September 2007 Archives

Before the Winter Olympics in SLC in 2002, the Olympic torch was carried in a precession across the US. Part of the precession occurred in Alaska, where students were dismissed from a school to walk across the street and cheer. Althogh the school pep band and cheerleaders performed, students were not restricted from simply leaving and going home. In order to attract attention of television cameras that were present, one Joseph Frederick unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." The principal of the school saw the display, walked across the street, told the students to take it down, and when they refused, she tore down the banner herself. Mr. Frederick was subsequently suspended from school for 10 days, on the grounds that his display was disrupting the school environment by encouraging the use of marijuana. Mr. Frederick subsequently sued the school, and the case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. God only knows how, but it probably had something to do with the rouge 9th circuit court of appeals which ruled in favor of Mr. Frederick. The ruling of the appelate court was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, this makes the stuff of memorable debates: what should be the limits of schools in restricting free speech? In particular, where should these lines be for displays that are off-campus and technically not at school-sanctioned events?

If you think the law is boring now, just imagine how mind-numbing it would be if people didn't do so many stupid things...

There are some pathological functions which are constructed by assigning one set of values to all rational numbers in an interval and another set of values to all irrational numbers in the interval. Such functions are usually constructed as examples of functions that are not integrable in the Riemann sense.

Here's an interesting example that is integrable in the usual sort of Riemann or Darboux sense. Define f : [1,2] &rarr R. For x in [1,2], let f(x) = 0 if x is irrational. Or let f(x)=1/n if x is rational, where x=m/n expressed in lowest terms.

"On the # 6 bus, a physics major explaining to his friend why uchicago has made him feel disillusioned with physics:

'I just feel like I'm living my life problem set to problem set.'"

--Posted on the "Overheard at UChicago" group on Facebook. That pretty much sums up my life: living from problem set to problem set...

Up until a few weeks ago, my experiences in the city of Chicago were almost solely confined to Hyde Park, Midway Airport, and the bus ride between them. True, I had ventured downtown several times, I had been to Chinatown, Pilsen, and this random Polish enclave on the northwest side once each, but my knowledge of this city was realistically very limited. Nevertheless, my impression of Chicago was necessarily constructed from these few data. It seemed like a very working-class city with mediocre food and an average selection of activities outside of museums and cultural experiences in interesting ethnic enclaves. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There are fewer distractions in this sort of environment. But I didn't find it to be an especially exciting urban environment either.

Unsurprisingly, this impression of Chicago is very incorrect. I had the excellent experience of visiting the city with my mother for a few days before I returned to school this year. We stayed in a prime location off Michigan Avenue. While the Disneyland-like inanity of Michigan Avenue and it's capitalistic mania became irritating after about five minutes, the areas just north are wonderful. Venturing just north into Lincoln Park, Belmont, and Wicker Park, for example, revealed neighborhoods so radically different from those on the south side that I could hardly believe I was in the city where I had lived for the past year. Unlike the hodgepodge collection of Currency Exchanges, sketchy trinket shops, and Harold's Chicken Shacks that constitute the south-side economic engine, there was a wonderful array of good restaurants (even cheap ones!), coffee shops, bookstores, theatres, etc. I should not complain to much about Hyde Park, for it is certainly a cut above the rest of the south side, but it suffers from having mediocre food that is slightly overpriced, and a lack of certain necessities (e.g. a decent grocery story: the Co-Op does not count).

Moreover, the urban climate of the parts of the north side I visited was radically different from the south side. The density of people on the street and urban development is far higher. The development and infrastructure showed signs of having been permanently maintained. We walked through Lincoln Park, which was lovely. It has a wonderfully-maintained and free public zoo, a conservatory, and many other features. Though gentrification has rapidly occurred in parts of the south side, the detritus of decades of ghettoization and disinvestment still remain.

The natural question to ask is why this enormous discrepancy exists between the two halves of the city. In its infrastructure and layout, Chicago is an extraordinarily monocentric city, implying that it should have some sort of radial symmetry in its development (Paul Krugman wrote that it was the most monocentric city in the US). The answer is, of course, obvious. The prolific industry and the stockyards south of downtown drew poor black workers to the area during the great migration, and various racist policies led to ghettos, etc., etc. It is all very well-documented.

But the interesting thing is: there are no more factories, the stockyards are gone, and the projects--which once supplied the area with a steady source of violent crime--have largely been demolished. Without these depressing forces, the south side is not so different from the north side. Proximity to downtown and the lake is the same. Access to public transportation is the same. In other words, many of the determinants of property values and population density are the same in the north and south. While the neighborhood amenities (e.g. schools, businesses, etc.) in the south are still significantly inferior to the north, these factors are largely determined by the wealth of the area's inhabitants. Thus, there exists a positive feedback effect on property value a neighborhood's "niceness" as its wealth increases. So, now that the depressing forces have diminished, perhaps the inner south side will not remain so different from the north side for long. True, there may end up being more distractions, but as long as the U of C doesn't become like it's cousin to the north, it might improve the collective welfare of the school and all of the south side.

I haven't blogged for ages! I feel a lesser person on account of it. Needless to say, there were good reasons for my recent drought of entries. Namely, I am back in Chicago and have finished the first week of the autumn quarter. Classes are shaping out to be even more painfully time-consuming than in the spring, but hopefully I can find a little time to write. I have some excellent material to post.

During the past week, now that I have returned to Portland, I have spent a lot of time with Leeor. Having absconded to Germany for the first seven months this year, he has crossed my path recently. Aside from catching up and having our famously abstruse arguments that stretch on for hours and hours, we spent some time visiting teachers at Wilson together. It was a bit more interesting than I had anticipated. I had several observations, but here are two notable ones.

In primary school, it is surprisingly easy to go through classes without ever knowing teachers well. Teachers instruct well over 100 students, and there is rarely any incentive to befriend teachers on a personal basis, or for teachers to befriend students. Indeed, given the unruly behavior that can characterize students of the age 14-18, having such close relationships can corrode a teacher's position of power to enforce discipline. While I thought I had very good relationships with most of my teachers, interacting with them now surprised me. The conversation was exactly like meeting an old friend: they asked about my life, and they told my about theirs and their families'. They did not feel afraid to share their (sometimes negative) opinions about their coworkers or administrators. One of the most surprising things I learned, in fact, was that all the respectable teachers dislike the same administrators and teachers for all the same reasons that the students do. Everyone with whom I spoke seemed a bit more human and likable.

My other observation occurred when filling out an application for a scholarship. The form asked for a list of my honors and awards from high school and college. Lest I were to become even more arrogant than I already am, I had relegated all of my awards from high school to a junk heap in my closet and I tried to forget about all of them. To refresh my memory, I looked through the junk and found a somewhat complete list in an application for a scholarship I completed a year and a half ago. As I was reading it, I was actually genuinely impressed with the volume of junk I had accomplished and won. There was a lot of stuff on that list. At the same time, however, I finally understood how utterly trivial and meaningless it all was. This list was nothing more than a long list of winnings in a very elaborate game. While I honestly did enjoy doing and winning practically everything on that list, it was dubious whether I would have still done it all the same if there were not the expectation that writing competitions or mock trial were the sort of stuff that "good" students do. Moreover I found this copious list of awards to incredibly ironic, given that the more I learn the more I understand how horribly ignorant I am in general and compared to other people. In this sense, all of these awards truly were meaningless; they were nothing more than dangerous illusion of some kind of skill or enlightenment. While it all did it's duty, giving me access to four more years of excellent education--and saving me about $160,000--a disturbing amount of it was nothing more than the modern academic version of the Cheyenne tribe's custom of decapitating their enemies in battle and carrying the severed heads as trophies of their conquest.

The first thing I did upon my return to Portland was to meet my friend Leeor, to chat and to debrief him from his 7-month trip to Germany and Europe. He studied German extensively and is now proficient, if not fluent in the language. We went to a park, sat on some swings that were slightly too small for us, began talking about language.

I was particularly struck by his description of German grammar. It is highly regular, with few exceptions to its rules. However, the rules themselves are a disordered disaster. Despite its extensive inflections, German has rigid and highly complicated word order. The rules governing this feature also don't appear to have a great deal of logic to them. An already messy verbal system is convoluted futher by the word order rules. For example, the auxiliary verbs used to form compound tenses can be scattered around a sentence depending on the other words in the sentence.

At the same time, I was comparing the German linguistic wreckage to the experience of my amateur attempt to learn Latin. Latin has this strange reputation of being an insurmountably difficult language, but I find it to be incredibly logical and orderly. It is certainly no more complicated than German. The only real work in learning Latin is memorizing all of the stupid declensions and conjugations, but pure memorization is easy if time-consuming. For all its morphological complexity, Latin has surprisingly few rules that seem as truly arbitrary as German. To be honest, I find the freedom of Latin and all those inflections to be very pleasant. It makes each sentence like a little logic puzzle, which depending on the order of things, can give so many interesting shades of meaning with such economy of words.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, slated to be operational by the middle of next year, employs over 2000 scientists and engineers. It is said that roughly half of the world particle physics community is working on the LHC and its six experiments.

This is the current state of experimental high-energy physics. It so happens that my intellectual interests have been very much focused on high-energy physics, but some recent reflection is challenging my views. No high-energy physics can occur without massive experiments requiring enormous human and financial capital. While this has always been true of accelerator projects like the Tevatron and LHC, it is now true of practically all other experimental efforts in the field. Double Chooz, the neutrino oscillation experiment on which I work, is considered a "small" collaboration with only 140 scientists. The resulting degree of delegation means that each individual group only manages the tiniest slice of the overall experiment. Although our group has an enormous set of work to do, for example, our piece doesn't even have anything to do with neutrinos directly. We're building the outer veto which essentially cancels out noise from background particles.

The result is a fun project, but I often feel more like we're doing more construction or engineering than genuine physics, and I lose sight of the big picture. Theory consequently seems all the more appealing as time goes on. And if I'm not smart enough to do theory, perhaps I should migrate to condensed matter physics. That might be fun, just as long as I don't end up doing materials science.

I was doing my reading for the day, when I learned that Latin's third declension (the evil one) has four irregular nouns. In some languages it seems that heavily used words tend to have the greatest degree of irregularity. In Spanish, for example, consider ser, estar, tener, poder, etc. These four irregular nouns are: vis (force), sus (swine), bos (ox), Iuppiter (Jupiter). How times have changed...

It occurred to me a couple days ago that I have maintained this blog for almost exactly 4.75 years. Given that I very recently turned 19, this constitutes one quarter of my entire life. I'm not sure whether I should be impressed or depressed by that number, but I certainly find it pretty funny. It is, by far, the single project in which I have invested the most time. One might almost say that it is my life's work.

A few weeks ago, my mother was calling and complaining again that I spend too much time working and studying and not enough time "getting out." I tried to convince her that, given my disgraceful efficiency in completing my goals, this could not possibly be the case. My rationalization fell on deaf ears as she continued her chiding. Soon after, a friend of mine was complaining that I had not yet visited at the University of Missouri, as I said I would. People did not seem very pleased with my activities, and I sensed the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. So, I immediately purchased a train ticket to Jefferson City, MO for Labor Day weekend for the fair price of $89. Given my deteriorating financial situation from the sub-prime mortgage fallout and the unexpectedly high tax withholding that threatened to turn my summer earnings into summer losses, it might not have been a very wise financial decision, but at least it promised to be an enjoyable adventure.

So off I was last Satuday morning, walking across Washington Park to catch the 7:30 AM green line El to the Loop. Emerging from the blue line subway, I walked the couple blocks to Union Station downtown. The most striking feature of train stations is their monolithic size and beautiful designs, particularly in comparision to their passenger flux. Chicago's Union Station, with its vaguely neoclassical architecture, is no exception. Walking in, I found a spectacular cavernous room, but it was surprisingly devoid of passengers. Instead of travelers, I found a Mercedes-Benz auto show, with a lot of rather wealthy-looking people labeled with nametags. Indeed, I wondered if I had found the correct place. It turned out that I had, but the bulk of the useful part of the station lay in a renovated and modernized (and distinctively more ugly) section of the station.

As the train slowly inched out of the underground terminal and out of the imposing mass of Chicago's skyline, I found myself noticing the superiority of train travel in comparison to travel by plane or automobile. Security is lax and boarding is quick, the seats are enormous, there is a copious array of power outlets for cell phones and computers, one can wander around at will, and the crowds are usually small. Although I didn't indulge myself, even the cafe car appeared to sell appetizing food, albeit at slightly inflated prices. According to wikipedia, the Amtrak trains also use about 2/3 of the energy per mile in comparison to planes or automobiles. The only downside of train travel, of course, is that it is slow: my meditation on the virtues of train travel were abruptly interrupted when the conductor announced that the trip to St. Louis, MO would take 5.5 hours. Tacking on an additional 2.5 hours to travel from St. Louis, MO to Jefferson City, put my total travel time at 8+ hours.

My family and I have been on a lot of road trips all over the West in our history. We've driven from the Bay Area to Sun Valley, ID, from Portland, OR to Salt Lake City, UT, from LA to Salt Lake, and more. Spending a lot of time in the back seat of a car, one can read a lot, play stupid games, or sleep, but invariably one spends a great deal of time watching the scenery pass by. Taking the freeways around the West, one soon realizes that the dominant urban scenery is a hideous and homogeneous brand of suburbia. Freeways in the West are uniformly flanked by the same collection of cheap, worthless shops, like Wal-Mart and Taco Bell, and by the same arrays of cookie-cutter houses with unnaturally green lawns. As you probably already knew or could guess, there is a bit of connection between the two. Freeways permitted cities to expand out of urban cores into low density suburban swaths. Mass production of houses enabled a cheap supply to meet the strong demand fueled by white flight, etc., etc. Crappy chain stores somehow fit into that mix. But the key point is rather simple: transportation fueled a development model, albeit a generally ugly one that necessitates too much driving for my taste.

The same is true for trains. Riding through the suburbs of Chicagoland, then the exurbs, and finally the endless corn fields and small towns, I had the sense that I had been transported to 1940 or 1950. Every small town we passed had a surprisingly interesting collection of shops and architecture that could have easily served as the inspiration for Disneyland's Main Street, USA. Like freeways, passenger rail had created its own development model of medium-density development accessible by trains and foot. The decline of rail since 1950 just meant that all this development was stuck in a time warp.

As I was noticing this, I also started noticing that I was only 1.5 hours into my trip. It is a shame that the US hasn't built the same sort of high-speed rail infrastructure that exists in Europe. Rail would be significantly more viable here if the trains were faster. Perhaps it would not be economically efficient in our much larger country, but a little bit of Googling indicates that it would be more environmentally efficient. My guess is that it might also cause urban development to be a bit more interesting, convenient, and "human" than suburbia currently is.

When I finally arrived, the rest of my trip was very good. People at the University of Missouri appear to spend a surprising amount of time frequenting upscale restaurants (which shockingly do exist in central Missouri--probably even more than in Hyde Park) and bars (apparently they do not check ID there). Though living in such a fashion for more than a few of weeks would have probably left me bankrupt (remember fallout in the stock market from subprime mortgage?) and full of antipathy toward the establishment, it was amusing for a weekend (though I must admit that bars aren't really my "thing"). We were also able to take a foray into the more rural regions, which were surprisingly pleasant. One can very much envision Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn dashing around the woods of the Ozarks playing cowboys and indians, or setting out on their raft pretending to be pirates.

As I was looking over my earnings for the summer and seeing that 23% of my already small summer earnings were deducted in taxes, I felt somewhat poor. That realization and a little bit of free time compelled me to seek some scholarships. There are a surprising number of them around, most involving simple essays on a variety of accessible topics.

In my first step, I applied for a generic sort of "science scholarship" from some random company. After I submitted my essay and application, I decided to read the information from past winners. The first was a female who was a premed biology major, the second was a female premed biology major inspired by her mother's diagnosis with cancer, the third was a female premed biology major. It continued. In fact, every single person who has won this stupid scholarship was a female premed biology major. Half of them had parents who had had cancer at one point. Needless to say, I didn't feel to confident that my essay's message that I do physics more or less because it's really, really fun and beautiful would go over too well.

So I looked and I looked for more promising scholarships, and I think I've found one with a glimmer of hope. It's a $10,000 scholarship for creating and maintaining a blog. I can enter all of uberfluss into the competition. The only downside is that I have to start writing "unique and interesting" content about me and/or my "passions". Not sure that will happen, but given that this blog has documented more than one quarter of my life, the collective content is probably somewhat interesting.