A Weblog

You can find my NEW BLOG at http://jreyes.blogdns.com! [Actually, I never moved there.]

Following Peter Woit and the guys at Cosmic Variance, I decided that maybe I should follow fold and start using WordPress for my personal blogging. Not to say that the folks at the Berkman Center don’t allow for a nice blogging experience, I just want a bit more control over the functionality and presentation of my personal newspaper is all. This is why I use LaTeX rather than Microsoft Word or some other WYSWIG document processor. [Also it minimized the number of times my roommates would ask to use my printer while they were here. But that wasn't ever immediately my intent.]

Unfortunately, as it would happen, for me, WordPress requires access to Php and MySQL — a scripting language and a database. Undergraduates can’t get a hold of these fancy internet toys, so I can’t host this thing on my school account. So, as I pride myself on my resourcefulness and fickle compulsiveness, I hunted down and installed an Apache sever on my laptop, configured Php and even created a MySQL database. Now I can post, but, you, my reader, cannot access my posts. At least, I’m not sure that you can reliably.

I’m investigating what sort of privileges I have at the Design School. Yesterday I remembered that I might have an account there. And I do; you can send me email at my GSD account, and I can masquerade as an architect in training on the internet — something that doesn’t sound fun enough to do. But if I can use their computers to host my blog, perhaps I’ll change my tagline to “Because I don’t go to the Design School.” In the meantime, I’ll figure out how to import and coordinate and keep everything at the Law School.

Since last we spoke, I’ve been to New York and back. Come this fall, Abbe will live just across from the UN building on 43 Street. Her building doorman told us that we could park the UHaul despite the street signs which reserve the curb for diplomat and consulate parking only.

I don’t normally like New York; this time was no different. However, I got a pair of sunglasses at one of the rest stops. With UV protection, polarized lenses, and a pink and orange glaze, they make me look like the type of man who sells space credits in clubs in between glow-in-the-dark shots served in test tubes.

After moving Abbe, it was Michelle’s turn. To celebrate, we hosted a cookout in the courtyard. Beef kabobs with peppers, onions, and zucchini with a bananas foster � la Boy Scout camping trip.

We got lost some where in Roxbury. Thinking that we could drive around all night without ever finding the Green Street station, we pulled into a gas station for directions. I strolled inside sporing my Fast Park uniform with Jose name tag and glasses hung carefully on my collar. There I found five or six “urban youths.” They didn’t seem to notice me for a few seconds. It was impossible to catch any of their eyes, so I spoke. “Hey, do you know where the Green Street station is?”

I wasn’t prepared for their response.

“Yeah, I know. — No, wait. I want to tell him. — I’m going to tell him. Go up here. — Yeah, go right up here. — I’m going to tell him, yeah. Go up here and you’ll see a school. Is English over there? — Yeah, but you’re going to see Ruggerios. — Ruggerios, and then there’s a police station. — Okay, okay. Yeah. I’m gong to tell him, go up here and you’ll see Ruggerios and then a police station and then turn right right after the police station. That’s Green Street.”

I tried to keep my smile from growing to wide, thanked them, and was off.

Michelle lives in a place called the Pirate Ship, and they don’t take the name lightly. Perhaps I’ll have something more to say later.

But even though I had started my day at the Miracle of Science Cafe, and even though I had had more than a pound of meat and half a dozen bananas at the barbecue, I was still hungry. For helping, Michelle offered to feed her moving crew. We hit up IHOP, which is just off a scenic driveway in Watertown on which only pleasure vehicles may drive. How else could you classify the Stratus, I ask.

The stuffed french toast tasted something like a jelly donut, but the hashed browns and bacon were redeeming. The recess lighting above our table was cut off and on by the ceiling fan positioned between to a rhythm which caused us each a headache.

I still have a headache. Not the same one, of course. After IHOP, I dropped Mary and Michelle off, then DJ. Except that DJ doesn’t live on this end of the Red Line and I wasn’t in driving form. Since I woke up, Howard Stern has been talking loudly from the online archives; Soul Caliber has been equally loud and visually confusing for just as long. Between them, it’s hard to compose full sentences.

Perhaps I’ll go home, recover, and give a proper post later.

The past few days have been eventful. And it looks as if they’re going to continue to be that way. Thursday I ran into the illustrious Ashley Bo Tse Ma, who, as I understand it, has moved from that acursed place known as New York City to the friendlier environs of Cambridge. And for some time. This is permanent. While I know I can’t claim to have done anything myself, I take a certain pride and satisfaction upon winning anyone to Massachusetts.

She was on her way to get hangers for her new place. I was heading to the astrophysics library to get new books for my presentation, which I was to give seven hours later.

After lunch at Grendel’s I headed home for a nap. The day before I spent the morning reading William James’ Pragmaticism in Widener at one of the carrels in the French literature section of the stacks. [I liked it so much that I've applied to get one myself; that make you feel so scholarly.] So I had an accuse to nap. But I had a presentation to write today. It was before 1pm, so I reasoned that I wouldn’t get any work done before 3pm anyway. Then at 4pm, I woke up.

Luckily, I had already rehearsed my presentation the night before with Ian and Hepler. And since everyone’d be sober tonight, it’d go much more quickly this time. And to satisfy the physics kids, I even threw some motivation from Dirac and the Gordon-Klein equation. This was big, you know. Dirac generated a Clifford algebra. Could I have better reason to give my presentation?

Dirac wasn’t enough. And I droned on for about one hour, twenty minutes. At least, I’m told, that my handwriting was “mesmorizing”, to which someone else echoed, “I know!”

The fun continues on through Friday and today and tomorrow. Yesterday I got my car inspected. After lunch at Grendel’s, of course. This time at the bar and with Mary. We’re a funny pair because both of us are perfectly happy not to talk to one another. Some how we managed to communicate long enough to agree to get my car inspected. And it passed. We had to replace the windshield wipers, but this was something I’ve been meaning to do since at least late January. I used them last night to pick up DJ. In the tropical storm hovering over 93 South yesterday afternoon, they were a godsend.

They were less useful on the way back. I fell asleep to my IMAX movie on coral reefs. DJ eventually passed out as is evidenced by his comatose corpse on the floor behind me. We’re supposed to help Abbe move to her grown-up appartment in New York this weekend. But she hasn’t called to wake me up yet.

I’d go swimming but the pool doesn’t open until 10am.

The other Abby called last night to wake me up, though. I wish I had been awake since her calls are so rare and always welcomed. But I went back to sleep in time to receive another call at 2:30am. Stephanie called from New York completley coincidentally. While in school, Jen and Stephanie, and later on, I liked to yell cute things in aggressive ways. If ever you woke up to a pseudo-angry, drunk shout “CUDDLING!” in the early morning to any of our voices, I apologize.

Stephanie called to tell me that Jen had come up with a new one: huggling which is funny, because it’s not a word but still works. I told Stephanie that I’d call her once I got into the City. She told me Na’s back from China.

Tomorrow Monica flies in from San Francisco. Maybe I’ll stick around until the 12th. But then again, this is New York and I already promised not to return this year. An extended visit might be in direct violation. Plus I got a thesis to write, part of which is due Thursday!

Monday night is free apps night at Sunset Grill & Tap in Allston. So the Yale Beer Society (formerly the Harvard Beer society) gathered who it could for a meeting. Among us were a student astrophysicist, physicist, mathematician, and recently graduated intellectual philospher. [I'm told that the intellectual part isn't simply arrogance, but actually designates a particular type of philosopher. Or, I could be making this entire story up. Given what follows, it's not clear even to me.]

Mistake number one: the appetizers are free on Monday’s, but not until after midnight. We got there at 8pm. With about one hundred twenty beers on tap and just over three hundred in total, we had no problem waiting around. We are YBS, after all.

Mistake number two: someone, maybe a few someones, ordered two flights of mead. For those who haven’t been, a flight is a standard unit of measurement. It is equivalent to four beers. In fact, it is four beers. This is not to be confused with a yard of beer, which is also four beers tall. The yard comes in a long, silly cylinder. The flight is served on a mat and in four glasses.

But the point is not the quantity, but rather, the contents. Mead is about the most vile stuff known to man. [Not true.] It definitely gives me some insight into viking culture. In no time flat, we were screaming on the top of our lungs at one another.

But what were we screaming? Well, the astrophysicist was Ian. And the student mathematician; ah, well that’s me. It’s not hard to guess just what were were screaming about. What is the nature of the universe; where does math exist; are virtual possibilities physically manifest; is there a God; can nothing exist; does its non-existence necessitate the full existence of physically viable possibilities? It went on. And on. And on.

By the end of the night, the bar had cleared out. Except for us, of course. Having missed the rain and the last bus home, we walked. Continuing our philosophy.

Dan, the philosopher, and I maintained our distance from the physicists. We had paired off into loud sides in the restaurant and had no intention of letting things go. He and I had accidentally reconstructed William James’ arguments about the noumenal and phenomenal, communities of inquiry, and problems with bivalent vs multivalent logic. When we ordered the two flights of mead I thought that this was one of those non-standard college moments. Now I was sure that wasn’t especially normal.

By the time we reached Kirkland, Dan’s destination, we hadn’t finished. We had only really just begun. But Dan didn’t have a light for his cigarette, so we had to stop, at least for that. There were some kids hanging in front of the entrace to the House. They were nearly scared away as they heard discussing, no longer arguing, first and higher order logic. “No school talk,” one of them demanded. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell them that this was just our fun drunk talk.

We thanked them for the light and across the diagonal of the MAC quad toward Leverett. Then, at about 3:30am, we promised to exchange reading lists. A few hours later we did. Right now I have lecture notes from when James’ taught Philosophy 9: Metaphysics and 20c: Metaphysical Seminary. Dan has a review article on axioms and belief systems in math from the Journal of Symbolic Logic.

Check out Penelope Maddy: “Believing in Axioms, I,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 53 2 (1988) pp. 481-511, if you have the chance.

[There's a follow up on determinancy, which an axiom that is not consistent with the axiom of choice. "Believing in Axioms, II" 53 3 (1988) pp. 736-764.]

In other news, Bush is single handedly trying to ruin science in this nation for at least a generation. Earlier this week, Bush said in a press conference that:

“Both sides [evolution and intelligent design] ought to be properly taught…so people can understand what the debate is about,” he said, according to an official transcript of the session. Bush added, ”Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. . . . You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes.”

These comments drew sharp criticism yesterday from liberals, who said there is no scientific evidence to support the intelligent design theory and no educational basis for teaching it.

I’d like to point out that not only liberals but scientists, too, cannot find any evidence for intelligent design. According to what my fifth grade science text said about the scientific method, no untestable theory qualifies as a scientific theory. That’s the whole point about scientific inquiry, experiments. We don’t go around voting on what we think the truth is. Every once in a while, we do poll for opinion, though.

There’s a tenth planet out there in our solar system. At least according to some American astronomers. Coming just days after the Spanish announce their discovery of some other celestial body navigating our sun.

Excited by the news, I immediately sent an email to two of my astronomer friends to guage their reaction.

The first maintains “that we live in a system populated by only 8 wanderers.” And, flatly, that “the largest objects of the Kuiper belt should hardly be considered planets.” The second declined to comment.

Which made me wonder, what makes a planet a planet? Pluto is small. But this thing is at least more than double Pluto’s size. The orbital plane is offset 44 degrees to the rest of the solar system. But Pluto, which we commonly accept as a planet, is off, according to an unreliable and somewhat confusing source on the web, orbits at 32 degrees due to a myseterious twelfth planet. But the repulsive magnetic forces of the sun are righting the planet. Given enough time, I suspect similar mechanisms would operate on our new eleventh. (The chronology is a bit fuzzy here. We just found a tenth; where’d this well-established twelfth come from?) Maybe this will renew interest in, and funding to NASA.

But I’m getting myself into some dangerous territory, and I don’t want the guys on This American Life to accuse me of being a modern jackass. So I’ll admit my ignorance and get off the planet here.

In other news, I suddenly remembered that I don’t have to snoop around the internet to find new music. Instead, I can just walk over to one of our music and media libraries and borrow new stuff.

Because I missed the reenactment today, I got me a CD of period music from the American revolution. Since I was in the area, I picked up some Duke Ellington and Jim McNeely, too.

Perhaps jazz isn’t the healthiest thing for me. It makes staying up in the middle of the night really, really tolerable.