Long Live the New Year

‘Round, Round we go - 

Another year over

And a new one just begun;

A time of renewal, 

Yet another bite at the apple!

We cycle our personal calendars from December back to January,

Feeling younger and refreshed.

The Earth rotates, carries us out of its shadow -

Not just the dawn of a new day but a new year:

The Earth revolves anew around the Sun.

Circles nested within circles.  

How deep does it go?

Arbitrarily, we mark the passage of time:

Reflect, 

Take stock,

Look forward and celebrate the renewing of the renewal

Which we pretend will never end.

‘Tis not a true renewing though,

As it is predicated on the old;

The new year has the old one embedded within it.

I will not be getting any younger.

The planet will not sweep out an identical

Path through space and time.

The Sun is lighter, our ellipse precessed, space expanded and cooled: 

Nothing is exactly the same 

Our personal and Universal entropy climbs

No matter how we mark the time.

Nonetheless, we celebrate the completion of a lap.

The idea of renewal,
Marking the moment,

They are not valid but they are necessary.

Invalid validness keeps me going on,

Keeps me spinning round,

The cognitive up and at ‘em my small brain needs…

So, three cheers for another lap, world of mine.

The changes are slow enough and my vision poor enough

I can tell myself all is possible once again.

We are all riding the tide of entropy 

Sometime between too low (boringly ordered)

And too high (boring in its disorder).

Like a catapulted sleeper

Who awaken near the apex of his flight,

Enjoying the heights of the ride

Having missed the ascent

And falling asleep before the descent.

What a glorious time to be alive,

What a view our big brains have earned

Examining those Keplerian ellipses we ride.

The clockwork of finite nested circles that is the universe

Spins not forever - 

It had a beginning and will someday end,

But what glorious turning for now!

AI art generated from lines of this poem

Pasta from Santa

Spoiler Alert:  There is no Santa in this story.  I bought myself an automated pasta-maker and put it under the tree for myself (no, I didn't wrap it but I didn't start using it until after the 25th!).  

It mixes and extrudes automatically.  I just have to cut the length off that I want to keep as it extrudes:

It does different shapes:

Plain Spaghetti

Plain Penne

100 percent whole wheat

50 % white flour / 50 % whole wheat

-----------------------20-Feb-24 Update------------------

Tomato and Spinach Pastas!

Deep Fakes, Authenticity, and History

I was reading a New York Times article about the "Last Beatles' Song" and pondering this new reality we find ourselves in, fretting over Deep Fakes and authenticity.  I share the unease that most do, but what I am understanding today is that we are just entering a new reality where, in the future, it will seem quaint and (perhaps) cool for live people to perform in front of cameras and create movies the traditional way. My first experience of this was was in the Star Wars Rogue One in which both Princess Leia and General Tarkin appear but there is no actor/actress alive to do that role anymore.  

In the distant past, the only way to get a story experience was to hear the storyteller tell the tale in your presence.  Then books were invented and it became a quaint and cool experience to have someone tell a story in real time straight from their mouth into your ear.  There is still a special joy to be had during these times, but it is not the usual way we receive a story anymore.  Music is the same way but an in-person experience is still highly valued even if it is by far the more rare way in which we experience music these days.  (I could argue that a lot of the appeal of going to live music is less about the music and more about the experience of the event, but I'm not sure about that so I won't).  We still go see and enjoy plays as well, but (again) not the standard way in which we enjoy performance pieces anymore is it?

So my prediction is that AI enhanced Deep Fakes will not replace music and cinema as we know it, but it will become the de facto production method in the future (or at the very least, a prominent element in the product).  We will, however, still honor and enjoy the quaintness of non-enhanced music/movies and, even more so, the occasional in-person live event. 

Unavoidably, future novels, music, and movies will all have AI written/enhanced elements to them unless it is marketed as an "organic" product as a novelty.  Perhaps future generations will look at this decade as comparable to the invention of the printing press or the record player.  The change in paradigm was not overnight but the societal impact was deep and profound.  Fear of the printing press was real and similar to fear of this AI revolution, but I'm guessing we will settle into a new normal and be just fine with it... 

So even though I am slightly put off with dead actors and musicians putting out 'new' work, I'm thinking I need to get over it. I'll try to acclimate by enhancing this 'organically' written post with some AI generated art:

AI generated from the prompt "Fear of an AI future"

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On the other hand,  Nick Cave says we should fight AI tooth and nail:

Visas, Bureaucracy, and Thinking you are smart...

 My brother just now mentioned that he was waiting on his visa for his upcoming trip to India and I said "Oh, I know all about that!"  I looked for the blog entry here that details that fiasco but it turns out, I never blogged it!  Here we go...

====================

As I have blogged before, in the mid-to-late 90s I worked for a company that flew me around the world doing some technical work for them.  One very memorable trip for me was to India. 

Before I left on that trip, I found out I would need a visa to travel to India.  Back then, formalities like this were just part of the landscape of life ("I'll grab lunch over there, swing by the Indian Consulate, and come back to work around 2PM); now I feel like I have to shut down an entire day to get something bureaucratic like that done.  In any case, the guy helping me with the visa pointed out that my passport expired later that year. I was like "So?" and he kindly explained that India does not let people in on a visa on a passport that expires in less than 3 months.  I was kind of incredulous as I had return tickets for one week after my arrival.  He shrugged and gave me my visa and I went on my way.

Fast forward to my actual trip: After a hop from Houston to Los Angeles,  I tried to check in for my flight to India and the lady wouldn't let me.  The reason: my passport was expiring too soon! What?  You mean the guy whose job it is to give out visas knew what he was talking about?  Who would've guessed? 

So, I talked with the check-in lady and she put me on the list for the last flight out that night (this was an early flight) and I went off to find the State department offices and beg for a new passport.  After a 15 minute taxi ride, I went in and pled my case.  Luckily I landed in the hand of sympathetic young guy and he rushed it through and issued me a new passport within a few hours.  I didn't even know that was possible!  To keep the visa, he punched a hole in my old passport and I carried both with me and had no further issues.  Honestly, I'm kind of amazed it all worked out.  Back then, I didn't know any better so I tried to make it work out and... it did!

Oddly, the taxi ride back to the airport was taking over 30 minutes and didn't seem to be traveling the same efficient path my earlier ride had taken.  I sighed loudly and, all of a sudden, the driver hopped on to an interstate and I was at the airport in less than 5 mins.  Strange how that happens, huh?  Only time in all my travels around the world where I felt like I was literally 'taken for a ride' by a taxi was here in the USA!

Note to self:  Don't try to out-think bureaucracy, just comply.

AI art prompt: travel red tape passport India

The Glory Gaussian Days

So, I wasn't a very good grad student.  My grades were okay, but I was a bit directionless.  On my way to my Master's degree in Physics (which was just supposed to be a waypoint on the way to the PhD but well, you know... stuff happens), I was mostly taking classes.  The thing is, I thought I would understand things better.  It turns out that the old adage "the more you know, the more you know what you don't know", turned out to be very true in my case.  I always felt like I was on the verge of learning/understanding something very cool about physics... but never quite arriving.

There is one glory moment that I like to relive though.  It was in Statistical Mechanics.  I was really looking forward to this class and it was taught by a relatively charismatic faculty member who was about to become the department head of the physics department.  Turns out, he wasn't a very good teacher (if I had a nickel...). He would assume we already knew stuff we didn't know and spend lots of time on something obscure that he found interesting and then he would give us tests that were only tangentially related to what we have been doing in class.  It wasn't just me, all of the students in that class were a bit frustrated with that experience.  (To his credit, after the class, he came by and asked several of us to tell him why it went so poorly so he could do better in the future!).

Since I wanted to understand what was going on, I picked up an old textbook of my father's (I just googled and found that it is still exists, but I'm pretty sure Amazon is making up this edition number!)

On one of the pages, the famous gaussian integral was introduced and there was a brief footnote where they outlined the derivation of this important integral (I can still picture the page and the format of it to this day).  I was fascinated and read it carefully and thought "Wow, this is cool."  Of course, I was still confused about how to apply it, but at least I understood the calculus tricks involved.  

Back to my glory moment (one of only two during my three years of graduate school) in the class:  One day, the prof wrote the integral from negative infinity to positive infinity over e to the ax^2.  He asked if anyone happened to know the answer.  I waited a beat and said casually (assuming others knew), "Yea, square root of pi over a."  He then turned to me in a swooping motion and said "BUT CAN YOU PROVE IT?"  His face lit with joy and anticipation.  My reading fresh on my mind, I responded without hesitation, "Yes, sure - you square the integral, change to polar coordinates, solve that integration over the plane, and finally take the square root."  He stood there and looked disappointed and sad.  He deflated and said "yes, that's basically it."  It was a strange encounter but I felt my fellow students were proud of me in that moment (pretty sure none of them remember it today though like I do !)

This memory triggered courtesy of my son, who does not know any calculus but somehow found this little video cool enough to share with me today after he mentioned the words "gaussian integral" and I said "what do YOU know about gaussians?".  Small world, huh?

Halloween 2023

 Some pics from throughout the day

(still a mystery to me who gifted this hoodie to me!)

Astronomy

Advisory

Rideout-Squared

LIB and me

Stairwells and Philosophy

One of our destinations this past summer was the Ci'en Pagoda overlooking Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan.  The view was simply spectacular:

Our tour guide casually remarked that Buddhist temples are always an odd number of flights.  This one had nine stories.  It was, of course, an octagon as well.  I asked him why always an odd number and he said he wasn't sure (side note:  I really appreciated his honesty because I have had many tour guides over the years simply make up things on tours which is something I really can not stand). A bit of cursory research tells me that, in Buddhism, odd numbers represent becoming whereas even numbers represent completion.  Human, of course are in the state of becoming.  Nine is especially auspicious as it is the ultimate and final level of consciousness.  An octagonal shape, of course, reminds one of the Eight-Fold Path of Buddhism.

As we walked up for the view, I found the eightfold symmetry of staircase fascinating and took several pictures:

Taking these pictures reminded me of another vacation stairwell shot I took over 20 years earlier in Barcelona of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia.  The entire architecture being nature inspired, the design of the stairwell is snail shell inspired:

(not my pic, but similar to the one I took)

Although the odd number numerology is missing, the Sagrada Familia is famously always in the state of becoming and seems to never be complete.  

We humans are always battling two competing, useful, but ultimate incorrect viewpoints:  that nature is continuous and that nature comes in categories.  Snail Shells and Octagons of Nine Stories may not have the final answer but they can tease us into contemplating big thoughts if we let them...

So, as I contemplated these East-meets-West architecturally inspired thoughts, I turned to our tour guide and said, 

"Will we have to fight an enemy at each level in the Octagon?"

He smiled and said "I think you watch too many movies."  

Immigration, Extraction, and Exhumation

So in Irene's family lore, Taiwan is an important transition place.  An inflection between the past in China and the future in America.  Certainly a few relative were born in Taiwan, but for the most part most of the older folks were born in China and most of the younger folks were born in America.  So Taiwan is, like, 0.75 of a generation?  How do you quantify these things?  You don't I suppose, so I should stop trying.

Our trip this past summer may well be the last for many of us.  Irene and I have no plans to return (she has been many times, I have been twice).  Who knows what allure it will have for the kids when they are older?  As part of that decision, the older generation decided to bring the family patriarch's remains over to the United States (his wife is buried here in the Boston area).  As you will see below, his grave is a formal and ornate place in Taiwan and thus it was a big deal to exhume his remains for cremation.  The four of us were honored to represent the family so that my children's great-grandfather had a son, a granddaughter, and two great-grandchildren (plus this token white guy) all watching over the careful and respectful exhumation process shown below.

A few weeks later we had a half Christian half traditional ceremony for the interment of his ashes here in the Boston area with most of his children attending as well as half a dozen grandchildren and a handful of great-grandchildren.  The half-traditional/half Christian nature of the ceremony here nicely reflecting the half-in half-out nature of the entire of the lives of all our immigrant relatives.  Two powerful events that speak volumes about immigration and tradition and family.  

Reasons and Seasons

Ever since I took a class on religions of the West at Purdue, I have known this basic difference between the Western and Eastern religious traditions:  Western religion are outward looking whereas Eastern religions are inward looking.  Western religions emphasize rebirth and resurrection, Eastern ones an eternal cycle of reincarnation.

In my Astronomy class, I am always lecturing (in a good way; the academic style lecture rather than the moralizing one) my students about how all these things we take for granted about time actually evolved slowly from primitive ideas of astronomy: "Moonths", turning a 10 month calendar into 12, the usage of 12 and 60 for hours of daylight and minutes in an hour.  I tell them about how holidays that are not fixed in date on our modern solar calendar are holidays associated with lunar cultures etc.  How we carefully manipulate time to keep our solstices and equinoxes in the same place because the seasons are so important to us.  But I missed the very existence of seasons (or not) as playing a role in picking solar or lunar calendars in ancient times!

When I worked in the family winery 12 hours a day, every day for 8 weeks straight, I began to thing about everything in winery metaphors.  Children are like the grapes and adults are like the wine.  Education is like a destemmer and a crusher... well, you get the idea.  What's interesting is not the metaphors themselves but that my brain readily adapted its own private symbolism based on my everyday experiences.  Our metaphors don't spring out from nowhere!

What I recently learned (shout out to my man Joseph Campbell), is that the religions of the West all grew out of traditions established in regions of the world where the seasons play an important role.  The seasons roll right into their religions from their mythologies which are already steeped in seasonal symbology (including the springtime theme of rebirth and resurrection). Eastern religions, on the other hand, grew out of tropical zones (India for the most part) where seasons are muted.  Instead, stillness and eternalness are baked into their founding metaphors and myths.

AI art "Western myths meet Eastern myths"

Doppler Shifting Being Self-Critical

On our way to the library, Izze and I had a fire engine pass us with its siren on.  I noted how I never really just tried to understand the doppler shift before I learned about it in physics class.  I bemoaned the fact that I wasn't really intellectually curious enough, that I wasn't intellectually engaged in daily life as a matter of course.  No wonder I teach science rather than do science - I just don't have the right stuff!

Izze responded, "Well, that's a surprising thing to hear you say because you are one of the most intellectually engaged people I know."

====

Years ago, we had an interim principal for a year (JR) and I remarked to him that, as a school, we seemed to always be beating ourselves up.  "We could this better" or "why do we do it that way" or "why can't we be more like that school over there that does it differently?"  He responded immediately with "that's what great organization do, they are always looking for improvement.  They aren't sitting around congratulating themselves - that's the way to slide backwards."  I thought that was a wise insight.*

====

So, maybe it's a good thing that I am frequently disappointed in my own intellect.  Why didn't I see that coming?  Why didn't I take the time to figure that out?  How could I forget that? Hopefully some progress was made through the years. 

Thanks, Izze.

AI art from the prompt "doppler shifted thinking"

*He also dropped wisdom on me in response to my saying that eighteen year old Ken would be disappointed in 45 year old Ken teaching high school: "What could you do that is more important than this?" 

Pluto, Rizz, and Categories

The other day, I was going through the whole demotion of Pluto to dwarf-planet status when I used the following phrase: "Pluto is basically a high rizz asteroid".  Then, me being me, I had to stand back and admire my own turn of phrase.  I forced a bemused smile out of a couple of students for my efforts and then I went back to the delicate disentanglement exercise the IAU had to do in order to demote Pluto.  "Clearing one's orbit" seems so arbitrary and unsatisfying doesn't it?

The thing is, we all like to put things into categories.  Binning our concepts neatly separates things in our mind.  However, nature doesn't really work that way.  We got pebbles, meteoroids, asteroids, rings, comets, moons, dwarf planets, planets small and rocky, planets big and gassy, and everything in between.  Sometimes a student will ask me "Where does the Earth's atmosphere end?" and I reply with "how close to zero without getting to zero ever do you want to get?".  

One of the many reasons I like to teach astronomy is I will spend class time talking about these larger-than-science issues.  To name something is not to know it.  To name something is to think you know it...

AI generated art from the prompt "pluto is a high rizz asteroid"

In case you didn't know, Pluto is just a member of the Kuiper Belt

The Universe is Kind to Kens

Look what the postman delivered to me (on my daughter's birthday no less; confusing but cool to get a gift on someone else's birthday!)

No note so not sure who to thank.  So, a public but anonymous thank you!

(The Ken-from-Barbie swag is accumulating!)

Dreams, Video Games, and Investing

I have long been skeptical of those who place too much value in their dreams.  In my understanding, sleep is when we sort through our short term memories to lay some of them down as long term memories.  (side note:  one of the reasons why managing sleep as a part of studying and learning is so important!).  So, those who think that dreams are a deep reveal, I think, are overemphasizing the messages your subconscious may indeed be telegraphing in its weighting of events and impressions formed throughout your day and throughout your life.  Not trivial, but not profound either...

So, I was quite bemused by a late august dream when I am fully expecting the usual back-to-school dreams.  (Not finding my classroom, forgetting the schedule, forgetting to get dressed, etc.) Instead, what I got was a surrealist, abstract crazy world of video game characters who were walking and talking representations of various brokerage accounts.  Once character was very steadfast and, frankly, kind of boring:  That was the account for the kids' college fund.  Another was off-the-wall, fast talking adventure-type:  The brokerage account I trade options in.  Another was the Roth IRA (risk taking cleric with healing spells in case you are wondering).  Anyway, you get the idea.

When I awoke and I was processing just how weird and original that dream was, I realized that just before the school year I was playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 (so good!) and rebalancing all of our online brokerage accounts on the computer.  So, when my brain was processing whether any of these events were worthy of long term memories, it created that nice little dream for me.  

This is my mashup for the post. 
The art above was AI generated with the prompt: Dreaming of stock and video games...

Mise-en-place, Activation Energy, and Better Living

 Remember activation energy from chemistry?:

Based on the work of Daniel Kahneman and others, organizations are starting to make the 'smarter' or 'better-for-you' decision the default.  Simply allowing new employees to opt out of a retirement plan rather than allowing them to opt in has an amazing effect.

In our household, we use the term mise-en-place liberally (some might say I use all words liberally but I say most people are just using words too conservatively!).  We find its utility far outweighs simply food prep or setting the table.  Dad has a big repair project? Do that mise-en-place of gathering all the tools he may need at the site of the project (sometimes days before the actual project!).  Going on a big trip?  Get those bags and must-go items gathering in a designated location.  Big test coming up?  You get it...

Recently, I needed to lose some weight* so I planned to eat a lot of salad wraps.  Thing is, when you are a hungry, it is easier to heat up some chicken nuggets or something.  So, I cut up and cleaned my lettuce in bulk ahead of time and, voila, the activation energy to eat a salad wrap was almost nil.  

The Take-Away for this post: Lower the activation energy for future you to make good decisions by doing his mis-en-place for him now.

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* being a physicist, I had two choices for this:  lower the strength of gravity or lose some mass.  I chose the latter route for simplicity's sake.

Barbie and...

... Picture Day!

Unsurprisingly, I am not one who stresses or frets over driver license, passport, or work ID pictures, so when faculty were instructed to get their picture taken for new ID badges while the yearbook photographers were on campus, I quietly exchanged my usual earth-toned button down shirt for a recent gift from colleague and friend, JI:

Soon, I will add to this post with a picture of the actual ID badge or, failing that, a picture of myself teaching in the iconic 'Kenough' shirt on some Friday in the near future...

Image courtesy of IR, most favored daughter

Although I am surrounded by those who have, I have yet to see the Barbie movie (I did catch the awesome Oppenheimer in the theaters though in case you were wondering if I was aloof from the entire Barbenheimer summer culture).  I did not own any Barbie paraphernalia when growing up either but I do recall wondering if I was suppose to 'like' Barbie or Barbie-types girls when I was about 8 years old or so.  Maybe all little boys in the 70's had this fleeting thought or maybe it was just those of us named Ken?  

Many have written about and studied the harm those early Barbie dolls have done to little girls over their early years in the self-image department.  But what about us Kens?  Where's our longitudinal study about the harm in our perception of women?  Mattel, best start writing a big ole check address to "Ken Ough"! ;)

=======October update

A bit disappointed by my school ID picture (although an enigmatic "I am ..." statement is not so bad I guess).  Maybe Mom will still want to order some wallet sized ones?

 

Gaining Ten Pounds

Normally, I am filled with regret and self-incrimination after gaining ten pounds (warning for the youth:  easy on and hard to get off is true once you get north of 30 years old!).  However, on the recent trip to Taiwan, I decided from the get-go to just let it all go and eat like there is no tomorrow.  In my youth, I lived under the delusion that everything will always be accessible to me in the future.  But, now, I realize this is probably the last time I will be in Taiwan.  (not that I don't want to travel, but it's just not likely to be to this particular country).  

Anyone who has been to Taiwan or knows Taiwanese people, knows it is all about the food.  I mean, everyone always says that about all cultures.  But, in this case, it is more than true.  Everyone is talking about food, hawking food, asking about food, thinking about food, etc.  Interestingly, the focus is so on-the-food, that western ideas of service and amenities are almost entirely absent.  Want a napkin, grab some of these cheapo thinner-than-tissue "napkins" yourself.   Want a drink, head over to the fridge and help yourself.  Want to clear your table?  Forget it, that old lady at the back of the floor ain't touching your dishes until you leave.  Need to use the bathroom?  Send in one of your kids to scout it out first... is there a door?  Is there an actual toilet?  Is there toilet paper?  I sound kind of prudish but, actually, I wasn't surprised by this (not my first rodeo by any means) - but what stood out to me on this trip was the disparity between the quality of the food (very high) and other trappings of eating out (usually (but not always!) quite low).  I found myself reflecting on how often I have eaten out in the United States and had a very fancy setting and very nice (overly attentive?) service while eating food that was, well, kind of meh.

Anyway... a random gustative photo travelogue:

Fish head soup

Duck Eggs in the back

Just when you think they can't fit another dish on the table... they manage to somehow.

Whole fish came out at the end of almost every meal

Shrimp dish with almost every meal.  Always slightly different!

Being the designated chicken fiend, I was anointed to tear the roasted chicken (roasted with head and claws on!) apart with the provided gloves.  Apparently a roadside stand tradition now in a restaurant setting. 

Japanese restaurants are very popular.

This is my face after one of our drivers convinced me to chew on some of his Betel nut.  At the end of our ride, he offered me more.  I declined.  Not a gustative highlight.

And, for dessert...

Shaved Ice!