consciousness at the scale of gravity, if neurons could tune to the fine geometric structure of space and time

science is nothing but an extended frame of reference. the human mind imposes its own coordinate system upon the fluid topology of our perception, gingerly constructing a set of logical principles as its basis vectors.

thoughts have mass, carve ripples into spacetime

each entry of transformed tensor is a multiple of the determinant of a matrix whose rows are the derivatives of the old coordinates with respect to the new coordinates

aware of the slowing of time due to the ripples on a river, falling leaves, the mass of flowers in spring.

gravity is a pen with which mass writes on the pages of spacetime.

science adapts experience to sentience

the American Midwest is infuriatingly conservative in geometry.

definite integrals are primitive mathematical pleasure. from the cold, sparse simplicity of adding and multiplying arises a rich and diverse ecology of numerical life forms.

to look at an integral and see tiny flower gardens enclosed by a long curling fence on one side is like writing an unabashed love letter to human creativity

Walking to the sea in the sweet wet velvet of winter eve,
I looked up and saw a beach of stars, galaxies strewn like seashells in smears of cosmic sand.

Today I will sleep exactly one hour.

[Coming soon: 300% more blog, including a photogenic Bildungsroman in which I visit the beach and McDonald's, not once but twice each!]

(As a result, whenever a classmate uttered a complaint like, “I was five standard deviations below the mean on the last test,” my response was along the lines of, “Cool, you sound like a fascinating and unique person.”)

*Has anyone else ever noticed that the definition of standard deviation is horrifically incomprehensible in standard English? Inevitably, you end up saying something like, “The square root of the average of the square of the deviation from the average equals the deviation of the average of the square from the square of the average. No, it's not a riddle.”

On the other hand, General Relativity has been an eye-opening experience on the days when I've drank enough coffee that it hasn't been an eye-closing experience. For instance:

1.The more I learn about General Relativity, the less I'm sure of what a vector is. Right now, my internal definition of a vector is “something that has intrinsic pointiness.” (This also happens to be my internal definition of kitchen knives, needles, pineapples, pine cones, sharp-beaked birds, and points.) In four weeks, I'll probably tell you that a vector is the Shroud of Turin or something.

2.Graduate students are people just like you and me, except that they like to talk about how magnetization is like a covariant vector. Ex:
Me: “Hey, can I borrow a sheet of paper?”
Grad student: “Magnetization is sort of like a covariant vector. Yippee!”

3.You can turn a coffee mug into a donut if you're really gentle. (This is literally the extent to which we covered topology.) Also, a small person living on your coffee mug can't tell that it's now a donut unless they either figure out the metric or discover that the fundamental particle of his universe is sugar.

4.Lowercase Greek letters all look the same when piled onto a 5-indexed tensor. Specifically, they all look like o's scribbled by someone who failed penmanship class.

5.Whenever someone talks about tensor contraction, I have trouble resisting the urge to say, “Can't we all just relax?” (The same applies for mention of stress-energy tensors.)

In retrospect, taking Special Relativity last semester was like eating a large bowl of Lucky Charms at 5 AM after spending a bleary all-nighter solving cardboard-flavored textbook problems in classical mechanics. As the sunrise smears over oiled skies like raw egg yolk, your tired soul is momentarily uplifted by the sight of hearts, stars, rainbows, clovers, gammas, and uppercase-lambdas pouring into your plastic cereal bowl, rinsing away the dullness of frictionless pulleys and massless ropes in a crayon-colored flood of sugary milk. Two hours later, you're hungry again and feeling awfully inertial.

General relativity, by analogy, is brunch.

Speaking of brunch, I had it, non-metaphorically. On a cold Sunday morning two weeks ago, I pestered Jess '12 so much that she agreed to spend a miniature fortune with me, portmanteau'ing two meals into one ultra-(price/class/tast)y monster of a gustatory hybrid. In context, I was making $10.75/hour at the time working near X-ray radiation, so I figured that the phrase, “Money is short and so is life,” probably applied to me.

With due disregard for financial management, Jess and I walked over to Craigie on Main, a cozy upscale restaurant just around the corner from MIT, swankily cuddled in a block of the usual college-student haunts (pizza parlor open til 3 AM, ice cream shop with a penchant for creative caffeine, the Canonical Cheap Chinese restaurant, etc.) Flanked by tall mugs of hot strong coffee, we seated ourselves at the counter and watched the cooks inscribe isosceles toast into circular plates.

Jess' first course was a miniature sugar-crusted donut, pliant and warm as a fresh corpse lying in a puddle of caramel gore. (Despite my attempt to make Jess' choice of appetizer sound Hitchcockishly unappetizing, it was actually pretty good. Nice job, Jess.)

Endowed with slightly more civilized tastes, I started with a scoop of coriander and cashew granola, pleasantly crunchy with the mildest hint of curry.

Next was a plate of citrus-cured arctic char and sablefish, curled and piled onto toasted bagels smothered in cream cheese.

Also, I had caviar for brunch. This is now on my resume, in case you were wondering.

For her main course, Jess ordered the grass-fed house-brined corned beef hash with slow-poached egg and onion rings and too many hyphens. My conscience forces me to admit that this was unequivocally delicious. The beef revealed itself in tender, melt-in-mouth morsels of rich, velvety saltiness snuggled in blankets of briny, creamy, and crispy.

Dessert was a glass of sour milk pannacotta drizzled with a few sweet spoonfuls of blackberry coulis.

And then I went back to school and ate cereal out of a Ziplock bag during lunch while unlearning about vectors.

*Not that this is supposedly impressive. Probably half the problems were just to take logs (the math kind, not the kind that President Lincoln lived in, which are much harder to take). Speaking of which, you should check out my friend Phil's blog, blogarithm, not necessarily because of the content but because I thought of the title.

After my advising meeting, I loitered for a few hours, had a meeting with the Department Head of Physics not worth blogging about (yet), caught an elevator* to the 6th floor of the Kavli Institute, and nearly fell asleep four times on a sun-dappled sofa while waiting for my UROP supervisor to finish his phone call. In the meantime (between sleep cycles), I started to debate the redundancy of phrases such as “stick of chapstick,” which has bothered me so deeply in the past that I've refused to use chapstick of any flavor, texture, or bee-produced ingredient in fear of getting belittled by my peers for repetitive word choice. Unbeknownst to me, there was an unopened stick of chap in my coat pocket, a complimentary gift from Cedar's Hummus Company that annoyingly happened to be peach-flavored instead of hummus-flavored. I later gave it to a British exchange student by the unlikely name of Nimrod, who remarked, “Wow! It's chapstick flavored like hummus flavored like peaches!”

*The elevators in the indubitably tall Building 37 are visible from Earth only slightly more often than Halley's Comet.

Tomorrow, I will (1) wake up, (2) attempt to get a career at the uncareerlike hour of 9 AM, and (3) sit through six hours of classes, in body if not in spirit.

Lastly, I'd be remiss not to publicly observe that my bed is a right triangle. I sleep on the hypotenuse: conveniently, (Wall length)^2 + (Wall length)^2 = (My height)^2.

Slush blooms like grey wildflowers on concrete during murkily warm, precipitation-infatuated Januaries. This I gleaned from a morning of traipsing from car-to-door with luggage stuffed like roasted peppers (the stuffed kind, you know), ferrying the bare-stripped evidence of my baryonic selfhood in three suitcases, two boxes, and a broken laundry hamper mashed onto the cushions of a green car. (Is “green” somewhat of a creative-imagery let-down? To be specific, the car was nearly the exact color of the Green Party logo, but I thought that “Green-Party-green car” would be too much of a modifier sandwich.) Slush, puddled with motor juice under thin skins of ice, is the terror of unscotchgarded ankles in urban New England. Slush is a test of courage and moral fiber.

MIT is not a school for the daintily-shod. For that, I direct you to the sun-drenched, flip-flop-friendly sidewalks of that other school in Southern California, where the socially-repulsive pairing of socks with sandals is an acceptable solution to hard weather. (By “hard,” I mean “comparatively pleasant.”)

By the way, I'm sure some of you think that “shoes” is a metaphor for perseverance, academic ambition, or high SAT scores, but I urge you to read this literally. Forget having brilliant ideas or scientific ingenuity or whatever; you can't pulverize a chunk of snow in your path by factoring large integers on a quantum computer in polynomial time, unless your shoe also runs Shor's algorithm.*

*Inexplicably, as I was writing this, I mentally permuted a well-known tongue-twister into “Shoes solve Shor cells in the C shell.”

Long story shor(t), I moved out of Random Hall and into pika on Monday.

The purest of all unimportant joys may well be the clarity of knowing exactly what you own. To be precise, I have no clue whether I own any free will* or whether I still own my Intro to Solid State Chem. textbook after lending it out to some guy named Cappie, but there's little point in chasing after the unanswerable. After the sad, sweet, soul-searching-and-room-searching process of moving out of Random Hall, I can list everything I own that interacts with photons and has never interacted with Cappie.

*Evidence against the existence of free will: I lost the game while writing this.

So I typed out this poem. Apologies to anyone who can read; after 1.5 years at MIT, I consider poetry to be a list of junk in my suitcases with line indentations partially inspired by e.e. cummings* and partially inspired by Python code.

*By “e.e. cummings,” I mean “the Wikipedia entry on e.e. cummings.”

Unmachinewashable sweaters,
Unmachinewashable electronics (laptop, etc.),
A problem set for
      8.07 sublimated by Maxwell Stress Tensor puns (I was tired that week, alright?
      I just couldn't feel any sympathy for
          how stressed and tense the electromagnetic field was.),
A mechanical caterpillar,
Name-brand ketchup (Heinz) as well as a phonetic ripoff of name-brand ketchup (Hunt's),
Van Gogh flipbook in which the artist cyclically loses and regains his ear if
      you flip it forwards and backwards in sequence,
Stephen Hawking's Universe (although he's been asking for
      it back. Not that I wanted it in the first place, considering how much entropy he put in it.),
Stamps, the kind that last for-
      ever supposedly. (Stephen Hawking hates these stamps because they violate all sorts of
      physical laws when they fall into black holes.),
Five bottles of free hand sanitizer, courtesy of H1N1.

(In a moment of face-slapping irony, I realized soonafter that my list of possessions does not in fact include a room at pika, thanks to technical details of the housing system. For the past week, I've been sleeping in the back of Ruth's room, storing my unmachinewashable luggage in Dave GradStudent's room without his knowledge/consent, and waking up every morning in gorgeous pools of sunlight that softy obliterate my aversion to homelessness.)

Between transferring addresses, splurging a weekend on Mystery Hunt, helping build a sounding rocket with an X-ray telescope (it's going into outer space in 2011! As opposed to inner space, which is where mathematicians like to take dot products), cramming a 16-week class into 4 weeks, grading for the class that convinced me to major in Physics a year ago, not blogging, and sleeping five hours per night, I've been tossing a problem around in the liminal spaces between rational thought and crazy conjecture. I'm going to share it here, with the warning that it lurks around in a playground of optical physics and offers to give you plenty of brain candy if you follow it a bit further. (Don't take candy from strange physics questions.)

A few weeks ago, my friend Aviv* went to see a certain movie and returned home with a pair of magical 3D glasses. They were magical not only because they'll probably win an Academy Award for Best Inanimate Object in Cinema but also because of the strange way in which they filtered light. When Aviv looked in the mirror through his new glasses and closed his left** eye, he saw one lens of the glasses go dark while the other one remained transparent. Take a guess. Which lens was which?

*Aviv's defining characteristics are (1) competence at both computer programming and roller-skating (he worked for Google and roller skates in Boston regularly without getting concussions) and (2) surviving on a diet consisting of only broccoli, strawberry yogurt, and chewy bars. Unrelatedly, the most bizarre thing that I've said to a mathematician recently was, “Did you know that if you cut up broccoli, you just end up with exponentially more broccoli than you had originally? That's because broccoli is a fractal.”

**Left and right here will always be in reference to Aviv, not the mirror image of Aviv.

If you've read that 3D glasses usually work by polarization, the natural assumption is that the left lens went dark when Aviv closed his left eye. Imagine that the left lens is horizontally polarized while the right is vertically polarized. The light from Aviv's closed (left) eye is horizontally polarized after it passes through the left lens, remains horizontally polarized when it bounces off the mirror at near-normal incidence, and gets completely blocked by the vertically-polarizing lens over Aviv's open (right) eye. Thus, he doesn't see any light from the area covered by the left lens of his glasses, whereas the vertically-polarized light from his right eye still gets through the vertically-polarized right lens.

Great! Problem solved. Now let's go make a PBS special.

Except that exactly the opposite phenomenon happened. When Aviv closed his left eye, he saw the right lens go dark. That is, he could see his closed eye but couldn't see his open eye in the mirror.

[EDIT: Just to be clear, I ruled out the possibility of the linear polarizing system described above as soon as he mentioned this. Avatar was released in three different 3D formats, according to Wikipedia, and two of them offer interesting solutions to Aviv's question.]

After 15 minutes of Googling all possible combinations of “Avatar,” “3D glasses,” “what the heck, I thought I knew how light worked,” I stumbled upon a paper summarizing the technical specs of the Avatar glasses. (The discovery of this document is left as an exercise to the reader.) Quickly cobbling together a few scraps of peripheral 8.03 knowledge, I scribbled down a halfway decent explanation and went to bed. The next morning, I decided it was basically all wrong. Two hours later, I decided it could be workable with a few changes.

And then I decided that I simply needed more data.

Thus, gentle reader, I implore you to try the following tests and post your observations if you happen to have a pair of Avatar 3D glasses and a mirror within close reach:

1.Put on the glasses, look in the mirror, close one eye. Do you confirm Aviv's observation?

2.Look at light reflecting off a surface at an angle of around 50-60 degrees from the normal. Close one eye. Close the other eye. Does the light disappear either way? If so, open the eye that doesn't block the light, close the other eye, and tilt your head 90 degrees or until sufficiently uncomfortable. See if the intensity of light changes.

3.Repeat both of the above tests wearing the glasses backwards. (That is, face the outside of the glasses toward your eye.)

4.Repeat Test 1 with a reflective metal surface instead of a mirror.

In the meantime, I encourage you to comment here if you have an explanation. Scientific backing is appreciated but not necessary.

I met Yan during our freshman year (she even unwittingly snapped a picture of me in Diff Eq. around Valentine’s Day http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/student_life_culture/valentines_day_special_1.shtml) and continued to run into her with increasing frequency until we were living under the same roof this summer at pika*. You might recall we journeyed to New York City at the end of July and survived a gastronomical bildungsroman**.

*In all prepositional honesty, at least half of the living at pika happens on the roof instead of under it. Pika's homemade, impeccably sanded (by Yan & Co.) roofdeck is a full-service pit stop on the road to cozy summer skylines, breezy sunsets, and barely-interpolated constellations swimming in celestial gutters cluttered with light pollution. As I shiver in the dregs of December and qwertily exercise fingers unwarmed by penurious radiators, I can't help but rhapsodize my midsummer memories of coarse-grained films splattered onto a makeshift screen on the roofdeck, froth-tipped banana-sweet smoothies on the roofdeck, impromptu rope-climbing on the roofdeck, reading books in eye-frazzling noon sunlight on the roofdeck, listening to Jess discover the 2934829th normal mode of her violin on the roofdeck, absorbing plenty of delightful UV radiation on the roofdeck . . . anyway, I digress.

**Way to steal my polysyllabic descriptors, Jess.

For kicks, I asked to borrow five minutes of her fame, and she gave me a guest blog entry. Yan's pretty generous.*

*Jess, I could use a little more specificity here. Remember the time you gave me two entire packs of gum because I mentioned that the kind you had in your backpack was the most delicious thing I have ever eaten instead of breakfast while trying to catch a bus? And remember how I was so Oprah-gasmically grateful that I gave you one of my granola bars from Trader Joe's? Anyway, I think that would have made a fine anecdote about the value of friendship and generosity, etc.

I'm Course 6-2 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and live on Conner 4 of Burton-Conner. Basically, I've got a run-of-the-mill major and live in a dorm populated by a glut of bloggers, past and present. There are a few unusual things I can share about my experience at MIT, though. For one, I have a UROP (a research job) that’s in a field totally outside my major and so non-technical that it’s slightly blasphemous—it’s in Course 21W: Writing and Humanistic Studies.*

*What in the world is a writing UROP, Jess?

“What in the world is a writing UROP?” you ask.*

*Way ahead of you, Jess.

I’m working as an editorial assistant for Angles (http://web.mit.edu/angles/), a magazine of exemplary work written by students in MIT’s introductory writing classes. The authors here aren’t the most polished, professional writers—these are the voices of regular MIT students who take the introductory classes to improve their writing, or out of interest in a particular class’s topic, or even because they are required to by the results of the Freshman Essay Evaluation. Regardless, the essays students produce in these classes are thought-provoking and even intensely personal at times. In the course titled “Writing and Experience,” people have written on topics ranging from coming to terms with their racial identity, to the death of a brother, to ethical vacillations about vegetarianism.*

*Jess, alliteration with the letter V is so passe. Ever since that movie came out that began with the letter V and ended with the letters “for Vendetta,” you can't say phrases like “vacillations about vegetarianism” anymore unless you wear a plastic halloween mask.

So, there you go, UROPs don’t have to be in your major, or even technical.

I also do quite a bit of music in what time I can squeeze out of my life during the school year. And here’s a not-so-big-secret—the music department at MIT is a gem.*

*Mohs def, Jess. (Mineralogy puns are hard.)

I started piano in kindergarten, violin in third grade, and played in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras from middle through high school. When it came time to choose a college, music was an important factor in my decision.

What initially drew me in about the MIT Music Department was the Emerson Scholarship Program, which funds half to all of students’ private instrumental or voice lessons if they pass an audition.

MIT has a variety of musical ensembles, from the standard to the exotic: the MIT Symphony Orchestra; Chamber Music Society; Wind Ensemble; Concert Choir; Festival Jazz Ensemble; Rambax, a Senegalese drumming ensemble; and Galak Tika, a Balinese gamelan.

There are many fine musicians* here (especially pianists). Some people here go to Aspen Music Festival and other competitive music programs over the summer.

*Did you know that Feynman played the bongos?

This term I took two and a half music classes—Musical Improvisation, Harmony and Counterpoint I, and Chamber Music—which combined with last year’s classes finished up my humanities concentration in music. My favorite class was Musical Improvisation, which was taught by a visiting professor, Donal Fox. As a classically-trained musician, I had always played the notes on the page. The professor asked us to keep a journal through the class, so I started a blog for it. The last entry pretty much sums up what I want to tell you about that class. I would just copy/paste.

Although HASS classes are considered by some to be exercises in irritation*, there’s a benefit people don’t talk about much—you make friends through these classes. At least in freshman and sophomore years, when the courses you take tend to be large lectures in which you’re one in a relatively faceless crowd, HASS classes are a good way to meet new people. By virtue of being HASS, they tend to involve more discussion and interaction. All the ones I’ve taken have had fewer than twenty people, and I’ve met a range of students from different backgrounds**—from different majors, living groups, and graduating classes.

*No kidding. Nothing quite jerks your stomach into your lungs like spending two hours fleshing out the harmonic nuances of a Bach chorale in Harmony and Counterpoint II only to discover that you missed the key signature that Bach intended by an angle of pi/2 on the Circle of Fifths. Trignometry hurts.

**Speaking of diversity, I met someone in one of my HASSes who didn't like any sauces with tomatoes.

And hey, chances are I’ll meet none of you reading this, unless we take the same HASS*.

*Jess is being humble here. Other ways of meeting Jess include but are not limited to: living at pika over the summer, working for the Tech, playing in MITSO, joining the Sport Taekwondo team, spending all your time in Course 6-2 classes, letting me have your gum, writing a guest blog for MITadmissions, spending a happy new year (hopefully) with your family in Massachusetts, and visiting me over IAP because we didn't spend nearly enough time together this term, right, Jess?

1.Baked bread.
2.Read Feynman.
3.Written this list.

On second thought, make that four:

4.Unsuccessfully re-installed MATLAB (twice) because my license keys obnoxiously expired while I was busy playing minesweeper* or something likewise pre-installed and useless.

*I kid, because I have swept nary a mine since bidding goodbye to the tender age of microwaved pizza rolls, Windows 98, and messily penciled sonatas of elementary algebra on crumpled graph paper. Years ago, I convinced myself that minesweeper was prototyped during the Vietnam War to sharpen the reflexes of future army enlistees, and that Bill Gates had cleverly developed a way to hook up my parents' computer to mine-detonators in remote Third World countries. When I first learned the word “career,” I imagined myself as a top-secret military agent whose patriotic duty was to sit in front of a CRT monitor and play minesweeper to protect U.S. troops from setting off hidden mines in the Midwest or whatever. If I cleared one of the smaller minefields in less than 10 seconds, the government would issue me a bunch of yellow smilie face stickers and a “HIGH SCORE” certificate.

Every Christmas morning, I momentarily revert to my childhood definition of an agnostic (me) as someone who regards God's existence as unknowable due to lack of sense-based observations and Santa's existence as obvious due to presents-based observations. This year, however, the solid grounds of my agnosticism turned to swamp when I noticed that Santa hadn't visited my house and left me a licensed copy of MATLAB.

“Santa doesn't exist,” you interject. (By which I mean, I interject on behalf of you since you can't leave a comment on this blog before I finish it. Furthermore: FIRST.) Normally I'd agree with you, but at this transitional, trans-semester stage in my life, I interpret Santa as a wave function whose time component peaks around Christmas season and spacial dependence peaks in countries with a large population of Christians and high GDPs. The fact that I didn't get a present this year is simply the result of the Santa wave function experiencing destructive interference with economic recession.

Nonetheless, I'm the first to admit that “Santa Clause is Coming to Town” is much more metrically flexible than “Santa Claus's Probability Distribution Has a Local Maximum in Your Vicinity.”

Furthermore, I'll concede that the Santa function is complex and probably has a sizable imaginary component. It may be renormalizable, but it won't renormalize your family's opinion of you as you explain to your 5-year old cousin the dual nature of Santa as both a wave and a barely-employable guy at the local mall.

Anyway, while I was busy drafting the lyrics to “Carol of the Bell Curves,” “Deck the Hall Effect,” and “Do You Hear What I Hear, Or Do Our Observables Fail to Commute?” an anonymous commenter on my previous blog queried:

can you summarize your other activities outside of classes?

(i figured a bit of e.e. cummings would grant me some internetz)

My response follows:

Dear Anonymous,

I slept, sometimes. Other nights, I'd stay awake and think about a nice, rustic loaf of bread.

Best wishes,
Yan

According to Facebook, my other activities included:

*UWIP = Undergrad Women in Physics
**FASAP = Freshman Arts Seminar, an advising program that paid for countless free dinners and concert tickets last year. Highly recommended, even if I don't remember what the “AP” stands for.
***ATS = Association of Taiwanese Students. I am neither Taiwanese nor an association of any sort, but thanks to ATS, I'm now Taiwanese by association.
****Katelyn Gao = my former roommate, not an acronym.

In the past week, I've splurged a semester's worth of energy, motivation, and Googling on amateur breadmaking. After 19 hours of tango with mercurial thermostats and Schrodinger's yeast (is it dead or alive? I can't tell), I tossed Loaf #1 into the oven with a hearty dash of pessimism, clocked off 30 minutes, and pulled out:

A lithospheric formation of charred crust, high density, and too much compression in the . . . um, upper mantle.

Loaf #2 turned out better after a 25-hour rising period. Biting into the bone-thick, morbidly crunchy crust to pillow your molars on the soft spongy tissues of dough inside was like experiencing the most delicious dental surgery ever.

After two nights in a plastic-wrap cocoon, Loaf #2 was reincarnated in a casserole dish under 375 degree heat. A modest serving of leftover bread stuffing with apples and red onions inexplicably wore the aroma of red wine like a secondhand dress from a seamy thrift shop. I've come to accept the strange personality flips of maturing yeast.

In context, the stuffing made a terrific pairing (tripleting?) with sweet coconut chickpea curry and roasted brussels sprouts, the dinner I cooked for mom on Dec. 24.

Interlude: The rest of the coconut milk from the curry went into a cauliflower flatbread, because I was getting fed up (figuratively) with yeast getting fed up (literally). If you understood the previous sentence, congratulations.

The dough for Loaf #3 chillaxed in the fridge for two and a half days in hopes of coaxing the lively, nostril-curling flavors of sour yeast from a wet marsh of flour and water.

Yet again, I forgot that the thermal regulator on my oven had been clinically diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Volcanic bursts cracked open the marred crust as the thing was cooling on the rack.

The loaf was tastier this time but still not French enough to belittle me. Isn't there a French proverb that goes something like, “A good loaf of bread is condescending toward the cheese”? (I hope not, because I just made this up and I think it sounds copyrightable.)

And that's what I did over Winter Break. I baked bread that wasn't condescending toward the cheese.

*In fact, this fact is not factually interesting at all, except that it starts with a strategic and misleading adverb. One of my firmest personal beliefs is that one should never waste the grammatical potency of “interestingly” on sentences that are actually interesting, like this one, which began with “One.” One could say that “one” is one of the worst one-word sentence hooks ever. See?

Apparently, I forgot how to communicate ideas other than “you can integrate a stress tensor over a surface without actually integrating it” and “I like Feynman” after one year cloistered at MIT with contact into the outside world that was tenuous at best and Facebook at worst. Soon after departing into the Christmas jingle-suffused bowels of Logan Int'l Airport, I encountered Level 10 communication barriers, on a scale where Level 1 includes talking to Intro to Linguistics teaching assistants. (In case you had an exceptionally well-englished TA, you can consider the scale to be logarithmic.) The first sign of impending bafflement appeared as I handed my boarding pass and state-issued photo ID to the boarding-pass-and-federal-or-state-issued-photo-ID-checker*.

*Do they have actual job titles? Can I abbreviate this to “BPAFOSIPIDC” without offending anyone? I'm writing this on the Internet, so the answer is either obvious or I should ignore it.

Quoth the BPAFOSIPIDC, peering at my (unabashedly expired) Missouri Driver's Permit, “Did you get an extension on this?”

Me: Nope! Too hosed.

BPAFOSIPIDC (frowning): I'm afraid I have to ask if you have any other identification.

Me: Nope! Should I go back to school now and spend Winter Break watching other people play Guitar Hero? I guess that's okay.

BPAFOSIPIDC: No, your ID is fine, but you should renew your driver's permit.

Me: I don't know what a car is.

I walked away from the conversation shoeless and uncertain of my understanding of rudimentary human communication. As my shoes drifted down the conveyor belt and into a sophisticated machine designed to verify that they weren't size five-and-a-half grenades, I puzzled over the indubitably intricate logic of the BPAFOSIPIDC: did he think I should become a licensed driver in Boston, a city where thousands of intelligent college students learn how to not operate a motor vehicle until they're over 25 and in California? Or does he simply have an unnatural aversion to expired identification? I suppose that's understandable. I have an aversion to expired dairy. In fact, I'd even venture to guess that I'm expired-lactose intolerant.

Security surmounted, I slid into a decidedly-solid piece of generic aiport furniture and, hazed by a callous carousel of Logan-traipsing on four hours of sleep, flipped to the preface of David J. Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and internalized the most weepingly beautiful prose ever to flower from the turgid, algebra-swollen loam of a QM textbook: “ . . . quantum theory was not created- or even definitively packaged- by one individual, and it retains to this day some of the scars of its exhilarating but traumatic youth.” Never has my heart flowed with such insuppressible pathos for the metaphoric childhood of a scientific field. Yet, as soon as I belted myself into my airplane-seat-that-doubles-as-a-floatation-device-in-case-of-emergency, the intrinsic challenges of Sitting Next to Another Person became crumblingly manifest:

Stewardess: Would you like a beverage, peanuts, cookies, or pretzels?

Me: E, none of the above.

Guy in Seat 17A (gets a cookie): Are you sure you don't want a cookie? They're pretty fantastic. They taste sort of like graham crackers. Do you like graham crackers? Are you sure you don't want a cookie?

Me (in a mild state of panic, since by now I'm convinced that this guy is working for Delta Airlines and will blackmail me out of my SkyMiles if I don't get a cookie and enjoy it with televised gusto): Boy howdy, graham crackers are awesome! I have six boxes in my room!*

*This is actually true because of miscalculations in preparing for this.

Guy in Seat 17A: What are you snacking on?

Me (eating pita chips out of a ziplock bag): Pita chips, but they taste like graham crackers, which I presume taste like that delicious, complimentary cookie provided courtesy of Delta Airlines. Yum.

Guy in Seat 17A (unwrapping a cookie with an enormous Delta logo chiseled into the front): Mmm, this tastes like a thick gingersnap cookie, but even better. I love to eat them in the morning*. Hey Stewardess, can I have another cookie?

Me: Enough is enough! I have had it with these m*****f***ing snacks on this m*****f***ing plane!

(I didn't actually say this, because I suspected that Delta was filming my conversation with this guy for a commercial on public television.)

Half an hour removed from Cambridge, my regret for leaving MIT had already been amply nourished by the discovery that normal people have apparently sold their right of free speech to airline companies. I'd go back in a femtoheartbeat* if I didn't have to fly Delta.

*Combining biological figures of speech with metric prefixes satiates my inner Faulkner.

Good thing I took pictures of my bed before I left. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to print these and pin them to my pillow. Else the misery of separation would be unbearable.

(The ladder isn't attached to the loft, not even gravitationally and definitely not Coulombically. I took it out of my room and tried to pole vault with it once.)

1. Today I accidentally punched a friend in the head while gesticulating the angle between a wall clock and the horizontal. In an effort to convince Matt McGann that I am an entirely trustworthy employee as long as you don't ask me for the time in a panicked tone, I'm willing to bet that most socially-competent people punch someone every month or so. Statistically, if you have 500 friends, and .5% of your friends are within 2 feet of you at any time while you're awake, and the average human arm length is around 2.1 feet, and you point at something every 4 minutes or so, and . . . well, you should probably just try to have less friends. (Especially if your friends come in multiples of 2.5.)

2. It is possible to succeed in life even despite enormous obstacles like having 16396 unread emails in one's inbox.

3. A mental exercise: Next time you walk into a bathroom, spontaneously promise yourself that you will not leave until either:

A. You finally understand a concept that you've struggled with for a long time.
B. You remember the capital of whichever Dakota or Carolina you find to be more mneumonically elusive. (South for me in both cases.)
C. A friend/family member threatens to inflict serious Hitchhock-esque damage to your person if you don't get out of the bathroom within the next five seconds.

Through regular practice, you will expand your self-directed learning capacity while fostering a strong awareness of diverse cultures. And by diverse I mean both North and South Dakota.

4. One can broadly describe an academic field by its use of the word “subtle.” Consider the following:

Ethnomusicology major: Bartok's mingling of quasi-folk microtonal melodies with radio broadcasts from WWII airstrikes creates an aurally subtle yet contextually ponderous effect of reminding the listener that (s)he will eventually die. [“Subtle” = “non-observable.”]

Math major: This problem is subtle. [“Subtle” = “non-solvable.”]

Psychology major: The desire for social belonging is a subtle consequence of human nature. [“Subtle” = “obvious.”]

5. Over IAP, MIT's computer science department offers an enticing-and-possibly-poisonous candy shop of miniature programming classes. For instance:

[Conversation transcript follows]
Me: I think I'm taking intro class on programming in C.
Linda: I took it last year. The problem sets are hard.
Me: Really? It can't be that bad -
Linda: One kid stepped on his laptop so he wouldn't have to turn his in.
Me: . . . That's subtle.

The author hypothesizes that MIT Medical and IS&T should jointly investigate the frequency of laptop suicides over IAP in order to prevent the horrifying and tragic results of undiagnosed disorders in poorly-written code.

6. The older I get, the more crammingly I have to swallow the urge to begin every blog entry with trite, brittly cynical three-word sentences. “I'm getting old” creeps into my typing fingers like an arthritis, and every push of the delete bar afterwards nursingly massages out an infectious cramp. Lulu, with the battered wisdom of a senior year Physics major who speaks of skipping town on frigid New England winters and frigid academics while I'm listlessly thinking to ask her about the force on a dipole due to the gradient of the B-field, probably warned me about the onslaught of premature aging a long time ago, but I don't remember what she said because my memory drifted in an elsewhere of superconducting rings floating dreamily along curling field lines. Perhaps my geriatric expressiveness is a just a flavor of Seasonal Anxiety Disorder: the dry snap of dessicated branches, catapulting ice onto unprotected pedestrian heads, is pretty scary now that I think about it.

At the same time, I've become increasingly fond of telling friends and strangers alike that John A. Wheeler (Feynman's mentor and the co-author of the best textbook on General Relativity ever written for preschoolers) once believed that all electrons had the same observed mass and charge because (wait for the punchline) they were all the same electron. This is perhaps my favorite fact ever. It's thought-provoking, it's a hit at parties, and it's snappy like a dry tree branch laden with snow. (In which snow is a metaphor for hilariousness. I bet you Robert Frost never thought of that one.) On the other hand, I'm slightly worried because the uncontrollable sharing of one's Favorite Fact Ever with people who don't care is a well-documented characteristic of old people.

Hypothesis: The older I get, the closer I come to rivaling Professor Sadoway for the title of Person Most Likely to Try to Entertain You by Talking about Electrons.

Side note: What's your Favorite Fact Ever?

7. In astrophysics, the no-hair theorem postulates that black hole solutions to the General Relativistic equations of gravitation and electromagnetism can be characterized by only mass, charge, and angular momentum. At MIT, the no-time-for-hair theorem postulates that solutions to the general problem of simultaneously having hair and having too much work to do can be characterized by variants of the same three parameters: massive hair, electrically-charged hair, and angularly momentous hair. I was a brilliant example of non-quantum entanglement last week:

8. Spending Thanksgiving away from family is a delectable excuse to go geocaching with a low-precision car GPS that will ensure complete failure to find any geocaches. I tested this theory last weekend at pika, after waking up on Thanksgiving day to a house full of British accents, coupon-bloated newspapers, grey November sun dapples, dying flowers, and leftover chai tea and cookies on the dining room table. Holidays are like American dollars in Europe during a recession; they're better spent in pursuit of reckless adventures than anything else.

Ruth '13, as per family tradition, spent the morning biking through the city with her sister.
(I'm rather fond of how “pika” got truncated to “oika” in this photo, mostly because I imagine an Ancient Grecian doppelganger of Pikachu squealing, “Oika!” as it battles some sort of Charizard-esque creature from Hades.)

Emily '10, as per family tradition, baked several pies and drove to New Hampshire to celebrate pie with her relatives.

Desi (pika's cat-in-residence), as per family tradition, climbed onto my Star Wars Original Trilogy bedsheets* and pounced at Darth Vader.

*Mom wouldn't let me bring my LEGO Death Star II replica to college though, probably because she didn't want me to have too wild of a social life.

And then Desi found out that Darth Vader was her father.

Eventually, I stopped photographing the cat and kneaded some leftover potato coconut soup into a wheat flour batter, which briskly crisped into a skillet of coconut curry flatbread. Although in retrospect, I think it would have tasted just as good without the cat.

[The next morning, I released the sequel: Rosemary Onion Mushroom Olive Focaccia (or Faux-caccia, to be puntastically faithful to my non-traditional improvisations), frankensteined together from Scott '13's leftover vegetable collection. It was decidedly and fragrantly okay, but probably should have been flatter and/or breadier. Although it was easily fixed with a dollop of catsup, if you know what I mean.]

Scott made waffles.

Post-breakfast, I grabbed my GPS and embarked on a journey into the desolate zombiefied streets of Boston, whose denizens were presumably occupied by traditional Thanksgiving activities like Guitar Hero and Turkey-Consumption Hero. O'er hill and dale I traipsed, GPS dutifully bleeping the (approximate) coordinates of unseen treasures as I and my entourage peered into skeletal tree trunks, sunk our eyes deep into overgrown grass, overturned mud-entrenched rocks, and generally acted like characters from Redwall in search of a plot device.

Short story short, I decided to call it a day when the robotically-sonorous female voice on my GPS intoned, “Jump off bridge; swim fifty feet downstream and turn left. Arrive at destination.” I was like, “Girl, please. Heck no I ain't retrieving this geocache.”

So I walked home and took pictures of the cat leftovers.

Because: the first question on my Special Relativity test required me to add (and subtract!) numbers with 5 significant figures, and the professor did not manage to include a free copy of Matlab on the formula sheet. No kidding. I opened the test book, glanced at the first page, and felt my face melt into a puddle of inconsolable horror at the sight of more Arabic numerals than I've seen since the SAT II's, which was like 29483 years ago. Unable to bear it any longer, I turned the page, and went on, shuddering in a rising tide of despair. With the precious rind of spare time remaining after I finished the next three problems, I took out my extra pen and whittled an abacus out of the armrest of my chair, with which I hoped to compute the difference between .02932 and .39328.

A wise person once said that arithmetic is like arthritis: it cripples your dreams and contains the letters a, r, t, h, and two i's*. Or is it three? I can't add, remember?

*Cross-curriculum insight of the day: Homophones are the limit of consonance as consonance approaches infinity. Someday, I plan to teach a literature class that has a math prerequisite.

It wasn't until 6:30 pm that I discovered that I had scored 40 points higher on the exam than predicted. (Or was it 50? I can't subtract either.) I'm like the Dow Jones of test grades these days. Also, I'd like to thank the proud sponsors of Sesame Street for their generous contribution to my math education. Never will I forget that seven always comes after Big Bird.

Additional thanks goes to the Physics department library and the irreproachable views of Killian Court glowingly spread outside each window, watching over the study desks like guardians of sanity. Waves and vibrations, sunsets refracting through Windex'ed glass panes, provided the counterpoint to a dry, overbaked textbook with too many pictures. By pictures, I mean “diagrams.” By “diagram,” I mean “a sine wave with an arrow pointing at it.”

It's now 1:46 AM, and I've exceeded bedtime by a couple of hours. To first order, I'm sleeping as I type this. (Definition of MIT, #129: The ability to Taylor expand your states of consciousness around an equilibrium point, usually to convince yourself that you've slept recently.)

This semester, 8.07 (Electricity and Magnetism II) takes the proverbial cake for hopscotching around my criteria for likable classes. The first ten weeks or so straddled a slender line between geekishly fun and downright scary. On one hand, it's hard to complain about a class where the professor spends 5 minutes playing the Electrostatic Video Game in the middle of his lecture slides* and then inexplicably flings his USB drive into the door using a makeshift rubber-band slingshot. (I believe he was attempting to demonstrate something about tension in field lines, but the lesson was sadly overshadowed by the fact that his USB drive looked pretty expensive.)

*All seven people in attendance during this lecture burst into applause as the Positive Charge bounced off a wall, hovered in a precarious moment of unstable equilibrium, and slowly rolled into the target. It was the most breathtaking thing I'd ever experienced, but only because I don't have asthma.

On the other hand, the class this year was taught backwards, starting with the gnarliest subject in the entirety of 8.07: dipole radiation. Have you ever seen a dipole radiate? The thing spews out enough math to educate a third-world village.

<<<<{{((^))}}>>>>

(This is what happens when I stop taking photos. It's supposed to be a graphical representation of an oscillating dipole, alright? As I always say, MIT admissions values tolerance.)

On the third hand, there was a warm and cherished moment in 8.07 when the curriculum abruptly leaped from relativistic dipole radiation to Coulomb's Law. Did you know that I'm probably one of the few people in human history who learned the Liénard–Wiechert formulation of potentials for a moving point charge before learning electrostatics? By the way, the problem set for that particular week was far more bipolar than dipolar: one question was along the lines of, “Find the force on a line charge in a uniform electric field, but use the Maxwell Stress Tensor and do a spherical integral over infinity only after converting your basis vectors into Cartesian. Also, while you're solving easy problems using the hardest method imaginable, carve a turkey using toothpicks, but only after you convert your toothpicks into a small wooden flotilla.” The next question was like, “Find the magnetic field due to a current-carrying wire. HINT: Use Ampere's Law!!!11 HINT #2: The circumference of a circle is 2*r*pi.”

“What about your other physics classes?” you ask. Well, let me prelude my good-humored kvetchfest by remarking that I have nothing to complain about and that it took quite a few yardsticks of imagination to come up with the following criticisms. It's also worth mentioning mention that I'm only 35-50%* serious here: please keep in mind that all of the following are, at worst, only as mildly painful as getting punched in the kneecaps by someone wearing mittens. If you want to understand the true heartstabbing pain of MIT, you can also keep in mind that I will be repaying tuition loans for the next ten years. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go chug a bottle of aspirin.

(*Even outside of the esteemed blogging profession, I'm around 55% serious at best. By “at best,” I of course mean, “at funerals.”)

-8.03 (Vibrations and Waves) is a perfectly reasonable class until you realize that it's full of propaganda, just like television (whose existence is due to none other than VIBRATIONS AND WAVES. Coincidence? I think not). According to 8.03, vibrations and waves created light, made the world in six days, rested on Sunday, and then invented evolution, thereby ensuring that thousands of unsuspecting children would continue to buy Pokemon cards (the most expensive of which contain reflective holograms, whose properties are due to none other than VIBRATIONS AND WAVES. Coincidence? I think not.). The first one may actually be true, but I refuse to accept the premise that waves are mankind's only remaining hope for salvation. I mean, otherwise, Barack Obama wouldn't have won the Nobel Peace Prize, right?.

No OCW am I, but here's my stab at summarizing the 8.03 course material:
-A wave on a spring is a wave.
-A wave on a rope is a wave.
-A wave in a pipe is a wave.
-A wave on a transmission line is a wave.
-A wave in vacuum is a wave.
-A wave is also called a vibration sometimes.

Did I tell you the name of this class, by the way?

-8.033 (Relativity): I will heartlessly say that 8.033 makes electricity and magnetism look like clumsy squash players stumbling around in a ballroom full of elegant, waltzing kinematics, firstly because I hate playing/eating squash and secondly because I think this is some sort of metaphor or whatever. In the first half of the course, each lovely transformation and kinematics equation was tastefully attired in immaculate thought experiments before its initiation into the polite society of established physics. Yet as soon as E&M clodhopped into the room, dripping with murky math and shod in raggedy logic, the exalted sophistication of relativity spiraled down the metaphorical toilet of terrible curriculum design. You could hear the flush as soon as we started transforming Coulomb's Law in like 32939 different scenarios of relative motion between source charge and test charge. Introducing E&M by applying the force transformation laws to Coulomb was like smearing dirt over the brilliant connections between E&M and Special Relativity. Why not link the fields to the intrinsic properties of space and time, and then deduce how they must look to an observer moving at relativistic speeds, such as Lance Armstrong? To be fair, we probably discussed this in recitation for about 20 minutes.

Lance Armstrong, that is.

(Just kidding. I can assure you that we learn more about cyclic permutations than cyclist permutations in 8.033 recitation.)

Also, the flavortext (yes, flavortext) on the Problem Sets is about as straightforward as the nonexistent Star Trek episode written by Richard Nixon. Example:

Buckethead and Ry Cooder, two guitar masters who are completely unrelated and look
nothing at all alike, meet at Antone's, the famous blues club in Austin. Ry is scheduled to play
the first one-hour set, with Buckethead immediately to follow.
To while away the time, Buckethead hops in his motorized chicken coop and drives west at con-
stant acceleration a = (5=3) £ 106 m=s2 for precisely 30 minutes (as measured by his dashboard
clock) - at which point he slams on the breaks, stopping the coop almost instantly, turns around,
and drives back, again at constant acceleration a. After precisely one hour on his clock he arrives
back at Antone's, slams on the breaks again, and walks in for his set smack on time. Importantly,
all along his trip, Buckethead maintained a perfect soulful C on his monster Jackson King V.
Meanwhile, back at Antone's, Ry plays an awesome set, closing with his classic version of Woodie
Guthrie's \Vigilante Man" (as recorded on \Into the Purple Valley"). As the song ends, perfectly
on time, he holds out the last note, keeping it ringing until Buckethead walks back in at the end
of his trip.

Note: some details about the real world you should neglect in solving this problem:
² The earth is round. Let's treat it as flat and infnite { buckethead's coop always stays in
contact with the ground.
² Since a is roughly 20,000 g, the acceleration would crush any human inside the coop. Don't
worry, Buckethead is not human.
² To stop the coop on a dime would require absurdly wonderful breaks. Yes, it's an awesome
chicken coop.

Dare I venture any further comment? You know that something's awry with your problem set when the hardest part of the question is figuring out that it's a question.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that physics can be crushing, but there's nothing to worry about. Buckethead is not human.