Nothing

So here's what I've been doing for the past week or so, my excuse for neglecting my small-but-faithful audience: nothing.

And I've loved it. Nothing like -- riding in the car fifteen hours each way from Chicago to Denver and back reading out loud to keep Ken awake (The Sword in the Stone, which we finished, reading about the Boxing Day Boar Hunt on the day after Christmas) and watching the New Lemony Snicket movie and reading books seven, eight, nine, ten and eleven of the Series of Unfortunate Events.

The movie just about lives up to the books -- a high standard. All that's missing is the joy the books take in words themselves. In obscure vocabulary and playful definitions, in codes, puns, alliterations, anagrams, and literary allusions. I was extra-pleased by the mention of C.P. Snow's Corridors of Power, and I love all the T.S. Eliot. It's great that you can recognize villains by their fondness for Edgar Guest, while the well-read heroes prefer Herman Melville. I need to look-up some of the references which went over my head -- "Morel" Behavior in a Free Society, Archy and Mahitabel, Comyns, and Carl Van Vechten. I should also read the Gulag Archipelago, one of these days. But I think I got most of the references to Nietzche and Beverly Cleary.

Anyway, even some of that fun makes it into the movie, through Jude Law's pitch perfect narration. So it's worth the ticket price. We also rented "King Arthur" (which doesn't completement The Sword in the Stone as well as you'd think) and "Shaun of the Dead" (which does complement "Dawn of the Dead" -- Ken's favorite movie -- very well indeed.) I give it four stars, and I'm not the zombie-lover.

I picked out a wedding dress with my mom. Wedding plans are being revised, although I'm not making any more announcements yet.

Took Ken to Midnight Mass and to Casa Bonita. He's a good sport.

Christmas shopped up to the last possible moment, and then reaped an amazing haul on Christmas morning -- thanks for the cell-phone service especially, Dad and Mom.

And since we got back, I've spent a lot of time hanging out with Ken while he plays "Fable," which I got him for Christmas, after heavy hinting. I like watching video games. It makes more sense than watching sports -- at least I know the person I'm cheering for. And this game has a great story. I got totally caught up. The most hilarious part was when he took off his helmet and all of the game characters fell in love with him. His "renown" level was very high, as was his "attractiveness" score -- since his hair had grown back after his stint in prison.

There was a lot of recorded West Wing and Gilmore Girls to catch up on (thanks Becca) and more video games, movie rentals, books, and snow ball fights, and walking around on frozen ponds, somewhere in there...

It feels so good to do nothing, for a while.

Even Though My Sister Hates the Poetry Posts...

The Journey of the Magi
by T.S. Eliot


'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Running Out of Classes

I feel ripped off.

I thought by this point in my education, I would know a lot more. I still look at papers, and feel like they're in a foreign language. I still look at the math, and feel like you'd have to be much smarter than me to understand it. (Including math that I've written.)

I do not feel like an expert. And this is bad, 'cause they're letting me help teach classes...

You know how they promise you, your whole life, "You'll understand when you're older"? They say, "Well, we can't explain this to you yet. You don't have enough math. You have to learn all this other stuff first."

But now I've done all that, I've sat through all their classes, almost. They haven't lived up to their side of the bargain. There's still so much I don't understand. And now I begin to suspect that they don't really understand either.

There are still lots of people above me, but they are not so far above me now. I'm getting to the point where it's not so much about people who know more than you, as people who know about different things than you, where we start to specialize.

So now, when I listen to physicists talk, I'm much less likely to believe they really know what they're talking about. I don't, and I've gotten this far, so why should I believe they do? And I feel the same way about people in other fields now, too. A doctorate is so much less impressive now that I think I actually might get one. Any club that would have me as a member, etc...

So running out of classes has made me feel a little cynical. Also smug, though. And old. (But I like feeling old.) Mainly, though, I'm just outraged about all the questions I now see I'm never going to get answers to. After so much work, and such a long time... Man! That sucks!

Everything I Know About Quantum Field Theory

Okay, this is not going to be a great explanation for three reasons. First: because my understanding isn't great. Second: because I'm going to try to write for a reader who hasn't taken quantum mechanics. And third: because the theory itself is young, only about forty years old, and there isn't a complete consensus among professional physicists yet on how to interpret it.

That said, the math predicts experimental results with incredible precision, and this description, unlike the quantum mechanics I've studied up until now, is consistent with our other knowledge of physics, with the theory of electromagnetism and relativity.

Here are the assumptions you have to make to get a working theory: 1. The particles of which everything is made behave, in many ways, like waves. 2. If you insist on thinking about particles instead of waves, you'll find some paradoxical properties, such as the idea that a particle which has a definite momentum does not have a definite location. Note: I didn't say that we can't know its location. I said it doesn't have one. 3. Time is a dimension almost exactly like length, width, and depth. It helps to think of "later" as "over there."

Now I'm going to explain these ideas further, but please understand that these are assumptions, not conclusions. It is not true that modern physics "proves" any of this. But if you make these assumptions, you can develop a theory of how particles interact which exactly matches, in every experiment to date (and there have been a lot of them, in those giant expensive particle accelerators) the way particles do interact. It is very possible that another description would match these results equally well, but we haven't found one yet (though some candidates -- incorporating large parts of Quantum Field Theory -- do exist.)

Okay, so what do I mean by that assumption number one? In what ways are particles like waves?

When waves encounter an obstacle, they spread out around it. (Imagine a box sitting in a pool, and ripples reflecting off of it in wide arcs.) Particles do something similar. If a beam of electrons encounters an obstacle, they too will spread out in different directions. Contrast this with billiard balls. If I send a bunch of billiard balls one at a time, from the same direction and the same speed toward some box, I expect them all to bounce off at the same angle. Electrons do no behave like billiard balls in these experiments. They also diffract around edges (billiard balls don't turn corners) and even show effects that are analogous to rainbows. Then too, like waves on Lake Michigan (I've watched them) and like light and sound waves, beams of electrons can interfere with each other, cancelling out in some places, and adding up in others (where electrons add up you get extra bright spots on your screen. Where water waves do, tall peaks and low troughs. Where sound waves do, loud noise, Etc.)

So why don't we just give up and talk about waves all the time, without ever mentioning particles? The fact is that both a beam of electrons and a beam of light are detected as a series of discrete collisions. Click, click, click, goes you photon detector or Geiger counter, one click at a time, whenever you shine your beam at it. (Photons are what we call the "particles" of light, the individual clicks on our devices.) You find charge and energy only in discrete lumps, whenever you go to measure it. So both electrons and light move like waves, but look like billiard balls, to our instruments.

The way physicists handle this is to say that the wave tells us something about the probability of detecting a particle. The bigger the waves at any given point in space and time, the more likely a detector located there is to go "click." So in the areas where the hypothetical waves add up to bigger waves, in these interference experiments, I detect lots of particles. That's my bright stripe of electrons or photons. In the places where the waves cancel out, I detect no particles.

Okay, now about that second assumption. That's called the "uncertainty principle." There's actually a couple of variations on it. The one I quoted, about a particle not having definite location and a definite momentum at the same time, is the most famous. It's experimentally testable -- just try measuring the positions of a beam of particles whose momentum you know, or the momenta of particles you've got trapped in a specific place. You'll find that under identical circumstances you get different results.

In fact, this is not nearly so confusing if you think about waves. A perfect wave repeats itself forever and ever at a uniform wavelength, so it doesn't really have a location. Everywhere looks just like everywhere else. By contrast if you have a single blip, where the water splashed up into one little peak, I can talk about the location, but not, really, about the wavelength. In traditional quantum mechanics, the wavelength tells you the momentum, so saying you can't know the momentum and the position at the same time, is just saying something obvious about waves.

Now picture a barrel full of water. Drop stones in the exact center of the barrel, and you may be able to create a circular wave pattern that holds its shape. The ripples spread out in circles, hit the circular wall of the barrel, reflect back as shrinking circles, and, if the wavelength is just right so that the reflections overlap the original waves, you get what's called a "standing wave pattern." It only works if the wavelength is just right, though, and the stones hit right in the center. This kind of pattern looks a little bit like the blip (it never spreads out past hte barrel) and a little like long train of incoming waves. I can talk about both its location and its wavelength, although both are a little ambiguous. And this kind of wave can persist, can hold its shape, but only if it's the right size to "fit" in the barrel. (For a simpler example of what I mean here, try drawing a box on your computer's paint program, and then drawing a wave with equally spaced crests inside it, that has a crest at both edges. You'll find that you have to get the spacing of the crests just right.)

It's waves that "fit" -- which look a little like blips and a little like wave-trains, which persist only if they have a certain shape and size -- which we actually see in real life. They're the ones that last long enough for us to see. The shape of these waves determines their energies, and only certain shapes, certain energies, are allowed.

When we try to measure the energies of electrons in real life situations, we don't get any old number. Over and over again, we find only the same discrete values -- the ones corresponding to those states that "fit" in our boundaries for the experiment. I'm talking experiment now, not theory. The same values over and over again. The theory is just our best guess as to why that would be. It all has to do with the fact that whether a wave-shape sticks around depends on its wavelength as well as where it start spreading out from.

All of this is ordinary quantum mechanics. It describes my electron (or whatever) as a probability wave, and tells me that I'm only going to get certain values for the energy.

What quantum field theory does, then, is try to explain why I should only get certain values for the number of electrons. In other words, if these thigns move like waves, why should my detector go click click click? Why do I never see half an electron? Why do I never see anything with half the electron's charge?

What if, says QFT, the wavefunction didn't describe that probability on a scale from zero to 100%. What if it described the strength of some field at that point in space and time. What if (for a specific wavelength) the bigger the field, the more particles I am likely to find at that point in space. In that case, for small energies, it still tells me the chaces of finding a particle here, but for large energies it tells me I might find more than one.

In other words, whether I detect a particle at some location does depends on the strength and shape of the field, but the field is more than just a probability function. For low energies, it doesn't matter; the effect is the same. But for high energies, I would seem to get particles popping out of nowhere. The idea here is that what actually exists is the field, not the particle. The particle is nothing but a click on my detector, the likelyhood of which depends on the field that exists.

But why should I get clicks at all? Wasn't that the question? If it's fields that are real, why do my instruments seem to see particles? Okay, and here's where it gets weird...

What if that field didn't have a specific value, the way a single blip on the water has a single location, or have a regular rate of change, the way a train of waves headed towards the beach has a specific wavelength... What if the charge, or whatever it is that my detector detects, depends on both so that only certain values "fit"? The way only certain shapes fit into my barrel. Those shapes didn't have a specific location or specific wavelength. They were spread out over a whole range of locations, with different wavelengths. In quantum field theory, my field doesn't have a specific value or rate of change, but a whole range of them.

So what I end up with, in effect, is like a probability function for a probability function. I look at one point in space and time, and I make a graph of how likely it is to have a field of a certain size, and that graph, of probability as a function of field strength, looks like some kind of wave. Only certain wave-shapes fit the boundaries that I draw, and those wave shapes correspond to the incidents where I detect a single particle at that location, or two particles, or three, or... Well, you get the idea.

It's a pretty big idea. When I discover an electron, the field doesn't have a single value but a range of possible values, a special wave-shaped range. If you like, you can picture a wave with a blurry edge, like the one below. That's what I'm picturing.



These are the things that are real, supposedly. At least, a theory describing these things predicts exactly what really happens, stuff that moves like waves but registers in our detectors like particles, predicts the results of experiments to an accuracy that is, as my professor likes to say, the same as giving the distance between New York and LA to within the width of a single human hair. (I didn't give him enough credit in my previous posts. He's a good professor, and he was trying. He just doesn't think about things in the same way as I like to.)

So that it...

Oh, but wait. You wanted to know about that "time is a direction" stuff. Well, actually that's not so much quantum field theory as relativity. But, as I mentioned at the beginning, quantum field theory (unlike old fashioned quantum theory) is consistent with relativity. Mainly in that it treats mass as a kind of energy (and even shows that mass can be "created" from energy, if you want to think about the probability of measuring more particles when the energy is bigger in that way) and treats time as a direction. So basically instead of having six directions to go (up down, forward backward, and left right) these waves actually have eight. When they scatter, there's a chance they will scatter "backwards in time." Now this sounds strange and spooky, but 1) mathematically it is mundane. A function of time is no different from a function of x or y or z, and I can graph them in just the same way and 2) the only implication it has for the real world of experiments, is that it means we should sometimes see particles which look just like our normal electrons and so on, but with the opposite charge, and a couple of other reversed properties. All we see in the lab is an "anti-particle" going forwards in time -- the two are equivalent. The only reason you might want to use this backwards-in-time description at all, is in describing what happens when a particle and an antiparticle occupy the same place at the same time. They "annhilate." At later points in time, neither one of them exists. They don't scatter off into any of our detectors. This spooky experimental fact actually seems less spooky of you think instead of a guy in a movie, getting into a time machine and going back. He vanishes, but at an earlier point in time there are two of him... Similarly you might think of someone from the future coming back to our time, which happens to be just before his own birth... In the future, there are two of him... (this is equivalent to the kind of particle creation I described earlier.) And if all of this seems far fetched, please remember that anti-particles are routinely observed in the lab (having been predicted by an early form of QFT) and that they experimentally can be created and annhilated. It's the universe that's far-fetched, and the theory faithfully describes it. If thinking about time travel gives you a headache, join the club. But take comfort in the fact that this mathematical description still says causes have to precede effects, and no paradoxes are possible (this is guarenteed by the fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but don't ask me how, exactly.)


You don't have to believe it. We'll probably come up with something that works even better, eventually. But considering the paradoxical experimental results that it had to explain, this one works amazingly well. Anyway, that's my understanding of quantum field theory, after a one quarter course on the subject. Considering how badly I did on the homework, you should take this with heaping spoonfuls of salt. Not only might the theory be wrong, but I might very easily be misunderstanding huge parts of the theory. But if you promise not to consider me an expert, I do like sharing my interpretations.

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.