bram

Inspired by my high school math teacher, whose own memoirs describe HIS teachers, I thought I'd write some portraits of interesting and influential teachers I've had.

Let me start with Bob Young. Mathematics professor at Oberlin College.

I think it's shameful that he only gets 3.8 out of 5 stars on ratemyprofessors! I get 4.6 stars at Clayton State and 4.4 stars at U of South Carolina.

https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/236410

Only 29% of students say they would take him again.

Although 20 of 45 students rate him a 5 for "awesome".

I had him for Multivariate Calculus my first semester at Oberlin. This is a course usually taken in the second year, but thanks to Unified Math VI in high school and scoring a 5 on the Calculus BC exam, I jumped in easily. I scored a perfect 100 on the first exam. Gradients, Lagrange multipliers, divergence, curl, line and surface integrals, Green's theorem, Stokes's theorem, I'd already learned those in high school.

I later took Young for Linear Algebra, Complex Analysis, and Real Analysis.

He was a friendly and urbane fellow, although very private. Some teachers let you know a lot about themselves and lead students by giving a window into their inner lives, they share a vulnerable side. Not so much Bob Young. We knew he sponsored a walrus in the zoo, named Olga, and he sometimes drew pictures of her on exams. That was it.

Young's lectures were extremely polished. A common student complaint was that he made everything blindingly clear while he was lecturing but as soon as you left the classroom it all fell apart in your mind and you couldn't reproduce it. Being at a liberal arts college, Oberlin, instead of a university, led me to have this teacher who was a true artist of teaching, and not someone who was primarily a researcher.

After graduating, I did ask him about his research interests, and he mentioned something about spectral theory, and I think a book by someone named Berbarian?

I see the whole book is available as a PDF online:

https://web.ma.utexas.edu/mp_arc/c/09/09-32.pdf

Anyway. He was noted for his use of color chalk. Everything on the board was beautiful, elegant, colorful. And he was hilarious. I'd laugh as hard in his class as watching Monty Python. He'd get super enthusiastic. In describing how you define integration starting with adding up slabs and then taking the limit of Riemann sums: "What happens when you replace the DESPAIR of slabs with the JOY of Riemann sums???"

I remember several classes where some promising line of mathematics seemed to fail and he'd say: "And now, I leave you on a note of despair..."

Sometimes he'd give a class an unusual framing structure. Like a menu for a meal: This bit of mathematics, a proof maybe, or a lemma, would be labelled "Appetizer", and there would be a main course, side dishes, dessert, etc.

Students complain about his hard tests and optional homework. That was perfect for me though! I'm one of those lazy students who because he was labelled gifted, thought he didn't have to grind at hard work so much. Homework optional, but some of his tests were... week-long, take-home and open book! How could all the students consider those too hard? (Maybe in the LLM / AI era that wouldn't work!) Because the problems often involved some super clever trick. Young made me a fan of the elegant trick. One exam in particular had a problem you had to prove by induction. It kept not working though. I wrote it out on the whiteboard in my room and lived with the problem a bit. I slept on it. Finally I realized you had to prove something slightly STRONGER, making different assumptions, and then it all fell out!

Young was a Platonist. He thought math was REAL, which I never did. Oh, I should be leaving this cafe soon! Cathy will be coming over before too long.

So for example, I asked him about those unprovable math claims, like the Continuum Hypothesis. Couldn't we just make up different math with different "truths" depending on which alternative possibility we assumed? He said: we'll always be able to build our intuition and see a larger picture in which one answer will be obvious.

Ok, a very different math teacher at Oberlin. Actually mathematical methods for physics. Robert Weinstock. He taught Applied Analysis I and II. In some ways he wasn't such a great teacher, and his approach seemed to me outdated. But he had an admirable personality, and a few things he's said have stuck with me.

He was noted for a common introductory text he wrote on "The Calculus of Variations". The calculus of variations was in a sense invented by Newton, in solving the "brachristochrone" problem. The story behind that is very impressive. In this "calculus", you extremize integrals with respect to functions within them. For example, what path of a particle over time minimizes a certain quantity, when integrated over a path? That's used a LOT in physics, and in fact is often used as the foundation for all physics. You define an "action" or "Lagrangian" and then the Euler-Lagrange equations let you solve for the function that will extremize the integral.

https://engineerine.com/newton-vs-bernoulli-the-legendary-brachistochrone-challenge/

He was also on a crusade to show that one of Newton's greatest claimed achievements was in fact a fraud. Newton allegedly proved that conic section orbits are possible if and only if you have an inverse square force law. But Weinstock claimed that Newton only had a one way proof, that his proof was flawed, papered over with circular handwaving. Only later did someone else prove the "only if" side I think, maybe one of the Bernoulli brothers.

Weinstock didn't have a fancy coddled upbringing. He worked in the boiler room of a ship in World War II. But he was very widely read and educated. He bragged to me the first time we met that he went to a concert where his son was playing all 3 of Beethoven's late piano sonatas. I believe he and his wife read each other classics, like Don Quioxte (his wife also helped him grade our papers--unlike Young Weinstock assigned homework that was graded).

These classes were hard. In fact class met also on Saturday mornings at 10 am. At least he brought donuts.

Why did I think his teaching was so flawed and outdated?

For one a lot of the work was done within particular coordinate systems, where we were buried in detail. In math department courses things like tensors were treated abstractly in a coordinate free way. You'd talk about tangent spaces, and things like d/dx and dx would be co and contra vectors, acting on each other to give delta functions. (Delta functions were hard for me to accept as a physicist as they don't make sense to high school level math and can only be defined in a weird way rigorously that's not intuitive.) You'd talk about functionals, wedge products, etc.

But in Weinstock's class we'd look at the forms for gradient, curl, divergence, etc., in various curvilinear coordinates, spherical, cylindrical, etc.

We spent a lot of time solving the "secular equation", finding eigenvalues and eigenvectors. That does have deep applications to quantum physics.

Later I'll write about my thesis advisor Dick McCray. When first getting to know McCray, he asked me about my college math education. He was incredulous when I told him that Weinstock spent class after class proving something called the "Implicit Function Theorem". McCray had never heard of it, but it was a central part of our course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_function_theorem

The point of view of an astrophysicist is very different from that of a mathematician!

One student collected "Weinstockisms", favorite sayings of Weinstock. He'd quip things like: "is the derivative of a product the product of the derivatives? NO, that's a political slogan."

The one though that has really stayed with me is succinct: "Gather, don't strew"

There's a temptation to EXPAND every expression you have factored. You want to see what your equation is made of, each little bit. But, particularly because his problems were all within coordinate systems and involved a lot of complicated terms, it's easy to lose track of some terms when you expand them all out.

Given that Weinstock's Saturday morning 10 am classes followed so soon after night in the Friday Disco on campus (open until 2 am), I sometimes got in to class a little late. My sneakers had this tell-tale squeak to them, probably from dancing on them so hard, so that when I came in Weinstock still facing the board would quip, "Here comes Bram with his squeaky sneakers!"

I didn't do super-well in Weinstick's classes, as I did in Young's, and his lectures weren't as entertaining and sometimes got bogged down in detail, but we all respected his knowledge and personal values.

Sue Colley. Notable as a female teacher / mentor. I also had You-Hua Chu as an astronomy mentor, but that was for only one month of January and then over a summer. And then Saku, now my most common research collaborator, who came to astronomy from a very different point of view from me. I'm more theoretical minded, and Saku very observational, leading her to be highly skeptical of ideas that weren't grounded in observation.

Colley taught my differential equations class and my Linear Algebra 2 class, and sponsored my honors math project in self-taught differential geometry and dynamic systems.

At times when Colley was mentoring me, I was distracted by the start of my attempted relationship with J. Once Colley said to me something like: if I had your talent I'd take it a lot further, you're in danger of squandering it... And once in our 8 am Linear Algebra II class, she found we weren't paying sufficient attention (I think there were only 2 or 3 of us in the class) and cancelled it.

Now on to my thesis advisor, Dick McCray.

He was really a kind of superlative person. He had all sorts of gifts, but it didn't go to his head and make him arrogant. He was extremely broad-minded and broadly educated. He championed students from diverse backgrounds, but was also fascinated by China, learning Chinese, visiting China, and finding most of his graduate students in China (one postdoc had been through the Cultural Revolution.) He said if a student could find their way out of China, where there was so much hidden talent, they had to be very good!

While McCray was my advisor, his wife had serious medical problems, and I often had to fend for myself. She was on dialysis for a while, needed hip replacement surgery, etc.

He was very charismatic, with Clark Gable movie star looks. He was an amateur airplane pilot, and in fact I found out at the birthday party celebrating his 70th, he sometimes flew his students to other universities for talks! He won some kind of award for swimming in the over-40 age category.

Before getting a PhD himself (he studied with Peter Goldreich, who did important work on Saturn's rings and many other fields, and who himself studied with Thomas Gold), McCray taught private high school science, I believe, specializing in optics, I think.

As I mentioned previously, he wasn't so grounded in abstract mathematics (like the Implicit Function Theorem), but knew tricks about applying math and computers to astrophysics models. When we found differential equations that were hard to integrate numerically, he'd point out a class of "stiff" differential equations.

Sometimes he'd surprise me with finding an alternate way to view something in astrophysics we took for granted. One of his research specialities was Supernova 1987a, the supernova closest to us in modern times when we had telescopes that could see across the electromagnetic spectrum. He worked on these mysterious "rings" surrounding the supernova. The spectrum showed some gas was coming towards us and some away, a sign of expansion--but he said: maybe it's contraction? That would also have some coming towards us and some away. It turned out it was expanding, not contracting, but still it impressed me on the need to think outside the box.

When I was a postdoc I developed this really clever mathematical and geometrical method for figuring out what was going on in a stellar wind with a neutron star inside it. The shadow of the X-rays moved through the wind, "slicing" it, and logical and geometric arguments showed how you could infer what was going on in the wind through these slices.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/307336/pdf

I showed it to McCray and he was not only very enthusiastic, but right then and there one-upped the clever geometry! I included both my method and his extension in the paper we wrote. He pointed out that the X-ray shadow of the star would be a cone, and then the nearly planar "isovelocity surface" would intersect the cone, so the region causing emission at a given velocity would be a conic section--simplifying a complex problem!

Now, this paper and its result haven't been all that important scientifically, but it was a neat situation where I could use clever math and logic to learn something real.

I got started with McCray when, floundering in grad school at first, I had to do a research project as part of our "comprehensive exams". Revising a telescope proposal he had written, I came up with this fascinating scenario.

A pulsar beam could reflect off a surrounding accretion disk. And the reflection could appear to move faster than light! That's a problem I sometimes suggest to my intro astronomy students: can the Bat-Signal on the clouds move faster than light? And yes, it can because it's not a physical thing. If you think the Bat-Signal is really moving across the sky, you're like my cat who thinks the red dot is really doing the moving.

So I used the old standby, proof by induction, which I used in my high school Westinghouse project, and then to answer Bob Young's devilishly tricky exam problem, to prove exactly how many points you could see at once from the disk, even though only 1 was lit up at a time, because of these "effectively faster than light" effects.

I also briefly did some freelance training of "AI"s in math, and was able to stump and then correct the AI with this problem.

Here's McCray with... none other than 10 year old Kanye West, in China!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kanye/comments/zfb6jd/a_young_kanye_west_living_in_china_he_spent_his/

(Third photo)

Ed Bostonian:

Going back in time now a bit, I want to mention (or re-mention) another formative teacher, Ed Bostonian, my 10th grade physics teacher (actually this was 11th grade physics, but I took the class in 10th grade).

There are contrasts and similarities at the same time with my thesis advisor McCray. McCray was universally admired (though some said he was a better researcher and mentor than teacher), a charismatic pilot, world traveler, medal winning swimmer.

And I feel kind of bad that the other entry I wrote about Mr. Bostonian, written the day after 9/11/2001, when you can see I was being flippant in reaction to the grim mood that I felt as a stultifying enforced unity, emphasized too much that he was very UNPOPULAR (unjustly!) with the mass of students in our time:

https://bram.dreamwidth.org/2001/09/12/

Later his daughter found that entry and angrily came to his defense, though saw later that I also had respect for him. She let me know about other difficulties in his life. The outward impressiveness of McCray wasn't the essence (his modesty and empathy were), a teacher can also be struggling in life and inspire.

I think I impressed Mr. Bostonian explaining to him a similar issue to the one that let me become McCray's research assistant: astrophysical illusions of faster than light travel. At the time a "superluminal" jet from a star system had been discovered, which puzzled Mr. Bostonian. I explained to him that the jet moving MOSTLY towards us with a little sideways motion had the sideways motion fast-forwarded from our perspective, as the jet started to catch up with the image it gave off.

I hardly ever write public entries on LiveJournal now. When I first got on tenure track, I played it careful. Also, Facebook has taken over a lot of my online socializing. Sometimes I vent in a friends-only entry. Let's see if I have much to say in public now.

Sometimes I think over things I've written and how they might appear to different people. Sometimes I think about the last entry I posted here. The political lens through which I expect my words to be read has been changing over the period I've had this blog, which I started back in 2000. In my last entry I bemoaned that even though the U.S. has so much going for it, there's always this insistence that we are an extraverted, busy people, always active and aimed at external achievement. Usually in the 16 years I've had this journal I've imagined someone scanning it over from a view to my political right, but times are a-changing as they used to say. The left has been gaining strength. So I imagine a reader thinking: "That's really the only bad thing you can say about this nation, that the cultural temperament doesn't always match yours? A nation that encoded slavery in its founding documents, that nearly wiped out the indigenous population in its borders?"

Well, having been so angry during the Bush years (starting with the way his "election" was handled and through the travesty of the Iraq War), and now happy to see the candidate I supported in the primaries (Obama) ensconced as President, I've been content to dole out more praise than scathing criticism of the way things are. When the Seth Rogan movie about North Korea, "The Interview", was threatened, I could download the movie to watch, and say: yeah, America should be free!

Of course I'm familiar with Chomsky, Zinn, et al., and almost entirely agree with their critiques. Paradoxically the potential and actual good in our systems have sat so close to the evil, often within single individuals like Thomas Jefferson. I'll skip over my theories for why that is, for now.

I guess I could say that the unbalanced temperament I find in the U.S., the emphasis on motion and extraverted energy, is probably linked in some way to its persistent deficiencies, the racist police violence, the predatory capitalism, etc.

The emergence of Trump as the Republican front-runner is maybe something I can address here. The way he denigrates his rivals as "low energy". He seems to appeal in similar ways as George W. Bush, who I detested, even though Trump called out the pious elision that allowed some to say of Bush, "he kept us safe," as if 9/11 came from an outer space time machine and not from the real world when Bush had more power than anyone else on the globe.

The similarity to me comes into play with Bush's joy over calling himself "the ex-ec-u-tive," and "the decider", drawing out all the syllables, strutting over the fact that he's The Boss, scoffing, "I don't do nuance"--the crisp, clean, executive who's worthy by the very act of making decisions. Trump too is known for being a reality TV show boss, taking joy in his power to make his words reality, no matter how they are tested (as his multiple bankruptcies show, he doesn't always pass the test!)--"You're fired!"

There was something also about the run-up to the Iraq War that deeply offended my temperament. We now know that some of the TV networks required at least 2 war advocates speak on air for every war opponent. There was a fearful group-think in the media. Maybe because the media is so often accused of being liberal they shilled for the war to prove their bona fides. That also offends me about Hillary Clinton, if I may continue to fit how current presidential contenders mesh with my world-view...

Before I get to her though--hearing Trump and the other Republicans talk about ISIS as if we could fix up the Middle East if only we were more ready to use violence... That offends me too! I think there are few things more tempting to humans than the prospect of doling out aggression to those who truly deserve it. We have to keep ourselves in check all the time, but if someone out there is a "bad guy" then finally we don't have to! And that biases some terribly... For some it's always the eve of WW II and every enemy of the U.S. is Hitler, every peaceful resolution is "appeasement"... (There was even one young TV talking head war advocate who kept insisting Obama's policy was "appeasement" who, when pressed, could not even describe what the historical policy of appeasement was!) And so there's very little I loathe more than when people fall into this trap.

I've become much more anti-war than I was when I started this journal. I viewed myself as liberal because I loved science, which is funded mostly through the government and not private industry. And so contrary to economic libertarians, I see a role for government, and it also made sense for the government to help those in need. I love science, and artistic expression, because they flow from our common humanity and imagination, and whether or not someone's good at making a buck, they share that common humanity and imagination and we should promote them and their lives as well.

But now I find there was something in the psychology of those who anticipated the Iraq War with joy that I despise. Also I've come to despise a certain kind of Conventional Wisdom that holds that certain things are politically inevitable, that must unfold in a certain way, and yet the ideas have been inherited from different eras. They no longer really apply but are being carried out blindly by political machinery--the way that guy accuses diplomacy of being "appeasement" because he knows it sounds bad even if he doesn't know what it means.

So that's part of what irks me about Hillary Clinton. The run-up to the Iraq War was a case of The Emperor's New Clothes. And there were several types of politician: those who hallucinated that the emperor did have new clothes, the type who could see the Emperor was naked but by political expediency assented to the consensus--or even worse, those who punched down, condemning those who spoke up and said, "he's naked!" Only a few would actually say "he's naked!" which is what helped Obama get the job in 2008 once we all saw the disaster Iraq was. Hillary Clinton strikes me as one who will always for expediency go with the conventional, even if it harms the activists who are getting it right from below.

Of course she did nothing wrong in Benghazi, but as Sec. of State she was far too aggressive in regime change in Libya. It was the old "get the bad guy" syndrome that led us to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

On the Democratic side though the election isn't turning on foreign policy so much, as that isn't Bernie Sanders's main interest. Were Biden to enter the race I'd give him a close look, because I know he's truly anti-war. The generals in Afghanistan called him "Vice President Bite-Me" because of his insistence that the war not be continued merely out of inertia and habit.

But when it comes to economics too, there's a lot of Conventional Wisdom that is making the present a prisoner to attitudes from the past. Both Obama and Hillary represented a post-Reagan synthesis, they were both middle-of-the-road politicians who were prepared to make compromises--only they would compromise in different ways. Obama has straddled the gap between neo-liberalism and leftism, and over the course of his presidency I have made the move from liberal to leftist. The next President probably won't be able to straddle those ideologies, but will have to choose. The neo-liberal advocates lower taxes, lower trade barriers, charter schools, thinks "our schools are failing" and teacher unions have too much power, thinks unions are archaic institutions that reek of the past and hold back the energetic dynamism of new transformative technology. Mostly the neo-liberal has incorporated the mind-set of the upper strata, and thinks, "If only the masses could have the discipline and energy of the elite! We must provide nudges for them, we must devise clever remedies for whatever infirmity led them not to be rich! But they always must be a win-win kind of deal; anything that would take away from the rich is anti-business, would hurt our competitiveness, would be class warfare, could not become political reality..."

Well, it's not 1980 any more... Not only are minority populations greater, but the Millennial generation has been completely screwed. Conventional politicians still think most Americans are middle-class. When I was in school I was taught we had a "barrel-like" wealth distribution in this country, mostly a middle class with smaller poor and wealthy classes. So many Americans now live paycheck to paycheck, so many have hardly any life savings to speak of. The Middle Class, a family that owns a house in a suburb and a couple of cars, is no longer normal, and the values of the class are not normal either. The reality is student debt... When liberal politicians like John Edwards invoked "two Americas", they were appealing to the compassion of liberals, but now so many Americans have fallen behind that such talk appeals to self-interest. Also on the theme of people living with a conventional wisdom of the past--the term "socialist" does not carry the baggage it once did! How many voter now never knew the Cold War?

I value nuance greatly of course, and believe that evolution is stronger and more stable than revolution. I believe that the incremental changes of the Obama era will really matter. We avoided the toxic "austerity" of Europe. But I also see that there has not been enough push-back to changes taking place largely out of their own momentum, changes pushed by advocates from another era--and the system is out of whack.

Anyway, maybe I'll end this here, and get on with my day...!

I have many things I should be doing, and want to be doing--job applications, astrophysics research analyzing particular star systems, my own idiosyncratic discrete models of quantum mechanics, finding a good sushi place to take a date--but for a while I've been musing about certain topics in history and anthropology, and I feel inspired this evening to finally write a public LiveJournal entry. So this is an indulgence; once out of the way I'll put schnoz to the grindstone.

As I've been getting older, I've been thinking more about history. My thesis advisor, I remember, told me about how interested he was in history. I think as one ages one looks more for a larger perspective of where we humans came from... So there are a few strands of these speculations I'll cover in this entry.

One item in the news from a couple of months ago: the genome of several Neanderthals have been mostly decoded and compared with those of modern human populations. The main investigator was this Swedish guy working at the Max Planck Institute for Anthropology in Germany, Svente Paabo. The intriguing result is that non-African populations have 1-4% of their DNA from Neanderthals.

One can get a little queasy that investigations into human origins like this could be fuel for racists, and racism truly is rank bullshit. At least in this case the results kind of hack away at the received racist stereotypes; Neanderthals in popular culture are often depicted as subhuman, and white people have enslaved and oppressed Africans and white supremacists have often derided "mud peoples" as impure mixtures (when it turns out non-Africans are the mixtures). In the big picture it's so obvious that racism has been a driving force in human history and that the ways people measure "races" (African-Americans for example, can carry DNA anywhere from mostly African to mostly European) and measure differences are so biased as to be meaningless--even genes are expressed in different ways in different environments, the expression linked to fetal environment, diet, etc. etc.

But that aside, I think it's kind of neat to accept this new information into one's worldview. It brings the distant past in greater variety down into the present. There have also been recent discoveries of other closely related hominid fossils--one in Siberia, and the celebrated Homo Florensis that only disappeared 13,000 years ago, the island "hobbits". So our myths peopled by elves, trolls, giants, dwarfs--that could represent a kind of lonliness for our missing also-human cousins.

The Neanderthals one can now assume were in our own species--at least according to the definition that they produced fertile offspring with us--unless, as was pointed out in one blog I read, one decides to call all non-African people members of a non-species, sort of like freak fertile mules! But before one goes too far, from what I understand the Neanderthals still were pretty different from modern people. They were, I gather, about 5 times further away from us, genetically, as the most far-flung people nowadays are from each other. Their mitochondrial DNA line, passed from mother to offspring, no longer survives. Given that I myself am stocky, muscular, with a big nose, prominent eyebrows, and small jaw, one might speculate about where in that 1-4% range I'm in--but for perspective on how different they were, it's worth realizing that unlike modern humans, Neanderthals couldn't even throw a spear because their arms and joints just weren't built for it. They apparently were very muscular, and hunted by getting up close to Mammoths and spearing them (pretty badass!)--instead of throwing the spears or shooting arrows like modern folk.

By the way, it's amusing and sad how the internet kind of levels scholarly achievement... Any science crank with good web skills can make a case to the public in a way most people can't see through... For example this site on Neanderthals (which bizarrely claims the recent study supports it), which superimposes a Neanderthal skull inside a chimpanzee head without regard to orientation, 3D shape, or scale, in an attempt to mythologize Neanderthals, in a contrarian fashion to current research, as nonhuman.

In actuality, Neanderthal and human lines are supposed to have diverged 500,000 years ago. As the received timeline gives modern human emergence as occurring 100,000-200,000 years ago, my uneducated guess is that either some of what made both lines human happened in parallel or there was some intermixture still in that time period. DNA analysis has shown that Neanderthals had the modern human version of the FOXP2 gene, which in the popular press is called the "speech gene". One (British I think) family which, by inherited mutation in this gene, had developmental problems which included being unable to pronounce words such as "hippopotamus", led to the association of this gene with speech. (I think birds also have a different version of this gene from other animals, perhaps related to their singing syntax.) But the role of FOXP2 is actually very complicated. It turns on and off a whole bunch of other genes in the course of development and life:



This is a network of the interconnection between FOXP2 and other genes. This reminded me a little of computer hackery--that sometimes randomly messing around with computer software you find something interesting--I remember in high school we had these PET computers that had only characters and no graphics. They had a memory add-on called "toolkit" that let you do "advanced" stuff like "trace" the BASIC program as it ran. You started up the "toolkit" by typing, "SYS 45056". One day I tried instead "SYS 55056", and found that it would give interesting behavior, always different--once it affected the computer's display so that the characters shrank into dots which followed each other around in a rotating ellipse--it seemed like magic to the other kids. Anyway, the power of random tweaking at the hardware level where things are interconnected--that seems to be underlying evolution.

Also it's interesting to speculate about what the importation of Neanderthal genes did for people... Could it have been that it wasn't so much a matter of benefit to individuals but to the population, to have these genes? Humans tend to live in tribes, and as baseball players play infield or outfield, we specialize in different skills and work best when there is variety and balance. The first hybrids with Neanderthals must have knocked out some genes in which the non-Neanderthals (I'll call them Cro-Magnons) had evolved differences from chimpanzees, but Neanderthals had retained the ancestral version, and vice-versa. But for example, if gene 1 had evolved in Cro-Magnons and then gene 2 evolved thousands of years later, was the interaction with gene 1 necessary to the success of gene 2 or not? Probably this depended on the case. And vice-versa--the hybrids would have some new Neanderthal genes which had never been paired with the ancestral genes--and some hybrids must have had the novel genes from both ancestors.

Apparently the tools of the Neanderthals were a little more primitive than the tools of the Cro-Magnons, but not out of the range of what one might consider cultural variation. There's evidence that Neanderthals created musical instruments, like this 40,000 year old flute carved from a bone from a bear cub:



And a diagram reconstructing how the full instrument may have looked:



There was speculation that the holes could have been bite marks of a carnivore, but there were no marks on the other side (from the lower jaw). The spaces on the flute mark do, re, mi, fa notes!

We don't know why the Neanderthals died out. There's some evidence modern humans killed them off. Also, they were adapted for Ice Age conditions, and may not have competed well with modern humans who could hunt with bows and arrows from far off, and who needed fewer calories to fuel their less-muscular bodies.

* * *

In other news that has fueled my imagination and speculation, I've had snippets of my own DNA decoded, now that there are some affordable services that do this. I'll try not to blab too much about this, as it's pretty private information! Yet it's also very interesting, and it's motivated me to learn more about genetics and human populations and history, branching out from self-absorption to curiosity about the wider world.

There's been lots of speculation about where Jewish people come from, how closely related we are really to the ancient Hebrews of the Bible. Some of this speculation may have come from anti-Semites, religious nuts who admired the Hebrews who brought into the world the religion that would give Christianity as an offshoot--and yet thought that actual Jewish people were kind of schmucky, and couldn't have been related. There's also been legitimate speculation about a mysterious ancient Turkish group called the Kazars (the subject of a very interesting, playful, and experimental novel by the late Milorad Pavic) that may have converted to Judaism. And throughout the Jewish diaspora, there's been no way to know how much intermingling there's been with the European populations in whose midst the Ashkenazi or Sephardic populations lived.

Well, it turns out I'm pretty closely related to the populations that currently inhabit the Middle East, including Palestianians, the Druze, and Bedouins.

One interesting side-note is that my "paternal haplotype" (Y chromosome passed from fathers) as far as I can tell may be more common among coastal populations in the Levant than inland populations. One subset of Jews (not me), often with last name "Cohen", are reputed to have descended from the temple priests, and ultimately to be descend from Moses' brother Aaron. Actually there is no archeological evidence for Moses, or the Patriarchs of the Bible! Perhaps some day such will be forthcoming. There was a kingdom of David centered on Jerusalem, but it's a matter of some dispute how extensive this kingdom really was, and Jerusalem existed as a city before the Jewish people got there.

In any case, I might speculate that this Middle-Eastern coastal population I partly descend from may be a remnant of the ancient Pheonecians, seafaring people, centered mostly on Lebanon and northern Israel, who have mostly disappeared from history in spite of introducing the first real alphabet.

From the Bible as a text one imagines the Israelites influenced by ancient Sumeria: the epic of Gilgamesh also carries the story of a flood, and Hammurabi like Moses had a code. Though there's no evidence outside of the Bible for the Israelites being slaves in Egypt, there was an Egyptian pharoah, Akhenaten, who briefly introduced monotheism to Egypt.

But it is interesting also to look at history from the vantage not just of the inland peoples, but those on the Mediteranean coast. The Odyssey for example gives a picture of what life might have felt like at the time. And it's also interesting to think of forerunners of the Israelite population. We often think that we can trace origins back through history, that my ancestors were Jewish, full stop. We retell the stories of those who were coerced into renouncing the defining monotheism of our heritage, we recount all the times we had our asses handed to us, by Babylon, by Rome, and yet persisted... And yet somewhere in that ancestry, there were probably Canaanites, Phoenicians, whoever--who were coerced into this newfangled Jewish religion that sprung up perhaps from some Bedouin goatherders inspired by rumors from Egypt, while other Bedouin goatherders still in the 21st century toil on in that ancient goatherding life as if all of this history passed them by!

So it's a change of perspective to look at the map of Europe and see instead of the land-masses and river-beds that gave rise to the inland nations, the "cradle of civilization" also centered on the Mediteranian Sea, birthing the Greeks, Carthage, the Phoenecians with their fancy triple-decked rowing ships trading prized purple dyes... I imagine it in some ways idyllic, the sun and sea, trading olives and wine and spreading an early version of a cosmopolitan life...

So my nth postdoc is over--I'm rewriting my statement of teaching philosophy and sending out CVs. Meanwhile, I'm excited to get some time to work on my own research. (While still tinkering with the postdoc project as well.) I've been feeling pretty good this weekend. I have both some more speculative physics ideas to work on, and also the X-ray binary research I've worked on most of my career, which is more familiar to me and easier to direct myself on than the galaxy research I've started.

I'm making some Doppler tomograms for a colleague, and this motivated me to go back to data I still haven't published on the Scorpius X-1 star system. Sco X-1 was the first X-ray binary discovered--it's the brightest persistent X-ray star in the sky. If we had X-ray vision, we'd see this as the brightest in the night sky (except perhaps for some variable stars). It's both close by and intrinsically bright--about 10³⁸ ergs/s is the energy rate of the X-rays, whereas the Sun gives off in visible light several 10³³ erg/s, so it's on the order of 100,000 times brighter in X-rays than the Sun in visible light. It's a mysterious "Z source", a neutron star system from which we've never seen the regular pulsations that mark the rotation of the neutron star.

Anyway, the problem with this data was that it was the first observation of this star system in the far ultraviolet, and it turns out that interstellar gas absorbs the spectrum that far in the UV at multiple narrow lines, corresponding to all sorts of different atoms in different stages of ionization, and also molecules in different energies of rotation and vibration.

But when you're working on your own you can afford to be a hero. So I'm trying to go through and identify all of the lines in the spectrum that were eating up the spectrum. It was quite severe: there are two bright lines from the star system itself, emission lines, that I wanted to see in this observation. However, the absorption was so severe that only one of them could be seen! And one of my scientific goals was determining the ratio between the two lines!

But I'm impressed by how much I can reconstruct of what's going on by meticulous attention to the interstellar absorption. I can probably do better, but this is a major start.

Below I'm showing only a small portion of the spectrum--it goes from 912 Angstroms (the lyman limit: this wavelength corresponds to the energy needed to take the lowest energy level of an electron in hydrogen and break it free of the atom--below this wavelength, you don't see much through normal amounts of interstellar gas until you get to wavelengths smaller than a hydrogen atom. It goes from 912 Angstroms out to 1180 Angstroms or so, where the Hubble Space Telescope picks up. I helped a couple of my ex-supervisors with Hubble observations of Sco X-1 that looked at the spectrum from 1200 to 1700 Angstroms or so.

One thing that was neat was that I was able to take the model for the continuum from the proposal I had written to get the FUSE observations of Sco X-1, based on our model of the Hubble observations--and what I wrote in the proposal matched almost perfectly with the actual data! The lines didn't match nearly as well, but the continuum did--although I am wondering whether I just got lucky. There's uncertainty in how much the interstellar gas reddened the spectrum, and I may be able to get a better handle on that.



What's going on here? The spectrum shows brightness (flux) on the y axis and the wavelength on the x axis. The jagged black curve is the actual data, averaged over 15 sub-observations. The red curve is my model--based on (1) the model for the continuum from the proposal, (2) a model for the emission lines (quintuply ionized Oxygen) as a Voigt profile (convolution of gaussian and lorenztian shapes--look up the defs in Wikipedia), with the ratio between the two lines as a free parameter, (3) absorption lines at known wavelengths from Silicon, Carbon, and Oxygen, and very deep absorption from Hydrogen ("lyman beta")--also absorption from H2, molecular hydrogen. The absorption lines are marked on the top of the graph with a little line and the name of the absorption--if it's from molecular Hydrogen I also mark the rotational level (j=0 to j=5). The smooth black curve shows my model (just continuum and Oxygen emission lines) without any of the absorption in the way.

You can see I was able to reconstruct the ratio between the two Oxygen lines!

Also, I mentioned that this is actually the sum of 15 sub-observations. I was able to measure the Doppler shift of the emission lines in each sub-observation. This tells us the velocity towards or away from us of the gas that gives off the emission lines. The observations were planned to cover the entire orbit of the star system, which lasts I think about 0.7 days. In the plot below I show my measurements with * and with a sine curve and a line I show what other researchers independently think are the expected motion of the neutron star and the velocity of the star system as a whole (it's "systemic velocity").



I think most of the observations previously had only identified emission lines from the normal star--these would be, based on the velocity, from the accretion disk surrounding the neutron star. Optical helium lines seem to move similar to these Oxygen lines, but with a phase shift.

Note that the alignment isn't perfect--it could be that I need to calibrate the zero velocity better. I will have to do that based on some of the interstellar lines. Right now I've only grouped the data to be accurate to about 15 km/s. It's also possible that the accretion disk isn't perfectly symmetric and may emit more from one side or the other. It's possible there is some emission from the normal star along with the accretion disk. Perhaps my empirical model of Voigt profile is not so good--I could make a double-peaked accretion disk model, broadened by turbulence instead.

So this might help constrain the mass of the neutron star better. Also, I want to make Doppler tomograms to see if we could map out structure in the disk. It will depend on my accurately finding the zero velocity. But also being able to correct for this multitude of interstellar lines is important.

Anyway, it's time to go to bed. I'm also excited to be reading a paper by Ted Jacobson on the Feynman checkerboard (old paper from 1984). It's much more sophisticated in regards to the physics than the other papers I've been working from. It's distinguished in several ways from what I'm doing; one is that he's not using a lattice--he's allowing one special dimension to be the spin axis/particle travel dimension, and then assumes the particle scatters randomly in the next step, defining the next special direction.

I used to be much more of a booster of Artificial Intelligence than I am now. Growing up, I was into Godel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter's and Dennett's "The Mind's I", and other similar books. In grad school, I used to get into debates online with Mikhail Zeleny, this Russian grad student, kind of a crank, who believed that AI was impossible. He was prone to obscure and kind of bizarre claims (computers would never achieve "noumenal perception of the infinite"), but in some ways was intelligent and erudite. He used to get into arguments with McCarthy, the guy who created the AI programming language LISP, and would cite obscure errors from McCarthy's papers, if I recall correctly.

Some AI critics have influenced my thinking even if I think that their criticisms are highly suspect. I think that Searle and Penrose have made me appreciate more that a human is a physical system, and that "intelligence", "thought", "cognition", etc. are abstractions we make based on that physical system. What seemed "natural" to someone growing up with programming was that the Mind was to the Brain as Software is to Hardware. That "we" as thinking beings could be equivalent to intelligent computer programs, but we were "running" on the "hardware" of a brain instead of a computer.

There's something a little arbitrary though about abstracting from a real physical system to leave only "thoughts"--though one has to admit that while arbitrary it's also not entirely artificial. Many cultures have imagined a separate spirit and body. I think what makes AI seem so transparently plausible is that computers are designed in such a way that the hardware is separated so clearly from the software. We know what Microsoft Word is (unfortunately!) independently from Mac or PC (or even PowerPC Mac).

Many supporters of AI think that "intelligence" is a perfectly coherent abstraction from a physical system, but "consciousness" is not--that it's vague, or meaningless, an "epiphenomenon" arising from short-term memory or the "Cartesian theater" of different computational "modules" within the brain interacting. I guess the reason why this is, is that intelligence is in some ways measurable, but not consciousness. Although what we measure is some statistical abstraction from tests, this "g" or "general intelligence" factor, is not necessarily what we mean by intelligence, and was only found (and considered to be similar to "intelligence") because of confidence that this concept we normally spoke about had some correlate in reality. It's hard to imagine developments that could convince us that intelligence (or its lack) is not a useful concept to apply. (Particularly after exposure to the works of George W. Bush.)

One easy way to make the brain-computer analogy work is to understand neurons as performing a parallel computation. But although Penrose and Hammeroff's speculations appear mostly bunk, they did convince me that there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on below the level of the neuron. The cytoskeleton of neurons (or all animal cells) is fascinating with these microtubles... And the way that messenger RNA sends signals around the cell, both through the bases of the RNA and through its shape--that's fascinating, and I'd like to learn more about it.

My guess is something like IBM's Blue Brain Project, that tries to simulate an entire mammalian brain, neuron by neuron, would not really reproduce the process by which neurons grow new outgrowths (or even new neurons are born and become interconnected)--that perhaps the short-term behavior of brains will be easier to simulate than longer-term changes, in which what goes on within the cell to change its growth might matter more.

When you look at, say, soap and water mixing, it's hard not to anthropomorphize and think the liquids have repulsion as humans do--and to think that some of how we "feel" is inseparable from actual chemical reactions, as opposed to patterns in which the underlying substrate doesn't matter. This is, of course, not a scientific argument.

What I'm getting at is that AI boosters and critics may be subdividing the world differently, and may frame the "ultimate" question differently. The boosters may be asking: "Can a computer do what a human does?" (Abstracting certain things that merely "make up" a person but don't count as to what a person "does".) Whereas the critics would say, "But it's not a human, so what?"

I seem to be thinking a lot about politics these days--I'm not certain why.

With the Republicans scrambling to find a Conservative True Believer to succeed Bush, I've been thinking more about Reagan and his relation to George W. Bush. It's almost as if W. were Reagan returned both as tragedy and farce. He's certainly made Reagan, in retrospect, look better (as he's made his father look quite fantastic by comparison). Overall, I would say W.'s attempt to enact Reagan's legacy was like someone with no sense of rhythm banging really really hard on a drum to hide his deficiencies.

On Reagan, in spite of my great antipathy for him while I was in high school, the following could be said honestly and positively:

1. His presidency was a time of general economic prosperity and peace--except for what appear to have been mostly minor skirmishes
   
2. The Cold War ended without major bloodshed
   

On the other hand, the failures of the era were mostly behind the stage:

1. Economic inequality rose
   
2. The deficit grew vast, and was only closed up by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton
   
3. Some of the "America is so strong now" posturing hid dishonest maneuvering (for example, Carter was so widely assailed for the hostage crisis while Reagan actually negotiated for hostages)
   
4. Objectionable judicial nominees (Bork), an attourney general who was a pig (Meese), labor losing power, etc.
   

Although George H.W. Bush is largely thought to have been limited to 1 term by his breaking his "no new taxes" pledge, I think that's revisionist.

I think in reality, it was Pat Buchanan's speech at the Republican convention in 1992, calling for a "culture war", that alienated Republican moderates, the kind who just wanted peace and prosperity and were a little more sober-headed and less wild than Democrats seemed to be.

I remember working for Clinton that election and seeing the campaign office filled with ex-Republicans turned off by Buchanan's right-wing rhetoric.

* * *

Lots of Republican voters value morality, and unfortunately that's in their minds kind of coded up with lots of aspects that are really extraneous to true morality. It often seems limited to shielding their children from adult content, or castigating those who don't live in traditional monogamous heterosexual relationships, and not about truth and honesty and trying to understand and respect others. It often seemed curled up with warm feelings about living up to one's own religion.

It's troubling to see a book like that by Dinesh D'Souza, who used to get his culture war on fighting against multiculturalism in academia (which did have a faddish aspect in the mid '80s.) Now he seems to be arguing that the Islamic radicals who attacked the U.S. on 9/11/2001 were fighting against our permissive cultural values (not foreign policy such as troops in Saudi Arabia, Palestinian problems, etc.) and that conservatives should join this fight (sort of to appease the terrorists, I gather.)

For one, of course, permissiveness is relative--in the 1950s Elvis shaking his booty on TV was quite shocking. Internally, if one has a problem with the culture, one shouldn't work to appease murderers from outside the society. (Yeah, I might have a problem with the culture too, but not as a matter for legislation so much as (1) increasing education, and (2) increasing employment opportunities might increase quality of stuff--I'm not offended by "vulgarity" and those who are can always look away...)

I tend to be a relativist who on the contrary feels that relativism is morality, morality is fundamentally not imposing one's will on others. Perhaps the few conservatives left who really do have some intellectual cred--and who do not just like to paint pictures of strawman opponents as sloganeers--view themselves more as the successors of the Enlightenment, and view that time as having a stricter heierarchy of values... On the contrary, I'm influenced by developments such as non-Euclidian geometry--ideas from the last few centuries that have opened minds to how much our traditional culture closed off.

Returned the Yiddish book to the library and skimmed a book about the Eric Rudolph case. Not only has Eric Rudolph recently been sentenced to life, but the case is also timely because another man with two first names, John Roberts, may actually turn out to reverse Roe vs. Wade, although this time through means other than pure evil.

I read in the NYT that a doctor at a clinic bombed by Rudolph confronted him at the trial. She tried to dress him down. Whenever I see pictures of him, he seems insufferably smug, as if he is absolutely sure of the rightness of his cause and furthermore, convinced that his opponents are foolish and stupid.

It was much the same with the Unabomber, who taunted the FBI and his victims (like Gelertner). Before the Unabomber was caught, a lot of people thought he was cool because of that police sketch of him in shades and that hood. He railed against science and technology, and technophobes and luddites cheered him on. Then when he was revealed to be a scragly slob, and, moreover, an old school geek who wrote incomprehensible math papers, the same people dropped him like a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks, it doesn't matter which because they both weigh a ton. I thought that was ironic. These trendoids cared more about his hygeine than the fact that he killed people.

(Actually, as revealed in The Atlantic, the Unabomber--as I will call him because I can't spell Kacynski or whatever--signed up for a psychological experiment at Harvard, in which after befriending him, a trained lawyer betrayed him, caricatured and demolished his worldview. All while his vital signs were impersonally recorded for further study.)

Anyway, this doctor told Rudolph that he hadn't been so clever: his schemes had been foiled and the clinic's work went on as before. Perhaps not for very long, now that John Roberts seems headed toward confirmation.


* * *


Entering college, I believed in the Democratic platform, but there were two issues I had reservations about, affirmative action and abortion. My position then can be thought of as a universalist approach, that clearly fairness meant treating everyone equal, and that the rightness or wrongness of abortion didn't have to do with what the individual woman carrying the fetus thought. It was probably not coincidence that, as a white male, I thought conditions most favorable, or least harmful, to my group followed from universal principles. Later I learned that crucially important nuances applied to these situations, and finally, they became not nuances, but new principles. I debated Judith Thompson's transfused violinist and Dennet's conditions of personhood and Peter Singer's version of utilitarianism, followed Dershowitz's metaphor of floors and ceilings.

I think that at age 17 I briefly flirted with these ideas means that now, when I see them, I feel I see through their appeal. Pro-lifers stomp their feet and say, "But it's not ok to choose to kill someone! Slaveowners couldn't choose the death of their slaves! A fetus is human!" And I think, "That is the argument of a 17 year old. Can't you suggest something more sophisticated?" Whenever anyone suggests something is obvious, I conclude it is wrong.


* * *


The Rudolph book is not very well written. The sentence structure doesn't vary much. There are too many points of view, and the attempt to get inside the heads of the major players is frustrating. But you can't go wrong with that story, really.

Richard Jewell, for example, got tangled in. His is an elemental story of someone falsely accused, like Kafka's Joseph K. Even Bill Clinton, trying to ooze out of the Monica predicament, compared himself to Richard Jewell, which, of course, he wasn't like.

I was disappointed to think that the doctor's upbraiding of Rudolph, suggesting that abortions would go on in spite of terrorism, appears not to be a winning hand. I imagined myself there trying to lecture the guy, instead attacking his belief system--perhaps like the lawyer who tore about the Unabomber in that Harvard experiment detailed by The Atlantic. I thought the beliefs driving his antiabortion terrorism might have been similar to what I thought at 17, and that I could wipe his smugness away by showing how simplistic his core beliefs were.

So I raced ahead to find out: what did this guy actually believe? And I was disappointed at the stupidity of it. I did not think it was possible to be that stupid and yet to be that smug about it. I mean, he's not only dumber than dirt, he's dumber than the dirt that perished because it was not fit to survive in competition with the regular normal dirt that's under our feet. There you have it: Eric Rudolph looks up to dino-dirt.

Apparently (I only skimmed) he was a subscriber to the "Christian Identity" movement, which holds that yeah, the Bible's all literally true, but those evil Jews put themselves in it--and Jesus was really not Jewish at all. I mean: with all those miracles and Son of God stuff and partings of seas and Sun stopping in the sky, and we all come from Adam and Eve--all that, and the only thing you can question and doubt and suspect is different from the way it's written down is the race of some characters? Not to mention that there is documentation outside the Bible (Josephus) on Jesus.


[Yeah, and maybe the Buddha was a Native American, Mohammad was Inuit, and Martin Luther was an Aboriginee...]



* * *


The day, my day, was a bust.

Last night's dancing was fun. There was a guest DJ, but I showed up halfway through his set. Someone asked me how I liked it and I confessed I didn't know that much about the music at goth night, as opposed to '80s night. My body likes what it likes.

There were times when I thought I had some good moves going. A woman talked to me at the bar and--playing against type, I shook her hand and asked her name (she came in with a guy though).

I wasn't the only one to use the "Ohio monsoon" phrase. Leaving the club at 2:15 am we found ourselves deluged, and hid out under the ledge for a while.

Today I think my body successfully resisted my obligation to do anything useful. Many of the useful things on my list are "you have to do this to fit in with society and the world" kind of things. My body rebels, I get horny, I stare off into space, I surf the web.

Now perhaps I've recovered from dancing enough to be lucid enough to do something.

I also have some entertainment: I've rented a Penn and Teller show about Bullshit on DVD, and also Constantine with Keanu Reeves. I wanted to see Hotel Rwanda, but it was out (I considered buying it though.) At first the subject seemed daunting, depressing, and an uncomfortable duty for me to learn about--although it is something I can no longer affect (Darfur is another matter--although it's hard to affect anything, given the US does not have a popular vote.) Reading about Rwanda in Salon, however, provided the key word by which it has entered my consciousness: it is incomprehensible. The Yiddish book, just returned, had also made me think about the Nazi genocide of Jews.

Help me, I'm addicted to this damn internet web thing! A crumb of work to do that involves anything that's hard, and I'm Doctor Surffingers. To paraphrase King Henry II's inadvertent death sentence upon Thomas Becket: Will no-one rid me of this troublesome DSL connection?

At least I'm helping a colleague on a proposal to use the doomed, Doomed, DOOMED Hubble Space Telescope to investigate the brightest of a class of X-ray binaries called the "Z-sources", so called because they trace out a "Z" shape, for only theorized reasons, in a "color-color diagram" that's sort of like a Hertzprung-Russell diagram, but in X-rays. And they have mysterious unstable oscillations up to 1,000 times a second.

So these are some spoils of my daily joy ride down the information superhighway:



It appears as if Kerry and Edwards are coming out, in favor of civil unions. Future (running) mates?

Michael Kinsley in that virtual rag, Slate:

When the government is running a deficit of half a trillion dollars a year, a tax cut isn't giving folks their own money back. It is borrowing money to pass out, until it has to be paid back.

This Salon review of a book about Gnosticism annoyed me. The topic seemed interesting, and I'd like to learn more about the Gnostics. They seem to have believed that the God of our world is evil, responsible for what's wrong with the world, but that hidden away at a higher level was the real God. William Blake seems to have had a similar theology. What annoyed me about the review--although I am unfamiliar with the subject and haven't seen the book reviewed--was that it seemed very centered on our own time, and on the beliefs of our day. It was fixated on the book getting to the sexy parts. You know, one of those reviewers who wears her pubes on her sleeve (see for example the "elbow sex" scenes in The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Annoyed by the academic writing, with footnotes, the reviewer seemed to require that the book be a carnival ride. However, very few people can be relentlessly hip about academic subjects; David Foster Wallace is one of the few people who carries it off in his own mind. In particular, questions like "were the Gnostics feminist?" annoyed me, because they didn't try to get a feeling for the times Gnostic ideology flourished. It seems to me that what we think of as feminism is a reaction to specific roles and ideologies that came before. Was Athens democratic? Yes, for citizens. Of course an ancient theology is going to seem paradoxical like that. "Gnostic" is a label that is attached to 15 centuries of thought, so inconsistencies will be huge.

I've also been thinking about why I lost a recent LJ friend (of course free disassociation should be allowed without an inherent fuss.) I'm not sure why this happened, but I do have a tendency for satire and irony, and I often don't spell out when I'm not being serious, or what my purpose is in not saying what I literally believe. I suppose some of you like me more for this playful but ambiguous habit. I shouldn't be all peer pressured and aim to please anyone though, friends who stay or those who don't. I should be open to self-examination and re-thinking.

On the good side of satire is someone like Swift writing A Modest Proposal. It should be pretty transparent that Jonathan Swift didn't think poverty would be best solved by munching on babies. I don't follow rap music so closely, but perhaps there is a place to look for people who get in trouble with words--I imagine some starting out ironic, exaggerating, and finding that the only protest they are making is a token side-swipe of irony.

Writing is so many things. I suppose in the end I don't think it relates to morality. It's mysterious though, what it reveals and doesn't--does the writer know best the meaning of the words, or is the writer blinded by lack of distance? How important is it to clear away words that could hurt--if "misinterpreted"--and how important is catharsis, jokingly thrashing out words (which they say can never hurt, although sticks and stones break bones) to release them, conjure them up and laugh at just how stupid evil is? Does anyone think I want to be Rasputin and shtup Heather Graham (who I have never even had a dinner date with), and that I scorn right handed women as female dogs and prostitutes? You might as well think my revenge against Osama bin Laden would be a mere kick to the tuchus and denial of my home-cooked spanakopita. Perhaps the humor is in the unexpectedness, and you have to know what I really do consider an appropriate reaction.

So anyway, yesterday I went to a poetry slam. My housemate was MC. I know you only read this to read about my dancing escapades. After the poetry reading I went dancing--not my usual night, but I've decided I need exercise two nights a week (though dancing late sets off my sleep cycle! catch-22 yet again!) This was goth night, or "Crypt". I think these black clad weirdos are better dancers than the multiclad weirdos of Saturday Night ('80s music), when I usually dance. And there were many songs I felt kind of lost dancing to; looking to people around me only confused me. Some songs were from a genre I think of as Konstipaschorn, a kind of industrial slow beat with some strangled Germanic vocals over it--I feel so bad for these vocalists and just want to give them some X-Lax! Actually, this may be the genre that techstep plays over the radio. But I did eventually hit my stride, formal shoes notwithstanding. Started out goofy, but settled down a bit. Best part of the evening: the DJ played "I'm a Vampire" by Future Bible Heroes. The DJ is in fact the keyboardist for this band. Not many people were on the dance floor, so I danced right beneath the DJ's booth, making a kind of tribute to him. (I suspect I annoy him, when he can see me, by a lack of strict beat--he's a musical pro after all.) But I danced energetically and entertainingly ("I can turn into a bat"--and I did the hand-shadow for a flying eagle; when the song emphasized keyboards, I pretended to play), subtly bowing to the DJ booth as the song reached its conclusion.

Up late. Went to an internet cafe/bookstore, a place I kind of like, but on the way back I felt sick. Luckily my office was just there--went to the bathroom, found myself sweaty. I think something's going around.

I'll spare you the trivalent network lecture. Of course I'm thinking of such topics. I'll remind you that more than trying to solve a problem, I'm trying to construct something new here. Maybe later or tomorrow I'll write something on this topic.

Interesting article by George Lakoff on the California election, "framing" of issues, and how Republicans appeal to "strict father" emotions in calling for blind discipline.

At this Internet cafe, I read some Zizek, who I'd read about in the New Yorker last month. Very interesting. He's Yugoslav, a Lacanian philosopher. In his book on 9/11 and other dates, titled "The Desert of the Real" (from "The Matrix"), he starts out with a story from the old East Germany (from memory):

A man's friend was moving to Siberia to look for work. "Listen," the friend said, "what I write may be censored. We better have a code. If I write in blue ink, it's true, but if it's in red ink, it had to get past the censors so it's false."

The friend moves to Siberia. After a while, a letter written in blue ink is received, "Everything is wonderful here. There are well-paying pleasant jobs available, the rooms are spacious and well-heated, the women are beautiful and friendly. The only think you can't get here is red ink."

I agree with Zizek that this is a wonderful little story and applies not only to communist dictatorships, but also to Western nations. Somehow direct dissent (red ink) is taken away from us, and what we must do is obliquely point out, encoded but in the open, that everything is a lie.

I'd like to read more by him.

Anyway, what do I mean specifically? For example, Salon's recent article on Stigliz's new book points out that there's a "Neanderthal" right-wing reflex against anyone who criticizes the underpinnings of pure unregulated capitalism, but no basic in-your-face leftie criticism--there's only nuance.

Journals like The Baffler or Baffler editor Thomas Frank's book "One Market Under God" often will tell a story through the eyes of a pure unregulated capitalist and show just how inconsistent such stories become in the end...

Well, I suppose it's past my bedtime. I'll try to dream of trivalent networks.

I'm not sure why, but recently I decided to explore those I considered "heroes" in my life, although the word "heroes" seems maybe too monumental. And to see how I've changed in my life, and what lessons biographies of the famously accomplished might have for me.

I would have to say that for a long time, when I think of how to live a life of creative accomplishment, I think of Beethoven and Einstein. Dead white males, native German speakers. What's struck me recently about these two heroes of mine is (1) that they are BOTH popularly accorded top notch rank, AND ALSO by the cogniscenti. They are not obscure at all. Could I have said, "Well, Einstein is all well and good, but my personal hero is Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac--his work was of fundamental importance not only for quantum mechanics, but he also predicted antimatter, a new class of particles, which had not yet been observed." Perhaps something in the life of Dirac, or say Bohr, might appeal to some more who are familiar with the detailed accomplishments of these physicists. On the other hand, there's NO denying that the popular image of Einstein as the head of this pack is based in reality; only a crank will deny the central importance of what Einstein did.

And item (2) is that both are not only known persistently in the popular imagination (kindly German-accented old man with bushy gray hair and moustache; glowering deaf composer shaking his fist), but that a shorthand for their actual WORK is popular (in fields where very little is nowadays popular). In spite of classical music being dead to the average American, who doesn't recognize the first 4 notes of Beethoven's 5th symphony? (They even have cultural resonance beyond music: weren't they used in WW II as a morse-code symbol of victory?) Sometimes it's unfortunate that something's well known--Beethoven's Fur Elise is a nonentity among his compositions, but a pretty enough tune that it's got some popular recognition. For the 5th symphony however, the people have it right--that first movement is really remarkable, although it's sometimes hard for me to hear it as music and not the famous monument it's become. It's Beethoven at his best, crisply and clearly showing us exactly what he feels. For Einstein, of course, the popular shorthand of his work is "E=mc²". While that's not at the basis of his most revolutionary work (Genereal Relativity), but more like the endpoint of his youthful important work (Special Relativity), it was still important. The flavor of his work's sweeping importance is captured by the relation between energy and mass, and that it has something to do with the speed of light.

Neither Einstein nor Beethoven were people whose work was motivated directly by helping others in need. Some, such as kytty, do hold to this as a prime motivator, some imagine always the bony hands of the needy. With Beethoven, first, one might retort that music was not a frilly luxury, but what kept him alive. He was the son of an abusive alcoholic, never married, and of course what could be worse than having the greatest musical imagination coupled with nearly total deafness! So he needed to write music, it took hold of him. Though I've said social justice wasn't the main motivation of the lives of either of these heroes, it DID play an important role. Beethoven's 3rd symphony, for example, was to celebrate Napoleon, when he was a hero of the French Revolution. When Beethoven heard that Napoleon had declared himself emperor, he tore up the dedication page of the symphony and said, "So, he's just like all the others--he'll declare himself tyrant and trample on the liberties of others!" Then there's the 9th symphony, with the Ode to Joy that goes, "alle Menschen werden Bruder", all men are brothers... Beethoven scorned the aristocratic system, admired democracy.

Einstein was a pacifist in WW I, getting in some trouble for his position. He invented a new refrigerator design after hearing about a family that had died when the cooling gas had escaped overnight.

Perhaps one thing these two heroes of mine have in common is that they are concerned with finding something very BASIC. This is probably oversimplifying a bit. The last movement of Mozart's Jupiter symphony puts together very complex combinations of 4 notes too, also aided by some counter-themes. But with Mozart or Bach, there's nothing like the 4 notes introducing the 5th symphony. Although Beethoven was not as skilled in counterpoint as either of those other giants, his music has an elemental quality, it's not afraid of simplicity (the 55-straight e-naturals of the opening movement of the 7th symphony, for example.)

Maybe I could have found other "heroes" who had this quality too--I'm thinking of Shakespeare, for example. Everyone knows Shakespeare, everyone knows "To be or not to be," but one couldn't say the popular imagination had seized on a mediocre playwrite and play--no, it's because Shakespeare, like Beethoven and Einstein, gets right to the point, that everyone (nearly everyone) recognizes his greatness.

Now, perhaps I could write a book like Godel, Escher, Bach, but Beethoven, Einstein, Shakespeare! Which brings me to a more youthful hero of mine, Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter and GEB were very big in CTY. I've been reading entr00pi and evan who are also Hofstadter fans. Well, somehow I lost interest in "popularizer heroes" in college. Carl Sagan and Douglas Hofstadter were not the ones praised to the sky by academia--no they were more kind of sneered at. The physics building had these big posters from the centennary of Einstein's birth in 1979, telling his story.

There was a phase in college when I read a lot of the essays of Bertrand Russell, as well as Einstein's. They're both definitely worth reading. I'm not sure why I don't idolize Russell these days. To write essays like Russell's or Einstein's, to be of such interest one could tell the world one's opinions in detail seemed like fun--of course now I have LiveJournal! Maybe it's that philosophical accomplishments seem more tenuous than physics accomplishments. Maybe the homophilic biographies by Ray Monk of Wittgenstein and Russell came down pretty hard on Russell. For whatever reason, I haven't read or re-read much by Russell lately.

Strangely, I never found Einstein's biography to be intimidating. I actually thought, "Hey, I could do that!" Of course, here I am, at 35 (when he'd finished his major accomplishments) and all I've produced are 15 or so inconclusive journal articles on obscure stars. I was always more intimidated by Feynman. He gave the impression of being into physics, REALLY into physics--although he had outside interests, they were mainly later in life. Einstein gives me the impression of a more general mind, and there are all the stories of him doing well in school only selectively, of his talents being hidden behind a mediocre job ("patent examiner, third class").

Why not Leonardo da Vinci? I don't know. I think I read something on him in 6th grade, though Thomas Henry Huxley was more my hero then. But sometimes I do wonder whether I should pattern myself more after a Renaiscance Man than someone with accomplishments in one field. Sometimes I feel pretty smug about myself, "Hey Bram, you're really creative in a lot of different fields! You can do astrophysics, math, philosophy, stand-up comedy, write music, you're pretty versatile at writing (not so good in the visual arts...)" I do feel I can write well and creatively--of course my chorus here on LiveJournal has selected itself on the basis of liking my writing. My parents are writers, and while it doesn't give me that feeling that I'm getting at something basic that led me into physics, I enjoy writing because when you write you can be creative with a minimum of raw materials.

For da Vinci though his separate interests came together to support his painting. Carving up cadavers helped him understand bones and muscle under the skin and thus become a better painter. He studied light, vision, he studied natural phenomena (fluids) in order to render them better.

Most accomplished creatives don't hoard their resources for one giant masterpiece but generally repeat dozens or hundreds of attempts in the same medium, learning and exploring as they go along. Beethoven had 135 musical publications, Mozart in a much more brief life had what, 551? Understanding how Beethoven wrote his 9th symphony may seem daunting; understanding how the mind that had already written the 5th symphony wrote the 9th symphony, less so.

As for me? Well, I could have gone much further in those 15 or so papers. Sometimes I think I hacked my way through the path of least resistance, or didn't learn about peripheral issues that could have been interesting. Nothing involved was of fundamental importance. But I think I've also learned as a teacher--I've learned the material better, been prodded by student questions, had to think on my feet a bit guiding students through labs. Probably I'm too close to the raw data, too close to computer programs instead of analytic understanding. Instead of trying to understand atomic spectroscopy better, I defer to my expert co-author, or kitchen-sink computer program.

Then there are the repeated livejournal entries on philosophical physics I've posted here. I'd like to think I'm getting better at it, or at least exploring it better in my own mind, by my own criteria. But my criterion is that I eventually say something sensible and falsifiable.

In the end I've got a bunch of creative talents, things that really puzzle me and interest me but relate to nothing that can be solved or demonstrated and day to day astrophysics that answers minor questions with tentative answers that only sometimes require creativity.

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