Fermata
There seems to be some sort of pagan festival taking place on one of the lawns here. There is a giant bonfire, loud punk, and a large pentagram hanging on a banner from one of the buildings. I take this to mean that the seniors at this institution have finished their classes and began today the octave that will lead them to a stage, the calling of their name, and the receipt of a certain piece of paper. The paper feels a little hollow at the ending, when you consider how much labor of men and women has gone into the instruction, the learning, and the awful business of paying for it all. But I will say this for those who graduate here on Friday. I've seen how they earn it. Perhaps, their learning has been overly narrow by some standards. But a great world lies before them.
A few days ago, I was talking of dialectic with the ebullient operator of this firm . (Yes, this is a shameless advertising plug.) She was interested in the details of the Chicago Core, since one of her great heroes, Carl Sagan, was a product of the Hutchins Core. I explained to her that the heart of the Socratic Method is that truth is unique but that the ways we come to it are not. The goal of dialectic is to guide the individual soul on the necessary path and not to inculcate by rote.
My officemate informed me recently that one of his housemates, a freshman here, was being re-educated. To my mind, this was a sinister choice of words, and I asked him what he meant, since I knew that the person in question had come to Caltech as a young Earth creationist. (Don't be surprised. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary recently hired a Chicago geophysical sciences alumnus [Ph.D., Harvard, under Gould] to head its center on "origins." Yes, he, too, is a young Earth creationist and apparently this was well-known and tolerated by his professors.) My officemate said, "Well, he just learned about radioactive decay and ran the numbers and concluded: (a) the Earth is 4.5 Ga; (b) or God is a sadist; (c) or God made the Earth look very old to test our faith, which might imply (b)." The young man in question is leaning toward (a), because he believes in God, honest and truthful. Hopefully, his faith will be strengthened by the experience. But most importantly, he was not being re-educated. He was educating himself. For the Greeks, this was the mark of a free man. And our polity once was based on the same ideal.
Ooh, I'm being pedantic this evening, aren't I? Well, the term has ended. The summer will be an exceptionally busy one. Two very difficult problems lie before me, and the solutions are not as easy as I once thought. Einstein had it right, "Subtle is the Lord" and so with His works.
But I'll tell you about those problems when I have made more progress. For now, I have had an exceptionally difficult week. I had travel arrangements to make, classes for which to register, qualifying examinations to start arranging, and I had finals simultaneously. The end result, as I forecast, is a sleep schedule very much out of whack. So, don't worry about the posting time in this entry. I just can't get to sleep. I am going to take the day off tomorrow, sleep in, do a little shopping, and go swimming in the evening.
Passing over my physics exam, this week required the writing of two term papers in about 2.5 days. Due to the time constraints, they were not the most well-written papers. They had far too much of my awkward belle stile and Aristotelian compulsion for completeness. They, however, were signs that eleven months here has done wonders for my skills as a scientist. From my training in non-scientific subjects, I have managed to develop most of the skills of a good literature reviewer. This skill set served me well as an undergraduate, when professors were very happy just to see good writing and broad reading. A little critical thinking was a cherry on top. When I left Chicago, I noticed that the faculty was greatly concerned with the idea that a review was capable of breaking new ground and thinking qualitatively about how new questions could be answered.
I took this strategy to heart last term, writing one paper on methane in the ocean and another on remote sensing of atmospheric methane. There were, of course, a few common references between the papers. What I strived to do was to examine the research on both topics, critically evaluate the present evidence, and suggest profitable new directions. To some extent, I had managed this in college, but in a rather desultory way or at least in a way that suggested a lack of background. Finally, last term, I was able to identify proven research that was going in the right direction or explain clearly (if not succinctly) what was wrong with present research strategies. I actually managed to give a talk on the remote sensing question and attracted some flattering (but inconveniently timed) interest from a capable researcher in the general area. This is a good sign. It is also a good sign that the research summary I wrote for one of my advisors seems to have gained me passage to a conference this summer to explore some of these topics more deeply.
One of the great problems of my life is that people do not understand the way I think. The explanation, of course, is not that I am astonishingly brilliant. No, it is that I possess a certain odd creativity. Such a trait is an exceptionally useful trait for cogitation (especially in the company of brighter minds) but not worth a sprig of wheat for communication. To make a long story short, I'm trying. The oral presentation course this term was very useful in this regard.
So what was it about the two papers this term that made me come to the realization that I wasn't stagnating as a scientist? Well, these papers required a major switch in style. One of the papers forced me to do actual research on "an impossible problem." What was funny is that a few weeks ago, I needed to come up with a topic for the second paper. My creativity was sapped. Finally, I decided to research a question that I had come across while researching the first paper. I intended it to be a critical review. After all, that was the expectation of the assignment. But at a certain point last week, I came across an aspect of the problem that intrigued me greatly, and I thought, "Wait just a second here, here is an actual research question. And I don't need to hem and haw about the need for further work. I can take the first step right here and now." I modified a technique that Noboru taught me in college, which apparently was the invention of my new academic advisor. A couple of days later, I had my answer. It was sloppily done, but I knew how it could be done better.
I am still quite unfinished, of course. One always can be a better communicator. More importantly, there is much room for improvement in my ability to treat quantitative problems in a rigorous and exact manner. But early Wednesday morning, I sat listening to Di.fm EuroDance while finishing up the first of the papers. (Oh, by the way, Faure's Requiem and Bach's Magnificat are both incredible works. They were the rest of the paperwriting soundtrack.) I said to myself, "Do you want to do this the rest of your life?" I was tired. I was worried. But I said, "Yes." I just need to keep from being obsessed with it. There is life outside your office. (One of the guys in my research group went to high school with the writer of Avenue Q ). But not quite yet... In October, I have an examination that one fellow student says is far more stressful than testimony before Congress. (He's never testified before Congress.) I need to prepare.
Plans for the Weekend: Relax on Saturday. On Sunday, I volunteered to help with the polyglot goodness of Pentecost. We'll see what else happens.
An Inconvenient Truth
I capped off a busy evening with this movie. (I also bought a bilingual Georgics and went to Zilchbrau.)
Go see it. I really don't know how many political conservatives read this blog. Being pro-life doesn't make you a conservative, for instance. If you're a political conservative, you might find this movie to be a testament to Al Gore's megalomania. I saw it more as a look into his head and heart in a way I didn't see in the 2000 campaign. It's also about global climate change, a subject very near to my head and heart. If you see the movie, you should pay attention to a few important issues that are not treated accurately in the movie:
1. Greenhouse effect graphics. The depictions of radiative transfer in the movie are somewhat deceptive in that they suggest that carbon dioxide etc. backscatter IR radiation to Earth. In reality, greenhouse gases re-emit infrared back toward the surface and re-emit smaller amounts of infrared than emitted at the surface. The radiation vectors would be most accurately depicted as short pulsing arrows in both directions originating from the middle of the atmosphere rather than a thin layer at the top. However, I did enjoy the Futurama explanation of the greenhouse effect, despite its complete inaccuracy. Gore also is not clear that emissions that "pollute" in an air quality sense are not always the same as greenhouse gases. Considering the counterattack ads from the American Enterprise Institute, this is an important point.
2. Gore is at his best when he is talking about Revelle, the Keeling Curve, and the paleoclimate record. Revelle is a name I know well from chemical oceanography. I was very impressed to see the impact his instruction had on Gore. I hope that some of my future students, especially non-science majors like Gore, are so well-equippped.
3. When discussing Antarctica, Gore jumps around a lot and nearly loses the entire thread of the argument. A little judicious editing might have been helpful here. He also might want to revise his public talk at this point. But his discussion of the Larsen B break-up is quite good. I heard the initial guesses about that story from Doug MacAyeal at a talk a couple of years ago.
4. Gore is clearly in touch with the latest research. The plot he shows of global precipitation pattern changes is a much more elegant version of one in a paper I reviewed for my climate class in the fall. The paper is from 2005, I believe.
5. Day After Tomorrow Moment: Gore discusses the Ocean Conveyor Belt and the Younger Dryas in a fairly sane way.
6. But, of course, one must be careful with the thermohaline circulation shut-off story. Wally Broecker in a recent issue of Science demonstrated fairly convincingly that the story of the glacial lake breakout shutting off open ocean convection in the North Atlantic still has a few odd holes in it. For instance, there aren't very many morphological signs of flooding in the right places. A few parts of Canada should look the Oregon scrublands. They do not.
7. Invasive species. There still is some controversy about whether invasive species are spreading because of climate change or trade and transportation.
8. Climate skepticism: The study Gore cites about the random sample of scientific papers is somewhat deceptive. At this point, Gore is quite right that there is no respected climate scientist who is unconvinced that greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in global warming. But there are still scientists like Richard Lindzen, who still ask valid questions about the magnitude of changes. Non-linearity doesn't have to be bad. It can suppress change, too. Of course, if Greenland's melting has a noticeable effect on global sea level, it will become nearly impossible to remain skeptical about the magnitude of change.
9. James Hansen moment: Flashback to Gore interrogating Nasa scientist about contradicting his own testimony. Well, that's Jim Hansen. Every once in a while, one of my advisors forwards me interesting materials from Hansen. Hansen has written an amicus brief for a case here in California (mentioned in passing in the movie) that makes the best scientific case for catastrophic global warming I ever have seen. If I see it has been made public, I'll link to it. My birthplace may be underwater within my lifetime. Now, that's a scary thought.
Good night and good luck.
There seems to be some sort of pagan festival taking place on one of the lawns here. There is a giant bonfire, loud punk, and a large pentagram hanging on a banner from one of the buildings. I take this to mean that the seniors at this institution have finished their classes and began today the octave that will lead them to a stage, the calling of their name, and the receipt of a certain piece of paper. The paper feels a little hollow at the ending, when you consider how much labor of men and women has gone into the instruction, the learning, and the awful business of paying for it all. But I will say this for those who graduate here on Friday. I've seen how they earn it. Perhaps, their learning has been overly narrow by some standards. But a great world lies before them.
A few days ago, I was talking of dialectic with the ebullient operator of this firm . (Yes, this is a shameless advertising plug.) She was interested in the details of the Chicago Core, since one of her great heroes, Carl Sagan, was a product of the Hutchins Core. I explained to her that the heart of the Socratic Method is that truth is unique but that the ways we come to it are not. The goal of dialectic is to guide the individual soul on the necessary path and not to inculcate by rote.
My officemate informed me recently that one of his housemates, a freshman here, was being re-educated. To my mind, this was a sinister choice of words, and I asked him what he meant, since I knew that the person in question had come to Caltech as a young Earth creationist. (Don't be surprised. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary recently hired a Chicago geophysical sciences alumnus [Ph.D., Harvard, under Gould] to head its center on "origins." Yes, he, too, is a young Earth creationist and apparently this was well-known and tolerated by his professors.) My officemate said, "Well, he just learned about radioactive decay and ran the numbers and concluded: (a) the Earth is 4.5 Ga; (b) or God is a sadist; (c) or God made the Earth look very old to test our faith, which might imply (b)." The young man in question is leaning toward (a), because he believes in God, honest and truthful. Hopefully, his faith will be strengthened by the experience. But most importantly, he was not being re-educated. He was educating himself. For the Greeks, this was the mark of a free man. And our polity once was based on the same ideal.
Ooh, I'm being pedantic this evening, aren't I? Well, the term has ended. The summer will be an exceptionally busy one. Two very difficult problems lie before me, and the solutions are not as easy as I once thought. Einstein had it right, "Subtle is the Lord" and so with His works.
But I'll tell you about those problems when I have made more progress. For now, I have had an exceptionally difficult week. I had travel arrangements to make, classes for which to register, qualifying examinations to start arranging, and I had finals simultaneously. The end result, as I forecast, is a sleep schedule very much out of whack. So, don't worry about the posting time in this entry. I just can't get to sleep. I am going to take the day off tomorrow, sleep in, do a little shopping, and go swimming in the evening.
Passing over my physics exam, this week required the writing of two term papers in about 2.5 days. Due to the time constraints, they were not the most well-written papers. They had far too much of my awkward belle stile and Aristotelian compulsion for completeness. They, however, were signs that eleven months here has done wonders for my skills as a scientist. From my training in non-scientific subjects, I have managed to develop most of the skills of a good literature reviewer. This skill set served me well as an undergraduate, when professors were very happy just to see good writing and broad reading. A little critical thinking was a cherry on top. When I left Chicago, I noticed that the faculty was greatly concerned with the idea that a review was capable of breaking new ground and thinking qualitatively about how new questions could be answered.
I took this strategy to heart last term, writing one paper on methane in the ocean and another on remote sensing of atmospheric methane. There were, of course, a few common references between the papers. What I strived to do was to examine the research on both topics, critically evaluate the present evidence, and suggest profitable new directions. To some extent, I had managed this in college, but in a rather desultory way or at least in a way that suggested a lack of background. Finally, last term, I was able to identify proven research that was going in the right direction or explain clearly (if not succinctly) what was wrong with present research strategies. I actually managed to give a talk on the remote sensing question and attracted some flattering (but inconveniently timed) interest from a capable researcher in the general area. This is a good sign. It is also a good sign that the research summary I wrote for one of my advisors seems to have gained me passage to a conference this summer to explore some of these topics more deeply.
One of the great problems of my life is that people do not understand the way I think. The explanation, of course, is not that I am astonishingly brilliant. No, it is that I possess a certain odd creativity. Such a trait is an exceptionally useful trait for cogitation (especially in the company of brighter minds) but not worth a sprig of wheat for communication. To make a long story short, I'm trying. The oral presentation course this term was very useful in this regard.
So what was it about the two papers this term that made me come to the realization that I wasn't stagnating as a scientist? Well, these papers required a major switch in style. One of the papers forced me to do actual research on "an impossible problem." What was funny is that a few weeks ago, I needed to come up with a topic for the second paper. My creativity was sapped. Finally, I decided to research a question that I had come across while researching the first paper. I intended it to be a critical review. After all, that was the expectation of the assignment. But at a certain point last week, I came across an aspect of the problem that intrigued me greatly, and I thought, "Wait just a second here, here is an actual research question. And I don't need to hem and haw about the need for further work. I can take the first step right here and now." I modified a technique that Noboru taught me in college, which apparently was the invention of my new academic advisor. A couple of days later, I had my answer. It was sloppily done, but I knew how it could be done better.
I am still quite unfinished, of course. One always can be a better communicator. More importantly, there is much room for improvement in my ability to treat quantitative problems in a rigorous and exact manner. But early Wednesday morning, I sat listening to Di.fm EuroDance while finishing up the first of the papers. (Oh, by the way, Faure's Requiem and Bach's Magnificat are both incredible works. They were the rest of the paperwriting soundtrack.) I said to myself, "Do you want to do this the rest of your life?" I was tired. I was worried. But I said, "Yes." I just need to keep from being obsessed with it. There is life outside your office. (One of the guys in my research group went to high school with the writer of Avenue Q ). But not quite yet... In October, I have an examination that one fellow student says is far more stressful than testimony before Congress. (He's never testified before Congress.) I need to prepare.
Plans for the Weekend: Relax on Saturday. On Sunday, I volunteered to help with the polyglot goodness of Pentecost. We'll see what else happens.
An Inconvenient Truth
I capped off a busy evening with this movie. (I also bought a bilingual Georgics and went to Zilchbrau.)
Go see it. I really don't know how many political conservatives read this blog. Being pro-life doesn't make you a conservative, for instance. If you're a political conservative, you might find this movie to be a testament to Al Gore's megalomania. I saw it more as a look into his head and heart in a way I didn't see in the 2000 campaign. It's also about global climate change, a subject very near to my head and heart. If you see the movie, you should pay attention to a few important issues that are not treated accurately in the movie:
1. Greenhouse effect graphics. The depictions of radiative transfer in the movie are somewhat deceptive in that they suggest that carbon dioxide etc. backscatter IR radiation to Earth. In reality, greenhouse gases re-emit infrared back toward the surface and re-emit smaller amounts of infrared than emitted at the surface. The radiation vectors would be most accurately depicted as short pulsing arrows in both directions originating from the middle of the atmosphere rather than a thin layer at the top. However, I did enjoy the Futurama explanation of the greenhouse effect, despite its complete inaccuracy. Gore also is not clear that emissions that "pollute" in an air quality sense are not always the same as greenhouse gases. Considering the counterattack ads from the American Enterprise Institute, this is an important point.
2. Gore is at his best when he is talking about Revelle, the Keeling Curve, and the paleoclimate record. Revelle is a name I know well from chemical oceanography. I was very impressed to see the impact his instruction had on Gore. I hope that some of my future students, especially non-science majors like Gore, are so well-equippped.
3. When discussing Antarctica, Gore jumps around a lot and nearly loses the entire thread of the argument. A little judicious editing might have been helpful here. He also might want to revise his public talk at this point. But his discussion of the Larsen B break-up is quite good. I heard the initial guesses about that story from Doug MacAyeal at a talk a couple of years ago.
4. Gore is clearly in touch with the latest research. The plot he shows of global precipitation pattern changes is a much more elegant version of one in a paper I reviewed for my climate class in the fall. The paper is from 2005, I believe.
5. Day After Tomorrow Moment: Gore discusses the Ocean Conveyor Belt and the Younger Dryas in a fairly sane way.
6. But, of course, one must be careful with the thermohaline circulation shut-off story. Wally Broecker in a recent issue of Science demonstrated fairly convincingly that the story of the glacial lake breakout shutting off open ocean convection in the North Atlantic still has a few odd holes in it. For instance, there aren't very many morphological signs of flooding in the right places. A few parts of Canada should look the Oregon scrublands. They do not.
7. Invasive species. There still is some controversy about whether invasive species are spreading because of climate change or trade and transportation.
8. Climate skepticism: The study Gore cites about the random sample of scientific papers is somewhat deceptive. At this point, Gore is quite right that there is no respected climate scientist who is unconvinced that greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in global warming. But there are still scientists like Richard Lindzen, who still ask valid questions about the magnitude of changes. Non-linearity doesn't have to be bad. It can suppress change, too. Of course, if Greenland's melting has a noticeable effect on global sea level, it will become nearly impossible to remain skeptical about the magnitude of change.
9. James Hansen moment: Flashback to Gore interrogating Nasa scientist about contradicting his own testimony. Well, that's Jim Hansen. Every once in a while, one of my advisors forwards me interesting materials from Hansen. Hansen has written an amicus brief for a case here in California (mentioned in passing in the movie) that makes the best scientific case for catastrophic global warming I ever have seen. If I see it has been made public, I'll link to it. My birthplace may be underwater within my lifetime. Now, that's a scary thought.
Good night and good luck.
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