screaming godhead

Read it in the Strata

2008-09-07T12:38:00.006-04:00

It always takes some time to get back into the groove after these fuck-it-all forays to Detroit. They are the truest vacations I know, and if ever I sincerely forget my work, it is there. Especially on longer trips like this last. I just about get to feeling back to normal, re-integrated in the scene and likely to turn up around your table on any given week night with no more ado than nods and handshakes. But then, as surely as alarm clocks wrench one from good dreams, I find myself lying confused and disappointed in the Boston sunrise coming through my familiar window; the trucks rumbling by below just like they always do.

I am starting to realize that I am living two lives, and that they are grossly incompatible. They are not Detroit and Boston; I’m not so malleable as all that. But they are certainly exemplified in their respective places, for any art must inevitably concede the will of raw materials. On one hand, I love human beings. I could build and justify an entire personal philosophy on the grounds of maximizing my interactions with good people. I want to sit around campfires and drink and smoke and laugh. I want to wake up in the sand, build spears and hurl bottles of rum into the inland sea. I want to yell and jump and beat makeshift drums. I want argue about your quirks and idiosyncrasies and marvel at our differences and then resolve them with laughter. I want all of this every day, and I want every rigid tick mark of calendar time to relax and dissolve into day and night.

On the other hand, I demand the solitude that wrings quantifiable progress out of every passing second. I can spend weeks and months in a cycle that’s strict and rigid and wrought with challenges, and it doesn’t rob of the human will to impulse and distraction, but brings it to the fore, teaches control, and makes life feel real and vibrant and raw. Life is capable of dealing extreme highs and lows, and by placing at regular and frequent interval the inevitability of exhaustion and stress, of pain and suffering, and the high probability failure and shame, you can achieve glory to put every intoxicant to shame. I want to read the books others cringe at and write the papers others couldn’t. I want to think hard and mutter and twitch until these abstractions take shape for me. I want to fight for the insights no number of hours will get you, but only the achievement of a new level of concentration. All this just to watch the respect and disdain brew unwillingly in the core of peers and superiors. I want to run and throw weights and release raw-throated and primal distress calls through the gym. I want to positively cower in the face of the tasks ahead of me, and then drive through them with mindless exertion, all because when I drop the last impossible weight, its clambering to the ground over my breathe speaks some epic fuck you to everyone and everything, and I mean it. This mode of life isn’t about people, it’s about me. It’s not about ego, but action. It’s about weakness seeping out in the sweat and the ink.

The merging of these two lifestyles seems to me impossible. Take any compromise between the two, any average behavior, and each philosophy is ruined. My solution has been (and this by no conscious planning of my own) to segregate them into distinct periods of time. I charge full speed at every test and trial for weeks, and then I forget it all, let the progress fade, and run off on great and irresponsible binges, enjoying whatever company I can find and relearning culture from only the most random and unexpected participants. And over time the dividing lines between these two have become darker and deeper, the transitions sharper, and the executions more extreme. I can’t help but wonder what I’m barreling towards here; what inevitable reckoning lies down this path. I may have found a passable solution to these dual urges of mine, but I’m more than a little unnerved by the fact that I am not converging toward anything stable, but fluctuating ever more wildly. Then again, I’d rather go down in flames than fade and atrophy in the middle ground.

Vessels of the Rock

2008-08-09T14:48:00.002-04:00

“D.K. Belyaev and his colleagues took captive silver foxes, Vulpes vulpes, and set out systematically to breed for tameness. They succeeded, dramatically. By mating together the tamest individuals of each generation, Baylaev had, within 20 years, produced foxes that behaved like Border collies, actively seeking human company and wagging their tails when approached. That is not very surprising, although the speed with which it happened may be. Less expected were the by-products of selection for tameness. These genetically tamed foxes not only behaved like collies, they looked like collies. They grew black-and-white coats, with white face patches and muzzles. Instead of the characteristic pricked ears of a wild fox, they developed ‘lovable’ floppy ears. Their reproductive hormone balance changed, and they assumed the habit of breeding all the year round instead of in a breeding season. Probably associated with their lowered aggression, they were found to contain higher levels of the neurally active chemical serotonin. It took only 20 years to turn foxes into ‘dogs’ by artificial selection.”
-Dawkins, The Ancestors Tale.

My body has within it some tens of thousands of Carbon atoms. By all likelihood, there is somewhere in some vital organ, a single Carbon atom which was at a previous time of my mother, and yet before that of some leaf or piece of meat, and was still earlier a constituent of some vast geological formation. Even before that it was Helium or Hydrogen, forged into something wholly different in the unimaginable conditions of a star. And in a time yet to come, when the last x-thousand Carboned creature lies flat and dead on whatever wasted version of this globe proceeds, it will float for lonely millennia as stable atmospheric CO2. Of these things are Men made, and each is but a nexus of such histories.

I'm coming home in two weeks. Almost none of you have any idea how that feels.

Failure is a Must

2008-07-26T13:52:00.005-04:00

This week I disproved the very premise of the work I’ve been doing for the past four months. It’s all bullshit, and now there will be no paper and likely no conference in Poland. The worst part is that in retrospect the problem is so obvious it hurts. I took the boss a one line proof that we both stared at in silence for several minutes, defeated, and then with shrug I get, “Well, there’s an ample supply of stupid. No getting around that. All we can do is try to tap into the scarce supply of smart.” Your average Ph.D. will admit that they could reproduce all of the work in their thesis in about 6 months time. The other three and a half years are devoted to figuring out exactly what work to do, and it’s a painful process of trial-and-error. I guess I’ve got four months of that done; could have been more.

Yesterday one of the campus bars closed down and there was a party to finish the kegs. I met some random crew of mechanical engineers who were over the top. These guys built a robot that mixes drinks in precise proportions and volumes, and wrote a program that uses machine learning techniques to invent new drinks based on people’s ratings of its previous efforts. They were drunks, every one of them, and they loved to sit around and elaborate on ridiculous ideas, like getting ransom from NASA on the threat of defacing historical moon landing sites. We’re to imagine a rover with a mounted feather duster poised delicately over Neil Armstrong’s footprints. For the first Friday in a long time I was entertained instead of entertaining and it was good.

Thanks to whoever found Babylon Circus. I daresay Au Marche Des Illusions is as good as Underdog World Strike.

Inconceivable

2008-07-20T22:39:00.006-04:00

"The importance of this discovery for the development of the human mind lay in the fact that the earth, mankind, and the individual ego became dethroned. The earth became a satellite of the sun which carried around in space the peoples swarming on it. Similar planets of equal importance accompanied it, describing orbits about the sun. Man was no longer important in the universe, except to himself. None of these amazing facts arose from ordinary experience (such as the confirmation of a round earth by circumnavigation of the globe), but from observations which were, for the time in question, very delicate and subtle and from accurate calculations of planetary orbits. At any rate, the evidence was such as was neither accessible to all men nor of importance to everyday life. Visual evidence, intuitive perception, sacred and pagan tradition alike all spoke against the new doctrine. In place of the visible disk of the sun the new doctrine puts a ball of fire, gigantic beyond imagination; in place of the friendly lights of the sky, similar balls of fire at inconceivable distances, or spheres like the earth, that reflect light from other sources; and all immediate sense impressions were to be regarded as deception, whereas immeasurable distances and incredible velocities were to represent the true state of affairs. Yet this new doctrine was destined to be victorious. For it drew its power from the burning desire of all thinking minds to comprehend all things in the material world—be they ever so unimportant for human existence—by simple, unambiguous, though abstract, concepts. In this process, which constitutes the essence of scientific research, the human spirit never hesitates nor fears to doubt the most self-evident facts of visual perception and to declare them to be illusions, but prefers to resort to the most extreme abstractions rather than exclude from the scientific description of nature one established fact, however insignificant it might seem."

-Max Born on the Copernican system

Sunshine

2008-07-12T18:02:00.002-04:00

I woke up to sunshine teasing an epic headache, broken hints and glimpses of things I’m not sure if I regret. There are bruises behind dried blood on arms and shins and then this giant stain on my jeans I couldn’t even begin to explain. Images: Back Bay, hard pre-gaming, a prompt ejection from Boston’s #1 single’s bar for being an absolute fucking ninja, presented to bouncers in turn for future reference, some apartment, a six mile stumble home in the dawn, Chinese food and cigarettes from somewhere.

I wrote four-thousand lines of code in past two weeks. I’m automating a technique, and soon I’ll be ripping through test problems. The plan is to publish this work by the end of the summer, submit an abstract to a conference in Krakow, Poland for next June, keep the NSF at bay about their money for a time. I’m driving at this hard right now because I can finally see the payoffs I’ve been eyeing for the better part of a decade and it’s all looking very real. Most of my peers are aimless, neglected by their advisors and nowhere near publishable work. Turns out I’ve made some strong choices and now the advisor everyone was scared of two years ago is provoking some unspoken jealousy. Truth is, I’ve got more pride in this lab than I’ll ever have in MIT. And then the boss and I spend an hour at my computer looking up pictures of the resort we’re staying at for a conference in Cancun and express similar sentiments about the poolside drink pavilion.

I spent one year with high hopes for this city and a second wallowing in disappointment. I’ve said a lot of shit about Boston, and believe that I’ve meant every word, but the next era is where I quite talking and resolve to wring a good time out of this city or raze it to the ground trying. Work long hard weeks with every intention of winding this thing so tight that I explode into Friday night like it’s my last; Saturday some meaningless maybe on the other side of cataclysm. Maybe it’s the sunshine, or maybe I’m getting sentimental about upcoming August days in Detroit, but sometimes I get the feeling I’ll miss this place terribly when I’m gone.

Too Few

2008-06-17T16:32:00.002-04:00

One might think that the pain fades in time; that the more these bonds stretch and break, the more numbing I’d find the loss. But this is not the case. No, over time the anxiety only builds because somewhere over these past months a concrete deed has become temporary in my head. I’ve given it an end, a release, a time when it will be righted, and toward such a terminus one dreams…. See it was never friends I lost or gave up; turns out it wasn’t even individuals. It was freedom in a sense. Or better, it was human beings, and of those there seem altogether too few.

And so it came to be that on the first day of the 21st year of Alyssa Mullen, as I stood in the center of a yelling mob, lawn chair raised high above my head, a deficiency in my life suddenly took on clarity. The thing that I had failed so miserably to articulate on so many occasions finally took the form of a word for me. It came to me again, that word, as I stood on the following day under the beating sun drinking donation beers in a nebulously managed non-bar, listening to loud rock from countless bands that seemed to draw their members from the crowd at random. Later that night the word came again, as we sat in some overgrown sheet metal enclosure burning used lumber found roadside and stolen for simple lack of communication.

Community is what came to echo in my head during these times. In what sense? Take for example the fact that at no point in two days did I find myself in the company of less than 10 individuals save maybe late at night when things tend to dwindle in the usual way. But sometimes it seemed thirty or more people were around me, all there for essentially the same purpose, however subdivided into tighter groups and relations. And of these people I knew many, but often not most, and met more of them than I could reasonably be expected to remember. And these groups, in such numbers, seemed inevitably to take the attitude that the rules somehow did not apply to them in full, the attitude that if they were criminal then they were also jury. These groups inevitably took on the behavior that seemed, at that time and place, to reflect the will of their members, without appeal to objective external customs or regulations; without appeal to laws or norms. They behaved as tribes do, where consequence comes only from within.

What I have failed to articulate so frequently is the difference between Detroit, so run down, dangerous, and devoid of worth to the outside viewer, and the thriving cities, Boston, NY, etc., with their cropped city parks, well maintained storefronts and high standard of living. The answer, at last, is community. The answer is that, without city works, without routine maintenance and ample police force, without plentiful jobs and plush accommodations, Detroit has developed a real community unlike anything found in the modern metropolis. The people have given up on the city; it provides them nothing. The city is not what looks after them and protects them, it is not what entertains them or provides them opportunity. The city is not what gives them comfortable places to relax and spend time. The city has utterly failed them and they instead turn to their neighbors. They turn to the principles of common good. In community and trust they find protection and piece of mind; in community they find their entertainment. Who builds the fire pits? Who is responsible for the best bars and parties? Who can claim responsibility for the festivals and shows, the music and the art? The People and the community. And who’s right is it then to make rules and punish. The police and city officials who have failed to protect them or ease their fears? No, it is only the tribe to which you are accountable. That is community, and these are human beings.

But in Boston, law and order come from the outside. The people are comfortable and entertained. They do not yell and hoist lawn furniture; the People would not be behind them. They do not make fires and play guitars in the night; there are clubs and sports teams enough to keep them entertained. There are no festivals in the streets because, though there’s money enough, the people have no pride and do no work. Here you owe your neighbors nothing because they provide you with nothing. The city provides and demands obedience and all are docile and in their place. They are clean and well dressed, they’ve no grit on their hands or stains on their clothes; they sleep at home and know routine. They have no thirst for blaring trumpets and no taste for Tequila. In summer, their porches are empty and their instruments are put away. There is no nature to be seen in the things they build. This is the price of protection and security, of manufactured entertainment, of centralized control and order. Where are the human beings here and where is the community?

The human being is filthy and uncouth. It is spontaneous and unpredictable. It is impulsive and acts in the moment. It is anxious and restless. The human being does not conform or check itself, it knows release in music and thought and destruction. It recognizes no institution. It loves other human beings and answers only to them. It loves excess in all things, yet it makes due on little and thrives in discomfort. It lives for the experience; lives to be confused and challenged, to be surprised and to learn. And it finds in other human beings something infinitely richer, more satisfying and more compelling than in all other works of nature.

Yes, of these there are far too few.

K is for Karma

2008-05-17T20:12:00.002-04:00

I keep telling myself I’ll keep this blog flowing and it never happens. I guess I don’t spend as much time as I used to pondering bizarre ideas to write up or crusading against some misplaced brick the foundation. Frankly, I don’t have the company to stimulate it. I’ve gone boring by all accounts; wake up, office, gym, office, sleep. Caffeine in the morning, adrenaline in the afternoon, and all the while I’m hacking out code and writing manuscripts, swearing under breath and crumpling paper by the ream. There’s a social event in this routine maybe once a week. The funny thing is, I’m thrilled with it. One more semester down and a sleepless 48 hours has me convinced I can take over the world this summer if I put my mind to it.

And now warm weather’s come to Boston and my daydreams are all bandanas and porch time and glass bottles in the post-12-ounce range. I’ll be on the ocean soon too, back to island hopping and causing trouble at the other half’s lavish beach houses. There’s debauchery off the mainland this time of year. It all go’s out to sea.

By the way, I’ve received a parcel from my dysfunctional Alma mater, and it seems that the latest fantastical blunder in the long line of enrollment errors, misplaced funds, lost paperwork, and ignored service requests is a single check, for $1K even, made out to me and mailed with no forms, letters, or explanations. Alright Wayne State, let’s say we call it even.

I Have Created

2008-04-17T00:05:00.009-04:00

So I tend to drop of the face of the earth from time to time. I’m no good at keeping in touch. Well, I figure that'll probably never change, but know that if I've tried your patience, I've never wasted it.

This semester I poured myself into this thing. There was a month where I worked more hours than I've ever done before. More, I did it with an efficiency I've never approached before. I went longer without a drink than I probably have in 6 years. And I made this, and its different than every other thing I've done because its mine. I dug it out of a hundred papers. I spoke it to myself while pacing hallways. I woke up with bits of it scrawled on whiteboards. I wrestled abstractions onto paper. Solutions materialized in my head as if they’d been there all my life. Some nights I laid awake naming ideas I somehow knew made sense but had no clue what they were. I put more into this than anything before it, left no excuse that I could’ve done better, and handed it to a man whose intellect frankly scares the hell out of me.

Its one of the two ways this semester has taught me how to make real sacrafices; how the hardest things you'll ever do in your life are also the most painfully simple. There will be no hard choices, just work to do. Straight ahead.

There are very few people anywhere who will understand that work. I suppose I put it here to make it a bit more tangible. Like I can actually see how I might finish this thing I started so many years and cups of coffee and pages and dead pens ago. Like I can almost justify waking up hundreds of miles away from the people I do any of this for.

And this weekend I took what was due. A five day inter-city bender with an amalgam of strangers and friends from a past life. Saw my brother, the closest thing to family anybody not my blood will ever get, and did late nights like it was '01. Had drinks with both of my sisters in the same place for the first non-X-mas event maybe ever. Realized that its very possible that the best friends I've made since I moved here are people I left.

And now its back to reality, slowly but surely squeezing back into that routine. I've got a second wind and an itch for the airport. Who knows what I'll be up to next?

Can't We All Just Make Sense?

2008-02-10T22:19:00.000-05:00

School is in and I’m on the thesis trail with a purpose. The story so far is this: A guy previously in my lab worked out a theory and a computer program for solving a previously unsolvable type of optimization problem. It works but it has a lot of short comings. That’s where I come in. I’m supposed to improve the method so it can be used on bigger, more complicated problems. Well, while I’m away in Germany some dude from an unnamed university releases what appears to be a landmark paper in exactly the type of problems I’m supposed to work on. It solves almost every issue with my labs previous method, and this paper makes a major point of demonstrating this new methods superiority over ours. So I spend a couple of weeks trying to understand what they did, and their theory is gorgeous. Things look pretty dire for our method. But then last week, about three weeks into this whole episode, my advisor and I finally find what we think is the Achilles heel of this new method: it doesn’t scale well. Vaguely what this means is that as the size of the problem you’re trying to solve gets bigger (more variables), every computer program will take longer to solve the problem. In this case, their method gets worse a lot faster than ours. We think. It will take me 2 months of grueling coding to find out whether that’s actually true.

Points here are these: First, the dude who came up with this new method must know that his method scales poorly, but he doesn’t mention it in his publication. He solves a series of relatively small problems, shows how much better his method is, and completely ignores the fact that he’d get smoked on any realistically sized problem. Second, he purposely obfuscates half the shit in his method. Like he’ll mention some crucial step in passing but not actually present the details, so that when I try to implement it, I have to spend weeks reinventing his method from what little clues he gives and snippets of a hundred other papers on marginally related topics. Basically, I think this guy is being a bit of bitch here. Healthy competition is probably responsible for a huge amount of development in science, but making grand claims and then withholding information is a punk move. I’m going to figure out what he did, it’s just a matter of whether or not I think he’s a complete asshole by the time I do. Meanwhile, the rest of the optimization community who hasn’t pined over this paper for three weeks basically thinks this whole subset of problems is solved. What’s the appropriate anamonopia for a scoff?

Yesterday I was at this party and I basically got called uncouth for wearing a white T and rocking a bottle of beer in my front jeans pocket. Fuck you. It’s hot and my hands are full. I’m sick of taking heat for exercising logic in my everyday life. And who talks shit on white T’s? Everyone knows they look good.

Meanwhile, Back in the Now...

2008-01-19T17:02:00.001-05:00

So I guess I need to bring this thing up to date. I’m going to skip the rest of the Europe bit. I covered the better portion of my noteworthy travels, save maybe Bad Durkheim and Oktoberfest; check the pictures.

Africa. Its only been a week and the whole thing seems as much a fantasy now as it did before I went. I tend to forget it happened, but some of pictures make me shudder. I made it to the top of Kilimanjaro, but it took everything I had in me. The summit was a slow hell. Barely on two feet, feebly mis-stepping on a treacherous crater rim, exhausted, blurred vision, hallucinations, frostbite, famine, lungs seized and burning, the complete spiritual revolution whereupon life, purpose and point become a single step, taken on the edge of consciousness, without recourse to logic, pity, or the pleas of the corporeal. These are the most uncomfortable eight hours of my short life.

The mountain and the countryside are gorgeous. The rainforest is lush and dense, the savannahs span endlessly, pocked with giant Baobab, the same for countless miles in every direction. There are creatures there I wasn’t sure actually existed; things not from this epoch. Things that have roamed there since before the first hominid rose from the dirt in that very same spot.

The city of Arusha was absolute chaos. The roads are mostly dirt, some hardly navigable by safari vehicles. Shops are pieced together from scrap wood and sheet metal. Bars crop up in the haphazardly roofed interstices of other buildings. The streets are absolutely bustling: cars hardly restricted to lane or street, bicycles and wheel barrows threading through traffic with abandon, throngs of people trekking to the marketplace, bananas on head. And always somebody looking to make an easy buck off the white people; they’ve got gambits Americas never seen the likes of.

There are pictures in unmanageable quantity. I’ll post some links soon.

And finally back to Boston, ready to do what I came here for a year and a half ago. I’m through the bullshit. I took my classes, passed my qualifiers, did far flung internships, rounded out a Masters degree. Now its thesis time. My brainchild. My masterpiece. It’s not that there are no more hoops to jump through, but everything I do now is directly applicable to the goal. My proposal is due by the end of the term. I’m reading math books that make my head spin. Its extremely taxing work, but it makes me giddy like I haven’t been since I was a freshman getting my first tastes of physics and calculus. Every idea I grasp seems somehow hugely relevant. I know this is about as nerdy as it gets, but I fucking love pure mathematics. It is beautiful and terrible, it is infinitely intricate, and it will swallow you if you’re not careful. It’s better than drugs.

And by whatever fall of the dice, I’m good at it, and this thesis will be epic.

Every Great City has a River

2007-11-04T20:05:00.000-05:00

OCTOBER 17, 2007

5:45

I slept fitfully at best on the second half of the train ride. I was crammed in a 6 person enclosed cabin with five other filthy travelers’ half asleep in all variety of imaginative positions. The air was extremely hot and thick with feet smell. I got charged two days on my Eurail pass for traveling overnight, which is clearly identified as bullshit in the terms and conditions I had with me, printed in all proper and waterproof English legal tone, and useless to stop the massive French conductor from matter-of-factly squeezing the hole-punch.

I got into the Paris East train station at 6:45 and realized that my guidebook doesn’t list hostels. The cheapest hotel in the book was 80 euros, which is roughly four nights at any hostel I’ve ever been to, but I decided to head that way for lack of a better option. I tried to sit and negotiate maps in the train station, but the sound that France’s train stations use to signify a loudspeaker announcement is this like super reverby and echoed few notes that sounds like some clip from the theme song to Unsloved Mysteries, and this, combined with the nebulous mix of pigeons and long skirted gypsies that sort of just drift around in your periphery as you sit, and break around walkers like wisps of smoke only to reform behind them (more on gypsies later), all of this, was bit unnerving for me in the chill predawn of 6:45 Paris, so I just headed to the nearest subway line instead.

I gather that the word ‘hostel’ is not a French-English cognate, though hotel is, because no one seemed to have any idea what in the hell I was talking about at as I combed the city for every knowledgeable looking hotel receptionist I could find. After about the fourth hotel, throwing out an absolutely ridiculous variety of English words to mean ‘hostel’ – and I am operating entirely in parle- vouz Anglais? mode here – I was given a poorly drawn map to a nearby cultural center, with brief verbal directions in an accent so thick that I had to repeat my plea for English at least three times, though it was already being spoken. Honestly, have a French person tell you to take Boulevard St. Michelle and tell me that sounds like English.

I roamed around Paris for another hour and a half or so trying to interpret this map. Eventually I stopped at a café and ordered a coffee, a croissant, and a baguette. The coffee here is unbelievable; dark and thick and strong enough to leave a film in your mouth.

Refreshed, I tried to cross-reference the map with some others in my guide book. In doing so, I discovered an alternate interpretation of the hurried drawing and perused that direction. It quickly became clear that this was the intended direction, but there was in fact no cultural center where my friend had assured me there would be. Further, it came to me in force then that I have no idea what exactly a cultural center is or what it might be able to do for me. I gave up, finally, and set out to find an internet café to solve this the new-fashioned way.

On my way to a café, either by sheer luck or the basic laws of statistics coupled with my now heinously long meandering, I happened upon a hostel.

By some odd rules that neither French nor English allowed the receptionist and I to see eye-to-eye on, I was not allowed to stay at that hostel, but, at long last, she provided me with a list of other neighborhood hostels. I went to the only one that seemed anything like hostels I’ve been in. They had one bed open. So at 11:00 am, 5 hours after arriving in Paris East, I finally secured a bed.

The logistics of this bed, however, where absolutely soul crushing to me. I was going on 3 hours of sleep composed from a smattering of sub half-hour intervals in a sweat-box, and I already had several miles of walking under my belt. So there at the hostel, so relieved to finally have a place to sleep and more tired than I can really ever remember being, I was informed that my bed would be available at 4:00 pm.

The truth, in just about every other city I’ve been in, I would have found a nice tree and slept in its shade. Paris, however, is crawling with pick-pocket gypsies. Their little sneaky goddamn gypsy kids swarming, causing diversions, groping. One of these little whores actually went for my back left pocket in lobby of the hostel while I was checking in. She almost got a worthless map of Paris, but I caught the bitch and she played like it was just a clumsy bump as she passed. Wallets go in the back right you stupid gypsy cunt.

I passed the time at a café down the street, drinking as much of that delectable coffee as I could afford. Reading, nodding off, always watching for the fucking gypsies. At about 2:00 pm I got a second wind and went for a little stroll.

8:00 pm Saturday

So I walked toward the river and in not too much time I encountered Norte Dame. I’m quite sure there’s not a building in North America like it: spires, buttresses, horrible gargoyles covering every inch. And these rabid greyhound looking things leaping periodically from the walls. Its a shame that all of the best art is born of fanaticism. It seems people are always the most fervent about the things they’re wrong about.

Continuing down the river, I came upon Musee Louvre. This is another incredible piece of architecture. The outside of the Louvre alone is enough to spend an afternoon gawking at. It’s enormous, encompassing an inner square and front courtyard both big enough to house most modern buildings. It is entirely of stone, sculpted with an intricacy that speaks of countless thousands of skilled man-hours, and it has arches you could drive a semi through (so long as it was extremely bulletproof).

In front of the Louvre, a garden spans for a kilometer at least. Beautiful flowers, precisely trimmed hedges, and priceless sculptures throughout. At the far end of this garden I was forced back by ominous rain clouds. I began back along the river, mistook some nameless tower for part of Notre Dame (only in Paris), and turned ‘toward’ the hostel. When the rain started I went into a café for dinner.

The cafes are omnipresent here; all reasonably priced, all delicious. I had a salad with avocados, smoked salmon, and a caesar-esque dressing that mad my eyes water. When the rain let up I went for it, realizing shortly that I was still very far from my hostel. I assumed I could improvise some route back to my street, which, if you’ve ever seen Paris, was plainly ridiculous. An hour of hopeless, disorienting circles andI stumbled through the door five blocks shy of soaked.

so close...

At last I was allowed to my bed (though I had to rent sheets) and I slept until 7:00 am this morning.

I ate a quick breakfast and made it to Musee Louvre by opening time. Were every piece of art removed, the interior of the Louvre would be every bit as spectacular as the exterior. With the art (and I am certainly no connoisseur of visual art), it is simply unbelievable. I won’t try to comment much on what I saw, because my vocabulary in the arts is about as extensive as my vocabulary in French, but I have to wonder if anyone alive today could paint with such intricacy, such accuracy of poise, such minutia in the wrinkling of a robe or the life in the eyes, and I think not.

I stopped back by the hostel to sort out some earlier dicking around that caused me to clear out of my room (sheets and all) and threw my second nights stay into limbo, before moving on to the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. The arc is a massive stone structure depicting gods and heroes and should be awe-inspiring but almost becomes the norm in this city. The tower is almost inconceivably large, but a bit dull otherwise. In fact, being the foundation of steel design, it may well be responsible for the divorce of architecture and art, however necessary that may have been to reach the sky.

Fucking gypsy bitches

There’s an elevator in the Eiffel tower that, for 12 euros, will fling you up what must be a thousand feet to the tip of the structure. The line was agonizing and riddled with gypsies [See footnotes 1 and 2], but the view was well worth it. Only there did I realize how huge this city actually is. I must have seen a mere hundredth of this spanning metropolis. It seems you could fit Manhattan into it about 20 times.

I’ve seen views from those heights before; I’ve probably been on 30 airplanes. It’s not until you realize that you’re actually supported from the below, on some giant stepstool, that it really becomes amazing. You can’t see the struts from the platform atop the tower, and though no technology exists to levitate such a platform at great heights, it really seems like the more feasible explanation. You really have to think about all that steel beneath your feet, give a little jump maybe, feel it. In a way it’s a very primitive idea, to reach the sky simply by building up from the ground.

Next time I decide to go onto something so extraordinary, I intend to bring an egg so I can eat it and then do a push-up. Just for the quote. Just so that when they finally decide to blow it up, I’ll be ok with it.

11:00 pm Sunday

The Paris hostel was even lamer than the first hostel I stayed at in Berlin. There was no common area of any sort, so it was impossible to gather a crew. So I spent my last night in Paris sitting in cafés drinking espresso and wandering the streets. It was actually quite a nice wind down from the week’s travels. In the morning I went to a big bookstore over by the Louvre to pick up a little gift, then went and sat by the river for a few. I caught a two o’clock train back to Frankfurt, picked up my bags, and made it to Ludwigshafen by about 9:00 pm. And then the fun began.

[1] I’ve learned more and more about the gypsies as I’ve traveled through Europe and none of its good. They’re all over the major cities, mostly at train stations and major tourist attractions. They are beggars, especially to the English speaking, but the begging is almost always a front for some more devious scheme. Often they will ask you to write something in English for them, and while you do so, another one makes off with you bag or wallet or whatever. They always have sob stories that absolutely don’t jive with the sheer number of them, like they’re sisters and their father can’t work because of some debilitating injury etc., etc. They all have the same style of ornate long gypsy skirt that looks a bit too nice for a bunch of homeless girls to be running around wearing. There are no men.

Everything about them speaks of some frighteningly organized and widespread cult. There must be thousands of them around Europe, spanning tens of countries. Yet they all have the same bullshit stories and scams, the same too-nice clothes. I have no idea what they’re actually up to, but I have to imagine that begging is merely one leg of a complex and multifaceted business plan.

It’s also not understood where these bitches go to sleep. It seems they must just recede into walls like cockroaches in sudden light. They seem to me, in the way that they mill around the crowds in feigned aimlessness, to mingle so seamlessly with the pigeons that my personal opinion is that they bear something like the same relationship to the filthy birds as vampires do to bats.

[2] In all of this anti-gypsy ranting, I mean to refer only to this particular gypsy bitch-cult and to express my disgust with their practices. I mean to imply NO OFFENSE whatsoever to the members or associated community of Gogol Bordello, should any of them happen to read this account.

Berlin

2007-10-22T22:09:00.000-04:00

OCTOBER 13, 2007

3:00 pm

Train to Berlin. The plan was entirely successful, save the shower. Apparently KLM airlines feels that a night without obscure feminine products is more inconvenient than one without shampoo. My bags were at the airport this morning, so I swapped out my laptop for clothes and checked my bags into airport storage. I grabbed a chicken wrap at the airport McDonald’s, which seemed like it might actually be healthy, but they had drowned it in ranch dressing. It tasted like America. I went to the airport train station (Flughafen Bahnhof) and found a train to Berlin 1 hour hence.

This train is not quite as English friendly as I found Frankfurt, but my German is coming along alright. I speak a mix to everyone; German where I can, English everywhere else. I’ve almost stopped staring slack-jawed and horrified when people approach me in German.

12:30 pm

Arriving in Berlin I spent some time deciphering the train system and eventually got on a few trains which I didn’t pay for and may or may not be covered by my railpass. The train system here seems to operate on some sort of honor system whereby you buy tickets that are not required to board and are, from what I’ve seen, never checked. The first hostel I tried was full, but the receptionist made some phone calls for me and found me a bed about 20 minutes away. I checked in for two nights and instantly took a shower.

Afterwards I went for a bit of a walk through a pretty bustling but run down area of Berlin that I believe was part of ‘North Mitte.’ There were some cool buildings, etc., and I also saw more hookers than I’ve ever seen in my life (probably ~10), and unlike those I’ve seen in Highland Park, these ones were actually dressed well, had all of there teeth, and were generally quite attractive, however disease ridden.

I went to a restaurant for sausages, carried out the transaction entirely in German, and wound up with some dish that was definitely not sausages. It was actually some deep fried slab of pork which was pretty good anyway. I’ve found that in Germany you will be allowed to sit at a restaurant indefinitely; Even if you haven’t ordered anything for the past hour. You have to actually ask for the bill every time, or they just let you sit. I ended up talking to these girls from Tel Aviv while I was pointlessly waiting for my check. They asked me why I was only in Berlin for three days and when I told them I had to work on Monday they seemed baffled by the idea. Americans suck at vacation.

Back at the hostel I tried to make friends, but the only English speaking group in the place was deeply engaged in some card game so I went to my room to read for a bit and try again later. I woke up half an hour ago and missed breakfast. Hopefully the long sleep has cured the jet lag that I’ve so far been treating with binge drinking.

1:00 am

Walked my ass off today. I went down ‘Under den Linden,’ the main historical strret in Berlin. The name means ‘Under the Lime trees,’ referring of course to the trees that line the street. The trees were all felled during Hitler’s reign to make his parades more visible, but have since been re-grown. The street has one of the only remaining gates of the original city walls (tors). The rest were leveled by bombings during WWII. On top of the gate is a statue called the Quadriga, which was stolen by Napoleon and kept briefly in Paris, but has since been restored. Beyond the gate is the Teirgarden, a park comparable in size to Central Park in NY. I walked back toward the hostel by a different route and took a wrong turn which sent me about two miles in the wrong direction, but also lead me to the remains of the Berlin Wall.

The Quadriga on Bradenburger Tor

Preserve that history, Berlin

Berlin Wall. Basically a glorified police baracade, cement and re-bar, totally climable without the gun turrets.

This hostel is actually kind of lame. It’s a nice place, but everyone is very low key and Berlin is enough of a tourist destination that the people here are largely non-English speaking. So again, I failed to find camaraderie, leaving me one for three. Tomorrow I will try to find a hostel that’s a bit more lively.

10:30 pm

I went to an archeology museum that was pretty amazing. It has this giant reconstruction of some excavated Greek temple with epic battle scenes carved into every surface. Extremely intense. It also had a large portion of the Ishtar gate. All of this stuff is B.C. or early hundreds A.C. After that I went to the Berlin Natural History Museum, which is about the lamest museum I’ve ever been to in my life.

Serpents, minotaurs, and genitals

Man-boy love

Fisticuffs

Ishtar Gate

Me and The Man himself at the Natural History Museum

Traditional German fare

The hostel switch was a roaring success. I met four people as soon as I walked in the door and hung out with them all night. We went on a guided pub crawl that gathers people from all of the local hostels. One guy was from Belgium and the other three were aerospace engineering chicks from U of M. I spent the early part of the pub crawl trying to prevent this drunken band of Argentineans from harassing one of the U of M girls, and though I was a real dick to him, one of them took some odd liking to me and we talked ineffectually over shots and a massive language barrier for the rest of the time. Somewhere between bars, on a poorly lit street corner, our tour guides gave us all free pulls from liquor bottles they produced from a backpack, Absinth included.

Some crazy Argentineans and Myself

U of M chick and Argentinean dude: A situation soon to be out of hand.

Complete ignorance of acceptable conduct can be a good thing.

Yes, resignedly, border line embarassed and degraded, and with infinite sarcasm, I present that cliche, that icon of frat boy party favors, that without which no European misadventure would be quite complete, two girls kissing.

Say ahhhhh...

Shitty club I was barely awake for

Time to make my exit

I awoke late this morning and barely made checkout. Got breakfast at the hostel and rode the subway to Berlin Hauptbahnhof to see if I could get to Paris. I booked an overnight train that takes about twelve hours and gets into Paris at 6:00 am tomorrow. Booking the train back to Frankfurt (which I had to do now because I have it on good authority that the French like to tell Americans that trains are full when they’re not) was considerably more complicated. Finally, three bad reservations and 25 euros later, I got a train at a time I can deal with. I spent five hours wandering around the station. The surrounding is right on the Rhine River and is actually pretty nice.

I’m about six hours into this train ride now; starving, filthy, and not even a little bit tired.

The Elephants of Frankfurt

2007-10-01T04:02:00.000-04:00

AUGUST 11, 2007

2:00 am Eastern, 8:00 am here
Just landed in the Nether-regions, about to make a dash for our connection…

12:30 am Germany
Shits a bit fucked up at the moment. My baggage (Gepäck) didn’t make the transfer in Amsterdam. I’m waiting for the next flight to arrive at 3:00 pm, which may or may not contain my bags. I’m shit tired. I didn’t print directions to my hostel.

Germany has Particularly seductive food ads

Yeah girl, drink that juice

Pork chop sandwiches!

4:30 pm
Waited in the airport until the next plane from Amsterdam arrived. 5 hours, no luggage. On the subway I asked a women how to get to the stop where the hostel is: “Oh, you don’t want to stop there, that’s the read light district.” Fucking great.

The biggest strip club I’ve ever seen in my life is downstairs, but it looks like a nice enough neighborhood. I’m off to check out the room, find some food, and get a goddamn phone card. I have to keep checking in with the airport until my luggage arrives. I have zero clothes in my backpack; packed completely for airplane entertainment. Shit is getting interesting, having to deal with all this. I really am a small and helpless child here.

There will be no doing anything of any sort in this zone. What do you think this is, America?

9:00 pm
Brat and a beer a few doors down. Just saw a guy get beat down in the street for wearing the wrong soccer jersey. Difficult to explain this place really, but its rowdy if nothing else. There were also a few bachelorette parties that came down the street while I was eating. Apparently the way they do it here is about ten girls get together, put on costumes (tight black with devil horns for example), get shitfaced, and then walk up and down the street flirting with strangers and collecting money by selling miniature shots an contraceptives of various sorts. There were three wasted marines on leave sitting next to me who must have given them a months salary each.

Aussies

There's a drum down there somewhere

9:00 am
To add to my disorientation and complete inability to operate here, I am nursing a wild hangover. Last night actually followed my stupid assumption that I would simply happen upon friends and storm the town. Although there was altogether very little storming the town: Back and forth to a liquor store and club across the street. Drinking in stairwells, guitars and drums, goodness. I bought a couple of 7.5% cans with an elephant on them, which is mildly ironic because I believe they caused me to forget large segments of the night. Some drink along the way claimed my ability to properly subtract 6 hrs from the time displayed on my phone (in fact, I should have been adding 6 hrs), which sent me rushing to check out at a pace set delicately between losing 20 euros and vomiting on the carpet. It turns out I was actually 2 hrs early and in time for breakfast. I might even have time for a shower if I have appropriate supplies in the care package the airport gave me.

Agenda: shower, checkout, call airport, get to Berlin, find bed.

Uhhh...

The Leap

2007-09-13T08:35:00.000-04:00

August 10, 2007

Ready

Boston

Here, on an oversized bullet flying 37,000 ft. above the Atlantic Ocean, I find my first moment of solace in a week. A minute to think about Detroit, about what the fuck I’m flying into.

Detroit was then a glorious blur and it remains so now. A bit of the past; old friends, hard laughs, the rare mookfish sighting, that city I can’t forget. But also something fantastic and new; a bit more experience behind the yells and throws, a little schnapps into it, and a shared smile with beautiful bright eyed little thing not quite yet biped. I’ve got a feeling I’ll spend a week every year of my life in search of those friends and little liberation, wherever you all might be.

Last week was a whirlwind of responsibilities, juggled precariously over some yawning chasm ensuring that any drop would be completely irrecoverable. I dropped several, and though I made it on the plane, I only have accommodations for one night in the next ten days. I was quite anxious earlier, but I’ve eased into some inexplicable calm, sure that I can point and grunt my way into a bed at least a few of those nights. I’ll also be without phone or computer for ten days, which is horrifying in America let alone wherever I might be. One of the few items I did manage to arrange for before I left is an unlimited Germany/France rail pass, so there may be some nights spent on the train anyway.

This plane is huge. A completely improbable take-off by my intuition, but here we are. The clouds are amazing below me; now endless vistas, now wispy archipelagos. And though my mind knows better, every bit of my body tells me that if I jumped now I’d descend to that billowing surface and not an inch further.

To sleep now. I’m traveling 6 hrs back in time.

Awww shit Europe

Bernie

2007-07-22T22:13:00.000-04:00

Ocean bound again this weekend; another boat, another isolated locale, another beautiful moment where water is all you can see. Nantucket this time, where the population blooms from ten to one-hundred thousand as the east coasts richest flock to there summer beach houses. We spent a day on the beach battling waves from an off-shore storm; take the hit, curl up fetal, then try to bite down the all too rational bit of panic as you're whirled about and dashed against the rocky floor. If you stay under long enough, you'll end up back on the sand. At night we somehow secured an invite to the lavish 51st birthday party of a retired stock trader. We drank whiskey on the rocks, mingled with old men visibly concerned we might steal there wives, and old wives hoping they were right. I showed the DJ how to do his job and gave everybody a party like they haven't seen in decades. Given my condition, I can't even imagine how they felt this morning.

In other news, I hear that Farmer Jack went out of business. Farmer J was the only major grocery store willing show its face in Detroit and created a whole development of worthwhile real estate in the city. Every shop within a mile of the Jefferson Farmer Jack probably has a contingency in their contract requiring the presence of a major supermarket on the strip. So now one of the only centers of active growth in the downtown area has potentially reached a premature apex, and can be expected to begin its descent any day now. For the thousands of citizens that shopped there, just be glad the bus system is convenient, reliable and comprehensive.

"My group used to have a reputation for being heavy drinkers. Then I hired all these pussies."

2007-06-28T23:39:00.000-04:00

Four pints and a glass of whisky with your advisor does wonders for the group dynamic. I asked questions I never should’ve asked, got responses I never should’ve gotten, and generally got a good flavor of guy I admire tremendously, masked with sarcasm and insults as it was. He cracked jokes about Americans, told me I was a clueless mathematician, and then shook my hand for agreeing to drink anything he bought. Somewhere in the fray I got him to agree to give me eight weeks vacation if I publish a paper that gets cited over 130 times. When my first paper goes platinum, you can expect to see a whole lot of Joe Scott around town.

I suppose I hate to admit that I give so much credit to a guy just for going out to the bar, but that’s my outlook on academics. He can spit and drink with the best of ‘em because no one in the world can fuck with what he does from nine to five. That’s the goal, and that’s why knowing that he agrees with anything I believe in, not least of which my rebellion, is a huge boost.

Interesting Weekend

2007-06-25T22:44:00.001-04:00

32 hours in NYC. Got hooked up with a sweet pad in Brooklyn, took the worlds cheapest cruise around Manhattan (w/ dinner and free wine), and saw a Detroit band in one of the coolest bars on the east coast. Drank with the band until 3:00, had a completely random run in with an old friend on a three hour subway misadventure and made it back to Chinatown for the 6:30 bus.

Four hour nap, a breath of Boston and onto the 2:00 ferry to the Cape. 90 minute nap.

24 hours in Provincetown, MA. Two whale watches beyond belief; no sight of land and little more than an arms length from a beast 50 feet long and weighing several thousand pounds. 10 of the 24 hours spent out at sea, fixed at the prow with 40 mph ocean wind in my face.

I’m convinced once again that I’ll need to carve out time for a dream I’ve been having for years. I’m buying a boat; an ocean-faring boat. Not soon, but sometime. And I’ll need a crew (you know who you are). Expect a letter from me sometime in the next ten years. It’s going to say that you need several months off of work. I’m not sure where we’re going, but my boat will have enough rum for the long haul. It’ll have bunks and a library and we’ll do Kung Fu on the deck. We’ll be out for weeks getting tossed about by the most un-fuck-with-able force on the planet. Go for a swim in water that extends for miles beneath your feet. Count on it.

Still Looking

2007-03-27T23:48:00.000-04:00

Well fuck, I guess I’ll be surprised if anyone still checks this blog, but maybe that’s the point. I guess I’m realizing that despite early successes, I haven’t really found the people that I was hoping for here. I don’t notice it in the rush of things. I stay in the office late and come home in time to eat and crash. But now I’m on my spring break and the open time hasn’t quite filled out how I expected.

There’s a good night here and there, but always punctuated by two more spent pacing my apartment like a caged animal. I start to ponder if it’s worth a few hundred bucks and a parole violation to catch a quick flight home for a couple of nights. Most of the people I hang around with here aren’t much for night life, and the ones that are need some big production to make it worth their while. What the fuck ever happened to good company and few drinks?

Yeah, I’ve got good friends here. One crowd in particular that’s even good for sitting around the house with a case every now and then. But even with the right setting the content tends to be a bit off; all fantasy sports and bar sluts. I used to feel good about a night of fucking off, like I’d learned something about politics or art or people, some nugget of wisdom. I used to scoff at my gen-ed classes because I knew I could get a better primer over a bowl and a jug of wine just by raising the question. I’m not sure I’ve had a single non-academic conversation of true value since I’ve been here, the kind where I regard someone through half closed eyes and think ‘Thanks man, I had no idea.’

Fuck. It’s not all bad. My nine-to-five is everything I could possible hope for. I’m in an absolute hub of knowledge and I haven’t even come close coming down from that. But I’m figuring out that the flare was in the contrast all along, the big ‘fuck you’ from the unshaven fuck-up in the back row that just aced your test with hangover. That’s been my whole obsession with academics from the start. Its merit, not shirts and ties and obedience and haircuts your grandfather would approve of. Well it’s the same way here, I’m just not taking nearly enough advantage of it anymore.

I’m getting worried that I’m letting this work take so much of my life that when I decide to stop do something else for a while there won’t be anything there. I’m going months at a time now without ever talking to anybody back home. The fact of the matter is, most of the time I have nothing important to say, as much as I’d give to be sitting around your living room arguing about some completely inconsequential shit we’d find amusing.

On the bright side, I’m at the tail end of the major ‘paying you dues’ section of my PhD; shit will start looking up soon enough.

Back Burner #1

2007-01-01T15:03:00.000-05:00

So there’s an urge to write, sometimes; a particular way I begin to think and shape words. And yet I rarely do. Mostly, I would claim, as a matter of preoccupation. But as the urge has persisted for many years now, through periods of sleepless toil as well as those of yawning leisure, I begin to realize that the struggle is more fundamental. There seems a coupling necessary, of words and the message, who like a man that disguises himself as another, seem always to appear only after the other has left, and always to leave before the other returns. At times, I have a thing to say, yet can only do so flatly, or with such vigor that my listeners turn a deaf ear more due to its extent than its premise. Other times I have words, or pre-words; some rhythm or cadence or flow that begins before words, waiting to be materialized. So near words even, that I can almost feel them shaped on my tongue, taste the way one syllable follows the last, plan the emphasis, pause, and tone. And yet with the delivery, even the mood set and ready, there seems nothing to say. It is like thought in that detached state we often occupy, whereupon we find such gems of philosophy that we can hardly contain our wonder, yet see no urge or purpose in recording them, and upon our return to material concerns, discover that we no longer recall answer nor question. It is this duality, I think, by which most writers fail, and with which the remainder struggle. Favoring words are the poets, who in dispensable blurbs will regurgitate some agglomeration of words which flow beautifully, even purposefully from one to the next with all power of mood and sentiment, and yet convey nothing, or something very near nothing, save the potency of words alone. Those who favor content can be found primarily in journals, where the simplest of words seems nearly to buckle under the weight of its cargo, and of the artifices of literature, only brevity is had. Somewhere in the interim, vast and uncharted, lies every form of novelist, who must confine to rigid frames those things, fluid and formless, that are seen best from the corner of the eye and vanish upon inspection. This is a task, I have often thought, that should be done in two pieces, separated in time and demeanor, in much the same way as filmmakers capture reel upon reel of footage, following this urge or that, only to eventually resign themselves to the infinitely tedious and methodic task of arranging these bits, frozen in all of their reverie, side by side in orderly progression with beginning and end. In doing so, the novelist wrestles not one but two forms of art, and does more still for the fact that these two forms in particular seem to be at eternal odds with one and other. It is in this region, at the midplane between the purest expression and the most deserving theses, that literature stands alone and uncontested among the arts.

The Lows

2006-11-10T01:39:00.000-05:00

1 a.m. Thursday. Friday is an Institute holiday. I stopped working an hour ago, tried to arrange a last minute trip to the bar to wind down, failed, and decided I’d write a bit. My apartment has no means of entertainment and on the rare equations when I require it, this computer is my only refuge. My subconscious is firing some noise about a covariance matrix and a posterior density function that my computer has been telling me is not a number. Hopefully it will stop soon, or I’ll lie in bed thinking and fall into restless half sleep working on it all night. Frighteningly, I might make progress. To add to my current discomfort, I have two exams looming in my near future and I can literally feel my score dropping the longer this goddamn homework takes me. The first is Wednesday… I need to start studying by Sunday morning at the latest, and that’s going to be a tough deadline to meet. I’ll probably sleep very little between now and next Friday. I’ll stumble into my exams, bags under my eyes, caffeine shake, more prepared than I’ve ever had to be, and fight tooth and nail to beat the average. Meanwhile, I have to select the advisor that I will work for for the next 5 years of my life. And by select, I mean the exact opposite. Beg might be a better word. Try and convince someone that I’m a great fit for their group even though I’ve had no time to read their work or meet with their students. Convince them that they need to deny a handful of my classmates, who may or may not have a great deal more experience than me in their particular area. It’s going to be a rough haul till Thanksgiving.

On the bright side, FC Landau made the playoffs (our IM soccer team). We were undefeated in the regular season and last week we tied AP United in a glorious stand to seal the playoff spot. Rumor has it AP is a long standing playoff shoe-in at MIT. No more.

I feel like I’m at the point where it’s difficult for me to write about how I’m doing without introducing several characters. I’m not sure what the best way to do this is. Perhaps Dossiers.

Anyway, I’m tired now, so I’ll leave this uneventful and incoherent post as is and promise to fire somebody in Quality Control before the next.

Welcome to Jamrock

2006-10-08T23:18:00.000-04:00

MIT. At once exactly like and utterly different from the generic brand. It is an enigma, likened from the outside with images of hermit brilliance; that preoccupied demographic completely immiscible with the lay-populace, confined and working toward some ill-defined yet bracing good. Cut-throat to dream laureates and the fashionable academic alike. The passerby feels palpable awe at its gates, chased by the thought that wide eyes might belie the curious just inside its corridors. And yet a noble institute, decked in the history of progress, tracing the pinnacle of modern man…

There exists a curiosity, I expect, that I have quenched at long last and yet neglected to relieve in others. It took some time to navigate such a place of legend with any semblance of regularity or belonging; to call it home. But I have seen it through the heavy lidded eyes of routine, the autopilot that makes a thing real simply by the lack of will to overlay fantasies, or give due reverence. And finally, I believe myself in a position to comment on the Institute.

It is, as I said, an academic institute and merely that. With great disappointment I must admit that even MIT suffers from the common pathology of the university, though normally to a lesser extent. There are irritating bits of bureaucracy, dickhead classmates, assignments of busy work, and bad professors. I say this not to complain or belittle an incredible place; my myriad praises are to come. But it’s easy to form outlandish expectations here. In one fit of frustration I condemned the whole institute after an encounter with an uncooperative copy machine. It appears that 10,000 world class engineers and the cash flow of flourishing nation-state can’t prevent shit from breaking. Pity.

Even so, the institute is about as user friendly as could be expected. There’s an honest and wholly unfamiliar tendency here to minimize the bullshit tasks of the student. The idea is to allow students to focus on what they came here to learn, and it’s done well. On the other hand, the work load is unbelievable. Any nightmare estimate I had about how much work this semester would be was a lower bound at best. I work from 9am to 10 or 11pm six days a week at least. Strangely, I’ve been very accepting of the lifestyle so far. All of the time is spent doing homework sets for my core classes. There are 3 homeworks per week, normally 3 problems each. If you can finish two problems in a day, you’re making good time. The expectations in the problems are pretty ridiculous. They’re never straightforward. For those familiar with engineering problems, our assignments are normally like those examples that require some random mathematical trick that makes you wonder how anyone ever dreamed up such an approach. I’m beginning to learn how to dream like that.

Most of my classmates are truly brilliant. I wouldn’t say that MIT competition is a myth, but certainly a misconception. The work is incredibly cooperative. In fact, no one could solve these problems in time by themselves. But legitimate arguments arise in group solutions. Most of them involve me, and I’m wrong more than I’m right. But the points are always relevant and I’m generally considered to ask good questions. In the same vain, I’ve developed a reputation as a threat to certain professors in lecture.

Three of my professors are mediocre, one is excellent with caveats, and the last is the epitome of clarity. He wrote the text we use, which is the best I’ve ever read, and he teaches from it, as one classmate noted, with the conviction one might expect from a high priest reciting the Word. And as far as completeness, I believe that the average man commits more oversights while mowing the lawn. It is in his lecture, more than any other aspect of the Institute, that I feel the benefits of my prestigious environment.

The net result of all of this is that I learn at a rate I never thought possible. We learn those underlying principles that are so universally applicable that its often difficult to distinguish one class from the next. We learn that knowing nothing about something in the morning doesn’t prevent you from knowing a great deal about it that night, and on a typical Friday I enjoy a genuine chuckle about all the shit I thought I knew on Monday. Some days I think I might vomit if I have one more abstract thought. But when I really consider my choice, I can’t think of a single worthwhile thing I’d be doing if I wasn’t doing this.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts

2006-09-02T19:59:00.000-04:00

After a week of company, I'm finally alone here. It's strange how you can commit, plan for something, prepare for months, and still have no concept of how taxing it will actually be. Nonetheless, I'm now mostly settled and I'm very pleased with my surroundings.

My roommate is far better than expected. His name is Eric; he's an urban planning student from San Francisco. Consequently, he seems very interested in Detroit lore, which is apparently much crazier than we ever had the perspective to realize. He arrived with no television and, after a few days of tiptoeing around the issue, stated the he would much prefer to keep it that way. He was born in Columbia and happens to make excellent tacos.

The apartment is huge and difficult to furnish. Eric and I used my parent’s car to capitalize on some Craig's list finds, one of which took us on a dizzying two hour excursion through Boston’s north end and no less than three neighboring suburbs. I was also unsuspectingly forced to merge into the big-dig from the right; an experience which I think made us closer friends.

Boston is incredibly active. I've been through roughly 25 miles of it on foot in the past week. The downtown area is apparently small, say people from real cities. Go figure. The beer here is excellent and I have yet to find a bad meal. At least two Sam Adam's brews are on tap everywhere I've been. At the moment, Boston Lager and Summer Ale, which is heavenly. Harpoon brewery is also very close, so I'm drinking quite a bit of UFO.

Cambridge is arguably more happening than Boston. I live right off of Massachusetts Ave., which connects MIT to Harvard via a series of bars. There's an Irish pub called The Asgaurd, which has yet to cease being humorous. There's also a place right across the street where I can get giant slices of pizza for two buck until 1 or 2 am every night. Unfortunately, nothing stays open 24 hours around here. Cambridge law forces all but a select few bars to close at 1 am, and the subway stops at 12:30. There's a strip club for cross-dressing men right next door, which I will go to as soon as I find the right dress...

MIT is sweet. The keynote speaker at my welcome address was a co-founder of the Human Genome Project. He was an absolute badass. I get free internet and the Institute subsidizes just about everything I've tried to purchase since I got here. I get 15% off my monthly phone bills and I haven't paid for a meal in the last week. My classmates are way cool. I went to the campus bar with them the other night. Last night 20 of us bought a 30 pack and an array of liquors and went to an apartment downstairs from me. It was 6 o'clock. Roughly six hours later I was forcibly removed from a lounge in a neighboring dorm where I had been innocently napping for an undisclosed period of time.

All things considered, I'm doing very well so far.

The Great State of Michigan

2006-09-02T19:51:00.000-04:00

A few selections from the dunes...

Thanks

2006-08-27T09:05:00.000-04:00

I spent my last night in Michigan sitting in my parent’s living room holding a volleyball and crying like I haven’t for many years. On that night, I got a more intensely sincere send-off than I ever expected, and I knew that a surprising number of people would honestly feel my absence. This won’t be drawn out or personalized, now or maybe ever, but I feel now that I made some serious oversights then. So engulfed in the affection being showered on me at the time, I became completely inept at showing what you all mean to me. Many did not get the goodbye’s they deserved. As part excuse but more a statement of my fortune, nothing said or done in a night could have addressed my feelings comprehensively. I was never with words what most of you are, but know that I love and miss all of you; you are my family.

JKS

Moving Out

2006-07-29T01:39:00.000-04:00

The house is half empty and the cast of characters is soon to follow. Sifting through the unbelievable wealth of relics here and reflecting on this final summer, I’m left with one conclusion; one that’s been building for a long time. Life does not stop and start at Your convenience. It doesn’t matter how much time or energy you devote to reminiscence, to reveling in a soon to be past. The present will not wait. Events will move forward, new plots will unfold, and you will find yourself instantly removed from the very thing that you hoped to preserve. Anything you hope to accomplish in your life will either happen now or not all. And immediately, the unimaginable life without will be fuller than the one you left. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this whole transition is how soon I’ll forget why I thought this was all so pertinent.

2006-06-14T22:23:00.000-04:00

This book comes with the highest recommendation. I'll update my thoughts as I progress.

All of the Below

2006-06-12T00:51:00.000-04:00

Some days ago I took a mostly unremarkable test. So unremarkable that I can’t at the moment recall what subject it was on, yet one point has kept me thinking. Somewhere in the multiple-choice section of this test I was offered the possible answer

a. All of the below are correct

This is a new one by me. Aside from the initial shock, I’ve decided that my issue is that I haven’t yet read ‘the below,’ so how can I determine if any, let alone all, of them are correct? In any case, this must be causing an uproar in some conference room somewhere. We have conventions for these things. Namely,

d. All of the above are correct

I suppose that a works just as well as d. Nevertheless, I have to object because I feel that, if left unchecked, this will eventually lead to the inclusion of the awkward responses

b. The one above and two below are correct

And

c. The two above and one below are correct

Let’s run with this. We can imagine that if b and c become routine multiple choice answers, then, some day in the future, one might be posed with a question – the nature of which is unimportant – with the possible answer set:

a. All of the below are correct

b. The one above and two below are correct

c. The two above and one below are correct

d. All of the above are correct

This is an interesting question. Think about it: If a is correct, then b, c, and d must also be correct, creating a web of mutual correctitude that in turn supports a as the correct response. Naturally, the same argument can be posed beginning with any of the other three responses, so they are all equally correct. On the other hand, if a is false, then one of b, c, or d must be false. But since each of these answers include the clause that a is correct, they must all be false. Therefore, no answer is sufficient. Applying common test taking skills and the famed process of elimination, this latter can not be the case. Thus, a, b, c, and d must all be correct answers.

Perfect. This should bring those MEAP scores up…

To tkhoveringhead

2006-06-09T22:58:00.000-04:00

An honor and a privilege has drawn to a close. Two weeks of anxious attempts to sit and soak expectedly fell short of two years of growth and unexpectedly ended in a pile of friends, a bucket of water, and a very literal puff of smoke. No Davis’, personal balls, cure for diabetes, or regrets. And here I am, momentarily in your wake, to reflect with questionable adequacy on your parchment, with an art you showed me could do this justice.

You entered a group of friends that I thought lacked no stimulus and could not be improved. This notion was shattered almost instantaneously as our conversations bypassed formality, precursor, and context and went right for the throat. We had some disagreement then; I don’t remember its exact nature, but it was deep and encompassing and only through the concerted effort of weeks did we finally beat it back to one’s and zero’s. Our methodology was the same, we sought truth in logic and when contradictions arose on either side we played by the rules. These are among the best and most productive dialogues I have ever shared. I had never before picked a brain so quickly and thoroughly and, for what it’s worth, I have not since found another so worth picking.

I, in those times, was dealing with a scattered mess of ideas that could not find purchase. I had a love and passion for the sciences, technology, and their extensive applications. I had begun to understand the politics such application require, and some facets of humanities current failures. I had long since shaken god, but only had hints of what I now consider a sound atheist stance. And in the depths of my cognizance, I was checking the last doors and windows out of this ultimately pointless existence and finding them all locked in reason. But in our current state, these ideas are fanatical and hopelessly uncomfortable. So this turmoil brewed without outlet and without confirmation, leaving me to wonder what all else had found but I had missed. I checked and rechecked: all locked.

You were the first to pose those same grave ideas that I had been moving towards. Coming from a different starting point, but exercising objectivity and the same tools on which I had relied, you arrived on a nearly identical solution. For me, this was water into concrete. And moving from that solution, you agreed to walk deeper into those catacombs intent on finding the true purpose of this life, to pull back all facades and bare its ugly teeth once and for all. What we found was precisely nothing; that all we know is an infinitely complex manifestation of absolutely nothing.

In the following months you and I fought to reconcile this conclusion. This problem innately allows no truly correct solution, yet we quickly identified those that are concretely wrong: those that avoid the question entirely. And later, we had to agree that the true purpose is self-defined, consisting of a choice, a will, and discipline. Needless to say, the conversations I have held with you, the years spent in close quarters, have changed me irrevocably; A thousand pitfalls I am no longer even slightly eligible for. And all this we accomplished with the internet and a dry erase marker, passing a certain baton.

These are the underpinnings that define destinies. These are the fires that sent you west and will send me east soon enough. These are the reasons that you left with my full and proud support; we have said, for the moment, all that needed to be said. But during your time here you did much more than speak. You agreed to live. Between talks we drank, smashed, threw sandwiches down hallways, tried our best at poor decisions, and still woke up bright and early in the morning. Before you came, we were all full of ideas, but always fell just short on motivation. You tipped those scales and the results were unprecedented. Suddenly we were party planners, landscapers, decorators, bartenders and cooks. We enjoyed all those activities that are so much more for the effort they require. A three-story mansion under no one’s jurisdiction threatened to go underused, but now we can only say that we possibly went too far. On calmer nights, lectures and organized study groups proved just how productive leisure time can actually be when surrounded by the right kind of people.

But I won’t reminisce too much. Frankly, I’m glad you’re gone. The only person in memory to throw my work ethic into question, I need you to keep moving forward as much as you need to yourself. There’s a gift in your words. And I don’t speak for friendship or encouragement, but as a conscious human being looking for a guide and a way to grasp those all-important scraps of life that pass and vanish with the ticking of clocks. You alone lock in amber those things which the rest know only as a tingle of nerves, a rush of adrenaline, or the welling of tears. Moreover, I need our conversations to gush like they once did. We’ve been on too level a field for too long, subject to the same experiences. Go and fill your head with fresh and daring ideas, I’ll do the same, and we’ll meet again as doctors to hash things out anew.

I have no fear of loosing touch with you; for my part, we’re beyond that. You’ve talked a big talk, spoken many dreams to me, and believe that I will haunt you if you falter. I expect nothing less from you.

Good luck.

A Tribute to Humble Beginings

2006-05-08T14:50:00.000-04:00

Every existing entity is composed of flaws. Sentience absolutely requires the housing of contradictions. Without them, no personality can exist, no opinion, no singular being. Begin with objectivity, a completeness of knowledge and perspective, and insert flaw: blindness, sections of closed mindedness, narrow views; the byproducts of choice. In this manner beings are born, personalities created. The narrower the view, the deeper the flaw, the higher the capacity for decisiveness and action, the stronger the tendency towards fervor. Fanatics on one end, subjectively right while inevitably wrong. The other end is loose, drifting aimlessly, beings so aware they’ve dissolved in it, so aware as to have ceased opinion, influence, and life. Having looked everywhere else, the conclusion arises that we have no purpose, save bedrock fairytales that cannot be accepted. At this point, the slide towards the loose end begins, rewarding with ever more wisdom, tainted by the married inability to act. The motive to maintain a respectable societal role seems lost, and yet some things still draw smiles. These we have no choice but to follow… mere artifacts of a biology nearly obsolete.

2006-05-03T01:29:00.000-04:00

Alright, I’ve finally slain the last beast of Winter ’06, thereby ending my extended hiatus from writing posts and every other leisurely activity requiring even the slightest commitment. Unfortunately, a numbing mess of high school recaps await me in less than a week; pinions to my summer moria. So if I’m to be dragged kicking and screaming back to sobriety to listen to campus pipeline tutorials, I might as well be writing too. While much more is soon to come, I offer several new sidebar links in the meantime. Notably, I now link to the official website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This development has consumed the better part of my last couple of months and deserves more thorough treatment, but I will not attempt to revive drowned thoughts and this is not a topic I intend to regard seriously again until August. Here are some pictures from the campus.

Progress?

2006-02-03T10:03:00.000-05:00

A continuum of thoughts I have as yet no desire to force order upon
To speak from within these fits; bound by the necessary alarm to burst this
revelry
Currently 6 for 6, despite my best efforts at poor choices: one of America’s most
wanted
Not a success met with relief… a handshake on a bet
A plan more fruitful than expected, premature ending might convince my fleeting
seconds I’d done all I could
But no such luck, good or bad
Not a scratch on this paint job, at the cost of character and a reluctance to
risk…
No more efficient a trek, but wits enough to see this ants crawl for what it is
Any direction good as the next and left ponder the coupling of forward motion
sensations
This is win-win and lose-lose, but that indecision console doesn’t fit the itinerary
It’s head first into this trap…

The State of Modern Science: Fear, Corruption, and the Weight of the World

2006-01-02T19:48:00.000-05:00

Less than a month ago Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk was the leading stem cell researcher in the world and the pride of Korea. He was a national celebrity and an inspiration to people suffering from currently incurable diseases and irreparable injuries around the world. There exist numerous accounts of these less fortunate following his work almost religiously, checking his progress daily in hopes that Dr. Hwang would win the race against their advancing ailments. He was also a worldwide icon for scientific progress, daring to dabble in the most taboo of all fields, yet producing results whose utility could not be ignored. He endured constant attacks from the memetic descendants of those cowards who opposed drugs and vaccination in their time, slandering his morality and chastising him for mimicry of some omnipotent. Even so, he continued his work undeterred, fighting for those who depended on him and upholding the dignity of science.

But in early December, Dr. Hwang was pressured to resign as head of the World Stem Cell Hub and all other official posts, saving only his professorship at Seoul National University. The allegations concerned unethical acquisition of the human eggs used in his research. On December 23, Dr. Hwang offered his resignation from Seoul National University in the face of rising controversy. Now, in addition to ethical concerns, Dr. Hwang’s scientific merit has come into question as colleagues have accused him of intentional fabrication of data. However, Dr. Hwang has repeatedly cited mix-ups and oversights, holding to the fact that his results are legit and claiming the ability to reproduce them in only ten days.

Now before I really get into the details and minutiae, I would like to introduce my reasons for taking interest in this issue in the first place. While the results of official investigations into the matter are pending, we are left to guess between two possibilities. In the first, Dr. Hwang reproduces all results and clears his name; we can only hope. In the second, which seems at the moment far more likely, he is found guilty of fabrication and scientific misconduct. The latter is my interest because it holds within it two broad possibilities of its own, and I’m afraid no cut and dry investigation will turn up on this point. If Dr. Hwang is found guilty of fabrication, one has to wonder whether this is the literal truth, through malevolence or negligence, or if he has been forced out of all positions of influence by some underhanded advance of his moral adversaries.

For those of you at least somewhat familiar with religion’s willingness to lower the bar (See practically anywhere else on this site), this will not seem such a far-fetched idea. It should, rather, be very unsettling. Dr. Hwang’s research walks the line between the worlds of religion and science, its boundaries largely dependent on a rigorous definition of what it means to be alive: what gives life and when? Further, it is a potential gateway for new technologies in cloning and genetic manipulation. Dr. Hwang is, for all intents and purposes, a modern day Copernicus. When I think of a scientist of Dr. Hwang’s influence being forcibly removed from all posts, sealed from his own laboratories, having all data seized, and having necessary supplies cut off, I get visions of Giordano Bruno burning at the stake; a slippery slope right back to the Dark Ages.

On the other hand, if Dr. Hwang has intentionally fabricated data, then science will be seriously damaged. Although better for having sniffed out and excised the problem by that self-correcting hallmark of science, our ability to trust any new and staggering development in the future will be fundamentally weakened. There have always been hacks willing to twist words and skew statistics in order to prey on some profitable lapse in self-esteem. But those are hacks and their lies are restricted to the realm of pamphlets and infomercials. There is a real problem when a world-renowned scientist, holding numerous degrees from an accredited institution, leading the charge into a new and ill-defined field of study, knowingly and willingly fabricates evidence and draws false conclusions. It is a larger problem when this fabrication is published in the most trusted scientific journal in the world and subsequently read and believed by some thousands of honest researchers.

Neither case is desirable here, but the detriment of each sparks a distinct set of concerns. It is certainly worth trying to see which of these two evils we are up against. Why did Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk, arguably the most forward looking man of our time, a man who might later be accredited with having saved billions of lives, feel that his only viable option was to abdicate all positions of influence and forfeit his life’s work?

In 2004, Dr. Hwang submitted a revolutionary paper to Science Magazine. His research group had created the first ever pluripotent human embryonic stem cells from a cloned human blastocyst. What this means is that the nucleus of a non-reproductive cell was taken from a women’s body and implanted into one of her unfertilized eggs. The egg was then cultured in the laboratory until it formed a blastocyst, an early cell mass. If the blastocyst were allowed to develop it would eventually form a fetus that is genetically identical to the female donor: a clone. Instead, Dr. Hwang’s group extracts pluripotent stem cells from the early cell mass to use for regenerative medical treatments. Pluripotent simply means that the cells have not yet ‘chosen’ which type of body tissue they will be a part of (bone, liver, skin, brain, etc.). Because of this pluripotency, these cells can theoretically be administered to a great many different damaged areas and, taking cues from their environment, develop into the appropriate type of cell, thus regenerating the damaged tissue. The development of pluripotent stem cells, however, was not the notable achievement of this paper; it was the cloning technique that was novel.

In 2005 Dr. Hwang scored again, publishing a second groundbreaking paper in Science. This time he had gone one further, implanting nuclei from the cells of different people into the women’s donated egg, not her own. The success of this technique was immediately promising because it meant that a person suffering from a debilitating disease, a male even, could give skin cells, have them implanted into a donated egg, and recover pluripotent stem cells that were a perfect genetic match for his body. In the paper, Dr. Hwang claimed to have successfully created 11 stem cell lines specifically tailored to diseased patients. A series of high-resolution microscope photographs and a method of DNA ‘fingerprinting’ evidenced the claim.

While some regarded these achievements with accolades, others grew fearful of the implications. The ubiquitous comment from Dr. Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, was “whatever its technical merit, this research is morally troubling: it creates human embryos solely for research, makes it much easier to produce cloned babies, and exploits women as egg donors not for their benefit.” Richard Doerflinger, director of pro-life activities at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, “Up until now, people were beginning to wonder whether human cloning for any purpose was feasible at all. This development makes it feasible enough to be a clear and present danger.” Hence my aforementioned suspicions.

In truth, Dr. Hwang has never made any attempt to clone a human being and has never insinuated that he might. What he creates, though a potential clone, is an early cell mass of pluripotent cells. These cells have not yet ‘decided’ to form even the most basic functional parts of a human body. Further, it is my understanding that the process of removing the desired cells from the cell mass renders it nonviable. Nevertheless, those who oppose this research care little for such trivia so long as they can perform some trick of semantics resulting in one of those key words sure to insight political jihad. ‘Clone’ happens to be one of those words and recently, by bunk association, so is ‘stem cell.’

Sophistry aside for a moment, here’s the real controversy. The eggs used for Dr. Hwang’s 2004 paper were donated, mostly by South Korean women. Last month it was discovered that two of Dr. Hwang’s researchers had donated their eggs and that the procedures were paid for with Dr. Hwang’s research funds. Dr. Hwang claims that he was unaware of these donations until after the eggs had been used and, when questioned by Science, lied about the origins of the eggs in order to protect the women’s confidentiality. In addition, payment for the donation of eggs is illegal in South Korea. However, an investigation by the Institutional Review Board on Human Subject Research and Ethics concluded that payment to donors did not become illegal until January of 2005, well after the publication of the 2004 paper. Further, the investigation showed that Dr. Hwang’s group had not coerced the women or violated any of the established ethical guidelines applicable to the donations. His claim of ignorance is also quite plausible because Dr. Hwang is, by law, not allowed to inquire about the origins of his donated eggs. Nevertheless, Dr. Hwang’s white lie to Science magazine cost him all of his official posts.

With the publishing of the 2005 paper came the real trouble. Shortly after it’s submission and peer review, an editorial bedlam ensued as microscope photographs of the cells were swapped, relabeled, excluded, resubmitted, and altogether jumbled beyond comprehension. On December 13, co-author Dr. Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh requested that his name be removed from the paper stating, “my careful review and evaluations of published figures and tables, along with new problematic information, now casts substantial doubts about the paper’s accuracy.” He also said the he had “received allegations from someone involved with the experiments that certain elements of the report may be fabricated.” Later, a member of Dr. Hwang’s laboratory confessed that he was told by Dr. Hwang to make data for the 11 reported stem cell lines from only two lines in the group’s possession.

These accusations led to an investigation by the Seoul National University Investigation Committee. The investigation committee reported to Science on December 23, stating that the results of Dr. Hwang’s 2005 paper suffered from substantial research misconduct. For nine of the eleven lines, Dr. Hwang had apparently sent two samples of DNA from his patients to be tested, claiming that one of them was a lab cultured, genetically identical stem cell line. Further testing on the remaining two lines showed that they were not actually patient specific stem cells. The microscope photographs turned out to be photographs of two cells doctored to look like eleven distinct cells. The investigation has now moved onto Dr. Hwang’s 2004 paper as well as a paper he submitted to Nature claiming to have cloned a dog for the first time in history.

Dr. Hwang responded to all of this at a press conference on December 16. He admitted several irrevocable mistakes, mix-ups with results, and incidents of contamination in the cell lines. He never denied or confessed fabrication, but holds that the 11 cell lines were made and that he can duplicate the results in ten days. He also claims that some of his cell lines were stolen and replaced with lines from MizMedi hospital, accusing a former laboratory member now working with MizMedi. Investigations into this accusation are still pending.

On the up side of all of this, I can see no hand of religion in it without subtlety unbecoming of fundamentalists. All accusations and investigations have been forwarded by legit scientific committees and backed with concrete proof. My worst fear, at least, seems to be absent. The down side is that a respected scientist has fabricated revolutionary results. But with this answer comes a new question: did the patient specific stem cell lines ever exist? Was there a reason, not necessarily a good one, but some logical reason that one paper had to be fabricated? Or, was the whole thing, from the first experiment on, all a hoax? There are a few reasons that this last suggestion seems unlikely and these will require a bit of background.

Hwang Woo-Suk grew up impoverished in South Korea. He worked on a farm to put himself through veterinary school at Seoul National University. Practically on a whim, he decided to attempt to clone a better cow for farm applications. So he trained in Theriogenology (the science and practice of animal reproduction), receiving a Ph.D., and proceeded to clone several cows and pigs. Seeing the potential applications in medicine, he decided to start working on human stem cells and had immediate success applying his animal cloning techniques. Dr. Hwang wakes up at 4:30 am to do yoga. He reports to his laboratory by 6:00am where he works until 12:00am the following day. He has food catered to him and his research group so that they aren’t bothered with having to go out for meals. Leaving the lab, he returns home to sleep something slightly less than four hours and wakes up to do it again… seven days a week. He has not taken a vacation for nineteen years and sees his wife only in bed. I know this evidence is anecdotal, but I fail to see how it takes eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, to write a paper full of bullshit. Prove that every last word in both his 2004 and 2005 papers is false and there remain enough novel accomplishments to call Dr. Hwang a brilliant scientific pioneer of exemplary character, hopelessly devoted to his work.

So what could possibly drive such a man to knowingly and willingly falsify data? Are we really to believe his William Gibson plot of MizMedi espionage? Whatever we believe, he has made it very clear that, even while the papers lie, he did successfully do everything that his papers claim he has done. So why rush into publication before the evidence is in place? If the cells are contaminated, start over. It is possible that some pressure may have driven him to make claims he could not yet support and it shouldn’t be overlooked that he was a national hero in Korea. He was carrying a nation on his shoulders. The day Dr. Hwang submitted his resignation as professor at Seoul National University the majority of the country held candle light vigils for him. Perhaps the enormous popularity Dr. Hwang had achieved had begun to offer him an ulterior motive. I have thought for a long time that science should see more limelight than it does. Why report TV reviews and celebrity love affairs when astonishing scientific discoveries are happening everyday? But this turn of events has me reconsidering the point. Perhaps it’s better we focus on events that are, in any real sense, irrelevant; events where continuous slandering and spreading of rumors doesn’t harm much; and, most of all, events where large-scale pressure, expectation, and the occasional nervous breakdown of a superstar don’t reek havoc on the foundations of modern learning.

Littering the Countryside with Pleas

2005-12-03T22:38:00.000-05:00

This one is a bit personal, but hopefully I've crammed enough philosophy into it to keep interest. I have been charged with the task of commiting my personality and life goals to a single peice of paper to accompany my pleas that will soon pepper the country from New York to Florida to Califronia and back to right here at my modest alma mater. It has been a difficult period of brainstorming and tonight I have finally managed to spill some ink. The following paper is my first insufficient and yet audacious attempt at a personal statement to MIT, the number one chemical engineering graduate school in the country. I'm posting this in part because it required conciderable reflection and the results may be telling to some, but more becuse I am humbly requesting your comments: phrases that work, phrases that don't, discontinuities, unclear passages, anything.... Please.

If there's one thing I have been at no loss for, it is opportunity. In the past few years I have experienced nearly every manifestation of intellectual application. I have seen the bottom line of the chemical plant, the vision of the research laboratory, the benefit of associations, the oppressive time line of the classroom, and the after hours coffee house right down to the familiar blur of a text stared at almost long enough to sink a purpose. But after years at an institution that inevitably becomes so much more than deadlines and percentages, one of these now tugs at my attention with a real promise of fulfillment. I intend to make the pursuit of knowledge my life's work and I feel that the academic research laboratory is the only arena that adequately fosters the notion. After completion of my doctorate, I will seek a faculty position at an appropriate university. Academia stands for a set of principles that remain pure and logical even as the scope embraces a scale nothing less than epic. To attack a problem for the pride of the solution; to pair a phenomena with a truly profound impact through a novel application that does not fail to recognize the needs of a society nor the progress of a people. I require academia's unique combination of open minded approach, scientific rigor, and communal inspiration to leave a footprint I can be content with. My present solidity aside, I have not always borne this future in mind and I have my undergraduate experience to thank for giving me the clarity to establish a cause. On four years of personal redefinition and now confidently poised at the decision of a lifetime, I suppose there are a few comments to make.

When I decided I would pursue a college education in chemical engineering, it was more than a little arbitrary. I knew it was supposedly challenging and I'd be lying if I said I didn't derive any sadistic attraction from the fact. But at the time my decision had much more to do with dollar signs and the status quo's definition of success. If my education over the last four years has imprinted anything timeless on my personality it is my own personal definition of success. In the broadest sense, it is the requirement that I exert some lasting influence on a large scale. More specifically and for reasons more numerous than I could effectively list here, I have come to the conclusion that the most productive way for me to exert this influence is through the addition of something novel to the general knowledge base. Maybe it's my science fiction viewpoint insisting that researchers have a more dominant influence on the direction of society than those officials that we've elected for governance, or maybe its some leftover from my auxiliary study of evolutionary biology that has me aching for progress. On a more personal note, it could just be the result of my eventually successful campaign to conquer and hone my obsessive compulsive tendency to demand the world of myself. Whatever the cause, it took no more than a week of laboratory experience to convince me I'd found the ideal environment for my life's work.

The next several months investigating polymer nanocomposites only strengthened my resolve, all the while rooting out the blunders of my inexperience. I learned patience and persistence in experiment, and the occasional slap of clarity taught me that the simplified picture scribbled on the back of a paper can lead you astray if your lose sight of where it came from. In complicated systems, you can convince yourself of just about anything if you don't understand the comparative magnitudes of the forces at play. Most of all, research has shown me that I can actually satisfy my delusions of grandeur by taking incremental steps on a practical scale and recognizing the pride in being an integral part of something greater. My attendance at this years AIChE national conference affirmed the power of such cooperation by displaying those 'stranger than fiction' advancements of an aggrandized popular science magazine in a rigorous and supported format. I have developed a profound interest in polymer properties and the macroscopic effects of micro and nanoscale manipulation, including self-assembling structures. The potential of this field is overwhelming and I have no doubts that it can contain my aspirations and foster my progress.

I have chosen to appeal to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for my graduate education for several reasons. I have been at the top of my class at Wayne State University for the entirety of my core engineering education. That status has offered me numerous opportunities that I would not have otherwise had, including a position in a competitive research group, nominations and leadership positions in student and local organizations, and invitations for research presentations. While all of these opportunities have resulted in valued experiences and lessons learned, the top offers certain limitations and I fear I may have outgrown my cage. Just as I couldn't turn my back on a field that has never failed to push me to the precipice, I know I would be cheating myself if I willingly entered into anything but the highest level of competition, although I do so at the sacrifice of a certain comfort. Insofar as comfort belies stagnancy, it is a challenge I am eager to begin. I should mention that my intentions at your institution have nothing to do with succumbing to a particularly prestigious form of mediocrity, but rather have everything to do with rising to the top of the most competent group of engineers in the country. Secondly, a review of current research projects leaves me convinced that MIT has numerous avenues for development in my areas of interest and seems to have a more bracing view of the potential and importance of the applications. In its finest form, engineering represents that insatiable drive to overcome adversity that defines the human spirit. It is precisely this connotation that has set MIT firmly at the top of my list. I look forward to hearing from you.

Joseph K. Scott
Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202

The Means to an End and The End of Democracy

2005-10-26T19:03:00.000-04:00

A bit of political blasphemy has been growing in me for some time now and, finally, I have convinced myself of its validity. Democracy is no longer an appropriate political system. The notion of equal say, under certain circumstances, is plainly foolish. Every person is born equal; Unfortunately, we don't stay that way very long.

Things have gotten a bit more complicated since the dawn of democracy some two millenia ago. Some might argue that this is regrettable and I will not waste time on that point here. What I intend to express is that the common citizen no longer has so much as a fading grasp on anything relevant in a modern democracy. We can examine a brief list of issues that are currently paramount, if not a little forward looking: Nano-technology, Space, Population Control, Disease Control, Environment, Nuclear Energy, and the infinitely taboo Biotechnology just to name a few. Understanding these subjects requires not only intimate knowledge of the specific subject matter, but a solid background in scientific concepts, an understanding of how scientific systems function, experience in interperetation, and, eventually, a little intuition. You can not be reasonably expected to build a house with no prior understanding of how hammers, saws, and drills operate. Whether or not the common citizen can be reasonably expected to have this level of competency in scientific principles will be dealt with later; For now it is sufficient just to realize that he/she does not.

According to the most recent national literacy survey, 15% of the American population "may be unable to determine the correct amount of medicine to give a child based on the information printed on the package." If this is extrapolated any further than our sixth grade reading level newspapers the figures get ugly in a hurry. Yet, these people have the right to decide what research can and cannot be funded. I can think of no other setting where such blatantly unqualified opinions are even considered, let alone taken as final. I suppose it's to all of our benefit that these people don't decide directly, but merely select the official that looks most competent. But here is another interesting principle: democratic selection strictly favors policy makers that appear to be the most qualified. In other words, those who appeal most to the generally ignorant public. I doesn't seem a terrible idea to me to have some sort of competency examination for those that wish to parent the species, but then I'm not necessarily providing alternatives as of yet. As a side note to those who are slightly appalled by my denouncing democracy, what currently prevails is a feint. We won't be falling far.

So what has gone wrong here? I don't really believe that everyone, regardless of incompetence, shouldn't have a say in the circumstances they are subjected to. Of course they should. However, somewhere along the line we've confused ends with means. What conditions we should live in are strictly matters of opinion; How to achieve such conditions are anything but. Someone with a great deal of my respect voted for George W. Bush last November under the belief that another term of Bush would reciprocate a stronger liberal vote next time around. I took a more direct path and voted to the contrary. The point here is that our ends were similar, but our means were starkly different. That I have good reason to believe his means were the result of higher qualifications is irrelevant. What is relevant is that we both voted for the means to an end rather than for the end itself. One of us was, at least in some degree more than the other, wrong. Ends are matters of opinion. Means are the property of sophisticated predictive relations.

Assume for a moment that you would like some cake, or rather, that a group of individuals decides that they would all enjoy some cake. You happen to be highly skilled in the culinary arts and, if you do say so yourself, make a moist and delicious cake. Now imagine that as you begin to prepare said cake, you are immediately contested and, after some argument, it is decided that the method of preparing the cake will go to a vote, or, as a slightly more accurate analogy, a series of votes that converge on some compromise. The resulting cake, though better for your professional input, is sub par at best. Had you been allowed to prepare the dish yourself, everyone involved would have benefited as they enjoyed your moist, delicious cake. Now imagine that the better part of your company have never seen an egg and have no concept of the function of an oven. Now we are at a point something like modern democracy, and the cake tastes like shit. It should be noted that if your party had genuinely disagreed on exactly what type of cake is most delicious, than this decision would have been well put to a vote. After all, your favorite dessert is a matter of opinion. The proper way to prepare a cake, generally speaking, is well established fact.

Another flawed bit of logic modern democracy tends to ignore is the issue of unattainable states. In this situation, whether or not the means are flawed, the desired ends are simply not a possibility. This time we're baking bread and the argument concerns how long the doe should be left to rise before baking. After all the votes are tallied, a few give correct times, many give wrong times, and altogether too many have surmised that if the doe is left long enough it will grow so large that they will get a whole loaf to themselves. Again, optimum rise time is not a matter of opinion, it is a fact. But more importantly, the amount of bread is determinate. What we are left with is a lot of irritated people that had to wait too long to eat, and another group still demanding that they get the whole loaf. Clearly, if your ends are unattainable, your vote is pure detriment.

In essence, democracy is only logical when we are dealing with pure matters of opinion. The problem is that pure matters of opinion simply don't exist. Nor, of course, do pure matters of fact. However, just because a matter is not completely understood does not imply that it should be blindly guessed at. To be sure, there is a matter of credentials; All guesses are not equal.

As I stated before, I am not attempting to propose a solution presently, but there are a few comments that outline the general form of the solution. First, concidering current progress, or rather the rate of current progress, I do believe it to be unreasonable to expect that everyone have a competent opinion on every issue. This is precisely why democracy must be left behind. Specialization is becoming quite pronounced and it is only in its infancy. I can't imagine that the concept of general education as we know it survives but a few more generations. Humanity works now, and will continue to in successively more efficient stages, as one complex organism (if only by capitalistic means). It will soon become illogical to expect that any one part of the organism be able to do the job of another, or even have any useful input as to its operation. It may seem initially that this type of operation involves a great deal of unwarranted trust. It must be understood, however, that there is often mutual benefit to cooperation and this problem will likely not be resolved through human ingenuity, but rather, unavoidably, as a matter of equilibrium. Whatever the solution may be, it will be a system in constant flux. Things have gotten a bit more complicated since the dawn of democracy some two millenia ago.

One last consideration: where do those who wish to remain blissfully ignorant fit into such a system? Do they retain the right to make that decision, however unfathomable it may seem to some of us? This is touchy, however, someone who does not actively contribute to society does not deserve to fully benefit from it. You can be a janitor and receive tangible goods for your tangible work. But no intellectual contribution means no abstract payoff. If you do not influence direction, than you should not necessarily benefit from progress. More specifically, society should foster what your contribution is. Only when your contribution is influence should society foster that influence by allowing you a say. If your contribution is mere manual labor, society owes you nothing more than the right to life.

Apologies to the Foreshadowed

2005-10-05T18:19:00.000-04:00

What was so confidently alluded to will not come into being. Almost unanimously we decided to continue this sentient taboo we called Trumbull House; it's purposes were many, it's resources prodigy, and it's will evident in every symbiont pattern. With full knowledge we turned our backs on every warning, precaution, and prejudgment, endeavoring to do what was not expected, encouraged, or even understood. We enforced an environment permeated with knowledge, open to perspective, and aching for progress. Advancing through a complex medium of contemplative delirium and deserved belligerence, we opened to humanity for what aid it might offer and what influence we might exact. What humanity returned was an affirmation of denial to replace my lost naivety.

These are my formal apologies:

To those who I met only in passing and those yet to pass. Some knew me and my family in a fashion not entirely reciprocal. For all of those who eagerly accepted our peace offerings and hospitality, and who took no advantage, I thank you indefinitely. For those who go unremembered, lost in the crowd, purged in the aftermath, or obscured in the general haze, I apologize sincerely; you will not receive my impartial beginnings again. For those who will remain only as abandoned potential, I apologize most deeply. Because so many who passed were good, you fell to a statistical inevitability.

To my family, as they were; people of such exemplary character that the ideals of Trumbull house came without direct effort or feat of will, but as a natural consequence of the general hunger and discontent with societal norms. An enormous amount of selfless toil was forwarded by these people for no better reason than to provide an open and positive environment for all who were willing to accept it. The better part of this effort was based on a few people who's intentions were of such purity that I have often found response only in tears. I apologize that such a noble, elaborate, and utterly tireless attempt was thwarted by an evil of such pitiful mediocrity.

Because none of the unnamed ever will, I apologize to myself. I apologize for the environment that I have lost and for the assumptions that I can no longer make. When intelligence, ambition, and blatant defiance collided with the opportunities provided by magnitude, cooperation, and a relative anarchy, I spent one year in the eye of the storm. Every conversation rivaled the classroom, every party a reaffirmation of life, and every day the antithesis of routine. I leave Trumbull with more respect for just about every conceivable topic in the intellectual myriad, and as a more highly developed and complete individual. But those ideals have grown unstable and they must inevitably collapse. With such freedom and acceptance comes an inherent vulnerability. This is a valuable lesson that requires my acknowledgment, reconciliation, and redefinition.

It has been said that all things happen for a reason. I don’t necessarily agree, but I do believe that some lessons can be extracted from the events. Some of us thought that if we gave enough to people we would reap what we sowed. My greatest loss is that last little bit of naivety; someone will always exploit altruism. But the real damage was not to me. I remain with my family, among those that we trust unconditionally, and we will continue our progress, our community, and occasionally our deserved belligerence. But we will do so in isolation, secure and free from distractions, eyes set to the next level. It is all of those who were yet to come, those nameless and faceless who would have known the place and time if not the people, and those few who would have eventually made their way into our trusted circle, reaped the benefits of our environment, and bestowed us their priceless contributions, who have truly lost. For those we did see, most of them were good, kind hearted, and harmless beyond even my expectations. Most. I guess the point here is that there are a lot of human snakes out there and sometimes you want a tomato that’s just too goddamn big to fit through the door, even at Trumbull House.

The Divine Stagnance: 2

2005-09-28T11:56:00.000-04:00

Here are the second and third articles. The second is basically just a general case of the first. The third deals with the detriment of stalling progress.

SHOULD MORALS HAVE A VOICE IN SCIENCE?

It would be quite ridiculous to state that morals should play absolutely no role in science, as issues of rights and consent are undoubtedly important. However, the effects of morality on science should be very carefully controlled. What must be understood is that morals do not constitute a static body, but rather fluctuate continuously. Morals represent what we as a people consider to be 'right' to the best of our knowledge at any one time. Consequently, morals at any one time may be, and are very likely to be, wrong. This is not to say that morals should be utterly disregarded, they are after all the best we have. However, when morals are not clear, when a significant gray area exists, it may prove best to take a hands-off approach to advancements in science. The reason for this is simply because a moral gray area is a good indication that the best of our knowledge is not enough. In other words, the only way to give definition to such a moral gray area is to actively encourage research in that area. The emerging facts will provide the raw materials necessary for successful philosophy. The fact that morals, especially ill defined morals, normally act against the progress of science constitutes a fundamental catch 22. A lack of knowledge leads to morals that prohibit the very research able to fill that void.

In history, the use of morals to hider research into misunderstood advancements is ever present. Most of these morals are derived in some way from religious beliefs. We see in the Christian dominated Middle Ages immorality being cited against every major medical advancement including anatomy/surgery, inoculation, vaccination, and even anesthetics, all considered immoral tampering with human life and interfering with the divine will of God. A fundamental ignorance of the natural origins of illness and disease lead to such a set of moral beliefs. This issue is again seen in 1868 when Cardinal de Bonnechose, Archbishop of Rouen and member of the French Senate, ruled that “the tendencies of higher scientific teaching at Paris were fatal to religion and morality.” These instances are by no means isolated, and could easily be listed far beyond the point of effectiveness in this analysis [7].

The most disturbing part of these past moral conflicts is the similarity to arguments used presently. On the issue of embryonic stem cell research, religion based moral arguments are incessantly used to attack scientific efforts. Those of the Eastern Orthodox faith claim that they “cannot condone any procedure that threatens the viability, dignity, and sanctity of life” [3] while opposition from a Southern Baptist think tank includes references to the research as “a barbaric assault on the dignity of humankind” [8]. However, the bases for assuming the life involved as having 'dignity' or 'sanctity' is never given and, in fact cannot be, as it is not available information save through extensive progress in the very research which these comments hope to deter. A leading Jewish scholar frames the issue in a similar manner, stating “Our understanding of these cells has grown rapidly since they have been successfully grown in culture. One feature of this research is that the basic science is itself rapidly evolving, and hence the ethical reflections that follow the science are changing as well” [4]. So, while clear cut precepts of morality are assuredly fundamental to scientific research, to deny progress in areas where significant gray areas exist is to fall into a stagnancy that benefits neither science nor morality.

CAN THERE BE A BENEFIT TO LIMITING RESEARCH AND STALLING PROGRESS?

In many instances it seems as if particular studies should not be undertaken based on a serious moral concern. We must be careful, however, that we have the relevant knowledge to make such a moral judgment. All too often, a moral issue seems just, legitimate, and insurmountable, but turns out to be based on misinformation, in the light of which, the moral issue dissolves. In such cases, of which many will be shown, the limiting of research is unwarranted and harmful. Knowledge, after all, is of paramount value to mankind, allowing us to continue on through the evolution of our civilization, overcoming the endless stream of new and challenging adversities, and ever adding to the mastery of our environment. To stall progress, for any reason, could prove very dangerous to us as a species in both short and long term considerations.

Today, many people oppose the encouragement and even the very practice of embryonic stem cell research. The opposition comes in many forms, all of which are genuine, well indented, and seemingly in the best interest of mankind at large. However, I would strongly urge advocates of such opposition to explore the history of our scientific development which shows countless examples of such opposition, many of which I will list here at the risk of redundancy, that without fail prove to have been unsound and baseless inhibitions from the perspective of higher science. Further, the results of such stagnancy, ultimately temporary as it was, are often terrible.

I will begin the list of limited research that has wronged mankind in astrology. In about 600 B.C. Pythagoras proposed the revolution of the earth and planets around the sun. Around 100 B.C. it was proposed again by Aristarchus. After Aristarchus the thought was lost until near 1500 where it was written by Cardinal Nicholas de Cusa, and shortly after him by Nicholas Copernicus. Given the position towards science at the time, Copernicus feared releasing his work for nearly thirty years, finally publishing in 1543. This theory was supported in 1601 by Giordano Bruno, and was proved true by the telescope of Galileo in1611. Galileo went on to discover numerous supporting facts such as the phases of Venus and spots on the sun. For all of the work of these men in uncovering this great truth, Aristarchus was charged with blasphemy; Giordano Bruno was hunted, arrested in Venice, imprisoned for six years and finally burned alive; Galileo was denounced, humiliated, made to recant, and eventually placed in the hands of the Roman inquisition where he was imprisoned and tortured; and Copernicus was discredited, escaping further ramifications only through death, but not without documented fear of “vengeance on his corpse.” More disturbing yet, is what became of their great works. The Catholic Church released the Index, a list of all books forbidden to Christians under pain of persecution, including “all books which affirm the motion of the earth.” The Index was forwarded with a signed papal bull. One historian notes that a “mass of books appeared under the auspices of the Church immediately after the condemnation of Galileo, for the purpose of rooting out every vestige of the hated Copernican theory from the mind of the world.” In addition, the Copernican theory was forbidden to be taught almost anywhere in Europe. Even into the seventeenth century professors were forcibly made to take oaths not to hold the Copernican theory as truth. Records show expulsion of numerous professors in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky for this same offense into the late nineteenth century. The list of other scientists of the time so restricted includes Descartes, De Dominus, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, Locke, Milton, Fenelon, Howard, and Darwin. Andrew Dickson White, late President and Professor of History at Cornell University, states that “the list of those who have been denounced as ‘infidel’ and ‘atheist’ includes almost all great men of science, general scholars , inventors, and philanthropists.” The official removal of the Books related to Copernican theory from the Index did not occur until 1820. Thus it was that a fundamental truth concerning the environment in which we live, and the basis of an endless field of natural research was concealed, obscured, and utterly restricted for nearly two thousand years. All moral arguments put against this research were, in the face of immutable proof, found to be utterly wrong [7].

Another, and more severe, example is apparent in the development of medicine. Again we see the very beginnings of this science in ancient times. In Greece medicine and anatomy were studied thoroughly and openly. However, entering the age of faith, all such pursuits were immediately halted. Countless restrictions were put upon this most important research. In 1248, the Council of Le Mans rendered surgery forbidden to monks and Pope Boniface VIII issued a decree forbidding “the separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead, which soon applied to all types of dissection. This decree threatened charges of sorcery and even death. Shortly after, Pope Alexander III forbade monks from studying physic. Due to this decree and others, surgery was despised well into the sixteen hundreds. Versalius, a brilliant anatomist in his time, was excommunicated and sent on a pilgrimage to repent in the prime of his career for discovering that man had an equal number of ribs on both sides of his body, despite his descending from Adam, who had one missing rib (owing to the creation of Eve). In addition to surgery, inoculation was also denounced and its discoverer, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, threatened. As was the case with Jenner and his discovery of vaccination. In 1798, the Anti-vaccination Society was formed to eliminate the study and use of vaccinations. In 1847, James Young Simpson was denounced for the use of anesthaesthetics in child birth [7].

The result of this enormous delay in the progress of medical science is horrific. This enforced period of ignorance cost the lives of countless millions. The restrictions on anatomical studies brought about “such doctrines as the increase and decrease of the brain with the phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of human vitality with the tides of the ocean, the use of the lungs to fan the heart, the function of the liver as the seat of love, and that of the spleen as the center of wit.” The inoculations of Boylston saved 294 out of 300 people in a particular town, while at the same time traditional treatments allowed one sixth of people to die. Jenner’s much hated vaccination proved itself in Berlin, where in the same amount of time before and after their discovery, the difference in child deaths from smallpox was four thousand versus five hundred and thirty five. In Wurttemberg, one in every thirteen children died of smallpox, while after the vaccination was discovered only one child in every sixteen hundred died from the disease. An English Physician of the late nineteenth century stated that “Jenner has saved, is now saving, and will continue to save in all coming ages, more lives in one generation than were destroyed in all the wars of Napoleon.” So while the progress of medicine was held at bay for almost twenty centuries, mankind experienced one of the worst periods in its history, a time of stagnancy, and a time of utter defenselessness to almost all natural adversities thrown in its path [7].

Had men like Versalius, Boylston, and Jenner not risked reputation and life in the name of science, if the opposition had had its way, the terrible scourge of smallpox may have never been overcome. Such dangers to mankind cannot be predicted and, when such threats arise, our knowledge will be our only viable salvation. White sums up this thought upon reflecting on Roger Bacon, a persecuted scientist of the thirteenth century:

“The nineteenth century was robbed at the same time with the thirteenth. But for that interference with science the nineteenth century would be enjoying discoveries which will not be reached before the twentieth century, or even later. Thousands of precious lives shall be lost, tens of thousands shall suffer discomfort, privation, sickness, poverty, ignorance,.for lack of discoveries and methods which, but for the mistaken dealing with Roger Bacon and his compeers, would now be blessing the earth.” [7]

The modern case of stem cell research is starkly analogous. No one might predict what knowledge lies beyond that research, or what threats may come onto mankind in the form of our genetics. Not only can we not restrict the acquisition of such knowledge for our common good, but we should feel, in fact, a strong obligation to exploit stem cell research to fullest of its potential.

The Divine Stagnance: 1

2005-09-22T14:09:00.000-04:00

Religion is often in direct opposition to scientific developments. In my book, this means direct opposition to the progress of mankind. I think, by now, that anyone with half a brain is familiar with the numerous follies of religion in history, but I doubt that many people really grasp the magnitude of the situation. I’ve done quite a bit of research on the topic and I found that the instances that I was familiar with comprised about one percent of the damage that religion has done to mankind. I have written some responses to questions I was asked on this subject several months ago. They are focused around the current controversy over stem cell research, but they inevitably address general concepts concerning the place of religion and morals in scientific development. Because it was appropriate for the original audience, my anger was significantly toned down for these writings (I personally feel that oraganized religion should be charged with crimes against humanity and exterminated for the virus that it is). However, the concepts are present along with enough examples to make any rational person nauseous. For a much better and more detailed account, see the sidebar link to ‘The War of Science and Religion.’

Here is the first:

ARE EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS CONCIDERED HUMAN?

The issue of the humanity of embryonic cells and the consequent moral status is remains the foremost debate in issues concerning stem cell research. Ironically, this issue is, in fact, a moot point and is, by its very nature, paradoxical. The reality is that most of the definitions concerning what is and is not considered human, and what does and does not have -even in some limited fashion- human rights, are based solely on religious scripture. Looking at the statements of those groups who would oppose funding for embryonic stem cell research, or even the lawfulness of such research, the most common arguments take the form of theological reasoning based in Scripture or extrapolations of some ancient scenario preserved in religious texts. The Catholic Church resorts to the Donum Vitae citing, the “human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception,” further noting that the “the prudent response would be to recognize that as a practical matter ensoulment is coincident with fertilization” [1]. A prominent Catholic Theologist stating an opinion on the morality of using embryonic stem cells notes “the important help of Scripture” [2]. A representative of the Eastern Orthodox Church claims to “understand that the human person is one who is in the image and likeness of God” and that the “process towards authentic human personhood begins with the zygote” [3], while a Jewish representative claims a textually based opinion that before the fortieth day after conception, the embryo is to be considered 'like water', calling upon passages from the Talmud, the Mishnah, the Arakin, and the Old Testament [4]. In more influential positions, the head of President Bushes Bioethics Council states “we should be eager to avail ourselves of the wisdom contained in the great religions” [5] while the President himself admits his views to be “shaped by deeply held beliefs,” citing the particular belief that “human life is a sacred gift from our Creator” [6]. All of these interpretations of sacred texts -which can surly come to no agreement- are used as ammunition against pursuing embryonic stem cell research.

The paradox arises in the fact that the very research being opposed by such reasoning is the only endeavor with any hope of shedding new light upon the issue of what is and is not a human being. Take for example the facts that a blastocyst only consists of about 140 cells, or that no nervous system has been developed. It may be useful to understand that cells in the blastocyst stage can actually be separated and will form two separate persons (countering the argument of individuality), or the fact that the outer cells of the blastocyst will not be human at all but will form the placenta and chorionic villa [4]. So to adequately address what is and is not human, to ever approach on any sort of relevant definition, absolutely requires that research on such cells be undertaken. With this in mind, the detriment of Scriptural arguments is twofold: first to fuel ceaseless bickering between denominations, and second, to prevent the only foreseeable means of resolution.

Though my point be clear, it would be truly unthorough on my part to leave this discussion without some presentation of the track record of such theological arguments as applicable to scientific advancements. Scripture was used to contest much of science leading to our modern understanding of astronomy, for example. The Old Testament claimed a 'firmament' above the Earth with all the heavenly bodies hung within it, further maintaining that the Earth was the center of the universe as stated in Psalm 93:1 and again in Ecclesiastes, its advocates regarding the sun-centered theory of Copernicus as “delusive and arbitrary hypothesis, contrary to Scripture” In characteristic fashion, this argument was backed by such waterproof statements as “Since it can certainly be gathered from Scripture that the heavens move about the Earth, and since a circular motion requires something immovable around which to move,... the Earth is at the center of the universe.” Qouters of scripture further denounced ideas such as the moon reflecting sunlight, contradictory to the statement in Genesis regarding the moon as a 'bright light,' the existence of other planets, gravity, and the elliptical motion of the planets; each, of course, supported by logic equally as insurmountable as that in support of geocentricism presented above [7].

Given this extremely brief set of examples, it seems ever more perplexing that any man might look to Scripture with any reasonable hope of uncovering a true solution relevant to modern scientific issues. White, the late President and Professor of History at Cornell University, spoke on the aforementioned Scriptural arguments, saying “Hardly anything throws a more vivid light upon the danger of wresting texts of Scripture to preserve ideas which observation and thought have superseded, and upon the folly of arraying ecclesiastical power against scientific discovery” [7].

Of names and purpose

2005-09-17T23:40:00.001-04:00

I feel the need to say a few words about what exactly the screaming godhead is and what type of content can be expected. During the time since my liberation from the ranks of the cowardly and mundane, those who through fear or some form of atrophy have refused to approach the relevant questions in any real fashion, I have rounded up a meager collection of ideas concerning the bigger picture: life, consciousness, evolution, progress, and always arbituity. Two necessary concepts that precede any solid understanding of the aforementioned ideas are, first to understand how much there is to understand, and then to understand that that degree of comprehension is utterly impossible. During one experience in particular I attained what I would hope was a thorough grasp of these two concepts, and my thoughts turned momentarily to god, any god, a godhead to be general -- Some entity that understands everything simultaneously. It occurred to me then exactly how unpleasant a state of being this would be. The perception of an omnipotent god, I think, has always been one of effortless omnipotence; knowing all, suffering no limitations, affecting every facet of reality on a whim. I now find this quite ridiculous (I have found this quite ridiculous for some time for very different reasons). If some entity were to understand all that there is to understand all at once, I should think it would have a hard time doing much of anything else. It would not be gifted with such understanding, but utterly tormented by it. It would be drowning in the shear magnitude and complexity, layers upon layers, circles within circles. Every bit of the tangible information in the known universe would be inconsequential when compared to every nuance of every idea, concept, higher analysis, viewpoint, state of mind, and philosophy never approached by the deepest thoughts of man. This entity would exist on the brink of eruption, every moment epiphany. The paramount struggle to maintain the concept of self awash in so much raw consciousness would pervade its every eternal second. The only vain outlet to the mounting pressure of containing such infinite comprehension within a definable personality, reconciled under some subjectivity, would be a scream whose terrible sincerity could only be overshadowed by its eternal, unbreaking necessity. This would not be a pain that surges and abates in unbearable waves, but an agony unfaltering for all of eternity.

The godhead is screaming. I do not believe this to be literal truth (I am quite sure that no godhead exists), but it remains, for me, a valuable conclusion. In the most literal sense, the screaming godhead symbolizes a class of revelations. Under this class are those epiphanies whose profoundness surpasses excitement and pride and enters into a realm of nausea, disorientation, anxiety, and often hints of depression. These often concern the arbitrary nature of everything, the loss of purpose inherent in looking at such a big picture that individual actions, no matter how epic, recede into negligibility. I will use this site as a medium for such abstractions, though to anyone but myself, they will border insanity at best and become downright incriminating at worst.

The screaming godhead also has a slightly tamer interoperation. It serves to symbolize a relationship between those who actively seek knowledge, benefit from its power, and suffer its curses. Facts and ideas are not idly learned so long as the person learning them is rightfully considered as an affiliation of pervading themes, influenced by every datum he/she receives. It is often impossible to unlearn things. This is the burden of the student, to reconcile new facts with old, to eradicate contradictions, and to actively redefine the self. The screaming godhead suffers exactly these burdens. People, however, need not tackle these duties alone. In this way, the screaming godhead defines another class of ideas: those that benefit from sharing with others willing to receive them, and those that seem impossible to communicate to those who need them most. In other words, if you understand why my godhead screams, than you should be worthwhile company. Establishing a network with such individuals is another reason for this page.

There is one more, however not so much an interpretation as a misinterpretation. There are many people who will take this title to refer to the Orthodox Godhead, that is, the Holy Trinity. These are people who not only cannot understand why my godhead screams, but are seemingly incapable as seeing the godhead as a metaphor in any sense. As I consider their godhead, he is watching his chosen pets pointlessly groveling their blessed lives away, stopping periodically only to exterminate each other under the guise of divine agendas. I believe he has plenty to scream about. I will frequently use this page to vent in a very similar manner.

Almost any post I make will inevitably fall into one of these three categories: those abstractions posted purely out of need for solidity, those ideas I feel would be useful to share, and those that relay my amazement at the general ignorance.