The Trans-Siberian Handbook

As you know, there have been demonstrations and deaths in Tibet over the past week. I have not heard from my Tibetan friends in Lhasa, where phones and internet have been cut off and the city has been shut down following riots, with the army patrolling the streets. My time in Tibet, and the friends I made there, have been among the most important in my life. Even as a carefully watched foreigner, I was able to see that Chinese occupation is intentionally destroying Tibetan cultural identity — most obviously simply by occupying the territory and outnumbering the Tibetans with Chinese immigrants, limiting their religious freedoms and freedoms of speech, relocating Tibetans to gain access to natural resources, requiring Tibetans to be educated in government propaganda, etc. Even more troubling, but which I did not personally witness, are the many other human rights abuses that are reported.

The Tibetan people are a peaceful and spiritual people. They are not deserving of the “cultural genocide” being carried out under China’s illegitimate occupation of Tibet (here I quote the Dalai Lama). Please take a moment to sign the petition to the Olympic Committee to use the influence of the Olympics to bring a peaceful solution to Tibet (the Olympic Truce is part of the Olympic mandate), and find out what else you can do to help.

http://www.savetibet.org/action/index.php or http://www.racefortibet.org/act/index.php

Please also see the Dalai Lama’s statement:

http://www.savetibet.org/news/newsitem.php?id=1217

I’ve long been fascinated by Russians. The New York Times is reporting on their upcoming election:

Putin’s Iron Grip on Russia Suffocates His Opponents

The article is interesting, but I think that one Russian reader’s response is more fascinating than the entire article. This comment was posted in response to the Russian translation of the article on a Russian website put up by the New York Times for this purpose. It was a rare one written in English, but the New York Times is dutifully (if not carefully) translating the comments posted there for their own nytimes.com comments page.

Comment by ‘pushta’: ‘Straight to English, if you don’t mind’

What I find so fascinating is the failure to communicate: the New York Times writes what it sees as investigative journalism, and the Russians read it as propaganda. That we two cultures should read news with such different eyes is instructive — and maybe the more important half of the lesson is the part about our own hidden assumptions. Interestingly, few of the Russian comments take issue with the facts reported — only with the implications of their presence in a New York Times article. So we should ask ourselves: what is the purpose of journalism, if it is read so differently by different cultures?

The other Russian comments are interesting too, and many are on the theme of ‘I’ll worry about freedom after I’m sure I’ve got food,’ which is to say, stability of the country is the priority. It’s a valid point. Americans have a strange obsession with democracy: after all, it is supposed to be a means to an end*, not the end in and of itself. My own modest experience living in Russia two years ago at least served to confirm this ordering of priorities. So while we’re asking questions, we should probably also ask: what is the purpose of democracy?

~~~

* And an at most satisfactory one, at that.

The usual frustrating vagueness of popular media explanations of science aside, I found this article delightful. The author is clearly revelling in the absurdity, and so he should. It’s wonderful. The scientists in the article are portrayed as dismayed by the absurdity of their theory — and go so far as to say it must therefore be wrong — but we should all take caution at our own emotional reactions to science. The great theories of science tend to dethrone man. I, for one, would love it if this were true. And - oh! - the metaphysical quandries of whether we could ever know it were true, if in fact it were.

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs? - New York Times

Probably the best response I could give to a question of religion or philosophy would be to say, “I’m an absurdist.”

It’s suddenly the end of my time in this designer-granola-chewing-surfing- communing-with-nature-from-inside-your-SUV-ridiculous state.

I’m sitting on my carpeted floor — my desk already sold and gone to another surfing, sandal-wearing organically-grown graduate student — trying to stuff my sleeping bag into my suitcase. The buckle snapped when I tried to close it on my weights, books and uneaten canned foodstuffs. Now, reconsidering, I’ve filled it with clothing, carefully considering which items I would be willing to lose to the tarmac winds when the suitcase explodes on the conveyor belt to the airplane. I wonder if it is Southwest Airlines policy to collect each piece of underwear that flies across that incredible concrete expanse, and return it to you as a designer collection of airplane-grease-coloured intimates. I wonder if I would watch in silent fascination from my airplane window as employees pull my sportsbras out of the engine intake so we can take off safely. I wonder if I would turn to the mayonnaise executive beside me and say cheerily, “Sorry, those are mine.”

As I ponder this, I am eating cranberry sauce. My diet this week has been dictated by the marketers who calculated the precise number of pickles that should be sold per jar, the exact amount of mayonnaise to package as a unit. As food ran out, the available combinations diminished. This afternoon I finished the frozen smelts, the feta cheese, and a bag of green onions. Now there are preserved cherries, yogurt, pickles, peanut butter and soy sauce. And four cups of tart cranberry sauce. I wonder, briefly, if I could cement my suitcase shut with cranberry sauce. The peanut-butter seems a better bet, but I was planning to eat that with the pickles. So I am eating cranberry sauce straight, hoping that at least urinating will be more artistic tomorrow when I get up at 4 am to phone for a taxi.

I try to calculate the safest place to put a plastic tube of cooked polenta. It probably doesn’t stain, does it? Why did I buy this anyway? I could eat it, if I didn’t need the room in my stomach for that much more perishable 2 lb bag of carrots staring at me from the corner. I can’t even leave the tube of polenta for my roommate, who is also moving out this week. I am at the mercy of a glaring collection of unloved groceries. And I’m not even hungry.

So these are my last hours in beautiful California. I hardly noticed the time pass. I was deep in work, riding past the pacific ocean each day thinking about elliptic curves and forgetting to look left. I was only drawn out of my reverie by the smell of exhaust and the veering, giant metal monsters. This state, this beautiful state, this absurd state…

California is summed up by the scene in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. Each day the lot fills with oversize just-washed SUVs cramming themselves into parking slots and then burping out delicate designer women wearing organically grown hemp and carrying reuseable grocery bags. Reuseable grocery bags. This state screams its environmental concern at 100 km/hr down the freeway.

But it is stunningly beautiful. Nature here is too large to have been conquered, even by this incredible load of driving humanity. And in their strange way, Californians worship it, riding the waves on little boards, drenching themselves in the vast ocean day after day. I can’t help but wonder what they are doing out there, like a flock of birds, floating and paddling and looking for something.

I went to Birch Aquarium today. It’s just down the hill from my house, probably the closest source of emergency hotdogs. I’d only been there to pick up and drop off the Flexcar in the parking lot next to the rusty submarine. But I decided it was my duty to do a closer inspection, so this afternoon a fascinating three hours were spent looking at their twenty or thirty aquariums (this is no rival to Boston’s Aquarium).

Let me quote Richard Dawkins, after he has described the razorfish, long and narrow, which swims perpendicularly with its head toward the ground; the leafy sea dragon, which resembes a whole bush of seaweed; gulper eels, which eat prey larger than themselves in much the way a snake does; and air-breathing mudskippers, which may follow a person around ”like little puppies” on land. He writes,

“The teleost body plan seems almost indefinitely malleable over evolutionary time, tolerant of being pulled or squashed into any shape, however distantly removed from the ’standard’ fish shape. The oceanic sunfish’s Latin name, Mola mola, means millstone, and it is easy to see why. Seen from the side, it looks like a huge disc, up to an astonishing four metres in diameter and weighing up to two tonnes. The circularity of its outline is broken only by two gigantic fins on top and underneath, each one up to two metres long.”

So I went to the aquarium. And indeed, fish are bizarre. Probably among the most amazing things I learned is that I reached the age of 29 (or is it 28?) without realising that sole and halibut live their lives sideways! They grow both their eyes on one side and lie down on the sandy ocean bottom (eyes protruding up out of the sand) to wait for prey. They begin life fishily enough, swimming upright like other fish, but as they grow, their skulls rotate and they develop camouflage on the “top” side. Then they lie down and spend the rest of their lives in this twisted position.

(How many other asymmetrical animals can you think of? The only one that comes to mind is crabs with one giant claw.)

I met fish that are female until age two, and become male if they are fat enough. I watched jelleyfish “bud” off planted columns of connected baby jelleyfish. I felt a sea anemone try to sting me (they give the weak ones to tourists). I saw a crab’s discarded body armour: whenever a crab feels a little tight in the belt, it climbs right out of a gap in the middle of its back, leaving its entire outer body behind — including arms and tentacles — grows a little, and then calcifies itself a new layer. I saw flashing lightning fish. I saw a baby shark growing in its peapod-like egg-case. I stared into each tank for dozens of minutes, and new inhabitants kept popping out of the strangest corners with coloured hats, distorted fins, and goofy expressions. It was like the circus.

Stopped at one tank, I couldn’t help noticing the striking resemblance of an upside-down octopus to a giant testicle, causing me to remember that the word “avocado” also has its etymology in our familiarity with this particular body part. The octopus shoved at a large nearby starfish with some strength, but the starfish was unmoved. Eventually, however, the starfish deigned to start a slow descent along the glass, moving its thousands of tiny suction cups in a curiously disorganised but effective ramble, and causing me to wonder whether it controlled them all from a central brain or if they were really just the sort of vaguely directed horde of little body bits they appeared to be.

In the tank next to the octopus-testicle was a dead sea anemone sagging remarkably like an aged breast. It struck me that even in a ridiculous alien world like this — even when we go out of our way to go experience whatever is farthest from our own reality — we always predictably see ourselves. I can be excused from seeing human beings in the kelp tank, though. Saturday afternoon is kelp-tank-cleaning time and divers go around vacuuming the floor and wiping the inside of the monolithic plexiglass window. Then they feed the fish. It turns out Pavlov could as well have trained fish, judging by the affection these baracuda, bass and eels have for human divers carrying plastic buckets. The sharks and eels were positively loving, wrapping themselves around shoulders and neck like pet ferrets.

Anyway, fish are delightful.

I’ve been riding for many years and I feel safer on a bicycle than in a car, because I’ve developed a very detailed set of traffic skills.  What I’ve learned all those years from my father, from close calls, and from observation of the traffic around me has been written down here by Michael Bluejay:

Bicycle Safety: How to Not Get Hit by Cars

This website is largely a distillation of the wonderful book The Art of Urban Cycling by Robert Hurst.   This is not plagiarism — it’s because it’s the correct advice.  Read my review of Hurst’s book from 2004.

There are a lot of people walking around with surfboards. I thought they’d been making that up.

I’ve recently completed the first major stage of my recovery from a hamstring injury. This was a persistent injury, something more than a little beyond what it should have been. It has taken me a full year to completely regain my day-to-day functionality, and I’m just beginning to ride my bicycle in any real way again.

The doctors and physiotherapists agree that the recovery time was several standard deviations outside normal for the original injury. What has been so difficult, and what seems to be so difficult for many people facing physical therapy, is managing the constant evaluate-and-adjust process, walking that delicate line between over-straining and over-resting.

At my most recent appointment, my orthopedist finally said something that lit up the switchboard that is my mathematical brain. He explained that the irritation and strain, which has at this point become chronic, is dependent not on my level of activity, but to the change in my level of activity. As long as I am holding the level of daily use of the muscle at a constant, the strain will gradually improve. As long as I am slowly increasing my level of activity as I regain my ability to do the daily activities and exercise I once did, the strain will remain constant. If I quickly increase my level of activity, the strain will worsen.

So the trick is to very gradually but consistently increase activity while maintaining a low level of irritation, until one’s desired activity level is reached. Then, by maintaining that level, the strain will gradually heal. My error, early on in my injury, was two-fold: first, to initially push too hard too fast to recover, increasing the irritation quite badly; and then, in reaction to the sudden worsening of my condition, to cease using the hamstring altogether, in an attempt to “let it heal first.”

This complete cessation of use (I used crutches to avoid walking on it) did let the hamstring begin its gradual healing, but in the meantime my whole leg (quadriceps and other muscles) atrophied and I had set the level of use so low that it took months and months to work myself gradually back to daily use at the pace the strain would allow without worsening.

Mathematically speaking, there was an upper limit on my rate of increase of activity (which, if exceeded, would cause the strain to worsen). So once I set myself back to zero (no use), it took a long time to get back to normal (high use). Once I understood this, the use-or-rest game became much easier to sort out. All along, I had been trying to correlate pain to activity, and the data I was getting was contradictory. As soon as I tried to correlate pain to rate of change of activity, it all made perfect sense.

And that, my friends, is calculus. The rate of change is more often called a derivative.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Note 1: This is the first in what will probably become a series of posts in which you (my family and non-mathematical friends) are lulled into complacency only to be ambushed by mathematics. I'm hoping you'll develop a liking through this sort of forced exposure.]

[Note 2: I saw a number of doctors and physiotherapists while trying to figure out what to do with my hamstring injury. The orthopedist who was finally able to help me learn to heal myself, and who was articulate enough to explain things in a way I finally understood, was Dr. Khaund, of University Orthopedics on Butler Ave. If anyone is in Providence, RI, and looking for an orthopedist, he comes highly recommended.]

I think what this link proves is that mathematicians are frankly not good at wearing sarongs.

The Sarong Theorem Archive.

I wonder if I could eventually knock my house over by repeatedly running into the wall at full force? After all, earthquakes level buildings, and when I slam my fist into the wall, it shakes the whole house. Doesn’t it seem sometimes like we don’t really have much of a real sense of physics at all? This is part of a bigger problem, here, one that is really not acknowledged frequently enough by politicians and social reformers. Here it is: if we weren’t so damned determined to follow things like city bylaws and social etiquette, we’d have much more fun.

Come on, don’t lie about it. If you didn’t feel that “taboo” feeling, you’d see if your rice pudding really would stick itself to the bottom of the table. You’d take the old junkeable car out to a deserted stretch of road and see if cars explode the way they do in movies. You’d drop things off buildings, and put things in the microwave that you shouldn’t, and you’d see if you can really unroll a whole roll of toilet paper by putting one end in the toilet and flushing.

You’d have to clean up after yourself, of course. That’s only fair.

And it isn’t just physics. We’re robbing ourselves of chemical and biological knowledge, and even psychological know-how. A certain friend of mine suggested we go down to East Side Marketplace with placards denouncing baby food — after all, eating babies isn’t nice. Just to see if we could fool anyone with some fancy posters and buttons. I mean, you’re curious, admit it. How many people out there would get it and laugh? How many people would be offended and stick their noses up high enough to interfere with air traffic? How many minutes before the cops come? These are worthwhile statistics!

But no, we’ve agreed to stifle our creativity and give up the honourable tradition of science outside the government-funded laboratory. We seem to be perfectly happy to sit at home and watch Discovery channel tell us over and over about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Aren’t you at least tempted to go out and blow on things yourself?