Poem which expresses my feelings at the moment

I’m preparing the last bits of my application to a science journalism internship this summer. Feeling restless. Hopeful. Transparent.

My poetry professor was one of my recommenders. This was the last poem I turned in for that class.

***

Lunch Date with Frank O’Hara

It rained today and I’m moving,
aware that my hair is huge
and flopping in the daylight
I’m walking by,
an old man bends an eye toward me
a group of school boys with shirts all
breezy, lean on the number 1 busstop
A truck passes and
shakes everything
the sun falls out from behind clouds

It’s about noon, and I’m on the edge
of traffic looking hard for your shape
a pocket Rachmaninoff
that I don’t remember or recognize
plays in my ear. It’s not this one but
this is a good one. The streets are cooking
getting hotter now,
I open my physics book

“Nothing is real,”
it tells me.
no, wait,
“Nothing is definite”

So I sit down and I look around,
like you so often, thinking
how I wound up in the middle of this whole
human mess
having to choose,
by half a century having missed you
and without a plan wondering
what if it’s too late
to be an astrophysicist
or too futile to become
a drunkard

And when the lights turn strangers
are disappearing
into the road and I watch them do it,
they’re tripping and motioning me
to join them, I don’t,
I’m meeting someone I say so they go on
they dip into the great flickering river
and don’t step out the other side

Now, I can hear faraway
a car door slamming a part of this
whole symphonic buildup
getting to me, but now, I find
I’m asking for a little more time
with a crack in my voice
growing wider
and I’m getting this feeling like
you’re not going to show up today
and honey, to think
I came all this way
and I brought with me lunch
and a great deal of affection.

Back to the land of the living

Drinking brandy with dinner cause it seemed like a waste to open up a whole new bottle of wine just for myself. It’s official. I no longer have any weirdness toward the process of cooking meat. Tonight I made chicken thighs. Even as I’m eating them I’m having trouble pinpointing the location of the thighs on a chicken. I was fairly certain the drumsticks were the thighs, I had a conversation to this effect once. But these didn’t look like drumsticks. They also didn’t look like chicken breasts, which my mom said was the least tasty part of a chicken. Chris thought that was ridiculous. I thought I’d see for myself. My conclusion is chicken thighs are too complicated with the fat and the tendons. I do prefer the simplicity of chicken breasts to chicken thighs so even though I’ve barely begun to explore the chicken anatomy I’ve already found an exception to my mother’s rule. She gave me an interesting cooking tip, though, to use with those boring chicken breasts:

Coat both sides of the chicken in a thin layer of honey before frying. It adds a bit of flavor and helps it to brown.

I tried this the other day. Thanks mom.

According to a bottle of ice tea I bought from an asian grocery store, everyone should drink tea because the English do. I am drinking tea incidentally but that is not why. I see no reason to imitate the English.

I’m all moved into my sublet except for a box of books which are still in the trunk of my car. I applied to a tutoring job in San Francisco and got an immediate response. I applied to 3 non-tutoring jobs. Nothing.

I’m on the Stanford payroll, finally. Moving into the city just became a reasonable decision. Also, last night I went to get ice cream at 10:30pm. I walked 2 blocks to Clement St still full of life. I smiled the whole way.

It was my birthday present to myself. The city. My birthday presents from other people consisted of a few bottles of alcohol and a GPS device. That has the potential for an interesting narrative about my life.

Evidently

Last evening as a 22 year old and last evening in Santa Cruz.

Tomorrow, the age of 23 and life begins in the city, full of promise.

After today it’s a week of rain

Time to get better tires

Decisions, decisions

Spending a day in the sun. Not feeling so bad about anything at the moment.

Ran into the professor who helped me get the job at the UC. As per my usual dilly-dallying I found myself in an empty classroom several hours after the end of my section. He was on his way out and, surprised that I was still hanging around, dropped in to chat a bit.

I see why friendly people are so universally admired. I do pass the occasional resolution to be more sociable, but I can’t ever keep it up. I’ve also considered resolving to be more resolute, but even just thinking about that makes me tired. One day, maybe.

So this incorrigibly friendly and helpful man asked how everything was going, about my plans for break, ideas for life after. I reported the news that I was to get parttime funding for research at Stanford. “Well that’s great!” he said.

“But, I’ve also been offered a full-time possibility here,” I added.

“Ah, but you don’t want to do this,” he laughed. “Take the research. Definitely.”

So I will.

Thanksgiving away from home and an essay

I woke up this morning with a deep sense of well-being. In my bones I felt like something had changed. Maybe it was that for the first time since October, I woke up warm, easy, and unconcerned, having gone out last night to Ross’s on River St and purchased a beige-colored faux down second comforter with my now-expendable income. I didn’t wear a sweatshirt to bed. I woke up all wrapped up in a plethora of fabric.

Maybe it was just that it reminded me of home, that when I opened my eyes I expected to see the original pale blue walls of my old room in Connecticut. It would be winter now and the heat would be on low to save on gas bills, the frost which grows on the tree branches outside would have crawled halfway up my window in the night. My nose would be cold in the dim morning but my body warm under the covers. I peak at the clock: 7:05. I peak at the dresser: 6 feet away. I pull the covers over my head instead. I may seem to be making only incremental progress but beneath my sleepy visage there raged a shifting, fierce battle in which I was slowly gaining the upper hand.

As always, a glass of chocolate milk and a peanut butter cookie greets me on the kitchen table. The spoils of war.

No one is born with a love of science. I’ve met folks who take to science like fish take to water, but even so, they weren’t born knowing it. There are formative years, when we morph like clay to any external stimulus, when we really lay the wires for the decisions to come that will motivate us to live and resolve us to our endeavors, that many will attribute to an innate love of science. But even this is untapped potential without exposure. My friend once joked that half our graduating class at MIT are here because of Bill Nye the Science Guy. I used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy and the Magic School Bus back-to-back after school. I discovered science as something I loved about the same time I discovered chocolate cake.

There’s much distrust and fear of science. There’s much detraction and misunderstanding of its goals. Sometimes I stand up for the institution which I think is noble and good but sometimes I think they’re not entirely wrong.

My housemate once said something I found egregious. We had been talking about the events of 9/11 and I was commenting on the importance of skepticism at the time. I had asked him if he had done any fact-checking on the validity of the evidence which has convinced him of his particular views. “It’s impossible to check all the facts,” he replied. “that’s why we rely on ‘expert testimony’.” As I was thinking about how to respond to that comment, he added, “You like physics, right? Well, have you gone through and fact-checked every piece of information your professors have given you?” For a second, I was stunned, then, I was horrified. “No, but I should,” it started making sense to me. “And I will. Eventually, I have to.” Why all these people are so skeptical of “science” when “science” is just the name given to a pursuit of knowledge.

Truth. Truth with a capital T is not a matter of definition. It’s independent of the instruments which discover it, the methods by which it’s disseminated. I tried to explain. Science lives by its fact checkers. If we didn’t question established rules there would never be any progress toward the truth. We’d be as ignorant today as the day we first walked the Earth. Yes, I’m guilty of taking some unconfirmed assertions as fact, but that’s a mere coincidence of my inexperience– what you’re alluding to is the fault of a person, not the decree of a science.

But the damage has already been done. For as long as science has existed, pseudoscience has been right by its side. But something alarming is the case in this so-called scientific age. Most people perceive no difference between the two. In part, science journalism is to blame. The business of “selling science” has left the public in a doozy. First, coffee is good for you; then, coffee will give you a heart attack; coffee will make you smarter, stupider, live forever. Readers are left to hang on a few percentage points without ever being educated about the margin of error. They’re sent into a panic about the possibility of disaster without being informed of the insignificant odds. And journalists are only feeding the frenzy, overextending facts to break big interesting stories with magazine sales through the roof and intellectual honesty all but out the window.

No wonder the public backlash against science. Listen to us, we seem to be saying, we’re experts, our opinions are as good as fact. Then what of actual facts? Are our journalists are not discriminating enough to sort them out, our public too uneducated to put it together? We lie by omission. We appeal to authority. And when experts disagree with each other we’re left to conclude there must be no objective fact, the truth is our invention, what’s real and what’s imaginary is simply a matter of opinion. Presented in this form, science is no better than just another form of indoctrination. Propaganda. No wonder.

Good science teachers encourage us to see for ourselves. When I was 10 or 11 I came home one day to Bill Nye the Science Guy on my TV chattering about different wavelengths of light. It is selective absorption of light which gives things color, he announced, to great fanfare. Light carries energy. This is why black things are warmer than white things. See for yourself!

So I went around touching things. For days I did. I started noticing how much warmer black cars were than white cars, how my hair seemed to catch fire in the direct sun. I even conducted an experiment with my mom’s collection of fabrics. I cut little swatches out of each material and lined them all up under the kitchen light. I let them sit for an appropriate amount of time and then with my eyes closed tried to separate the dark ones from the light ones (this endeavor was only somewhat successful). But there really was a difference! And so I was convinced of this particular fact.

How easy it is for me to put my faith in science when I’ve felt like a participant for most of my life. Yet I was not born with a love of science. My privilege was to be included in the scientific dialog. My education consisted of progressive versions of reality. Each beloved theory a model carefully constructed, dressed up, and committed to memory only to be mercilessly toppled and replaced by the next. And so, like this, I learned that science is about not knowing. A friend and classmate used to say that the only result of his scientific education was that he was not sure of anything any more. Good scientific journalism must recognize this fact– present the evidence, explain the logic– lift the veil of invincibility and open a real line of communication with the public.

In some ways, scientists are to blame. The scientific community is a community of people, and as such is not free of human quarrels, intrigue, pride, short-sightedness. It’s not unusual for even great scientists to make it their objective to “thin the herd”. The herd is, of course, referring to interested non-professionals, prospective students of their discipline, even peers. The objective? Ostensibly an improved level of dialogue, a higher mean quality of work, and undeniably, exclusivity.

3rd year students at MIT majoring in physics take a year-long lab sequence which introduces them to some landmark physics experiments of the 20th century. “Junior Lab”, as it’s termed, is, for most students, their very first exposure to what it takes (at least from the experiment portion onwards) to conduct a truly independent investigation in science. Each of the 10 experiments culminates in a scientific paper and a 15-minute oral presentation. Most students who go on to be physicists find this experience invaluable. But there is much dread, as well. Junior Lab is high pressure, fast-paced, and generally unsympathetic. In every way a weeder course for the physics major except that it occurs way too late into our studies.

Certain professors of the course have accumulated over the years particularly frightful reputations. One professor, a pioneer in the field of quantum computing, was legendary among the student for his offensively direct, sometimes unduly harsh, criticisms. His evaluations, instead of comments on the quality of the students’ work, often strayed into an assessment of a student’s abilities. Sometimes they were humorous. On a graded paper, I once saw the following annotation, “Much better than last time, but still terrible.”

Other times, they seemed to border on malicious. He took the opportunity of the public oral oftentimes to really drive home some of his earlier critiques. The public oral (held at the end of the first semester), was an opportunity for students to practice speaking to a large audience. Students, friends, and professors are all invited to attend. There are snacks and projectors and everybody’s dressed up. It can be a nerve-wracking experience. There would be follow-up questions on the apparatus, the data gathered, the analysis, then, “You’re an awful physicist,” he would spit out, during the question-answer session following a presentation. “You’re embarrassing yourself. You should drop this class.” I’m not sure if anybody ever attempted to defend the kids at the front of the room. Even as they stood there crying.

Scientists have a reputation for heartlessness. They have a stigma for being only tenuously human, curious and stubborn creatures with a fuzzy moral code. They do little to disabuse the public of this impression. In fact, it’s not out of the question that it’s even a source of pride, this “otherness”.

There’s no doubt that we’re looking at an elite crowd. But then who can blame the public for their distrust of scientists, and in turn, suspicion toward scientific evidence and the basic tenets which guide the scientific endeavor? Exclusivity and exclusion are one in the same. But this raises several questions, does the public really deserve to be ostracized? Is this ultimately beneficial to our cause?

Who among my generation of scientists has not heard of Carl Sagan? In his series, “Cosmos”, Carl Sagan said, “Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. In a way, it’s the opposite of chaos. It implies a deep interconnectedness of all things. The intricate and subtle way that the universe is put together.” Ultimately, he devoted his public life to addressing just one question, “why science?” His answer was two decades long and his strategy was to have a conversation with the people. He presupposed their capacity to understand. He impressed them with his humanness. And the people responded en masse.

But ironically, Sagan was least popular with those for whom he advocated the most. In 1992 Carl Sagan came before the National Academy of Sciences as a nominee for membership in the most prestigious of science organizations in the world and was rejected despite the thumbs-up vote from the astronomy sub-community of members. His public persona was to blame. By that time he had written over 20 books, directed several movies and TV shows. (Not to mention he had also published some 600 scientific papers and made significant contributions to the study of planetary astronomy) But that was enough. As it turns out, his popularity discredited him. He was an egomaniac, they said, not a real scientist.

This is not an unfamiliar tune. When I mentioned to a professor once an interest in science journalism, his kindly response was that he thought I might be capable of a lot “more”. When I made the decision to put off graduate school until I’ve better defined my interests, I was warned against the implication this would have on my chances of being taken seriously later on. That there are precious few real ambassadors of science is no doubt a testament to the great command of the purist view point over the scientific minds of today. Our nostalgia for the past great eras of discovery and innovation have driven us to, at times, rally against our best interests. The unfortunate truth is that the business of science has superseded our love of it — what set us going from the beginning, this devotion to truth and progress, is now just an afterthought. It’s a sickness in the scientific community that goes to show just how human we really are. But while we judge and quarrel and blame and bicker, the next generation of scientists have just opened their eyes and are glimpsing our world for the first time. If science is to live on, it cannot lose its advocates.

Headphones

Last night I had a dream that I ate my good headphones. I was sorry afterwards because they were my favorite headphones and they didn’t even taste all that good.

1-Mile Buoy

I live two blocks from the ocean. On the banks of the San Lorenzo River which is a very modest river as far as rivers go. It begins in the Santa Cruz Mountains, climbs out of the redwoods, and picks up speed as it drops through an elevation of 2500 feet into the San Lorenzo Valley. On its way its slices the city of Santa Cruz into East and West, and when it’s over drains into the Monterey Bay. I live next to the delta where it becomes the sea. On the East Side. Most of the time I forget about the ocean. But once every couple nights the waves swell up and the air is still in such a way that all of Lower Ocean is filled with the sound of great volumes of water colliding. Because by the time the sound reaches Pearl St, it’s taken on this great round quality, ricocheting from house to house until it’s coming from every direction all at once, walking around on the dark street late at night, it feels close, like you can grab it and hold it against your body, like you might drown in it.

The sound of waves is always accompanied by a muffled, intermittent fog-horn in the distance. The first few nights it drove me crazy. The sound is identical to a cell phone getting a call on vibrate. It put me on edge and once I started listening for it I really couldn’t sleep. My housemate told me it was the 1-mile buoy, off the shore, to warn ships that they’re getting close to land. The mechanism is activated by waves. On days when the sea is choppy, like it is tonight, it’ll happily play all night.

My room is wood and yellow with two round windows and one long window with a pane that slides open. The ceiling is sloped in such a way to give everything the appearance of being slightly tilted. If I slid the window all the way open I can sit on the window sill and dry my feet on the asphalt roof. Before the fog came I would climb up and out of the long window, spread myself out at night on the shingles and look at stars. Chris says my room is like a yellow submarine. On the nights when the waves are heavy then I imagine I’m out at sea, and I’m going up to the deck to look at the stars. Now it’s the winter sky I don’t have any clue of what I’m even looking at but it’s still fun to look. On any given evening I’m likely to spot at least two shooting stars and a satellite. Eventually I’ll get chilly and crawl back into the warm light of my room. I’ll wrap myself in blankets and when they get to be the temperature of my body I’ll contemplate sleep. Outside, the streets will grow as still and cold as the air. But in the distance the 1-mile buoy bellows on. My heart slows way down.

Cows are dipoles

A recent study of Google Earth images revealed a preferential spatial alignment for grazing and resting cattle. In a survey of over 8000 cows in about 300 pastures, the study found conclusive evidence of a significant deviation from random orientation with preference for a magnetic North-South direction. They were able to use global differences in positions to rule out the effects of wind and sun, and show a statistical correlation which favored magnetic north over geographic north as a predictor of cattle pointing direction. In other words, cows are dipoles. But they’re not the only ones. Deer show an even stronger alignment with the magnetic poles. Look at this diagram from the original paper:

A is cattle, B is roe deer, C is red deer.

That’s a great looking distribution in the middle. I wish they’d clean it up and fit to it. I expect to see a follow-up study calculating the effective magnetic dipole moment of the cow.

The theory. If you’ve ever played with two bar magnets you know there is an orientation to the magnetic attraction between them. Indeed, the magnetic field is a vector field and dipoles tend to line up along its field lines. The needle of a compass for example is a magnetic dipole. If allowed to spin freely, it will point toward magnetic north/south. A dipole in a magnetic field feels a torque which is proportional to the strength of the field and the magnetic moment of the dipole.

T is the torque, u is the magnetic moment, B is the external magnetic field (of the earth, in this case).

This torque will tend to spin it in the direction of the magnetic field line. Viewed another way, the energy of a dipole in an external magnetic field is:

The natural inclination of a system is to move from a higher energy state to a lower energy state. The lowest energy in this case is represented by the case where u and B are aligned (theta = 0), therefore their dot product is maximized, and the energy is most negative.

Now, cows are lazy, and they undergo some kind of random motion, so naturally there will be a width to the distribution of the probability that a cow will be pointing in a given direction. Now, if this random motion is associated purely with thermal energy, the pointing probability could be calculated exactly. My guess is that it’s more complicated than that. If I come up with a good way to model it, I’ll probably publish the follow-up paper.

An interesting side note is that many animals have already been well-documented to have internal magnetic sensors. Birds and salmon have been known to use magnetic field lines to navigate their migration. Apparently, even rodents possess some kind of internal magnetic compass. What they need it for is beyond me. Interestingly, some studies suggest humans who sleep oriented East-West experience shorter REM sleep periods than humans who sleep oriented North-South. REM sleep is apparently important for memory, alertness, creativity, and every other good thing our brain does. There’s something, after all, to be said for feng-shuing your room.

From randomness, order.

My life has been evolving slowly to become more and more structured and less and less what I feel like I really ought to be doing. In addition I’ve experienced a noticeable decrease in REM sleep lately as my days and nights have really filled themselves up. This is only adding to my sense of confusion.

Mondays and Fridays I teach at the UC. Mondays are discussion sections and Fridays are labs. I’ve been doing this for 3 weeks now and it hasn’t gotten any easier carrying 50 lab notebooks across Science Hill.

Tuesdays and Thursdays I tutor middle and high school students in Aptos. This last Thursday one of my duties was to help a 7th grader finish his auto-biographical slideshow presentation. His accomplishments included being the last to be cut from the basketball team and almost making the honor roll in the 5th grade. His goals were one day be richer than Bill Gates.

Wednesdays I head up to Stanford to report on the meager progress I’ve made that week in my research. This wednesday I bring up the issue of funding for probably the last time.

Yesterday I helped bartend at a frat party. Someone stole a handle of vodka and a $1.50 jug of safeway brand orange juice. A vinyl record was pilfered from the DJs. Party was eventually broken up by the police around 11:30. Pretty classy stuff. I’ve been thinking about getting a job in sustainable energy and bartending on the side.

In other news I bought a used 2000 Volkswaggen Passat with a V6 engine and a moon roof. I’m going to use it to learn how to drive stick. Also, I’ll probably use it to get around.

And move.

I don’t know where I’m going to move to come spring but I will move somewhere.

North star is an airplane

Lots of people know a little about science.

During my rather disastrous commute home from Palo Alto today a man looked over, saw the book I was reading, and started talking to me about the atomic bomb. “I’m lousy at math,” he said. “but I understand physical principles well.” This was exciting to me, so I asked him what he meant. “For example, Einstein gets the credit for the atomic bomb, but it was really M—- who did most of the work. He was Einstein’s collaborator, but no one’s heard of him cause Einstein took all the credit.” This was not a physical principle. “Lots of people worked on the atomic bomb,” I said. He ignored me. I named 5 in my head.

“I’m in school, too, you know.” He said.
“I’m not in school.”

“Have you heard of Tesla?”

Did I know that he invented a laser, that it could shoot through the earth and turn ions negative in the atmosphere so that they changed the earth’s gravity because the magnetic field of the earth goes around like this and the ions go around like this… Now environmentalists were worried about the effect so they confiscated his invention because it was capable of making the surface of the water rise into the air did you know this and then you’d have black rain, have you heard of black rain? which is iron, it would levitate things, and fish and frogs would fall out of the sky too, isn’t that wild?

I thought about that for a second. “Like in a tornado?” He continued on. The more he talked, the more excited he got, he began stuttering and saying things that were logically disconnected. Between the noise of the bus pulling itself up highway 17 and this guy’s lack of coherence, I stopped caring and returned to my book. I was just starting a chapter on standard candles and getting excited about the Cepheid variables that had made such a buzz in cosmology. I tried to remember what Feynman had said about them,

Two different populations of stars… Cepheid variables of one type… but there’s another type… universe must be twice, or three times, or even four times older than we thought!

Meanwhile, bus guy does not stop talking. “Have you heard of frictional force?” he asks. I just look at him.

He explains. Bring together 5 people… I did this with my friends. When we all rubbed our hands together we generated enough frictional energy to levitate off the ground… just our hands… He showed me his hands. And rubbed them together to demonstrate what it looked like when you rubbed your hands together. I didn’t like that very much. I wasn’t trying to ignore him, but I was pretty bored. “Cepheid variables are named after the star delta Cephei,” I read from my book. Energy force, man… I swear to god I’m not lying… highly luminous supergiant stars… I swear to god this is the truth… pulsationally unstable… periods between 1.5 and 60 days… 400 pounds, a box… I just lifted it with my bare hands…. relationship between period and flux… would have never happened if I hadn’t rubbed my hands together… you know how it feels warm when you do that?… rare stars… hey… nearest Cepheid is Polaris… difficulty is calibrating luminosity… hey… north star is a variable star. North star is a variable star. I thought there was something profound in that.

… hey! Are you listening??

Can you hear me??

“Ok look,” I hadn’t said anything in about 20 minutes. “You think I can read my book?”

He looked unhappy and I was a little sorry for it. Poor guy didn’t know anything about physical principles. He’d absorbed a couple of keywords here and there, heard about some concepts, and pieced them together into a random narrative that didn’t make a bit of sense. This guy was a little busted but it’s something I’ve been seeing a lot of lately. The assumption is that knowing the names of things is the same as knowing the things. It’s an equivalence of the scientific endeavor which is vast and noble with its by-products, and connected with the idea that the thing science should not be encouraged because of what humans do with the knowledge gained. I glanced at an open book on the dining room table today (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) which accused science of being “reductionist”:

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry… The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters.

This criticism of the scientific method, for instance, is no criticism of the scientific method at all. It’s a criticism of human beings with limited capacity for complexity and ambiguity. If a thing can be described by a finite set of parameters, and they each have an effect on the whole, then they, by definition, can be measured (in principle, at least). Science attempts to determine some of these parameters in order to understand better a more fundamental mechanism. If we were to stop at simply describing the properties of the thing itself, then the knowledge gained is narrow and more or less useless (“stamp collecting,” as Rutherford called it), so scientists tend to move on from a particular subject after some time in search of the answers to a more interesting question. They provide documentation of their research so that others may focus on another aspect of the same topic and extend their investigation in perhaps another, also interesting, direction. This gets somehow interpreted as reduction. The actual reduction is not occurring at the level of the science, but at the level of those who are applying some small bit of knowledge gained to public policy, who are careless or pragmatic or what-else. I just can’t justify the defensiveness of the general populace when it comes to scientific principles. I can only imagine it is a reaction to the exclusivity maintained by the scientific community. The average person feels like an absolute outsider, informed by loose threads of dubious journalism which twist the truth this way and that in order to suit a certain personal world view. Then they get scared and think science is trying to take away their individuality. Lately I’ve noticed mainly two kinds of reactions to any general scientific discussion: a complete refusal to participate (“that stuff’s never made any sense to me”) and a thorough and immediate recall of every bit of scientific trivia related to the matter at hand. A general fear of the conversation.

Back on the bus, friction man was disgruntled. Mumbled something about being in the army and a gunshot to the head then stared straight ahead. I didn’t ask him to elaborate.

I did start wishing, though, that I had my pepper spray on me, pepper spray that wasn’t shaped like a toy gun (dad…). Even though that would be a pretty lame thing to do on a bus. I couldn’t read any more for having to watch him out of the side of my eyes. He fidgeted a whole bunch. 5 minutes pass. Finally, he picked up his backpack, and with the dignity worthy of a king, walked up to the only other empty seat on the bus, and sat down, 3 rows up.

I breathed a sigh of relief and read some more about standard candles.

We ended up being on that bus for 3 hours. I realized today (sitting on that bus) that Highway 17 is really the mechanism that preserves this certain “unique”-ness that folks like to attribute to Santa Cruz. In an excruciating way but mindful, discouraging newness like geography and a poorly designed transit systems only could, through its sheer stubbornness and difficulty. When the only artery in and out of a city is a winding, 2 lane “highway” through the mountains for 25 miles with a speed limit of 45, which comes to a frequent and complete halt in the case of any traffic incident or volume (google “highway 17 accidents”), a place can feel pretty isolated. Santa Cruz is less than 30 miles from the heart of the Silicon Valley. Yet it has no living industry besides tourism. It has none of the hustle-bustle intensity of its neighbors, none of the mass-produced mass-consumed mass culture, none of the ambition and restlessness. It’s idyllic– like a beautiful accident. But it’s no accident. Many people are grateful of the state of the place without knowing what they’re grateful toward. It seems to me that Santa Cruz is more a place where people come to settle down. It’s the town of Spectre in the movie Big Fish. This is where young people come to experiment with doing nothing, wind up growing old and living forever.

Jammed up end to a pseudo-science day

We were all thinking the same thing. We had a lot of time. We were 40 people sitting in silence, making private, furious plans to one day move closer to where we work. I made a flow chart.

I didn’t seem to have too many options.

We had waited at the bus stop for the 7:45 until 8:15. And now, finally on the road, the bus hadn’t moved a meter in 45 minutes. When I got sick of reading, I entertained myself by contemplating the nature of traffic jams. How, in a bottleneck-free situation, jams propagate like longitudinal waves through a medium. The cars ahead of the jam dissipate as cars behind pile on, and as long as a constant flow of cars is maintained with a flux which is high enough per unit of time for a car to get from one end of the jam to the other, the jam moves through the cars like a constant amplitude, constant velocity density wave. Much like the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. Regions of high density, which are the result of small velocity and density fluctuations in the interstellar gas, are not made of the same stars and planets and particles always, instead, stars and gases pass through these regions, like we pass through traffic jams. Eventually.

Some have even proposed that the passing of the Solar System through the spiral arms of the Milky Way could be the cause for the temperature and climate fluctuations on Earth. Much like being stuck in a traffic jam could have effects on the temperament and blood pressure of its constituents, the solar system, bathed in the cosmic rays of these more active regions, may experience noticeable changes as well. However, researchers claim to have debunked this theory using more precise mappings of the galaxy. I remember doing this lab in 8.14 (Experimental Physics) using a radio telescope to measure the abundance and redshift of hydrogen gas in the Milky Way. It was not an easy lab. Our errors were pretty huge. This was the best we could do for the location of the spiral arms.

On the other hand, if there is a bottleneck in the road, and vehicles are forced to move bumper-to-bumper, I imagine traffic could be approximated quite well by an incompressible flow with smooth boundary conditions. That’s just a flow with a constant density, or particles per unit volume, everywhere, that runs into no sudden stops or sharp corners. The key concept here in the steady state solution is then conservation of mass. We place the restriction that the rate of mass entering any imaginary volume you draw within the flow must equal the rate of mass leaving (otherwise the density within this volume would change and it would no longer be considered incompressible). If, in particular, you align your volume so that it has an area A perpendicular to the direction of flow and length x that is parallel, you can write

The above holds for all locations in the flow. This implies for any two sites

Applied to our idealized traffic situation, an expression can be found for the average speed of a vehicle stuck in the traffic queue as a function of the speed of traffic currently passing through the bottleneck and the lane reduction.

For instance, an accident causes a 3 to 1 lane reduction. This necessarily results in backed-up traffic moving at about 1/3 the speed of traffic currently passing the site of the accident. Now imagine that this is a really spectacular accident and there is a lot to see. The folks passing by the commotion want to get a good view so they’re driving 15 mph. This limits the speed of the poor blokes in the vehicles farther back to an average of about 5 mph. This is the effect of “rubbernecking”. It’s unlikely that it will end though, who doesn’t want to reap the rewards of hours of boring waiting?

(Of course there are limitations to this highly simplified model. For instance, the assumption of an incompressible flow is unrealistic when vehicle velocities are high, as safe driving practices do not dictate driving bumper-to-bumper at 45 mph. When incompressibility breaks down enter the density waves discussed earlier. In addition, since lane closures do not constitute a smooth transition but rather an abrupt change in boundary conditions, there’s a feedback mechanism which limits the speed of cars in the bottleneck according to how smoothly they can merge and how quickly they can accelerate, which then goes on to affect cars farther back in the queue.)

Anyhow, 2 1/2 hours of crawling later we got our moment. Faces went immediately to the windows.

There were 10 cop cars and 3 tow trucks at the site of the accident and one slow-moving lane of traffic. And though I rubbernecked as hard as I could, I could see no wreck in the darkness. Just 15 or so cops standing on the side of the road with their hands in their pockets. Like they were bored. Like nothing had happened at all.