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