I Don't Understand.

I found this shocking article on the Huffington Post via Rabbit.  How is it that someone so filled with bigotry could think that his views would mesh with public opinion?  What would possess someone to publish such a thing?    

How To Screw Up

1. Promise a prominent professor that you'll do some numerical experiments for him.
   
2. Use local supercomputer to do said experiments.
   
3. Do not at any point verify that the experiments you think you're doing are the experiments that are actually being performed. 
   
4. Announce that the experiments are completed.
5. Perform a rudimentary analysis and observe that most of the data is useless.

When I was an undergrad my professors always told me to analyze data as it was being generated so that I could avoid precisely the above situation.  Luckily the math department has plenty of time on the supercomputer so I can run the experiments I need, but it's going to take a while.

Meditations on Meditations on New Year's Resolutions

I have a terrible memory for emotional states and this allows me to write posts such as this one. If this were not the case, I would have remembered how every semester there are too many things to do, and too little time to do them all well. I would also remember how, when stress levels rise, I don't pursue the things that reduce stress. The outlandishness of the post would have been apparent to me as I wrote it.  Instead the outlandishness is apparent to me now, and I can't help but wonder, who exactly was the author of that post?  The wife notices such inconsistencies as well. She doesn't get upset or even curious any more.  She merely points out when I contradict myself in a week's time.  Usually my decisions (e.g. I'm going to write and stretch more) don't have much impact on anything.  

Instead of regaling you with an impossibly dull list of the things I have to do (and am not doing at the moment) I'll tell you about my fish tank: It makes me really really happy.  It belongs to both my wife and me, but I say 'my' fish tank in the same way one might talk about 'my' sports team.  Shortly before the end of last year my wife and I decided to get her five gallon tank going again.  Once we got to the fish store we noticed that the ten gallon tanks weren't so expensive, and would hold a lot more fish, rocks, plants, and general fish tank stuff.  We made one of those impulse decisions that I am quite good at and my wife is not so good at and got a new tank. In stages we've stocked  it with some cardinals, platys, an algae eater, some plants and a rock that I spent twenty minutes picking out myself.

When I get up in the morning I go check out the tank before I shower.  I like to eat breakfast and dinner watching the fish.  I cut up an old paper grocery bag to make a blind so that sunlight during the day doesn't cause algae blooms.  I feel joy when the glass is clean, the water is clear and I can see the fishies exploring their three dimensional world.  The problems and rewards associated with taking care of a fish tank are wonderfully simple.

I'd like to get a much bigger tank, but that requires buying a house which in turn requires finishing grad school. 

Reviewing a Paper

I still intend to write the second half of, "Ingredients of Change." It wont happen today, though. It's crazy for me to think that I could write meaningfully about the social inequalities in America. For this reason, I'd like to embark on such an effort after more reflection than I have time for now.

In the meantime I'm going to complain about reviewing a paper: Reviewing a paper is a lot of work. This is especially true if you happen to be a grad student and the subject of the paper is outside your area of expertise.   The ideas presented seem very clever, but several assumptions are made, and I don't have a good way of determining if these assumptions are valid.  Maybe this is part of the culture of this area of study, maybe the authors are sweeping something under a rug.  I can't tell. 

I felt honored to be asked, "Me judge if someone else's research is fit for publication?"  I don't feel quite so honored now.  I feel like I signed up for a ton of work.  One thing's for sure, I don't intend to review any more papers while I'm a student and I'm definitely maintaining some bound on the ratio of number of papers I review to the number of papers I get published. 

Interlude

What started in the last post will be completed shortly.  In the meantime I offer a description of a less enjoyable experience for a grad student.  

This semester I'm a TA and one of my responsibilities is holding recitations.  In these sessions we review material covered in the lecture, I help with homework problems, and answer any questions the students may have.  In one of these recitation sessions I have maybe thirty kids.  Most of them are completely silent. But one kid, who sits in the back, answers my questions with a tone suggesting that everything I'm asking is pointlessly obvious.  His demeanor makes it hard for me to get other kids to speak up.  In trying to encourage broader participation I write something on the board and ask everyone who thinks that it's true to put their hands up.  No one does anything, except the kid in the back puts his hand up announces that it's true.  I then ask everyone who thinks the statement is false to put their hands up.  Half the students'  hands go up.  The statement is false and I commend the students who recognized this, although anyone who had done the reading would know the statement was false.  Then the kid in the back starts trying to argue that the statement is actually true.  I make a clear explanation appealing to pre-calculus level mathematics, but the kid in the back wont give up.

There is a small percentage of students who either can't tell or don't care that their actions are disruptive and annoying, and it's exhausting having them in class.  While I really want to tell them to take their social dysfunction somewhere else, I usually carefully explain that the way they are behaving is making it hard for me to do my job.  And always they get this surprised look on their face.  It makes me wonder how much I want an academic position. 

The Ingredients of Change (Part 1)

Harry Belafonte spoke at my university this afternoon.  My wife decided to go, but I was feeling exhausted so I hung out in her lab and helped a physics grad student install equipment into a vacuum chamber.  About ten minutes after the talk was supposed to have started my wife returned to the lab and said that the place was mobbed and there was no chance she could get a seat.  Instead we watched the talk on RealPlayer.  Of the complicated mush of feelings resulting from the talk, the two most relevant were: One, a sense of shirked social responsibility, and two, a sense that the story or race in America hasn't changed in as long as I have been alive.   I'm 35.

My introduction to race in America came in high school, studying the civil war and the civil rights movement, and then living in south side Chicago for four years.  I had been in Chicago for less than an hour when I realized that my high school had glossed over the fundamental reality of the issues at hand.  My Dad drove south on Lake Shore Drive and turned right too early, somewhere north of 47th.   I simply stared out the passenger-side window.  Shop windows were boarded up.  Burned out cars and trash sat by the curb.  People wandered down the middle of the street.  The familiar signs of commercialism one expects in a city were absent.  My Dad didn't say anything.  Our destination was an uneasy oasis in an economic desert. The student body was almost entirely white, and the only thing that could conceivably have passed as race relations were dealing with people asking for money and trying not to get mugged.  In our classes we were taught a wide range intellectual tools, all of which were hopelessly insufficient to come to terms with the magnitude of the inequality all around us. I didn't understand the first time I heard the Martin Luther King quote, "No one is free until everyone is free."  After a short time looking at poverty up close I understood. Although, some, as a defense mechanism, opted for various intellectual contortions that allowed them to go on not understanding.

Mr. Belafonte talked about gathering young people together to talk about pressing social issues and it left me feeling depressed.

A Not So Thoughtful Post

I found the following on A Gentleman's C

Perusing Boing Boing, I encountered deep fried things that ought not be deep fried.  Truly, there can be no doubt as to the importance of the web.

Why Graduate School

Rereading the personal statement I wrote when applying to grad school is always good for a chuckle.  In essence, the essay says what all application essays say: I like math, I'll be good at it, here are the mitigating circumstances for any shortcomings in my application -- in my case the lack of B.A. in math, and the fact that I had been out of school for ten years.  The essay was honest and I think it was well written, but math has turned out to be much harder than I thought it would be. Being good at math requires more than a logical mind.   It requires being able to rapidly absorb great masses of new ideas and employ them to solve difficult problems.  First year was hard.  The first month of analysis covered general measure theory, and oh my gosh did I not have the slightest clue what we were doing.  Years later measure theory seems like such an obvious way to do things, so obvious, in fact, that it feels like I've known it all my life.  What could be simpler than assigning some measure of size to a set in a way that respects countable unions and intersections?  To do so based on geometric considerations is nothing more than what we learned as a kid when we encountered words such as 'length', 'area', 'volume.'

One of the appeals of mathematics is that while it makes rigorous basic ideas we've worked with all our lives, it also introduces very new notions.  For example, the Hausdorff measure can be used to define 'length' and 'area' by setting a dimension parameter to 1 and 2 respectively.  The formal construction of the Hausdorff measure does not require that this parameter be an integer.  And so, along the way to making 'length' and 'area' clear, you also pick up all these fractional dimensional things for which the theory is as clear as it is for length, but the intuition is not clear at all.  After a while you suffer what my analysis professor might call a "professional deformation" whereby these ideas that started out as strange and foreign begin to seem like common, everyday objects.  At this point leaving math means going out into a world where almost no one thinks of fractional dimensional objects, and even fewer have effective tools for working with such things.  All these familiar ideas would drop out of existence outside of math because there is no language for them.  It isn't a happy prospect for someone who has spent considerable time struggling to understand these ideas. 

The other appeal of math is that on the few occasions I've made progress on an open problem I've gotten an enormous rush.  To have an idea come at an unexpected moment or to see the details of a new argument work out on paper in front of you is a tremendous feeling.  There is this realization that you know something about this abstract world that no one else knows.  It's a rare to be sure, but there are maybe three times when I've had this happen and it makes me feel remarkably alive. 

The thing is that the process of doing math is delicate.  Here's an analogy: As an instructor, when students came to my office hours, I would make them write on my whiteboard.  There is considerable evidence that more learning occurs when the student figures something out on her or his own than when the instructor reiterates the answer.  In those moments students are caught in a realm where they aren't sure of their footing.  They move slowly, second guess themselves, and set out on epically wrong paths.  This is remarkably like what I've observed research to be.  In meetings with researchers there is an awful lot of "I don't know," and, "I couldn't get this to work."  The analogy breaks down in that researchers have no answer keys and no one to guide them to the answer when they get lost. 

Meditations on New Year's Resolutions

In years past my new year's resolutions have been little more than equal parts judgment of self and wishful thinking. And so this year I've decided to take a different approach. All my resolutions revolve around things I enjoy and feel good about. To that end my resolutions are

• stretch every day and
• write more often and thoughtfully.

I enjoy these activities, do them little, and more importantly both these activities leave me predisposed to do the things that normally land on my yearly laundry list of things to do more of e.g. exercise, relax. Neither of these activities increase my stress level, and even thinking about these activities doesn't increase my stress level.

The motivation for this approach to new year's resolutions came in two forms. I had a cold over much of the holidays, and when it came time to make resolutions I was exhausted. Since I have a terrible memory for emotional states, I couldn't imagine that I would feel anything other than exhausted for the following year. Any of the resolutions I would typically make left me with no other thought than how following through on the resolution would separate me from what I envisioned I really wanted, which was lots of sleep and a chance to stare thoughtlessly at the walls. The other motivation came from a discussion with my mom. She was describing problems she faced trying to get work done and ascribed them to getting old. As soon as she told me about them I recognized the cause as stress.

In mulling all this over I came to see that 2007 was damagingly stressful. Being a graduate student is all about staying balanced on a knife-edge between fear of failure and burnout. This is not a healthy state in which to spend an extended time, but last year was particularly bad. The stress and exhaustion that came with writing my qualifying paper, battles with theory, and teaching last fall was changing me. I was less articulate and had trouble formulating or parsing complete sentences. I was supremely distractible when not doing math. I was irritable all the time, especially when someone was asking for my time and taking me away from what I wanted to be doing.  There were few things more frustrating than a phone ringing. (While I try to treat everyone with a certain basic level of respect, tele-marketers who called me last year often got nothing more than terse good-bye's.)  I didn't want to be this person I was changing into, but I wasn't (and am still not) sure how to go about being a grad student without these side effects. And so this year's resolution is essentially to be less stressed, in the hopes that this will return me to the person I remember I once was. 

Success!

For going on years I've felt that fastchance looked like crap and that I should fix it. I kept thinking about using Blogger, but always assumed that it would be a huge hassle to retain my domain name and use Blogger at the same time. Turns out it isn't. In fact it took me like ninety seconds to get things working. I am repeatedly amazed at how well Google products work. I also opted for Blogger because fastchance lacked a feed and I didn't want to set one up.

That is all for now. Soon more math blatheration.

Something New

I'm experimenting with something new.