In 1958, just after James Van Allen discovered his eponymous radiation belt about the earth, he agreed to work with the US military to attempt to disrupt it. More details at NPR, Exploding H-Bombs In Space:
In any case, says the science history professor, “this is the first occasion I’ve ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up.”
Accelerating hard up the dark streets from the Ford Parkway Lifetime toward my apartment near I94, life felt perfect. I had just wrapped up another hard workout, and I was headed home to spend a lovely summer evening with my fiancée. It was late July, 2008. I remember the song I was listening to as the cool air whipped through the car: Cellophane Girl, by Graham Colton.
I thought I had it figured out, but was I ever wrong. Wow.
Now, I feel that I’ve got it figured back out. I’m likely mistaken, yet, the comfort of my naiveté is tremendous. The solace of limited understanding is a veneer, a faux finish, over our conscious minds — we don’t trouble ourselves with what lies underneath the surface; that is, the “whys” of life. Too many of these questions could make life unbearable. Too few, and you miss the richness of the world, the nuances that color everything.
Still, people find joy in ignorance. A quote from The Matrix:
You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
Takes a bite of steak
Ignorance is bliss.
And still, people find joy in embracing these huge questions that underlie our very existence. A quote from Plato, Apology 37e-38a:
Perhaps someone might say, “Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?” Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.
How to rectify the two views? The questioning, struggling, striving mind which never settles for a simple explanation seems always at odds with the mind that relaxes and soaks in the beauty of the moment.
The University Recreation Center supplies the facilities for a variety of sporting events throughout the year. This past weekend, it hosted the 2010 USA Racquetball Junior Olympic Racquetball Championships. So, it’s not unusual to run into scampering quorums of teenagers who aren’t quite old enough for college. I had an encounter with one such group when leaving the Rec Center on Sunday.
The boldest of the group approached me, asking, “Hey man, you go here?”
“Yup.”
“How you like it?”
Not wanting to explain my graduate student status, all I came up with was: “It’s — well — I mean, I like it here.”
“Lots of programs?”
“Yeah, I mean they have a ton. You get a lot for your money. If I were you, I’d definitely go here.” The young man’s friends orbited slowly, listening to our conversation.
“The parties, how are the parties?”
“I — umm, well I don’t know. I hear they’re good?”
“Right. And man, how are the women? You know. The women.”
Holding up my left hand and smiling, I said “I wouldn’t know, I’m married.”
Hootin’ and hollerin’ “He’s married!! ooohh, you got him!”, the group bunched back together and wandered off. I laughed — it was fun talking to them. I think I like talking to strangers.
From a review of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl:
“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is,” Frankl writes. “After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
Thanks to Mykala, this book jumped to the top of my “next book to read” reading list.
The longest tennis match IN HISTORY is currently tied, 59 games all. Some comments from the Hacker News thread on the topic highlighted the hilarious commentary from the liveblog at the BBC, covering the match:
6pm: The score stands at 34-34. In order to stay upright and keep their strength, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut have now started eating members of the audience. They trudge back to the baseline, gnawing on thigh-bones and sucking intestines. They have decided that they will stay on Court 18 until every spectator is eaten. Only then, they say, will they consider ending their contest.
And then, disbelief:
7pm: What’s going on here? Once, long ago, I think that this was a tennis match. I believe it was part of a wider tennis tournament, somewhere in south-west London, and the winner of this match would then go on to face the winner of another match and, if he won that, the winner of another match. And so on until he reached the final and, fingers crossed, he won the title.
That, at least, is what this spectacle on Court 18 used to be; what it started out as. It’s not that anymore and hasn’t been for a few hours now. I’m not quite sure what it is, but it is long and it’s horrifying and it’s very long to boot. Is it death? I think it might be death.
42 games all.
Then, zombies again:
9.25pm: Last thoughts before I ring me a hearse. That was beyond tennis. I think it was even beyond survival, because there is a strong suggestion (soon to be confirmed by doctors) that John Isner actually expired at about the 20-20 mark, and Mahut went soon afterwards, and the remainder of the match was contested by Undead Zombies who ate the spectators during the change of ends (again, this is pending a police investigation).
Still, if you’re going to watch a pair of zombies go at each other for eleventy-billion hours, far into the night, it might as well be these zombies. They were incredible, astonishing, indefatigable. They fell over frequently but they never stayed down. My hat goes off to these zombies. Possibly my head goes off to them too.
It’s a crying shame that someone has to lose this match but hey-ho, that’s tennis. The historic duel between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut will resume tomorrow and play out to its conclusion. Possibly. Maybe they’ll just keep going into Friday and Saturday, Sunday and Monday; belting their aces and waiting for that angel to come and lead them home.
The great thing about the BBC commentary is that it’s exactly like checking in with your buddies at the local pub (bar, in the US’s case) and talking about the game. I think it really adds that sense of context that can be missing when it’s just broadcasters trying to appeal to a very large audience. It kinda serves the purpose of the weatherman — everyone can look up the radar picture and forecast on their own… but it’s nice to have somebody who knows the topic talk about it for a little while.
Oh, and once again I should have listened to Dan back in 2009 when he talked about the greatness of BBC liveblogging.
Norway is a huge exporter of oil. Here’s an article about “The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil”
Norway’s state oil company, StatoilHydro, is internationally recognised as a competitive commercial player and one of the most environmentally and socially conscious ones to boot. Since 1996, every krone the government has earned from oil has gone into a savings fund, which now totals some £240bn – more than a year’s gross domestic product and equivalent to about £50,000 for each of Norway’s 4.8 million citizens.
Right now, that’s about $73,000 per person. Anyhow, that Iraqi was named Farouk al-Kasim, and moved to Norway in 1968 out of necessity: it was the only country that could provide medical care to his son. I find his quote at the end of the article particularly interesting:
Not everything in life has been good – but things have mostly come in a fortunate order. It’s got nothing to do with skill, it’s simply luck.
Two band names for your consideration:
Love in Four Acts: What is Romantic Love?:
The romantic couples who have been together for half their lives have something quite different from romantic love. Johnson calls it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love – “it represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks … to find the relatedness, the value, the beauty, in the simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama … or an extraordinary intensity in everything” (pg. 195). In a strange way, this is true love because it can be everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form in our lives.
This article talks about “limerence”, which was a new word for me; it means romantic love. We are all familiar with its intensity… and also how short-lived it is. A theory posits that limerence exists so that a couple is together long enough to support a child until it walks. The timing does seem to match up, but I wonder if limerence could even persist in the absence of the cultural trappings and traditions we have woven around nascent romantic relationships.
Recently, I was waiting in our dental school reception area to meet with Patient Financing and I opened up the February New Yorker. In it was a brilliant essay about the intersection of society and alcohol by Malcolm Gladwell, entitled Drinking Games. Gladwell’s anecdotal and anthropological evidence reveals that the effects of alcohol are not uniform — our reaction to being drunk is heavily influenced by… what we are expected to do when drunk. Here’s an awesome quote:
“Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.”
You really should read the article: Gladwell is a brilliant story-teller. Incidentally, the topic ties into a conversation with Mykala a few days ago. It began when I was biking home from the rec and school, and I considered what Past Alex would’ve done with such a cloudy yet not rainy day. It was in the upper 60s and the sky was quite gray. The answer to my question caused me to almost be overcome by a sense of loss: I would’ve played basketball with my friends. It’s not that I can’t physically play basketball (though I would imagine I’d be quite rusty), it’s more: I’m “homesick for a place that no longer exists”. Those carefree days are fading fast from memory; sometimes you feel those sands of time in that hourglass running through your fingers. Anyhow, that homesick phrase is from the movie “Garden State” and it has sometimes been called by the German word “weltschmerz”, though that word actually has a more philosophical and less navel-gazing-y meaning. Anyhow…
Growing up means more responsibility — you take responsibility for your actions, right the wrongs you do unto others, help others, honor commitments, show up to places on time. And with that responsibility… you lose the carefree feelings of youth. You still have fun, but within a structure, before your bedtime, within the limitations adults must place on themselves. And so sometimes you’re sad that those times of youth are gone.
This all relates to the alcohol because of a comment Mykala made: “Maybe people drink so they don’t have to think about tomorrow, so they can forget about adulthood for a little while.” I thought this was quite perceptive when I heard it, and Gladwell’s comment about the “myopia” of drunkenness fits in with it perfectly.
Ultimately, I think I know how to deal with the melancholy that accompanies nostalgia for youth: cultivate an environment for my own children where they can experience such wonderful, carefree, days.
Tony Hsieh’s article Why I Sold Zappos reveals just a fraction of how much he has learned in guiding his company, Zappos, from near-bankruptcy to a recent acquisition by Amazon. I think I’d like to read his book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose since I hope to run a business a decade from now. Check out this quote from the article, just mixed in with everything else:
… Zappos’s policy of paying new employees $2,000 to quit if they’re unhappy with their jobs.
When I read this, I actually said aloud: “How can that work?” It sounds like it would make employees want to leave. Then, I thought about it: it does make employees want to leave! If Zappos isn’t a good fit for someone, this money kickstarts their aspirations to find a job that is a better fit. They’re not wallowing in employment inertia, poisoning the workplace environment because they hate their job. Thus, the former employee leaves happy, and Zappos gets to find another person to fill the position. However, the money says something to the employee up front: we want to make you happy to work here. After all, Zappos can’t be hiring someone each month, then paying $2000 “severance”. Interesting.
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