This is a heartbreaking poem by W.S. Merwin which I came across a couple of years ago. Then I thought it was beautiful. Over the years, it has become more and more personal and private. Today on the occasion of my father's birthday, I thought I should celebrate it with you.
Poems need to be read, and read aloud. None more than this one, because it's about things unsaid and undone.
Great poetry is like that. First you read it, then it reads you.
Last week with temperatures in the 70s it was an Indian Summer. Running on trails is fun, but you can't stop and stare an beautiful sight. But for once instead of lacing my trail running shoes, I took a camera and walked through the trails that I love. After a run on a beautiful day, I always swear to myself, that I will be back with a camera. But, I never make it back with a camera.
This was my last chance to capture the beauty of the fall in two of the two greatest trails in Ann Arbor. The brutal and beautiful Nichol's Arboretum and a trail less traveled - the Huron River Trail.
More pics from Fall.
Every year, my colleagues and I put up a joke/satirical/thought poster at Annual Society for Neuroscience Meeting under the teaching section. This poster is usually finished last minute. More last minute than our regular posters (There was more controversy this year which I shall get into some other day as it deserves a couple of posts.)
However, coming back to November 2006:
Borrowing a riff from Bob Dylan, our poster posed the question, "How Many Neurons Must One Man Have? (Before you call him a man)". We have about a 100 billion of them, but how do these neurons makes us what we are? How do we remember? Why and how do we forget? As is usually the case, the poster sort of evolves over the week with us, the pranksters/jokers/dunces, feeding off ideas and encouragement from the gallery and adding ideas. While, Tim and Greg were getting parts of the poster printed after the conference began, I started scribbling a back-of-the envelope equation which was pretty close to this -
At some point, it struck me that there is no better place to put a back-of-the-envelope equation than an envelope itself. Everybody simply loved it! Nothing gets scientists/engineers more amused than jargon puns.
After coming back from the meeting, Tim and I decided to do something beyond a few laughs. Which means in scientific currency - a publication. We worked on it in our free time. It was an interesting question and as we scoured the literature, we discovered that the research on the subject was rather thin. We read interesting papers from Bell Labs, papers on pigeon learning, autistic savants (Daniel Tammett), phenomenal mnemonists (A.K.Luria), artificial brains (Jeff Hawkins). At one point, we both realised that we were just enjoying this garage science project so much, that we weren't really making any progress with a publishable manuscript. Our research was all over the place and it took some work to curb our enthusiasm and coalesce collected ideas into one coherent manuscript.
Even then the road was not easy. One unrelenting reviewer took a while to 'get it' and made us go through what seemed like endless and silly revisions. Yet, to his credit, the manuscript was a little less folksy-sounding and perhaps more rigorous than we were planning. Also, since we decided to go for hand-drawn illustrations harking back to a simpler and purer time in magazine publishing, it was somewhat of a chore to redraw the illustrations.
So, finally almost after exactly two years since that scribbling in an Atlanta Holiday Inn, the ideas have been honored to be oozed with ink in IEEE Potentials Magazine. Tim's friend Thad, a commercial artist, gifted a wonderful drawing to use as the opening cover. However, the editor disagreed with us last minute and decided to go ahead with an computer image over the wonderful black-ink sketch. We were a little upset with some of odd-looking coloring.
This is the actual IEEE Potential Article as it appeared.
This how the article would have appeared, had we got our way:
Our Aesthetically Pleasing Article. We leave you, the reader, to decide if you agree with us.
As they say: Ars longa, vita brevis
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Previous post on the 2007 Poster:
Published in the Annals of Improbable Research: The Cingulate Cortex does Everything!
I feel bad for the network folks. After enjoying high-ratings for the past year and a half, people are mostly back to watching sports. It was pathetic to watch Larry King last night showing "The Best of Obama". Yeah, you heard that right! Larry King suffering some withdrawal symptoms of his own and had to overcome his nostalgia for Ghost of Election Just-Past by re-running Obama's speeches and interviews. While the rest of the staff takes a much needed holiday, the networks have gone green. Recycle yesterday's election news for today. Make do with less. Change has come to America!
The primary motivation to learn how to frame stuff was that framing is super expensive. The local arts-and-crafts store Michael's was quoting about $100-$120 to frame a Madhubani painting that we had got from India. Like most people who decide to have something framed for the first time you realise that the artwork being framed is the cheapest component of all the costs. Going to get framing done is like getting car-insurance. There are so many different options and picking one over the other can result in drastically different costs. There is a choice of mats - standard, acid-free, rag-paper. Then the choice of the frames - thin or thick wooden, metal, or fancy wooden. Choosing the correct kind of glass is not transparent business at all - there is plain glass, plexi-glass, non-reflective glass, UV-ray protected glass and other varieties. Soon you realise that $120 quoted was simply the base price. I walked away thinking it's not a coincidence that they call it framing.
Even if the initial driver to do-it-myself was cost (being a starving student and all that), DIY is not an option for cheapskates or the impatient. It's probably going to cost more and take much longer than you think.
First, is the research: I spent the next two months reading up on the subject (with books from the library, of course!) and another month buying the equipment and tools. If you thought the frameshop had too many options, wait till you decide to buy framing tools. There are mat cutters that are $25 and then there are mat cutters that are a few hundred dollars. It is ironic, that as a newbie you often better off getting the more expensive equipment, as it is the easiest to use. That never happens does it? So, you have to deal with the frustration of a fumbling beginner with less than ideal tools.
Second, is practice: Work on projects that don't matter. It's not a bright idea to start framing your masterwork while you are still learning to control the cutter. This process takes time and patience and perhaps a few bloodstains. After being off by an eight of an inch on one side and seeing the resulting disaster you really understand one the maxims of life: "Measure twice, cut once". It is rather humbling that after two decades spent in school, no one taught me this.
Slowly, but surely the pilgrim makes his progress. A few months and a couple hundred dollars later, I had the Madhubani painting framed. Factoring in the bamboo frame and non-reflective glass, the cost of getting it done and doing it myself were about the same. But, at the end of it that's not your first thought. The first and last thought is pride, despite the slight imperfections. And they call pride one of the seven Deadly Sins.
My friend, Tim has been trying to restore a vintage El Camino for the past couple of years. I have begun to believe that he never really intends on calling it quits on working on the car. It's always a work-in-progress. If he quit then there would be nothing more to learn, it will be just be like any other car. I have sat in another one of his rusty-but-not-trusty cars, an 1981 Toyota Tercel, thinking that a wheel might fall off any moment. But, unlike with some other people I haven't been the least bit scared since I know that Tim will be able to fix that car even if it may be a temporary fix with duct-tape. The powerful uses of duct-tape, that's another thing they don't teach you at school.
If you are one of the undecided voters, here's what David Sedaris has to say.
I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?
RUF2T?
C this Gr8 NYker piece
u shud read it.... it's :-) i was ROFLAO
BTW I luv the Germans 4 coming up wit nok its Gr8
B4now tc
CU tom pls.. nok ;)
If one photographs people it is the inner look that must be reflected. One must reveal what goes on inside them, as well as their relation to the other world.
As I photograph with my little Leica, I have the feeling that there i something so right about it: with one eye that is close one looks within. With the other eye that is open one look without: one see the shapes, the living quality of what moves one to photograph. W passion, without working with the emotion of the heart and the enjoyment of the eye, nothing vital can be put down.
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
I have returned to Alex Ross's excellent book - "Rest in Noise". I'll let him explain the title and the idea behind the book:
The title I chose for the project, The Rest Is Noise, played off Hamlet's last words ("The rest is silence") and, more widely, the perception that classical composition devolved into noise as the twentieth century went on ...
... The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a voyage into the labyrinth of modern music, which remains an obscure world for most people. While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, its influence can be felt everywhere. Atonal chords crop up in jazz. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalism has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.
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.
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?
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.
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.
