eve, and a video game, "Nancy Drew: Danger by Design." Because I said there should be more video games where you have to solve mysteries.

From my parents, Ken and I got an electric toothbrush (which I asked for, and love) and a down comforter, and I got a new winter coat (black with cool random metal bits, and very warm), a couple of pairs of jeans and tops during a mother daughter mall trip, and holes in my ears. Yes, my mom paid for me to get my ears pierced. I must be one of the only women in the world to pick out her first earrings to match her wedding ring. Also, they're paying for the plane ticket for the visit, which is a huge gift in itself.

From my brother, the Xbox 360 remote, because the Xbox 360 is now the source of all our entertainment. From my sister, a poster sized Lord of the Rings Calendar and a Harry Potter bookmark, because she knows I'm a sucker for LotR and Harry Potter. And from my Grandpa, as usual, a pad of one dollar bills. You tear them off one at a time and the look of consternation on the store clerks' faces is worth way more than a dollar.

All in all I made out like a bandit, and I hope you did too. Happy New Year.

Good MOT, Good MOT!

2006-12-20T18:39:00.000-06:00

Okay, so remember the other day when I said we had the brightest trap ever, but couldn't get it to work when we changed the set-up? And how if we didn't change the set-up, we couldn't do the experiment? So we really needed to get it working with the new set-up? Well, we did!

I promised pictures of the super-bright trap, and I took them, just didn't get around to uploading them. But now you can see the super-bright trap, and the new-set-up trap.

But first, for reference, is a picture of what the trap used to always look like (on a good day)

Second is a picture I took of the same monitor, with the same camera (though the camera had been moved slightly, but not significantly closer) on the day after we saw the trap with the naked eye. Believe it or not, the trap was actually even bigger than this at one point, though not much bigger.

The final picture is the trap we got today. It was also slightly bigger than this at one point, but this was a better photo. As you can see, even the weaker new trap is brighter than the kind of trap we used to get.

It always feels like a lot of lot of work to get back to the same place, when we're trying to get the trap going again. This time it took weeks. But the truth is, this represents a major step forward. Because we changed the configuration of the laser beams, and this trap, unlike the old one, can be launched upwards.

The theory behind a trap requires six laser beams: one pointing up, one pointing down, one pointing left, one pointing right, one pointing forward, and one pointing backward. (Actually, our trap is rotated a little so that some beams are diagonal, but lets just ignore that and talk about up and down, forward and back, and left and right.) Up until now, the left pushing beam was simply a reflection of the right pushing beam, and the doward pushing beam was a reflection of the upward pushing beam, and so on. But if you can change the frequencies a little, so that the upward pushing beam is a little higher in frequency than the doward pushing beam, you can arrange for the upward beam to push a little harder than the downward beam... And the atoms are launched upward. It's called an "atomic fountain." This is a necessary part of Ken's experiment. But you can't do it if the downward beam is simply a reflection of the upward beam -- then they're automatically the same frequency.

However, the downward beam is a reflection no more, but a completely independent beam whose frequency can be independently changed. Another hurdle cleared. The impossible experiment is still on.

And we can go on Christmas break without this frustration hanging over our heads.

It feels good.

December Poem

2006-12-20T08:20:00.000-06:00

A Child's Christmas in Wales

(It's more a short story than a poem, and I can't possibly quote all of it. I'll link to this copy instead.

I'm just going to quote the end, but please believe me that knowing how it ends does not spoil this particular story.)

... And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house.
   "What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"
   "No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.
   "Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.
   "Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.
   "Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Good News and Bad News

2006-12-12T09:52:00.000-06:00

The good news is, yesterday we got the biggest, brightest trap we've ever seen. It took up half the camera's view. Its brightness saturated both cameras and drowned out all other light in the chamber in the pictures. It looked like the sun. It looked like it was going to eat the lab. Our advisor asked us why it was so much bigger, and Ken said "Because we rock?"

Here's the thing -- it was so bright, you could even see it with your naked eye. The reason that is surprising is because it glows in infrared.

"Wait, how can you see infrared with the naked eye?" you ask. Well, the eye's response doesn't cut off sharply at a certain wavelength. It just gets less and less sensitive as you go to longer and longer wavelength. Our light is far enough past the peak sensetivity of the red-receptors in your eye to qualify for the term "infrared," but the eye still has some sensetivity to it. In other words, if it's really bright, you can still see it.

The trap was that bright.

Somehow seeing something like that with your naked eye is much more impressive than merely seeing it on a screen or through a viewer. You know it's not a special effect. It's like -- wow, there's a ghostly glowing red dot just hovering in the center of our vacuum chamber. Okay, I believe in quantum mechanics now.

Nothing else could possibly explain that.

The bad news is, we got this incredible trap by going back to the old set up. See, the way we usually get a trap involves having laser beams that go through the trap (it's partly transparent), hit a mirror, and then go through it again from the other direction. What we need to do now, for reasons I won't get into, is have one beam going through it from one direction, and a separate (but identical) beam going through it from the other direction.

When we reflect one beam back on itself, the trap works, and works spectacularly. When we take off the reflectors and send a supposedly identical beam in from that direction, it doesn't work at all. How can that be?

So that's where we are now, the frustrating mystery we are still trying to solve. But seeing the largest trap ever, and seeing it with our naked eye, makes up for the frustration a little.

For reference this post has a picture of what the trap normally looks like on our TV screen. Yesterday, it took up, literally, about a third of that screen. So, huge. I'll bring a camera in today... And here is a picture of what a trap looks like when you look at it with your naked eye. The difference is, theirs is a sodium trap, and sodium glows with visible yellow light, which makes it much easier to see than our infrared glow. But other than appearing redder and dimmer, that's just what ours looked like.

Things that are Nerdy

2006-12-09T09:45:00.000-06:00

Okay, I know the "breaking news: water on Mars" thing was kinda ridiculous. I mean, since it really was news, you probably saw something about from real journalists, and didn't need my link. What can I say? I was excited. In my opinion, nothing could possibly affect the course of history as much as life on other planets, whether human (someday) or alien -- even bacteria. And Stephen Hawking agrees with me. So there.

Meanwhile, Nasa's putting out press releases about plans for a moonbase.

There's a lot of "why" in the discussion that links to, that I really don't comprehend. Why go to the moon? Why hold the Superbowl? Why fight wars? Why try to build quantum computers? Why make Bond movies? When you think of all of the ridiculous things the human race spends billions of dollars on, doesn't a moonbase sound supremely rational in comparison? I know, people say we could better spend NASA's budget on things like aid for African countries dealing with famine and disease. But number one, we wouldn't spend the money on aid for Africa; we'd more likely spend it on weapons research. Or should we give it back to the taxpayers so they can spend it on tooth whitening systems and Christmas presents for their pets? You know it's going to get spent on something ridiculous regardless, right? And number two, even if it were going to go toward aid for Africa, it could only help a small part of single generation... Which is certainly worth doing, but isn't it also worth doing something that could potentially change the destiny of all of the human generations to come?

Um, just in case I offended anyone there: I've bought tooth whitening systems and presents for my pets too. I'm not saying there's anything horrible about that. Just the national teeth-whitening project we're all engaged in is perhaps slightly more ridiculous than a national space exploration project.

That's all the space news I've got, but there are a couple of more links I've been saving up, so I'll sqeeze them into this post as a part of an overall "nerdiness" theme.

Scientists trying to predict the future

Comic books: Joss Whedon is writing one apparently to be titled "Buffy: Season Eight".

For those who watched the Sci-Fi channel's reality show "Who Wants to be a Superhero?" the comic book based on the winner's character has been delayed again.

I'm planning to read both of those comic books, but right now the only one I read is The Walking Dead. That link goes to a review of the first issue that I agree with, so I don't have to write my own review. Except he says he doesn't like zombie movies, and, ever since I started hanging out with Ken, I do.

I do read lots of comic strips. And since I am a protophysicist, I'm gonna link to Zippy the Pinhead talking about string theory every now, and then.

I also think the Brewster Rockit Space Guy story line beginning here is funny, but the website is annoying. Just lie when they ask you for personal information.

Man, I am such a nerd.

Canals on Mars?

2006-12-07T10:38:00.000-06:00

A riverbed on Mars where there was none before.

It might mean life, or it might just make life a lot easier for future Mars colonists...

A New Project

2006-12-05T08:49:00.000-06:00

So, you all know by now that research is frustrating, right? The project that was supposed to be my thesis... Well, I was spinning my wheels on that for a long time. Couldn't get any traction. When we finally, finally understood the theoretical description of our problem, we discovered that 1: the experimental device we were trying to build wasn't going to work (although not for the reasons I had thought it wouldn't) and 2: the theory behind wasn't new. Other people had already done these calculations.

Ugh, that's very vague. I never know how much I can say about my actual research. I mean, in science, you're supposed to publish in peer reviewed journals, not blogs. But I think it's okay to tell you that I was working on a new kind of optical gyroscope.

Ordinary optical gyroscopes, usually called ring laser gyroscopes, are pretty simple, in principle. Basically, when you rotate a certain type of laser, the frequency of the light coming out of it changes. If you want to know how fast you're rotating, measure the frequency of your laser. This is useful for navigation. Keep track of how fast you're turning and for how long, and you always know what direction you're facing. You can know really accurately, enough to navigate by dead reckoning alone. So all of these airplanes and ships and satellites carry little lasers on board now; optical gyroscopes are pretty standard, apparently.

Anyway, we were supposed to be building a more sensitive optical gyroscope, capable of detecting even very tiny rotations. But it turns out that the effect we thought would simply enhance the sensitivity has a lot of other consequences as well -- like making the frequency measurement much harder to do accurately. And the conditions under which this effect happens turn out to be narrow and hard to realize in practice, and realizing them handicaps the sensitivity in other ways. Which explains why we never managed to demonstrate the increased sensitivity experimentally.

So. End of story, right? So much for my thesis. I've been at loose ends now for a couple of months, wondering if I was ever going to graduate, if I had to start all over, worn out and kind of burned out by the whole saga of the gyroscope. (And meanwhile working on the trap, which is a two person job, with Ken. The trap is always, always frustrating. About two hundred pieces of equipment have to be working all at once in order to trap atoms at all, and optimizing them all takes half a day for two people, even when things are working well, which is not very often. And then when you change anything, it can take days or weeks or months to get the trap back, as you try to track down the problem among all those parts... We've recently changed some things. Ken found a better way of doing what he's trying to do with the trap, in some papers. But it's So. Much. Work.)

To sum up: Arghh! Damnit! Arrrrghh!

But the effect that was supposed to make the gyroscope more sensitive, the effect that other people have already discovered and written about? In trying to understand it, a question occured to us (well, to my advisor) to which we can't seem to find any answer in the literature. Nor is the answer obvious from theory. At first this seemed like bad news -- we still don't totally understand! But now my advisor has given me the assignment of attempting to answer the question experimentally. The fact that no one else seems to know the answer means that the result of such an experiment would potentially be publishable... And more importantly, could go into a thesis.

And that means that all my work so far isn't wasted. The stuff that I learned about this effect, even the stuff I learned about gyroscopes (because depending on the answer to our question, maybe some of those problems I mentioned can be gotten around someday), can still go into my thesis. These things are supposed to be about 200 pages long, but most of that is usually background material. I was worried that all the background I'd been learning was going to turn out to be totally irrelevant, that'd I'd have to start from scratch. So I am incredibly relieved to be given a new problem that is actually related to the work I've already done.

Now actually doing the experiment is going to be hard, don't get me wrong. I don't know where I'm going to find the time, considering that the trap is going to continue to be a two person job, and there are only three of us in the lab. And I've still got classes to take... And I'm already forseeing a million problems with trying to set this new experiment up, and the problems that you forsee aren't ever the bad ones, either.

But those frustrations are for later. Right now, I'm just relieved to have a new project that won't require me to start from scratch.

Sad Stories

2006-11-29T09:28:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I keep links to stories that move me, but find it hard to work them into posts. Too serious to throw in with a bunch of links to space pictures or television trivia.

But this one really got to me, and I want other people to read it: "Laos had only two million people then. And we were later told that the U.S. and its allies dropped three million tons of bombs on us.."

"Eventually, nobody could survive here, anymore. Our houses were destroyed and our fields were full of unexploded substances. People were dying and so were the animals. We had to leave and so we decided to go to Vietnam, to search for refuge. But the journey was tremendously arduous. We were moving at night, carrying few possessions. During the day we were hiding from the enemy planes."
...
In this biggest covert operation in U.S. history, the main goal was to "prevent" pro-Vietnamese forces from gaining control over the area. But the entire operation seemed more like a game, overgrown boys allowed to play, unopposed, their war games, bombing an entire nation into the stone age for more than a decade. The result of that "game" was one of the most brutal genocides in the history of the 20th century.

Some of the most brutal bombing raids were done out of spite, with no planning. When U.S. bombers couldn't find their targets in Vietnam due to bad weather, they just dumped their load on the Laos countryside, as the airplanes couldn't land with the bombs on board.

More warcrimes: missing CIA prisoners.

From the Tribune -- `I have to make this right' "In 1997, June Siler named Robert Wilson as the man who attacked her. Today, she's convinced he's not and blames police for the mix-up."

You know what? That's enough sadness. The other stories I've got can wait for another time.

UPDATE:

A happy ending: Victim recants; convict to go free: "A Chicago man who had been serving a 30-year prison sentence for a 1997 attempted murder will go free today, a month after the victim in the case told the Tribune that she no longer believed that Robert Wilson was the person who attacked her."

But it's still a sad story, even with the happy ending. 1997 to 2006 is a long time.

Thanksgiving Poem

2006-11-23T11:42:00.000-06:00

The Fire of Drift-wood
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

DEVEREUX FARM, NEAR MARBLEHEAD.

We sat within the farm-house old,
Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,
An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port,
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
The wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night,
Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
Our voices only broke the gloom.

We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been, and might have been,
And who was changed, and who was dead;

And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.

The very tones in which we spake
Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.

Oft died the words upon our lips,
As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
The flames would leap and then expire.

And, as their splendor flashed and failed,
We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
And sent no answer back again.

The windows, rattling in their frames,
The ocean, roaring up the beach,
The gusty blast, the bickering flames,
All mingled vaguely in our speech;

Until they made themselves a part
Of fancies floating through the brain,
The long-lost ventures of the heart,
That send no answers back again.

O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned!
They were indeed too much akin,
The drift-wood fire without that burned,
The thoughts that burned and glowed within.

Or if your mood in the mood for something less reflective and more ridiculous, take a look at these turkeys drawn by psych students. Their TA added an extra page to the exam when making copies -- it said "draw a turkey." via MeFi.

Human Infrastructure

2006-11-21T08:41:00.000-06:00

One of the last things I can see myself doing with my life, below "astronaut" on the list of unlikely careers, is managing a software company. Yet for some reason I've been reading the archive of Joel on Software recently. I find myself nodding in agreement with his descriptions of managment techniques that don't work, including musings from his days in the Israeli army about military-style management and why it's necessary and why it doesn't work if your people can quit. (What does he say works? Trusting the people who take pride in what they do.) Mostly the guy is just a good writer, funny and insightful, one good point per entertaining essay.

Anyway, one essay in particular got me thinking. It's called The Development Abstraction Layer.

He starts off with the story of a talented programmer who saves up enough money to live for a year and then quits his job to write a piece of software better than anything else on the market: "Flawless, artistic, elegant, bug free." Then he sets up to take orders from customers.

Of course, no orders come. Why?

"He's pretty sure he knows. 'Marketing,' he says. Like many young technicians, he is apt to say things like, "Microsoft has worse products but better marketing."

When uttered by a software developer, the term "marketing" simply stands in for all that business stuff: everything they don't actually understand about creating software and selling it.

This, actually, is not really what "marketing" means. Actually Microsoft has pretty terrible marketing. Can you imagine those dinosaur ads actually making someone want to buy Microsoft Office?

The real reason, he says, is the lack of infrastructure to support the product. Not just marketing to make people want it, but sales, to make sure they can get it, and customer service, to make sure they can use it, and billing, to make sure they pay for it, "and public relations, and an office, and a network, and infrastructure, and air conditioning in the office," and "accounting, and a bunch of other support tasks."

But this isn't limited to software development:

The level a programmer works at (say, Emacs) is too abstract to support a business. Developers working at the developer abstraction layer need an implementation layer -- an organization that takes their code and turns it into products. Dolly Parton, working at the "singing a nice song" layer, needs a huge implementation layer too, to make the records and book the concert halls and take the tickets and set up the audio gear and promote the records and collect the royalties.

.

While I was thinking about that, I read Teresa Nielsen Hayden's latest post on book publishing. Teresa works for Tor, putting out mainly science fiction novels. She sometimes uses her blog to explain how book publishing works, and why nobody ever reads books that have been "self-published" by their authors. Why, in fact, self-publishing is a scam, even if the people who print your book offer to help you "market" it.

Huh, I thought, a publishing company is like a software company without any programmers! The whole company is "infrastructure." The product comes from somewhere else. And no matter how great that product is, "self publishing" almost never works.

Then I thought about reality shows like "American Idol" and "American Inventor." The prize on those shows is, basically, an infrastructure.

Even the military works this way. Joel Spolsky says "It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier. This was not decadence. Modern armies probably run 7:1"

All of this has opened my eyes a little. First of all, I am not going to think of "efficiency" in the same way anymore. When I hear that big charities spend 80% of their donation income on administration, I am not going to be appalled. Every effective organization spends 80% of its income on administration, according to Joel. An efficient organization is one in which the infrastructure works invisibly.

Secondly, I am going to try to be more respectful of the people who actually do all of this infrastructure work. I'm guilty of complaining bitterly about "bureaucracy." Of losing my cool with customer service people. Of noticing only when the secretaries and payroll people at my university do things wrong, and not all of the times they do things right. Of not appreciating that their job is both hard and vital. The lesson here is that the infrastructure is in some ways more important than the product. A bad product with a good infrastructure may succeed, but a good product with a bad infrastructure will not.

I know I have a tendency to forget this. Which is one of several reasons why, though I notice bad managment all the time, I wouldn't make a good manager either.

A Small Blue Marble

2006-11-14T09:36:00.000-06:00

Human civilization is a very new and very small and very fleeting thing in the universe. To help keep things in perspective:

Pictures of a near neighbor which is only 764 times larger than Earth (in volume.)

Two men who have gone farther from Earth than any others in human history, except a few of their friends who took the same trip. How far? About 1.2 "light seconds". (A light second is the distance light travels in one second.) Doesn't sound so far when you remember that the sun is eight light-minutes away, and the nearest of the stars, four light-years.

The Chicago Tribune has a little more with these two.

A bunch of people who are trying to do other things unique in human history... (involving pizza, and tea parties, and rattlesnakes, and Michael Jackson.)

There's a movie doing the festival circuit called Ever Since the World Ended.

After civilization ends, how will you be able to navigate?

A new group is taking votes on The Seven Wonders of the Modern World All man made, as were the originals. Six of the original seven are gone. The Great Pyramids remain, and I voted for them, along with the Great Wall of China, the Easter Island Heads, Petra, Stonehenge, the Colosseum in Rome, and the Acropolis.

Physics for Future Presidents tells world leaders what they need to know about "nukes" and radioactivity and the technologies that come from quantum mechanics...

Nasa shows us a movie of the Earth shrinking in the rear view mirror as one of their probes leaves for another planet.

Pictures of the shuttle lifting off from a unique point of view although probably not the ISS according to the MeFi thread that followed...

And finally, to provide a little perspective for US readers: how the rest of the world reacted to our recent elections.

Why I'm not Voting Straight-Ticket Democrat

2006-11-07T09:17:00.000-06:00

Some of my favorite bloggers (Jim McDonald at Making Light and John Scalzi and Chad Orzel, who links to the other two) are urging people to vote straight ticket democratic, in an attempt to cause a shake-up in the Republican party, which is desperately in need of new leadership.

I share their aims but I'm not going along with their program. Because as one commenter at Making Light said, they don't live in Chicago.

Chicago shows what happens when the Democrats start taking your vote for granted. Specifically, in this race, we've got an incumbent governor who is under federal investigation for giving state business to certain companies in return for millions of dollars in kickbacks, and hiring unqualified people for state jobs either in return for campaign contributions or simply to build a network of cronies. Not to mention the fact that his policy decisions on things like toll roads and pensions have been plain stupid. And we've got a candidate for county board president who is the son of the man who won the Democratic primary. Two weeks before John Stroger won, he suffered a stroke. His family covered up the seriousness of the stroke until after the election, allowing voters to think he would recover enough to take office. They revealed his true condition at the last possible minute for changing names on the November ballot, and then arranged to get Todd Stroger's name put on instead. They have the clout to put names on the Democratic ticket at will because John Stroger has for so long been a very important cog in the Democratic machine in Cook county. I have no doubt that the kickbacks and hiring scandals and cronyism are even worse at the county level than at the state level, and that the Stroger family is a part of them.

So I'm not voting for either of them. But not only am I not voting for them, I am voting for their Republican opponents, both of whom are running on platforms of reform.

See, I have this theory about how the two party system works. It's based on the idea that the most important function of democracy is to allow the people to throw out a bad government without a revolution. To me this seems very difficult to do in a multi-party system. Either you've got three or more parties in a winner take all election, which means that a minority is enough to elect a generally unpopular person (ie, Ralph Nader helps get Bush elected) or you've got a proportional representation system, where, even if the bad government leaders lose their majority, they can keep part of their power by joining a "coalition."

By contrast, in a two party system it is possible to vote against someone, not merely for someone. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm a big fan of checks and balances, and two equally powerful parties act as checks on each other, ideally. I want to keep them roughly equally powerful. And they're not, around here -- I think that's the root of the problem.

Which is not to say that there are only two points of view on every issue. Just that, in the US, I think the multiple perspectives should be hashed out within the parties. The long list of candidates with the spectrum of ideas should appear on the primary ballot. And the elections which actually choose someone for office should be (and are) run-offs between the winners from the two long lists.

That's my philosophy. I like the two party system because I believe of all systems it makes it easiest to "throw the bastards out." So I'm voting to restore the balance of power in Illinois, and throw some bastards out.

But at the national level -- straight Democrat.

Scary Ideas

2006-10-31T09:04:00.000-06:00

Happy Halloween! I've still got the costume I bought and never wore last year -- Natasha, as in "Boris and Natasha," as in "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show." It has a rubber wig and a tube dress, and really long fake eyelashes, and purple eye shadow, and bright red lipstick. It's scary, all right. If only I had somewhere to wear it...

Girl Hacker has posted a programming schedule for her personal television channel, and it seems like a good meme to steal for a post of my own. Rocky and Bullwinkle will be on it, of course. But mine's got to be much longer, because I really like television, and have watched a lot of it.

7:00a - Breakfast Time
(Wikipedia describes it as "an off-the-cuff morning show with lifestyle segments and 'roving reporters' who visited unique sites across the country each day. This was the network's flagship show and utilized every room of the [New York City] apartment [that fX used to broadcast from]. Hosted by Tom Bergeron, Laurie Hibberd and Bob the Puppet.")

9:00a - Game Shows
(Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud, Love Connection... Whatever. Game shows are good in the morning, a cheerful way to start the day. I'm scheduling three hours of them. Also: Blind Date and Fear Factor count as game shows.)

12:00p - Sports on weekends, or TechTV on Weekdays (These days its "G4TV". But back in the day it was Kate and Leo all day long from a single studio set, making it up as they went along. Obviously I'm not usually home at this time, but if I am, this is just the kind of friendly company and infotainment I'd like to have. Apparentely other people miss it, too. Better than court shows, anyway.)

3:00p - Kids' Shows
(Rocky and Bullwinkle, as promised, and also the Muppets, and You Can't Do that on Television, and Out of Control, and Clarissa Explains it All, and the Tomorrow People, and Spellbinder, and Liberty's Kids, and Danger Mouse and Count Duckula. Two shows a day.)

4:00p - British Comedy
(Monty Python, Red Dwarf, Blackadder, the original Whose Line is it Anyway, Have I Got News For You, etc. I think these are all half hour shows...)

4:30p - The Simpsons

5:00p - Sitcoms
(Roseanne, Dharma and Greg, The King of Queens, Malcolm in the Middle, The Dick Van Dyke Show, the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Scrubs, and Get Smart. Because those are my favorites, not because they have anything at all in common.)

6:00p - Action Adventure
(The Incredible Hulk, MacGuyver, Dr. Who, The Bionic Woman, Star Trek The Original Series, Mission: Impossible, and Alias. Which seems to fit better with these older, more light hearted shows than with the "serious" later shows... I'll schedule some Due South in this slot too.)

7:00p - The Aaron Sorkin / Amy Sherman-Palladino hour
(The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60, Gilmore Girls)

8:00p - "Serious" New Shows
(24, Heroes, House, and Jericho, but Jericho'd better get better quick or I'm cancelling it. Maybe fill in with some CSI.)

9:00p - Buffy and Veronica etc.
(Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel (yeah, why not?), Firefly, and Veronica Mars. And shortlived Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls. And possibly Joan of Arcadia. I liked the little bit I saw.)

10:00p - The Daily Show

10:30p - M*A*S*H (or maybe sometimes "Moonlighting." I haven't actually seen that at all, but Ken tells me I'd like it.)

11:00p - Svengoolie and Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Overnight - More Sitcoms. Doesn't really matter which ones, but I'd include I Dream of Jeanie, Bewitched, and Mork and Mindy, for starters. And The Wonder Years, even though that's not exactly a sitcom.

Luckily, I'm married to the one person in the world who would actually want to watch this with me.

Things That Look Cool

2006-10-22T14:05:00.000-05:00

* Close Up Pictures of Snow Crystals via Girl Hacker

* A photographer who made his famous subjects pose in midair via MetaFilter

* This is what the end of the world looks like Links to missile test pictures at MetaFilter

* Manhole covers of Japan via Making Light

* The Biomedical Image Awards We know lots of people in biomedical imaging these days... Also via Making Light.

* Photos of Mars they need your help cataloguing all the craters. Computers aren't good at it. Via User Friendly I think.

* The Sidewalk Art of Julian Beever via Making Light and User Friendly.

* Mars in 3-D I'm sorry, I forget the source.

* The Nieman Marcus Catalog featuring a cruise in a space ship.

* Light and line Great shots by Chicago Tribune photographers. Registration probably required.

* Our pumpkin. Ken suggested I try to carve this Bears logo, and it turned out great.

Bears Win

2006-10-17T08:51:00.000-05:00

Did you see that Bears game last night? The Chicago Tribune called it a Monday Night Miracle. On national television, the Bears came back from the 20 point deficit they were looking at in the third quarter. The offense looked like amateurs and never managed more than three points in the whole game, while turning over the ball six times. But the defense and special teams proved they could win the game all by themselves. By one point. That one point lead wouldn't have been enough, of course, if the Arizona kicker hadn't missed his easy shot in the last minute of the game. Man, two and a half hours of painful, boring futility, followed by half an our of shouting ourselves hoarse, and a final minute of jumping and dancing and arm pumping. I guess American football can be as exciting as Ken says it is... And the Bears are still unbeaten.

But how does their defense do it? The Onion reveals their secret.

October Poem

2006-10-09T00:07:00.000-05:00

October

By T.A. Daly

Come, forsake your city streets!
Come to God’s own fields and meet
October.
Not the lean, unkempt and brown
Counterfeit that haunts the town,
Pointing like a thing of gloom,
At dead summer in her tomb;
Reading in each fallen leaf
Nothing but regret and grief.
Come out, where, beneath the blue,
You may frolic with the true
October.

Call his name and mark the sound,
Opulent and full and round:
“October.”
Come, and gather from his hand
Lavish largess of the land;
Read in his prophetic eyes
Clear as skies of paradise,
Not of summer days that died,
But of summer fructified!
Here, O soul, his message sweet.
Come to God’s own fields and meet
October.

News of the New

2006-10-03T09:28:00.000-05:00

Apparently a couple of Americans have won the Nobel Prize in physics. They worked on the COBE satellite, measuring the cosmic microwave background. Microwaves are, of course, just a kind of radio waves. The microwave background is nothing but static, noise. The point is that it doesn't have a source. It seems to come from all directions at once, from all over the sky. It was first discovered by accident by scientists at Bell Labs trying to build a radio reciever, who weren't happy that no matter where they pointed the thing, they couldn't get rid of the noise... But it's not quite the same in every direction, and that's what the COBE satellite measures. The little tiny differences. Since the only possible source for radio waves that come from everywhere is thought to be the Big Bang, studying it can tell us something about the beginning of the universe.

But the Nobel Prize people do more than just give out awards. They also create cheesy flash animation games. Certain members of our lab who shall remain unnamed have no problem playing this at work, since after all, it's educational! It's on the Nobel Prize website, and it's about lasers. We're supposed to be learning about lasers, right? Thanks to Chad Orzel for the link.

In other space news, did you see that Neil Armstrong got his line right after all? The story says

Some historians and critics have dogged Armstrong for not saying the more dramatic and grammatically correct, "One small step for a man ..." in the version he transmitted to NASA's Mission Control. Without the missing "a," Armstrong essentially said, "One small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind."

The famous astronaut has maintained he intended to say it properly and believes he did. Thanks to some high-tech sound-editing software, computer programmer Peter Shann Ford might have proved Armstrong right.
...
In a graphical representation of the famous phrase, Ford said he found evidence that the missing "a" was spoken and transmitted to NASA.

"I have reviewed the data and Peter Ford's analysis of it, and I find the technology interesting and useful," Armstrong said in a statement. "I also find his conclusion persuasive. Persuasive is the appropriate word."

I, personally, am very glad to hear this. I know some people who would say that there is something to be learned from the original story about an embarrassing human error at the moment of a great human achievement, that it's the difference between real life and myth, and it's important to remember... I say we need mythic achievements these days more than we need reminders of human fallibility. I hope that history books from now on record the line as it was meant to be.

Not all of us get to walk on the moon, of course. But a few teachers got to experience weightlessness recently, in a special airplane like the one astronauts use for training. Sometimes called "the vomit comet," I believe... The idea was to get the teachers excited about science, so they could go back and get their students excited (and incidentally get some publicity for Northrup Gruman, who sponsored it.) But supposedly half of all people get space-sick their first time in zero g. And you only get thirty seconds or so of weightlessness at a time, not enough to acclimate. So you gotta think about half those teachers weren't all that enthusiastic about the experience... But hey, I'd risk it.

Some Links, Some Thoughts

2006-09-24T09:02:00.000-05:00

On science related topics:

Peter Woit writes about "open access" journals.. You probably know that scientific theories and experimental results are supposed to be published in "peer reviewed" journals. You may not know that the only subscribers to the physical copies of these journals are university libraries. That's because those subscriptions are expensive. Or that no one these days ever really looks at the physical copies. The university library usually has a subscription to the electronic edition too, you see, much easier to access. (But also expensive.)

Also these days many papers are available on the so-called "arXiv". (The X is a greek Chi. Get it?) Papers on the arXiv have not been peer reviewed yet, may not ever actually be published. But since results appear there months earlier than in the journals, and since papers which will end up in all different journals are available there in a single place, it's very popular.

So to me, the question is, does it make sense to write papers to fit the limitations of print? The shortage of space in print journals means that there is usually no room for a whole derivation, so equations are presented without justification. Results taken from huge data sets are summarized in single graphs. Basically, everything has to be compressed until it's so cryptic that even "peer" reviewers (who are not always specialists in the precise sub-fields of the papers they're sent) have little chance of working out whether the equations make sense or whether the results are reasonable.

And, of course, lots of papers are rejected by the more prestigious journals, not because they're wrong, but because you can only fit so much in an issue. This makes the ego-driven, status-seeking aspects of "publication" even worse.

But the "Open Access" movement apparently doesn't want to move to electronic journals, but to pay-to-publish print journals!

Speaking of the ego-driven, status seeking aspects of publishing: Piled Higher and Deeper has a simple diagram of how it works.

Okay, but before I get too cynical, I'll go on to "Cocktail Party Physics," a non-academic, un-mathematical blog by science writer and Buffy fan Jennifer Ouellette. Her enthusiasm for the subject usually restores my own a little, (so does Pyracantha's.) Inspired by the internet holiday called "Talk Like a Pirate Day," she proposes Talk like physicist day. I think we should combine them. Argh, matey, that plank is a simple harmonic oscillator and you're about to find out its natural frequency!

And Chad Orzel, a working researcher in (more or less) my own field, reminds me that as frustrating as the impossible experiments we try to do on our cold atoms may be, the basic idea of laser cooling is still pretty awesome. He describes the first time he heard of it, as an undergraduate "Right about there, I was hooked, just because it's such a wonderfully counter-intuitive idea. When you think about hitting something with a laser, you don't imagine that it'll get cold.". He then describes the basic concepts involved, continued in the following post. This is the theory behind a lot of the stuff our lab does, if you're at all curious. Ken is the university's laser cooling and trapping expert, these days, as the operator of the only working atom trap. Even when the research is stalled, that's still a pretty cool position to hold.

Finally, Mark Chu-Carroll has a post about working in a academia versus working in industry from the point of view of someone who works in industry. Of course, his field is computer science, but a lot of what he says seems to be true in general. He says, "When I started working on my PhD, I had no intention of going to work at an industry research lab. I went to get my PhD specifically because I wanted to teach." The story of how he wound up where he is, especially the parts about not having as many publications as he'd've liked, and research politics, and the constraints of being married to someone with her own career, and the fun he had working at his current lab as an intern compared with the pressure to get grants and get papers published in academia, are all really interesting to me. And the fact that he's so happy with how it worked out is very encouraging.

It's also really encouraging that some post-doc friends of mine recently got permanent jobs of their own, outside the academic track (and in very diverse places.) We'll probably see one of them, at least, at a conference we're attending next month (my first one! I'm nervous about it.)

In the end, the best advice is probably Timothy Burke's. Accept that your first job out of college or grad school is not going to be great. Accept that you're going to be paying some dues. Just because you don't get the cool job right away, doesn't mean you never will... So I should relax.

I'll try.

September Poem

2006-09-20T01:19:00.000-05:00

Dunno what this one means, but it suits my mood.

W.H. Auden

For what as easy
For what thought small,
For what is well
Because between,
To you simply
From me I mean.

Who goes with who
The bedclothes say,
As I and you
Go kissed away,
The data given,
The senses even.

Fate is not late,
Nor the speech rewritten,
Nor one word forgotten,
Said at the start
About heart,
By heart, for heart.

The Final Frontier

2006-09-11T09:05:00.000-05:00

I'm a fan of the space program. Not a hardcore fan, maybe, not a self-made expert like some I've known. But, y'know, I watched Apollo 13 four or five times in theaters and the HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon" and "The Right Stuff" and then I read some of the books that those are based on. And yesterday I picked up We Seven, purporting to be an account of the "most magnificent adventure of modern times, told by the heroes who achieved it" -- the Mercury astronauts.

And then there's all the science fiction dating back to the early days of the space program that I still love. When I bought the Mercury book, I also picked up Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham. "An international prize of over a million dollars was being offered to the first man to complete an interplanetary journey. Target -- Mars. [...] Dale Curtance of England didn't need the fortune. He was a millionaire. He was an eccentric. But most of all he was an adventurer and he was determined to win. [...] There were going to be many surprises. And they all began with the stowaway aboard Curtance's ship. A stowaway to Mars. A woman."

Who could resist that?

The great part about space travel is that it blurs the line between science fiction and reality. For instance, there is the X Prize Cup, which has already awarded a ten million dollar prize to a spacecraft developed by a billionaire. Now they plan to offer more prizes. And a British billionaire has joined forces with the American one to try to put the prize-winning craft to use.

And NASA really is planning to go to Mars, and back to the moon. The Constellation program borrows ideas from Apollo (and so resembles the science fiction of that era too) for the design of a vehicle versatile enough to handle both, supposedly, and dock with a space station too. Lockheed Martin got the contract. They're hiring in Colorado. My mom sent me an e-mail alert. But I don't really want to build it, so much as fly in it... Maybe I'll stow away.

Realistically, private space tourism is probably is the only way I'm ever going to get any kind of taste of space. Right now it's a little out of my price range, around $20 million to go up aboard a Russian Soyuz and an extra $15 million if you actually want to do a spacewalk. I'm saving up.

There is one other option. You can move to a small country and talk them into buying fighter planes from Russia, and hope the Russians throw a trip in to "sweeten the deal". That's how Malaysia's getting its first astronaut to space. Whoever it is will attempt to make Teh Tarik (pulled tea) in space. This will be a challenge because, normally, it involves pouring "boiling-hot milky tea swiftly and repeatedly from one vessel held high in one hand into another held low, producing a distinctive layer of froth."

If I ever go into space, I'm going to drink my national beverage: Diet Coke. I can think of all kinds of experiments to do with that. Shaking the can, ditching the can altogether, maybe even bringing along some Mentos.

Happy Birthday to Me

2006-09-03T09:29:00.000-05:00

Actually I did have a happy birthday yesterday. I love that my birthday falls 1) on or near a three day weekend, every year 2) at the beginning of my favorite season. And now that it's not "back to school time" for me anymore (I never left), my only worry is allergies. What the heck is it that blooms in September and makes my nose go nuts?

But the season is worth the sneezing. In Chicagoland, fall is by far the nicest time of year. Seventy degree days with golden sunshine and cool lake breezes. And yesterday was the most beautiful day in the history of the Earth. I went for a long run, interrupted in the middle by a little while laying on a bench and watching the sailboats pass in front of the skyline and letting myself be hypnotized by the sunlight flashing on the water.

I got a bracelet, money, flowers and (yet to come) running shoes from my parents. I asked for the running shoes. From my husband, I got, not the new watch I had asked for, but my beloved old one, repaired. He snuck out and got this done while I was making copies the other day, never even knew he'd left. I also got a new wallet (the one I had was in shreds, but I hadn't been able to find one like it) and and candy and glow in the dark solar system and Star Wars stickers. I will be taking general relativity soon, after all. A girl's got to decorate her binder.

He also took me out to dinner -- capellini pomodoro, red wine, and chocolate cheese cake, with a candle. Mmmm.

Then we went for a walk, back out in that beautiful sunshine. And I got phone calls from family, and fell asleep watching the Saturday night B-movie on Svengoolie. I tell ya -- this is the life.

Real and Imaginary

2006-08-27T22:56:00.000-05:00

I've got a few blog entries marked "keep new" in my Bloglines feed, because I keep meaning to get around to writing about them. The problem is that they're on intimidating subjects, which deserve long, thoughtful posts, and it's hard to muster that much mental energy. But they nag at me, and so perhaps I'll just try to say something about them, and link to them, and get it over with.

One is a sort of rambling post by Lance Mannion called The Purpose of Religion.

In it, he says

Faith, that is the belief in things unseen, is willful stupidity. Faith is believing that what your eyes and ears tell you is secondary to what your imagination allows you to wish were true instead. Faith is a belief in nonsense. To have even a little faith is to believe in nonsense and to open your mind up to all kinds of other nonsense.

That sounds harsh, and later he backs off it a little -- he seems to be trying to say that he can see the appeal, unlike some atheists. But seeing the appeal is not the same as approving.

By contrast, Pyracantha posted a nice series of short essays beginning with Science Religion Imagination Realities, part I (and continuing with part II, III, IV, and V) wherein she summarizes the conflict between those who believe in the supernatural and those who do not, and places herself somewhere outside of that, as someone who believes that the supernatural exists in our minds, and that this kind of existence, while unphysical, is still real.

She thinks that scientists will scorn this unempirical, irrational view of the world. But I think that if they do, they're hypocrites. The thing is, scientists believe in math. Math is unphysical. And yet you'll have a hard time finding a scientist who doesn't believe the person who discovered the value of pi (or rather, the means to calculate it to as many digits as you please) didn't discover something real about the universe.

I had this argument with a philosophy professor in college. I said, "Pi doesn't exist." He said, "Yes, of course it does." I said, "Show me where." He said, "It's implicit in every circle." I said, "Show me a perfect circle."

I don't remember how he answered that. It seems to me unanswerable. There are no perfect circles. Pi is an idealization, and abstraction, an idea.

The same goes for every theorem ever "discovered" by mathematicians. They are really invented. They rest explicitly on unprovable assumptions. Some of those assumptions are even acknowledged to be inconsistent with what we see about the universe around is, and yet scientists believe theorems about hypothetical spaces where triangles have more than 180 degrees to be, nevertheless, "discovered," to be in some sense, facts.

But it doesn't stop at math. If pressed, most scientists will admit that they believe in such abstractions as justice, friendship, and personal identity. All the fictions that human beings live by. You can't kick justice, you can't measure friendship, and no one is really the same person from moment to moment; nobody is consistent or predictable enough in their behavior to qualify as a real scientific phenomenon.

The metaphor that I like, I got from Buckminster Fuller. It's something like this: these abstract things are like knots tied in a rope. You can't have the knot without the rope, of course. The knot, by itself, isn't a physical thing. It's just a pattern. The physical thing is the rope. But the knot is really there, nevertheless. Another metaphor for the same thing: a mosaic. Let's say a mosaic depicting an elephant. The stones are physically there. The elephant is not, has no existence beyond the stones. It's true, there is no elephant. And yet everyone who sees it knows exactly what it is.

Buckminster Fuller said that energy was the rope, and even matter was just a knot in it. Because matter is created and destroyed (in nuclear reactions, usually) but energy, on average, is not.

You can extend these metaphors. What if I make a pattern out of knots, two and then one, two and then one? Is the pattern really there? But it only exists in the knots, which only exist in the rope. You could even imagine using the knots to make morse code, or the mosaic tiles to make letters, and spelling out the word "apple." In what sense is the apple "really there"? (It must be a little bit really there, because if I show it to people and tell them to go fetch one, they'll consistently -- repeatably! -- come back with real, physical apples.)

So that's my take. The difference between a real person and a fictional character is a level of abstraction, the difference between a knot and a pattern made out of knots.

Now believing that a God exists at some level of abstraction is not likely to satisfy a genuinely religious person, since Sherlock Holmes also exists, at some level of abstraction. The question is, is God a pattern in the universe, or a pattern in our minds? What level of abstraction? This ambiguity is sort of like a Rorschach test or an optical illusion -- is the image on the page or in your head? But maybe either way, it hardly matters. The mind is so many levels of abstraction away from matter and energy anyway, what's one more, give or take? If it exists in the mind, it's only a little further from the physical than we ourselves are. And it can still have consequences in the world, can still make people fetch apples. Of course, the only difference between a right theory and a wrong theory in science is also the level of abstraction (wrong theories exist only in your head), but if God is not a scientific theory, is more like a work of art? Does it really matter if a this still life was painted from a model or simply created in the artists' imagination? Does it matter if he got the details "wrong"?

Statements like Lance Mannion's seem to me like someone looking at a mosaic and insisting that there is no elephant, only a bunch of stones.

You Say You Want a Revolution

2006-08-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

Maybe the odds are a bit better for Big New Physics being developed in my lifetime than I thought.

It appears "dark matter" is no longer just speculation. Here's some observational evidence that there is something out there that we can't see.

Short explanation for those who've never heard of dark matter before: for a long while, it's appeared that the galaxies and other astronomical objects we can see don't move the way we'd expect them to for the mass they appear to have, if they were just acting under the influence of gravity. So physicists speculated that either they were more massive than they look (by a lot!) or our understanding of gravity was wrong.

But there are apparently reasons to believe that if they are more massive than they look, that mass doesn't come in the form of stuff made of neutrons and protons and electrons. It seems it has to come from something that doesn't interact with normal matter by almost any means except through gravity, otherwise we'd be able to detect it. So ghostly "dark matter" was invoked. Such convenient substances have been hypothesized before, though, and eventually disproved, as in the case of luminiferous aether

Only all of the sudden it's no longer so mysterious, so speculative. It seems that some astronomers have found a couple of galactic clusters which collided, and the collision knocked the matter in them away from the gravitational center of mass. Now normally the center of mass is, you know surrounded by mass. That is to say, surrounded by matter. But here all the matter's been pushed away, and the gravity is still pulling things toward where it used it be. It's as if the Sun got knocked out of the solar system but the earth kept orbiting the point where it once was. You'd have to assume there was something else there, right?

The revolution will come when and if we ever figure out what dark matter actually is, besides all around us.

(Actually dark matter still isn't enough to completely explain the dynamics of the stars. Something else, called "dark energy" or sometimes "the cosmological constant," is invoked to explain some aspects. But that remains in the realm of speculation and controversy for now. Anyway, I'm looking forward to finally taking that general relativity class this winter, and I'm sort of glad I'll be taking it after this dark matter discovery.)

Low Sodium Soup

2006-08-20T19:05:00.000-05:00

This is an advertisement. Why? Because I want this product to do well so that there is a market for similar products.

No salt added minestrone: low sodium soup from Health Valley.

Do you know how hard it is to find low sodium products?! Much harder than low fat or low calorie or even "low carb."

If anyone has tips or recommendations, leave a comment.

August Poem

2006-08-18T15:08:00.000-05:00

I have been away, attending the funeral of my great aunt Mary, and then visiting my family for my mother's birthday and my sister's sixteenth birthday. It's been a strange trip, a funny mixture of sad and happy. My parents had to work during our visit, but my grandfather was there during the day. He was fun to hang out with, in spite of some medical problems of his own. My mom took us out to fancy dinners and then took me shopping on her birthday. Ken drove us, more than 2500 miles in all. That was stressful. And while we were there he drove my sister around to see some friends, get a haircut. He's a good brother-in-law. She passed her driving test yesterday and will soon be driving herself around.

I'm tired, after sixteen hours in the car yesterday, so it seems like a good opportunity to post the August poem:

On The Meaning Of Things
by Ana Castillo

(In memory of Dieter Herms)

He took me to my first opera.
I was 38 and he was dying.
He looked elegantly gaunt rather than infirmed
in an off-white double breasted jacket
suitable for summer.
It was 'Don Giovanni', in Italian with
German subtitles projected onto a screen.
"The plot is rather stupid," he said and already knew,
but enjoyed hearing Mozart again, the high point for him
being when he recognized an aria and could fit it
into the story.
He listened throughout near-faint
with the thinness of air, the crowded theatre,
and the constant drilling pain.
At intermission, he reserved a table
and we had champagne.
"This will be the last time we see each other,"
he said. "What is hardest for me to give up is memory."
I moved my seat closer to his, "Perhaps, memory too,
will be transformed," I said.
"Will I remember you?" he asked.
"In another way," I speculated,
as is all we can do
with the meaning of greetings and partings, and love
that resists death.

--Originally printed in Poesía, Ollantay Press, 1995

My aunt Mary never took me to see an opera, but she did own opera glasses, and used them for watching TV, or watching the pastor in church. She was going blind, her last years, and resented it, but the opera glasses helped. Aunt Mary worked as the admissions director for a fancy girls school in Dallas for 37 years (I went there for preschool and kindergarten) and moved in a set of rich and famous people who did go to operas. She did take me to breakfast and then to school, when I was about five years old, and we lived in Dallas. She did give me old books signed by famous authors she'd met, for my birthdays. It's funny how as soon as someone dies, they stop being old. They're every age at once. She's as much the person I remember from my childhood, now, as the person who was sick in the nursing home these last few years. She's the person I've heard stories about, who went to college and then began a career in Chicago before World War II, and then moved to Wichita to work for Boeing as a part of the war effort. The happier, younger Mary is as real now as the older, sadder one, who had already given up a lot of her memories... That's a comforting thought for me.

Mini Blog

2006-08-09T10:18:00.000-05:00

I wrote a short story this weekend, so my writing muscles were too tired for blogging. Before I wanted to be a physics major, I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I figured a PhD was a good fallback... Turns out, it takes up a lot of your time. Who knew? But I recently joined a writer's group, as a way of having a social life, and it's motivated me a bit. People have weirder hobbies, right?

Only I still can't think of anything to blog about. So you get a little lazy blogging, which means, "repeating something I read in the Tribune." You heard it here second (or more likely, twenty-second. This must've gotten some publicity that I missed):

One Laptop Per Child.

That's the name of an organization that's developing cheap laptops for kids in developing countries. They give the village a wireless router and the kids computers, and presto, internet for everyone.

Apparently, Microsoft has problems with this idea. From the Tribune story:

At long last, MIT-associated computer experts gave a demonstration of a seriously working model of the final machine to be distributed to worldwide poverty pockets, to the dismay of some industry stalwarts, notably the folks running Microsoft Corp.

...

Craig Mundie, top new technology planner at Microsoft, has been quoted saying that a better solution would be to build such a computer around a cell phone--preferably one running Windows Mobile PC.

By picking the open-source and free Linux instead of Microsoft's products, if successful, the project could affect Microsoft's overseas sales to one degree or another.

Additionally, by picking small-fry chip fabricators instead of Intel for the 500 megahertz central microprocessor, the project has shunned the American industrial establishment since it was introduced by Nicholas Negroponte at the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 28, 2005.

Annoying Microsoft isn't the actual point, of course. The point is raising a generation of literate kids with technological tools and expanded horizons.

There's a view of the prototype here.

There seem to be lots of practical features built in, like a low-power black and white mode, and a hand crank for temporarily recharging it. But I wonder...

Are parents going to really let their kids use these? I mean, it looks like something for kids, but you'd think it would be such a precious possession. And these will get broken. I can imagine hundreds and hundreds of ways for kids to break these things. Their parents will be so furious... If your computer were irreplacable, would you trust your kid with it?

Then again, will the parents be able to use them at all? Or does it take a kid to figure it out? Technology, like language, seems to be a skill learned best when learned young. That seems to be the idea behind the project. Maybe parents will let their kids play with them, because the parents won't actually understand their value.

Blue Man Group

2006-07-30T22:19:00.000-05:00

A cheerful post to push the last one down the page a bit. Yesterday as an anniversary present, Ken took me to see the Blue Man Group.

I don't want to describe it in too much detail. Part of the fun was realizing how closely "confusion" and "delight" are related. Part of the fun is being constantly surprised.

But before I went I was really curious to know what I was going to see. They were expensive tickets. How could I be sure this was really up my alley?

So the whole time I was there I was trying to think of how to describe it, what I would tell people so that they would know what alley it was up.

When you first enter the lobby (of the Briar St. Theater in Chicago which has hosted the Blue Men every night of the week since 1997) the network of pipes and tubes above your head -- like the intestines of some plastic-and-metal animal -- and the weird lighting, and the wire sculptures, and the surrealist paintings made even more surreal by the insertion of blue men into them, give you the sense of being in line for a theme park ride. It reminded me a bit of the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam, not that I expect that will help anyone else. That was billed as "multimedia experience," which I suppose is what the Blue Man lobby also is. Look out for tubes that seem to be breathing. Or those labelled "chat tubes." Use the bathroom before taking your seat and enjoy the "Blue Man Lobby Bathroom" song. Damn catchy.

When the show started, it was hard to be sure whether it had started at all. I felt like a subject in a psychology experiment. Something about group dynamics and susceptibility to suggestion. The whole crowd was reacting... Started to feel like the call and response parts of church, or when the whole congregation welcomes new parishoners. And yet we were all still waiting for the lights to go down and the curtains to open, at that point.

But when it did really begin, it was with a bang. Literally. The Blue Men are all drummers. That is probably the simplest true description you could give. They don't talk except through the drums (although that doesn't mean there are no words in the show. Just that they don't say them) so they might be called the loudest mimes you've ever seen. But the percussion is not the only thing going on, although it is amazing, and they do have an album. The drumming parts of the performance are also a light show of sorts. The parts in between the drum performances are not without music -- there is another live, three piece band above the stage. They play while the Blue Men do prop comedy or magic or puppet theater or concept art or hilariously surreal improv with victims from the audience. The prop comedy is also surreal. You keep thinking, "where did that come from?" Like Wyle E. Coyote pulling signs from behind his back. Where did he get them?

They keep straight faces, always. Can't crack that blue paint. It makes them seem even more otherworldly. It's like being entertained by aliens -- aliens from the future.

When we first arrived, what I was expecting was something maybe a little like the luau show we went to in Hawaii, which did have lots of drums and dancing and light... And it was like that. If the luau were hosted by aliens. Ken said it reminded him a little of the people who filled the time at his high school variety show between acts, interacting with the audience. If those people were aliens.

When we were actually seated and confused about whether the show had begun or not and I asked him for the last time what to expect, he told me to expect "a party." And that was maybe the best description. Except it was a party without anyone standing apart and feeling awkward. At no time was the audience not involved. Everybody there was having a good time. This is an experience that I wouldn't hestitate to recommend to anyone, of any age, no matter what your tastes -- unless you're an alien from the future, this isn't like anything you've ever seen anyway.

So just to recap, here are the things the Blue Man Group is "just like":

A theme park ride
The Heineken Experience
Church
A rock concert
A mime show
A magic show
A light show
A puppet show
Stand up comedy
Concept art
Wyle E. Coyote cartoons
Aliens from the future
A luau
A variety show continuity act
A party

If any of that sounds like something you would like, you should go see them.

Career Paths

2006-07-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

I don't want to say anything here that I will regret. I don't want to stand up and declare "I am done with academia! No more!" and then be embarrassed by that someday, when I'm feeling less disillusioned and less scared, and am after all applying for professorial jobs. And, of course, I don't want any potential employer to find out I've written anything like that.

But I don't think professorial jobs are the ones I will be applying for when I finish grad school. I'll try to summarize the reasons why not. What's a blog for if not working through your angst? And maybe there are some insights to be had from my experience, who knows?

I didn't start my college career dreaming of being a professor. That was an ambition I picked up as an undergraduate, which is probably when most people who become professors decide that's what they want to be... As an undergrad, you're being exposed to all of these new ideas. It's a thrill. If you're lucky enough to go to a small teaching institution like I did (The University of Puget Sound), you're talking about all of these ideas with your professors. You want to keep talking about exciting, important ideas, to keep making discoveries, to contribute something to humanity. And the way to do that seems to be, become a professor. Because they're right there with you, having these conversations, only getting paid for it. Only it's even better for them, because they're experts, with the respect and attention of everyone else in the conversation...

And then, if you're lucky enough to go to a small teaching school, you sometimes get invited over to their houses (beautiful! Hardwood floors, views of the Sound and the mountains, basement workshops, cute families) and even out on their boat (thanks, Professor Thorndike!). And they travel. Take sabbaticals! Who wouldn't want that? It looks like a dream job. And to get it, you think, all you have to do is stay in school. Undergraduate you doesn't mind that idea at all. You're good at school. And it's a lot less scary than the idea of getting a "real job". You wouldn't even know where to begin to find one of those. And besides, you now realize college hasn't really trained you for a real job (unless you majored in business). Maybe you thought vaguely that you would be a "scholar" or a "philosopher" or a "scientist," but now it starts to sink in that all of those words are just synonyms for "professor." The idea of wasting all that education on an office job, coming home every night to your own empty apartment (assuming you're not married or engaged by the end of college) and no guarentee that there will ever be more... Well, it's depressing. And besides all of that, if you're a scientist, they offer to pay you to go to school! Not a lot by your parents' standards, but more money than you've ever made, more than you've had to live on for the last four years. So you start applying for grad school, and on all your grad school application essays, you say that you want to be a professor, and have a view of the mountains, and make important, meaningful discoveries and contribute to humanity. And you do want that.

So what could possibly have changed in three years that this no longer sounds like a dream come true?

Well, I guess it does still sound like a dream come true, in the same way that winning the lottery does. But I have come to realize that saying "I want to be a professor like the ones I had at Puget Sound" is only a little more realistic than saying "I want to win the lottery when I grow up." As an undergraduate at a place like that, you have a skewed sample set. Every person you meet who went to grad school, also has a faculty position. But as a graduate student, you meet all of the people who didn't get that golden ticket. You meet some people pushing forty who are still grad students (and some who have dropped out after spending ten years of their life in grad school, with nothing to show for it.) You meet post docs, who have earned their PhDs and make a little more money than you do, but who are basically still doing what grad students do: low status lab work, taking orders and sometimes abuse from their faculty advisors, often living in dorms. They are on temporary five or three or one year contracts. After that they are on their own again. You eventually find that you know some unemployed post docs. You meet "adjunct professors," "visiting professors," and "research faculty." These people are older than the post docs, in their forties and fifties and even sixties, but they too are on temporary contracts, which you think must make it hard to have kids or buy a house or even a car. How can they know what they'll be able to afford in five years, after their current employment has ended? You realize that many of them don't have those things, houses or cars or families. You meet tenure track professors who are then denied tenure, which is to say, fired, and the houses and cars and families in which they recklessly invested are now in jeopardy. You come to realize that even the professors who get tenure still have little real job security. Part of their salary comes from research grants which they are expected to get (mostly from the government.) These grants are highly competitive, and are awarded for one or three or five years...

You realize that in all this cut-throat competition for jobs and grants, the ones who succeed aren't necessarily the ones who deserve to succeed. The people who make the hiring decisions and give the grants aren't usually experts in the fields the research is in. So they have two things to rely on, when making these decisions: the applicants' own claims about themselves and their research, and the applicants' record of publications in various journals. So the people who are the most arrogant, the most self-promoting, the most prone to exaggeration and incomprehensible jargon... They win. Assuming they have also published a lot of papers, at least. Hence the phrase "publish or perish". So it's the stressed out, frantic, intensely career oriented, arrogant self-promoters who actually win. Do you really want to be like them?

Worse, you see the incentives to exaggerate the importance of one's research, to make bigger claims for its potential applications than it really warrents. To make it sound more impressive and more successful than it is. And you begin working on research of your own, which you realize cannot possibly live up to the claims made for it in the funding applications. If you are a scientist, you learn that science is hard. That most ambitious projects aren't going to succeed, at least in the short term, because that's what "hard" means. The better you understand your field, and other people's research in it, the more skeptical you get. You don't feel like you are contributing anything signficant to humanity after all. You feel like a fraud. And you suspect that some of the other people in your field, making even bigger claims, are frauds too.

The transition from coddled undergraduate at a teaching institution (a paying customer) to cheap labor at a research institution is a rude awakening generally, for ambitious and academically talented students. Your education is no longer about taking classes, certainly not after the first year. It is more like an apprenticeship. But there are few protections in place for you. If your advisor wants you to work nights and weekends, and you really think they might punish you for refusal in any of the hundreds of ways available to them -- assigning you to meaningless and tedious tasks, grading you harshly in their classes, declining to put your name on papers summarizing your groups' research, even failing you on your qualifying exams or thesis proposal (or simply failing to schedule them), or refusing to graduate you, or refusing to give references and recommendations if you do graduate -- then you'd better work nights and weekends. No overtime pay. (Not that my advisor has punished anyone in any of these ways. But the fact that the potential exists is oppressive enough to make it hard to object to anything he asks us to do.) In grad school, you are not made to feel special. You are not made to feel like a smart person with a lot of potential. You are now (especially when you first start your research) the stupidest person in the room, the lowest person on the totem poll. The things you are asked to do seem impossible. You get used to failure. The ambitions that motivated you as an undergraduate now seem unachievable.

Finally, if you have met someone, if you are no longer facing the prospect of a lonely studio apartment after graduation, you start to wonder how you're going to make it work. You are twenty-five or twenty-eight or thirty years old. Your parents had a kid or three by this age. If your significant other is also in academia (and if you met them in grad school, the odds are good that they are) then you faced the two body problem. Getting any kind of permanent position seems impossible, but getting two in the same state, much less the same city? If you take temporary positions, what are you going to do when one of them ends and the other does not? It seems you will have prioritize. How important is this academic career to you after all, after everything you've seen? Now that you've lost your illusions?

Paints a pretty depressing picture, doesn't it?

Well, that picture is an illusion too, to some extent. Things have been getting better, this past year or so. I am not so new, anymore, and I no longer feel like stupidest person in the room, for starters. I feel more confident about the work that I'm doing, confident of my own abilities. I have gotten over some of my disappointment with the gap between the claims people make and what research can actually achieve. Anyway, not everything fails. some useful stuff does come out of this kind of research. A lot of people do find ways to make families work. The job market is tough, but not necessarily any tougher than the one my mom faced with her law degree, for instance. Making two careers and a family work is difficult for anyone, in any job, and you do have to make sacrifices, but you don't have to sacrifice either one completely.

Finally, and this is an important one for me to remember, because I often lose sight of it in my worry about the future... My life right now does not suck. I have a great apartment near the lake in one of the best cities in the world. My job, while stressful and hard on the ego and low paying and distressingly temporary, is also mentally challenging, with flexible hours, and not what you would call a dead end. I expect to make quite a bit more, not too far in the future, regardless of whether I stay in academia or not. Even post docs make twice what we're paid now, and more than the national average wage. And, of course, I'm married to an amazing guy. I already have a family. Just because we'd like to make it bigger some day doesn't mean it's not happy now. And furthermore, I have wonderful parents and siblings. And great in-laws. And I've been to Hawaii and Europe in the past two years. So really, I need to quit whining and start enjoying it, right?

But taking all of that into account, trying to keep everything in perspective... I think I'd rather go into industry than academia after this. The prospects for job security are better. There is (I hope!) less direct competition with your colleagues, less "publish or perish" pressure, less risk of perishing, in general. And I have been humbled by this experience so that I no longer look at abstract "contributions to mankind" as the only worthwhile thing to do with one's life. I think I would now like to do something a little less grandiose and a little more useful. Like designing products that people actually want. If the justification for doing science is that its discoveries allows us to develop new technologies which then make people's lives better... Well, I wouldn't mind being involved in the developing new technologies part, instead of the discoveries part. There just aren't enough significant "discoveries" out there to really support all of the people who want to make them, anyway.

Of course, that's only part of the justification for doing science. The other part has to do with the value of understanding for its own sake. But I feel like, in a weird way, I now know enough about the universe. I know calculus and quantum mechanics and a bit of particle physics (quantum field theory) and once I've learned a bit more relativity (this winter, hopefully) I will have satisfied the curiosity that led me to major in physics in the first place. As much as I'm likely to really satisfy it, anyway. Unless significant new insights, on par with relativity or quantum mechanics, are found in my lifetime. Odds are they won't be. They're pretty rare, in human history. Odds are I wouldn't be the one of the find them, if they were found. And even if I were likely to find such insights, other people would be equally capable. Things like this are usually discovered independently a couple of times. I'll let them have the fun... Generous, of me, right? If such a revolution happens, there will be nothing to stop me from reading a few papers on it even if I'm not in academia at the time. And nothing to guarentee I'd understand them, even if I were.

And who knows, maybe one day when I'm sitting at the computer designing lenses or lasers or whatever, inspiration will strike. Einstein was a patent clerk, wasn't he?

Chicago: City of the Future

2006-07-18T18:04:00.000-05:00

In "I, Robot" they had a great computer generated future skyline for Chicago, but this guy has them beat: his computer models show buildings which are actually under construction, or whose construction has been approved. Particularly stunning:

The skyline at sunset, from the lake

That central peak is the still hypothetical Fordham Spire, which appears in close up here.

Here's a daytime view of the skyline.

And another, with stronger shadows.

The view from an expensive condo building.

The view of an expensive condo building, specifically, Trump Tower, which is about eight floors high right now.

There's a lot of new construction going on in Chicago right now, much of it shown in those skylines, which I haven't identified. The city is in a sort of renassaince. Cranes everywhere. The Fordham Spire is certainly the most inspired, though. Check out these artists' impressions from the Sun Times. Breathtaking.

Close runner up is the much smaller Aqua. That's a brochure to day dream over...

Some of the new construction is sponsored by the city itself. For instance, the peerless Millennium Park. And Daley famously bulldozed an airport in the middle of the night to put another park in its place. He's been planting gardens on public land and encouraging green roofs.

And by the way, he wants to bring the Olympics to Chicago, building a temporary stadium and revitalizing the south lakefront in the process.

I believe Daley is the definition of "benevolent dictator." What can you do?

Chicago is my favorite big city, and I've been to quite a few. It's so much fun to see it grow, right before my eyes... And still retain its unique character, become even more itself. Daley is like a symbol of that. Chicagoans love him, because they love Chicago.

July Poem

2006-07-10T09:21:00.000-05:00

Nationality

I have grown past hate and bitterness,
I see the world as one;
But though I can no longer hate,
My son is still my son.

All men at God's round table sit,
and all men must be fed;
But this loaf in my hand,
This loaf is my son's bread.

Dame Mary Gilmore

Because I'm not quite done thinking about patriotism, even though the holiday is over.

She's Australian. I thought I ought to find some poets who weren't American or British. She was a socialist who tried to help found an ideal communist community in Paraguay. Now she appears on the Australian $10 bill. That would not happen here.

Here's a little bio.

I also wanted to link to a post of Jaquandor's that I thought made some very good points, about how being disappointed in a person, or a nation, doesn't mean you don't love them; you can only be truly disappointed in those you do love.

Americana

2006-07-05T09:46:00.003-05:00

So much celebrating!

We had a four day weekend -- now I'm looking forward to the coming weekend to recover from it.

Sunday, we gave Simon a tour of Chicago. You know Simon; he comments here sometimes. He'd been for a river tour that morning, and then came up on the El to meet us for Giordano's. You could see from his expression that he'd never had a Chicago style pizza before.

We showed him around the lab, and hiked over to the Metra for a super-swift (compared to the El) ride downtown. Then we all walked down Madison St. to Millenium Park. He seemed as fascinated by the bean and the band shell as everyone else, and we didn't warn him about the faces on the Crown fountain's impolite habit of spitting at people, so the spray took him by surprise. Then we wandered into Taste of Chicago, stayed just long enough to buy drinks and pick our way through the crowd for some country-music star, with a peak at Buckingham fountain and the lake, and made our way back up Michigan Ave. along the Magnificent Mile to the Hancock building, which is much better for going up than the Sears Tower.

Sunday was July 3rd, the day of our local community festival and fireworks. We saw jugglers, stilt walkers, magicians, and tumblers (the Jesse White Tumblers, to be precise, named after their sponsor, the Illinois secretary of state. Their tricks and flips and trampoline launches took them so high into the air that just watching gave us vertigo.) Ken got dogs from a hot dog stand, and I bought a toy that lights up and spins -- which I'm still playing with three days later, and everyone at the lab loved it too. Then the fireworks. What can you say about fireworks, besides "Ooh... Ahh!" They had some kinds we'd never seen before.

July 4th, we went to our neighboring community's parade. Everybody marched in this parade. Here's a sample from the program. (Yes, this parade had a program.)

58 North Suburban Peace Initiative (they were probably one of the chanting groups with "Down with Bush" signs.)

58a Warriors Drum and Bugle Corps

59 FAAM Youth Basketball Program

60 Amnesty International

61 St. Mark's Episcopal Church

62 Illinois Council Against Handguns and Brady Campaign / Million Mom March

63 Circ Estem and the Chicago Youth Circus (they rolled in on giant hamster wheel things, one person on the top, one person in the bottom)

64 Maxwell St. Klezmer band (tied for best music with the Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps, number 119.)

65 Women's Club of Evanston

66 Copia Records, Inc (apparently a hip hop label, featuring live rap and some awesome dancers.)

All in all, there were a hundred and twenty-something groups, including late entries like Senator Dick Durbin. Local business, political candidates and parties -- yes, both parties, but the Democrats got a lot more cheers. Also some military groups (U.S. Army recruiter, American Legion, and Bernard H. Baum, Brigadier Gen. (Ret.) marching all by himself), football teams, a drag racing club, a penny-farthing bicycle club, the Windy City Miata club, antique fire engines, a clown, a calliope, two bagpipe bands, Indonesian Performing Arts of Chicago (they were good!), and the Lawndale Lawnmowers Precision Drill and Marching Brigade. Yes, with lawnmowers. And a lot more that I can't really describe, but they were fantastic.

What flag waving Republicans need to realize is that the flag stands for all of that. The hip hop label, the peace protestors, the drag racers, and the gay and lesbian group that was sitting in front of us, with both American flags and rainbow flags on their lawnchairs. And this is the way to respect and celebrate it -- with a gigantic party!

They can't claim the flag for themselves. They can't tame the flag. They shouldn't try.

After the parade all that remained was more fireworks. We got the best spot in the house, closer than I've ever been before. Had to look straight up to see them, filling the whole sky. And while they didn't have as many crazy varieties as the ones the night before, they did have quantity!

What else can you say about fireworks? Here's the best description I can give you:

Happy 4th of July!

Don't forget to watch Master of Champions tonight!

Why God Made Television

2006-06-26T21:12:00.000-05:00

If you were from the past, and I told you that I had invented a technology which would allow you to watch people do things long after the event, and far away from it, what would you want to watch?

Surely the same things people have always loved to watch: Acrobats! Jugglers! Dancers and daredevils! Spectacle!

For some reason, American television hasn't really gone this route. Circuses remain popular in this country as they have been throughout history... (Ken and I saw the Greatest Show on Earth last year, featuring the amazing Sylvia Zerbini and Crazy Wilson. I've had those pages bookmarked for a long time now, waiting for a blog post I could work them into.) Do television producers here think this stuff won't sell on TV? But it does in other countries! For that matter, it does fine in this country on the Spanish language channels. And what do you think professional wrestling is, really, besides wildly successful? And then there are stunt-based reality shows like Fear Factor. And, prosaic by comparison, all of the different talent shows, from Star Search to whatever this new Simon Cowell thing is to "Ice Skating with Celebrities" or whatever it's called.

But the country best known for pushing the limits of the ridiculous is Japan, and it is from Japan that the concept for the purest spectacle on American television comes:

Master of Champions. You've got to love it for the name alone.

The format is, weirdly enough, almost exactly like "Iron Chef." Three judges (including Oksana Baiul!) and inappropriate sports-caster commentary from confused hosts (one of whom is apparently married to the White Sox's Scott Podsednik.) Only there are more competitors, and the judges don't really get to choose the winners. They -- look, don't try to understand it. How the winner is chosen really doesn't matter. They're all champions.

The series premiere started with people doing donuts in their cars around a block of cheese. There was a cheese grater attached by a long arm to the top of their cars. They had to grate as much cheese as possible by driving around it.

Pure, delicious absurdity? You may think so, but to the drift car driving community it made perfect sense.

The next act pitted a contortionist who shoots arrows with her feet (and was blindfolded for this trial) against a group of acrobat/dancers with spring loaded stilts and fireworks. In that kind of competition, the it's the audience that wins.

The final segment was a competition between two unicyclists. These guys are apparently well known in the unicycling community. (People who think skateboarding or stunt biking is too easy, I guess.)

There's a photo gallery on the official site, if you want the flavor.

The winner was the contortionist, Princess Elayne. This was as it should be.

Okay, I understand that this kind of thing isn't exactly intellectually demanding. But there's no reason why it should be. Are parades intellectually demanding? Are fireworks? Does anyone dislike fireworks? (Other than America-hating communist terrorists, of course?) No!

This is what you call "innocent fun." And we need it. Watching this stuff makes us all kids again. Complete with sense of wonder and childlike glee. Helps us resist the temptation to take ourselves too seriously. Helps us relax and enjoy. What I'm saying is, the world is a better, happier place, and we are better, happier people because of this kind of show.

So all of you, if you can't run off and join the circus, at least do your part to keep this show on the air. You know you want to. It's your civic duty.

Thursday, June 29 at 8/7c on ABC. This week features a low-rider car jumping rope.

Candidate Ken

2006-06-21T20:55:00.000-05:00

No, he's not running for anything. Ken gave his thesis proposal today, and it was accepted by his commitee, which raises him to the status of "PhD Candidate" (at least, as soon as the paperwork is done.)

And I've got to say -- as a colleague -- he kicked butt. Hardly any "ums" and "uhs" even when unexpected questions forced him to try to explain complicated concepts not covered in his prepared talk. Didn't have to rush, never got boring or bogged down, covered all the material, transitioned smoothly, kept the audience engaged, and clearly knew more than anybody in the room about the project, and knew he knew it. Made a couple of jokes, and got into a couple of interesting side discussions. In short: professional.

But what does this "candidacy" mean? Well, Wikipedia says that at some universities it's an actual degree:

All But Dissertation or All But Degree, abbreviated ABD, or Candidatus Philosophiae or Candidate in Philosophy, abbreviated C.Phil. is a formal academic degree awarded to a student, or an informal status that says a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) student has completed all graduate study leading up to the final dissertation. This typically includes graduate coursework, preliminary/cumulative/qualifying examinations, and defense of the dissertation prospectus, advanced to candidacy.

Sometimes "C.Phil." or "Ph.D. (ABD)" is used as a title. In the U.S., ABD is an unofficial status, and C.Phil. is an official degree at very few universities.

In some schools a student can write an additional thesis at this point and receive a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree; in others, the MA, MS or MPhil (sometimes Candidate in Philosophy, CPhil) is conferred on an ABD student who has been advanced to candidacy for the Ph.D. Additionally, some American universities award the Master of Philosophy to students who have completed the coursework necessary for a Ph.D. but who have not completed the dissertation.

What it means at our university is 1: He can't take classes anymore for credit. He's done being a student, officially. His job now is research. And 2: his tuition (which is paid for mostly out of our advisor's grant money) is now therefor much cheaper. This makes our advisor happy. And of course 3: the last formal requirement left for him for graduation is actually defending his thesis.

My turn will come after I've completed all my required classes, which I'm not planning to do until next winter (which is when the classes I want to take are next offered.) I hope I do as well.

Linkiness

2006-06-19T21:14:00.000-05:00

Marginally science related fun:

How to levitate a frog. Via Ken. Make sure to click the "direct link to video" under the picture.

How did "Duck Hunt" know where you were shooting?. Search inspired by a conversation with my brother, who couldn't believe Ken and I fell for the Back to the Future hoverboard scam, but had to admit there were technological wonders of the '80s he couldn't explain either.

Speaking of which, I also seem to remember a TV segment from the '80s about flying cars that we could expect on the market any day. Turns out, this company has been making them (prototypes of them at least) since the sixties. Link via UserFriendly's Link of the Day

Beautiful High Res Hubble Images via Jaquandor. One of these is now our desktop wallpaper.

Optical Properties and Optical Phenomena in Gemstones Strange to see dispersion and diffraction and total internal reflection and atomic crystal lattices mentioned in the context of jewels. As far as I can tell the physics here is all correct, but approached very differently than what I'm used to. Birefringence is described without ever mentioning polarization, for instance... Via Making Light. (I take it back, they do mention polarization further down, with a lot of neat pictures of gems taken through crossed polarizers.)

That's all I've got for now.

If I Were a Republican

2006-06-11T09:08:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that when I mention politics on this blog, it's usually to explain the thinking of conservatives to my liberal friends. But I think I make myself sound more conservative than I really am. For the record: I'm anti-war and pro-environment. I don't believe the free market can solve every problem. I believe public education and a welfare safety net benefit everyone, and I'm willing to pay higher taxes to fund them. I think corporations have too much power today. I support unions as the most direct counter-balance for that power. And I don't feel my marriage is threatened by gay marriage, even though I understand why some people do.

I'm a Democrat. And I'm really glad I am. Because if I were a Republican, I'd be feeling pretty betrayed, right now. Especially if I were a fiscal responsibility *, personal * liberty * kind of Republican.

Those links go to the federal debt, Patriot Act, and wiretap stories everyone already knows about. Everyone also knows about Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. But I've realized that if I were a Republican, there'd be a lot of stories I wouldn't really know about. Because these stories haven't made it into the national media much at all, much less to Fox News. So for the benefit of my Republican readers (I hope I haven't alienated them), here's a couple of stories that are old news on the blogosphere:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose death was recently announced as a victory by American forces, could have been killed or captured a long time ago. He was deliberately allowed to operate in the American patrolled no-fly zone. There is speculation that he was not interfered with because his base provided justification for connecting the invasion of Iraq to the "War on Terror."

The Pentagon is trying to remove Geneva Convention policies from the Army Field manual.

Bush has excused publicly traded defense contractors from normal accounting and securities-disclosure obligations.

President "Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution." That's a quote from the lead paragraph of the Boston Globe article.

And then there's the human trafficking stories. Some measures have been taken to put a stop to this, but they were delayed, and appear to have been driven by a general using his own authority to give orders, not as a matter of policy change by the administration or pentagon.

I understand why people voted for Bush, understand that most of the people who did so are intelligent and sincere and decent. But Bush and co. aren't what they pretended to be. I'm glad I'm not a Republican right now, because I would be pissed off at being so deceived.

As a Republican, I wouldn't like finding myself identified with the-- they're the villains of these stories.

Actually, as an American, I don't like it. These are the bad guys. But they say they're on my side. That makes me a bad guy too, at least in the eyes of the rest of the world. I don't like finding myself in that position.

So, I can sympathize with the Republicans...

May and June Poems

2006-06-04T09:23:00.000-05:00

For May -- this one I really couldn't resist:

The Bathtub
by: Ezra Pound

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

.
.
.

For June -- this one relates to the post below:

The Logical Conclusion
by: Ezra Pound

When earth's last thesis is copied
From the theses that went before,
When idea from fact has departed
And bare-boned factlets shall bore,
When all joy shall have fled from study
And scholarship reign supreme;
When truth shall "baaa" on the hill crests
And no one shall dare to dream;

When all the good poems have been buried
With comment annoted in full
And art shall bow down in homage
To scholarship's zinc-plated bull,
When there shall be nothing to research
But the notes of annoted notes,
And Baalam's ass shall inquire
The price of imported oats;

Then no one shall tell him the answer
For each shall know the one fact
That lies in the special ass-ignment
From which he is making his tract.
So the ass shall sigh uninstructed
While each in his separate book
Shall grind for the love of grinding
And only the devil shall look.

Against the "germanic" system of graduate study and insane specialization in the Inanities.

"Optics man is busy preparing to wrap the coils."

2006-06-04T08:48:00.000-05:00

Searching the internet to see if I could find out what the boiling point of Rubidium at pressures of ~10^(-6) Torr is (anyone know? Or know where to look it up?), I came across a site made by some students who seem to be trying to build a rubidium atom trap, but on a much smaller scale than our setup -- I guess they don't have to fit a cavity in their trap. Compare their pictures with ours -- there's no way we're building an oven around our system. We just wrap the heater coils around it and cover the whole thing with tinfoil, when we need to bake.

I am of course fascinated by this. It's weird to see someone else suffer through the same things, and weird to see their different approach to some of the problems.

They don't say whether they ever succeeded or not. The story ends with the coils still nonexistant. But I love "optics man." I'm totally going to build his brother, for our lab.

Also on the topic of seeing other people suffer in familiar ways: "Colst" explains the ways in which graduate student life is completely and utterly different than undergraduate life, which most people, including undergraduates who are considering grad school, completely fail to grasp.

Trap Day!

2006-05-25T23:24:00.000-05:00

Wait, didn't I already have a post called "Trap Day"?

Well, yes, and we saw the trap pretty much every day after that for a while, but this is an even better trap day than that.

That trap used a set of magnetic coils which had been handed down to us from grad student generation to grad student generation. Unfortunately, those coils were too large for our purposes. To make any progress, we were going to have to replace them. Last September, we did that... And the trap stopped working, for reasons we never exactly figured out. I thought it was never going to work again, until that day in January, when it finally did... With the old, too large coils.

Last week, right before we left for Hawaii, we opened the vacuum system and put in a different set of smaller coils. (Then we sealed it up and gave it the week it needs to bake out and pump down.) I was morally sure they would never work, and ready to quit if they didn't. It would have meant eight months worth of work down the drain, and no way forward.

But we got a trap! We got a trap! We got a trap! And on the first try. That never happens. Ken, at least, has been through this process many times, with a couple of different post-docs, and it just isn't supposed to work that fast. And this despite the fact that the chirp laser was seriously messed up this morning (Ken is now killer at fixing diode lasers) and the argon laser is dying (Pati made it work, eventually) and the Ti:Sapph laser control box kept messing with the lock (Ken and Pati together) and we ran out of liquid nitrogen (it takes an hour to fill) and the vacuum is still fluctuating and the trap cameras all got moved, and the new coils blocked their angles of view... In spite of almost everything going wrong that could go wrong, we got got a trap on our first try.

And now we have coils that will work, in there, and a mock-up of our cavity, and our impossible project is still on, and Ken can say in his thesis proposal (coming soon) that a major hurdle has already been overcome.

But I don't want to press our luck. Maybe we should quit while we're ahead, take a break to savor the success... Maybe we need to go back to Hawaii, now.

Hawaii: A Pretty Nice Place

2006-05-24T09:47:00.000-05:00

So, my dad has been saving up frequent flier miles for years to take my mom to Hawaii. But my mom wanted to take the whole family. (Thank you, Mom!) The complicated nature of a project like that, and the sheer number of frequent flier miles required, and the way that busy people have of putting off vacations, meant it felt like it was never going to happen.

Until some friends -- they were our next door neighbors twenty years ago in San Antonio, and moved to Colorado shortly after we did, for the first time -- invited us along on their Hawaii trip, to see their daughter's graduation. (These same friends had come along on my parents' trip to see my graduation, in the Seattle area. So there was a kind of symmetry.)

What this meant for Ken and me was that we got a call out of the blue one day: "If we went to Hawaii in May, would you be interested in coming?"

There is only one possible answer to that question. (Well, there are two, but "Duh!" isn't very polite...) That's the kind of prize you usually only win on a game show. On Fear Factor, you'd have to eat a couple of pounds of live insects just for a chance at a prize like that.

Since we had nothing to do in regards to planning this trip, it sort of got pushed out of our minds, as work got more and more stressful and Ken's candidacy came over the horizon. But all of the sudden it was time to go. Frequent flier miles had been spent on tickets in our name. A beach house was reserved with room for six (if two slept on a futon in the living room.) All we had to do was pack our bags the night before, and catch a cab to the aiport. (We caught the cab at 3:00AM, from the lab, where we had stopped to check on the baking vacuum system).

It was a surreal experience (especially with the ten hour flight and the five hour time zone change.) But when we got to the beach house, it was literally on the beach. You could watch surfers from the deck.

And we did. For a week, we watched surfers (including my brother and sister, and also the friends who invited us) and grilled out, and played in the waves. Gorgeous white sand.

And then we did all the activities the guide book told us too, too many to describe. But the highlights were a swim with dolphins who really did seem uncannily human, and, the final night, a luau and show at the Polynesian Cultural Center, complete with Fire Knife Dancers.

I filled up my camera's flash card for the first time ever. And half a dozen rolls of film. So even though it went fast, I'm definitely going to remember it.

Serendipity

2006-05-06T09:26:00.000-05:00

So, two Fridays ago, we were in the lab doing the kind of horrible stuff I described in the "Happy Monday" post. I was trying to shine light onto one end of an especially skinny fiber optic fiber and get it to come out the other end, and not having much success, when I noticed a funny smell. Usually in our lab, when you smell something funny, it means something is burning, probably the insulation on some high current wires... I asked Ken and our post doc if they smelled it. Our post-doc said "that's gas." And we were all confused, because what in our lab uses gas?

Still, we assumed the problem was coming from our lab, and went to tell our advisor. He could smell it in his office, too. And the hallway. Could it be coming from our other lab? Should we see if it smelled so strong in other hallways? He called facilities management to report it. They had no advice for us. As we stood around trying to decide what to investigate, we all began to feel a bit woozy, and went outside.

Other people were pouring out. From all of the hallways. We decided it probably wasn't us. There was some construction on the north side of the building, maybe they hit a pipe. Beautiful, sunny day. We stood around talking with a friend for a while, and then decided to go for lunch. The Fire Department had been called. We could see emergency lighting. We figured the building would be closed for a while.

But when we got to the student union building, on the other side of campus, the power was out. So then we started worrying -- if there's a power outage and our pumps go off, and then later the power goes on but the pressure is high, that can kill the pumps. About $10,000, right there. And if the power wasn't out... Should we tell people the lasers were on? We hadn't wanted to turn them off in case that caused sparks..

So, anyway, we went to our post-doc's place, spent some time on the phone with some very confused people who contradicted each other but finally said the power was on in our building (which seemed very strange, as that's where the gas leak was) and that our equipment was fine, decided we'd done all we could. We enjoyed a delicious lunch, and then a walk by the lake. We eventually went back to check on everything, after the all-clear, but it was basically a really nice day off, outside, out of our darkened lab with its tedious little knobs... We decided there should be a gas leak every Friday.

But what we didn't know, was that the fates were conspiring to give us our nice day off...

From: Eugene S. Sunshine, Vice President for Business and Finance, and C. Bradley Moore, Vice President for Research

On Friday April 21, 2006 at approximately 11:02 AM University Police (UP) began to receive numerous phone calls of a strong odor of natural gas in campus buildings. The Fire Department was immediately notified and responded along with UP officers and Facilities Management personnel.

As building evacuations were proceeding, a member of the Office for Research Safety responded to the incident command post and reported a small spill of the reagent Thiol in the Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly. This chemical is not harmful but emits a strong odor similar to the smell of natural gas. This chemical spill was later identified as the cause of the natural gas smell in multiple buildings.

At approximately 11:30 AM a power outage occurred affecting a portion of the campus. The outage was caused by tree removal work that damaged a power transformer. The outage affected approximately 16 campus buildings including some of those reporting the smell of natural gas.

At 12:34 PM, after the affected buildings were reopened, a fire was reported in a laboratory hood in the Center for Catalysis and Surface Science. The Fire Department responded and learned that a subject in the lab had utilized a fire extinguisher to extinguish the fire. The subject then left the room and activated the fire alarm system in the building. The Fire Department inspected the affected hood and determined that damage was confined to the inside of the hood. The fire alarm was reset and the building was declared safe.

No injuries were reported in these incidents. No significant damage to facilities occurred. A post-event action report to analyze the response of participating agencies and departments is being developed to identify strengths and areas for improvement.

I have only two further comments to make on these amazing revelations: First, Eugene S. Sunshine? And second, a "subject" in the lab? Because grad students are subjects of his royal highness, their advisor, I guess...

But for a single day, all us subjects threw off the chains of our oppressors, and enjoyed the sunshine.

Happy Monday

2006-05-01T22:24:00.000-05:00

Today, I spent trying to turn eight teeny tiny screws by hundredths of a degree at a time (without going too far) in order to line up teeny-tiny reflections, which disappear when you try to see where they are. Oh, and they can only be seen at all through a special viewer. In the dark. And that's not counting a couple of dozen other screws that had to be adjusted before I could even start... And this is also what I did Friday. And Thursday. Except those days, I didn't give myself a 400V shock on the piezo. (I'm fine.) I don't know why this is so hard for me. It shouldn't be. It wasn't, before. Somebody shoot me.

Fortunately, the weekend was spent doing other things. Watched the Cubs get embarrassed twice by the Brewers (just after I posted that last thing about them, with the stuff about Derek Lee being everybody's hero, he broke his wrist on an unlikely collision at first base, and was sidelined for the first half of the season. Because he's a Cub.) Listened to sports radio all day as they covered the Bears draft. I don't even like football that much, but I can tell you all about Danieal ("Dan-yell") Manning's career at Division II Abilene Christian. And we went over to a friend's place (actually, our post-doc's) to watch the Bulls win a playoff game.

Yes, I have watched a lot more sports since I got married, but just in case you think the influence is all one way -- Ken did go to a local farmer's market with me on Saturday.

So, busy weekend, mind-numbing, spirit-destroying workdays = little blog material.

But here's a link I want to put out there as a follow-up to my last post:

More worker riots in Dubai. Most of the deported rioters were construction workers from India. The blurb is short, and mostly interesting because of its context. The blog luxist mostly covers crazy and crazy-expensive products like "beer spas," pet jewelry, and celebrity real-estate. This story belongs because the building they were working on targets "the sophisticated, young and upwardly mobile professional of the middle to high income class" and "offers a very select number of sought after villas and one extravagant penthouse apartment that takes up the complete top floor of the building and is complemented by a private outdoor swimming pool and rooftop entertainment area." It's just a not-quite-ironic contrast.

A commenter links a Washington Post story about the life of workers in Dubai in general -- about what was described in the Tribune's article, but here the "villains" aren't American corporations but only American-style corporations.

But I'm not up for the full length post this deserves, with asides on immigrant rights rallies, and outsourcing.

Maybe later.

When Journalism Feels like Science Fiction

2006-04-25T00:52:00.000-05:00

The Chicago Tribune ran a series back in October that reminds me of a lot of science fiction I've read. Donald Westlake's Anarchaos, for instance. The plot centers around a man who goes to an anarchist world to find out what happened to his brother, and is himself ambushed by "corporation" thugs and sold into slavery (which is, ironically, inevitable on an anarchist world). Then there's the classic Merchants of Space, which is about an advertising executive who is likewise ambushed, has his identity papers stolen, and finds himself working a brutal agricultural job in order pay off ever increasing "debts" to a corporation he once promoted -- I think it starts with his kidnappers charging him for transportation.

I'm pretty sure I could think of a lot more if I tried hard enough. World building, suspence, and social commentary all in one neat package. And there's one other bonus: you get your readers on your main character's side right away. It's automatic; you can't help but identify with the victim in these stories.

Which is why the Tribune's series is so weird to read. 1) It's not science fiction. This is the world we see on the news. 2) The victims are young men from the incredibly foreign (to Americans) country of Nepal; the bad guys are American military contractors -- and you can't help but identify with the victims. It makes me a little dizzy to switch perspectives like that.

Here's the basic outline:

It had been only seven weeks since she sent her 18-year-old son off to earn a paycheck that would bring their family a better life. But that paycheck was supposed to come from the safety of a five-star hotel in Jordan, not the combat zone of Iraq.

Whether Bishnu Hari and most of the other 11 Nepalis even knew before leaving home that they were headed to Iraq remains a mystery.

At least three did, but they were deceived about key details. Most of the rest, including Bishnu Hari, appear to have been lured with fraudulent paperwork promising jobs at the luxury hotel in Amman.

They learned Iraq was their real destination only after their families went deeply into debt to pay huge sums demanded by the brokers who sent these sons and brothers to the Middle East.

...

For a fee, often 10 times more than Nepal's per capita income of $270 a year, those agencies send men to labor in the Persian Gulf region, Malaysia and beyond. While onerous, the fee is a gamble that any job in the Middle East might yield a salary of $200 a month, an unimaginable sum in Nepal.

...

Just one month's salary would be enough to cover rent for Bishnu Hari's family for more than half the year. Enough for him to send his little brother to college.

...

In late June, Bishnu Hari spoke by phone with his mother. It was time to pay the fee for the job, he told her, so please arrange to get the money.

She borrowed more than $2,100, about $400 of which came from the local development bank, a sort of savings and loan. The rest came from lenders in the village who charged 36 percent interest a month, she said.

(from part one

Unlike the science fiction stories I mentioned above, though, this one doesn't end with any kind of poetic justice. The unprotected convoy which is taking the Nepalese workers from Jordan to Iraq gets stopped by insurgents. The mother gets to see the ending on TV.

The carnage was captured in a grainy video. Judging by the blurred image of a young man in bluejeans and long-sleeved shirt, it appears Bishnu Hari was the fifth man shot.

(from part two)

I'm not quoting the graphic parts, or the the last words of the men, captured on tape. But it was all on shown on TV. Apparently there were some riots in Nepal afterward. I feel guilty about not knowing about this sooner. Maybe you people who read this already did. But in case anybody didn't, I feel like I should maybe try to publicize it. Not that I think I'm really helping any, but it's such a powerful story you know, classic plot, I'm really not going to be able to come up with anything better to write about. So I might as well put a few more links about this on the internet, for whatever it's worth... Maybe try to get the Tribune some more readers, so they can keep paying reporters to do this stuff. Maybe they can put a little more pressure on the military...

Because the whole point, of course, is that the guy in this story wasn't alone.

The top U.S. commander in Iraq has ordered sweeping changes for privatized military support operations after confirming violations of human-trafficking laws and other abuses by contractors involving possibly thousands of foreign workers on American bases, according to records obtained by the Tribune.

...

The Tribune also found evidence that subcontractors and brokers routinely seized workers' passports, deceived them about their safety or contract terms and, in at least one case, allegedly tried to force terrified men into Iraq under the threat of cutting off their food and water.

So basically: it's there may be more Americans holding hostages in Iraq than being held hostage, Nepalese kids, not enemy combatants.

But that might be changing. The last story that I quoted above was from Sunday's paper, and the headline was Iraq war contractors ordered to end abuses. Ordered by the "top U.S. commander in Iraq" -- so the US doesn't come off as a complete villain. (Although the Tribune says officials had been informed before, and that this order might not go far enough. Still, at least the officials admit something is wrong.)

Here is the home page for the whole series:Pipeline to Peril.

Be warned: you will have to register in order to read it. There's ways around that, but I sort of hope people to register this time. As a sort of reward for the paper, for good reporting, so they can keep doing it. Also, if you follow these links, you should know a lot of the descriptions are bloodier than the parts I've quoted. And with the photos, there's a couple that are really sickening. The others are mostly of daily life in the place these guys come from, which I think are really valuable, but this isn't a pretty story. The problem with the pictures, I guess, is that they make it feel so real.

Everybody Loves the Chicago Cubs

2006-04-17T09:34:00.000-05:00

Well, the Cubs are off to a hot 7 and 4 start, but don't worry, according to the Onion, Dusty Baker is sure they can pull out a losing record before the playoffs.

And if you like that, you should take a look at the Cubs very own satirical newspaper, The Heckler. Passed out for free outside Wrigley Field before games, it has stories like Cubs on Prior injury: Bleacher renovation on schedule, and Tribune circulation jumps 100,000 after Lee signs new deal:
Fine print reveals $65 million contract to be paid in Tribune subscriptions.

Speaking of Derek Lee, he is now the most highly paid baseball player in the city of Chicago, having passed the most expensive guy on the World Series Champion White Sox, Paul Konerko. This is fine by Cubs fans. The White Sox are no longer as desperate as we are. And Derek Lee is everybody's hero.

"When Derrek works out, the machine gets stronger."

"Lee doesn't take steroids, he's a donor."

"Derrek Lee is the reason Waldo is hiding!"

"Derrek Lee once shot down a german fighter plane by pointing his finger and yelling bang!"

"Derrek Lee can divide by zero."

And... "Superman carries a DLee lunchbox!"

From the fans at the Cubs message board.

They sound so exited, and hopeful, don't they? They can't help it. They know they're doomed, but they can't help but hope..."Wait 'til next century. No millennium can hold the Cubs." ... "Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue."

The Cubs don't have to win games to win these loyal fans. They play at Wrigley Field, the most beautiful ballpark in baseball. No, seriously. Look at this shot. Makes you want to move to Chicago just to go to a game, doesn't it? And calling their games are the endlessly entertaining team of Pat Hughes and Ron Santo. Listen to some clips. They don't always make sense, but that's part of the charm. Baseball itself is like that -- have you ever tried to explain it to someone who didn't know the rules? Life is like that.

We bought tickets but had to turn around a sell them, because of scheduling conflicts. But we will be buying more. And taking a friend or two from India with us, to see all that is best about America. It's going to be a great season.

Visit Japan Without Leaving your Computer

2006-04-10T08:42:00.000-05:00

So I wanted a haircut, yesterday. Apparently I've only had one since moving to my current location, from a place across the street, and I wasn't totally satisfied. So I did a google maps "salon near" and "hair near" search, and found about a dozen places, and planned my running route to go by them all, so I could see if they were 1) where Google said they were 2) open on a Sunday 3) likely to take walk-ins 4) likely to be cheap and 5) targetted at women, or at least unisex.

Not a single one fulfilling all those criteria. In fact, few that fulfilled more than one. I came back defeated. (I ended up taking a train down to where I used to live, and that was a whole other boring yet frustrating story.)

So anyway, I feel slightly let down by Google maps. But Ken reminded me what it's really for.

We explored the salons of a random city we chose to zoom in on over the Japanese map. Don't know the name. But we can zoom almost as close there as over our own city. See what the streets the salons are on look like. See the golf courses (if that's what they are) outside of town, and the beach. Click on the names of salons, and get taken to their webcams (the only English words on this page are "Japanese Barbershop Drama"). See them styling practice heads. Lots of slightly surreal English, including my favorite, Beauty Salon Mommy. We think we managed to sign up for a Yahoo Japan account, but I can't find my way back there now. Probably we'll get e-mail from them.

So Ken once again provides blogable links, and Google Maps is redeemed. We had a very nice trip.

Poetry Post

2006-04-07T08:55:00.000-05:00

Two for one, March and April. Both by Rudyard Kipling:

IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE

In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt;
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg
Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival, of Solutré, told the tribe my style was ~outré~ --
'Neath a tomahawk of diorite he fell.
And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart
Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,
And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
And I wiped my mouth and said, "It is well that they are dead,
For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong."

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: --
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!"

. . . . .

Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail;
And I stepped beneath Time's finger, once again a tribal singer
[And a minor poet certified by Tr--ll].

Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow,
When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;
When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,
And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,
Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk;
Still we let our business slide -- as we dropped the half-dressed hide --
To show a fellow-savage how to work.

Still the world is wondrous large, -- seven seas from marge to marge, --
And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu,
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

Here's my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night: --
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And -- every -- single -- one -- of -- them -- is -- right!

(Sounds sorta anti-war for a guy who loved glory so much, huh? I wonder what the soldiers who are in Afghanistan right now would make of Ford O' Kabul River...)

THE EXPLANATION

Love and Death once ceased their strife
At the Tavern of Man's Life.
Called for wine, and threw -- alas! --
Each his quiver on the grass.
When the bout was o'er they found
Mingled arrows strewed the ground.
Hastily they gathered then
Each the loves and lives of men.
Ah, the fateful dawn deceived!
Mingled arrows each one sheaved;
Death's dread armoury was stored
With the shafts he most abhorred;
Love's light quiver groaned beneath
Venom-headed darts of Death.

Thus it was they wrought our woe
At the Tavern long ago.
Tell me, do our masters know,
Loosing blindly as they fly,
Old men love while young men die?

Real Post to Follow

2006-04-05T20:30:00.000-05:00

Back Monday from a wedding in Philadelphia. Real blog post as soon as I get done with taxes... In the mean time, via Chicagoist... How to have fun on the El.

Earth in the 21st Century

2006-03-28T00:05:00.000-06:00

At first I was going to title this post "pictures from another world" or something like that. But it struck me that the pictures I was going to link to weren't from another world, really. What's more, they aren't from another time. They're this week's news.

I came across these when I clicked on a misfiled photo and found myself watching the slideshow labelled "Muslims Offended by Danish Cartoons" on Yahoo's news site.

There's a lot of ugly images in that slide show. Lots of pictures of burning flags of various nations, free speech protesters in London with the cartoons on their signs, protestors in Jakarta with banners saying Condoleezza Rice wasn't welcome, a dead Palestinian girl, victims of shootings by "suspected Islamic militants" in Thailand, funerals in Pakistan and India... Grenade wounds. Angry crowds. Blast sites. Tear gas. A picture from Guantanamo Bay.

But there are four that really struck me. They don't really have anything to do with the stories mentioned in their captions. They're just everyday scenes. And they're not from another world, and they're definitely not from another time.

A skyline

A man reading

Kids being lectured

A woman in the city

And then from the Afghanistan slideshow:

A kid with a kite

A cup of tea

The beginning of spring

(Here's another stunning picture of that and one of
women celebrating)

Of course, not all the pictures look like this. Some are ugly, like I said. And some just look like the kind of candid snapshots we all have in our albums. But some of them are magic, a kind of magic our culture doesn't know (though we have our own kinds, of course). Can you blame anyone for wanting to preserve this way of life, or for seeing us as a threat to it?

Life in the Lab

2006-03-19T13:58:00.000-06:00

I'm really enjoying Chad Orzel's "true lab stories." I linked to his first post in the series, which involved a two-liter soda bottle filled with liquid nitrogen, sealed, and dropped in the bathroom sink. The key words were "earth shattering KABOOM."

He's followed up with a link to a similar story involving a whole tank of liquid nitrogen. This time the key words are "all of the remaining walls of the lab were blown 4-8 inches off their foundations."

Most recently, he's posted a story of his own involving a lab flood. Our lab has had a couple of those, but no really bad ones since I got there. If you don't work in a lab, you probably think the most horrifying words in this story are "the fire department had already been called by the people in the lab downstairs, who came in to find a little waterfall running over the circuit breaker boxes on one wall of their lab"

But our lab has almost exactly the same technology that he describes in this post (only not two but *three* Ti:sapphire laser, each pumped by argon lasers... Or actually, four of each, if you count the ones that don't work. I won't get into the other lasers.) These are fussy, touchy, bad tempered machines that get sick frequently, and have to be painstakingly nursed back to health with days of tweaking. So I know that the most horrifying words are "The external cavity module was literally full of water-- when my supervisor picked it up and turned it on its side, it took a good ten seconds for all the water to drain out. We had to dismantle the whole thing, and clean every single surface."

And the idea of having to remove and clean every single optic (an "optic" is a mirror, a lens, a prism pair, or anything else that the laser beam hits on its way from the laser to the atoms you're aiming it at. There are dozens of things in each beam path, hundreds on a table) makes me shudder. It may give me nightmares.

I doubt that people who aren't optical experimentalists will fully appreciate these stories, but just in case anyone reads the blog in order to get a flavor of what life as a scientist is like... Well, even these stories make it sound more glamorous than it really is. But they're more accurate than any science fiction I've ever seen. A lot of science is trying to fix things that got broken in stupid accidents. When anything works, you don't change it, even if it could theoretically work better. It's almost impossible not to be superstitious, when so many things seem to happen for no better reason than that the universe it out to get you.

I have stories like this from our own lab, of course, but I think I'll wait until I've safely graduated to tell them in public.

What's the Matter with Kansas Revisited

2006-03-16T10:04:00.000-06:00

Fred Clark's posted something I agree with on the reasons why Republicans keep winning elections, in spite of the fact that the nation keeps getting less peaceful and less prosperous under their rule.

Of course, I nearly always agree with Fred Clark, but in this case, he's saying what I wanted to say after I read that book.

It's amazing how many liberals really don't understand. They think these pro-life voters are really anti-sex, or anti-woman, or anti-progress, or that it's a class thing (Tom Frank's argument) or a religious stricture, not having abortions, like keeping kosher if you're Jewish or not cutting your hair if you're Sikh.

But listen, Fred Clark's right. It's not any of those things. Pro-life people really do believe that abortion is murder. It's not a slogan. When they say that, they mean it as a simple statement of fact. How can they support any candidate who sanctions legal murder, whatever their positions on other issues?

Lance Mannion understands too. This is the real debate. Pro-choicers who argue about "not imposing your religion on others" or about women's rights to privacy are fighting straw men, though they don't know it. Knock those religious and misogynistic arguments down if you want. Those aren't the arguments that convince people to vote Republican. The argument that convinces people to vote Republican against their own economic self interest is this one: "Abortion is murder."

What's the Point of Having a Blog...

2006-03-15T10:08:00.000-06:00

If you're not going to brag?

Those are the pieces I made in the machine shop class. Two sets of bookends, four candle-stick holders, a plumb bob, and a paperweight/pencil holder. The silvery ones are aluminum, and the goldish ones are brass. We used a grinder, a horizontal band saw, a vertical band saw, a milling machine, and an oxyacetalene torch, to solder the tubes on the candlestick holders to their bases. It was not, technically, welding. But I did have to light the torch myself.

One of my bookends has an extra set of holes on the bottom. That's because, in trying to make the holes threaded so that I could put a screw in them, I accidentally broke a tap off in one of them. Also, one of the ring-shaped handles on the candlesticks is loose, because they too are held on by little screws, but I went too deep with the center drill and made my hole a little too big for the tap, so that there are only one or two threads in the hole, and the screw doesn't tighten well.

Still, I did better than I thought I would, considering my general level of clumsiness, and the inability to erase mistakes.

The guy who taught the class, Jim, is retiring this quarter after forty-something years of doing this. He has infinite patience and is good at explaing things without making you feel stupid, even if it's the fourth or fifth time you've asked. I feel lucky to have gotten to take the class with him.

All in all an experience I am grateful to have had. Even if I'm also grateful not to have to get up so early on Tuesday mornings anymore...

Neat Toy

2006-03-13T08:43:00.000-06:00

Google maps pedometer. Useful for planning running or walking routes. Saturday, which was the nicest day in human history, I apparently went 5.6 miles, passing through three different municipalities as I did so. And one of them, I went all the way across, northern city limits to southern city limits. Yes, I was so impressed with myself that I had to post it on my blog. Pathetic, I know.

Still, that makes six different cities that I've run to or through from where I live, counting the one I start in. Chicago suburbs are so small.

Long Days

2006-03-06T08:43:00.001-06:00

Have I missed the weekend again? It just doens't feel like a weekend, is the problem. We worked yesterday.

Not an unsucessful day at work, actually, but to do anything these days takes longer and longer. First we have to turn on the cooling systems, and turn on, warm up, and tune the lasers. The tuning by itself can take all day, if we're unlucky.

Then align all the beams. This involves turning little screws on the back of the mirror mounts to change the angle. We have little targets set up to help us aim them correctly, irises which open when you're done with them to let the beams pass through. You have to start from the first mirror and go down the line, because if you're off by a small angle at the beginning, you'll miss mirrors entirely, toward the end. Also you have to make sure the beam is passing through all the different lenses and frequency shifters correctly. With so many beams and such long paths this always takes a couple of hours, and is tedious and repetative. If we have to change the beam paths for any reason, that can take an extra hour, or all day.

Parts of the beam are split off and sent through rubidium vapor cells, where, if they are at the right frequency, they are absorbed. We have electronics to adjust the lasers if the beam stops being absorbed (meaning that the laser frequency has drifted). But the electronics are complicated and don't always work. So getting that going can take a while too.

Meanwhile Ken has turned on the heaters that vaporize the rubium for the trap. Once everything is ready, assuming the vacuum pressure is okay, he opens the valve the releases the stream of rubidium vapor into the main vacuum chamber, and looks for a trap. He gets it every day now, reliably. But usually it starts out weak, and more alignment has to be done, and frequencies adjusted, before it will get big and bright.

Now we set up and mount any equipment we will be using for today's trial. Oscilloscopes, high voltage power supplies, light detectors, function generators, etc. Our post-doc does most of the electronic configuration. He's very good. We run lots of cables. More alignment, to make sure the light is getting onto the detectors.

Now, finally, we are ready to begin. We turn off the lights. (These detectors are sensetive. Room light could damage them.) I babysit my laser, changing the frequency when called upon, and making sure it doesn't change when it shouldn't. Ken babysits one of his lasers, and pours liquid nitrogen into the part of the vacuum system from time to time (this helps keep the pressure down.)

Lately his job also includes casting a shadow on the detector, which is picking up light sources we can't control. If he moves, it stops working.

Our post-doc watches the function generators and oscilloscopes and calls out instructions for us, parameters to change. Make this beam stronger. Make this beam weaker. Change the frequency. Scan the frequencies. Block this. Block that. Make the pulse longer. Make the delay shorter. He is looking for certain effects on the light the detector picks up. If he sees them, he saves a trace and calls us over to look.

Not every day is like this. Sometimes we are assigned other projects to work on. But this is the priority, and it always comes back to running this experiment in the trap.

Yesterday we saw an effect we were looking for -- two of our beams prevented one another from being absorbed by the rubidium in the trap. (This is supposed to be useful one day in making the basis elements of a quantum computer. If you don't exactly see how, join the club.)

Today... We get to do it all over again, probably.

The Power of Procrastination

2006-03-03T08:46:00.000-06:00

I usually skip the speakers invited to talk by my department. I went a couple of times at first, but didn't find it rewarding. What these speakers are usually trying to do, is impress you. This means they use a lot of jargon and complicated graphs, and try to cram every result they've ever gotten into a one hour presentation. So you, as an audience member, have little to no chance of understanding what they're talking about at all. First, because they don't leave themselves time to explain the basics of their field. Second, because if you understood, you probably wouldn't be as impressed.

But last night I made an exception. Our whole lab attended a talk by Jorge Cham, the creator of Piled Higher and Deeper. You know, that comic strip I keep linking to.

He was great. It was like stand-up comedy with Powerpoint. Why don't more stand-up comedians use Powerpoint?

It was also thereputic. The thing about these comics is, we've all had these experiences. We've all been humiliated. We've all been ignored. We've all panicked. We've all been depressed. We've all been desperate. We've all felt like imposters. We've all considered quitting. According to a study Cham cited, 10% of us have considered suicide, and 1 in 200 actually attempted it. But we never see each other. We all think we're alone. The strip is nice because it tells us we're not. This guy we've never met knows exactly what we're going through. And he has thousands of readers. And he told us to look around the room and see how many people from our own university were laughing at these painful jokes, about being ignored by your advisor. About getting nowhere on your project. About having your ego crushed. About feeling overwhelmed.

At it was really nice to see all these people, to laugh with them. (Our post-doc was laughing so hard he could hardly breathe. That was nice to see.)

The title of the talk was "The Power of Procrastination." The message was -- yes, there are more important things you should be doing right now instead of attending this talk. Or watching TV. Or hanging out with your friends. Or being outside. But there will always be more important things you should be doing. You can't ever be finished with them. So you have no real choice but to put them off, if you ever want to do anything else. Try not to feel so guilty about it.

There were also some words of warning, now that he's graduated -- writing your dissertation will nearly kill you. You will not be happy with your work. And no one will ever read it. But the tenure process makes getting your degree look easy. This is why your professor has no sympathy for you. The academic job market sucks (but you don't have to stay in academia.) Get used to being rejected.

Man, for some reason when I say it, instead of him, this stuff sounds a lot less hilarious...

Interestingly, this morning, I followed a link from Word Munger to a page postulating that the reason there aren't more women in university science departments, is that jobs in university science departments are terrible. Their only attraction is as booby prizes in a sort of pissing contest, and women don't do pissing contests. Those jobs do seem more attractive if you are from China or India, where the standard of living is lower, but immigrant work forces are usually composed mainly of men. (In case you're wondering, Americans are traditionally the minority among physics grad students at major universities.) This sounds pretty cynical, but last night when Cham said the Big Question of grad student life was "Why?!" he got one of his biggest laughs. It's funny 'cause it's true.

Sounds like a depressing talk, but really, it put us in a good mood. It's just so reassuring to be told that it's not us, it's the system. We may feel like failures, but so does everyone else. And there's nothing wrong with a little procrastination. It was exactly what we needed to hear.

Thank you, Jorge Cham.