What happens when the world ends but the people don’t die all at once?

Borrowed The Road from the library.

He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The seas’ black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.

p.185.

Not my genre generally. For how wildly popular he is I’ve never read any Cormac McCarthy before this.

Another poem

My friend, I’ve made it,
sorry for the wait,
it’s a long way
up the narrow stairs to your room
from the night outside with no moon,
so intelligent and lonely we are,
I’m happy to see you.

And you, you’re a reflection
in the open window.
I’m wide-eyed
and I can’t shut up.
God, it’s so easy
to lose it all in this place.

There’s no more sleep left.
I grow thin
in the green light,
so we have bagels from the dumpster
on a cellophane blue plate,
with cream cheese and
gobs of fresh strawberry jam.

The old wood floor sways, under you,
then the fiddle, then the blues.
A quick swig of whiskey, and
from somewhere far off the 3am faint
smell of cigarette smoke.

Hey, what do you say,
let’s go for a drive.
I’m not bluffing, and you’re not shy,
just lettin’ the buzz go by,
just losing time again.

Listen, I’m starting to really like those trees
outside your window, and

rumor has it, the sun sets real low
over the west coast.
But while these folks are sleeping
huge stars are spinning,
and by daybreak,
we’re well on our way
sober and stumbling.

-Lulu Liu

————————————————————–

I wrote this for my junior lab partner. Spent a lot of late nights with this guy.

Harvard square once

We were lost in Harvard Square once. Me, my parents, in a Subaru packed high with my things. Seemed a lot at the time: books, clothes, some sentimental scraps here and there, there were shelves (to stay organized!), sheets (had to be “extra long”), a picture frame, my favorite pillow, a plastic water heater, an old poster or two to look at. It wasn’t that much. Not compared to what I have now, and quite suddenly. But it did feel pretty monumental at the time.

Anyways we were lost. And it was a happy occasion, so my parents, not naturally apt to socialize with strangers, stopped to ask for directions. We were in Harvard Square, and we’ve passed this intersection 3 times now, my dad explained out the driver’s side window to someone I couldn’t immediately see. We can’t take Massachusetts Avenue, he said, it’s going the wrong way, we need to go that way on it, we’re trying to go to MIT.

Stranger looked in the car. It was an older man, if I remember correctly. Looked to the back with all the stuff and smiled. “Go to school there?” he asked. Of me, apparently.

Um. Yeah. Orientation. I said. (I think. It made me nervous back then to talk to just about anybody.)

“Great. That’s great, ” He had the biggest smile on his face.

“I’m really proud of you,” the old man said, inexplicably. “You want to go this way and take Mt. Auburn, it joins up with Mass Ave in a few blocks.”

Thank you, thank you, my dad said. He waved as he pulled away from the curb; he beamed the whole rest of the way.

A few months later, we discovered the Cambridge St. exit off 90 over to Memorial Drive and we never went through Harvard Square again.

Now they are exhausted by my moving. Now I am exhausted by it too.

But back then, I was in one place, they were in many. My dad moved to Dartmouth in New Hampshire for work. My mom left New Haven for Maryland. Then my dad moved into a place back on Prospect St. He worries that my mom is home alone. All the driving. All the driving. When I started applying to graduate school, this winter, six years later, he joked that he was also applying. For work, at NIH or maybe another lab in the DC area. “We’ll see who gets the good news first,” he laughed.

Then he sold the house. Then I won.

A tree falls

Today at lunchtime, a tree fell over in the Qualcomm parking lot. John was walking by it. He said it was a redwood tree. I was stopped in the bus stop with my lights blinking. My arm felt hot from the sun. He said he heard a noise and saw it fall. It fell over onto a row of cars. Someone else saw it fall too but he was the first, he said. Then we drove to get Bento.

View

Summer before college we
looked for outcroppings
of rhyolite;
a rock
glass-like, that
has been known to
come alive
by earth’s heat and
walk slowly
across the land.

We picked
at the valley floor
with sticks
parted tall grass
while the cool slopes
on either side grew
like trees overhead.

Floods raze the land,
you said, waving
a bent stick at a stream
that was
not quite a river,
only a tame curve visible.
And I thought
such a biblical way of
starting over;
of course
there’s nothing to find here.

Then where?

We knew
what we would see.
Record of a
red hot earth
before the path and
chattering trees,
and the wailing births
of the geologists who
predicted a war
preceding any
in our human history.

Even before the visiting
glaciers that
aligned these mountains,
and the grass that spouted upward
in thin, green shoots
and finally covered the valley floor
like a bandage.

And long
before the two of us–
arms swinging
with each higher step,
stinking
from August sweat
and clumsy
with the weight of our bodies
–cast our two
impressive grey shadows
briefly
against a bulging sky.

“It’s starting to rain.”

Ahead,
someone’s abandoned walking stick
had flowered
and grown leaves.
I took a drink as
we climbed
ever higher.
Over our shoulders
slowly evolving,
an always more perfect view.

-Lulu Liu

————————————————————————————-

Years ago, I took a trip to Yellowstone with a group of people just like me. It was the first time in my life I’d met anybody like me.
Anyways, I felt like posting some poems.

New York Times picked it up

Hadn’t heard of the New Scientist, Sacramento Bee? Well, how about the New York Times?

Could have been yours.

Puzzle Hunt Puzzle

Almost two week ago, there was the Mystery Hunt. At school I wasn’t that into it. Not like these guys. Like just about everybody else, I was on a team, but I was the girl with the can of Oust air freshener that appeared every few hours to thoroughly spray down hunt headquarters.

A lack of hobbies might have something to do with it, but this year, I took more of an interest. I worked remotely, a few hours saturday a few hours sunday, pulled into it by John here in San Jose basically. But I didn’t have a bad time. I’ve been seeing a lot of Math is Fun propaganda lately, and I feel like sticking up for physics a bit. So here’s an example of a puzzle we solved and liked.

Pesky Bugs

The puzzle is called Pesky Bugs. There’s that wav file, and there is a tag line which serves as a hint, “Bio Man even controls the insects flying around your head.”

The answer is “PLAGUE”.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Mystery Hunt Puzzle before, but they don’t exactly come with instructions. Yet when you stumble upon the right way to solve one, you usually know it. There’s a certain elegance to these puzzles that I like.

The first thing to do here is split up the signal. Someone did this and found that the wav file is actually built up by overlapping six individual frequencies. The pure tones are at 220, 440, 660, 880, 1100, and 1320 Hz. They start up simultaneously at the beginning and end one at a time.

Next, you notice sound file is not in mono. The left and right channels are different; the amplitudes of the tones varying continuously but in a seemingly random way. Once you’ve gotten this far you’ll know that the solution must involve treating these two channels individually somehow, this feature is not accidental.

At this point I IMed Chris, my Sound Physics Go-To Guy. I asked, is the amplitude of a soundwave proportional to 1/r or 1/r^2, r being the straight line distance from the source? (1/r, he said) I also asked, is the electrical signal picked up by a mic proportional to the amplitude or the intensity of the wave? (amplitude, he said, what are you doing?) The idea was that there was something peculiar about the sound in the two channels, which shifted from one to the other, and if you leaned up very close to your speakers, it sounded like something was flying around your head. We were going to figure out the trajectory of the bugs.

The extraction was basically trigonometry, with some guess work involved. If the speakers were your ears how far apart were they? We initially constrained this by requiring that the distance D between the ears was no smaller than the maximum |R1-R2| and no larger than the minimum R1+R2 (bounding all possible triangles to be formed by the three sides). But this turned out not to be very stringent. We ended up with some funny looking curves that didn’t spell anything.

This is because there was another problem. Even knowing R1 and R2 and distance D between the ears the bug’s position is only constrained to a circle in the plane perpendicular to the axis of the ears. Assuming that it travels in a plane always we are still left with two ambiguous points for the current position of the bug. (If you look at the official solutions this ambiguity was actually eliminated with one extra piece of information: doppler shift, unfortunately we didn’t notice this about the tones) In any case, our solution was to look for momentum discontinuities at the x-axis that resemble reflections and stitch those manually.

We didn’t find them though, we found these smooth curves that, though definitely not the result of randomness, again, didn’t look like much:

Then there was a breakthrough! The appearance of the curves depended heavily on our choice of D. Though the upper bound varied widely, the D lower bound for each bug (frequency) was practically identical. This meant not only was D the same for each bug (as we suspected may be the case), but each bug also went all the way around the head. Pretty soon after realizing this we got our first letter: A

Due to the reflection ambiguity, upside-down, but unmistakable. A.

Some letters were confusing on account of that.

P or b?

Some were less so.

It’s exciting to me that so much information could be extracted from seemingly so little. Yet this is the kind of thing that physicists do every day. I remember from my time at LIGO using almost exactly the same technique to triangulate the location of gravitational wave sources using the time delay between signal detections at 4 detectors located around the world. In astrophysics tiny deflections in light from faraway galaxies can be used to determine the mass distributions of foreground dark matter. And in particle physics where just about everything is invisible, not just dark matter, all kinds of crazy techniques are used to infer the position and existence of a particle.

Anyways I just really like physics and also liked this puzzle. And in my mind there are many parallels. Seeing those letters emerge (especially that gorgeous G) after all that failed effort is astonishing but there’s the feeling that somehow it must. Much like finding order in the universe.

Shaken Baby Syndrome Story

So, what I was hoping would be my biggest, best, most original story of the summer at the Sacramento Bee never ran.

Because I wrote it in the last two weeks, working frantic 14 hours days? Because it’s a contentious issue and the Bee is not known for sticking out its neck? Because it was too long and went through too many edits? Because I was naive and believing and unprepared to fight?

Whatever it is, I’m not going into journalism, it’s not a huge loss for me. And I would have forgotten about it if it weren’t for occasional reminders from Bee interns that I’ve kept in touch with. And if it weren’t for running into it today while looking for graduate school documents.

This is neither the original thing I wrote, nor the final edited version. It was somewhere in between, when one day I decided I would save a copy on my laptop drive and work on it at home.

Back to the Future of the Internet

“Dave are you there on the internet?”
“Uh yeah I am, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Wonderful!”

This is an archived 1993 broadcast of NPR’s Science Friday– first ever to go out over the internet. And that’s the talking point:

How do you describe the Internet? Well, to say that it’s a network of over 10,000 computer networks is like describing the telephone system as billions of wires. It gives you some idea of how it’s constructed, but not what it’s used for. And that’s what we hope to do this hour, to talk about the Internet and the creative things that can be done with this massive worldwide network.

And to just illustrate one creative idea, we are broadcasting this program, TALK OF THE NATION, Science Friday is going out live on the Internet. It’s not going out as something somebody’s typing very quickly and making a transcript and sending it out on a computer. No, our actual voices on this program. Our voices are going out to computer terminals around the world where people are able to hear it coming through their computers.

There’s mention of MacIntoshes, Compuserve, “internet messages”, Dungeons and Dragons. The existence of half-a-dozen programs with graphical interfaces. There’s thoughtful discussions of dissemination of information. There’s even some fortune-telling about the future: copyright issues, misinformation and the pajamahadeen, downloading music, the promise of 64kps download capability.

It’s times like this that I am reminded of how phenomenal NPR is.

A plug for Pubget is a plug for me

http://pubget.com/paper/pgtmp_10112255