A glassless window

I have found the solution to my problem: blues dancing.

Oh man. I tried it for the first time ever, and... wow. Just wow. Maybe there's more structure to it than I realize, but it feels like pure musicality. It's like you can do whatever you want. Well, the guy can do whatever he wants, and the girl can do... whatever the guy wants. :P

Like I said, me being a complete n00b, maybe there's more to it than I realize, but it seemed like (for the girl) it's pure following... Like, you *can't* dance it at all if you're not following properly -- if you're not really *listening* to your lead. Feeling his every movement.

As a more experienced follow pointed out to me near the beginning of the night, this does mean that it can be absolutely horrible if the guy either doesn't know how to lead well or feels the music in some strange way that you can't pick up on. But with a good lead...

Wow.

It can feel incredibly organic... even raw, depending on the music. But beyond that... there's something so intimate about a dance that relies entirely on amazing connection between lead and follow. For me, feeling someone's movement -- really feeling it -- has a stronger effect on me than even hearing them play music, or reading something they've written, or seeing something they've drawn. All of these things are like a window into a part of a person that otherwise remains invisible. A part that reflects the essence of them as a person. It always affects me, to be able to peer into such a window and to see what's there inside of them, pushing its way to the surface through a pen, or through an instrument... through movement.

Even to watch a person's movement can be incredibly powerful, but to feel it and move with it is something else entirely. Can two people be connected more closely -- more directly -- than through movement of their bodies? Structured dances with specific patterns can be amazingly fun, and you can certainly express yourself through them (though often by playing around with the patterns...). But performing specific, learned motions in prescribed patterns is like singing a song that someone else has written: maybe it perfectly conveys what you want to express (and to the extent that it does, it can be a wonderful window... but who can tell if it does?), but it isn't the same as writing your own song. Moving however you feel like moving is like making your own music; partner dancing in an unstructured style is like jamming. Only strip away the instruments, strip away the distance, make the music not the connection itself but the matrix through which two people can move together as one... More than any other dance I've tried, blues is like this. And it's incredible.

Music through movement

I have no self control. It's getting to be a real problem in my dancing, I think, but I'm too afraid to ask any leads about it for fear that they'll confirm my suspicions. Instead, I am going to try to work on it under the assumption that it is indeed a problem.

In general, but especially when I haven't been dancing for a while, I can't control myself. Or, perhaps more accurately, I can't contain myself. If the music is really good, it seizes me by the feet (even if I'm almost collapsing with exhaustion), and I can't stop it. It just takes me on this ride, and I am at the mercy of the music. I haven't seen myself dance in a long time, but I am vaguely aware that my salsa continues to resemble salsa less and less the more I dance, and it's because of this. My friend told me the other day, "It looks like Danielle dancing", whatever that means. :|!

In any case, I'm not so much concerned about whether or not I look ridiculous, because it's absurdly fun (and, really, who wants to sacrifice fun for looking "good"? :P), but it's hurting my following. For the most part, I think (or hope) I follow alright despite whatever insanity the music and my feet are plotting together, but sometimes my weight happens to be momentarily on the foot opposite to the one it should be on for what the guy's trying to lead, at the exact moment that it *really* needs to be on the foot he expects (otherwise I just autocorrect as I go into the move). This is pretty rare, but happened a couple of times this weekend and kind of took me by surprise. I'm not sure how I can avoid this, short of not dancing to the rhythm I'm hearing and instead always sticking to the 1,2,3,5,6,7 (or 2,3,4,6,7,8, as the case may be), and... well, I'm not going to do that.

More common a scenario is that my body (not just my feet) is doing something with the music that's... let's say "suboptimal"... for what the guy is trying to lead. He can still lead it, but I have the sneaking suspicion that it must feel something like dancing with a wild creature that needs to be constantly reined in.

Worse is when the music makes me play with timing, but the dude either doesn't, or does something different/incompatible (timing-wise). Timing incompatibility deals Instant Death to following. :(

Beyond all this, I've become aware that, even when a dance isn't riddled with the above occurrences, I tend to dance with the music. Not my partner. Sure, my dance with the music is subject to constraints (i.e., the patterns the guy is leading), but in general the music forces itself to the forefront of my attention, and it's the main thing I'm aware of. It's incredibly difficult for me to disengage from the music -- to mentally block it out and stop listening altogether. When I do, however, I think my following improves dramatically; I can actually listen to my lead instead of him having to battle the music for control of me. It's such a different experience, listening to the guy instead of the music. I feel his movements and play off them, and it's so smooth... it's really nice. But without the music, it's like dancing in black and white instead of technicolour.

Now and then I have a dance in which I have no trouble dancing *with* my partner while still hearing the music... and it's really, really fun, having that kind of connection. Sometimes these are the rare instances of the guy feeling the music the same way I do, but I think it's more often that the guy just *exudes* the way he feels the music, so I can feel it through him and hear in the music what he's hearing. If that's the case, maybe I can remedy all of these issues not by consciously trying to contain myself (futility!), but by making a point of trying to hear the music through my partner instead of the speakers.

Yesterday I fell in love. (Too bad it's unrequited.)

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

- Ernst Mach

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

- Bertrand Russell

These two quotes were amongst many presented to my theory development class at the start of the term, and when I read them I thought, "Yeah, that's so true..." I thought they were great quotes. But I didn't really get them -- really *get* them -- until yesterday.

The lecture was on thinking and representation, and it included discussion of concepts and how we label them with words which are separate from the concepts themselves. We discussed a paper about concept maps as diagrammatic representations of concepts and the relationships between them: how Y changes as a result of a change in X (e.g., if X increases, Y inceases as well, depicted by a + on the line from X to Y).

Though useful, this type of model has at least one obvious limitation: it can't represent precisely how Y changes as a function of X. Many concepts, such as motivation or productivity, are not easy to quantify meaningfully. However, if we are able to measure X and then measure Y and we observe some kind of pattern as we vary them, we can apply a mathematical model instead. My prof used the example of Newton's Second Law, F=ma, and went on to talk about why it's a "perfect model", including the way it's quantitative, testable, generalizable, etc.

But then one student interjected and asked whether it really is such a great model -- does it really serve to convey the relationships between the concepts it relates? He elaborated to the effect of, sure, he "knows" that "force equals mass times acceleration" and can do the related computations, but conceptually, he doesn't *get* the relationship between these concepts from this equation: the prof agreed and went on to ask, "What does it even *mean* to multiply mass by acceleration? Or, if we want to determine acceleration, to divide force by mass??" Conceptually, how do these concepts relate to one another?

Here I suggested that this is where cognition comes into play: as humans, we obviously have cognitive limitations and can only represent so much and manipulate those representations so much before we run out of usable memory and processing ability. For me, I said, classical mechanics makes sense at a conceptual level. I have mental representations of force, mass and acceleration, and I can conceptualize the relationship between them independent of words, numbers or variables. But electromagnetism? V=IR? Sure, I can do all the math just as well as for anything else, but even if I can mentally represent (or "wrap my brain around") the concepts of potential, current and resistance per se, hell if I could successfully represent the *relationship* between them in terms of the concepts themselves. To think about the relationship itself, I have to resort to some kind of analogy involving, say, water and pipes.

And this is where I suddenly *got* it, what it means to say that abstraction is a tool -- that mathematics, the "highest form of abstraction in human thinking", is a tool. If I want to move a box from point A to point B, I can pick it up and carry it there. But if I want to move a whole skid of boxes, I need a forklift to help me.

Abstraction allows us to "[separate] the number concept from what [is] being counted" (Bronowski, 1976). As my prof had put it earlier in the lecture, "Back in the day, we'd think about five trees or five sheep. And then one day some guy comes along and says, 'To hell with the trees and sheep. I'm just interested in this concept of five.'"

Math in particular allows us to completely let go of mental representations of the concepts whose relationships we need to consider. If we can tie numbers to certain concepts by measuring them and observe, through scientific experimentation, a pattern that's consistent with an established mathematical relationship, we also don't have to worry about conceptualizing the literal relationship of these concepts to one another: mathematicians build various forklifts and describe for the rest of us where they'll go if we manipulate the controls in certain ways (and even, if they're especially brilliant/lucky, invent entirely new kinds of forklifts that can pick up different kinds of skids, or even objects that aren't on skids). So if I want to know what happens when I increase the mass and acceleration of an object by so much, I can get into my forklift, manipulate the controls according to some instructions that have been shown to drive the forklift from point A to point B, and not be bothered with actual the skid full of boxes until after I've already moved them. Then, I can get out of the forklift and see that, okay, this is how strong of a force I now have. Manipulating the controls has *nothing* to do with picking up the skid and carrying it myself (were it possible) except the result it achieves.

The magnitude of this sent my mind reeling -- how ridiculously powerful a tool math is, given how well our minds are able to represent concepts and the relationships between them (i.e., not very) versus all of the crazy things we're able to do as a result of circumventing these cognitive limitations. Constructing 50-storey buildings that won't collapse on us? Consider even just the chemical and mechanical properties of the metals, the woods, the concretes... let alone how those play into how much of each you'd need and where they ought to go. Here, those quotes from the beginning of the term came to mind:

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

- Ernst Mach

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

- Bertrand Russell

I sat there in class, just basking in my little epiphany and contemplating the implications, completely oblivious to the ongoing class discussion for at least a good five minutes.

I have fallen in love with math. I'd say "all over again", after having allowed myself to become and remain entangled in the depths of mathless biology for years... but I didn't know it well enough before to justify calling it love. Infatuation, maybe? But now, finally seeing it more clearly, I realize that I don't understand it, and it's eating me alive.

‘‘Mathematics is only patterns... [It] is not just symbols as names for concepts but is a system of relations with logic and reason built into its inner structure." (Feynman, 1975, 1999)

It finally became obvious to me, in an epiphany aftershock, what math research is. In the past I'd asked several math-student friends of mine what one actually *does* as a grad student in math (compared to physics students who smash things, chemistry students who blow things up, biology students who kill things, or social sciences students who... recruit people for studies). I'd never gotten a satisfactory answer: "You think. You read, and you think. ... ... and you play around with ideas until something fits."

"Um... okay..."

But yes! Just as those quotes before merely sounded true but now so effectively sum up what I finally *get* about mathematics, this now is so obviously the truth... In science one seeks to discover relationships amongst natural things and describe them in terms of simpler such things that have been previously observed and described; so too in mathematics, where one seeks to discover relationships amongst abstract concepts or other relationships and prove them using more fundamental ones that have been proven before. However, whereas scientists' substrate for observation and description exists as concrete objects the natural world, that of mathematicians is represented abstractly inside their own minds. Hence math research is indeed just thinking after all...

But this is what plagues me now: what are the "most fundamental" patterns, relationships, or concepts? How were *they* proven? *Were* they proven? Are some things just accepted as "true" or "given" (or are they assumptions of some sort), and if so, which things?

What are the irreducible elements of math?

Helical line (TM)

Quoth the can: "The helical line formed in and extending through the length of the cylindrical cookie is a registered trademark of D.B.C. Corp. All rights reserved."

... really? :|!

There needs to be a word!

You know what there needs to be a word for? Just like we have homonyms (words which share the same spelling) and homophones (words which share the same pronunciation), we now need a word for words that share the same keystroke -- like for typing on phones, using T9 or SureType or the like.

It's way too often that I have to explain to someone why my sentences make no sense because my Pearl's SureType guesses "are" instead of "see", and I didn't notice before I hit send! "Bye! Are you later! :D!" D:! And it's this relatively new phenomenon that needs a word other than typo, because it's not a typo at all!

Although... now that I think of it, there also needs to be a word for the irrecognizable word-guesses that result from T9/SureType/whatever trying to make sense of a word that you *did* typo, but which would've been perfectly recognizable (at least given the context) as the intended word had it not been mangled into something completely different (and possibly much longer than the number of keystrokes you actually made). If I miss hitting the OP key once while typing "people", I end up with something like, "Hm, but we don't have enough orole..." or "Yeah, they're a great bunch of proletarian." (??) Fail!

What's a good root-esque morpheme that refers to keys/typing? I keep thinking of "tecla" from Portuguese/Spanish (or chave/clave/llave/chiave), but there must be some variation of the Latin root that's more appropriate for use in this word that needs to exist!

Multitasking and me

Nicholas Carr blogged last month about multitasking -- or, rather, hypermultitasking and its implications. How we sacrifice depth of attention for breadth: "... concentration, contemplation, reflection, introspection. The less we practice these habits of mind, the more we risk losing them altogether."

One commenter notes: "Scarily, it also appears to be highly addictive - sort of like acquired attention deficit disorder, making it quite difficult to focus on one thing, even when it's necessary/there's time to do so." Another wonders about whether this may affect personal happiness.

I'd mentioned to my supervisor today that I have a lot of trouble attending to things/people/whatever for very long. Even if I've just asked someone a question and they're in the middle of answering it, I *think* I'm listening, but then half the time it turns out that, really, I zoned out 20 seconds into their response. Never mind paying attention to an entire lecture. Hell, these days, it's not uncommon for me to forget what I'm saying mid-sentence, my train of thought having spontaneously jumped tracks against my will.

This is something that I've been struggling with to an increasing extent lately, and it's something that I really want to fix. I feel like I've all but lost my ability to get -- and remain -- engaged in a single task. To sit down and read something, start to finish, without punctuating my reading with five other things. Even the very blog post that got me thinking about this in the first place: I clicked to the page, read the title and the first paragraph or so, thought something to the effect of, "Oh, this is interesting; I want to read this,"... and yet, moments later, found that I had -- for some inexplicable reason and without consciously intending to do so -- flipped back to Google Reader and was checking my other feeds. Huh?

This wasn't always the case: I definitely didn't have this problem during the first couple years of my undergrad... and I'm not sure at what point my powers of attention started to waste away into practically nothing. By default I'd blame the undergrad education system somehow... the same way I blame it for turning me into a highly time-effective assessment-acing machine whose mental-bulimia approach to studying got her through three years of school with strong grades and no learning. (Not of the course material, anyway.) And by "turning me into", I suppose I really mean "letting me get away with being" -- since, in my view, no proper education system would let such student-bots through at anywhere near the top of their class.

But yeah... I think that in this case I can't rely solely on my good ol' scapegoat, The Postsecondary Education System, and must regretfully point the finger at what in fact *made* my undergrad experience (in a good way): my involvement in iGEM. Or, more accurately, the combination of iGEM and my need to see the whole picture and have a hand in everything. Heading up my team involved dealing with not only the project design stuff, but the lab work, the marketing, the funding proposals, the dozens of miscellaneous administration issues, as well as the management and coordination of people (full-time co-ops and other members) involved in each of the above... while somehow also doing my own coursework or research, as the case may have been. And I loved it; for however stressful it could get, it was also hugely rewarding. But I got really good at having a billion unrelated things flying around in my head at any given moment, ready to deal with whatever came up from one moment to the next, and I got really used to constantly switching tasks, switching modes... going from working on a proposal to helping someone troubleshoot in the lab to rescheduling some meeting or other at the last minute... somehow managing not to suffer from severe mental whiplash, but eventually relating all too well to the left side of this comic.

At some point I got past the micromanaging tendencies I once had and *actually* wanted to give other people oversight of things... and I got into the habit of looking things over only to the extent necessary to pass them off to the right person -- that is to say, very superficially, without any serious thinking involved. And despite all of the books and papers I once used to read at great length, these days I have to actively focus on reading continuously, forcing my eyes not to flit down through the beginning and end of each paragraph on a hasty hunt for the key points. (Okay, so maybe my days as a student-bot are partially to blame after all.)

I suppose, considering that haste is what got me here in the first place, there is no quick fix for my problem. Perhaps curling up in bed with a nice, long book will be a good first step toward rehabilitation.

We have a lot of juice.

The current contents of the top right shelf of my family's fridge:

1. carton of Tropicana orange juice (No Pulp)

2. carton of Tropicana orange juice (Grovestand: Lots of Pulp)

3. bag of milk

4. carton of Minute Maid orange juice ("Low Pulp" (wtf?))

5. carton of Allen's peach cocktail (i.e., peach-flavoured sugar-water masquerading as juice)

6. carton of egg nog (why??)

7. carton of Oasis pineapple juice

8. bottle of french vanilla coffee whitener

9. carton of Rubicon guava Juice (SO GOOD :O!)

10. carton of President's Choice "pineapple, guava and passion fruit juice & purée"

We have a lot of juice.

Day One

Yesterday was the first day of the new term. My first class was cancelled, but since I currently know, like, two people in my entire program and wish for this not to be the case, I sat around in the classroom chatting with a couple other students for the entire length of the class. My program is interesting since there are so many students from such varied backgrounds. Most of them come from engineering, but some are just out of undergrad while others have worked in industry for years before coming back to build on their education.

Sitting and listening to one fellow talk about things he's done (including a failed business venture and how he studied for some kind of project management certification test requiring 1500 hours of experience) and his views on the types of companies/firms he's worked for (I hadn't even realized there was a distinction between the two :|), I thought he fell into the latter category. But it turned out that he'd just graduated last year and, because of the economy, decided to continue into grad school instead of braving the bleak job market just yet, predicting that prospects for entry-level jobs in his area would improve by the time he's done.

I guess that's what co-op does for you: being able to come out of undergrad with experience working for several different companies (not to mention at least some kind of sense about things like The Job Market) seems like an incredibly valuable thing, and if I could have appreciated this back then in the way that I do now, I probably would have chosen a different undergrad program and done co-op. That's not to say that I regret opting for the program I did -- quite the opposite, in spite of my opinion of the program itself: on the path I chose, I met some incredible people who have without question, and without even trying, changed my life, and I think I learned a great deal during my undergrad, even if it wasn't what my profs were trying to teach us in class.

Part of me wonders how my experience compares to those of the people I'd be working/competing with if I chose the academia route versus The Real World. I currently have little idea of what The Real World is like, and I can't help but listen to people who live in The Real World and be in awe of their vast wisdom and experience, feeling like my little Academia Bubble self would never stand a chance out there. And so it feels especially bizarre to receive any sort of oohing and aahing at my description of the things I've been doing so far, relating to school and to iGEM (as outstanding as I think iGEM is, from the inside), from such vastly wise and experienced folks. I don't feel impressive at all (more like woefully inadequate, half the time), and hearing people make impressed noises in my direction makes me feel more or less like a fraud. As if I said one thing, but they heard something else altogether, and suddenly I've inadvertently but unavoidably lied to them.

I've now steered myself into a program in which I'm not only doing a thesis, but also a considerable amount of coursework, and I've signed up for the co-op option to boot (which is extremely uncommon for a thesis-based program). I suppose, really, there's no point in comparison with other people, even if it were possible; regardless of where in the pack I stand, all I can do is do what I can, the best that I can, and that will get me wherever it'll get me. If I can figure out where I want that somewhere to be, so I can direct my efforts accordingly, all the better.

But lately I've been finding it increasingly difficult to direct much effort anywhere. Maybe it's partly because I spent most of last term being sick, but I think it has a lot to do with how I feed off of other people's motivation. When I'm around people who want to do things, I want to do things myself. Thinking back to fourth year, I still can't believe how productive I was, with courses, grad school and scholarship applications, trips to various places to visit potential labs (and all the research that went along with it) and of course iGEM, the task set of which naturally expanded to fill every waking moment. I remember spending all day at the lab and coming home only to collapse into bed. Scraping ice off my windshield at 2 am before finally heading home. I probably complained at the time, but now I miss it. ... okay, maybe not the midnight car-cleaning, but I miss the non-stop Doing Things, and the seemingly endless well of Desire to Do Things. Whatever it was that compelled me to do the things that I miss in spite of the things that I don't miss. But it wasn't just me: it was me and my friend, who got me into iGEM in the first place. It's so easy to get -- and stay -- excited about things when you're doing it alongside someone. It's more than how spending all day working doesn't feel so much like working (and can even be enjoyable) in the right company: it's how the right energy from some people can make you want to push forward even when they're not actually around. A wonderful positive-feedback loop of passion and drive. That's what I miss most, I think. It's exciting. From time to time I still somehow find myself in a super-motivated sort of phase, but without the feedback loop it tends to fizzle out pretty quickly.

At the moment, however, I'm quite excited for the new term. The courses I'm taking seem really interesting, I'm eager to get going on my thesis, and there's a really promising group of students involved in iGEM this term, including our two new co-ops. This is the best part of the term: everything is so fresh and full of possibilities!

Brasil II: São Paulo

I have returned to the land of snow! Boo... I'd planned to blog about my trip while I was on it, but I guess I ended up feeling more like doing stuff than writing about what I was doing (shock). And now that I'm back... well, there are many bits and pieces that I want to write about, so I will do just that: write about bits and pieces when the inclination strikes me.

I hadn't particularly wanted to go to São Paulo, but since I was already flying through, I figured I may as well spend a couple of nights there. En route from the metro to my hostel, I covered over half the length of Rua Teodoro Sampaio -- and man oh man, I have never seen so many music stores in my life. Not just in one place, either: I'm pretty sure the total number of music stores I've seen over the course of my entire life has at least tripled just from walking down that street. Musical instrument stores, I mean. It's insane. Not to mention awesome. Guitars, drums (of every type and size), violins, guitars, cavaquinhos, berimbaus, guitars, pianos, pandeiros, guitars... oh yeah, and then there were the guitars. I still can't believe I made it through this gauntlet of beautiful, shiny temptation without buying a new guitar... Especially since I spent a good couple hours in various stores trying out several. I'd been told while in Rio (to my surprise) that guitars are actually a lot more expensive in Brasil than in Canada, so I'd already sort of pre-decided specifically not to buy one... but in retrospect a lot of the prices, in this area at least, were actually alright... a supply/demand thing, I suppose? In a store I visited in Salvador, the same model of one guitar I'd really liked was a good R$200 (~$125 CAD) more expensive. I almost wish I'd just gone ahead and bought it... would've been really nice to have a guitar to play while I was there. But yeah, I don't even want to think about what hauling a guitar around, in addition to my bag(s), would've been like... definitely didn't pack *quite* light enough for that.