A Weblog

A few days ago the inside shelves on my refrigerator door were flood with a number of general purpose sauces. I discovered the first one while trying to recreate the dining hall’s O’Brien potatoes and steamed, yellow squash, though unsuccessfully. The squash, as it turns out, was over-dilled. Taking some liberty with the recipe, which I never had, I roasted some garlic and carmelized half an onion in the cooking oil. Lunch that day was full of powerful flavors all of which seemed to be competing rather than cooperating. To cover the taste of it all, I turned to the A1 steak sauce and ketchup. But, ah! what’s this? There lay unopened a bottle of Busha Browne’s original spicy Planters steak sauce, good it read, for meats, poultry, and seafood. I was eating vegetables, but meaty ones, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Busha Browne’s is a product of Jamaica. As such, it needs to be imported. And as you remember from high school history, that means the British are making out on it via that awful institution mercantilism. Busha Browne’s Planters sauce is overpriced. My dad also bought its sister product, a spicy tomato — or love apple, the tomato was once thought to have aphrodisiacal properties. It doesn’t. — a spicy tomato sauce. I say, stick with ketchup.

Boston baked beans are one of my more favorite foods. It was rare that I’d have the opportunity to find them in the dining hall at college. But now that I’m home and once again sovereign over my own cuisine, that is, now that I can tell my dad what to pick up on the way home from work, I can revel in Boston baked beans whenever I choose. And I choose often. Except my dad likes to improvise and innovate. He would’ve been a fantastic musician, but it makes for dangerous shopping.

Two days ago I woke up to an empty apartment in time to make myself lunch. Inspired by Martha and Conan, I decided to fashion myself a typical Irish breakfast, sans the Guiness and Jameson’s: one egg [I couldn't muster the energy to cook the bacon to fry the egg in the fat.] on a piece of toast [I choose a nice, long slice from our periennal supply of sourdough.] covered in beans.

Before cooking beans, or anything for that matter, I always read the suggested cooking instructions just in case there are any quirks I ought to be aware of. The plainly decorated aquamarine label got me suspicious. It isn’t often that manufacturers are confident enough in their name to print it only on a label without some other sort of enticing visual. The simplicity of the Heinz logo put me a bit off. But all would be explained shortly. On the back, they gave cooking instructions for the microwave and for the hob. Apparently dad has started to import the beans as well as the sauces. This can had come from England. In fact, he had purchased a garden variety of vegetarian baked beans, beans in tomato sauce, and beans enriched with soy and spiced with mustard — but no Boston baked beans.

Unafraid however disappointed, I cooked my beans in tomato sauce on the hob at low to medium heat, stirring constantly, watching to keep from boiling as not to impair the taste per the label’s directives. When things were ready I smeared the beans atop my egg and toast, seasoned everything lightly with sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper and ran to the refrigerator for general purpose sauce.

This time I noticed a bottle of HP sauce, the original brown sauce next to the Busha Browne’s.

Long ago in high school I once told DJ that I might be moving to France; my dad was in a position to take a job there and the whole family’d have to relocate. In the end, no one moved, that year. But since then, DJ will periodically bring this up. If something shows up in the house from far away but not too far away, he’ll assume my dad voyaged there for the day to pick up some groceries. It wouldn’t be so funny except that DJ has gone to Baltimore with me and my dad for the day. We flew down from Logan, saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, went to the National Aquarium, and flew back. In fact, I’ve only ever been to Baltimore twice. Both times I flew in and out the same day. The second time I wasn’t even with my father. I hope this doesn’t mean I’ve turned into him.

But the sauce: I put it on my Irish breakfast; I put it on my dinner that night; I smear HP sauce on everything now. I don’t even like it that much. It lacks that peppery, steak taste. A few summers ago, when I had almost no money and lived off of $20 a week, I’d swill a swish or two of Worcestershire sauce. Despite its obviously being liquid, I could trick myself into believing I was eating meat. The number three is three fire trucks without the fire trucks; a good steak, it seems, is a good steak with a splash of Worcestershire sauce without the steak.

You can’t do that with HP brown. It’s sweet and tangy — it’s decidedly weaker than its competitors. There’s probably an analogy about the cumulative strength of the British empire compared to the individual power of its constituent colonies. If there is, I’m not clever enough to find it. Still, I find myself reaching back for more. I just put some on a slice of left-over pizza.

As the label says:

Everything goes well with HP sauce. Great for spicing up chips, bacon sandwiches, and snacks such as jacket potatoes and baked beans.

I guess I was right on.

HP Sauce: the original and the best!

Lea and Perrins Worchestershire sauce was first bottled in 1839. HP didn’t come around until 1899. HP is suitable for vegetarians whereas Worchestershire sauce is not. Maybe they were pointing to their hippy-friendly, health-forward originality. In 1899 England, even the carrots weren’t vegetarian.

Tonight I spent some time with my neighbours who happen to be friends from high school, though they are a bit older than me. They are married and have two kids, both boys. The older one, Kyle, is six, which puts him at just the right age to start kindergarten, something he did, in fact start, last September.

I love asking kids questions. Hell, I like asking anyone questions. But kids are usually the best because things which we, the grown-ups, would consider old hat are, to them, brand new. After slowly walking towards Kyle in what he called “a chase” around the back yard — I like to walk slowly rather than run. Because it’s unexpected, it tends to freak them out a little more — we sat down inside at the kitchen table to prepare our hamburgers with Caesar dressing, grilled red bell peppers, and all the other fixings. I took this time to ask Kyle what he was doing at school. “Oh, just some math. But I’ve already seen math, so it’s not hard,” he replied as a matter of fact. I smiled. Everyone in the room smiled, but no one gave it away. They didn’t know what, but they knew it was coming.

“Yeah? Sounds like you’re ahead of the game, then,” I answered. It wasn’t time yet.

“Yeah, but not always. We learned about odd numbers and I didn’t know about them before,” Kyle offered. He’s a good, helpful kid. He’s constantly trying to help his younger brother, Luke, who’s just about to turn 14 months in a few weeks, do whatever kids that age do: throw the phone on the floor from on top of chairs and rip CDs out of their cases, I suppose.

Now it was time. Kyle had given me something to play with. I couldn’t resist, so I started out, “So what is an odd number?”

He thought about it and after a moment he responded, “It’s a number that doesn’t have a pair. If it’s an even number then there is always a partner, but in an odd there is one all alone.” Hey, it even made sense, at least to me. To see what sense he had made of it, I asked him for examples of odd numbers. He gave me one and three. And the next? Five.

“Okay, what is the biggest odd number you can think of?” I thought I had won, but you can’t ever underestimate little kids. If you do, they’ll prove you wrong. Kyle pondered my question.

At last he spoke, “There isn’t one.” Foiled, I smiled and regrouped.

“You’re right, but can you tell me which is the largest one you can name?” I’m sure that we can glean some fact about cognitive development or learning theory or maybe just that people can be tricked even if they themselves have supplied enough information not to be — and in my experience most people, not just children can be fooled even if you tell them “This is a lie:” — Kyle answered anyway.

He told me that “one-oh-one” was the biggest odd number he could name. It’s certainly odd, I agreed, but which odd number came next? He quickly gave one hundred three. Kyle would be the last one to finish his cheeseburger. His was cold before I downed two. By now I was working on a Sam Adams Boston lager, which I had saved for last.

We continued in this way until we made it up to nine thousand eleven. [I stopped after only one beer, though. Kyle told me that he is allowed to drink root beer, which is like beer except that it'd didn't have alcohol.] Not satisfied with our latest contender, nine thousand thirteen spoiled its chances, we gave up.

Last night, after church choir, I headed into town to visit with Michelle on her last day of vacation this week. I planned for a crazy night and therefore brought the aforementioned ACEE evalutation results with me to read. But there, in the kitchen, Matie [MAE-TEE] — that is her legal, given name — and her friend Molly had already claimed the table for their lending letters. You see, they’re canvassing financial support for the sex shop they hope to open in Albuquerque. Now, before you guys pass judgement — and I know you already have — Matie holds an advanced degree in social development and non-profits or something germane. And she happens to be pretty on top of her stuff. In our now more frequent exchanges, we discovered something bizarre. The general public treat us and our fields in identical ways.

I explained that the world is mathphobic. If I were to go to a bar, say, and someone asked me, “Oh, which school did you go to?” Harvard gets you the first strike. You can approach the question “Yeah, really? [I had an aunt who went there in the 60s, she...] What did you study there?” in a couple different ways. If I don’t want them to talk to me I can say math, but if I feel a little more sociable, I can answer science. Science is vague enough that it might mean biology and therefore be less threatening. Everyone has a biology, few people carry around their math. But you can only dodge the question for so long. No matter when you pitch it, it’s always strike three: math.

Math makes people uncomfortable. And most people have no idea what math is and an even worse conception about what mathematicians actually do. It isn’t easy [for some reason] for people to hear that math is really just like anything else, that anyone can do it, and that they’ve probably never done it themselves. Adding and substracting isn’t math. [It's almost computer science.] People forget that the content is secondary. It’s the relations that exist within the content that’s important. That’s why when I draft my socially responsible, angry letters a classicist and a sociologist can read them and there’s a pretty good chance that they would’ve written something similiar. [Though I'm sure we'd argue the grammar until the cows come home.] The same style of argumentation you use to write a paper on phonology is the same you use when discussing Engels dialectic approach is the same you use to investigate spin cobordism. The words look different. The language looks different. But the processes that govern them all, they’re the same. [Probably not, but close enough.]

But to overcome the discomfort I and my math present, people always share with me these impromptu anecdotes to justify or demonstrate or something, I’m not especially sure, maybe just to connect however awkward a connection it may be with math and therefore with me. “I was really good at math in high school, until calculus;” or “it’s not my thing. I can’t even add at the grocery store;” or, “I had this teacher and he was really good at explaining math. I really wish I stuck with it.”

It turns out that Matie gets the same response:

• Sex [Math] makes people uncomfortable.
• Most people are uneducated about sex [math] and get the issue confused, perhaps, to the detriment of themselves and those who do sex [math].
• People offer unsolicitated, personal disclosures about sex [math] to those who profess to know anything about the subject.

We need to do something about the current state of affairs, even if it does make for some hilarious chit-chat.

“No, sir, I don’t want to know about what you do with your wife or your ‘really great’ high school math teacher.”

If you want to trace the source of my neuroses, you don’t have to climb far up my family tree. While running off a copy of the 2004 ACEE evalution results for personal review, our wireless, networked color laser printer/fax machine/copier combination [we have this monstrosity in the living room but lack a conventional loaf of bread in our kitcen; I made my sister and me grilled cheeses on organic cracked wheat bulkie rolls or something. I won't complain, however, about our whipped compound butter infused with garlic and herbs. To be fair, I've staked out the kitchen table with a laptop.] ran out of paper.

Earlier this week we took a family outing to Staples to pick up some RAM and some printer paper, having anticipated running out. For nearly twenty minutes my dad and I argued over whether to buy paper with a brightness level less than 98 and 28 lb weight. For half the price we could’ve walked away with paper with a 97 bright measure and 20 lb weight. It just wasn’t heavy enough for him, so we paid $10 for 500 sheets of paper.

Well, the crisis hit but dad wasn’t around to save me. Not knowing where he hid the new paper, I supplied the printer with my clumsy 84 bright and 20 lb 30% recycled paper left over from my school days. I hate to admit that I can both see and feel a difference and that I now secretly side with my father. Screw the environment. From now on, I only proofread my drafts on cardstock. I’m don’t even care that I’ve increased my exposure to papercuts.

Mathematicians, I am told, have the highest incidence of alzheimer’s by profession. Paul gives me until 34. I guess it didn’t help when I refused to address him as anything but Jimmy for a full conversation with him on St. Patrick’s Day for effect. [Note: this never happened, but we told Carol it did. For effect.]

Disclaimer #1: If you are my mom, either do not read this entry or read it in its entirety before calling me. Once you have done that, read it again. And if, after you have read it three times, you still think that someone is sick, in danger, pregnant, or dead, do not call. Everyone is fine. Actually, my foot is a little sore from volleyball. But that’s exactly what I’d tell you on the phone.

Disclaimer #2: DJ, like many of my friends, is a hypochondriac. Once he went to the ER because he was cold — he only had mild hypothermia; because his stomach hurt — his spleen had ruptured and the refuse which circulated his body put him in severe danger of dying, but we got him an ambulance. I don’t see why he refused to walk back to the house so we could call for one; because his it hurt to walk — he had strained his groin, but you can only really walk something like that off. Anyway, you shouldn’t ever take his ailments seriously. I, myself, probably suffer from chronically recurring meningitis, but do you see me rushing to a hospital for “treatment”? No, no you don’t.

Last night, after my first five games of volleyball in about six years courtesy of an adult pick-up nearby, DJ decided that it had gone on long enough: the fever, stiff neck, and headache which had localized in the base of his skull had played enough on his psychology that it was time to go to the hospital. I consulted with my doctor friends Emily and Laura before finally acquiescing to DJ and his symptoms.

He had spent the last five days as his own personal disease detective and, and in accord with various Yahoo searches, he now was convinced that he had meningitis. That didn’t stop him from going to community volleyball. At least he’d be infecting a neighbouring town.

Despite my doctors’ unofficial, unaminous advice to sleep it off and go to the clinic in the morning, DJ insisted we go to the emergency room — but not before he showered, nor before I ran home to fetch a math and notebook for the wait. We almost got suckered into one of those science documentaries about nuclear explosions and government secrets that continously play on the Discovery and History Channels at night, but we forged on: first, to one hospital which DJ deemed “too full” upon a drive-by; next, to the hospital he always goes to, always.

His registration sounded pathetic. Symptoms? “Well, I’ve had a headache for a really long time. About five days, and it’s in the back of my head.” The paraprofessional was unimpressed. But we were just warming up for the triage nurse. She was pretty convinced that DJ did, in fact, have a headache. She ran into the back, mixed up a few pills in a small plastic cup suitable for dipping sauce and brought them back with a cup of water. “Take these,” she said, following with, “On a scale of one to ten, with ten indicating the worst pain imaginable and one representing no pain at all, how do you feel?”

There was a chart in front of me taped to the table with just such a chart. It ran smiley faces to crying faces from left to right. The end with the pained faces had curled up, obscuring the most truly pained face. Good thing, too. It was sad, full with a frown and one black tear rolling down from each eye. It’d be more painful, I think, if the face were missing one or both eyes. I kept my thoughts to myself. Tonight was DJ’s night and it his turn to talk — not mine. He thought about the question. The pause made his reply seem all the more ridiculous.

“Well, I guess a two. No, maybe a three. A two or a three,” he decided at last. “What did I take, anyway?”

“Motrin and some advil.” It was official: DJ did have a headache.

The waiting room was separted naturally into two parts by an entrance in the middle and matching built-in shelving units for the TVs and magazines which flanked dividing wall and faced outwardly on opposite sides. DJ and I, being anti-social unless we have to be or are drunk, sat in the smaller, though perhaps slightly more crowded section furthest from the registration desk. In the corner a man and woman sat in chairs. The woman had brought a tan blanket and presently covered herself with it. The man had already removed his shoes. I caught up on my math. But something inside of me felt empty. It was my stomach. After some discussion, I ran to the adjacent town with a mission: I would retrieve four junior bacon cheeseburgers, a staple on the Wendy’s 99� menu and substitute for McDonald’s double cheeseburger from their dollar menu.

When I returned, triumphant, I called DJ from the parking lot. I left the engine running, but shut off the exterior lights and played Cool, a song from West Side Story and made famous more recently by a GAP ad. I also like to play it at night when I feel like following a random car to its destination. It’s my all-purpose, night-time, stake-out music. DJ found the car and passed on some very interesting news.

“You know that couple in the corner next to us? They’re not even sick. The security guard came over to them and said, `Come on, guys. You can stay here tonight, but you can’t come back tomorrow. You were here last night, too. And I could lose my job.’”

“So they’re homeless?”

“Yeah. Don’t do crack.”

“Pass me my other burger.”

We finished our midnight snack and rejoined those whom we now knew to be crackheads. Suddenly it made sense. The woman kept repeating long, full sentences that DJ and I had said to each other or had directed at the TV but not to her. All the while she laughed and rocked. But by this time we were all friends and thoroughly enjoying an episode of Sibling Fear Factor together. Her laugh was deep and purposeless. Many of her teeth had fled her mouth, leaving two fragmented rows — one top, one bottom, both displayed prominently in the front. By now she had turned on her side, her head on the neighboring seat, her feet flung on the floor behind her in an awkward cross.

Shortly after Fear Factor ended — the pair of obnoxious brothers who had won all of the contests leading to the end lost due to a freak, technical failure of equipment. Steroids don’t help you breath underwater. — a nurse called DJ’s name and I was alone to further math. Someone wanted to put on the Colbert Report. The woman writhed to one in particular, “What’s that, sugar? Oh, put it on, I’ll tell you if I like it.” Then, without any prompt and again to nobody she started, “Oh, I know what you’re talking about now. You mean Benny Hill? I love Benny Hill.” The man, who had not until now said a single word, broke his silence. “I like Benny Hill,” he shared.

Alas, the hospital didn’t subscribe to those fancy pay channels. We would watch, instead, an infomercial advertising for the Bombardier Outlander 800. A man sat down next to me. He reeked of cheap booze. I continued my math. He watched what I wrote. I felt uncomfortable. The other waiting area had cleared out, and the TV over there was playing Leno. It was time to move.

I fell asleep but my rest was short-lived. A woman whose name was Meghan woke me up with her phone conversation. She had come in because she “had an anxiety attack.” Someone named Craig hadn’t picked up when she called him earlier in the night. But now, at 3am, he was all ears. Meghan told Craig, and me by means of my proximity and her flagrant disregard for others, that she simply “couldn’t sleep.” And “Yes, [she] drove [herself] to the hospital,” and “if it takes too long [she would] go home to bed.”

Cindy Crawford followed Leno. The ad for her Meaningful Beauty skin treatment system lulled me back to sleep. By 4am, Conan was on again. Meghan had left and both the crackheads were comfortably asleep. A staff attendent asked me if I had been helped and who I was with. On rerun, Martha Stewart and Conan made an Irish breakfast for St. Patrick’s Day; Macaulay Culkin peddled his newly published collection of semi-autobiographical short stories, essays, and sketches. The interview was so painful, I got up and paced to distract myself. Macaulay admitted to being a closeted Save By the Bell fan. I wanted to die.

Then DJ emerged. We had been at the hospital nearly six hours. A nurse told us that the average wating time for a doctor was four hours. We brought down the mean. And what had happened to him in there? No spinal tap, no CAT scan — he had had a test sent to the lab, though. It came back negative. The doctor thought that DJ probably had meningitis, but since it was on the downswing, no immediate action was necessary. He did write a prescription for vicodin. The instructions read as follows:

Onetab p[backwards c]q6h per PAIN.\\\\#10 (ten)

Something about it seemed too easy. I asked if DJ had used codewords to ask for drugs.

“Look, doctor, I’m looking to develop a casual drug addiction. I don’t want nothing too dangerous. I saw them crackheads in the waiting room. Now, I’ve got this headache, what do you say to that, eh? What’ll you give me? It’s real bad and I need some medication.”

I said that he got jipped and should’ve waited until he upped it to some oxycontin and a morphine drip.

Real-life Joke #1: Last night I went to a presentation given by the new (and I mean that this position is new) so-called Alcohol Czar of Harvard at Leverett. It’s not exactly clear what his job description is, but it must include talks on responsible drinking. So we invited him to speak in our Pizza, Pop, and Port series, which seemed apt enough. During the Q&A portion of his talk, one student questioned the validity of the “hair of the dog” hangover recovery strategy. Rather than answer straight away, the speaker asked, in return, “Who invented those drinks [mamosas and bloody Marys]?”

Without giving it a thought, Jenn raised her hand just above her head and slightly forward, and with one earnest swoosh yelled, “The British!” timing her comment with an abrupt stop which made for quite the dramatic response. Ryan, the speaker, was surprised but not undone. He tactfully posed a follow-up.

“Yes, sure. But more specifically?” I started to think. There’s got to be a trick to it. Who drinks these things? I do, when I can, and when it’s funny. Ian does, too. It was a Sunday afternoon. People go to church on Sundays. Ah, ha! I had the answer.

So it was my turn to scream a stupid response, this time after thinking it over. With just a tiny bit less histrionic gesticulation, I pointed my right index in front of me and proclaimed proudly, “Old women.”

Ryan was looking for us to say, “Alcoholics.” No cause is a lost cause like ours.

Real-life Joke #2: In Math 235: Minimal Surfaces, Professor Yau has been using the Kerr metric — a stationary, rotating black hole — to introduce various topics in general relativity. Today he wanted to discuss gravitational radiation and Bondi mass, even though the Kerr metric doesn’t radiate on account of its being stationary. [No stationary black holes radiate; that's the point of them.] But he proceeded somehow even still. One of the magical things about the Kerr metric is that in the right coordinate system, its wave operator actually admits a solution by separation of variables. This is a suprising and blessed [though still tedious] fact. In some high schools, AP calculus students learn this method. To dream that it could work in the case of Kerr is unbelievable. To remind us how to perform the trick, Professor Yau wrote the following mnemonic on the board:

C₀u(r)a_n(t).

He then laughed for about forty-five seconds. This is a long time for Yau during lecture, and an even longer time for anyone who saw the joke. [Richard Courant was the famous mathematician after whom the Courant Institutue of Mathematical Sciences at NYU is named. So, you see, it's funny. Courant worked on partial differential equations and functional analysis and the calculus of variations, so this joke is not only funny, it's appropriate --- even more than it is funny.]

The Archbishop of Canterbury is a smart, influential man. In England. Unfortunately, his words are a wash on our Fundies, who, have broadened their attack to include the big bang, not just evolutionary biology and global warming — note: that guy who claims to have a degree from Texas A&M in not-science actually never graduated, and so, doesn’t have a degree even in that.

The Archbishop calms me down slightly, and he reminds me that I need to reevaluate the enemy in this War Against Science. Look at how reasonable he is:

“I think creationism is … a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories … if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there’s just been a jarring of categories … My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it,” he said.

Yes! That’s right. Good argument. Not only is creationism not the same as base, secular science, to put it there side-by-side with godless biology would be to defile it. Okay, so he’s not exactly saying that. But really, science doesn’t purpose to say anything about religion; religion ought not to say anything about science, except maybe in fluffy theological treatises where tenuous and often wrong analogies are drawn between the two. They’re simply not in the same category. [Ah, yes, what a good word.]

I’ll leave the dead horse alone now.

I wrote this with the intent of sending it to the Boston Globe, but since time marches on and I’m not the most time-sensitive individual, I pass it off to you to read here. Notice how my professional writing is still vaguely colloquial:

In his opinion piece, “Kids take back seat to gay agenda” (Boston Globe, 15 March 2006), columnist Jeff Jacoby argues that gay activists have pursued their cause, “the normalization of homosexual adoption,” to the detriment of children. He defends the Catholic church’s right to discriminate against homosexual couples. He claims that millions of Americans believe the parents in a family must be of both sexes, and further comments, this is “neither a radical view nor an intolerant one.” Since Catholic Charities can no longer place children with anyone, Jacoby concludes that gay activists and colluding media and state government officials have propelled gay equality forward while relegating children to the back, much like a few rotten apples spoiling the whole bunch. Jacoby is wrong in two different ways.

First, Jacoby ignores the other, very valuable and very laudable work done through Catholic Charities outside of adoption. In addition to adoption, Catholic Charities offers over thirty services, among which include child care, mentoring programs, substance abuse counseling, and homeless shelters and transitional housing. Each year the United Way awards Catholic Charities with a grant, most recently for $1.2 million. Had the State issued a waiver to the anti-discrimination law, it would have put all programs run through Catholic Charities, not just the adoption services, at risk. Most funders, including the United Way and the state government, refuse to grant financial assistance to organizations that discriminate. Many of the budgets of these programs are already sensitive to even slight fluctuations in current funding; if Catholic Charities were allowed to ban homosexual adoptions, the resulting decreased financial backing would ensure a curtailment effecting several other vulnerable populations throughout the city who were not directly involved. In essence, the State’s ruling saved many more charitable programs. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to remember that the Church chose to close the adoption services, not Catholic Charities, and not the State.

Second, the view Jacoby claims to be “neither radical nor intolerant” has no founding in contemporary research, and is, therefore, not only intolerant against gay couples but is also harmful to children. According to the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, between 6 and 14 million children were living with a gay or lesbian parent as of 1990. The dozens of studies to investigate the psychology of children of LGBT parents have been motivated primarily by family law, and thus directly address the effects on children of having gay versus straight parents. Evidence shows pretty convincingly that children are not harmed in any way merely by having homosexual parents. In fact, it shows quite the opposite. According to one study by Hoeffer published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, daughters of lesbians, on average, have higher self-esteem than those of straight women; their sons are more caring and less aggressive. Additionally, children of homosexual parents are no more likely than the general population to be homosexual themselves. In light of these statistics, we have no choice but to deny Jacoby’s interpretation of the views of “millions of Americans” and call his opinion what it is: unreasoned, unjustified, and harmful to children.

Dear reader, lately I have been remiss in my writing. Please accept my apologies sincere and deep. Of course there is much that I’d like to write to you. Each is worthy enough for its own entry, but, I do not wish to burden the reader [or the author] too much. So here’s a summary:

Tuesday through Wednesday afternoons, Stephanie and I camped out on my kitchen table, laptop beside laptop, to tackle the proofreading and last-minute writing and revision of her honors thesis, Writing: The Urban Calligraphy of New York City. If we’re lucky, she’ll let me post the final copy in PDF here. Then you’ll get to learn about the graffiti [which, by the way, is an offensive term to the Writers] and the artists who started it all back in NYC during the early ’70s, their innovations, their schools, and the rhetoric of their work. Bet you weren’t expecting to see the word “asyndeton” ever used to describe tags before.

Thursday I recovered from Tuesday and Wednesday. DJ and I drove into Cambridge to crash the free appetizers at Grafton but proceeded to Whitney’s, where we played darts with new and temporary bar friends Adam and Diddy. They appeared to be regulars, so there’s a good chance we’ll meet them if we go back. At the end of the night no one could close bulls. Scottie, the bartender, needed to close up. On his second dart he throw a double bull’s eye, proving to us that “it’s not that hard.”

Friday I was back in Cambridge to talk with Uri Treisman at the Harvard Foundation Scientist of the Year award ceremony and luncheon. Afterward, I headed back to the River — Pfoho always hosts the Foundation for some reason — to visit Paul to check in on his marathon training. Its being St. Patrick’s day, we went to Tommy O’Doyle’s for a few Guinesses. Had not been a holiday, I wouldn’t've touched the stuff: I usually hate nitrogenated beers. We got there at 3pm. I left around 7pm, only to journey three hundred yards away to dine with Michelle, Mary, and Mary’s cousin visiting from Arizona by way of Colgate in New York Tracy. I was asleep by 11pm. So when Patrick called at 2:29am to wish me a Happy St. Patrick’s Day, I wasn’t exactly ready for it. But Pat has a long history of waking me up, and while I was slightly out of practice, I garnered enough consciousness to hold a ten minute conversation. Still, all the reasonable celebrants start drinking at 1pm and can’t continue well passed 9pm. Paul’s wisdom is comprehensive; St. Patrick’s Day is such an “amatuers’ holiday.”

That brings us to Saturday. I had missed out on my weekly Saturday lunches with Dan, Susannah, and Henry for the past couple of weeks. So yesterday I was determined to show up. Before I left, however, I had to run to the bank to deposit $990 in cash money into my account so that I could by DJ plane tickets to LA and Mazetlan, Mexico. I also had to purchase the tickets. We bought them, and a few flights and shafts at the dart store down the street from my house, and took off to the T. I read about homogenous reductive groups on the way. My understanding of Lie groups and algebras is pretty weak in general right now, and I’m working to fix it.

After lunch Stephanie and I crashed the Holi celebration that the South Asian [Indian] student group held to welcome the coming of spring — at least that’s what they claimed. No one cared much about the change in seasons as far as I could tell. They couldn’t. Cubidi, a game that reminds me of a sort of reverse Steal the Bacon meets Red Rover combined with tackle football with a little holding your breath under water on the side kind of disaster waiting to happen, commanded the focus of the room. Truly, children’s games played by competitive adults can be very dangerous, and therefore fun to watch and cheer. The electrifying thumping in the Indian techno coming from the DJ’s table in the middle of the room completed the experience. It also prompted many of the players to taunt the other team with funny bhangra dance gesticulations and silly faces.

To end Holi, we convened outside in the Mac Quad to smear colored powder scented with rose water all over each other in a mad dash of bright color [none of which really occurs naturally but somehow signifies spring quite fittingly] and screams. The only rule: stay away from the eyes, in the beginning. Arianne and Evan found me on the street on my way to the T. I splayed for them, as if I were a work of art. [I believe I was.] On the right side of my head I wore a blood red hand print. Joining the magenta, aquamarine, yellow, and purple, the red powder spoke, as if saying, “I fought a clown. To the death. And won.”

But that’s not all. After a shower and more boiled dinner that my sister had cooked, and cooked well, it was time to meet up with my high school friends to celebrate. For the most part Liz, Nick, and I sat in the corner, silently watching and mocking Kershner, our host. Periodically, there were swells of gossip. Mark got married yesterday; his fiancee is pregnant; Jessie is getting divorced — wait, Jessie was married? We just found out from her sister. Everyone knew about the baby, she had married the father to try to keep him in the country, but he got deported to Brazil, no one knows exactly why. Jenny and Kenny were twins, not cousins, and their last names did used to coincide. An old, widowed history teacher was marrying another teacher, but wasn’t she the mistress in an extramarital affair with another history teacher when we were in the sixth grade? Yeah, Kristin’s mom came in and yelled at him, exposing the whole thing, in reading class shortly after he had carressed Kristin’s hair in the lunch room. Mostly gossip, nothing especially new, mostly fun.

But ah, ha! Heidi works with preschoolers and third graders, but she spends her one-on-one with a very cute boy with Down syndrome. She says her experience at school has taught her a lot about education and parenting that she had never thought about before. Most exciting to me was her lambast against technology and its seizure of children’s toys. “None of these kids will play with a toy unless it beeps…they want the castles to look like castles…none of them has any imagination.” And Heidi’s observations are founded in lots of experimental and researched fact. Rather than spending more time and space to rant here, look for it later.

My dad and sister and I went out for our weekly Sunday brunch. This is when we catch up and I get into a fight with my dad about family principles, education, and life, in general. We just had a heated discussion about my seventeen year old cousin and her July pregnancy and what to do with the child. It’s left me fairly exhausted, and I need to start my statement of intent. I plan to use notation like this:

I know that I promised a letter to those near-sighted state representatives a week ago. I did draft it, and an op-ed for the Globe, but I haven’t had the time to sit down and edit them properly. It’s nearly 5pm already, so I’m not sure it’ll happen today. Soon, I promise, dear reader, soon.

In the fifth or sixth grade, I had to do a report. And much like my fifth grade science fair project, which I do remember: I passed in a paper on resistors with a small experiment that my dad all but typed up for me, I had no idea what I was writing. The topic was Einstein’s special relativity. The whole thing was lifted from the appropriate volume of Encyclopedia Britannica kept in my dad’s home office. But what was so special about special relativity? The encyclopedia article explained that the theory was the result of a simplifying assumption or something in Einstein’s general theory, and that this whole thing was really about gravity. I have to admit, I still find the entire enterprise of relativity and gravity mystifying. One of the more outrageous predictions of classical GR are those objects popularized by scary movies like Event Horizon and other popular science fiction called black holes.

Black holes are tricky to define mathematically. Physically, they’re a place where mass becomes “infinitely” dense. [The quotes are there because infinite anything is a physical no-no. If you were to squeeze the mass of the earth into a ball a few millimeters across, then the force of gravity would take over and compress it even further. The math predicts a formation of singularity --- the thing at the center of a black hole.] The space around such points acts funny. Because of the strong gravity associated with these objects, if something, a rocket, a lampshade, or a photon of light, for example, gets too close, then it gets drawn in ever closer until it meets collides with the singularity. Then all bets are off, and nobody can say with any amount of certainty what happens. The boundary in space beyond which nothing can return is called the event horizon of the black hole. Because not even light can escape, the structure will look, well, black; hence the name.

Black holes have always made people feel a little uneasy. First off, they’re scary. When I was small, I hated the drain in the bath tub. It was only a matter of time, I thought, before it took me down with the bath water. Black holes evocate the same sort of fear. And according to the big bang, there are tons of tiny, primeval black holes floating around the universe. The thought of it petrifies me. Secondly, black holes cause a few problems. Most notable is the information paradox, something that Stephen Hawking both proposed and recently resolved. The old saying goes that black holes have no hair. To avert the paradox, it turns out that black holes must be fuzzy, that things can escape. The problem stems from a butting of general relativity against quantum mechanics. They both work in their regimes, so what gives?

George Chapline has an answer: there is no such thing as a black hole. Instead, he proposes something whose geometry looks outwardly very similar to a black hole. He calls this something a dark energy star. I met him last spring when he came to give one of the Friday colloquium talks. He motivated his quantum critical points — a concept which neither I nor the New Scientist article I link explains — with the following scenario. [Okay, I will a little: usually we think of temperature as the master of phase transitions. Cool down a gas, like water vapor, and you get a liquid, like water. Cool down further, freeze it, even, and you get a solid, say, ice. Now keep going, cool it down all the way to just above absolute zero. When things that cold, quantum mechanical effects are the dominating factor in phase transitions, not temperature. In this condition weird things can happen, like superconductivity.]

Consider a long cylinder filled with a superfluid. The pressure gradient will be small nearer to the top, at the bottom, it will be large. At the top of the tube attach a speaker which sends out a sound wave. As the wave travels through the liquid it will slow down as the gradient increases. At some height, the wave should stop. What happens, he asks, as the wave meets this surface? If you’re a classical general relativist, you might look at the math and think, “Ah, ha! That’s just like the event horizon of a black hole. So, nothing, the wave will just pass through.” Classical GR lets anything just fall into a black hole. Once you’re inside you can’t send emails or make outgoing phone calls, but outside of that, nothing happens. You wouldn’t feel a thing. The earth could’ve just passed through the event horizon of a super, ultra massive black hole right now and you wouldn’t even know it. But Chapline does some quantum mechanics and says that’s not what happens. Instead, we might expect the magical height at which the wave stops really to represent a quantum critical surface. And the phase transition effects are wild.

In his talk he explained that a sort of Georgi-Glashow process could occur, causing quarks to split into an electron and a positron. This could account for all the anti-matter we see at the centers of galaxies. Using the liquid superconductor analogy, he conjectured that the vortices like those that form when liquid helium might also explain relativistic jets we observe spitting out anti-matter, too. The exciting [or threatening] implication of Chapline’s idea is that there is no singularity, no black hole, just lots of dead stars.

On the other hand, Penrose and Hawking have their names attached to the famed Singularity Theorems. They say that given certain assumptions on the causal structure of a universe, assumptions that we think our universe satisfy, then there needs be a singularity some where in that space-time. What of that? I’m not sure, and I’m not sure I care. Luckily, mathematical general relativity is replete with really interesting questions that are completely divorced of whatever’s going on in this universe. As I like to say, “Physics is the study of this universe, mathematics is the study of all possible universes.”