The Christmas Spirit

For some reason this year, I am all about Christmas. I bought a wreath and candles about two weeks before Thanksgiving, and that was it. I held off as long as I could, but I had already listened to Mannheim Steamroller and watched Scrooge before the Season had officially begun.

Perhaps I got into it early because in England they don't have Thanksgiving for a buffer. As early as October, shelves are stocked with Christmas crackers (not for eating) and mince pies, and by November the German Christmas Market is up. Sure, there's nothing particularly Christmas-y about a bratwurst to Americans (though it's a tradition I could get behind!), but there was something about it - the little fake cabins with the fake holly - that put me in the Christmas Spirit.

So what the hell is the Christmas Spirit?

Like all good questions, this has many answers. Anyone who celebrates, or lives in a country that celebrates, Christmas could give you their own answer, and these are all fine by me. I could go on about the things I enjoy... dark red and green together, lighting candles, decorating the mantle in just exactly the right way, cuddling by the fire with hot chocolate, listening to Mannheim Steamroller wrapped in the Christmas blanket, smelling the tree... it's about being warm in the middle of the cold, and feeling good for absolutely no reason.

I'm an atheist and I love Christmas. There I said it. And it doesn't bother me one bit that I'm ostensibly supposed to be worshiping the Sun God. (Do you ever use a word without being certain that you're using it in the right way? Ostensibly that's what I just did.) I don't blog about religion as much as I thought I would. Partly because people can get easily offended, but mostly because I don't care what people believe. For questions of spirituality and faith and love, there are no right answers; for questions that deal with the physical world, such as the age of the Earth and biological evolution, we have science.

But these are complicated philosophical issues, and I digress. I've become more interested not in what people believe, but why. Religions weren't created in a vacuum... there are psychological and sociological reasons for why humans believe what they do and behave they way they do, and that shit is fascinating.

It's no coincidence that the primary holiday of the Northern hemisphere is during their winter, the same as it's no coincidence the Christian church eventually chose December the 25th as the birthday of their savior. Yule, Saturnalia, Solstice... of course Jesus is born when the sun is at it's lowest in the sky, for Jesus is the Son and the Sun. The pagan traditions that Christmas adopted, like bringing a pine tree into your house, are a celebration of life in the midst of death. There is no need to celebrate life in Summer when it is all around you; but Winter is the time for endings. The evergreen tree, the birth of Christ, remind us that life will begin again.

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.... let's break the seasons down. You might be thinking that no, Spring is the real time to celebrate life. And you'd be right, too; Easter with its eggs, bunnies, and resurrection celebrates the renewal of life: Spring is the season of Beginnings. Summer follows as the season of Being, and Autumn/Fall as the season of Ending: the trees lose their leaves, and we treasure the last bounty of the harvest.

So where does that leave Winter? What is left after Beginning, Being, and Ending, can only be Non-being. Winter is the season of the Spirit.

The spirit, like the Sun, is constant. The moon symbolizes the cycles of time by its monthly cycle of birth and death, but the sun symbolizes the eternal, which is outside of time. (I will admit that this is from Joseph Campbell, like most of my deep thoughts on symbolism and mythology.) Symbolized by the evergreen tree and the birth of the Sun God, Winter, then, is outside of time; between death and birth; the silence between the sound. Christmas is the time to settle, regroup, reflect, and prepare for the New Year. And eat lots of chocolate.

So that, in a very large nutshell, is what I think about the Christmas Spirit. I didn't even mention how I love the icon and imagery of Santa Clause, with a twinkle in his eye and a deep laugh. To me he is not the fat man in the bright red with white trim, but more of a Mithrandir archetype of the wanderer, doing good where he can, eternally wise and eternally eternal. (Mithrandir is Gandalf, btw. It means the Grey Pilgrim in Sindarin. Do I have to explain everything to you?)

Happy Christmas!

The Philosophy of Cosmology, or: What I Didn't Spend Three Weeks Doing This Summer

Sit a while, and let me tell you a story. About hopes. About fears. About an epic battle between science and philosophy, and a lone blogger caught in the crossfire...

It starts way back in February. There I am, checking Sean Carroll's blog (a cosmologist who regularly blogs about philosophy, i.e. me if I had fame and tenure and was better at blogging), when what do you know, there is a call for applications for a Summer Institute on the Philosophy of Cosmology! My hobby and my day job all rolled up into one!

My first instinct is that I need to apply because Believe in Your Dreams. (Uncertainty Phase 1: Excitement.)

Then after a bit of research, I decide I do not trust the motives of the Templeton Foundation, and I'm not going to get in anyway, so why bother? (Uncertainty Phase 2: Insecurity.)

Uncertainty Phase 3 then slips into cold hard reality...

In tandem with researching the people involved with the Philosophy of Cosmology institute, I watched the Moving Naturalism Forward videos, which seemed the natural thing to do once I was in a philosophical mood. One of the speakers, who was a physicist and is now a philosopher, talks about the practical differences of the two academic fields to emphasize that as a scientist, you just don't have the luxury of taking a broader view and reading literature in related fields - at least not until you go on sabbatical or get old and philosophical! There are teaching duties, overseeing graduate students, solving practical problems in the lab, and writing a ton of grant proposals to occupy your time, and there is only so much time in the day.

The cold hard reality of the situation is that perhaps I don't have the luxury to spend a day thinking about philosophical issues, much less three weeks, because it's normal - even expected - for postdocs to work on weekends. Sure, not all do, and sure, mostly this is my guilt and insecurity about not working enough, but I don't hear faculty talking about how much they slacked off as postdocs. I hear them talk about how much sleep they didn't get. It turns out I love sleep. I also like to pretend to be profound and pretend to be philosophical, but that's not something I should have the time to do as a serious scientist. Crap.

Despite all that, I convince myself (and let friends convince me) to apply anyway. (Uncertainty Phase 4: Action. slash Believe in Your Dreams and Figure Out Later Whether They Are Your Actual Dreams.)

Cut to April, when the most annoying thing happens.

I get in.

Uncertainty Phases 1 through 3 kick in all at once! Of course I'm super excited about getting in, but actually going would mean keeping up with philosophers for three weeks (and actually talking to them! Ahh!)... and then there's the added annoyance that a very relevant conference overlaps with the philosophy institute, and because time only moves in one direction, I can't do both. (WTF, time?)

I almost resolve myself to do it despite my misgivings. Abandon Certainty and Follow Your Bliss and all that. But there's that nagging question of the actually-relevant-to-my-job conference. If you are aware enough to notice things like blog post titles, perhaps you can see where this is going. I get the word from the higher-ups: "if you want a job in astrophysics, go to the science conference. you will be able to do this interdisciplinary stuff once you have a permanent position (if you have time! because no one has time to do anything as a professor, haha!)." I may have paraphrased just a little bit, but the message is clear: scientists are interested in science and nothing else.

Believe in Your Dreams... Later.

This signaled to me that the paranoia behind why I don't have my full name on here or link here from my actual website turned out to be justified. Perhaps I didn't intentionally plan it that way, but at some point I realized that I definitely don't want potential employers to read this blog. First, some would see it as indicating that I'm not serious about science, or think that blogging takes away from time better spent doing research. If this blog were only about science, that would probably be okay - but most of the time I would rather talk about "somethingness" and "nothingness" and "wait what does that even mean?"

Which brings me to my second point: I sometimes write about personal shit and sometimes write about Chakras and sometimes mention how time is an illusion or discuss the unity of duality. Who would hire a scientist who doesn't believe in time? (Of course, I do, really, insofar as "believing in time" is even a useful concept... and of course I don't literally think that chakras are pools of energy in the body that we can open by meditation and yoga... but metaphors are useful and logic can be boring!) Not only am I philosophical, but I have weird ideas...

In hindsight, the science conference did turn out to be very worth it and good for my research/career. Also, as a bonus, the philosophy of cosmology lectures were all put online and seem to be mostly on topics in which I'm not particularly interested... not that it wouldn't have been awesome, but the actual awesomeness level of counterfactuals is impossible to determine. (Again, unidirectional time. What a let-down.) Anyway, another philosophy of cosmology opportunity may come again, and meanwhile maybe I will write about the Copernican vs. Cosmological Principles and how no one understands them because cosmologists are bad at philosophy.

I guess the moral of the story is: Believe in Your Dreams Even If You Don't Necessarily Follow Them All the Time.

I was sat

I've now been in England for one year. Somehow I survived. Perhaps made easier by smuggling brownie mix and Nestle chocolate chips across the border, and by having access to US TV-on-the-internet, I managed to make it through an entire year in the UK. There are many things I could write about living here, but on reflection, nothing made me want to write a blog post until considering the oft heard phrase "I was sat there."

I could, for example, talk about the food. I could wax poetic about a midnight kebab, discuss the subtle lack of any flavor in fish & chips, relate the militant loyalty the English show to their English curry, or express my deep wish that more steak dinners could be had in pie form. But no, nothing makes me realize I'm in a foreign country more than ordering food from a pub and being asked, "Where are you sat at?" I've been here long enough to be used to it, but the briefest pause must have prompted a follow-up: "Where are you sitting?" Ah, that's better.

I could talk about the other funny things they say. An elevator is a lift and an apartment is a flat, and all that... but you've most likely heard that before. I could mention some less well-known and certainly more important translations, like pants are trousers and undies are pants. Exits are ways out and "for here" is have in and "to go" is take away, etc.... all these appear on a running list I started long ago of the unique things you hear on this side of the pond, but top of the list is "I'm sat there."

I could discuss the finer points of how to describe someone you don't particularly like or aren't happy with. What is the distinction between wanker, tosser, and knob? What is the equivalent of asshole, douchebag, and jerk? What is the difference between an American twat (pronounced like swat) and an English twat (pronounced like bat)? (I apologize if you've sat through this blog post only to be offended by my language, but note that I didn't say "if you've been sat," which would be far more offensive to my ears.)

Or perhaps I could try to describe the taste of English "Real Ales," the coziness of an English pub, the smell... there's certainly a lot I could say about that. Pints are larger, and ales are indeed warm and flat to American tastes, but I haven't quite managed to figure out the precise way in which "this ale is quite nice" becomes "I would kill for a Sam Adams" in just a few months. From not knowing the difference between ale and lager, I now appreciate the bounty of American craft-brewed beers, without the hampering "purity standards" that make most European lagers taste exactly the same. But when experiencing these nuanced, beer-hazed musings on a typical Friday pub night, I might be jarred out of my reverie by someone complaining how they "were stood there for an hour" to the realization that no, I am not at home. The people here are different.

Every time I hear something like that, I can't help but wondering, "By whom?"

Look, I'm not a prescriptivist. I care about grammar because it's like the algebra of sentences, and algebra is fun, but I'm sure there's nothing grammatically incorrect with saying "I was sat there" instead of "I sat there" or "I was sitting there." (Yes that's right, algebra is fun!) To me, it seems like "I was sat" implies an unspecified subject - like, for example, "Grandpa sat me down to tell me how the world works." In this case Grandpa is the subject and "I" is the object, and "I was sat and told how the world works" is just refusing to acknowledge Grandpa, the subject. So when people here "were sat at a train station eating a vindaloo pasty," I know, deep in my heart, that "vindaloo pasty" should be the most English thing in that sentence, but I just can't get over the grammar.

So, I have been in England for a year. I've been to Stonehenge, Edinburgh, and London. I traipsed across the South Downs and had an English breakfast in an Oxford college. I was jammy to find a nice gaffe in under a fortnight, and have an app to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. But you will never hear the phrase "and I'm sat there" cross my lips, (unless ironically), because I am an American.

Cheers, Ta, Thank you very much indeed!

Nautilus

I'm in love with this new magazine, Nautilus. It is named after "a remarkable intersection of science, math, myth, and culture", a mollusk with a fractal logarithmic spiral in its shell. First of all, I love logarithms! In a weird cosmic synchronicity, the random (from a list of names?) band name given to me in Rock Band was "Just a Matter of Logarithms" and you'd better believe I kept it. Second of all, I love science, math, myth, AND culture! I love all of those things! So I was pretty excited to find out about this magazine.

The first article I read, I chose because of the title, "Metaphors Are Us". (I love metaphors!) I was fascinated to find out how metaphors, empathy, morality, and neurology all come together in a beautiful and complicated mess of humanity. Our ability to feel empathy, to connect to someone else's pain and feel it ourselves, relates to very specific functions of the brain:

While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too.

Humans also appear to abstract disgust as well as pain. The insula, which processes gustatory disgust in all mammals (to make us spit out poison, for example), also activates when we think about some shameful thing we did. This "moral disgust" also relates to humans as social creatures:

Many cultures inculcate their members into acquiring symbols that repel, doing so by strengthening specific neural pathways from the cortex to the insula, pathways that you’d never find in another species. Depending on who you are, those pathways could be activated by the sight of a swastika or of two men kissing. Or perhaps by the thoughts of an abortion, or of a 10-year-old Yemeni girl forced to marry an old man. Our stomachs lurch, and we feel the visceral certainty of what is wrong. And we belong.

That beautiful paragraph makes me want to read more by the article's author, Robert Sapolsky.

I haven't finished Issue 1 yet because I was distracted by Issue 0, which I got around to reading today. I probably won't write about all of the issues, but here are more reasons I love Nautilus:

In one article, I learn that music is fractal, and so is a coastline!A fractal pattern looks the same on large scales as it does on small ones; put another way, the parts of a fractal system look similar to the entire system. I'm not entirely sure how music is fractal, but it's still cool!

In another article, I get some fascinating insight into psychological epistemology:

According to Rolf Reber, a psychologist at the University of Bergen, in Norway, “there is growing empirical evidence that people use a common source for evaluations of both beauty and truth.” The source he refers to is processing fluency, the state of being able to easily parse and understand a situation. Essentially, the more easily we can get a handle on a situation (because it’s mathematically simple, we’ve seen it many times before, it’s symmetrical, etc.), the more likely it is to seem right.

This explains so much about people and why they believe what they do! (I have just now decided to call this psychological epistemology. It probably already has a more appropriate and boring name like the "psychology of belief" but... boring.)

So anyway, this is very fascinating for psychological epistemology: the easier something is for us to understand, the more likely we will accept it as true. Simple and elegant solutions just seem right. Things that don't make "horse sense" are met with skepticism. And when we hear something over and over again it becomes much easier to believe, even when it has no relation to reality. (I'm glaring meaningfully in your direction, Fox "News"....)

A third article had me at its title, "Where Science and Story Meet", because I've been wanting to read "The Storytelling Animal" but it's not at my local bookstore. The article was not quite what I expected, but that's good; if I only ever learned what I expected to learn, then I probably wouldn't actually learn very much. Anyway, the unexpected thing I learned was that

The pleasurable feeling that our explanation is the right one—ranging from a modest sense of familiarity to the powerful and sublime “a-ha!”—is meted out by the same reward system in the brain integral to drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions. 

Not only are humans good at pattern recognition, but figuring out the pattern produces happy chemicals in the brain! Solving that equation, putting that jigsaw piece in the right place, or hearing someone else tell you something you already know is true - putting things together into a coherent story - makes us feel good, while not solving that equation or puzzle, or having a friend present you with facts that contradict your beautiful story, makes us hate math and angry at our friends. This pretty much explains why I like to do jigsaw puzzles when I'm stressed, and adds to theories I have about the psychology of gaming. (Or maybe theories other people have that I've read...)

There's more Nautilus to read, and learn and think about, but this story is over for now!

Quiet

I got the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking for Christmas, and honestly I wasn't expecting that much. I had seen her TED talk and thought it was great, but I couldn't imagine how she would fill a whole book. Introverts are awesome, and everyone needs to calm down and stop talking so much - got it. What else is there to say?

As you may have guessed from the fact that I am blogging about it at all, it turns out it had some pretty interesting and unexpected things to say! I highly recommend the book to anyone who is an introvert, or an extrovert who knows introverts, or a parent of a quiet child, or a human being.

One of the more interesting things I learned was about the neuroscience behind temperament, and relatedly, why oral exams are a horrible way to judge knowledge and intelligence. If I could have told my examiners, "Look, I am a 'high-reactive' type of person, which means my amygdala goes into high gear in stimulating situations like being around people and trying new things, so in these situations my neocortex is spending considerable effort to soothe my amygdala, thus interfering with my ability to speak on the fly and 'think on my feet', so kindly bugger off, and anyway what does thinking on your feet have to do with being a good scientist, aren't good results obtained with careful diligence and error-catching?!".... then perhaps I could have saved myself a few years of stress and anxiety. But somehow I don't think it would have gone over too well. Luckily, giving scientific talks has none of the stress-inducing JUDGMENT of exams, and I usually eat some dark chocolate right before speaking. (To stimulate the release of dopamine, of course.)

I interpreted this part of the book as an explanation for why mantras work. Specifically, this quote:

In fact, a recent fMRI study shows that when people use self-talk to reassess upsetting situations, activity in their prefrontal cortex increases in an amount correlated with a decrease of activity in their amygdala. (p. 118)

Fear is a pretty basic emotion governed by the primitive part of the brain, but we can learn to get over it by activating our powerful front brain. However, the fear response of the amygdala never goes away completely, so when the cortex is otherwise occupied, such as in stressful situations, we may find that we do not have our shit together as much as we thought we did. Shit.

"Quiet" covers the basics of introversion/extroversion for people who spend too much time at parties to learn about this fundamental aspect of human personality. (JUST KIDDING extraverts, I love you! but seriously pick up a book sometime okay?) It dispels myths about introverts, such as they are always shy and depressed - though this awesome cartoon might be the best explanation of introversion. "Quiet" also talks about related aspects of temperament like sensitivity (though 30% of sensitive types are extraverts if I remember correctly), which describes people who are "keen observers" who "have difficulty when being observed or judged", "tend to be philosophical" and "dislike small talk", and who "feel exceptionally strong emotions" and "process information about their environments unusually deeply." (p. 136) Does that sound like someone you know?

There are a bunch of other insights that could be drawn from the book, from politics to the media to religion to business to education to relationships.... basically, anything that involves people, because people are either introverts or extraverts or both. So that pretty much covers everything.

But you don't have to take my word for it! Go read it yourself! If you want to. Or you can just take my word for it. It really doesn't matter either way. Do whatever you want! Just calm down.

Nostalgia

At some point in my young adult life, I vaguely remembered a story that was a favorite of mine as a kid and couldn't for the life of me remember what it was. I knew it contained a lion at the end, who perhaps lived in a castle. I suspected it was in a book at Grandma's house, but she had given those away long ago.

I desperately wanted to find this story again, but why? Sure, a lion living in a castle sounds pretty cool, but it wasn't the coolness of the story I cared about. There might not even be any castle! (I was pretty sure about the lion.) It was something about the almost but not quite remembering - the hope that finding this story would unlock a wave of nostalgia that I was robbed of, because I couldn't be nostalgic for something I couldn't even remember.

Many years later, after my nephew was born, I had an excuse to buy children's books. (One copy for myself, one for him!) I found an illustrated copy of the Winnie-the-Pooh books and HAD to buy the DVD of the old cartoons - I had to clarify my vague memories of them getting lost in the woods, and of Tigger getting stuck in the tree. When I would visit and everyone else was tired of watching Winnie-the-Pooh, I would make them put it on, because obviously the DVD was a gift to myself.

When these relics of childhood are found again, they become more than they are. They are valued for their association with happy memories and being a kid, not for themselves. Let's face it, being a kid is pretty awesome! There's something about the initial remembering - the theme song of old cartoons, an image from a story book - that just makes us happy, no matter how stupid the book or bad the cartoon. If we hadn't watched Legend all the time as kids I seriously doubt that I would love it so much now. But now, I can say with certainty that it is objectively one of the best movies of all time. (Scientific fact.)

Eventually, buying Christmas presents for my nephew led me to stumble across Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever containing, you guessed it, my long lost favorite story: "Is This the House of Mistress Mouse?" (Spoiler: the lion's castle house was not her house!) On top of that, there were so many other stories and images that I didn't even know that I forgot! I try to read them to my nephew even if he thinks they're boring. But I suppose he is creating his own set of things to forget, to one day half-remember. I hope there's lots.

When I was reminded of Winnie-the-Pooh today, I sort of thought about writing a blog post about the philosophy in the books, but I ended up writing something else (and it turns out someone else has written that already...) Instead I will end with one of many deep and profound Pooh quotes:

“I do remember, and then when I try to remember, I forget.”

The Universe at Large

In the early days of the universe - back when it was merely a few hundred thousand years old - there was hardly any structure. The universe had just gotten out of it's "plasma" phase, a frantic and excited phase of its youth in which it was so hot and dense that light could not move around without running into electrons. This means it looked pretty much the same everywhere, a property we call homogeneous and isotropic. (Yes, the technical definition of homogeneity is "looking pretty much the same everywhere".)

Luckily there were very tiny deviations - a bit more stuff here, a bit less there - that grew over time under the influence of gravity to form structures. These tiny fluctuations were precisely measured first by COBE and then WMAP, and today Planck has joined in with the most precise measurements yet.

The Planck microwave background sky

I say luckily because if the universe were completely smooth, it would not have been able to form galaxies or planets and we would not exist! This evolution from smooth to structured is driven by the gravitational clumping of "dark matter", which makes up most of the mass in the universe but cannot be seen by our telescopes. Instead, we infer its existence through the effect it has on the movements of stars and gas via gravity.

The problem with trying to understand the universe on large scales is that there is only one. We can't move to a different place billions of light years away to view it from a different location, and we can't create a new universe to study how it evolves. Instead, cosmologists in my field (also known as "large scale structure") rely on computer simulations that solve the complex nonlinear equations of gravity for different cosmological models. These models can then be tested by putting galaxies in the dark matter halos and comparing the simulations to observations.

The results of one such simulation can be seen in an interactive browser that lets you zoom in and out on a slice through a very large simulation box. The yellow parts are the high density regions and the dark matter "halos" that in our real universe host galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Also visible are the filaments that connect the clusters and the low-density voids in between, all together beautifully representing what we call the "cosmic web" of large scale structures.




This simulation is called Millennium XXL because it is very large - almost the size of the entire observable universe! I say "observable" because light takes time to travel to us, so the farther away galaxies are the longer it takes for their light to reach us. The amount of the universe that we can ever possibly hope to observe is limited by the distance that light can travel over the age of the universe, starting from the smooth, "plasma" phase mentioned earlier until it reaches us today. The Planck satellite has measured that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, or 13,800,000,000 years!

In the interactive browser, the numbers in the bottom right box give you the astrophysical scale of the image in units of Mpc/h, or co-moving Megaparsecs, which divides out the effect of the universe's expansion. This unit is useful to express the distance between galaxies, whereas the size of our Milky Way galaxy is about one thousand times smaller (kpc) and the distance to the nearest stars is about a million times smaller (pc). You can zoom in all you want, but galaxies would still be too small to be resolved.

Have fun zooming in and out, scanning around for interesting structures, and be sure to make it full screen! If you find something cool, you can right click to save a snapshot image (as I did above).

Chavs

After reading "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class" by Owen Jones, I felt like to do it justice would require a researched college-style essay instead of a blog post. Not gonna happen! So go read it! It was a great book, and at the same time I learned a little bit about UK politics and history.

But even though I won't write an essay, I've made some notes about the pages I marked while reading. Also, most of the social commentary applies in some way to the dialogue going on in America around class, but of course there are important differences... someone should write a book about that. (Or a college-style essay!)

Racism bad, Sexism bad, Classism funny!
"Chav" is a derogatory term in the UK for working-class people. The closest thing I can relate it to in US terms is "white trash" - though of course one of the things that struck me while reading this book is that there is no derogatory term for poor people in the US that isn't also about race. (So we have that going for us?) The chav stereotype is of an uneducated young street thug wearing "Burberry" or other bling; laziness, drunkenness, violence, teenage pregnancies, racism, etc. are all traits associated with chavs. Literally the term comes from the Romany word for child, 'chavi', though people often associate the term with acronyms like 'Council Housed And Violent'. Another US analogy is needed here: council housing can be considered a nicer, British version of the projects... plus without the guns.

Jones opens the book with an anecdote: he was at a dinner party with educated, middle-class, liberal friends, and yet someone cracked a joke about chavs and everyone laughed. Why has it become okay to make fun of poor people? Why are there TV shows in the UK devoted to this very thing? I think this all hinges on the popular notion that class is a choice, or a result of your choices, as opposed to things like your race or your gender, which you are born with. This is a ridiculous and upside-down idea in the face of all the data about upward mobility (i.e. the lack thereof). But if being poor is your own fault, then it's okay to make fun of you for it, and not feel guilty. Game on!

There are probably other psychological things going on though that explain why people would rather believe people are poor entirely because of their choices than that education, race, gender, parental income, the structure of society, etc. have a huge impact on your life. Part of the story is perhaps that believing that the disadvantaged deserve what they get makes it easier for the wealthy to think they are entirely responsible for their own wealth ("I BUILT IT!!!!"), rather than accepting that they were dealt a good hand and used it well.

What is the working class?
"Interestingly, more people in Britain call themselves working class now than did in 1950," despite Tony Blair's insistence that "we're all middle class now." Stock-brokers "ask with faux puzzlement: 'I work, don't I? So why aren't I working class?'" A childhood friend which Jones considered indisputably working class "felt that being working class meant being poor, while being middle class meant being educated." (p. 141)

I think the last quote is why I marked this page. Also, after reading the entire book, I'm still not entirely certain what is meant by working-class. Maybe it just sounds better than "lower-class" (after all, we have "middle" and "upper").

The lack of upward class mobility scapegoated by the lack of aspiration
A common criticism of the working-class (I might just start calling it "victim-blaming") is that they have no aspiration - that they could make their lives better but they just don't care enough to try. Jones interviews Liam, who came from a working-class background: "I literally didn't know what university was, aged sixteen. University, to be honest, was kind of where posh people go!... It's just not what we do, it's just not on the radar... You can only ever really aspire to something if you know it and understand it." (p. 174-175)

I thought the last bit was incredibly profound. How can we expect poor people to work really hard (and spend a lot of money that they don't have... at least that's how it works in America) to get a University education when they have no frame of reference for such an aspiration? Especially now when a college degree is often a ticket to live with your parents in your early 20s rather than a ticket to a good job? In poor communities in the US, the most that kids have to aspire to is to work at McDonald's and not get shot. These are the kinds of things they can point to as attainable goals. These are the jobs they are trained for with what our education system is providing them.

The "get a job" argument, i.e. "try harder," i.e. "it's your fault you're poor"
Perhaps this is just a variant of the above "victim-blaming" excuse, both of which stem from the assumption that people have complete and total control over their own lives no matter what... But as it turns out, in the UK "the majority of people living in poverty actually have a job." New Labour (close enough to Democrats) attempted to tackle this problem, but they did it by "allowing the market to run amok," according to Jones. A Labour MP (Congressperson) describes this as introducing tax credits and redistributing wealth by forcing people into the lowest paid jobs: "In that way, you become the guilty person if you can't afford to dig yourself out of poverty. There's a Victorian, patronizing attitude towards working people." All the while, the minimum wage has been allowed to become less and less meaningful. (p. 201-202)

If there were one word to describe the 'chav' stereotype, patronizing would be it.

Chavs are all racist idiots who blame immigrants for their problems
If Children of Men taught me anything, it's that the British hate immigrants. The British National Party (one of those minor Nth parties that other democracies have) represents those sentiments. Hackney (a town? a part of London? something like that...) got a lot of votes in the 70s for the National party, but more recently they got virtually none, which a former London mayor thinks is because "you tend to get a problem of racism in an area undergoing transition." Very insightful! Jones goes on: "Hackney is one of the most mixed areas in the country, and as a result the far right has died out there." (The U.S. analogy is major cities, which are the most diverse and the most Democratic.) "But it [far right/BNP] flourishes in areas... where mass immigration is a new phenomenon... or, conversely, where there is very little immigration but a tremendous fear of it." Additionally "liberal multiculturalism has understood inequality purely through the prism of race, disregarding that of class." This is also what we often do in the U.S. but with good reason; however, in the UK, the white majority is a real 90% majority (which I learned from this book). (p. 224-225)

If you are middle-class and don't exactly have swimming pools filled with gold, you are probably worried about sending your kids to college and saving for retirement. It may seem unfair that some people are getting help from the government. You might have some reasonable things to say about that. BUT, it may seem even more unfair if those people getting help don't look like you. (I'm saying this simply as a statement of human nature and not a moral judgment.) "Why do they get handouts just because they are minorities?" is unfortunately something that real people say. It doesn't help that "affirmative action" policies in the UK are called "positive discrimination" (!!), but I will have to leave that discussion to future work.

A new sense of aspiration
"The new aspiration must be about improving people's communities and bettering the conditions of the working class as a whole, rather than simply lifting able individuals up the ladder." (p. 258)

Word.

The Universe is Void

While waiting for my sister to once again find the time to create artful interpretations of awesome facts about the universe, I inadvertently made art at work!

Most of the universe is void, containing not much matter and very few galaxies.

This is a thin slice through a simulation that calculates the evolution of dark matter particles under gravity as the universe expands. The big, colorful points are void particles, with different colors representing different voids; these are plotted over little black points of wall, filament, and halo particles that represent the collapsed structures in the universe. The voids, instead of collapsing to form stuff (i.e. galaxies form in the dark matter halos), are regions of space that matter flows away from because they are less dense than their surroundings.

It turns out that voids occupy most of the volume of the universe, perhaps around 90%, while only containing perhaps 30% of the mass. These numbers depend on the physics of structure formation, including whether Einstein's general relativity theory is correct on large scales. But they also depend on how you define a void and so could change depending on whom you ask on what day of the week. Researchers in my field are slowly converging on the best ways of defining voids in both simulations of dark matter and observations of galaxies.

So if you are wondering what I do, now you know: I study the large-scale structure of the universe, and I make art.

The Fact of the Matter

"The Fact of the Matter" by Sally Keith:

Industry sprang up.
Orange flowers surrounded the metallic poles.
The statue was a painted hawk with outstretched wings.
Sun beams spread out on wall-sized panes.
Two knights in armor were shown on the door.
People believed in me when I opened my coat.
An origami cat.
The poem a great gray wall.
The wall the softest kind of sheet.
Cosmos clustered in the median strip.
Soft pink slowed the city's strong wind.
The cosmos' stems shone electric green.
Elsewhere out flew a couple of cranes.
A beautiful boy into the velvet curtains pressed.
The stage barest black.
The hills behind it backlit, gold-rimmed.
A woman steps out and opens her hand.
Why do you weep? I ask.
She only unfurls her fingers to offer some seed.
She only bends her knees.
The world is the same. The world is the same.
The long green reeds will remain.
The wind inside is softly carving its name.

No commentary, I just enjoyed this poem - another from the PBS Newshour blog. You can watch the author read it here.

Happiness

Please remember this for me: If you don’t
have happiness in the present moment, there
is no way to have happiness in the future.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

A friend of mine posted this quote (with a picture of jumping happy people!), but instead of appreciating the sentiment and moving on, I am taking this opportunity to delve into the meaning of happiness. 

What is the sound of one hand being happy?

As most people would agree, "happiness" is a pleasant emotional state. I bring this up because below, I will suggest that there are better interpretations, or perhaps better words, in this context. For now, though, using the definition that 99% of readers will use, then on the surface, this seems like a pretty standard inspirational quote from a Zen master. Be happy now. Stop trying to be happy in the future. Take this opportunity to enjoy the life you are living. That's one way to interpret it... go jump around and be happy!

But because it is Zen inspiration, there is far more to it than appears on the surface. "If you aren't happy in the present, you will not be happy in the future"... well, that actually sounds pretty grim! The burden of happiness is laid heavy, and there is an implication of immense pressure: this is it, be happy now! If you aren't happy it's you're own fault and you will never be happy. Literally, that is what the quote is saying. But luckily that's just another way to interpret it, and literal interpretations are lame and boring and very un-Zen-like.

I would say that both of those are wrong, or at least only partly right. The first interpretation, positive and light, is correct in that happiness happens in the present moment. The second, with its Zen disregard for making sense, is correct in that happiness never happens in the future. You could substitute "happiness" with anything else and these would still be true. When things happen, they are in the present, and never the future. The future doesn't exist, and neither does the past, so how could you expect to be happy in the future? There is only now.

Therefore, if you aren't happy now, you will never be happy. The Zen thing to realize is that now is a constantly changing moment that each individual experiences in different ways as the Universe moves through time. Now is always. Then is merely what you remember, or what you anticipate or worry about. Basically, the quote is saying, "don't worry, be happy." (Now you have that song in your head. You're welcome.)

Be happy, or else.

The problem is this: I fully get behind the "don't worry" aspect of the quote, but not the "be happy" part; I reject the presumption that happiness is somehow the goal in life. Most people take this happiness goal as given. Various forms of "wisdom", whether religious, philosophical, or colloquial, are interpreted as ways of living that maximize happiness. And, if you are not happy, then something is wrong either with you or with your life situation, so one of those should change until you are happy all the time. Be happy now sounds nice, but it is a meaningless burdensome thing to say to a sad person.

Perhaps Thich Nhat Hanh only said "happiness" to be generally understood, because I think there is a deeper wisdom to be learned that the idea of happiness clouds. Happiness is just the other side of sadness, and vice versa, each meaningless without the other. Striving for happiness invariably strives against sadness, puts this ahead of that, whereas the experience of being human involves both. Fighting sadness thus fights the full expression of who you are in the moment. Here, too, the trick is not wallowing in past sadness or imagining future sadness. The trick, in my opinion, is not to be happy now, but to be here now.

When we get down to it perhaps we don't want to be happy. Perhaps what we want is meaning. Some substance to our lives that stitches it in with the rest of Life so that we feel alive. No one wants to be sad, but if we were happy all the time how would we grow? Why would we ever change anything? What would be the point? (Though, maybe realizing this would instantly trigger sadness, proving that it is not possible to be happy all the time, thereby solving the momentary existential crisis and restoring a feeling of well-being.... paradox averted!)

I might even go so far as to say that society's preoccupation with happiness is damaging, in the long run - that trying to be happy now will actually reduce future happiness. For example, it has been conclusively shown with sarcasm that listening to NPR makes people sad:

NPR is committed to delivering the news, and the news is not good. Whether they're reporting on corporate greed, school shootings, religious extremists, or a grossly over-entitled populace, it's hard to listen to public radio and not come to the conclusion that we're all just completely and totally screwed.

I believe that it is vitally important to pay attention to what's going on in the world, and that if we as a society continue to ignore things that we don't want to hear, we are lost. But that doesn't mean we should listen to the news and be sad. We should listen to the news and do what we can to make things better, and not worry about not being able to fix everything all at once. Don't worry, and listen to the news. But that somehow doesn't sound inspirational.

Be in the moment, or else.

 "We're often happiest when we're lost in the moment" seems obvious to me, but it was "among the surprising results" of this TED talk. Another talk says "flow" is the secret to happiness, when the "sense of time disappears" and you "forget yourself," which to me is the same as being lost in the moment. And yet these discussions are still framed in terms of how to achieve happiness. Being lost in the moment, forgetting yourself... how can you be happy if there is no you?

I don't think the experiences those talks describe actually amount to happiness, but that we lack a better word. I like to think of it as the intense experience, with full awareness, of the present moment... but that is tedious. Joe Campbell might call it "the rapture of being alive" and that is good too, but it sounds like an even more pleasurable state of happiness. (Happiness +1.) Being in the moment is beyond happiness or sadness, but even describing it that way is just moving the target. (If you are not beyond happiness and sadness now, you will never be...)

Despite all my above words, I don't have anything against happiness. My issue here is with happiness as a goal, because my issue is with any goal at all. Goals are things to be had in the future, and I think the real wisdom in the quote that started all this is the insight into the nature of time: now is all there is. Or put another way, from the pages of Dune and one of my own personal mantras:

Eternity is now.

Open Spaces

THE ROCK

Burger King sat on top
of the sky
today.

A fugitive rock tried to speak
to the asphalt,
but the asphalt like a traumatized child
said nothing
and the rock died.

We were really stressed out
until we heard the rock speak.
The pine trees had a few things to say
that also quieted our nervous hearts.

They said, "Listen, be still."
And the rock answered,
"You're telling me."

But the hummingbirds and the crows
were living on top of Burger King,
singing a song of sadness.

~ Albert Markovski, fictional poet and community organizer

Today I am really glad that my favorite DVD was recovered from the clutches of HM Revenue and Customs. To celebrate I am sharing some poems! Here is another:

Nobody sits like this rock sits.

You rock, rock.

The rock just sits and is.

You show us how to just sit here
and that's what we need.

~ Albert Markovski of the Open Spaces Coalition

I could say something serious about the actual loss of our open spaces all over the world, but that would be a drag. Plus there are worse things to be bummed about.

Like a dialysis machine to keep us alive in this horrible hell we call earth that we seem to be so proud has evolved from the dinosaurs to our "higher" species when in fact, as with the dinosaurs, it has always been a wretched carnival of violence, consumption, suffering, and survival. Shall we talk about war? Children losing limbs or eyes? Don't feel like it? I didn't think so. Why would you? It is an unbearable drag, all of it. How about your boring job?

~ Caterine Vauban, fictional philosopher, French

Somethingness.... Nothingness.... I guess if I want to talk about actual nothingness I could get back to studying the distribution of voids in the large-scale structure of the universe. Open Spaces indeed! To end on a more positive note, here is another quote from my favorite DVD booklet:

There is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity.

~ Bernard Jaffe, existential detective

Epistemology and the Media

A while ago I saw the documentary "Manufacturing Consent" about Noam Chomsky and recorded some thoughts as it was playing. Watch it yourself if you can, though it is rather long and rather old, or you can trust that my interpretation is a faithful representation of its main ideas - but be aware that these are not epistemically equal!

One of Chomsky's main tenets is that the media deceives and indoctrinates the public (though individuals in the media aren't consciously deceptive, and I think this is a misconception by critics). Anyway, soon in the documentary I realize that why I'm drawn to this subject and why I think it's so important is because I'm fascinated by epistemology, which is the study (or philosophy) of how we obtain knowledge. The dissemination of (mis)information through the media is another example of a process by which people learn about the world and how that information becomes biased, and how they come to believe things that aren't true. This is a lot of what fascinates me about politics, sociology, and religion, and as a scientist this is also what I'm interested in - not discovering the next big weird thing about the universe, but aiding the process by which that discovery can be made.

Process is important. Learning isn't about collecting facts, as if they're shells on the beach waiting to be picked up. The process by which one obtains information says everything about the quality, and even veracity, of that information. It is also important to be aware that you will never know all the facts about a situation. Most are buried beneath the sea, and the ones in view depend on where you are along the beach.

What follows is disjointed snippets of commentary, but hopefully not incredibly confusing to follow.

--

I like that Chomsky is a linguist. Tolkien was a linguist. I love languages and grammar but have never put in the effort to learn another language. (No, not even Elvish.)

... and then he said anarcho-syndicalism was the optimal way to structure societies and for some reason that is associated with Monty Python... yup, found it. Enjoy.

--

Is the "sinister view" of the media's control of information insulting the intelligence of those who consume the news? No. I think it's merely a description of how people think and judge and collect information, which is more often than not in a quick and inherently biased way. This is why understanding unconscious bias is so important to understanding discrimination - because people are often not meaning to discriminate, but merely making judgements they way they usually do when faced with little information, which is to resort to stereotypes and untested assumptions...

--

"More terrifying than the occasional Hitler..." is the "equanimity and the detachment" of observers...

This is quite a statement, but I think I might have to agree. Think about it in terms of the Sandy Hook school shooting (which happened after I saw this documentary, btw). How much more horrible would that have been if people had not been shocked by it, had not been deeply affected? As horrible as the daily atrocities which we ignore. As of this writing, there have been 489 gun deaths in the U.S. since the school shooting. The occasional tragedy shocks us and may start a dialog about aspects of our society, but if we remain detached we will continue to allow tragedies to happen. Why doesn't the nightly news say, "There were 15 gun deaths on January 3rd, 15 on the 2nd, and 39 on the 1st day of the year." Why don't we demand it to?

--

Media presentation of gulf war: "This is the people's war," so you need to know everything you can about it... i.e. we are going to war, there's no discussion to the contrary, we will help you deal with it. I remember MSNBC playing in the common area of my college residence hall with the title "Countdown to Iraq" on the bottom... the media just getting people used to the fact that we will go to war, neglecting their duty to inform people of the consequences, to question critically the politician's agenda, the evidence for WMD, etc...

--

This documentary is pretty old (1992) so it's talking about alternative media in terms of magazines, publishers, and radio instead of THE INTERNET i.e. blogs. But even back then, and more so now, it seems there is soooo much information out there - how does one take seriously the job of self-education and learning about the world when there is so much out there and hey I've been thinking all day I'd much rather watch TV ??

I wish I had an answer for that question.