omenti

twelve-thirty

He noticed it before I did, but that's part of what he's good at.   It was December of my third year as a grad student and I was showing signs of burnout.  He told me to take a few months off from the thesis work and throw myself into something completely different with equal or greater intensity.   A day of walking around in the snow (Stony Brook saw heavy December snows back then) was enough to find something. I couldn't send an email between Stony Brook from Brookhaven National Labs.  Not that I sent emails at the time.  A project in mind, I celebrated with a piece of tart cherry pie.

 

Computer networks had been emerging, but didn't connect into something that made it easy for one part to talk to another.  The brilliance of TCP/IP wasn't universally recognized, but several of the unconnected silos were moving towards it. Connectivity was going to happen.  I had decided to write a gateway between two of these networks starting from a point of zero network experience.  Most of my programming was in FORTRAN and CDC assembly language on batch machines.  Three months later I had something that worked well enough that people used it.  Very little engineering blood flows in my views, so this seemed like a major victory.  Refreshed, I was able to jump back into worrying about particle physics.  I'm pretty sure I made more progress in the months that followed than if I hadn't taken the little sabbatical. 

 

A few years later my director called me in for a chat as the new year began.  I had only been at Bell Labs for a few months and was still finding my way around when he told me my background wasn't broad enough to be a good researcher.  To broaden myself he wanted me to "pick something completely different from anything you've done and give me a report after you'd played for two weeks."   It was a great education and went on for about four years until he moved to a different area.  It was then that a "two week sabbatical at the beginning of each year" had been added to my employment contract.  I haven't found anyone else at the Labs who had it as part of their employment agreement, but more than a few did something like it on their own.

 

Some mini-sabbaticals were great, others were dead ends. All were learning experiences. They managed to get this introverted person to the point where he could search out experts.  They taught me how to identify the type of person who might be the most useful - after all, Bell Labs had uber-experts in several fields and many of them were the wrong sort of person to talk to. 

 

It's a good way to add a bit of breadth.  After leaving what was left of research at AT&T a bit more than twenty years ago, I continued taking these mini-sabbaticals.   I follow something of a ritual.  On the 30th of January I write down a half dozen or so unconnected areas I know very little about.   Areas where two weeks of study might get me to the point where I could begin to ask a question or at least know if it's really interesting.  Usually there's something by the evening and, for reasons unknown to me,  I mark the occassion with pie.

 

Tomorrow is the 30th of December.  That means I need to bake a pie.

 

 

 

 

 

from the heights of human creativity

Many of us have a few days to pause and think a bit.   If you're looking for a bit of awe and wonder these  introductions to two pinnacles of human creativity are good launch pads.,  

First up is The Queen of the Night - that sublime aria from The Magic Flute.  From Rhiannon Giddens's Aria Code podcast.  (she's a music historian, composer, conductor, singer,  Grammy   Award winner and MacArthur Fellow)

My favorite Queen is Diana Damrau - here's an example from a recording session. that gives a sense of the athleticism of the performance

 

 

In the past I've taken a crack at explaining bits of the Riemann Hypothesis.  Judging from some of the comments that came back, I did a poor job.  It's centrally important to Number Theory and a proof remains elusive.  Alex Kontorovich of Rutgers has a very clear beginner's level explanation of what it is and why it's so beautiful.  He uses animations and requires no more than high school math -- if you know what prime numbers are and  that  2 + 4i s a complex number and i² =-1, you're good to go!

 

learnings from some mentorships

When Rutherford introduced me to Bohr, he asked me what I was working on. I told him and he said,

'How is it going?' I said 'I'm in difficulties.' He said 'Are the difficulties mathematical or physical?' I said I don't know.' He said 'That's bad.'
            - J. Robert Oppenheimer

 

I've experienced some wonderful mentorships over the years.  I've written about one of my first a few times.   Growing up in Montana you can fall into the beauty of the nature that's all around.  For me it was the sky at night and during the day.   By thirteen I'd been through  the astronomy books the bookmobile had been stocked with and the librarian suggested I write to a few professors.  Fifty stamps produced two - an incredibly high percentage when you think about it.  They had different styles, but generally would pose interesting questions to work out.  The latency in the US Postal Service meant I needed to spend a week struggling with a letter.  Thankfully there wasn't any way to look up an answer, so I really had to think and try. 

 

Many of the lessons had several levels of complexity.  Of course I only saw the least sophisticated level at the time, but I was slowly developing a physical intuition and linking it with intuitive curiosity.  One of the profs concentrated on paths I found fascinating (one of his gifts was realizing what would be fascinating and how to frame it), the other taught some math disguised as neat tricks. It took a Neil Gaiman level of cleverness to make some of the connections.  Thinking about it years later I realized they gave me something else that turned out to be incredibly useful and powerful.  They taught me it was good to be usefully stupid.¹

 

People speak of the imposter syndrome.  Sometimes even  the jargon in a talk barely outside your field is completely incoherent. One can be left with a feeling of being an imposter for sitting in the room.   It should be a good feeling..  it means you might be able to learn something from these people by asking some good questions.  It also means they've spent as much time toiling in their area as you have in yours.   A close friend is a computer scientist who  knows about as much of physics as I know of computer science.  Mutually assured imposterdom.  Our conversations are fascinating and often productive as we deal with each of our ignorances.  It's just as good, and often better, when you're around people with even less overlap with your background and interests.  Art, music, sport, sociology, history, engineering..  there is so much to learn.

 

School generally fails to teach you how to be usefully stupid. Throughout most of the experience you have to 'get the right answer' or write good papers in a short amount of time.  People are good at gaming the system and the learning is often superficial.  I learned a bit of useful stupidity from my mentors as a teenager, but the message really came home as an undergrad when I was struggling with something on my undergrad thesis.  The professor suggested I talk to one of the experts in the field - someone who had been sprinkled with the holiest water in Stockholm. We talked at the blackboard for a half hour and he told me he had no idea what the answer could be and determining if there was an answer might be difficult.  He said it in a most encouraging way.   If he didn't know how to crack it - no one did.  And here I was working on it.  It meant it must be at the frontier. 

 

To be usefully stupid means that you're working hard with all the tools you've built over the years, but it's at the frontier.  No one knows.   In grad school, or a very good undergrad school, the right way to give an examination in math or the 'hard' sciences (and probably many other areas) is to give an oral exam that asks progressively more difficult questions until the student can't answer.  If they have answered everything, it means the faculty has failed.

 

The formal and informal mentorships I've had have taught me so much more, but learning how to be usefully stupid has been the gateway to the frontier as well beginning to broaden my interests.   And thank you to those of you who have been informal mentors to me!  

__________

 

¹ There's a relative stupidity where the material is well-known. Some students read and understand the material and do well on an exam while those who don't fail.  'Stupid' may be an inappropriate word, but it's one a friend with a Nobel Prize uses to describe himself as he struggles with the frontier.

 

 

 

auteur and other fine words and phrases

About a week ago my friend Paul reported on his walking vacation in Iceland.  Paul happens to be in his late 80s and hasn't lost his knack for physics or interesting words and phrases.  He sent photos and noting some beautiful displays of the lux septentrionalis.  In the 45 or so years I've known him I've picked up a fair amount of Latin, Greek and German.  He bears direct responsibility for some of the phrases I use.. cheating in a way as I'm not fluent in these languages.¹  Auteur is a particularly interesting word, so let's dwell on it.

 

Recognizing creation of a book is easy.  Usually there are one or two authors get the credit even though editors, proof readers, printers and more were involved.   It's similar in scientific papers - at least until you get to collaborations of a half dozen or more.  Music is created by a composer, but orchestral performances are jointly credited to the composer and a conductor.  It's the complexity of something - when more than a few creative people are involved, that the term auteur seems appropriate.  I'd nominate James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary as one of the first auteurs of a series of books - he went far beyond what normal editors do. 

 

The term auteur is usually associated with film.  Even in the thirties one hundred people might be involved in making a film and more than a handful - actors for example - may have had centrally important roles.  Here the equivalent of the creation of the film  is usually given to the director.  A director may not know how operate a camera, the intricate lighting or be able to perform on stage.  What they bring is vision and the ability to communicate it. 

 

Alfred Hitchcock wanted control over every scene of the movie.  He had to work it out ahead of time and communicate it so he repurposed Walt Disney's invention of story boarding to acted film. Hayao Miyazaki draws or corrects a lead frame of each animation segment of his films and spends a large amount of time with  composer Joe Hisaishi to get the music right. His style is dictatorial, but animators regard him as the best - an auteur among animation auteurs.  Pixar has a handful of internally grown auteurs who have seen remarkable success.  Wes Anderson is so good that name actors fall over themselves to get parts before seeing scripts.   It's an impressive group.

 

In spending time with an animation house as well as having worked on some large scale physics experiments, I see a common thread.  There needs to be a vision. There may be, and probably is, someone in the organization for each of the speciality skills who is better at their skill than the auteur.  The problem is having everyone do their best with limited knowledge of the rest causes project to drift from the goal.  It's the sort of thing David Epstein talks about in Range.   Someone has to have vision and taste and that's a special skill that requires development.  

 

It can apply to business.  Steve Jobs comes to mind and there are certainly others at various levels.  An interesting question is at what point does a project get big enough that an auteur is necessary and how does that vary by project type?  Many of you can come up with interesting examples.

 

Since sport is something of a mirror,  one can think of great coaches as auteurs.  It's certainly true  in team sports like football, soccer, indoor volleyball, etc.  Great coaches have developed a sense of the game and the taste in how it should be played.  Certainly they need a group of good players, but not necessarily all need to be, or even should be, great.  Finding a combination to execute the vision is the important piece.

 

__________

¹   Here's a non-alphabetical list of some that come to mind:

Danish (I know three Danes well)

klap lige hesten   "pat the horse" means shut up

det blæser en halv pelican "it's blowing half a pelikan"  means it's very windy

ingen ko på isen  "no cow on the ice" means  whatever the problem is, it's no big deal

så er den ged barberet  "the goat is shaved"  means the problem has been fixed, or the work is done

gå som katten om den varme grød  "walk as the cat around the hot porridge" means some is avoiding the problem

det regner skomagerdrenge  "it's raining shoemaker's apprentices" means the rain is very heavy

hygge a special coziness - what you might find on a snowy evening with good friends, food and a fire.

Italian

commuovere to be moved by a story to the point of tears

Greek

meraki    throwing yourself into something complete with passion, creativity and love.  This is how Paul approaches physics.

Tagalog

kilig the feeling of butterflies in your stomach as it romance or discovery

Malay

pisan zapra the time it takes to eat a banana - about two minutes

Swedish

fika gathering to talk and take a break from ordinary routines. Coffee must be involved.

resfeber the beating of a traveler's heart at the beginning of a journey. A anxiety with anticipation.

Welsh

hiraeth a homesickness for the time and place to which you can't return

Japanese

komorebi the sunlight filtering through leaves on the trees

boketto gazing into the distance without thinking about anything

wabi-sabi finding beauty in imperfections, an acceptance of the cycle of life

German

kummerspeck 'grief bacon'  the weight you gain from emotional overeating

freudenfreude finding joy in the success of others

Yiddish and Yinglish

shlimazel someone who seems to only have bad luck

(this part of the list is long .. mostly from friends on Long Island and NYC. Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish is a wonderful resource)

Bantu

ubuntu 'I find my worth in you and you find your worth in me'  human kindness

French

flâneur a person who lounges or strolls around in a seemingly aimless way. Often seen as an aloof observer of urban society

sirop de poteau 'pole syrup'  imitation or very low quality maple syrup that must have been harvested from telephone poles.

auteur a person of influence or artistic control - often associated with filmmaking.

I'll stop here..