Stay Tuned for My Mathematics Opinion Piece :)

Achievement Unlocked: I'm pretty sure that this is the first time I've felt the need to promise to an editor that I would not swear in an opinion piece that I'm going to write about mathematics.

Note: You should have seen the smile on my face when I was asked to write this. :P

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) February 17, 2020

In case you're wondering, the correct analogy (which you'll understand if you are familiar with Dragonlance) is "Tasslehoff was bored." (Nothing on Krynn is more dangerous than a bored kender.)

A sudden thought: I wonder if this counts as an Invited Tirade?

Foaming at the Mouth: Academic Inbreeding

One of the nice things about having old issues of The California Tech available online is that I can occasionally look at articles I wrote as an undergrad and see how much I agree with what I wrote back in the day. In this issue from 1998 (the year I graduated), I have a commentary on p. 2 about academic inbreeding. In this case, I pretty much agree almost completely with what I wrote 16 years ago. My occasional feature column, by the way, was called "Foaming at the Mouth". I was a Tech Editor before then and, additionally, my articles from early in my Tech career were reporting more often than features. I made an active change during my time at Caltech. Now if only the Rivet were online so that I could post the blurb from the time (last week of senior year) that I was named "International Terrorist of the Week".

Being Part of the Story of Science

When you are an undergraduate student, and for the most part when you're a graduate student (though it starts to change then), you read scientific and mathematical results that have been neatly polished and compiled into books --- and then somewhat less neatly polished and compiled into papers. You probably will see that there are many mysteries left to uncover, but it's still knowledge and somehow something that already exists. And then you become a scientist (and mathematician) and you realize that there are stories --- often very interesting ones --- behind the knowledge and that can occasionally be just as fascinating (or even more so) than the knowledge itself. It's not just that some of the personalities are genuinely interesting (though that is also true) but that the path to knowledge is typically a maze of twisty little passages, all alike --- and there are a lot of inside jokes and events that become part of the stories, and these jokes and stories often have many layers (pun intended).

Being a professional scientist isn't merely about creating new knowledge (though that definitely is part of the deal). It means that you're part of an ever-enfolding story that people outside can watch and appreciate, but you are actually in the story, because you're one of the people helping to create it.

And let me tell you: It is incredibly awesome being one of the players in this evolving story! It's hard to beat being part of that, and I can't imagine trading it for anything.

So the next time you open a math book and see a theorem (or some other important or maybe not-so-important result), remember that that theorem might well have an interesting story behind it. It's more than just a piece of deductive reasoning. And, obviously, the same goes for all other scientific discourse. :)

And what made me think of all this particularly poignantly right now? Ergodic clams, of course. None of the thoughts above are new to me (I have had them many times, in fact), and I'm sure that I could have phrased them more eloquently, but I have to thank Petter Holme and Sang Hoon Lee for the immediate inspiration for writing this post when I should have gone to bed instead.

Now I better start thinking about what my theme song should be...

Soap makes you clean. SOPA makes you dirty. :)

And if anybody else came up with this, be it known that I arrived at it independently.

(As if I would have any other stance on this...)

Oh, and don't forget to sign Google's petition!

What exactly is a tragedy?

I think a decent amount of time has passed since I've made a horribly insensitive comment, so I feel like I may need to break this streak.

I was reading one of my usual baseball venues (Rob Neyer's blog), and he was using Heath Ledger's untimely death (which I hadn't known about until I saw this article) to illustrate his point that the five-year waiting period normally present for a player to be elected to the Hall of Fame is a bad idea. (The comparison was to Ledger having lost out to Hoffman for a "Best Actor" Oscar victory with a speculation that perhaps the voters assumed Ledger would have many more chances given that his career was in its infancy.) Here is what Neyer writes about tragedies in this context:

Reading the message boards, one sees Heath Ledger's death described as a "tragedy."

No doubt. But for whom, exactly? He was someone's son, and the father of a two-year-old daughter. It's tragic for his parents, and for his daughter. In the grand scheme of things, though? Every day there are tragedies that would, if you could figure all the equations, rate larger than this one.

If you think Ledger's death is a tragedy, it's because of how it affects you, not his parents or his daughter. It's because he meant something to you. It's because you found his performance as Ennis Del Mar incredibly affecting and you wanted to see if he'd ever get another role as good. It's because you've been jazzed about seeing his take on The Joker since you first heard about that (presumably) brilliant bit of casting.

Or maybe that's just me. I just know I felt the same yesterday as I do when some long-ago major leaguer has died. It's my tragedy. I don't feel sorry for his wife or his children, or his grandchildren. They're mostly just abstractions in my mind. I feel sorry for me, because Johnny Podres and Tommy Byrne and Gerry Staley were all small-but-important pieces of my life.


I agree with the above sentiments. I have felt something when particular people (actors, baseball players, and so on) I've never met have died, and it essentially has to do with whatever pleasure they have brought to my life (and will no longer bring) because otherwise it's (all else being equal) the same as if it had happened to a random person. Obviously, things are much poignant if it's somebody I know personally (and am presumably fond of). Maybe my ability to empathize with other people is just woefully inadequate (I'm not sure, to be honest), but I think it is possible to simultaneously empathize with the family of somebody who has died way too early and keep the big picture in mind as well. Frankly, I think that most people are way to quick to apply the label of "tragedy" to things that are unfortunate, sad, and so on, but that aren't true tragedies. What that accomplishes is to trivialize real tragedies (of which there are than enough) by elevating things that are perhaps extremely poignant but not at the level of what an actual tragedy is.

While starting this blog entry, the background song "Sound of Silence", which seemed quite appropriate. (After that was "Goodbye-Goodbye", which is a bit livelier and perhaps less appropriate for this entry.) I'll miss Heath Ledger's acting and I do feel some sense of loss after reading this news, but please let's keep a bigger picture in mind.

Anyway, I don't think I've pissed off too many people lately, and I wanted to fill the sudden gap in my life.