The ability to be vulnered

Vulnerable is not having anything up your sleeve.
Vulnerable is being cold while wearing all the warm clothes you brought on a camping trip.  If you were cold but still had just an extra hat in your backpack or hadn't put on your gloves yet, you wouldn't feel as vulnerable.
It is not having anything to do on a Friday night other than staying home.  When you make the choice to stay in, turning down other options, that is not vulnerable.
It is showing someone your weaknesses or your passions or how much you truly care, and leaving it all out there, with nothing hidden, no choice in what else to say or keep secret.
Vulnerable is not having any control, because your choice has been made for you.
Vulnerable is fear.  Fear that if anything -- any circumstances, any feelings, etc. -- might change, you won't be ready because your options are all used up.
Vulnerable is not knowing if you'll be all right.


A major vulnerability I notice in my life is not knowing what the future will hold.  Just about every moment of every day, I cope with this by trying to project forward to predict my future based on what happens now, and changing my behavior/thinking if I don't like where things are going.  My idea of the future often thrashes around violently, and my present is consumed and overshadowed by imagining, based on the last hour or the last fifteen minutes, where my life will lead.  Am I a good person (who therefore will have a decent life)?  If the next question I ask in class is a dumb one, will I be able to make it in science?  Is this relationship one that will lead to happiness for the next 50 years?  That's a lot of pressure to put on the present, and what if the answer, the projection, comes up negative, as it inevitably will?

As my therapist and I discussed this week, this forward-projecting seems analogous to the butterfly effect.  Imagine a butterfly incessantly trying to predict the weather thousands of miles away and then flapping its wings this way and that in an attempt to change the result to something better.


I'm now starting to recognize this fear of the unknown future when it comes up.  It especially comes up when I feel lonely, because I don't know if I'll end up being a lonely soul.  And I stake a lot on not ending up a lonely soul, as another one of my defense mechanisms -- I don't know many things about my future, such as where I'll live, who I'll be close to, what I will do for my career, and so many more smaller things, but I think that all of these come secondary to my family life.  If I can have a nice home life, the other details don't bug me as much.  And when that is put into question, that's scary.  My fear response kicks in.

I don't want to feel driven to date someone out of fear of being a lonely soul.  I don't want to seek validation through flirting just to comfort my fear of being a lonely soul.

I want to find a balance between taking the present as one instant in a slew of instants and appreciating it as such, and keeping my future in mind.

I don't want to be so afraid of the unknown.  These are fear responses 5 year old Kieran developed.  They aren't what I need now.

Porpoise

Porpoises derive their name from French for "pig-fish."  Porpoises are also called mereswine (probably also related to swine/pigs in some way).  Porpoises swim for nearly -- and now that I've got you hooked, let's swim into the real ripples of this stream of thought:

People talk about having a purpose in life, or searching for one, or how a particular thing gives them "purpose."  What does this mean, and what's the source of mine, if I have it?

It seems like purpose is when effort spent now feels like it's going towards something of higher-importance in the future.  For some people, it's a dream -- Patrick has wanted to be a high energy physicist since 7th grade, so when he does quantum field theory homework, it is for more than just a grade: the hours he spends now are deposited into a vault which will eventually be cashed out in the form of being a professor.  And this makes his late nights worthwhile.

Some people feel their purpose is to live a certain type of lifestyle -- they'd like to eventually be able to give to others with all their heart, so they give what they can today.  Or religion steps in and the idea is that every act or deed performed with religion in mind will help to later lead a more holy life, or to have a happier eternity.  Talking to Gus just now, what drives him is the ultimate goal of being a capable person, which is worked towards by acquiring skills like cooking, playing the piano, and setting up a vacuum chamber, for examples.

Regardless, I think that purpose is when an everyday effort is made more special by the idea that it will make the future better.  Some effort does not contribute to a person's sense of purpose, so it isn't as palatable, which is why people tend to gravitate toward things that contribute to their ultimate purpose.

So, in thinking about this, where's my sense of purpose?  I feel the most inspired when what I'm doing will help me have a happier family someday.  A dinner cooked for Pearl feels like it requires far less energy than one cooked for Gus and Patrick, perhaps because I feel like it "invests" that time in the future, because there's a chance she'll be part of that 'happy family' in my mind, whereas it's more indirect to imagine the dinner leading to Uncle Gus and Uncle Patrick having a big impact on my future family.
The time I spend improving myself, whether through trying to acquire knowledge or emotional intelligence, often feels easier to motivate if I think about it as making myself a "better catch" for my future wife, or a better dad for any future kids.  And when I have little to no luck dating, as I did last year, it really gets me down.
This is also tied into the type of person I'd like to grow into -- someone who is understanding and compassionate, and who can tell loads of interesting stories of adventures through life, paired with wisdom and knowledge to get through just about anything life can through at you.  The idea of growing into this person is also a source of motivation and purpose, so time spent reflecting, as well as spent improving myself as I mentioned above, is also with this future-Kieran in mind.

Physics, on the other hand, feels like TV or a drug, in some sense, which lives more in the present than my future dreams of companionship or the type of person I'd like to be.  The highs I get from expanding my mind are great, but I guess I have a hard time envisioning a future to which they will lead.  I know that I will never understand the whole world, and the more I live, the more I see there is to learn outside the realm of physics.  I could study for my whole life and wouldn't even come close to brushing up against most of the topics that human knowledge spans.  Will the highs get better over time?  I don't think so; the mind explosion I had back in high school when trying to comprehend the size of the universe felt about the same as the one I had last year when I learned about path integrals and the ideas of quantum electrodynamics.  For this reason, it doesn't feel as if I am escalating towards anything with my pursuit of physics knowledge; it feels more like I have found something that makes me happy in the present moment -- a fun and creative source for problem solving, punctuated by amazing insights and new perspectives -- but I don't feel much of a higher purpose to strive toward physics mastery in the future.  (It does teach me skills, though, so that I feel like it is making me a more capable person at the end of each week, which does align with some of my sense of purpose.)

Does this mean I am in the wrong line of work?  Is it bad if my career is not what gives me purpose?  Will I find something that does someday?  There's also purpose attained from having an impact on people's lives, so how does that factor in?  How much is purpose inherently selfish?  I think that, as one of the first times I've put such thoughts into words, I've oversimplified things into thinking people have only one or two big sources of purpose, and that's it; there are surely degrees of purpose, and someone can have a whole slew of things that motivate them to varying degrees.  To say that I derive no purpose from physics is too simplistic -- advancing both my knowledge every day and, in an infinitesimal way, humanity's, does stir something in me -- but at first glance, when comparing to what else I have written, it is not as significant.

Just some preliminary thoughts on the subject; thanks for reading p diz!

Story Time: Little Happenings

What's the point, he said
Of what, she said
He stared hard into her eyes for a second and then glanced away, following a car as it drove by outside the window
Shoelaces, he said with a weak smile that tried to tie up loose ends
She chuckled and ate a piece of sushi after dipping it daintily in the soy sauce
They ate facing each other but their faces looked everywhere else
In passing his eyes over from the scene on her left side to the scene on her right, his met hers, and they shared a half second of connection before both blushed and continued to examine the room


"Let's gooo!!  You look amazing babe!  Our friends are waiting!"
"Have you seen my phone?"
He looked around the apartment, dropped flat to the floor to check under the couch, and hopped up to her smiling face right in front of his.  "Got it," she said.  "Let's go!"
He walked behind her to the elevator and admired the view.  She walked in front of him to let him admire the view.
She did a James Bond spin into the elevator and asked in a 'British' accent "Which floor, my dear?"
Not eager to uncage his 'British' accent, he grabbed her at the hips and did a 'spicy' 'salsa' move.
In the car they caught up over the little things of the day -- the happenings which constitute the majority of life, to be sure, but which also for the most part are only interesting to another with whom enough time is spent that they share in many of these little happenings -- her morning run, his meeting at work, her funny encounter with the Phyllis of her office.
...
"That was great!" she said, stumbling a little as she got into the car for the ride home.
"Such nice people," he said.  "And what delicious food!  We need to remember that sangria recipe."
They looked at each other and shared a half second of connection before both blushed and got out of the car to go up to the apartment.

Thoughts and Notes on the Bible

The Defining Decade by Meg Jay

"The best is the enemy of the good." - Voltaire
Trying to make the best decision is too paralyzing, it's much better just to make a decent decision and respond to the consequences.

Identity capital is the term she uses for the set of experiences and skills that you acquire over time, that serves as a currency for all sorts of relationships -- romantic and work-wise.  Kind of a cool concept that tries to pin down what you are building up over time as you gain experiences.

Six jams vs 24 jams Stanford psych study -- a taste test area was set up in a supermarket where 6 or 24 jams were displayed.  The 24 jams got more attention on the days they were out due to the huge array of choices, but only 3% of the people who sampled actually went on to buy jam.  When there were only 6 jams laid out, 30% went on to buy a jam.  Less choice made making a decision easier.

Weak ties -- this is the idea that the people closest to you are often the most similar, and the ones you'll learn the most from and expand your horizons with are generally the ones you have only a "weak tie" with.  They can help you network and get your foot in the door when it would otherwise be more difficult.  This chapter seemed to bash having a close friend group as it stifles growth, which I found myself a bit repelled by.  Maybe this is true, but I think just maintaining a diverse set of friends who don't overlap can be just as good for growth.  This may just be me clinging to a romantic notion of the value in a strong bond with another person, although looking to weak ties for help doesn't rule out the need for close relationships.  She just seemed to bash these relationships quite a bit.  Anyway, I like this idea, and feel like I had the same close friend group in Berkeley for most of the time there, but they were nice and diverse enough that I still learned a lot.  Here in Chicago I feel my friend group is more diverse but generally at the expense of closeness; I also feel like Pearl and I have a good mix of growth-inducing differences and empathy-encouraging similarities.

Work should be crappy sometimes.  She was saying how, at this stage in life, you want to feel like what you're doing for work is pushing you really hard because that's how you find your potential.  An "easy" job where you don't have to worry about meeting expectations doesn't make you grow nearly as much as one where you regularly feel anxious or lost.

To go with this, a lot changes in the brain in your twenties.  Supposedly it's a time where the brain is really plastic, comparable to the way a baby's is in the first few years of life.  Afterwards it sounds like character traits are more locked in.  She also wrote that people in their thirties and beyond become more accepting of things and more optimistic, and the ups and downs in emotions mellow out, which may both signal an end to a (volatile?) plastic brain and make you less eager to change yourself.  Anyway, it seems to place a lot of importance on laying some good groundwork down in your twenties.

Don't move in with a girl before proposing!  Supposedly the cohabitation effect is when you shlide into living together because it's convenient and fun, then get some furniture together, get used to sharing bills and cleaning the bathroom for each other, then shlide into getting married because it's easier than splitting up all your stuff again, and the whole time you're sort of just taking little steps toward a big thing which places less emphasis on each one.  You don't go into it asking yourself if this is someone you want to spend the rest of your life with; it's more just that it could be fun and convenient, but that's not the way to look at seeing if a partner is right for you.  So, supposedly this leads to higher divorce rates than if you ask yourself those big questions before choosing to live together (so get engaged first).

Trips are good.  People often view living together as a good test for compatibility, but how does that mesh with the cohabitation effect?  I'm glad you ask: trips to third world countries are good ways to put some stressors on a relationship and see how you both react.  They come with opportunities to have a lot of fun together as well as encounter and deal with new and unknown settings together.  Woo!  Go Asia Trip 2015!

Take home message: There is this ubiquitous view that life doesn't need to start until you're 30.  While many of the big decisions (marriage, starting a family, choosing a career and where to live, etc.) may not happen until then, the time to start thinking about them is definitely in your 20s.  Also, this time of little responsibility and attachment will go by fast, so keep in mind the mantra:



Yesterday is history; tomorrow is a mystery; but today is a gift.  That is why they call it the present.

Quotes and Hoes

I'm just going to stash these quotes here so I can find them again later.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. 

Louis de Bernières in Corelli’s Mandolin:

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. 

Agatha Christie in her autobiography

Uber: Pimp My Ride

So Pearl and I were talking today about "the sharing economy" as a Time magazine article called it, and how Uber works so well without having hardly any physical objects of value (Uber doesn't need to own cars, big buildings, etc.).  They offer an infrastructure and a name to stand under so that just about anybody can use their own resources, on their own schedule, working however much they want, to offer a service on the market and make money.  It seems so genius!  The company just needs to try to standardize its rides to a degree that consumers know what they are getting when they purchase an Uber ride, and then the rest is up to the drivers: to provide their own cars, to make sure their riders get where they need to be, to work enough that demand is met (and when it isn't Uber so wisely increases rates to lure more drivers out), etc etc.
This seems very similar to prostitution.  A pimp provides infrastructure (and that's it) so that women can each have the "freedom" to sell something that is already theirs.  The pimp has nothing to sell to consumers, like Uber when it's stripped bare of all its drivers, but instead offers a framework by which people can sell something they could have sold otherwise, but would have had a much harder time doing so without the name Uber offers or the protection a pimp offers.
Disclaimer My understanding of the two businesses is certainly limited so hopefully that connection isn't too forced or offensive (to compare the uglies of prostitution to driving people around in your car).

Anyway, it's taking me a while to get used to blogging... 

This thought (about Uber) was interesting during our musings earlier in the day, but just now, due to feeling guilty about writing so little in my New-Year's-resolution-blog, I thought I'd "revive" it for the sole purpose of posting it.  That feels forced, like most of the other times I think about posting something -- why is this thought worth preserving?  It's not really like I'll look back in a couple months and think "God damn!  Now that was a high quality thought! I'm glad I took half an hour to write that down!"  (I'll probably appreciate the clever title though)  Nor do I feel like any of the potential future people I'll tell about my blog really need to hear my thoughts on ride-pimping; this whole thought process really just fit in that conversation between just Pearl and me.

So maybe I should start writing more about events and things that I really want to remember down the road.  

This Valentine's Day (yesterday) I scrambled in a zipcar in the morning to Myopic bookstore and hid 5 old ticketstubs and receipts from some of the dates Pearl and I have been on, each with some sort of a note on them, in various books in the bookstore --

1. one was in a dream interpretation book we saw and talked about the time we went to Myopic before,
2. one was in the Agatha Christie section in the basement because we had read And Then There Were None together at the same time over Christmas break (and Pearl was so good at predicting who did it all)
3. one was hiding in 50 Shades Darker because 50 Shades of Grey came out yesterday and we joked about watching it together as our V day celebration, but they were out of that, plus I thought it'd be funny for her to have to ask where it was (the sex stuff is all in the front of the store FYI)
4. one was in a Rachel Ray cookbook so that Pearl'd have to go upstairs (and it's something to do with cooking; I looked but couldn't find any other good cookbooks to use); plus Pearl has a bunch of Rachel Ray cooking pans
5. the last was in Pride and Prejudice because Pearl supposedly really likes that book

So later in the day I went to her place and she'd cooked me lunch (which was very sweet).  Then she rented Guardians of the Galaxy for us to watch (such a fun movie!!), after which I sent her on her adventure to the bookstore while I attempted to make dinner for the two of us.  She'd also written a very sweet card which I read several times while cooking.  After a few hours she came home with donuts and tons of appreciation (which is one of Pearl's great strengths/virtues), and we ate and had a bottle of wine to share during a night of questions and discussions and joking and just plain old catching up, which was amazing.  And that was Valentine's Day with my valentine!  Then today we lazily got out of the apartment around 1 to go to brunch (and walked through the snow the two blocks to get there) and had our pimp conversation after that.  So all in all, a great weekend that is worth remembering, and while that was probably too lovey dovey or had too little/not enough detail to actually keep the interest of a general audience, it was more fun to write than the Uber stuff and feels like a more valuable update.  So maybe that's how I should blog from now on -- events I want to remember and thoughts about seeing the world in a different light (like the statistics post).  That's it for now, thanks for reading Pearl!

Stats Status

Back in high school, when the type of physics that was blowing my mind was deterministic equations of motion, I thought statistics was pretty useless and never studied it.  Why study fuzzy averages when you can know perfectly what will happen, as in the simple physics of a fired cannonball?

The more I learn, the more it becomes clear that you usually don't have all the information you need, or you have too much, or you have the wrong stuff, and statistics seems to be the tool to use to get what info you want.
--> Say you want to buy an airline ticket to Asia and your wallet could use a deal, but you don't really care to look all that much.  So you check once a week for three weeks to get a sense of the prices, then buy the next time it looks good.  Subconsciously, you're taking limited data points and extrapolating to some idea of a distribution of ticket prices, using past knowledge of how airline tickets seem to go in the weeks leading up to the flight date.  Then you do some statistical reasoning (also subconsciously, most likely) and compare your confidence in your model with how much searching you care to do, and when they meet you're ready to buy.
--> Or, say you find a data table in the Chicago Maroon with the time it took for the last 100 physics graduates to get their PhDs from UChicago, but that's way too much information!  You really just want the average, a measure of the spread, and maybe a measure (a higher order moment of the distribution) to tell about how symmetric the graduation times are about the average, so you boil down the unmanageable set of 100 data points into two or three numbers that your brain can handle.

In general, it seems statistics is a way of processing information into manageable terms.  The world is a noisy place where everything interesting has a spread on its values -- nothing is totally exact, nothing is precisely the same every time or every where -- and statistics is a tool to make sense of all of these uncertainties or spreads or variability or noise.  This perspective seems neat to me; it's like statistics as a field has been developed in response to how rich the world is.  How boring would things be if everything were known with certainty -- if every plane ticket were $2000, every physicist took 6 years to graduate, every blog post consisted of 500 words, and every split pea soup contained 3000 split peas (I guess meaning 1500 unsplit peas,,,?  That's assuming peas always split into two parts, but in reality pea splitting also follows a statistical distribution and hides some amount of hidden complexity!)?  Instead, every day is unique, and while your statistically predictive subconscious brain may have an idea of what to expect when you go to work, there are too many moving parts to predict exactly what will happen, and so every day is an adventure (some days more than others of course).

In my research with granular materials, hundreds or thousands of particles communicate through local interactions (a fancy-sounding way of saying they can only push on their immediate neighbors,  but then those neighbors push on their neighbors and so on, so you still get long-scale effects and complex "emergent" (=sum is greater than the parts) behavior).  Knowing each of these interactions is possible with computer simulations that we use, but not at all useful unless you find statistical averages to get some sort of macroscopic (large scale) measure, such as the global packing fraction (how well the particles fill space) or the stress distribution among particles (how forces propagate from one part of the system to another).  At the same time, though, the system size is small enough that some of those averages are so rough they border on being meaningless, such as when you ask about force chains, which are these long sequences of particles that pass on high forces to one another (rather than spreading it out among all their neighbors, as you might suppose would always be the case).  So in my work, while the small scale is fairly simple and intuitive (just shapes pushing on each other), understanding the large scale behavior (what the thousand particles will do together, whether it's avalanching or crunching together when you step on them or just filling a container) involves trying to boil down, statistically, a bunch of randomized interactions and pull out a useful average-type-behavior.  And the more I learn the more I see how nontrivial that is, and how useful it is to look at it through statistical goggles.

Let's get this party started!

Something my mom said over this most recent winter break home: meditate in the same room every day and over time simply walking into the room can bring a calm over you.  In the same light, something I was thinking about today was how even though I feel very much myself around my good friends, I still act subtly different with different friends, no doubt due to character roles we've fallen into over our many times together.  It therefore seems very important to set the stage for something like this (this blog-space), and to lay down the groundwork to make this blog somewhere I come to play around, experiment with abandon, and say whatever I'm thinking about, and you the reader (probably also me, or Pearl, who will be introduced soon) can come expecting a stream of consciousness chronicling 2015, the year of the blog.

So let's set the stage!  I'm a physics grad student and I can already sense my style of writing homework solutions, which often includes the reader in the process by using ample instances of "let's solve this equation" and "now we see what we've been searching for", coming into my writing here (see title).  My fun and adventurous girlfriend of about 6 months -- you guessed it! Pearl -- and I have made a resolution for the new year to each start and maintain a blog over the course of 2015!  We're hoping to lay down our thoughts and record any events that happen to us while learning about design as it pertains to websites and about some of the technical HTML type stuff that goes into customizing a sick user-friendly website.  

Who am I thinking the audience will be?  I'm already writing this a little differently than when I put my thoughts down on paper, which is feeling slightly restrictive but I hope I'll break that down over time and feel comfortable sharing whatever's on my mind with whoever might be reading.  In reality, though, this is for me, and I hope to make this an outlet of expression and to learn a lot in the process.  There we go, the first brick has been laid!  Till next time...

Playing around on a Foggy Saturday

Geez how many features does this have??