Why should I write in public? 2

Previously I considered writing in public in more or less personal terms. Is it a great way to look bad? What I concluded was that it is! However, the essential strengthening force of writing in public, psychologically speaking, is the inherent risk one takes. Accountable deliberation, which is to say deep thought in a nominally public setting, is dangerous but motivating.

So this is a tangible thing to hang on to. The poetry of it is this: you make yourself smarter and stronger by the potential embarrassment of revealing that you are neither. Richard Hamming's 'You and Your Research' (text) mentions a similar kind of ego-splotation, namely submitting important results in the abstract sent in advance to a conference, before actually achieving said results. It's an extreme measure! Without necessarily condoning it, this battle of the self with the ego has to be preferable to the notorious practice of cutthroat research professors: assigning two graduate students to the same project. Both are effective and inject a sense of urgency and accountability. Ethically of course, self- or ego-destruction must be preferable to collegiate collision courses.

Wrapped into this is the necessary evil of unpolished work. There is a sensibly high expectation of polish in final works in academia.

To be sure, there is a curve of polish-reward. Devils are in the details. In academic papers, little inconspicuous typos evolve into monstrous wrenches in the gears of reproducing results. However, extreme and meticulous detail must come at the cost of time and effort, which at a certain point must be stolen from more important tasks. This is the equipoise of doing anything well: tolerating your own inevitable mediocrity, but fiercely refusing to accept it.

In the present context, the moral is: to become better (at writing, thinking, at 'life', generally), it is equally important to be able to tolerate mediocrity as it is to incessantly strive against it.

Donald

Her hair was the color of the first ray of sunlight through a closed window and Donald felt it was equally, if not more, beautiful. He spoke nasally, hesitantly, the sound of a veteran of trepidation, the buzz of an alarm clock.

“Ms. Raedona, how do you respond to the critical consensus on your role in Murders in the East?”

She stared at him blankly, and then subtly rolled her eyes, as if she was hoping he would not notice the movement. Donald was proud of the chic décor of his office, but the colours seemed to blur and fade in her radiance.

“I don’t think people should listen to critics. When have critics ever made any great films? How do I know they know anything?”

Her voice was as soft as the edge of a shadow and Donald felt himself quiver with each felt syllable.

“That should be fine, Ms. Raedona,” he managed before his vocal cords were overcome by the nervous twitch. He diverted his eyes and turned off his recorder.  She passed her hand through her luxurious hair and stood to leave. Donald desperately tried to force himself out of silence. She walked out of the room, her movements defining grace. Donald blurted out a declaration he immediately wanted to tape over,

“I adore all that you’ve done!”

She did not turn back, and Donald was grateful to find he’d already turned the recorder off. He could only imagine how torturous it would be to listen to his shrill, ill-at-ease voice over and over again. As he heard her scream though, he wished he’d left it on.

           Donald jumped to his feet, and warily moved towards the sound of the scream. His curiosity conquered his nervousness and he stepped through the door that beauty had just passed through. He surveyed the hall and could not see any movement. His eyes were then drawn to the window across from him. He moved closer, ignoring the spectacular view of the city, intent on the glass. Something was terribly amiss, he thought, and put his hand out towards the pane so that he could look down at the bustling streets.

           His hand met only air, and he fell forward. He twisted violently, and managed to grab a hold of an edge. The street seemed incredibly distant and he stumbled backwards, his heart beating rapidly. For a few seconds he could only stare at the floor. He eventually looked back towards the panel-less window. It was difficult to tell the glass was now 300 feet below. It was several minutes before he began shouting, but much longer before he felt safe enough to stand.

Why should I write in public? 1

There are several features of blogging which I find appealing and what has kept me from it, through flirtations, has been my inability to settle on what exactly those features are and how best to manage them in the context of the anti-appeals. How can I blog without resenting myself?

The first appeal is accountable deliberation. It is that slowness, the requisite doubt, consideration, and ultimately regret and reflection that one makes in writing. We have to consolidate, evaluate and coherently tie together our thoughts - thoughts which race much, much faster. It is the sense that I am evaluating what is at the eye of the mind storm: the logical epicenter of the feelings, intuitions and swirling notions that -- maybe -- underlines what rational, or at least essential, thing I am trying to develop. Writing is the creation of a Cole's Notes, of the essential constituents of thought and feeling. Deliberation is one, the act of asking "What is essential to my thoughts?", "What have I learned?", and "What do I really know?" and two, proceeding to answer at the necessarily glacial pace of written thought. 

Secondly, accountability, is the looming pressure of being correct (or more correctly, not being especially wrong). It is the anxious element. And it is the one that allows completion, and relief, and the approach of truth. By asking ourselves critically, "Am I actually right?", we have to cut through and identify what certainty and conclusion we can draw. While those will tend to be images of uncertainty and questioning, paintings of ambiguity and doubt framed in "at least certainties": things we cannot necessarily carry to any conclusion but can "at least" assure ourselves of. 

Either way, we have one, the act of asking "What is essential?" and two, the act of asking "What is right and wrong?". For here I can say both are essential, but that I don't know they are all that is essential. But, at least their confluence feels more satisfying than either alone, which each feel more satisfying than neither. 

The corresponding anti-appeal: when we ask "What is essential?", and "What is right?", we also ask "What is the value?" and "Why?". When I deliberate, and when I am accountable to the outside eyes who may see, I also have "Who cares?" as a background sound. When I write, I have whether that writing is motivated by a goal of finding something closer to truth than a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings. I have whether the accountability of a possible reader is there so that I have to, each time, ask carefully, "Is this right?" (and "Is this really right?"). There's a background answer of "No!". How much of what I do, and say, and culture in view of others is anything other than marketing? Am I writing, reflecting, concluding, or failing to conclude on the basis of how it makes me look? Do I care about approaching truth or do I care more about appearing something admirable and enviable? In other words, if I am motivated to write, and to be read - am I writing to be read, or am I writing, to be writing, to be read? Is blogging only an outlet for ego-stroking, or for acknowledgement and external assurance? Is it only a way to construct a fictional Logan?

So the essential qualm is this: am I really interested in approaching truth, or more in constructing a fiction - one which may win (or lose) social capital or tip the scales in a job search? 

I don't know. I do at least like the feeling of attempting to answer. 

The Evolution of a Scientist

High School:

Undergraduate:

PhD:

Professor:

1. Obtain physics degree, 2. ?????, 3. PROFIT, or Experimental and Theoretical Physics

I recently graduated with a degree in Engineering Physics from Queen's University. Four years of virtually unwavering keenness and four summers of challenging but rewarding research seemed to leave no other option than the PhD. And while many of my colleagues were meticulously self-dissecting and weighing their options, I was pleased with what appeared to be a painless process.

But choosing a PhD barely filters the career spectrum. If anything, it applies a phase delay of 5-7 years and rolls off the tails a bit. Recently or soon-to-be-recently minted physics graduates have already applied a filter to the spectrum. However, as was probably an oft-cited feature of the physics degree, it is a broadband filter (for engineering physics, the filter is broader still). The ultimate destination for a physics or engineering physics major may lie in a range of industries: electronics, communications, petroleum, acoustics, medical imaging, teaching, finance or medicine (to name just a handful). It may also lie in academic research, in a dedicated research lab, or in some fusion of them all. And with the possible exception of the tenured professor, it may not even be useful to consider any destination remotely ultimate.

The bandwidth, B, of a physics degree filter is very large

Immediately, one can observe that the many-parameter space I've described, with all its possible wiggly traversals (not to mention start and end points), is beyond the scope of a single blog post. So, following the great tradition of spherical cows, I will consider instead the simpler problem of a relatively research-oriented student intending on probably pursuing an academic-track career or at least pursuing a PhD.

Spherical cows in a vacuum. 

The first question that comes up is then, well, should I be an experimental or theoretical physicist? 

Before discussing the recommendations, here they are. These are not as scientific as they may seem!

1. If you are absolutely, without the slightest doubt, certain you can and only ever could be a theoretical/experimental physicist, ignore that unless you've been through the steps 3-4 times already. If you are very certain you don't care, be an experimentalist.

2. Decide if you want to work in academia or industry and gauge how certain you are. If you are very uncertain or you very much want to work in industry, consider being an experimentalist.

3. Think about the people who are at the schools you've applied to and/or about the people within the field you would like to research in. Ideally, you would make a decision beforehand, and would choose accordingly a school, but many schools have many choices. If the top groups and/or top papers/authors in your school/research field are almost exclusively experimental or theoretical, you should probably do mostly that. 

4. Talk to graduate students who are doing theoretical or experimental work in the field you want to be in, at the school you want to go to or wherever. If you have done research with graduate students doing either sort of work, also think hard about that. 

5. If you are not an experimental or theoretical physicist, go back to step 1. 

ZapperZ, in his blog Physics and Physicists, has been making a case against the theoretical route. His biggest argument: supply and demand. He has recently brought up some empirical evidence for this by counting the job ads in the latest issues of Physics Today.

Walking the beam

"Walking the beam" is a staple of any laser-using experimental lab. Simply put,

These are the steps, which will be explained below. We'll assume each mirror has two knobs (i.e., two angles can be adjusted). If this isn't the case then well, you can guess what kind of time you'll have (or you will need four mirrors with two different kinds of mounts).

1. Mark the line in space you want the laser beam to occupy (the optical axis) at two points using irises (adjustable circular apertures).

2. Place one mirror (M2) very close to the first iris (I1), and another some distance away, closer to the laser.

3. Reflect the laser off of the two mirrors into the vicinity of the irises. This is a rough alignment, probably by just shuffling the position of the laser and mount around by hand.

4. Adjust the mirror closest to the laser (M1) to get the position of the beam right in the center of the first iris (I1).

5. Adjust the mirror closest to the first iris (M2) to center the beam on the second iris (I2).

6. Repeat steps 4-5 until the beam passes through both irises.

Why does this work? The beam itself travels in a straight line and can be described fully by 4 positional variables in a coordinate system defined by your line. One set of possible coordinates are, at a given point of the line, its x and y coordinates and the angles between the line and the z axis and each of the x and y axis. Alternatively, a line is just defined by two (x,y,z) coordinates.

If you could place the first iris right at the second mirror, it would be impossible to adjust the position of the beam on this iris using this mirror. By placing the first iris near the second mirror, you are making the second mirror the "angle controller" of the beam at the first iris (and the position of the beam on the second iris). The closer I1 and M2 are to each other, the more this is true. M1, on the other hand, will control the position of the beam on the first iris. Then,  "walking the beam" is essentially the iterative optimization of the angles and x,y coordinates of the beam at the location of I1. The process converges faster if the inter-mirror and inter-iris separations are large and if distance between I1 and M2 is very small.

There are some other tips to keep in mind when doing this.

First, any optical axis you choose should probably be parallel to the optical table you are mounting all your equipment on. There are at least two reasons for this:
1) if your line has a large angle relative to the table, the beam is probably aimed at eye-height somewhere away from where you are working (which is hopefully well-below that height!)
2) most optical mounts which are fixed to the table are designed to operate with an optical axis (i.e., your beam line through space) that is parallel to the table. This makes alignment of refractive and diffractive components much easier, since you can work in a more-or-less 2D world if you mount them properly. If you are aligning a diffraction grating or, worse still, a sequence of them with some lenses thrown in (such a sequence is found in a grating dispersive stretcher) and your beam path is not confined to some plane parallel to the table, you can guess what kind of time you're gonna have.

Second, you want your irises to be very precise and rigid. In the typical case, one would walk the beam and then use the subsequent, well-defined beam in a much more complicated optical sequence. One can use the irises as a tool to re-align or to put a different beam through the sequence, since they define the optical axis of the whole assembly. If they are aligned in a bit of haphazard way, somewhere down the line you'll eventually notice that the optical axis you wanted is not the optical axis you've got. This is probably the result of having I1 and I2 too close together and having them at different heights. Deciding on which height to use is generally one that requires having planned out the entire assembly. As for rigidity, if something in your assembly is bumped, rigid irises will allow you to re-adjust the bumped component back into alignment. If you only have two irises and one of them is bumped out of alignment, you can re-align it to the beam as long as the beam is still aligned. If the two go out of alignment at once, well...


Third, try to keep the angle of the mirrors from getting too large and keep the beam in more or less the center of them. Even though increasing the inter-mirror distance makes the convergence faster, it is sometimes better to not get too ridiculous with this, since at vast inter-mirror distances even the slightest adjustment of M1 will deflect the beam off of M2. If the angle of the mirrors is very large, it is almost impossible to avoid clipping part of the beam. 


In a complicated assembly, you will want to define the optical axis in at least a couple places. The reason for this is that, if 3000 knobs control the position of your focus at the end of a long chain of optics, any one knob can and will make that position wrong. If you have an optical axis which is defined at multiple points throughout the sequence, you can check approximately which knob you need to correct based on where you see your optical axis and the beam diverging (i.e., where the first iris that the beam is misaligned on is).

What the hell is the internet anyway? Part 2

Later, from about 12 through 16, I became heavily involved in what may be the most esoteric hobby possible and, equally or even more so, in an online community auspiciously devoted to it. Brickfilms.com, then a growing and active repository of Lego stop motion films and a forum for hobbyists of all ages, was frequented by maybe a few hundred or so aspiring directors from nearly the world over. Then at the critical size of maybe 30-100 very actively communicating contributors, it was a community as bona fide as any I've encountered.

Lego-based stop motion films are a topic for another reflection (although the parallels with experimental optics are so vivid as to make that reflection a likely one). Brickfilms.com was, at the time, as much a social entity as it was a topical discussion forum. In particular, the chat room which became an attached feature of the discussion board became a regular hang-out for many forum members, more than a few who had all but given up (in some cases before even starting) on actually participating in the hobby. For all its peculiarities it is, in retrospect, remarkable how very close to "real life" it was, how for those 3-5 crucial years of my life Brickfilms.com was, in a undeniable way, my de facto home on the internet and how the apparently radical differences between an internet forum and any other social vehicle were really, pretty minor.

Many brickfilms went far beyond this level of sophistication, though an equal number followed the lower road

On one hand, there was all manner of usual adolescent ribaldry (tempered, but less than you'd imagine, by the overwhelming fraction of the community which was evangelically homeschooled), with many discussions of girls and other decidedly non-Lego-movie topics. On the other was Brickfilms' diversity of ages and origins, a harmony of individuals that may have never been possible in a pre-internet age. And for all the darkness and baseness of the internet, it is this that actually serves as among the best evidence for the more-or-less goodness of people. There were as many adults actively participating in the community, both socially and as filmmakers, as teenagers (not to mention actual children). To be sure, there were many possibly single or at least childless men, ages 20-50, who were playing with Lego and who were also shooting the breeze with teenagers in a way that was, in retrospect, both admirably patient and cognizant. While no doubt much of the misanthrope-fuel of the internet is driven by a small number of participants, it is probably as much the anonymity that pushes the content to the top. Here was a community with a size where anonymity essentially vanished in lieu of actualized online identities. Reddit has, in a much more contrived but probably sincere way, attempted to reproduce this and has had some success (the relative ease with which one can slip into an anonymous account, fully separated from any established identity, is one weakness). Nonetheless, I think it is not a unique experience to become engaged in an online community with a diversity that seems to defy societal norms and yet functions in a ,well, functional way. Somehow, people from a staggering number of countries, of a large range of ages and with some obviously stark differences in philosophy, all carried on in a way with only the most trivial of conflicts. While Brickfilms.com may be a bit of a rarity, online role playing games seem to actively aim to foster this kind of interaction.

Around this time, my friends in the "real world" were becoming excited about the coming of World of Warcraft. Driven mostly by their enthusiasm and less by my own, I agreed to be a shaman or druid without much complaint and, by then feeling some historical significance to it all, joined them in the first open beta release of the game. Although I persisted for several months, dutifully and somewhat reluctantly playing the role of the healer in our adventures, I spent the majority of my playing time in WoW with my friends and, while the economy and, as the game was revised, increasing ease of interaction with others was fascinating, I eventually retired my account. My friends carried on the drive, however, and would appear to have become engaged in a community not unlike the one I experienced with Brickfilms (albeit less diverse at the time). For all the deserving criticisms WoW has accumulated since its debut, it also contains some of the purest goodness of the internet. In guilds, it has one of the most powerful mechanisms for fostering cross-cultural, cross-class friendships within organized communities with definite online identities and at a size where these identities have actual meaning (i.e., typically well below 100 to less than 10). It is hard to defensibly wax romantic about a game that I not only did not like, but which has since garnered as much hate as love. But to say it is one of the most powerful new objects to enter the internet cannon is possibly understating its significance.

Eventually, two other juggernauts became apparent. The first, Wikipedia, worked its way into my psyche around the same time the myspace craze was spreading amongst my peers. Myspace, being perhaps more open and increasingly spam-ridden, gave way to Facebook, an auspiciously cleaner and closed alternative.

My criticisms of Wikipedia could fill another post this size and even then only in summary form. Its very interconnectedness, scope and ease of use are also its greatest weaknesses. Its quality drops off exponentially as one leaves the central mass of carefully-pruned common knowledge. With every fault being amplified several fold as one moves outwards through the layers of specialization, Wikipedia can quickly become a frustrating and embarrassing mess. But even the most particular and narrow Wikipedia article has generally been written, if not coherently and if not with any particular mind to pedagogy or a logical structure, with some genuine enthusiasm and care. The external links and references, while a minefield of their own, often riddled with the whims of a particular self-interested party (usually one can make a clear guess as to the institutional affiliation of the primary author by a cursory glance of the references and external links), are often a entranceway into a much more useful source. But my early years with Wikipedia had all the unfiltered love of a young romance and as much as her disgusting quirks irritate me now, Wikipedia is the greatest website in existence. It is among the pillars of the internet and on almost pure knowledge alone. For casual (i.e., non-contributing) users, Wikipedia employs only the cheap trick of being an easy and enormous wealth of knowledge. Except perhaps in the most perverted magnification, Wikipedia is a rare internet entity that is nothing if not a sturdy thrust away from misanthropy.

Facebook is more divisive and more pervasive and, for the majority of internet users, is probably the closest thing to the de facto e-community I reminisced about above. Whether or not Facebook has been constructed and evolved in a calculating way or has simply been the organic following-ones-nose it appears to be, it is an almost enigmatically functional collection of features and interconnectedness that seem to really dig into the fibre of social fabric in a way that seems extraordinarily visceral. I wish I could say more about Facebook, especially because it probably represents the starting point for most new internet users, but it blurs the line too much between the online and offline world for me to feel entirely comfortable with it. Entirely online interactions and interpersonal relationships have a framework of manners and a protocol which is probably some combination of ad libbed, inheritance from offline interaction and e-necessary adaptations. On Facebook, the online and offline expectations and etiquette are fused in an unpredictable and haphazard way. Facebook is World of Warcraft but with the "game" replaced by the offline world and with the veil of anonymity and fantasy replaced by a more-or-less e-representation of ones actual self. Add to this that Facebook stretches long-dead personal relationships into an uncomfortable and almost surreal length and intimacy. Having participated in both, I find Facebook much more jarring, more intrinsically challenging, weird and unsettling.

But as an experiment in removing one crucial aspect of the internet, anonymity, from the equation, Facebook is worth reflecting on. Probably my earliest motivations to join were the usual ones. It is striking how quickly it became impolite to not be a friend-able member of the site. Very soon, my peers became a bit suspicious of anyone who was not available for scrutinization on the website.  Whether my life has been improved by it or not, I can at least agree that it is now not unreasonable to expect to be able to "check someone's social credentials".

On the one hand, the removal of full-on anonymity would apparently remove some of the darkest layers of the internet. But just as anonymity makes it easier to do wrong it makes it excruciatingly hard to be nice -particularly in the increasingly prey-mentality, psycho-phobic culture that has emerged in the internet era.  Some of the most unadulterated acts of kindness I have ever experienced were through the supreme anonymity of the internet. Even in WoW, where one has a quasi-identity, true kindness is much easier to give and receive. As much as I once hoped the slightly increased distance Facebook adds to any interaction might make politeness, kindness and compassion easier to implement, it seems to actually amplify the suspicious and awkward response these tend to receive in the offline world. In WoW, I found the world is a bit simpler and the threats and hysteria are so much further from actuality. Even if an act of kindness is "perpetrated" with ulterior motives, the worst consequences of those motives are so relatively minor that the impediment to just accepting kindness is markedly lessened. It is just as markedly easier to be make that act. And while it is similarly easier to be nasty and inconsiderate, it is just as markedly easier to flippantly move on without much offence. On Facebook, not only are most potential acts of kindness bound to be in the public record, for all to scrutinize and make judgements on, but they are in an arena which is perhaps even more full of caution and where the apparent ultimate consequences of any ulterior motive seem far more real. It is much easier to be kind for its own sake with other men (or presumably, with other women), but my experiments with this have ended badly with enough frequency to make me reluctant to continue. Most relatives are all pretty safe bets: Facebook is great in this respect. Overt kindness of any sort to the opposite sex within some range of your own age is very difficult. How precisely something is wrongly interpreted no doubt varies depending on the attractiveness of the parties involved but it seems rare that any exchange can just be kindness for its own sake. Offline, body language and intonation can be used to make a compliment or favour just "nice" instead of "creepy". On Facebook, creepy and nice intonations are practically indistinguishable. In all, Facebook essentially represents the internet with a bandpass filter: most of the worst of the internet is removed but most of the best is dampened equally.

So the internet is a supermarket for everything you can't find at a supermarket and where potato chips are pornography, profanity and piracy. It is a masked city on fast-forward and society on speed. It is a great throbbing mass of e-humanity with enough darkness to convert any rosy-eyed child into a raging misanthrope. But at all levels it contains a constant reassurance of the goodness of people,  even juxtaposed with the most stomach-churning gore, hate and ignorance we as a species can produce. It is just a hypothesis to be revealed true or false by a careful examination of a supermarket's balance sheet, but it may just be the case that to bring in the broccoli and blueberries, the grocer need to keep pushing the candy and potato chips.