academic

Wikipedia on Academia:

Academia is sometimes contrasted pejoratively with "practice", such as daily living, employment, and business. Critics of academia say that academic theory is insulated from the 'real world', and thus does not have to take into account the real effects, results, and risks of actually performing the actions which academics study. Academic insularity is sometimes referred to as the ivory tower. This often leads to a real or perceived tension between academics and practitioners in many fields of knowledge, particularly when an academic is critical of the actions of a practitioner. Depending on the degree of criticism, the practitioner's critique of academia could also be seen as anti-intellectualism. The balance to the view from the practitioner is that even if academia is insulated from practice in the real world, that does not mean academic study is valueless. In fact it is often seen that many academic developments turn out only much later to have great practical results. However, given that among practitioners there is a perception of academic insularity, it may increase the value and impact of the academician's studies and or opinion if they take that insularity into account when discussing or offering criticism of a practitioner or a practice in general.

I've been struggling with this question of the value of academia within an intensely practical fast-paced development environment. There are two aspects in which one's work may be judged overly academic. First, the topic itself may be perceived as useless. Secondly, too much emphasis on clear writing may be seen as a waste. The main issue here is time. Both of these things take too much time compared to the immediate needs.

From this perspective, however, an academic approach can be seen as a long term approach. On the one hand, tools are developed that may not be immediately necessary, but will provide fuel and resources for years to come. Secondly, communication without a delineation of context is also short-termed. It assumes a shared understanding that is rather fragile. People reading at a later time may well misunderstand.

Its this second goal that I've been most reluctant to give up, and I question the split. I don't want to give up clear writing, both for its practical benefit and for its personal benefit. Writing poorly takes the power away from the person writing. The truth is that there is a personal story here related to the group I am working in. I'd like sometime to try to write this out more clearly, but its probably better not to give too many details.

As a thread to follow up on, one of the books I read in high school that was influential was Herman Hesse's "Glass Bead Game". I've been meaning to come back to this book. I felt like Hesse had read my academic dreams and then put them into a larger context together with a warning to not become overly isolated.

Great first line to a technical paper

In the last few years, our vision of the dynamics of the Solar System has notably changed, and the picture of the planets moving around the Sun in a regular quasi-periodic motion has suffered many outrages.

J. Laskar, ICARUS 88, 266-291 (1990)
"The Chaotic Motion of the Solar System: A Numerical Estimate of
the Size of the Chaotic Zones"

finishing things

I've been trying to do things more quickly. To just get things done, even if they're not great.
This involves knowing that I put, say, an hour into something, and what I came up with is reasonable for an hour's work.
Some things I just take forever on. I was trying to understand why. I have this image of certain important things that are very fragile and complicated. I picture a many armed Hindu God carrying many plates, each with a crucial element that needs to eventually be combined with something else. But this God is on rather shaky footing, and must hop continually in order to avoid dropping one of the plates. Anything that touches on this domain must be treated very carefully, because it won't be a top priority. It needs to make sure it doesn't break anything, and the very process of doing it may involve helping to combine together some of the plates.
I don't think there's anything to be done accept to realize when something can be done independently of this blue creature. Then it can just be finished in its usual partial messy way, but not cause so much damage.

correspondence

When to write?
This evening, I am tired. I have made progress on big messy things that are not very satisfying. I have moved forward two steps through oatmeal and piles of string.
I tell myself, just take it easy. Don't bring in more stimulus, and the passage of time will bring new views. So I am deciding that my thoughts are not important for the next 10 hours.
And where do I find myself 1/2 hour later? Writing to people long overdue emails, and putting my disowned thoughts down on this blog.

chapters

What always shocks me about language is how obvious and powerful some words can be.
And when I think back to the time when my mind was in a knot, I imagine these words and what they would have meant to me then.
"I just can't believe how valuable people are."
This thought has such richness, and wonder how I could possibly maintain the tightness in its presence. But such a thought was unthinkable. All words were gray. All passed over piles of theorems and jagged bits of past and little jabs.

Paperless

I spend a lot of time on my laptop. Many documents are available there, and many transactions can be performed. At the same time, I feel like there are hidden problems.
My laptop even replaces watching TV sometimes. Last night, instead of watching a DVD on my TV, I watched the Simpsons on my laptop. The difference was that I can put the screen anywhere I want. On the one hand, TV has sentimental value to me. But further, the idea of a screen that is watched for certain purposes being located in one place has its role. Its like organizing our space. What happens when we open up the possibility of continually changing spaces?
How do we live? We are creatures of habbit.
This is something I have a problem with. I tend to get myself into continually changing environments. Yet there is a good part of me that this doesn't work for. How can something grow, when its environment is always shifting? I grew up with two houses, going back and forth between my father's and mother's, transferring twice a week until high school. Each place was different, with different rules and expectations, positive and negative aspects. I trace a lot of my scattered approach to life back to a coping mechanism for this lifestyle. My parents tell me that it was what everyone was recommending at the time for divorced parents with kids. However, the opinion later changed. A topic for future research/discussion.
Back to paperless. Despite all the benefits and time that I do indeed use digital media, it scares me. There's an underlying fear that the bottom has fallen out. That Borges' image of the infinite library is at hand. At the heart of this is perhaps the requirement for new skills at maintaining ourselves and new dangers to recognize. But for myself, I try to recognize the same patterns that I see in my approach to people, research, and organizing my life in my digital/paper approach.
Here is a random document I found in my search for the term "paperless office" (a review of a study called "The Paperless Office" by Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper). In the conclusion of the review, this line caught my eye:

Second, the digital alternatives to paper need to be better designed. Until that happens, until paper is used as an analytical resource for the design of technologies, paper will almost certainly continue to be the medium of choice.

It just reminded me to be wary of the hidden costs of using digital media. Paper hasn't been around for ever, and our current digital technology and metaphors won't be around forever, but technology shouldn't be quite as powerful in its role as dictating what questions we ask and what kinds of collaborations we pursue.

Sorry for rambling. Let me again blame the medium. Or more precisely, this medium seems to make this kind of shallow jumping around easy to do.
Finally, let me just add, as a "direction for further research", that perhaps where digital media fall short is in their very lack of physicality. We have a lot of intuition about our three dimensional world. To quote from my undergraduate thesis (on adiabatic invariants!) "We are largely concerned with getting ourselves from here to there and moving other things from here to there." The computer desktop metaphor is just that, a metaphor, not a reality. It is still largely a two dimensional model, with links between different chunks of 2-D space. You may argue that a book is also largely two dimensional. But the links between the different pages occur truly in space. The flipping of pages and the locating of later pages deeper in the book than earlier pages, is something that screen reading does not fully replicate.
Its surprising, but I find myself having to mount a defense for our poor 3 dimensional world!!

standards

I was recently told that I should lower my standards. That I take too long to get things done because I want perfection. There's some truth to this, but I think really I need to aim lower. Shoot for smaller things. If the project is too big then if you fail, you fail spectacularly. It is just totally useless, the work you put into it. There's a point when something is clearly pretty good: most of the pieces are in place and it basically is what it claims to be. Now, by lowering my standards, I certainly don't want to not achieve that level. Standards should come in at the final stage: how well to polish.

The problem is that I tend to end up with lots of partial results that each require a lot of work to even get to the "pretty good" stage. Its confusing because I look and see lots of work that I've done, but none of it seems to amount to much. There's a temptation when the time comes to account for what you've done, to paste together all these partial results and try to pretend that its one grand whole. Doing this would indeed be lowering my standards, but I don't think that this is the right thing to do. It doesn't leave you with much, unless you spend half your time tricking people and confusing them and convincing them that any holes in your argument are due to their lack of reasoning ability.

santayana

I've been finding audio lately.
Here's chapter 3 of George Santayana's "Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy".
I haven't absorbed it all yet, but the first part on separation of duties between experts and scientists (thinkers?) is right along the lines of what I have been thinking about and dealing with.
Later he concludes that relativity is a welcome, acceptable revolution in science, but with it must come humility. I'd like to understand better what he's saying here.

knot

I'm always drawn to traumatic history.
The topic I'm involved in is one part physics, three parts scattered remnants of trauma. The question is whether there is anything left of me before this knot dissolves. The poison infects everything eventually. Now my current collaboration is getting sucked into the old mess. The same issues of credit, hurt egos, unfulfilled dreams rear their heads. But perhaps this time they occur in a vacuum where they don't actually have effects. And after playing themselves out, sadness can be felt and people can move on. But again, this really doesn't seem to be the normal role for people in physics, and I wonder how much reality there is to this crazy quest.

today

I have been pushing hard lately. Just get things done. But nothing very specific. Many small things that set the stage for other things. Too abstract.
Today my dad told me that he thought I am a bit lost. That he's never before seen me without a clear path forward. But has my path ever really been clear? It has certainly not seemed that way.
Today I was at Barnes and Nobles for awhile. I saw people from within my isolation and didn't talk to them. But I feel like some processes are playing themselves out that have been hidden and pushed below. I think some of this is good. I was actually looking at this feeling of isolation, and deciding not to fight it in that moment. One thing I have come to realize about myself is that I am basically an introvert. I've learned to be an extrovert, but its not always so natural to me.
I picked up a book called "Loneliness" by John Cacioppo. I read the description of a New Yorker who started a relationship with an old girlfriend who was not thriving in the city. In the midst of the ensuing misery, he is staring out the window and sees the image of a sad, lonely person. At first he thinks this is himself, but then the image moves backwards, and he sees it is someone mirroring him out the window! This connection pulls him out of himself, allowing him to see his situation more clearly.The story made me cry. Ok, just a little.
Here's an interview with Cacioppo.
Actually, I'll add that while reading this book, I was noticing the focus on statistics which was annoying me. There's an interplay between personal antecdote and supposedly objective analysis. It was also the discussions about genes that bothered me. Like the gap between these two ways of understanding is too great.

a name for yourself

I seem to be pretty good at pushing things close to completion and then leaving them there. I somehow lack that spirit to really run with something. The way I think of it is that I build up structure so that I can enjoy the benefits of things in a relaxed way. Having to jump up and down in glory and deal with people who either didn't get as far as you or want to pull you higher, just isn't fun for me. But maybe defining yourself isn't so bad? Maybe there are new realms of uncertainty you enter?
I just keep thinking of John Cusack in High Fidelity when he finally decides to commit to a relationship:

I can see now I never really committed to Laura. I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and... I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.

ready to give up

Just one of those days where it seems like I just can't keep going on in the same way.
Whatever that means.

coming together

Our minds can live in many places at the same time.
I feel spread across the country, spread across disciplines, philosophies, loyalties, lifestyles.
I blame it on the internet sometimes- my scattered approach, but really my use of the internet as a tool developed naturally. At each step it seemed to solve a prearticulated problem. On the other hand, what often comes to mind is those stories about wish fulfillment. The ways in which getting what we ask for is what destroys us.
Maybe its just been too long since I've been in touch with a certain voice inside me. The voice that does cross boundaries and includes the various parts of me.
Maybe because I am working, holding things in suspension, creating small environments for things to grow, I can't access this voice. And I'm overwhelmed by too many pieces at the same time. I worry that there is no end. That its just one expanding blow after another with not enough glue to put it together.
I enjoyed painting for the first time in awhile. This is what painting is for me. It is putting things together. I used to think that I could put anything down on the paper or canvas and find a way to make it harmonious. Maybe giving up on this is why I've been unable to paint for so long. But maybe its time to believe in it again. But belief in the more humble sense of a longing and dreaming rather than a "must get it done now".

unstable

I have this funny feeling of sitting at the top of a bowling ball. Certainly it must have something to do with the amount of effort (useless perhaps?) I've been putting into thinking about how to approach the dynamic aperture problem. Find the separatrices and beyond that is unstable.

But its also a feeling from reading Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong blog for awhile, and considering the turn on of the LHC and the turn-off of so much US particle physics. I've never know quite enough about particle physics to be really excited about finding the Higgs boson. I never really got past renormalization and feel like there's something not so good about it, or that the lesson it is teaching needs to go all the way back to the beginning.

And with the Bush administration having already done its damage, google mostly taken over people's brains, I just really don't know where things will go next. What I usually do in times like this is just wait. I try to be quiet, to not make any decisions, and to let things play themselves out. Then I get swept in whatever direction. I don't like this feeling of complete uncertainty. Its familiar, but its reached a deeper level now. I know myself enough to know that I probably still have agendas, but at the moment they all seem dangerous and wrong. There is nothing to do but wait.

move slowly

Action items:
* brother changed name
* wedding to attend (not my own)
* books being neglected
* more time for self not involving tossing keystrokes into big mouth of lattice optimization and evaluation and politics of avoiding blame

ahhhh

This is a very satisfying link.

narrative amidst chaos

What do we say when there is nothing clear to say?
When according to your standards, you want to shout: "mush!"
The tree was covered in dark spindly bark. It was surrounded by small bushes with crisp green waxy leaves. This region of the forest had long been considered problematic. It was in fact just a restful region surrounded by stone walls rather by accident. Nothing really that special, just a confluence of hard to categorize, misty and perhaps obscure lives, corners and the usual uncertainty.

learning things from the ground up (or being buried in the mud?)

I feel like I've been learning certain things lately in the slowest, worst way possible.
I have to get results out of this code that I didn't write, but I have been trying to turn into something more friendly, familiar and reliable. I collaborate with one other person who has slightly different aspects of the code he is interested in developing. We try to keep in synch, but changing things break other things and I often find myself with a broken code and the tortuous question of whether to push on and fix the problems or go back to a slightly worse previous version that I know works (or at least the parts I have checked).

During this process, I am forced to learn about things that I don't feel like learning at that particular time. In the end I do learn certain things, and after I know them, I also have a sense of how they can break, how one can confuse them for something else.

I'm somewhat reminded of a comment by one of my physics professors during college relating to thermodynamics. One of the math professors suggested that there is a beautiful way to understand thermodynamics. If one just understands a certain structure, then thermodynamics fits into it very nicely. (sorry for vagueness, I never actually learned thermodynamics very well)
But the physics professor responded that he thought it was better for students to first muck around in details before getting the clearer grander picture.

So what am I afraid of? I do learn in this process. I think the problem is that I am encountering real design flaws, or perhaps imperfect implementation. As a result, I will likely never actually rise to that level of clarity, and then have only gained an extremely obscure skill: familiarity with a code very few people use. Perhaps I won't know the ultimate value of this until later. I have a feeling that much of the technical details I am learning could be learned much faster and easier in some other way. But perhaps there are lessons involving people, egos, creations, and collaboration that will be very valuable (if I can ever escape from this situation!!)

building out of real materials

I used to think that the world was built out of nice equally sized objects.
Now the pieces turn out to be sharp, crunchy, not very flexible. And even I am such an object.
We all clunk together, forming something larger.
I guess this is just a reminder to myself not to try to make things into what they are not, and to not pretend that I myself am infinitely malleable.

Too many connections

I have more and more ways to communicate but do it less and less. A fluid dynamics image comes to mind. A reservoir with multiple pipes coming out. At some point the outflow is faster than the inflow.
I am confounded by the long tail I so thought I desired. I go through my music and find things like: The Little Goat by the Gothic Archies.
Where and when did I pick this up? And again the same image: I don't listen to music because of the variety and randomness of it all. No center, no emotional story I can control. Getting run over by the digital age. The computer metaphor claiming to overcome all. Making our selves and our lives meaningless as other science/engineering images have: the machine, the molecule.
Too much. My eyes have been diverted. My senses have been distracted.

local/global

There's a certain line of thought in accelerator/beam physics connected to the question of the local/global dichotomy. I'll just put some preliminary thoughts, which is basically what I always do here anyway.
Let me start by linking to the book by Forest. In this book he continually makes the point that one should replace local Hamiltonian dynamics by global map-based methods in the modeling and analysis of storage ring physics. Of course one still needs to use some kind of local theory (a symplectic integrator) to get the global results to begin with, but the emphasis is on this separation of duties. He rails against the old school that mucks around theoretically in the local s-dependant Hamiltonian, basically saying that they never get very far because the real machines are so complicated as to make the approach useless.
Why has this new approach not completely caught on? Is it entirely due to idiosyncrasies and historical development of the field? Is it the old timers holding on to their beta functions and simple coupled theories and not allowing a more general approach that renders their knowledge obsolete?
This may be part of it, but I think there is also something fundamentally flawed about the approach from a scientific community perspective. Certainly there are local quantities and global quantities and global analysis of results coming from local quantities is quite important. The problem is that the physics model is never complete. There are always more local effects to include and if one takes a particular piece of physics and pushes this local/global picture too far, one ends up with software, methods and sociology that shows too much of a disparity between large and small.
The connection I would draw is to large corporations -- say Starbucks or Borders. On the one hand, these companies can accomplish certain large things quite efficiently. But on the other, they are going to change slowly in response to local requirements because they are defined in terms of their final goals. The analogy here is to the computer code that implements the model. (Part of my motivation for thinking and writing about this is my own frustration, partly just from lack of programming skills, in modifying a code based on these principles to do what I want. The structure is fine, but the scale is off for certain types of changes-- too much effort to do something small-- though some would argue that these things are useless, it is exactly here where the disagreement could be fleshed out.)
The problem with the local/global split is that it encourages this building of large structures without allowing many people to understand the workings at intermediate levels. It turns people into either workers or consumers, and leaves the power to mould the system in the hands of just a few.
I don't want to minimize the value of the particular local/global split that Forest advocates for storage ring physics. I think it is quite valuable and the clarity it provides is important. However from a pedagogical and sociological perspective, this leaving out of all forms of intermediate levels of understanding or analysis ultimately may prevent alternative more powerful synthesis and understanding to emerge, in addition to contributing to a polarized environment (though certainly no one person is to blame for this).

people art technology

Yesterday I went with an old friend into the city.
First we caught the last hour before closing of an awesome exhibit at the MOMA:
Design and the Plastic Mind.
It was full of ideas about how to think about the technological changes confronting us, from a variety of ways to visualize metaphysical spaces and complex data sets to ways that we may be changing. There was a story-board progression about how smell could go the way of sound, with nose amplifiers and processors to better magnify pheremones in order to more easily pick out a compatible mate.
Next we took the train down to the financial district and went to the Winter Garden in the World Financial center, which is adjacent to the Twin Towers site. There, the Shua group had an installation piece and performance called Giant Space Detail. I'm not sure I've fully processed it and gotten the concept, but it has a lot to do with paying attention to a place and the lives of the people in it. The performance involved interaction with people using the building, and most of the performers themselves had been enlisted from workers in the building. There was also an interesting interaction with the Twin Towers "Ground Zero". At the large windows where people can look out over the site, the group installed television monitors showing video taken from around the area of day to day working situations together with headphones and accompanying audio. To me, it had a powerful grounding effect that is very counter to the using of 9-11 as a propaganda tool. It really focuses you on the more mundane reality of the place, rather than a "shock and awe" approach.

dignity with computers

What does it mean that computers get fast, and that we can more clearly state some of our approaches to life in terms of algorithms? What happens to people in this process?
Does the fact that computers can beat us at chess mean that we shouldn't play chess? And is it really computers beating us (really somebody has programmed that computer).
Just a lot of disconnected thoughts, trying to say something about how to maintain integrity in the midst of our toys/tools seeming to surpass us.
One sees in the story of Stephen Wolfram for example, a person who thought that his computer tools are so powerful that nobody needs to do math or science anymore.
I don't want to say that computers can't do the things we do. I just want to say that we should stay clear about who we are and what we care about. If we create a computer that we believe experiences things as we do or does things that we respect, well then, let us respect that computer and what went into creating it. But we should not lose ourselves in the process. As long as we understand and experience self-worth and respect, then life is worth living and we don't need to worry so much about whether some other person or machine or computer has accomplished more, or is more than us.

falling trees

There's a gigantic tree in my back yard that fell down a month or so back. It has just been a part of the general background chaos that doesn't effect me until I realized that it really wasn't too far from my own apartment. And there are more of them that could fall.

I'm feeling very ungenerous these days. Like just keeping up some kind of schedule is all I can manage. And this schedule doesn't even serve me so well. Ungenerous to myself as well.

I ran out of propane and got the tank filled up again. But I have yet to reopen the pipes and light the pilot lights of my heater and stove. Partially completed tasks everywhere. Open bags and spare coins sit around useless.

I look out my window as usual and delicate pink and white flowers are blooming on one of these dangerous trees. Behind it there is fog, and birds in this wilderness landscape that is still so foreign to me.

documents

There's a nice article at the Institue of the Future of the Book blog about TeX and whether or not its a technological backwater.
I've been thinking about this kind of thing lately, feeling like I really need to get better at documenting my work. My typical approach is to learn lots of different things, none of them particularly well. So I know LaTeX passably well, a little bit of Word, a little bit of PowerPoint, and in order to keep a foot in the open source world, I've been trying out NeoOffice. For presentations, I also tried out the LaTeX Beamer class and created a PDF for a short talk a few weeks back.
I guess the general theme here is emphasizing (or at least not deemphasizing) the human element in the human-computer interaction/relationship.

clearing

Page 137, Kafka on the Shore:

I walk on for a while and reach a round sort of clearing. Surrounded by tall trees, it looks like the bottom of a gigantic well. Sunlight shoots down through the branches like a spotlight illuminating the ground at my feet. The place feels special, somehow. I sit down in the sunlight and let the faint warmth wash over me, taking out a chocolate bar from my pocket and enjoying the sweet taste. Realizing all over again how important sunlight is to human beings, I appreciate each second of that precious light. The intense loneliness and helplessness I felt under those millions of stars has vanished. Bat as time passes, the sun's angle shifts and the light disappears. I stand up and retrace the path back to the cabin.

This passage for me is a wonderful description of what it is like to have a moment of clarity and respite amidst a difficult time.

shifting sands

My work still feels like building something without a solid foundation.
Lately I've had this image of how ones gets things done in the world: kind of like churning butter, just start doing something and if you do it long enough, something crystalizes out of it. Creating something out of nothing.

One thing I will say is that I am damned tired of computer metaphors for everything. I am ready to start applying other kinds of metaphors to computers! Return of the desktop, file cabinet, river bank, stark trees, swamps, cathedrals and bazaars.

Happy unhappiness day!

strange shores

Many different collaborations, continue to move forward at a snail's pace, trying to not make them incompatible. Work has been difficult. A battle. But I don't want to be a fighter. I really don't.
It is pouring rain in Long Island. Last night I drove home after bowling, slightly drunk, hitting big pools of water, one road closed, I suppose from flooding. My neighbor, also bowling, who left first, wasn't here. I wondered what I would do if he still wasn't back in the morning. Call friends, call hospitals. But he returned at 4AM.

I read theory. My friend turned me on to Jodi Dean's blog, I cite.
Good stuff, but I spend too much time on the computer. Life is still too thin.

Yes, its still raining. And water leaks from the roof onto my futon.

group cohesion

Thinking about religions such as Transcendental Meditation and Scientology, I'm led back to issues of relativism. Are groups really allowed to do what they want? Should we be criticizing and imposing our values?
These questions are partly stimulated by recent press about the protests against the scientologists, and about their disconnection policy. The scientologists argue in favor of group cohesion, saying that they have the right to isolate those who don't fit in.
Reminds me of Jane Jacobs' arguments in The Life and Death of Great Cities about how some social environments have an all or nothing sharing policy. A dynamic group results from public space, in which people can interact while keeping their privacy.

Yes, this is a question I keep coming back to: how can we have the feeling of belonging without too much insularity and closedness?

(Yes, regarding scientology as a religion is a slippery slope. The slippery slope of relativism? Or maybe its just pointing out that I need to come to terms with Transcendental Meditation more directly.)

pictures of dynamics

productive?

Reaching a point of productivity. But there is always a worry that this is incompatible with the rest of life.

On another note:
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has passed away. I will perhaps write more later.
I had just resumed my reading of Mikael Rothstein's book about comparing the TM and Hari Krishna attitudes and approaches towards science.

ssc aftermath

I'm still interested in this question of how the fact that the SSC (see here or here) wasn't built influenced the future of accelerator physics. Check out this list of technical notes and imagine the amount of work contained, much of it quite painful. Would these people ever have been motivated to do this had they known that the thing wouldn't have been built? The tools and insights forged in the process were quite valuable, but the whole issue of credit and respect seems to have become particularly skewed as the motivations shifted. Just my somewhat outsiders perspective.

with or without beauty

I look out the window at black tree lines against bluish pink still dark sky.
There are oppressive structures that ask for simplicity and say that beauty is too complex/extraneous. But then they yield their own complexities: piles and crumples and extraneous things. The good art and science of aesthetics has been so quiet, standing back so shyly.

forming a discipline

There is something horribly redundant about the way work gets done in my group.
People push forward, and then months later its as if nothing was learned. The same concepts are being reimplimented and explored in new computing/people contexts. At some point it might be useful to outline the geography of the infrastructure that causes this to happen. The problem is that results are needed. So people somehow cannot afford to be outwardly interested in infrastructure.

The problem for me is that on the one hand I am good at building infrastructure, but on the other, this is not openly respected.

So my research projects move forward at a snail's pace. But what else can I do? If I push too hard in any direction, I fear that the delicate fabric will break. I see this has happened to some people. They have pushed very hard and in the end form a sub-discipline of whom there is only one expert. Then they spend years scratching their heads (or perhaps shouting and tearing themselves apart in frustration) wondering why all these idiots don't learn these perfectly obvious things that they know.

Without a robust connection to the world of ideas (which typically requires the environments that a university can offer), a subject will remain fractured and inefficient.

balance

There's a certain type of balance I'd like to achieve.
Its sort of a balance between always acting from a center and giving up that center in order to go into details. Sort of a balance between unity and multiplicity. At the moment, it plays itself out in terms of work vs. social life, but within work itself it there is a similar struggle.

Ahh, so I was reading Kafka's story about being a dog. He really does a lot of stuff with animals. That would be interesting to learn more about.

hello darkness my old friend

winter brings back memories. darkness. being alone.
i have a cold and this forces me away from physics back into my own obscure landscape.
time stretches out. i cannot imagine something different.
perhaps the one thing to take from this is that i am being too careful. imagining a snake around every corner is not helpful.

my computer life has blended the boundary between real and virtual. i ask whether i care about what my table is made of, or why it matters that my drawers are open and contain the least useful of my clothes. but i imagine that this is not something new to this time in history. there have always been people with a shadowy grasp on reality. perhaps it is the dream world or the spirit world that is blamed for this dissolution.

i wonder what would be a literature of winter. a type of writing that traces out such underground spaces. is it black and white, or is this just my relative inexperience with winter?
colors could be added. a dark purple, a crisp blue, perhaps even a pale yellow in a corner.

science vs. engineering

Ok, I will weigh in on this old topic.
Consider a matrix, an array of numbers. These can represent a wide variety of different things.
So, let's say a scientist and an engineer both think of their system as a matrix.

The engineer has control theory at hand. One thinks of a system in terms of input and output and asks about controllability and observability. How can I get this thing to do what I want? And... if I prick and sting this thing in all possible ways, will I have understood its internal state?

These are the questions the engineer asks. The system is to be made useful and its internal state is to be categorized in terms of well defined criterion. The questions are pretty set ahead of time.

The scientist doesn't seek total understanding in the same way. The scientist looks for funny properties. If I add up the eigenvalues of this matrix will I get a positive number? There is more of a creative element. A narrative element?

client/server vs. p2p

I realized that in some ways, what I'm been struggling with lately is a matter of architecture.
In a client/server approach, the resources are collected together in centralized places and server programs are your interface to those resources. In a peer to peer approach, there are many sources of information. In fact each node is on the same level. I feel like in each of the projects I was working on, I was being pushed to either be a client or a server, and I didn't particularly want to be either.

I know that hierarchy has its place, but on the whole, I'm much more comfortable with a p2p approach to many aspects of work and life.

back to physics

Ok, I need to do some integrals. I'm trying to find the number of electrons scattering per unit time into a given longitudinal velocity.
I need to do the integral:

where is typically a Gaussian.
I can do the integral first which seems like the right thing to do. But then to check it, I can integrate over from the momentum acceptance to infinity and get the Touschek lifetime. But I can't see how it gives the right answer. Anyway, its fun to get back to this stuff.

bridge

I've been trying to understand a certain piece of technical history that is important for accelerator physics. It involves people at each stage and their own skill sets. I'll leave it somewhat vague for now, because I don't understand it well enough. On one end we have various math ideas which from a certain perspective join numerical and analytical approaches, but from another, its just some math. These go under the names differential algebra, non-standard analysis and truncated power series algebra. At the other end of the bridge we have collaborative work on designing a particle accelerator.

The thing is that in some ways this is really just a personal bridge. I am comfortable reading math. And I am comfortable working in a team with an open environment. But in between has been a huge mess.

I was just trying to find references to Foucault's The Order of Things. I found this essay.
What the author says is that Foucault's grand schemes aren't particularly new, and his referencing is pretty poor, but when discussing particulars, he adds new depth.

Continuing my free association: I was just listening to this radio show starring Richard Stallman!

i am a computer

I used to be really worried about reductionism. You know, the whole pyramid of science thing, with atoms (or quarks and stuff) at the bottom. I didn't like being just a big pile of dumb old molecules bumping into each other.

At the time, I tried to analyze what was bothersome about this. I think the answer I came up with was that it was the dumbness of the molecules. Ok, they're pretty cool, but just not cool enough to equal me. So one way out of the resulting depression is to try to convince oneself that atoms really are that cool.

In the end, I think this line of thinking has at its heart: "I am a machine. Oh no!!"

Lately I've been thinking: "I am a computer. Oh no!!"

It gets especially dangerous when I drive around with GPS, and spend lots of time interacting with screens like the one in front of me now.

It then hit me that being a machine didn't bother me as much any more.
But, so why should being a computer bother me? I guess its because its the dominant language, and suggests certain limitations.

I'm tempted to say that this is about the mind body problem, or subjective versus objective, but I think its more about making things in our own image and then forgetting that we were their source and sort of becoming their slaves. Weird cycle.

extra something

So there are all these pieces, and on there own they rattle together.
Again, I have the image of having climbed out of a ravine.
In the middle of it all, one thinks that out of templates, convergent/divergent integrals, context free grammar, parameter 1 through n, file formats with and without futures and even secret and not so secret motivations, one can build something. Yes, but as long as one remembers that those are just raw materials.

putting it together?

ingredients:
*)"Practical C++ programming"
*)"Mastering Matlab 7"
*)"The Fokker Planck Equation"
*)article by Bruck on Touschek lifetime
*)an undocumented C++ library for particle tracking and global parameter extraction
*)a partially designed synchrotron light source
*)a bunch of smart people who don't work together particularly well

eternal

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A nice movie.
My simulation codes start to take hours, then days. I write scripts. These little creatures doing our work. My work.
The acorns have been falling onto my roof.

LaTeX

Ah, the joys of math. So now I can ramble away with equations! (Thanks to)
So, we can represent the symplectic part of the dynamics of an accelerator by a one turn map:

where is the operator saying to take the Poisson bracket with its argument. is the effective Hamiltonian and is a function of and . In the linear case, is just a matrix and if the Hamiltonian is with , then

where

is the symplectic inner product matrix and its multidimensional
extensions. Actually its kind of ugly. Ah well, I may or may not write more equations.

Speaking of Faith

Krista Tippett, pp. 3-4:

Of this I'm certain: the religious energy of our world now is not in essence a rejection of all disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades-- law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. Our most heated debates--on marriage, or stem-cell research, or abortion--defy the boundaries of legal rulings and political rights into which we've attempted to fit them. They drive back to the mysteries of human life and human sexuality. They are prisms for deep questions about identity, relationship, and love in our time. The also arouse fierce human impulses both to question difference and to defend it. We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code-- but they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to one another. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address, and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. I've seen a tapestry unfurled, both ancient and in progress like the whole of creation, a bearer of truths that arguments cannot contain. I must tell of these things, and how they meet my own deepest longings for truth, beauty, and hope.

settling in

My laptop is a "PC". You know, with Microsoft Windows. I have been so reluctant to install anything permanent because I don't trust it. Now I install Eclipse, consider becoming a Java developer, locate tools to untar, real basics. Figure out how to access lab unix servers. Slowly things become unbroken. And the metaphorical connection to Long Island, this desolate place, that perhaps after enough years starts to come to life.

fade in/out

Who would have thought that feeling lousy could be such a luxury?

Back to the theme again: life and physics fight it out. There's only so much room.

Here's what I do: I read through the Handbook of Accelerator Physics and Engineering. Again and again. I'm looking for something. I'm trying to make the world be different than it is. I want to find unity. But instead of unity, I find the only togetherness there ever was, the togetherness of being familiar with something. No, you say: there's Maxwell's equations. And there's SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1). Ok, I admit it. I've tried to read Foucault's The Order of Things. Not healthy, but I like to think he was a good guy anyway. And I've come back to Zarathustra, and can still find a small amount of my own voice afterwards.

These voices who ask me to help them build the pyramids... What does one say to them, except, "I'm sorry, but I only have one lifetime"? I wrote to my brother and told him I am an indentured servant. I don't even know what the word indentured means, except that it brings back the song that some music teacher sang with us in 6th grade:

16 tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt

huge systems

For the book group I'm a part of, this month we're reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. The part I'm reading now is describing the modern industrial food system based around corn. He tries to get the big picture, to see how our eating habits tie in with industrial and economic logic of production. Corn production is based on petroleum use (petrochemicals, oil based transportations systems etc.), and feed lot cows in turn eat a corn based diet. On page 83, he says

I don't have a sufficiently vivid imagination to look at my steer and see a barrel of oil, but petroleum is one of the most important ingredients in the production of modern meat, and the Persian Gulf is surely a link in the food chain that passes through this (or any) feedlot.

The part that interests me in this is the "sufficiently vivid imagination". Certainly Pollan has a vivid imagination as we see from all the creative, clarifying metaphors he uses. But the point is that the system is just too big.

I mention this because I feel the same way about my own work in particle accelerators. I jump in at different levels and understand different things, and find people and ideas and work flows and processes at each level. But it just seems too big. In order for it to work, the amount of expertise is literally incomprehensible. But on the other hand, any one person has only a piece of the picture. How this all worked was really a big question I've had for a long time. If no one person understands it all, then how does it actually work? Pollan uses evolutionary metaphors frequently, and I think that this gets at a good piece of the answer to this question. Both the people involved, and the system itself coevolve to form a relatively coherent whole. Corn evolves to use oil and maximize growth, and people adapt to eating processed food.

These big systems have a big effect on us. They shape our lives, and because they contain so many parts, the basic underlying logic escapes us which means we lose control of our life. I find Pollan's book very inspiring in that he is taking something so big that it is almost invisible, and laying it out in front of us in a clear, enjoyable way.

just give me

just give me one good reason
and I promise I won't ask you any more
just give me one extra season
so I can figure out the other four

Blue Umbrella, by John Prine.

distance

I typed in "Six Feet Under" to youtube and watched the season five promotional video. The characters were driving. They reach intersections in barren landscapes where they have to make choices.

I think of my own cross roads and wonder if I've actually made any choices. Somehow everything feels close, just a few steps away. I think that I've always tried to get places while at the same time leaving open the option to get back to where I was.

And then I think of the concept of a metric space. The internet can invert close and far. It all just seems too abstract. Well, that's enough random thoughts for a Friday night. Dangerous business...

keeping in touch

sometimes its hard to keep in touch with everyone. Why do we call certain friends and not others? Why does it take so long to write back to someone and say: "doing fine, thanks for asking." or "life's a bit rough, how are you?"

I guess people bring out different things in us. I imagine calling one person and know that I would end up talking about how depressed I am and how I want more friends, etc. If I call someone else, I'd end up talking about all the interesting work I'm doing. Some people would give me the impression that I'm leading a lonely difficult life, while others leave me with the impression that I'm doing exciting interesting things, meeting interesting people, and really doing exactly what I should be doing at this stage in my life.

Maybe it just means that its a complicated time. Its not one thing or the other, but a big mix of many things. I also think I'm one of these people who's a bit vague, not so well defined at the center of things, at least in the short term. I know everyone has this aspect to them, but its a matter of what's central. For people like me, who change easily, we have to be a bit careful of who we talk to. People can have a big effect on us. Sometimes its only in withdrawal, that I find my own direction again. But withdrawal can become a direction on its own, rather than a tool, if you're not careful. Not that its actually that bad of a direction, if you can take it. There's a whole realm of life surrounding being a solitary person, seeking yourself, or something beyond you inside you.

people

I just saw this film from the Stony Brook Film Festival called Who Loves the Sun.
One funny aspect was that I knew one of the main characters (went to high school with him). I've seen him act in a few other things, and I was realizing that its not so different from seeing any other actor multiple times. You start to feel like you know them- they become a part of your life.

The film was spotty, as most independent films are. Some parts really didn't work- with forced dialogue and pauses that made one feel that the actors didn't know what the scene was about.
The music sometimes had an experimental feel to it. But that's part of what can be so great- the lack of control can open up such interesting, unexpected pieces.

The story mainly surrounded Will, Maggie and Daniel. Will and Maggie were married, but after Maggie had sex with Daniel, Will leaves for five years. They are all stuck together at a beautiful lake house, and they fumble around trying to resolve old issues. Some of the shots were really nice, such as a long slow panning from the sky to the ground through trees and leaves.

learning something new

I'm trying to learn about collective effects in high energy electron beams. This involves the interaction of the beam with itself, mediated by its surroundings. One decomposes the distribution into modes, and tries to find the growth rates of these modes- positive growth implies an instability.

I've studied the Fokker-Planck equation and various physical origins for damping and diffusion, but this has a different flavor from the collective effects involving wake-fields and impedances.

So I have all these papers and a somewhat specified goal that I don't know enough to understand. I skim the papers and other books and try to get a feel for the language and direction. Then I feel useless for awhile- like I haven't learned anything, and like I don't know any physics, and like there are all these very tall walls to scale that I never will. And meanwhile, all the other things that I'm supposed to be doing fade out and also seem impossible.
It just colors everything. Its like how the book I'm reading can set the flavour for the rest of my life.

Next day: hmm, not so bad, I guess this stuff seems a little bit easier than I thought. But jeez... what a messy process.

defrost

There must be a better way to defrost my freezer than to wait for huge chunks of ice to come crashing down...

conference

I met people from Germany, England, New Mexico, etc. People are looking for the next big thing. Some complain about lack of inspiration, others complain about lack of rigour.
I guess for the first time I felt the pull of something like a center of gravity for this community.
I was reminded of the scene from the Star Wars film where they visit Jar Jar's people, and suddenly it opens up in front of them, this huge, hidden, underwater world.

too much

Problems with my hotel room: no phone, bad lighting, water pouring into bathroom in mornings when people above me take a shower, iffy door that left me locked in for 15 or so minutes til I could finally open it. I changed rooms. My would be travelling companions all backed out, so I drove to Santa Fe, Los Alamos and down through the Jemez mountains by myself. Then I got a speeding ticket at the end.
In hindsight will this conference be one of those wonderful times in my life?
Yes, there are good things, but they've faded out, lost focus. (I guess its called a bad mood..)
I was thinking today that I would want to talk to everyone I know about all the experiences I've had with them: "so what was going on with you then?"
Or maybe I just wish people would ask me that question.

new painting technique

just keep painting over it all with white. then, instead of deep, dark separations that need to be bridged, need to be harmonized, just gauzy swirls. but there are dark irreconcilable differences in the world!! yes, but that doesn't mean that I have to keep creating them!

dangerous fruit

My ten minute walk around the block is starting to get more interesting.
The mulberry trees have black berries growing directly from their branches.
Watching the ground, I find sour cherries that have fallen from way above.
I try to get my new neighbor to eat one of the mulberries. But he tells me the story of a Croatian herbalist who was jailed for causing lead poisoning in his client. All right, gas doesn't have much lead in it anymore, but along with the oil and exhaust, this fruit can't be too good for me.
Ok. Add "lead poisoning" to Lymes disease and Giardia amongst the list of things that may shorten my life by my careless habits. I guess we all get to pick our poisons.

long island

Last Sunday I took one of my wandering drives. My original motive of buying a guitar capo was soon forgotten when I decided to search for one of the nearby beaches I'd heard of. This plan was again forgotten when I saw a sign for the "Emma S. Clark Memorial Library". I parked, ready to explore this library when a path in the woods beckoned. Following this path, I passed by private tennis courts, and was soon looking across at a river with a series of stone bridges. I took a loop, using two of these bridges, passing by a proud father and his unruly kids, a group of serious teenaged girls who apologized for their barking dogs. I stared out at the water, a fragrant smell making me think of a California summer, and wondered how this whole scene could have been hidden amongst the strip malls, rude aggressive drivers, and dead-ends in warehouse/empty lot mazes. My whole sense of structure and hiearchy seemed turned around, inside out, like the spheres of Banach-Tarski, or perhaps a Mobius strip.

That night I had a dream that the water of the oceans spilled over and covered me up. Under water, were slowly moving clown-like people carrying out their secret business. I guess at some point in one's life, we become submerged. And we just hope that we have the tools to survive, to not drown, or become irrevocably lost.

souledness

I'm reading Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop". He talks about how big of a soul a given creature has and mentions a measurement system proposed by James Huneker with which to quantify this idea (p. 22). He suggests that our level of reluctance to kill a given creature is roughly an accurate measure of the amount of souledness, or the number of Hunekers contained:

In short, I would here argue, echoing and generalizing the provocative statement by James Huneker, that "souledness" is by no means an off-on, black-and-white, discrete variable having just two possible states like a bit, a pixel, or a light bulb, but rather is a shaded, blurry numerical variable that ranges continuously across different species and varieties of object... I would also argue that most people's largely unconscious prejudices about whether to eat or not to eat this or that food, whether to buy or not to buy this or that article of clothing, whether to swat or not to swat this or that insect ... reflect precisely this kind of numerical continuum in their minds, whether they admit it or not.

Its one thing to claim that people have some kind of internal model like the above in mind -- this seems quite reasonable. Its another to claim that this internal model coresponds to something fundamental in the world -- remains to be shown.

Of course, I have to counter this with a quote from Elizabeth Costello (p. 67):

.. And the fact that animals, lacking reason, cannot understand the universe but have simply to follow its rules blindly, proves that, unlike man, they are part of it but not part of its being: that man is godlike, animals thinglike.

Even Immanuel Kant, of whom I would have expected better, has a failure of nerve at this point. Even Kant does not pursue, with regard to animals, the implications of his inuition that reason may be not the being of the universe but on the contrary merely the being of the human brain.

And that, you see, is my dilemma this afternoon. Both reason and seven decades of life experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking. ...

I haven't yet fully gotten what Hoffstadter's concept of a strange loop is, but I wonder about this human-centrism. Haven't we learned again and again, how unspecial we are? Are we to find in the realm of consciousness we truly are the center of the universe? This process of taking our intuitions and assuming that there is something fundamental to them can be a bit dangerous.
Anyway, as usual, I'm impatient, and have to write something before I understand it... but isn't that the time its the most interesting? Before its all settled down and solidified?

tick season

As usual, I escape from my office by walking in a nearby pine forest.
I follow a certain path that leads nearby to an abandoned skeet shooting range, making a loop ending up back on a main road for a 5 minute walk back to my office. In the winter, my snow footsteps were the only ones in this particular path.

Today, I followed the path, enjoying the sun and watching the streaky clouds. A few hours later, I was talking to someone about magnets when they noticed a tick crawling on my pant-leg. Now, home, and ready to take a shower, I find another one feasting on my inside leg just above my knee. I guess its the season for responding to each small itch with a frantic search. Is it worth giving up the walks for? Until I learn the hard way, the answer will be no.

postdoctoral success/failure

I'm rereading Sharon Traweek's ethnography (1988) of high energy physicists, Beamtimes and Lifetimes. Here's a great paragraph about how someone sees their postdoc experience in retrospect (p. 90):

Another postdoc knows that he has not "made it," and he is angry. Reexamining his postdoctorate, he believes that he now understands why he failed. In the first year, he thinks, the senior experimentalists are scanning the postdocs to see who is "charismatic". They watch how the postdocs handle conversations; the preferred style is confident, aggressive, and even abrasive if one suspects that another's ideas are wrong; he feels he could have adopted this style if he had understood its importance. The next step would have been to seek out "an action sector"-- and exciting volatile, and fashionable area. At that point in his career, "charm" became fashionable. He feels he ought to have taught himself and taught others about "charm". He should have anticipated where the problems lay and cultivated connections accordingly. The next step would have been to gain responsibility for some large, important project-- so important that others would have sought him out to talk. Ideally, he should have proposed an experiment of his own. Instead, out of loyalty and commitment, he stuck with his assigned task. Now he feels this cost him his career in high energy physics. He believes that he would have had difficulty being granted these responsibilities, however; he sees himself as being outside the "old boys' club," because in the labs where he did graduate work his undergraduate school was not considered to be "on the map." This postdoc has come to these conclusions retroactively; he is comparing his career over the past several years with those who have made it. He has since left high energy physics.

I like how "charm" could be read in the non-technical sense and it still almost works in the paragraph!

This whole chapter, "Male tales told during a life in physics" is pretty good. I suppose one does need to remember the warning that anthropologists often talk to those at the margins of a society/culture, so while those people can often have the clearest perspective and speak the most freely, they also may have a certain bitterness and interest in painting the community in a bad light.

local/global lives

When I went to Nepal in 1997, my dad encouraged me to observe the ways of life of some of the people we saw because so many old ways were being lost. He also told me stories of the introduction of TV into island communities. An intact community with a variety of ways of interacting now spends much of its time watching TV, absorbing lives from far off places causing rapid change that leads to alcoholism and general community breakdown. That's the extreme end of things.

The internet, or perhaps Web 2.0, or whatever, is supposed to be different. Our spending time looking at a screen is supposed to connect real people together- create community rather than destroy. I find myself drawn into Facebook and Myspace (and this blog!) and indeed, it does feel like a new social forum. I saw a parody video on You-Tube related to these social networks which included the line "Go ahead, let Facebook intrude into and completely change your life!"

As usual, I feel like I'm a few years late getting into the debate. I guess I just want to try to clarify the ways in which these new forms of communication and community building change our lives. In what ways do our local lives fit into our distributed networked lives?

There's a voice in me that says I'm not supposed to ask these questions. It says that it is the job of the sociologists to ask these questions. The wisdom of this voice is that perhaps really all I should be doing is finding something that works for me. I don't need to answer these questions for others. But at the same time, without asking the general questions, the space in which I will actually find my own solutions isn't opened up.

the mathematician's power play

Interesting post at the blog The Truth Makes Me Fret.

Here is an article by Max Tegmark about mathematical reality.
Tegmark wants to argue from the existence of an external reality to the existence of a mathematical external reality-- basically that math is all there is. I admit that this "math is all there is" idea is pretty appealing to me. I think that while possibly true in some sense, at the same time it is less powerful than it seems at first.

I go through this mental excercise sometimes: suppose I spend much of my time studying X. Now here is why X is the most important thing in the world. Now repeat this exercise for Y.

For example, economics: We can't survive without resources. Study of exchange and management of resources is thus absolutely crucial.
Now try psychology: obviously thinking is important. We spend much of our time thinking and much of our existence is manifest through our thoughts. Thus, the study of the structure of thinking and its resultant behavior is clearly of the utmost importance, dare I say, crucial?
Repeat.


Ponder Stibbons shows in her post that Tegmark gets his result by a confusing use of the word "baggage".
I suppose Tegmark might find a way around this critique by claiming he didn't quite mean this or that, and I want to read his article more carefully, but as a document, it strikes me as an attempt for mathematical physics to regain the throne (in case it ever lost it).

the wonder years

oh no, i hadn't seen this show in just such a long time.
i feel like i should be embarassed, but instead, for the moment it becomes my ideal of romance. am i really stuck back in junior high?

"when i hear great soft rock, it always takes me back to a relaxing place, like a beach, or a house on a lake," says the man trying to sell me the cd set of songs to bring back the memories of the 70's.

here's a memory: i took this spanish class through cabrillo college at santa cruz high. one of the class members was billy rainbow (arcoiris). whenever we sang a certain song, the teacher would stop and say in a dreamy voice "ah, las memorias." i'm not sure why, but ruthie always found that incredibly funny.

"whenever i hear these songs, always feel like i'm on vacation"
"you know angela, you're absolutely right!"
"but don't go looking for this classic collection of songs in stores, because its not available."
"if its not the best music you've ever heard, send it back, and keep, absolutely free, our cd of classics from 1977"

elegant art?

I've been struggling with a painting. I look at it and it looks very complicated. Its achieved a certain consistency. The level of detail is similar throughout. I see smoke and drama, squares, ugly chunky bits and underwater areas with wrongly colored Dr. Seuss-like swirls. I'd say its interesting to look at.

The problem is that I don't like to look at it. Its too much. Its not at a human scale. Or maybe its just that I'm tired and burnt out and don't feel like I have the perspective to see what might be elegant in it. My instinct is that its not particularly elegant.

So do I keep working on this painting? I've never bought that strongly into the express yourself school of art. More about having a dialogue with color and form. People praise art that expresses difficult emotions but manages to maintain a balance. To pull form out of chaos. Is this just our preference for the happy ending?

I guess I'm saying that this painting can be done without it having an elegant resolution. Sure, maybe I'll paint over it or throw it away some day. But for today, this painting can be done. Its an expression of where I am today. And maybe given that, I can start another that will find the elegance beyond this particular mess.

more on Wendell Berry

I've been really appreciating this book of essays by Wendall Berry called "The Way of Ignorance". His basic examples come from agriculture and farming which he has experience with, but I can't help finding many parallels to physics.

His essay "Local Knowledge in the Age of Information" really solidified for me a good part of the reason (in a roundabout way) why I am in a national lab instead of trying to go directly to a university. He describes the need for conversation between the center and the periphery. He says that the periphery needs the center as much as the center needs the periphery. At the center, inormation is collected and efficient ways of representing and presenting that information is found. Life occurs on the periphery. Contact with the center can give one access to a wealth of experience from other places. But without conversation, the center loses its understanding that it owes its existence to the periphery, and the periphery loses its ability to ask for help and to gain useful information that will work within an appropriately local context.

Here's a (perhaps obscure) example given by a certain physicist that I work with. I think it provides a physics example Of Berry's point about the need for conversation and an illustration of what local knowledge looks like. Consider non-linear single particle dynamics in accelerators. The needs of this discipline involve predicting whether a particle in a certain non-linear system will stay within a certain region for very long or not (the dynamic aperture). Non-linear dynamical systems have been studied in other contexts as well. The gravitational n-body problem is an example from astrophysics. In that context, one wants to know, for example, whether our solar system will be stable over long time periods. The knowledge from this and other fields requiring the understanding of long term dynamics of non-linear systems has made it to the universities. Dynamical systems research collects together such knowledge. Now, certain theorems exist, such as the KAM theorem in which long-term stability criterion have been found. The problem is that the perturbations are just too big in an accelerator or a solar system for the theorems to apply. So, it may be that people in the universities think that in some sense the problem has been solved, wheras in "the field", the solutions are useless, and the very sense of arrogance implied in the attitude that the problem is essentially solved may at times do more harm than good.

Yes, this idea of conversation between the center and the periphery is very interesting to me, even if my example and explanation is rather murky at the moment.

murky again

building toys- trying to define an interface, make something that works. infrastructure, always working below the surface.
lately the dominant image has been climbing around on bars- a gigantic metal cage.
i'm watching the x-files movie. adds a dose of mystery.
no clear path.

particular/general language

Wendell Berry, in his essay "Imagination in Place", writes

All this [pressures of farming] calls for an exactly particularizing language. This is the right kind of language for a writer, a language developing, so to speak, from the ground up. It is the right kind of language for anybody, but a lot of our public language now seems to develop downwards from a purpose. Usually the purpose is to mislead, the particulars being selected or invented to suit the purpose; or the pariculars dangle loosely and unregarded from the dislocated intellectuality of the universities. This is contrary to honesty and also to practicality.

This reminds me of questions about the role of theory in physics. It is generally concieved to be the theorists who design the language and the experimentalists who work within that framework, occasionally finding that the framework is inadequate, thereby requiring a reworking.

If top-down language is dishonest and impractical, then what is its appropriate role? Could the tension here be between passing of knowledge through experience and through writing or language? A person that is able to do something can then teach someone else to do it. Songs can be passed down orally from generation to generation.

But Wendell Berry is also an author and thus captures something in his writing. Perhaps the point is that it is always through example that he teaches. There's something appealing to me about this picture of knowledge embodied in experienced people rather than in books, because I am so heavily biased in the other direction. But whenever one encounters what one lacks, it needs to be taken slowly so that what one has isn't destroyed in the process.

schedule

no time to shop.
so dinner is oatmeal and peanut butter and jelly, chips and salsa.
lunch was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
now i have forty five minutes to rewrite greenlseeves from e minor to a minor before my guitar lesson.

zen planning

It seems so clear that the present is when experience happens and so being in the now is obviously important. But at the same time, we are constantly making plans. We concieve of the moment as part of a broader gesture and this gives it meaning and improves the present.
This kind of micro thinking however is a bit like analyzing a novel letter by letter. I guess I'm wondering what Buddhism has to say about how the present relates to longer amounts of time. We have to make plans. We have to work. We have to do all sorts of long term things. Are we sacrificing the present for the future, or building meaning?
Anyway, this conflict between existing in the present but planning for the future is one that I seem to keep coming back to over the years.

cleaning

to clean is to decide what is dirty- to follow through on a system.
if the system is awful, the result can be awful as in ethnic cleansing.

but today, if i organize my clothes, and put my books on my bookshelf, and throw out most of my junk mail, i don't think i'll hurt anyone too badly.

eating turkey,

drinking beer in bed and listening to the rain- this is the life!

bookshelf

when i moved across the country, i got rid of lots of books.
but still, i have too many books on my bookshelf that i haven't read.
each one of these books is a project, an unfulfilled piece of my identity.

one book is a soldier of the great war by mark halprin. my dad gave me this book, saying he really loved it.

another one is raintree country by ross lockridge jr. my step-father gave this to me when he was getting rid of books, telling me it was the great american novel.

so these books become place holders for plans to get to know my father and step-father better sometime in the future.

i have a freud reader on my bookshelf. i bought this book for a humanities class in college and read almost none of it. but it stands for my plan to stop bsing about psychology and to learn a little bit more.

too many placeholders and i start to feel empty. the person i think i ought to be is so much bigger than who i am. so reading a book isn't a big deal, because there are too many left to read.
what i always forget about getting rid of things is that it doesn't mean that i won't want that thing again in the future. just because i get rid of my step dad's favorite book doesn't mean we can't discuss it sometime in the future.

its a fear that if potentialities aren't displayed, then they are gone. a child's worry that the ball hidden behind his mother's back has disappeared from the world?

when we look back

how will we describe this time, someday?

i get angry at imperminence and lectures tell me to treat it as if i were falling from an airplane. to find a home in uncertainty. we always forget the difficulty. the edges get softened, a few of the many coexistent realities are retained. is memory the inspiration for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?

will i remember that the choices expanded far beyond the ability to live those choices?

a useful tool i have found is to ask: "and what is so different about now?" "ok, but hasn't that been true for the past five years?" but this can also be a way to smooth and ignore.

(reading /the book of laughter and forgetting/)

dharma talks

Thanks to Hana for pointing me to some online talks from the Berkeley based East Bay Dharma Center. I listened to the last two by James Baraz about mindfulness.
I also listened to the one by Patricia Ellsberg, Daniel Ellsberg's wife. She describes copying the pentagon papers and talks about what its like to be with someone so attracted to darkness when she is so attracted to light and expansiveness. I was also interested to hear she learned TM many years ago, and now practices her own form of meditation which involves lying for an hour with one hand on her heart and one on her belly.

physics is conflict?

Nancy Cartwright joins the discussion of pro/con string theory as only game in town. Lee Smolin defends his book which argues that there are valley crossers and hill climbers and we need to encourage more valley crossers applied to other approaches to quantum gravity besides string theory. Michael Duff argues that its just sour grapes and that string theory is young and vigorous with some great achievements so far. Cartwright argues that "physics is conflict". She compares physics to John Locke's discussion of justice (which I'm not familiar with) in which no criterion exists to choose a theory of justice. The role of theory then is to manage conflict- to decide when choices should be made and otherwise, how to help competing camps coexist.
(from here)

more tm stuff

Continuing on this transcendental mediation thread, I just noticed a post about TM at Cosmic Variance.
Also, I recently bought Paul Mason's biography of the Maharishi, and have continued following the blog TM-Free. Oh, also, I watched a video by Steve Hassan (from TM-Free) about his approach to getting people out of cults. I'm still uncomfortable with this issue of new religion vs. cult. I apreciate the approach Hassan describes. He says often that he doesn't try to take anything away from people, only give them options. But at the same time he sees the situation as a war. Why am I so reluctant to be a warrior? Sometimes I feel like its weakness, sometimes strength. Maybe for me the reason is that most of the wars (be they family/work/politics etc.) that I feel pulled into choosing sides over just aren't important enough to me. Fighting in that war would screw up a bunch of other stuff that I find equally important.

Considering this question of being a warrior reminds me that the Maharishi focuses TMers on the first 6 books of the Baghavad Gita, with his own interpretation that the text refers to consciousness. The beginning involves Krishna urging Arjuna to fight against his family. I suppose this encourages TMers to see the struggle to enlighten the world through TM as an epic battle where individuals consciousnesses (even within a family) are fighting it out.

One way I think about TM is as a little like a micro-version of America. The people are mainly well-meaning and really believe they are doing good for the world. But the perspective is so narrow and solutions so simplistic that they often do more harm than good, while a few people actually get rich from the whole thing. So, basically, if it weren't for the arrogant megalomania that accompanies the whole thing, I'd be happy to call them spiritual/cultural/life style pioneers, trying to find meaning out of the complex world that doesn't usually fit very well into simple boxes.

dreams

a) Climbing about on the scaffolding. Something big being constructed, but I'm the only one working on it.

b) The field trip stops at an amusement park on the side of the New Jersey turnpike.
I run ahead to ride the roller coaster. But when the train stops everyone I came with has already left. Not clear how to get home from here!

I must be working too hard. Not very subtle... But thank you, dreams. You are always a steady friend!

bread crumbs

Trying to make progress in my job is like wandering in a forest.
I need landmarks that I know how to get back to.
What makes a landmark? Its familiar. And it takes time to become familiar with something.
But I'm moving too fast. I don't pause long enough to make comfortable resting places. Or I don't know how to make a comfortable resting place? No. I think I do. I'm just slow.
I know some things. I know where the river is. I recognise the clearings.
But then, sometimes its just really not a good time to stop and rest. Last week, I had the distinct feeling of having climbed up out of a gulley that I'd been wandering in for awhile. I had grabbed a hold of a tree branch and pulled myself up and could finally look back and see the creek bed, the rocks, the patches of trees, all the different microclimates.

synchrotron light sources

I suppose there's a time when you should do something with what you've learned. You can't be a student your whole life! (Well, of course you can, and I fully plan to, but I should also do something useful.)

So. What am I doing? Well, I'm part of a group designing a third generation synchrotron light source: the NSLS-II.

Ok, so what is a synchrotron light source?

Check out this photo of a machine called the NSLS VUV ring:
See the brownish tube in the center going all the way around? (Just above the dark blue things, and with some yellow, orange and light blue things here and there.) Its a copper pipe, called the beam pipe and for this machine its 51 meters around. Electrons travel down that tube at close to the speed of light.

All right. Nice. Three questions:
1) How'd the electrons get there in the first place?
2) Why do they stay in the pipe and not slam into the walls?
3) Why on earth would we want to do this?

Question 1 is why this is really a branch of the field of accelerator physics. We need a particle accelerator to get the electrons going fast enough. The electrons in this machine have an energy of 800 thousand electron volts. That's the energy one electron would have after going through 800 thousand 1 volt batteries.

By the way, in case you forgot what an electron was... we're mainly made of them. They are negatively charged particles that orbit the nucleus in atoms.

The answer to question 2 involves the yellow, orange, and light blue things surrounding the beam pipe. They are magnets. The light blue one is a dipole magnet, meaning it has two poles, north and south. The magnetic field bends the charged electrons. So that's how we can get the bunch of electrons going in a circular shape. The problem is that with just the bending, the beam would be unstable- if it was just a bit off the "perfect" trajectory, it would very quickly die a copper death. So the yellow magnets are there. They are called quadrupole magnets, four poles. They are like lenses for the particles. The orange magnets are sextupole magnets, six poles. They're also necessary, but its a bit technical as to why.

Ok. So, on to question 3. Why?

Well, for those of you who have taken an electricity and magnetism class, you might remember that charged particles create electric and magnetic fields. And remember that light is just an oscillating electric and magnetic field? Look around you. Yep. That's what's hitting your eyes: electric and magnetic fields. Basically, whenever a charged particle changes state, it gives off light. So, the electrons running around the ring here are having their path bent by the dipole magnets and thus giving off light. Because these machines are also called "synchrotrons", the light is called synchrotron radiation.

So that's it. Get some electrons stored in a big circle and whenever they bend, they give off light. That ought to be good for something.

Actually, these machines, synchrotrons, were originally designed to smash particles together. The higher the energy the particle, the more interesting things that might pop out from the collisions. Unfortunately, the higher the energy, the more of this synchrotron radiation gets produced which saps energy from the system. So, originally synchrotron radiation was seen as a big nuisance! Until some biophysicist (and probably some others) came along and said: hey, we'll take the light! So they started running the particle smashing synchrotrons parasitically, using the synchrotron light for whatever they needed it for. It turned out that this source of light was so useful that it was worth building these machines solely to get the light out! Second generation light sources were redesigned so that the electron beam was more suited for radiation purposes rather than particle smashing purposes. Then, third generation light sources were designed where the beam was really allowed to bend. In fact these devices were put in that caused the beam to wiggle back and forth. They were called wigglers. They are also sometimes called undulators. Here's a picture of one of these beasts:


So that's what I've been up to. The work I do, mainly relates to Question 2 above.
In particular, now that we add these crazy undulators and wigglers to the ring, we have to really be sure that the beam will be stable. So we need to write some computer code that tracks the electrons around to see what happens. To do this, we need to understand Hamiltonian dynamics, a formulation of classical mechanics. In my own skewed world, this is the reason I got into this field, and I still actually find this aspect quite interesting! Remember the craze surrounding chaos theory? One of these days, I need to try to really understand the KAM theorem. Well, this one of the fields where some of the math was developed, or at least was a major recipient. There are still plenty of open problems here! As for whether quantum mechanics is relevant for these beams of electrons in these machines, the answer is that it is and it isn't (and it might be). But that's a story for another day.

volver

I saw Almodovar's recent film Volver last night.

There was something interesting about the way death was dealt with. Death is a central element, but the people, the emotions, the story, somehow don't allow it to dominate in the way it easily could have. Also, beauty itself has the same paradoxical role. A large budget film these days can have teams of artistic designers who sculpt each shot into a piece of art on its own. One can get lost in the beauty of the way the colors are balanced and one imagines that someone is quite (justifiably) proud of the aesthetic achievement of a single frame. However, overall, the film itself often suffers as a result of individual artistic talents not working together to support the central goals of the film. It can have a piecemeal feel to it.
I guess Almodovar's films are just so consistently gorgeous that you forgive the extravagence. Or maybe its the fact that humanity never leaves the screen, or is never more than a few seconds away. The beauty isn't triumphalist- it isn't a stick to beat you over the head with, but instead a flavorful sauce that brings out a subtle taste, or the melodic structure that pulls you in to a sad song.

snacks

fruit: fresh- apples and kumquats.
dried- cherries.
bars: Odwalla, Tiger's Milk
microwavable lunch items: Peanut Satay noodles and sauce
Mushroom soup
Teriyaki noodle bowl (x2)

Ok, Boaz, now get to work!

spectacle of religion

Consider:

Chapter 14 of "the sociology of religious movements" by
William Sims Bainbridge discusses Star Wars. The Jedi knights tap into The Force which is both powerful to the faithful and often seemingly laughable to the unfaithful. (Not coincidentally, the book also includes a discussion of TM)

The movie "What the Bleep". It says that by tapping into the quantum, we can control our destinies... do anything.

The movie "Pi". A certain number exists that underlies both the numerology of the Hebrew old testament and the stock markets.

Three modern day myths. Seductive conclusions.

Although the "miracles" done in Star Wars are somewhat subtle (Luke's perfectly timed shot on the Death Star), the movie does seem to strongly give the impression that these supernatural things do happen. The same is true of Pi. A lot of people tell me how much they like it. I would have liked it if it weren't for the fact that it assumed that such a number actually exists. I couldn't make it all the way through What the Bleep, so I can't really tell you what the overall picture is. But my impression is that there's a story there with miracles occuring along the way.
Oh, I just realized that we can add the Matrix to this list.

Am I just being dense and overly literal to fault these films for basing their premise on something that's not strictly true?

I want to focus on more interesting things. Smaller things, less showy things. But maybe I need to deal with this big religious imagery producing popular culture machine first? (I should probably actually read what Bainbridge has to say. I'm just too impatient here. And biting off more than I can chew, ignoring my conclusions from the previous post.)

working with other people

Ideas on how to work productively with others?
One aspect is to give people finished pieces that aren't too big. Then they can use those pieces with their own work.
The tricky thing is when you want to build something big, but a lot of the work still remains to be done. If not careful, this can turn into a nasty dictatorship situation.
Lots of work needs to be done but the final result isn't up for debate, so people don't control the meaning of their own work. It can also be a half-baked idea.
Its the same reason why people with emotional "baggage" are dangerous. They may have a big picture of what your relationship with them should look like, but they don't actually know how to implement that relationship. They project an image of a completed relationship that doesn't actually hang together. And when you try to start working on the details to patch things up, you find yourself constructing most of it yourself: the cloth is full of major holes. If there's not that much there, stop hanging on to the same big picture!

Oh, and can Eric Raymond teach something on this topic? This section seems relevant. "Can't code from the ground up in bazaar style."
Only if you want to get to a specific place!