Sidney Awards

[Update 12/30/09: A second batch of Sidneys has been chosen.]

Every year, David Brooks, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, gives out Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays of the year. I spent at least an hour reading Matt Labash's "A Rake's Progress" yesterday and laughed out loud from the writer's expert analogies. Take, for example, this description of Washington D.C.'s Ward 8, the poorest ward in the district.

For decades, Ward 8 has been the crime and poverty and every-other-dubious-statistic headquarters of D.C. It is the land that the real estate bubble forgot. Amidst the check-cashing places and screw-top liquor stores, it contains such tourist meccas as the reeking Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment plant and St. Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital, where Ezra Pound sweated out his insanity plea for treason and John Hinckley Jr. can compose rock operas for Jodie Foster in peace. While only minutes from Capitol Hill, and from the more prosperous black suburbs in Maryland's Prince George's County, Ward 8 might as well be in Burkina Faso to the commuting class. The only reason to pull off there is if you needed to buy a quick fifth of Hennessey for the ride home, or possibly something less legal.

I had to look up all the references in that paragraph.

Most of the other articles are not so humorous. Regardless, it's a joy to simply be reading for pleasure again, [1] and especially quality writing. With only music humanities classes this semester, the extent of my literary exposure was xkcd comics and the occasional Tech article. I'm bundled up in pj's and a fleece in my room now with a mug of hot water at my side, the heat on and shades down (to hide the gray sky outside), reading good articles. This could make a great vacation.


[1] Admissions officer Ben Jones warned pleasure reading would die, in #26 on his classic list of advice for college. I re-read the "50 Things" maybe once a year for an injection of perspective.

Improv

"We embark unhesitatingly on the path, in a direction that is absolutely right and urgent, supported by everyone, in the knowledge that this path is but a learning process…[We] have to keep on learning, creating, applying, by-passing, touching upon, refining and clarifying a number of notions and details that need to be improvised and applied and which, thank God, we cannot foresee. The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing."
- Yehudi Menuhin

"Do not fear mistakes. There are none." - Miles Davis


I took 21M.355: Musical Improvisation this term. Throughout the class each student kept a journal; here's mine: http://improvinabox.blogspot.com/

I'm posting the final entry, which sums up my experience.
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The class performed last night in Killian Hall, a straight two hours without intermission. Fortunately, our audience endured.

The concert was a surprising success, considering that we started rehearsing the bulk of it two weeks ago. For many pieces it was even less than that.

For me, it was a vastly enjoyable concert. I tapped my feet and bobbed my head while in the audience. I tapped my feet and bobbed my head while on stage. I was truly having fun, whereas normally I'm nervous on stage. Perhaps the greatest personal success for me was that I didn't feel nervous at all. Okay, so a bit of adrenaline - but nothing close to what I've encountered in the past, especially with solos. Maybe it helped that it was a group setting, not a solo recital. But if you had asked me a few months ago, I could not have imagined being on stage, playing without knowing the notes to play, and not being nervous.

Guitar

I spent five hours today walking around Boston picking out an electric guitar. Actually, Dennis did most of the picking - in both senses - and I did more head nodding and shaking. I'm so excited now, I couldn't focus on my work when I got back and instead listened to music all night. That means two late nights working today and tomorrow, but then I'm back home for four consecutive days for the first time in more than a year.

In commemoration of tonight, here's part of my playlist this evening:

Doors and Switches

This evening, I quit the Solar Electric Vehicle Team, ending a livelihood since the start of freshman year. The decision may seem rash and sudden to some team members and to friends who knew of my heavy involvement with the team. They might wonder if I'm struggling with my classes, being unreasonably mercurial, or suffering a quarter-life crisis.

But actually, lately I've been often very happy. The choice I made wasn't one I conjured up just now, either; it had been simmering in my mind for some time, and I hadn't acted due to uncertainty -- "Aren't I giving up too early?" "What if it gets better?" "Won't I regret leaving, a week from now?"

I finally put my foot down due to a number of things, one of which is experience from surviving what felt like a pretty brutal freshman year. I learned not to stretch myself too thin, because nothing is enjoyable when you can't get enough sleep. I also truly began to believe that I should do what I love. (It's one thing to be told this, and another to believe it.) Life was miserable enough that by the end of spring semester, I considered quitting violin because it was impossible to imagine finding the time to practice sophomore year, when classes were going to be even tougher. I was showing up at some weekly lessons having practiced just the two hours before. All right, then quit, my friends advised. And so I made up my mind to quit, and immediately reversed it. I knew for sure I couldn't stop doing music because I loved it too much.

On the other hand, I've wavered on the issue of remaining with solar car. I've learned and had fun with the team, but when the car was finished this summer and test driving began, it struck me that I didn't have any desire to drive it. And now, I remain the only one from the team last year who hasn't driven Eleanor. When I joined the team, the project appealed to me because it was a piece of engineering -- it was an "engineering stunt" as Hayman described it. But once the novelty wore off, I found that I didn't have an innate love of cars or racing, and I started to have to force myself to go to meetings without the old enthusiasm kicking in. I was afraid to quit because it would seem a shame, a waste of all the time I had put in already. And the more time I continued to put in, I thought, the more a waste quitting would become.

The pieces were already in my mind, then. A couple of things this week just nudged me over the edge.

Building With Whole Trees

Building With Whole Trees

A man named Roald Gundersen builds houses from whole trees. Besides being beautiful - just check out the slide show - his houses are smart engineering, since "a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree." Keeping trees whole also reduces the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere in several ways: the wood sequesters carbon, and energy is not consumed to cut down the tree and process it into lumber, or to produce the steel that may have replaced it. Construction costs are low - Gundersen's first home cost him under twenty grand in materials and outside labor. The downside to this method, though, is that it takes a long time to build a single house. The process is labor-intensive and demands special skill, and it's a very organic process; thus, typical suburban cookie-cutter homes couldn't be cranked out this way. However, a house from whole trees would be, I imagine, a dream cabin in the woods.

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Counting Calories and Carbon

Swedes are now adding a new metric to their food labels, alongside nutrition facts: CO2 emissions from the production of food. The hope is that people will tend to buy products with lower carbon footprints. This information has certainly complicated consumer decision-making, as Ulf Bohman, head of the Nutrition Department at the Swedish National Food Administration, articulated: "For consumers, it’s hard. You are getting environmental advice that you have to coordinate with, 'How can I eat healthier?'" Some people report feeling guilty purchasing food with higher associated carbon emissions. Such a metric also causes less visible consequences - farmers have been pressured to adopt low-emissions techniques, which may force them to grow only certain crops. It'll be curious to see whether the metric becomes a permanent fixture that has a lasting impact, or whether it loses efficacy over time.

Paying Sleep Dues

As I'm currently drawing sums and sums from my sleep bank, this article is an eye-opener. Looks like sleep debts are like credit card debts; interest accumulates.

Fortunately, prior to this and last week, I've been sleeping an average of a bit under seven hours. This week I've sacrificed hours, though, to go running every morning, starting anywhere from 6:30 to 7:30 AM. I think the exercise has done more good than harm from reduced slumber, but it's not possible to keep up this four-hour-a-night deal. I enjoy the early morning weather, though. It's chilly, but not too cold yet that I can't wear shorts. And there's hardly anyone awake or on the sidewalks, one of the few times in the day for solitude.

Week of Soulwork

"Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium." - Henri Matisse


Instead of studying for my imminent AI quiz on Tuesday night, I attended a screening of the documentary Between the Folds hosted by OrigaMIT.

The documentary profiles a diverse group of elite artists in the world of origami, from the late Akira Yoshizawa, the Japanese master who pioneered new origami techniques and raised origami "from a craft to a living art" through his work beginning in the 1940's; to people like present-day "Postmodernist" Paul Jackson, who explores what aesthetically-pleasing structures can be accomplished with single folds and repetitive crease patterns, and "Choreographer" Chris Palmer, who makes paper structures that spin like tops, expand from 2D to 3D structures, or unravel in layers to expose geometric patterns. Appropriate for the MIT screening, computational and mathematical origamists were also represented by Robert Lang, a doctorate in physics from Caltech who has produced numerous papers and patents in the fields of semiconductor lasers, optics, and integrated optoelectronics, but left engineering to work on origami full-time; and Erik Demaine, who became the youngest professor in MIT history when he was hired at age 20, and now does origami research in CSAIL.

The film, brief at only 56 minutes, was a visual feast, both because of the beauty of the paper art and because of the moviemaking. Following the screening, Erik Demaine and his father arrived to give a Q&A in conjunction with Jason Ku and Brian Chan, two accomplished Origamit members. At first, no one raised their hands. But it was just shyness. A man broke the ice, and then the questions came in a deluge, driving the discussion for over an hour. We were all so curious; it was impossible not to be. What were the upcoming applications of origami research? What were the most complicated structures ever folded? I asked how they approached designing new origami forms, and they said, "Well... come to club meetings and you will find out!"

If I had the time, I certainly would. I did origami through elementary school, but haven't folded since.

What I can relate to, though, is one thing that struck me in the documentary. The older artists profiled remarked that they now folded much less technically complicated models than they did in their youth, that they sought instead to capture emotion. One man showed how he could add pockets to the jacket of a gnome he folded, a gnome already with expressive facial features, but that it required so many more folds and was ultimately not worth it, meaningless to him. He worried that eventually folding technique would overwhelm the art. That's a common thread through all the arts -- certainly in music. Technique "gets in the way"; that's why my old orchestra conductor had us sing what we wanted naturally, and then surmount the challenge of making our arms, hands, and breath control yield those sounds. There is the old criticism, "he plays too technically, but not musically." The conjunction of art and technique is always the struggle of an artist. But it seems that age and maturity do something to bring out the art, and I wonder what I kind of transformation my playing will undergo through the years.


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Wednesday night, I attended a talk by William Kamkwamba, now christened "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" due to his book of the same title. His visit to MIT was sponsored by D-Lab, which I have been inspired to take sometime in the next two-and-a-half years.

A historically severe famine struck Malawi, William's home country, in 2001, caused by a combination of crop failure and the sale of emergency grain stores by corrupt government officials. Forced to drop out of school, William turned to physics textbooks in English, which he could barely read, and taught himself electromagnetism. He fixed old radios and tinkered. Eventually, he found a book with a picture of a windmill in it, and decided to build one, reasoning that if it was in a book, "somebody, somewhere" must have gotten it to work -- and why not him? Everyone, including his parents, thought he was crazy or on drugs.

He was successful, and after the fame he earned for his windmill, he expanded his efforts to a solar-powered water pump that provided drinking water for his whole village. He built a system of irrigation for his family farmland, so that they can harvest three times a year instead of once.

William was a humorous guy -- listening to his presentation at the TED conference can show you that. I imagine, even in hard times, he could still keep cracking those jokes.

During the talk, I thought, with that kind of engineering inventiveness and buoyant personality, William, in more fortunate circumstances, could have been here at MIT. Easily. I don't think I would have been half as resourceful in his place.

I am so lucky. No matter how bad it gets here, mentally and emotionally -- my life is so good.

In whatever I do, I should give back to those around me, and those who have helped me.


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On Friday night, I saw the movie Lake Tahoe at LSC with Kyle. I don't have much to say for the plot and character development, both average, and the decidedly slow pacing of the film. (The film consisted of numerous shots in which the main character is seen slowly walking from one side of the screen to the other.)

What stood out was the beauty of the cinematography. Every scene would have made a perfect photograph; and even within some scenes, the characters moved in such a way as to constantly make the freeze frame a perfect photograph.

I will say, the slow pacing of the film was effective for its purpose, to make the audience empathize with the waiting that the main character does throughout the film. Watching this movie is not so much entertainment as an experience walking in another person's shoes, and that may well be the director's intent.


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Though these events seemed to be a waste of time before I attended them (before the Origamit screening, I debated going home to do a circuits pset), I'm glad I did go. I've found that being at MIT and constantly hacking away at homework, it's easy to lose sight of both the outside world and that light at the end of the tunnel. A dose of inspiration is priceless, and I will go out of my way to find it.


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(Ruby) Vroom for Hybrid Cars

During the solar car team's wind tunnel trip to Detroit last January, we met up with Ford MIT alumni and hitched a ride in a few of the company's hydrogen fuel cell and hybrid vehicles. They were smooth and very quiet, much more purr than vroom.

But here's a funny engineering design "flaw": though otherwise an asset, the quietness of the vehicles can be a danger when pedestrians can't hear them coming. So, electrics and hybrids may be getting "car tones," sounds that car owners will choose for themselves much as cell phone users choose their ring tones. Pimp your Pruis!

The Civil Heretic - Freeman Dyson

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much," - Walter Lippmann

This article about Freeman Dyson in the New York Times has made me question my thoughts on climate change. Dyson, a notable physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is a a so-called "heretic" for his views on global warming - in particular that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is not really a crisis. He believes that the models built by current climate change scientists have ignored the effect of biology to compensate for excess CO2, and that there is no ideal ecosystem.

Incidentally, this echoes the sentiment of my favorite high school teacher, who taught biology. I used to think he was sage on all topics except for global warming being a big lie. The world is bigger than us, he said. "How dare humans think that they're significant enough to change the earth."

Dyson, though, does recognize specific dangers to the environment, for example ocean acidification as a threat to marine life. His rationale for detracting from global warming is to shift attention to what he sees as more immediate problems, and his science is driven by consideration for the betterment of the human condition. Take his view on coal (granted, with the use of scrubbers to reduce the release of "real pollutants" like soot): "the move of the populations of China and India from poverty to middle-class prosperity should be the great historic achievement of the century. Without coal it cannot happen." But he thinks in about 50 years, "solar energy will become cheap and abundant, and 'there are many good reasons for preferring it to coal'" (qtd. from the article).

Dyson is an individual who stands apart from the crowd, even purposefully avoids it, while also admitting that he could be "dead wrong." He reminds me of Henry David Thoreau's description of "The American Scholar" in his speech of the same title, particularly this passage:

*the American scholar

These being his* functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

This attitude is embodied in Dyson's own words, when he speaks of James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute and a leader in climate change research:

He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgment than knowledge.

Here, Dyson strikes a thought expressed succinctly by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." It's clear from the tone of the article which side of the Dyson/Hansen divide the author is empathetic towards; who is right or wrong remains to be seen. In any case, here we do not have good against evil, but rather, which good? Fortunately, Dyson and Hansen share the common goal of improving the future of humanity. Dyson's important role here has been to question what most people believe, to make them consider possibilities deemed ludicrous and dangerous by conventional wisdom.

Boston Critical Mass

"Every time we choose safety, we reinforce fear." - Cheri Huber



At five o'clock today, I biked to pika, where I met up with Woon to ride over to Copley Square. Passing 77, we picked up another pikan, Suzanne.

Just an hour ago, I had run into a couple of music friends in Building 4 and mentioned I was going on a "bike ride at 5:30," and D. Somach had immediately followed up by asking if it was Boston Critical Mass. He had been a few times himself. "Watch out," he chuckled, "there are a lot of bike messengers and people really into biking - some of them are kind of crazy."

About two hundred bikers were already gathered in front of Trinity Church when we arrived, and more trickled in during the next fifteen minutes. We parked to the side, by the bronze statues of the tortoise and the hare. Looking around, I saw a vast range of riders. Hipster guys in tight skinny jeans. Hippies with long hair. Regular unassuming people. Old friends. New acquaintances of the minute. The crowd was definitely young, though. I recognized MIT students within fifteen feet of me: Wesley from two floors down, and the grad student who had visited SEVT this past Saturday. A farmer's market was set up in the square, bringing a sense of festiveness to the atmosphere. One guy had strapped a resonant plastic container upside-down to the front of his bike, and was banging on it with a stick like a drum.

Around 5:45, riders spontaneously began to ride in a circle in front of Trinity and to whoop. I watched for a few minutes before joining in. When the circle became so dense that it was hard for more riders to join in, people exited the square, pouring onto Boylston St in a massive, traffic-clogging force of nature.

I had read up on the event, but it ended up being much more than I expected. What I interpreted as a relatively civil parade of cyclists turned out to be a spirited protest on wheels. I imagined the event as a parade that would occupy one stretch of road at a time; instead, we started out a moderately dense pack, but soon petered out to a long, long swarm that wove in between lanes of vehicles, paralyzing traffic. I was surprised when we did not stop at our first red light. "Fuck the red light!" someone yelled. Some riders were leaders - they parked themselves in front of traffic at intersections to block any cars that would even attempt to travel through us, and waved us on. "Ride! Ride! RIDE!" they shouted. A chant started up amongst the riders: "Whose streets?" "Our streets!" "Whose streets?" "Our streets!" That chant and "Fuck the red lights!" were repeated often throughout the ride, especially when we passed large intersections. The man with the plastic container drum -- and a clanging cowbell, as it became clear -- rode with one hand and drummed with the other, providing a beat to the people around him.

It was a sight to see. Right in the beginning, maybe four hundred riders, pouring through the streets. A sea of bikes stretched out in front of me and behind. We passed the Common and the Four Seasons Hotel, where valet parkers grinned at us and swanky guests whipped out their cell phones to take pictures. Through Chinatown, where I almost ran into a Chinese lady trying to cross at a crosswalk -- as if this hoard would, or even could, stop for her -- through Government Center, up to the North End, the seaside, then down through Quincy Market -- more cameras here; in fact, cameras everywhere we went -- and then I was lost, separated from Woon and Suzanne. Turning back wasn't an option.

I saw a woman join the group from the sidewalk, and greet a man in front of me. "Hey, just caught you guys!" There was a rollerblader in the group, and a guy riding a "two-story" extra-tall bike. Someone exclaimed, "I'm so glad drum-guy is here!" Some pedestrians on the sidewalks yelled at us, or to us, I couldn't always tell. Some rooted us on; others sounded angry.

I began to feel uncomfortable with what we were doing, though, the farther we went along. So many angry drivers; were we accomplishing anything positive? Were we effectively garnering attention for bicycle rights or more bicycle lanes or whatever (I wasn't even sure what this protest was about), or were we just pissing people off? Then we heard the police sirens. First I saw a police car with flashing lights passing us going the other direction; then one turned to follow us. I rode faster.

Looking at those guys stopping traffic, and hearing the drivers honk back, I could sympathize with the drivers. Friday evening, people were just trying to get home, home to their families, home to Away from Work. A commute out of Boston can be bad enough; did we have to make it worse?

But another part of me couldn't help but think, those guys stopping traffic... are huge badasses. And I thought, those guys must've been like me once, taking this ride for the first time. They probably got the guts to do that over time, with each successive ride.

And then, who were the police going to arrest? Everyone? There were no named leaders of this 'critical mass' - only those riders who stopped traffic, whom most of the rest of us couldn't name. A faceless mass of civilly-disobedient two-wheeled individuals imbued with verve.

I found I was near the front of the pack; and now, forty minutes into the ride, the pack was finally dwindling, with still at least seventy bikers. The level of spirit was tangibly lower than before. I still had no idea where we were, except I'd seen Mass General Hospital a while back. And then we were riding up the ramp of a bridge, which meant, oh good, going to Cambridge. Back home. I knew this bridge. Pedal pedal pedal pedal up to the peak, and then coast coast coast down down to Broadway St. There was a guy next to me, taking this same speedy slide down the hill on a unicycle with an enormous wheel - at least three feet tall. No brakes, no helmet!

About five minutes later, the crowd was headed deeper into Cambridge. People were stopping at red lights now, and it seemed most of the group didn't know the area. "I think people are about ready to call it a day," I heard someone say. "Mass Ave's to the left," I pointed, before turning around. I was going to be a little late for dinner at pika. Still, as bikers saw me passing by in the opposite lane, they shouted to me, "You're going the wrong way!"