Fun With Marketing

Got something to sell? Want to advertise to your neighbors? Or just judge them by their purchases? Find out what kind of stuff they like to buy:

Demographics by zipcode

Isn't it handy that people can be so neatly divided into categories? Check out the full list, and find the stereotype that fits you best:

PRIZM

(both links via Making Light, a long time ago.)

But perhaps you're too busy to mess with door-to-door, or direct mail. Perhaps you'd prefer the convenience of bulk e-mail. In that case, you're going to need some names to put in the "from" lines:

Random Name Generator

(via Electron Blue, where there's an interesting article about it.)

Or perhaps you'll call people up during the dinner hour? Whether you do that or take the spam route, you'll want to give people a way to call you back to place their orders:

What does your phone number spell?

(via Ken, who is already brilliantly marketed. [the Harley Davidson guy at the bottom of the page is the best likeness.])

On the other hand, maybe you'd better go with something a little more cutting edge. Like viral marketing -- the flu's a big fad this season. Everyone's getting it, and it comes in a fetching green. (via someone on AFP.)

Thanksgiving

I'm thankful for:


The beer our landlord left for us as a reward for keeping the house nice.

The great dinner we had at Ken's dad's house last night, especially the delicious cherries and chocolate dessert his step-mom made. And for the opportunity to play with his little sisters. I miss babysitting.

The snow. And the forest preserve by Ken's apartment, which glittered yesterday.

The fact that Jewel Osco is right across the street, and offers thirty minute photo developing.

The Afghan restaurant on Devon, that left a menu on my doorstep this morning, and provides free delivery.

The cell phone my dad still pays for, which allowed me to talk to him, and my mom, and my brother, and my sister, and my grandpa, and my aunt-Mary, and my cousin (in a complicated way) Lynette, before they sat down for Thanksgiving dinner.

The fact that the circus is coming to town! We're going to try to go this weekend.

The blankets my mom bought me when she visited. My room is freezing.

The four day weekend, and the end of the academic quarter.

The public library, high speed internet, the Chicago Tribune, and CLTV.

Christmas lights.

My mom and dad, my sister and brother, all my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, and the new family I'm going to be getting, and the man I'm going to marry.

November Poem

Has it been a week? But I've got three or four posts I'd like to put up, only I have the links bookmarked on a different computer for one of them, and I don't want to write the QFT one until the quarter's over, and I don't quite know what to say in the last, which was going to be about how it feels to be running out of classes to take. (It's a funny feeling.)

So for now I'll just do the easy thing and choose a poem for November. I find I'm in the mood for Browning, and for something sort of sad...

Youth and Art
by Robert Browning

It once might have been, once only:
We lodged in a street together,
You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
I, a lone she-bird of his feather.

Your trade was with sticks and clay,
You thumbed, thrust, patted and polished,
Then laughed "They will see some day
Smith made, and Gibson demolished."

My business was song, song, song;
I chirped, cheeped, trilled and twittered,
"Kate Brown's on the boards ere long,
And Grisi's existence embittered!"

I earned no more by a warble
Than you by a sketch in plaster;
You wanted a piece of marble,
I needed a music-master.

We studied hard in our styles,
Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,
For air looked out on the tiles,
For fun watched each other's windows.

You lounged, like a boy of the South,
Cap and blouse--nay, a bit of beard too;
Or you got it, rubbing your mouth
With fingers the clay adhered to.

And I--soon managed to find
Weak points in the flower-fence facing,
Was forced to put up a blind
And be safe in my corset-lacing.

No harm! It was not my fault
If you never turned your eye's tail up
As I shook upon E in alt,
Or ran the chromatic scale up:

For spring bade the sparrows pair,
And the boys and girls gave guesses,
And stalls in our street looked rare
With bulrush and watercresses.

Why did not you pinch a flower
In a pellet of clay and fling it?
Why did not I put a power
Of thanks in a look, or sing it?

I did look, sharp as a lynx,
(And yet the memory rankles,)
When models arrived, some minx
Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles.

But I think I gave you as good!
"That foreign fellow,--who can know
How she pays, in a playful mood,
For his tuning her that piano?"

Could you say so, and never say
"Suppose we join hands and fortunes,
And I fetch her from over the way,
Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?"

No, no: you would not be rash,
Nor I rasher and something over:
You've to settle yet Gibson's hash,
And Grisi yet lives in clover.

But you meet the Prince at the Board,
I'm queen myself at bals-paré,
I've married a rich old lord,
And you're dubbed knight and an R.A.

Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy.

And nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever:
This could but have happened once,
And we missed it, lost it for ever.

Wish List

What do I want for Christmas? An end to hunger and injustice and indignity, and while you're out, peace on earth and good will toward all.

Thanks to the Hunger Site, it's occured to me that you can buy me some of that and some nifty playthings at the same time. The Hunger Site works by donating food (a little more than a cup of rice or wheat) to charity, for every day you look at their ads. They've been my homepage for a long time now, so I've seen a lot of their ads, and I want some of this stuff. For each of these items that you buy, you donate another fifty cups or so of food, and help keep the Hunger Site in business as well.

So you get that good feeling, along with the neat stuff, like recycled silk scarves, gloves, shoulder bags, and throw rugs. Or wooden Jacaranda hand-turned bowls, salad sets, and birch bark boxs (I like the oval one).

Those links just go to pictures. I can't figure out how to link directly to the catalog descriptions, so you'll just have to go to the store and search, I guess.

I'd rather have practical stuff than decorative stuff (I'm looking forward to a tiny but empty apartment in not so many months...) The Hunger Site is, unfortunately, a little short of that. As are Oxfam and Ten Thousand Villages even though I like their stuff as well, and they too offer the "good deed with every purchase" deal. (They also don't seem to have online catalogs, so you have to find a physical store.) But I figure someone must be selling dishes and blankets, so I searched a little and found that the Fair Trade Federation has a whole list of fair trade importers with online catalogs. (The one that I linked from the word "dishes" up there, "A Greater Gift," has a particularly large selection.)

This way you can get people unique, handmade, practical gifts, and also help people in third world countries support themselves. This is a longer term solution than mere donations. These countries need something they can sell to the west for a fair price, and handicrafts -- time and labor intesive -- could become a major export. Because if there's anything third world countries have, it's a labor force with time on its hands.

Buy this stuff, make a market for it. Most of these people would like nothing better than to earn their own living by working hard, taking pride in their craftsmanship. Start your Christmas shopping now, and make the world a better place.

Quantum Field Theory

Have I mentioned that Quantum Field Theory is kicking my butt? And the more I don't understand what he's talking about in class, the more discouraged and depressed I become about the whole thing, the less motivated I am to do the work I really need to do to keep up.

I have two main problems here. The first is the math. I'm completely lost by his notation, at this point. P's and P-slashes and a gagillion different gammas. I haven't got a clue what any of these symbols mean any more. Some of them are tensors (and incidentally, nobody has every formally taught me anything about tensors, beyond the ordinary matrix kind) and some of them are functions and some of them are operators, which might mean matrices or differentials or... Who knows. Sound hard? That's cause it is. But it really doesn't need to be. You can't convince me that there aren't clearer, unambiguous ways to write this stuff. You could start by actually writing all of it down, for instance, and not just assuming that there are greek indices "implied" or that we all know the expression you just wrote is supposed to be divided by 2m. You could write the steps that get you from one line to the next, instead of saying "I hope you're all filling these missing steps in." You could refrain from throwing terms out that we've never heard, in the service of some hideously complicated by irrelevant criticism you have of the someone else's work on the theory... (Although it is reassuring, somehow, that our professor knows the people who developed the theories we're learning now. We're starting to catch up. At least it's 1960s physics that's kicking my butt now, and not 1760s...)

And you could interpret things. That's my biggest wish. Just tell me what this is a model of. Tell me what these waves are supposed to represent. Tell me what the numbers I put in here measure. This is supposed to be our best description of the physical world, and we've lost contact with the physical world altogether.

I'm starting to develop my own interpretations, which I might post here, with lots of disclaimers, if I can word them a little better. I believe that anything which can't be put into layman's terms isn't real science. It has to answer questions that are independent of its formalism -- laymen's questions. So I want to make an effort, but I'm warning you now, I don't know what I'm talking about...

Quantum Field Theory is kicking my butt. Now I have to go to class.

October Poem

I seem to have missed my monthly poem in October.

Normally I try to choose a poem that reflects my mood. This one doesn't. (I'm not that upset about the election results.) But I like it very much, and am going to post it anyway.


The World's End

Those who have visited the North Pole
Or other pubs beyond a two-mile limit
WIll know, at least by hearsay, this one, too.
Here is no glory of the Star and Garter,
Nor the obscure theology of the Goat and Compasses,
But a somewhat plain home truth,
That the world lives by labour and barter,
And all things, in the long run, end up shabby.

Here is the ash of history. But we recall
When fire came down from heaven and the house rocked
(A sensation mildly exhilerating to those in love with life)
And we remember tracer-bullets and the white flares,
And a general atmosphere of form and colour,
With possible extinction giving flavour to the stewed pears.

Well, here is the World's End, or so it seems,
But Oh, my love, tenacity is all:
'Her years of pain and glory' are not ended.
Silent, invisible, the bombs explode,
The dead and wounded walk the cancelled streets,
Colour and form run through the brittle pages,
And Time can crubmle all, but cannot touch
The book the burns, faster than we can read.



By Michael Roberts.

(I suspect it is about the London Blitz.)

Linkiness

These are sort of obligatory:

The New Star Wars Teaser Trailer

The Further Adventures of Alice and Bob -- Chad Orzel finds a paper which takes Eve the Eavesdropper's side.

Neil Gaiman is coming to town.

Multilingual Jabberwocky.

I Voted

And I would like to thank The Chicagoist, the Chicago Tribune, and the Daily Northwestern for doing the research for me, along with the Cook County Clerk's office for letting candidates put up statements. This is how I make my choices for offices like Recorder of Deeds and Water Reclamation District Comissioner. I really like being able to vote corrupt people out of "minor" offices, and incompetent judges off the bench. It's exciting, knowing that a vote for Republican Richard Cox (I'm always glad when I can vote for a Republican or two, just because I don't want anyone to take my vote for granted) is a vote to dismantle the Recorder of Deeds office altogether, eliminating some conspicuous abuses of public funds, not to mention one six figure salary -- Cox has promised to take only a dollar.

It occured to me, as listened to my students talk yesterday about how futile it was to vote in Illinois because it wasn't a "swing state," and how the electoral college sucked... that the "swing state" thing really has very little to do with the electoral college. If we got rid of it and used the popular vote alone, then there would be no uncertainty in any state, in most elections, and everyone would feel like their vote was futile. Turnout would drop even lower than it already is. The real problem is all the advance polling, which is the only reason people feel like Illinois' results are a forgone conclusion.

I also wanted to remind the students that there are other elections, besides the presidential and senatorial ones. I wasn't a part of their conversation and anyway I'm the TA, so I kept my mouth shut. But I think they need to feel a little more local responsibility. I think they have a duty to vote out the current Cook County Recorder of Deeds.

Baseball, Lunar Eclipses, Homecoming, Fireworks, Bicycles, Pumpkin Patches, Oktoberfest, and Halloween

Back when I used to be less busy, I would write up experiences I partiularly wanted to remember. I'd write them in a diary or I'd write them for a website, or I'd write them up for a class or even a contest or school literary magazine, once upon a time. I haven't been doing that so much lately. And I think I'm missing things. it's too easy to forget all of the great moments and remember only the stress, which is not momentary.

Maybe I can still sketch some of the things that happened a while ago, as well as the more recent ones:

Ken and I went with his roommate Brian, and Brian's little boy Isaac, and Brian's Mom and brother, to a pumpkin "patch" which was really more like a pumkin theme park, with camel rides and ponies and a petting zoo and haunted houses and a really lame hay wagon and every kind of gourd you can imagine. It was a perfect bright fall day and I got free kettle corn because I complained that the bags were too big. Isaac went on the camel and the ponies and cried for his grandma, and Ken and I stuck our faces into the holes in a big wooden copy of American Gothic, and got our pictures taken. Brian bought $60 worth of pumkpins, and let me carve one of them with a Picasso punk, a cubist profile with a mohawk and both eyes on the same side of his head.

We put candles in them for the Oktoberfest party, an annual celebration in which Brian invites everyone he knows to drink lots of German beer. Beer of other nationalities is allowed if and only if it is a special Oktoberfest recipe. He's serious about this. I saw him send back a four pack of Guiness. He's saving the bottle caps to embed in the bar-top he's going to build. He also made T-shirts, and hung a couple of thousand streamers from the ceiling like a sort of shag carpetting, all red, black, and orange. Ken sat in a chair and as people arrived they dragged up chairs, forming a circle of followers. Everybody wants to be Ken's friend. All the guys who knew him in high school like to tell stories about him, legends, really. It was like watching a king with his courtiers.

He told them that he had just learned to ride a bike, and they all gave him a hard time. But he's impossible to tease. He just grins. He told them all it was great, it was fun, he was only a little sore... And it has been fun. We started off in a parking lot on campus, moved to an alley, and lately have been practicing in the forest preserve by his apartment. I go for my daily run, and he bikes along in front of me. There's deer, and migrating geese, and a pond with a weeping willow. Earlier there were amazing colors too, the trees all red and gold against a blue sky, but now they're bare. I took a jump rope out last time, and he watched me do the kind of jumps where you cross your arms. We skipped stones, and he practiced shifting gears on the way back.

That was just the other day, Halloween. We used the hour we gained from daylight savings time to do the bike ride, and then went back to his apartment to watch zombie movies for a while. I've finally seen "Dawn of the Dead" and "Dead Alive." Neither of them was even a little scary. We had apple cider and beer and worked on quantum field theory while we watched. Quantum field theory is kicking my butt.

We end up combining a lot of our fun with work. QFT during the Halloween movies, and little breaks from grading at 11PM on a Friday to go outside and watch the homecoming parade -- three bands, of which the high school band seemed the best drilled, and two Ghostbusters floats, of which the second was far superior, and Rocky Horror float with men in drag -- or fireworks, on one wonderful occasion a few weeks ago, a full fourth-of-July style show from the north campus beach, just for us. We assume they were just for us. There weren't that many other people around, after all, and we never heard of any other reason. They waited for us to come outside.

I don't think we were grading the day of the lunar eclipse, which was also the day the Red Sox won the World Series. (It had an all-around apocalyptic feeling.) We went to the Society of Physics students “bonfire” out by the lake. I had s’mores and he had coffee, and we watched the Earth’s shadow eat the moon. And Dr. Schmidt borrowed a guitar and played ‘60s folk songs, and I tried to sing along. We talked to some of our students. And then we went and watched and inning or two of the game in the student union. We ran into Carol and Paul who were doing the same, and they were good company. Paul is from Boston, and was holding his breath for the Red Sox. They went out to look at the eclipse between innings. We stayed until the top of the eighth and then went to the observatory, to see if we could watch the moon reappear through the telescope. The telescope is about a hundred and fifty years old, one of the biggest you can make that uses lenses instead of mirrors, and the observatory itself is wooden and red-lit and atmospheric, with a big rotating dome. Observatories are romantic places.

I’ve got pictures of most of this, but I don’t think I’ll try to post all of them. Maybe one or two. The moon pictures should be back soon.

The Big News

Ken and I want to get married.

Oh, not right now. We agree it's still too soon. But it's not too soon to start talking about it, planning for it. It takes a long time to plan a wedding, to say nothing of a marriage.

Next August makes sense. That's when my lease is up on the room where I'm living. It'll be our first anniversary as a couple (and two years since we met -- certainly that year of suffering silent crushes on one another in Quantum Mechanics counts for something.) It'll be between terms, so that we won't be dealing with classes or teaching. He'll be 27 and I'll be turning 25 at the end of that month, so we're old enough. And we don't want to wait too much longer, because we're in love.

We've been wanting to go to Europe together -- he's never been. I plan to show off the UK and France and Germany with proprietary pride, as if I'd invented them. And we're going to try for Switzerland and maybe even Northern Italy as well, if we can find the time, which we will discover together. We are going to conquer Europe.

If we get married in August we can go as newlyweds, make this our honeymoon. And that suggests another idea -- to get married while we're there, instead of before. This is appealing for lots of reasons, some of them very selfish.

We were stressed out, talking about the idea, by the problems of where to have it, whom to invite, what kind of ceremony, how to pay. Ken's best friends and part of his family live here in Chicago. My family is in Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. My friends are scattered to the four winds, up and down the west coast, the midwest, the UK. There are people who can't be invited if other people are. And we're both of us a little anti-social, intimidated by the prospect of playing host to so many people, with some powerful personalities. Even the idea is exhausting. There are religious issues, since I grew up Catholic but he did not, and the Catholic Church would require sacred oaths that neither of us is completely comfortable swearing, because we might, in different ways, feel like hypocrites at our own wedding. We can't risk saying anything we don't mean, making any promises we can't keep, on that day of all days.

But I'm not comfortable with the idea of a justice of the peace, either, in a drab room with strangers. I wouldn't feel really married. I don't view this as a contract. I hate the thought of marriage as a mere legal arrangement, with certain tax benefits and etc, to be dissolved when it is no longer advantageous to both parties. (Part of the reason I like the idea of marriage is that it will soothe my fear of losing him. A merely legal wedding admits the possibility of divorce.) This has nothing to do with the law, in my mind. The law can't require you to share each other's sufferings, forgive each other's flaws, keep each other company as you grow old. It doesn't require you to raise children together, to join one another's families, to collaborate in each other's work, and to be there for the other even if something horrible and permanent afflicts on of you, or your children... This is bigger than the law. This is the foundation of civilization, the root of every culture, one of the meanings of life.

And yes, I know the wedding is not the marriage. You could do all of that without any ceremony at all. But it's a symbol, and symbols are important to me. Symbols allow you to take a million separate experiences which are diffused in your daily existence and call them all by one name, represent them with one experience. You have to do that, collect them all together so that the common theme can emerge, the pattern, the abstraction, the meaning. Life has meaning, but it is diluted in the mudane. Symbols concentrate it, so that you can taste it... I want a better symbol than a civil servant in an government office, a better image to associate with my marriage.

So we're getting married in Europe. Just a small ceremony, but in a beautiful place. And far removed from our everyday lives, so that this experience will stick out in our memories.

A few witnesses, but no reception. We'll keep it small enough that we can all get a table at a bar afterward, if we like. And after that we'll have no duty to anyone but ourselves, with a continent at our feet. We won't have to borrow money or accept too much generosity (although we wouldn't mind a little...) or spend months fulfilling social obligations to hundreds of people.

When we had made up our minds to marry in Europe, I decided to try to arrange for a wedding in England, because I've lived in England and I speak English, and I know people there who might serve as witnesses. (Though I haven't asked anyone yet, and am a little worried about hurting people's feelings. I can't ask more than two or three. It wouldn't be fair to Ken, and our whole plan would be spoiled.) But we came up against a problem faced by people in innumerable British historical novels -- it makes me happy, in a funny way, to find myself in such a novelistic predicament. You have to reside there seven days, then post notice fifteen days in advance. But we don't want to spend three weeks in Europe before getting married. In British historical novels, people solve this problem by running away to Scotland, and I think that's what we're doing too. We've found a place, beautiful but not too expensive, not too grand for a small ceremony, just over the border on the Tweed. We're trying to book it now.

And that's my big news.

Conservatives for Kerry

I'm sure the rest of the world has already spotted this trend, but I'm amazed at how many endorsements of Kerry I'm reading by small-government conservatives.

In the Chicago Tribune,

in college papers,

and from Doonesbury, a whole bunch of them.

From the Tribune, Again

I'd figure out a way to link around the resistration page so that you could read all of these Tribune articles I cite without having to give them any information, except that I cite so many of them that if you're going to follow any of these links, you might as well make up a name and address to tell them anyway... I know it's lazy blogging, but then, originally blogs weren't supposed to do anything but call attention to interesting links.

Today's is actually from Sunday's Chicago Tribune. It is a profile of a person I find fascinating: peace activist Kathy Kelly. Do I admire this woman? With all my heart. Do I want to live her life? No. Am I sure she is right? I am not sure. But I am convinced that this is what saints are like.

Problems with Time and Space

I've been so busy lately. See, I'm a teaching assistant, and I'm taking quantum field theory, and I'm working in the lab. And then, yeah, there's Ken.

Lab work takes away from my quantum field theory time. To really understand what I'm learning in QFT, I'd need to teach myself complex analysis (I never took it) and relativity and review a number of other subjects that I have been taught, but never properly learned.

The professor started by talking about physical descriptions of rubber bands (a continuous medium in which for instance, waves can move... You can describe it mathematically with a "field") and then suddenly was talking about particles that go back in time. The idea of quantum field theory is, in a sense, that it makes no real sense to describe a single particle. You have to describe the whole system. All your particles, and the empty space between them, because the energy is constantly being exchanged. Oh, when I say "space" -- time is a dimension, almost but not quite like the others... If that sounds confusing, well, it is.

One class seems like more work than the seven I took in high school. But I don't have the time I need to spend. And it's worse because I really do want to understand this stuff. I'm wondering how the other half dozen in the class are doing, and convinced, of course, that they're all finding it easy. At least one of them is taking two other classes as well as being a TA and research assistant. But I'm used to feeling dumb.

Being a TA takes away from the time I spend in the lab. I'm just starting to understand what's going on there, to understand the point of the things I'm being asked to do. (It turns out that the project I was working on up until now may not really happen, but the new one is more interesting, and I don't really mind.) Right now, I'm working on building a control system for a laser. Now I've never studied control engineering, never heard of an "error signal before," have only a hazy idea of how feedback works. My entire knowledge of electronics comes from ten lectures and a half dozen labs I had in Durham, and here I am building adder and subtractor and integrator circuits with op amps... I can't even remember what an op amp does. I'd really like to understand how the thing I'm building works, but I'd need to relearn my electronics, and teach myself control systems out of a book, or something. I can't seem to keep hold of the various explanations I've been given... I do know that the purpose of it is to stabilize the laser, so that the frequency doesn't change when the temperature goes up or down, or when the pressure changes in the room, or whatever. I also know that if they really needed this right now, Pati and Venketesh and George and Joe could design a circuit in a few minutes. But they want me to learn.

This is the first step in the process of building a slow-light system in a vapor cell, which is the first step toward building a new kind of optical gyroscope. (I've been trying to study optical gyroscopes. It requires a little general relativity, and a lot of interferometry that I've never had. Also, I really struggle the problem of how pulses travel in cavities.) To make slow light you need a stable laser. I am also trying to understand slow light. In our experiment, it will be a side effect of something called "electromagnetically induced transparency." I am trying to understand electromagnetically induced transparency. What I understand so far is that if you use one laser to put all of the atoms in your sample into a superposition state such that the other laser tries to distort them in two directions at once, the atoms won't be distorted by the other laser, and so won't absorb its energy. That specific frequency will be able to pass through the material unabsorbed -- the material will be transparent to that color. But apparently if I send in a pulse made of that color and a lot of nearby colors, the pulse will be transmitted only very slowly. I am not sure why this is so. I do not really understand the way that the index of refraction -- the speed of light in a medium -- depends on the states of the atoms.


Ken has been helping me with this, and with QFT. He's in the same position as I am -- teaching, taking QFT, and working in a lab -- except his teaching assignment is twice as many hours, and he has a two hour a day commute. He's not taking QFT for credit, but he's doing the homework anyway, mostly so he can help me. He wants to learn this stuff too, but if not for me he would probably be trying to do it at a more convenient time.

I don't really feel like either of us is shortchanging the students, since mostly what I do is grade and supervise, and since I've seen Ken in office hours, patiently working through problems and giving advice... His students have a great TA. But we are both resenting the students, for the time they take, and I don't like that either. I don't want to resent my students. I usually like teaching. I usually get more out of it than this.

Meanwhile I haven't been posting to AFP, or to this blog (yes, that's my excuse), nor have I been watching TV (new fall season?) nor even reading much (though Ken and I are going through Catch 22 together...) We've missed concerts and movies we've wanted to see, haven't been down to Chicago since summer. And I haven't been phoning my family lately, although they're used to that...

I kind of thought that after my qualifiers, it would be easier than this. But I guess I didn't choose an easy life.

I chose a rewarding life. I chose teaching, and learning, and building things. I choose to try to balance all of that with meaningful relationships, a personal life, my family, friends, cultural stuff. I guess I shouldn't complain. I've got all of that. I've got an embarrassment of riches. Only I don't have time to enjoy them all...