Where literature comes in

Sometimes as a scientist, you wonder if literature has anything really important to say that science won't be able to answer given adequate time, resources and techniques. Can everything be reduced to some laws, even they are quantum or probabilistic ones? Experiments in giant fMRI machines are showing which areas of the brain are responsible for what affective qualities in decision making. While we still try to understand these phenomena literature fills that void. That void is literature's essential subject matter.

More from Menand's piece on Lionel Trilling:

In Trilling’s view, the faith that liberals share, whether they are Soviet apologists, Hayekian free marketers, or subscribers to Partisan Review, is that human betterment is possible, that there is a straight road to health and happiness. A liberal is a person who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, and the right psychotherapy will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy. The argument of “The Liberal Imagination” is that literature teaches that life is not so simple — for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject matter. In Trilling’s celebrated statement: “To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance . . . because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” This is why literary criticism has something to say about politics.

What kind of liberal are you?

From Menand's piece on Lionel Trilling:

" ... As a matter of political theory, very different types of liberals. There is, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, the liberal who believes in negative liberty, “freedom from,” and the liberal who believes in positive liberty, “freedom for.” There is the classical liberalism of free markets and individual rights, and the left liberalism of state planning and class solidarity..."

I consider myself a liberal. Now what kind is a difficult question. I am wrestling with the idea of positive or negative liberalism. At the same time, I believe that the labels 'positive' and 'negative' are unfortunate as they seem to connote that negative liberalism is lesser than positive liberalism. It easier to think of them simply as labels and focus on the question.

What if I believed in both kinds of freedom, does that make me a positively negative liberal?

The truth about bags and bags

Interestingly, today's WSJ reported on the topic of the last post - reusable or not. Of course, the chief issue is about learning to change behavior. Unless the shops themselves don't raise the bar on the bags, or in the absence of legislation there is a great tendency to slide into the convenience of the plastic bag.

There are bags and then there are bags. A high-end designer made these bags that are cool, but completely impractical unable to store anything other than a head of a lettuce.

It was rather sobering to note that I would have to first use my reusable bag a number of times before I start reaping the green benefits. In the short term at least, my house is relatively clear of plastic bags and I am happier for it. There were about 100 billion, yet 100 billion plastic bags used.

The Price of Convenience

Two weeks ago, we decided to stop using plastic or paper bags from the grocery store. We got some nice, sturdy, reusable bags that are relatively inexpensive from the grocery store.

Current behavior
Our behavior was to make a list, jump into the car and tear halfway through Ann Arbor to the grocery store. Then laden with about a dozen plastic bags we trudged back to our car. In contrast, I always remember my mother taking a large bag before she went grocery shopping. Grocers in India expect you to show up with your own bag. Of course, that has changed over the years and plastic bags are available everywhere and supermarkets in India are like supermarkets anywhere else.

American sales clerks are rather liberal with the use of bags and in their offers to use more bags. They always want to double-bag the milk container. I can see why, but do it really need them? I use the bags for about 30 seconds to load them from the cart into the trunk of my car, and then again for another 30 seconds to unload them back at home. Every week, we ended up with a litter of a dozen plastic and paper bags and I wondered if there was any justification in using a dozen bags for less than a minute to justify the convenience (read: or laziness) to not bring our reusable own?

Interestingly, when I visited my friends in Germany I was a little amazed as they began to packing the small stuff in their purses and backpacks. The concern for the environment is perhaps more in Europe because they are affluent and overpopulated. Americans have such ubiquitous resources and abundant space that they are yet to feel the pinch.

There are reasons to do it apart from the obvious tree-hugging ones.

1)The bags are larger than plastic bags and hence you can carry more stuff per bag. It's a real pain to carry nine bags when you can stuff all of it in six.

2)The bags are sturdy. What plastic bags are notorious for is giving up on your when you are halfway up the stairs by tearing and out tumbles the jar of salsa.

3)The bags look cooler and don't make one of the most annoying sounds in the world: people fiddling with plastic bags

How hard is it to change behavior?
Last week, we actually forgot to take the reusable bags to the car before we set off. I cringed at every plastic bag that we ended up using. That was rather instructive. Changing the habits of the past is harder than you think. I expect that the personal and private embarrassment of last week will affect future behavior.

Hopefully, the planet and we will be a little cooler next week.
Changing the world, a bag at a time.

Why there is a God

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
- G. K. Chesterton

FIFA!

For the wage slaves out there it's TGIF. For me considering the stuff that I need to get done in this fine first week of Fall it's FIFA

FIFA = Fuck! It's Friday already?

The Federer

Last afternoon, Roger Federer or 'The Federer' (as Marat Safin calls him) won a thrilling five-setter versus Igor Andreev. When he lost to Nadal at Wimbledon it augured the end of the Federer era. That idea is nuts! The guy made it to 12 of the last 13 slam finals. Not even the Pistol Pete managed that, and if I remember correctly not even Rod Laver. Nadal has improved insanely and was impossible to defeat on the French clay. What we all saw at Wimbledon was two players playing at an incredible level that is way above the rest of the crowd. At that level, it's simply a toss-up. Nadal came close last year, but this time Federer couldn't close it.

What is gone was the aura of invincibility. After that, a bunch of players beat Federer. But, the champion is far from done. Since that loss in Wimbledon a different Federer has emerged. Before Federer became tennis's most gentle and elegant ambassadors he was quite a brat. He said that when he was younger he screamed at every point, lost his cool, was negative about lost matches. Then one day sometime after his coach died he decided that he would keep his emotions in check. The world has not seen a more gracious champion. He is elegant both in victory and defeat. The losses in the recent months have released the emotional Federer. It's great to watch him play with that newer intensity. Like he has something to prove.

Nadal on the other hand was always the underdog, but now the Mallorcan Minotaur is facing the pressure of being #1. He has struggled a bit in all the matches at the US Open and he has stated that he is feeling tired. Can you imagine Nadal saying he is tired? I think its more the pressure than fatigue. It's great to be on top but how long can you stay there?

Yesterday, Andreev played some impossible tennis and had Federer back. But, the Fed has some answers. Jim Courier believes that the mononucleosis infection has hit him worse than he lets out and even in bad year like this he made it to 3/3 Grand Slam semifinals. The road to the final and a possible meeting with Nadal could have Djokovic or Roddick in the way for the Fed. I think he is going to get the job done and we are going to some exciting tennis from the greatest.

*****
Update:

Andy Murray exposed how tired and weary Nadal is. Yet, to beat Nadal he had to play perfect tennis. His backhand shots were astounding and the strategy to stand 15 feet behind the baseline neutralized the Nadal serve. Even though Nadal had to struggle for his service games, he managed to hold through sheer will power.

To beat Djokovich is no joke. Roger played some of his best tennis in recent months to down Novak.

So, now we have the two greats - Nadal and Federer and then the young Turks who are a shade below - Murray and Djokovich. The rest of the field is way below what they guys can dish out.

Looking forward to the final between the latest British hope and the greatest. I would give Federer the edge and predict that he wins the championship in 4 sets.

Daily Grind

I think I am ready based on the number of coffee cups.

From Litmuszine -- part-blog, part-magazine and part-litmus test.

Olympians

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
- Kurt Vonnegut

With the Olympics, the Presidential race has been put on the media backburner. Come September, the real games will begin. So far, Barack Obama has been losing some of his early faithful flock because of flip-flop. But, like any highly trained athlete Barack knows that in the final analysis what counts is whether you won or not. Only gold medal winners are remembered, silver medals are just glorified first losers. To win some, you have to lose some. Even liberal New Yorker ripped on him a while ago. Of course, he is politician. What did you guys expect?

I thought it was interesting that the Olympics and the US Presidential elections are always held in the same year. Also, they are always leap years representing a great leap forward perhaps? This year with these two candidates many believe that will be one of most sporting battles. I am really looking forward to the gladiatorial debates. The first one is going to be in a church, for heaven's sake.

Half Dome

View of Half Dome from Glacier Point. At some point, I will process the rest of the images from Yosemite.

Reciprocity

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.

- Alice Thomas Ellis

Gaps in History

Junot Diaz who won last year's Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a not-so-brief but wondrous book, says that he is fascinated with gaps in history. His book was is set in Newark and the Dominican Republic during the time of the infamous Trujillo. A dictator so brutal and merciless that there are almost no true reports of his republic. He once had a graduate student murdered for writing a thesis on the true nature of his regime. Junot Diaz's point is that if you look at somebody's or a country's history, the gaps in the reporting are the most interesting.

The current presumptive Democratic candidate oozes so much charisma that people who never voted before are now lining up to help him get elected. Of course, armed with an incredible story like Obama's, impossible is nothing. The image that is portrayed is that of a newcomer, a fresh face, someone who represents a new kind of politics. In the same breath one also cites that as a sign of his inexperience and naivety about Washington and the world.

Obama and Trujillo has poles apart, but there is a certain gap in Obama's self-reporting. The recent controversy over the satirical cover of last week's issue of the New Yorker obscured, in ironical fashion, facts that are relatively unknown about the junior senator from Illinois.

Ryan Lizza's story traces the making of Obama in his years as a Chicago politician. To forge an identity as a a nobody in in a city "which doesn't take kindly to political carpetbaggers" would be commendable enough, but Obama's sights were always higher than the tallest buildings in the Windy City. He always knew that he was slated for bigger and better things. People have been calling him President Obama for over a decade.

Of course, politics is always a Faustian bargain. On his way up, Obama has eschewed many of his old principles and let his old friends down. As President, things are not going to be any different even if Obama projects a different sort of image. Lizza writes:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Only the naive would call Barack Obama naive. If he does win in November, like all victors he can write his own history.

Speed dating issues

I would like to think that my dating days aren't over, but just in a perpetually suspended state. However, I was at a speed-matching event yesterday which attempted to have a bunch of people meet everybody else one-on-one in a space of an hour.



First, there were only fifteen ppl and it was apparent that at every round someone would have to sit out. Then another guy showed up and we were sixteen. Since that was an even number no one would have to sit out. The person in charge did the obvious thing - he made two concentric rings of chairs splitting ppl two groups - 'inners' and 'outers'. The 'outers' rotated around the inner ring. After the first rotation, everybody had met half of the people in the group, except the ppl in their own ring. Then he did the next obvious thing, made another two concentric circles of the rings themselves and repeated the process. After the second rotation, everybody had met 3/4th of the ppl. For the next round, these rings needed to be split further into similar rings. As you can see, this process stops when each of the two concentric rings have exactly one person.

Of course, since we had the fourth power of 2, i.e. 16 ppl, this scheme works beautifully. Since, I was part architect of the idea, I wondered if this arrangement would work for other even numbers, leaving the rather odd case of odd numbers aside for now. Very quickly, you can see that this scheme breaks down for 6 people.

Round I            Round II
A D             A-B       D-E
B E             C (sits out)       F (sits out)
C F

After the first rotation, you have Ring I meet everyone in Ring II. Proceeding as before, you end up with 3 ppl (an odd number) in each new sub-ring. Now every subsequent iteration will have one person in each group simply sitting one session out. As you can see from the example, we can form a pair with C and F in Round II, but they have already met each other in Round I. So, every subsequent period, one person will be sitting out and wasting his time. This would require 6 time periods.

Thus, the concentric circles thing is inefficient for all non 2ⁿ even numbers. I tried to come up with a pairing scheme for n=6. Since ⁶C₂ = 15 total pairs, and we have 3 pairs at each stage, we should need at a minimum five rounds. With the schedule below no one sits out and we achieve efficiency.

Table for 6 ppl

Station	1	2	3	4	5
S1	AD	AE	AB	AF	AC
S2	BE	BF	CE	BC	BD
S3	CF	CD	DF	DE	EF

The movement of people is non-intuitive and the schedule is complicated. You would need to hand people a schedule map: A would not move at all. B would move to stations: S2-S2-S1-S2-S2. I was certain that there was a solution to this problem, floating in graph theory or combinatoric literature. And indeed there is! But, this is no simple can of worms as I was to discover.

Famously, in 1850 Reverend Thomas Kirkman sent a query to the readers of a popular math magazine, Lady's and Gentleman's Diary:

Fifteen young ladies in a school walk out 3 abreast for seven days in succession: it is required to arrange them daily, so that no two will walk twice abreast.

1 of 7 possible solutions

The more general case of problem is called the Social Golfer Problem: Determine the maximum number of days 'w' that 'n' golfers can play in groups of 'r' each without meeting each other. This is still an UNSOLVED mathematical problem!!! If you are interested in reading more see: Social Golfer Problem

My original question of dividing 'n' ppl in pairs has been solved at least up to n=200. Round-robin scheduling is a wonderful site for those scheduling matches, or speed-dating style events. There is no simple movement order that can be prescribed. You have to pretty much follow the schedule blindly. Some schedules are unique, in other cases there are over 1000 solution, usually when 2ⁿ numbers are involved.

Yeah! Even speed-dating has issues!

Ignoble Research

While my so-called 'real' publications are limping along, one of my side-projects got published in this month's Annals of Improbable Research. A journal that is self-styled as " the journal of record for inflated research and personalities" . These are the good folks who dish out the Ig Noble Prizes each year

For the past three years, at the Society for Neuroscience conference my labmates and I present a 'joke' poster in the vein of The Onion. The Cingulate Cortex Does Everything started off as a satire on the field of fMRI research in neuroscience. There are tons of papers in journals like Nature and Science that implicate the cingulate cortex in all kinds of behavior. Brain fMRI scans detect oxygenation levels in the blood and determine if blood flow to particular part of the brain increases or decreases with respect to a behavioral event. It seemed rather interesting to us that the use of fMRI correlates so strongly with cingulate cortex sightings. We suspect that since the cingulate cortex is above the saggital sinus, a major drainage vessel for the brain, it seems to light up in fMRI studies as an artifact.


On scanning recent literature on the subject, we saw an explosion in cingulate cortex research and reached our startling conclusion - "Cingularity", i.e. if current trends continue the cingulate cortex will not only take over neuroscience research, but everything!!

Another interesting fact is that the word cingulate is derived from the Latin word cingulum meaning belt. Specifically, a belt protecting your family jewels.

Quiz blog

Dinesh K. aka Dinky has set things rolling with the U of M Quiz blog. And for all you shameless people out there - Googling is allowed!