Want

This is another entry I found in the binder from last summer; I think these must’ve been from July, because they’re in there with my letter to Congresspeople about the JWST, and I wasn’t using the binder otherwise. (Yes, my mind is such that I have to figure out when I wrote an undated journal entry. ) The “you,” once again, is just imaginary. I’ve always liked writing in the second person.

Ich will viel. I want a lot. Je veux… Je veux beaucoup. Beaucoup de temps, beaucoup des choses, beaucoup. I want to walk on air. I want to breathe physics and dance mathematics. I want to stay up all night watching the stars alone, surrounded by the echoes of everyone who has watched them before. I want to do something new. I want to see something that none of them did. I want to do something that would interest the greatest minds that knew this Earth. Is that so much in the end?

…

Don’t touch me now. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who you are. Are you the one who will wake me from my slumber? My thoughts are lost and full of fog. Help me find them. Don’t let me lose them again–hold them safe with you. They slip through the walls of my mind too easily when you are near. Perhaps they like you better.

I want my self back now. I seem to have forgotten it a thousand miles from here, if it was not all a dream. I miss the girl with the glimmering eye and the camera in her hand. I miss the girl who could be anything. If you see her, please tell her for me: Become something now, girl, before you become nothing.

I want a lot. I want pretty things, shiny things, strong things, bonodorous things. I want an arm linked with mine, a hand around my shoulder, a mischievous grin. I want knowledge. I want to know what makes the world tick and the knowledge to make it tick in better time. I want answers so that I can find new questions.

And I want someone else who wants those questions, too. “So many are alive who–” So many have forgotten how to say “why?” So many have forgotten the joy of a surprise, of an answer that holds more mysteries than the question it replies. I want someone who will search with me for questions.

I want one who can lose his world to a piece of paper. I want his imagination to be the vessel that carries him to Valinor, to Ivalice and Anuskaya. But I want him to come back nearly whole. I want him to see the difference and similarity both among these worlds. I want him to remember that this one is his home, clutch his wonder tight to his heart and see such beauty here that he needs no magic, elves, or fairies to make him stay. I want this of everyone. Je veux ceci pour tout le monde. Ich will dies.

…

If I ask you why the sky is blue
don’t just tell me that the sunlight bounces off the air
do not quench my curiosity
rather ask me why the sunset’s red.

In defense of the James Webb Space Telescope

Yesterday I heard through Phil Plait on Twitter (who writes Discover’s Bad Astronomy blog) that a new budget draft from the House Appropriations Committee would slash budgets for the sciences, most notably that of NASA, whose budget for FY 2012 would be $1.6 billion lower than this year. That’s a huge cut, and the bill would explicitly scrap the entire James Webb Space Telescope project!

JWST is seen as being the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been operating for over 20 years and has contributed immensely to our understanding of the cosmos. (Tidbit: We knew the universe is expanding, thanks to Edwin Hubble in the first half of the 20th century, but it was his namesake space telescope that showed us that not only is the universe expanding, that expansion is speeding up!) Hubble has peered back almost to the origins of the first galaxies; James Webb would take us even further. With it, we could see the formation of the first galaxies and stars; could see stars forming inside the clouds of gas and dust that obscure them from Hubble’s view. We could look for planets orbiting other suns, and even get a picture of what elements those planets harbor–that’s so much more than the faint hint of a planet that we get now with Kepler! We could look at other planets, outside our solar system!

In case you haven’t seen my earlier post on Hubble and my interest in things astronomical, it was the stunning imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope that first piqued my curiosity about galaxies and star clusters and nebulae. These images are breathtaking, some of them bizarre, some ethereal, some almost incredible: they are like works of art. But they’re not paintings, not mere imagined things; these are images of objects, flaming gas balls, pinwheels of light, and dusty clouds some of which are hundreds of thousands of light-years across and millions or billions of light-years away (millions or billions of years in the past!) and all of which are really out there in the vast dark of our universe. Can you even begin to imagine such immense size or distance? Can you wrap your head around the fact that by looking through a telescope in space, we can look at the past–so far in the past that we can almost see the universe before it even had galaxies? This was the power of Hubble for me; but Hubble’s life is almost over, and it’s time for something new to take its place. James Webb can be that something for a whole new generation, but only if we see it through.

There are billions of dollars invested in JWST already. The mirrors, it was announced last week, are fully polished. The equipment, part by part, is being completed. This telescope is at the top of the priorities for astrophysics research, described in Nature News as “the key to almost every big question that astronomers hope to answer in the coming decades;” its importance for America’s standing in the field of astronomy is hard to overstate, and its power to captivate and engage the interest of the public will probably be at least as great as that of Hubble. And the House Appropriations Committee is telling us to throw all that away when we have already come so far.

We are already losing the shuttle program. Please, please don’t let this happen to JWST.

Links to more info here:

• “Appropriations Committee Releases the Fiscal Year 2012 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations” (House press release)
• “AAS Issues Statement on Proposed Cancellation of James Webb Space Telescope” (American Astronomical Society)
• “Congress puts NASA and JWST on the chopping block” (Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy blog)
• “Why We Need the James Webb Space Telescope” (Julianne at Cosmic Variance)
• “James Webb Space Telescope” (Risa at Cosmic Variance)

And here, a pretty entertaining vlog advocating for the JWST:

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Picking up Melanie Mitchell’s “Complexity”

This is a good way for a book to start. I’m not familiar with John Holland, though–probably an advisor or something; I wonder whether he’s written anything.

Reductionism is the most natural thing in the world to grasp. It's simply the belief that "a whole can be understood completely if you understand its parts, and the nature of their 'sum.'" No one in her left brain could reject reductionism. --Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

Hofstadter was Mitchell’s faculty advisor when she was a graduate student at the University of Michigan studying artificial intelligence. I think I’m going to like her.

Lumosity: Fun games to stretch your brain

If you don’t know about the “brain games” website Lumosity, you should go have a look. It’s kind of like yoga for your mind. Well, maybe you wouldn’t like it if you hate puzzles and sudoku and lateral thinking games, but even if you do you might find it useful.

Lumosity isn’t a website of puzzles like sudoku, and it isn’t a brain teaser site, either, but it is designed to offer fun games that challenge your brain. Some of them are so straightforward that they could have been made for a personal computer circa 1984 – oh, wait. Raindrops is a prettified update to the old falling equations math game Funnels & Buckets; in some ways it’s harder (3 misses and you’re done, whereas in F&B the buckets had to fill up, so you could miss up to 10 times or so), but in others it’s easier (the screen clears for a fresh start when you miss in Raindrops, while in F&B the numbers keep on falling). Either way, though, it will challenge your speed if nothing else: the game speeds up until 3 equations have fallen to the bottom before you could answer, and it throws more equations out simultaneously as they begin to fall faster. You can’t ‘win’ this game.

Actually, a lot of the games at Lumosity are this way, and I think it’s one of the site’s strengths. However well you do initially, the games will speed up and add more variables until you struggle with them; they’re well-designed to offer a challenge at almost any level. And they are simple in concept – Raindrops uses basic arithmetic; a maze race game spins, challenging your ability to stay oriented while navigating as fast as possible; a pattern matching game tests your working memory by asking whether the current card matches the pattern shown one or two cards earlier, with a collection limited to 3 or 4 cards (surprisingly tough!); a word game asks you to come up with as many words as you can that start with the same few letters.

Unfortunately, the research on any benefits in the real world of working on your speed, memory, or mental calculation skill with these games seems to be sparse even now. Lumosity has some study reports listed on the website, but the number of study participants is so small that it seems unreliable; one lists 23 participants split into a control and an experimental group – far too few people to make for a representative sample. Other than that, the site notes frequently what people say about Lumosity, that is, it notes anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes prove psychologically persuasive for many or most people, but even when they report actual results (Lumosity only reports perceived results), they are too dependent on the individuals telling them to be reliable indicators of general results.

But there are some high-profile schools doing studies on Lumosity, they say (Harvard, Columbia, Stanford), so maybe they’re working on something more comprehensive.

Well, if I haven’t badmouthed their small-sample study too much, I’ll add that I signed up for the free trial a couple of weeks ago, and the games are quite fun. I’m playing them to get a little more comfortable trying to solve problems under an intense time constraint that gets more difficult as I do better. Sounds a little like a CAT, and I figure it won’t hurt. I tend to freak out a little bit when I feel rushed … never much liked the linear Mario games, where the screen will push you forward if you don’t keep moving constantly. So, I’ll try to get used to it so I can keep my head a bit clearer.

Give it a try. If you’re going to play flash games online, you might as well pick ones that are a little more edifying than, say, Gemcraft. Right?

Parallel lines

An optical illusion posted by the YouTube user greeenpro2009. Parallel strips of paper that line up to form a checkerboard pattern appear crooked depending on the arrangement of the checkers. Weird. (This one is thankfully not dizzying, unlike many optical illusions.) I have to wonder how it is we process visual information, such that these even, parallel lines appear tapered and non-parallel. Any thoughts?