I need to just write more, and not worry about having so much to say! I feel guilty about just posting project updates here, rather than personal ones.

Flame and I are well on our way to a full inversion of gender roles. I kiss her off every morning, and putz around the house until she comes back in the evening. We get the New York Times, and last week Flame immediately asked for the Business section (she has to stay on top of it for Greenpeace), and I grabbed Home (which had a leading article on inefficient bulbs).

That hardest part of grad school, I’m finding, is knowing when to try to make something publishable. No one advises me, so I work on projects and write things up and try in vain to get anyone to give me feedback.

The first year of my PhD is done, and it was everything I could have hoped for! The economics classes were as challenging as any at MIT, and combined with research, this last semester ranks as one of my most intense. The School of International and Public Affairs is practically gift-wrapped in fliers about interesting looking talks and actions of which I went to very few, but I did have the opportunity to give talks of my own, facilitate some internal foment, and help organize our fabulously successful sustainable development conference. For all the opportunities lost– missed activities, under-studied classes, and under-researched papers– I think there were more hard-won satisfactions and useful milestones set.

My friends here are as kind as they are sharp. My colleagues are passionate about research topics ranging from New York air quality to Nigerian agriculture, and their backgrounds are even more widespread. I’m starting up a “Tuesday Evening Experiments” meeting for the summer so we can get together and poke at random data, try out funky models, and generally collaborate together on some cool projects.

The usefulness of the economics I’ve learned remains in serious doubt. Some of the ideas are powerful, but it’s not clear that they are any more than a biased shorthand for the obvious. Hours after my final in microeconomics, I was talking outside in the beautiful sun, and a friend asked why everyone else was indoors. It was a Nash equilibrium, I quipped. But even if it looked like one, it couldn’t be– like so many economic models, the assumptions of game theory are so divorced from reality that all they can do is give answers to rhetorical questions.

But now, with some summer money for research and a part time job for the rest, I think I finally have a chance to delve into my own navel and see where it goes!

Suppose that when you die, you are told that you have and will continue to be reincarnated forever. In fact, there are unlimited worlds that you can live your next life on, and a full catalog awaits from which you can choose. Many worlds are closer to God (or the One, the divine essence) than this one. The catch is that if you decide to open the catalog, you can never find this world again. For example, you could live ten lives in this world, and then ten lives in another, and so on forever.

If you knew there was a lifetime more of beauty to find and good to do here, would you ever choose to change worlds? When?

Additionally, suppose that you can choose to be reincarnated with the same soul you have now, or choose from an infinite catalog of other souls. But if you give up your current soul, you can never come back to it. You could choose to be the Dalai Lama in your next life, but then you can never be yourself again.

If you knew there was a lifetime more of growth for you and wisdom in need (on whatever planet you live on) with this soul, would you ever try a different one?

Now, suppose that constantly in life you are being offered these choices. One way it’s framed may seem fairly removed: you are asked, in a million ways, whether you want to engage with people directly, or to engage with tools of various sorts. The tools (from computers to paradigms to limbs and eyes to the mind) are offered as a way to help you grow and do more. The catch is that the divine essence is to be found in the Other, in people, and every tool brings you further from It.

You can choose to give up as much technology as you want to be closer to God and others, but whatever you give up you can never get back in the same way. What would you give up, and when?

I don’t think I’ve written about my research projects, and since they always seem to be multiplying, I wanted to present them frozen here in time:

Open Model for Climate Behaviors: I applied for an EPA fellowship based on this. The idea is to construct a dynamic model of sufficient complexity that it’s possible to identify tipping points in the forces that affect American society’s climate behaviors. In other words, to build a system to help find small policy changes, which will grow to really change how people act. (Project Proposal)

Glaciers and Flooding in Himalayan River Basins: The Himalayan glaciers are melting, and their rivers are flooding– might these be related? No one seems to have checked. But I have a bunch of remote sensing analysis and good modeling that might be close to an answer. (Working Paper)

System Regression Estimators: My colleagues spend all their time running regressions, agonizing to find “exogenous” variables– variables which affect things but aren’t themselves affected. I don’t think such things exist, and I have some math that might let us give up the battle and estimate the relationships in whole systems, where everything affects everything else.

Self-Organized Criticality in Ecology: Self-organization is everywhere in human and natural systems, yet we’re only beginning to understand its implications. In particular, I think we’re very close to being able to describe ecological systems in the terms of self-organization, and I intend to give it a try.

Beyond that is the long tail of projects. My Alternative Economics group last semester was enlightening, and remains a big interest for me. I thought my paper on the connection between the Creaturely Life and access to reality was pretty successful. A couple weeks ago, I identified the size of hidden “poverty-or-wealth” sectors missing from standard (two-sector) economic models. While not research, I recently open-sourced a bunch of artificial intelligence code for natural language processing, built Flame a Droid app for Valentine’s day, and taught a class on unix and shell scripting. Hopefully this summer I’ll have a chance to build some of three online projects I think would be powerful: a site that acts as a personal adviser for counterbalancing the unintended consequences of your purchases, a site to help volunteers self-organize on ambiguous projects, and a site to hold politicians accountable for their campaign promises.

There’s a lot more I could say about all of these, but that’s a start.

I got this from my graduate student association:

In the FY12 Budget released by the White House last week, two recommendations were made that directly affect graduate, medical, and professional students:

1.) Ending the in-school interest subsidy on student loans for graduate, medical, and professional students, and
2.) Consolidating the Javits Fellowship Program with Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) thus eliminating the only federally-funded fellowship program that specifically supports fields within the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

If you want to use my letter, you’re welcome to. You can use Salsa’s Tool to find out who your representatives are.

Dear [Senator/Representative],

I am a PhD student at Columbia, and I recently learned that the 2012 federal budget includes two significant changes that will severely affect the ability of many graduate students to pursue their education: First, the in-school interest subsidy on student loans is ending. This is a disaster for students like myself who come from middle-class families and rely on the United States student loan system. Second, the budget eliminates the only federally-funded fellowship program that specifically supports fields within the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The contributions that will be lost without this program are inestimable.

Students are huge benefit to the future of United States economy and potential. Supporting graduate education is about supporting the future, and I urge you to fight for it.

Thank you.

I wish I could show you all our beautiful apartment! I know it’s awfully self-congratulatory, but Flame has such a great sense of interior decoration/design. Between the walls Flame painted our first week, the fabulous art and furniture she found in the trash, the fresh flowers, the endless books, and our new rugs and painted stoneware from Turkey, it would take hundreds of photos to capture the surprises here.

Short of that, here are a couple new additions, made by Flame and myself:

Flame’s painted outlet covers

Escher lizard switches

Love collage (from travel materials)

Map wall (5″ x 6″), in progress

The semester started quickly! Between a presentation of research interests to my program, and nine hours of extra classes (some of it “make up” for a TBD class the prof will skip), I’m glad it’s the end of the beginning.

Speaking of ends, I’ve been thinking recently about the purpose of life, and I think I have one answer. Life is many things to many people, and far be it from me to suggest that my own aspirations and avenues are a better answer than another’s preference. But there are a few things we all share: taxes, and death.

The Baha’i see death as a kind of next-birth. Just as a fetus develops eyes and arms which are useless in its mother’s womb, the Baha’i believe that we are developing capacities in this world for the next world. If someone were to try to explain to you in the womb that you would soon be in a new world with “things” to be “seen”, you would have no basis for understanding them. Similarly, for the Baha’i, the next world is not a heaven of perfection and paradise. We probably can’t know what it is, but it has a similar relation to this world as this world has to the world inside the womb.

Death, then, is a kind of breaking forth into the next world– the apparent shedding of this body is a projection of the shedding of the world itself. The purpose of life is to prepare ourselves for that transition.

Don’t take that suicidal-like. On his deathbed, Socrates said that the philosopher is ever expectant for death, but to take one’s own life is to flout the gods. A premature death would be like a baby engaging in self-abortion. The preparation for death takes time, work, experiences, and challenges (by Vedic philosophy, 75 years or so).

Who we fully are, and what we are capable of, we cannot know in this world. All we can hope to do is develop our selves the way a baby develops in the womb– by occupying a good environment, exercising all our capacities, and letting nature take its course.

It is time for our culture to embrace death, as a natural stage of life. We need to embrace it not only as a mechanism of hope for the future of our planet, but as both a personal driving force that can shape and inspire us.

In parts of the world where death is a constant possibility, life is said to take on a new vigor and crispness. If every street-crossing could be your last, you savor the times between more. In the West, our lives are characterized by boredom and itching meaninglessness. Media and commodities are designed to fill this hole in our lives, but they only feed our hunger.

I believe the problem comes from a loss of self. Death is one of the most powerful transformations of self– it is exactly that transition that we cannot do as a public. Death is a way of understanding ourselves, and situating our identity.

This re-enshrining of death causes certain upendings in our emotional lives. The classical personality type associated with death is the melancholic. Nowdays, the melancholic is often misunderstood: she differs from the modern depressed by virtue of an persistent unrest and a heightening drive for meaning– many poets and philosophers are melancholic. I believe that Freud is to blame for our loss of melancholy, by interpreting it as a less-healthy perversion of grieving (I have another rant on this). But melancholy plays a different role from grieving, and one which is at the heart of many cultures (see saudade in Brazil and hüzün in Turkey).

Melancholy arises from a recognition of life as characterized by death. It is a bittersweet emotion; a knowledge that what is is always coming to an end, and yet by holding it in our hearts, we turn that loss into a vitality. Melancholy is as close to a celebration of death as a people can get, and it is never far from the understanding that every end is a new beginning.

A friend just sent me this message:

Between today and tomorrow, the New FB Privacy setting called “Instant
Personalization” goes into effect.
The new setting shares your data with non-FB sites & it is
automatically set to “Enabled”.

To remedy :::Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant
Personalization>edit settings & uncheck “Enable”.
BTW If your friends don’t do this, they will be sharing info about you
as well. Please copy and re-post.

I’m back in the country! Our last few days in Greece were sublime, with so many cute coffeeshops, and a culture that appears to spend all its waking hours in them, just nursing drinks and free cookies and talking. It’s also Flame’s birthday today, and the day before my classes start, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

Last night we had a birthday dinner with friends, and the topic of how Facebook has changed people’s lives and culture at large came up. Within our group, I noticed a big gender divide: not only did the men take a more relaxed approach to social networking, but they were much less concerned about the expectations, stalking, and panoptical potential of the site. I imagine that if you told a stereotypical man that someone might be watching his wall all the time, he would feel some flattery and some pity, but very little self-concern.

I was jumped on for suggesting that it was a gender distinction. The women, who have all studied gender (I have not), pointed out that it was probably more of an age distinction. While no doubt also a factor, I wanted to explore the idea further. I think I’m pretty aware of the complexities of gender identity, but I don’t know who to incorporate those complexities into this, so take it as rough generalizations.

Is it taboo to say that American society has a lot of gender segregation, at least for children? Compared to other cultures, we’re somewhere in the middle, between cultures which physically separate boys and girls, and those that draw little distinction between them until puberty. But I’m mainly concerned with how we are compared to how we might be, and what direction we’re moving in.

It seems to me that American society has very strong social barriers between genders. Flame loves to point out people who are biologically different from their gender identification, but for the most part it’s pretty easy to read someone’s gender: men and women and boys and girls wear different clothes and talk differently. Several professions are mostly gender segregated, including some new ones (e.g., CS and bioengineering). As children, boys and girls tend to live in very different social worlds, reading different magazines, participating in different activities, and with friend circles of typically of just one gender. If someone approaches you on an dark, empty street, you might worry differently if they’re black or white or sober or drunk, but if they’re female, you probably won’t worry at all.

So I wonder how new technologies affect that equilibrium. For example, I imagine that modern television has been a force for greater segregation among children, with advertisers and producers projecting and targeting very strong gender distinctions. How about Facebook? As a single forum with both genders, it might be a desegregating force, but I wonder to what extent the different emotions it engenders are the result of existing gender segregation and to what extend it exaccerbates them.

Egypt has landed on our vacation like a ton of jello. From Cairo to Aswan (our only two data points), Egyptians appear to be excessively noisy drivers and pushy shopkeepers, friendly but disrespectful, and helpful but they want their cut. Everything seems like a rip-off or a scam: “set” prices for tourists are at least doubled, and every ten feet some one will shout “Welcome! You want a [hotel, taxi, falucca, camel, donkey, guide, scarf, spices, or cigarette]?” Touts stand by the doors of tourists sites, demand to see your ticket, then guide you (all the while insisting that they are from the government, their services are free, and they just want you to be happy) into a waiting sale pitch. Flame is constantly getting cat-hisses, “I love you!”‘s, honks, and other attention that ranges from irritating to frightening. The most chilling part for me is seeing women in full black hajabs looking like specters of death. The streets are a nightmare, with cars that accelerate at people crossing, and frequently too many lanes of traffic to cross without weaving between headlight-less cars. Cars honk for every reason and no reason, creating a constant cacophony reverberating for miles even in the middle of the night.

All that said, we’ve managed to do quite a bit in four days, and I think avoided the worst of it. Egypt has been exciting and intense for me as a culture shock– a place I could easily imagine living, for all its problems, just to experience a life of such a different grit.

Our first impression of Cairo was of how dusty it is– at times you can’t see more than a couple of blocks through the haze. Our hostel in Cairo was super-helpful, calling dozens of other hotels to find us a room when we arrived too late for the one we reserved. That night we walked through a solid mile of clothing stands to the European expat island of Zamalek for some fine Italian dining at half the European price.

The second day was a huge string of successes. We uncovered the right bus and braved the camel-toting touts to see the pyramids. Then we used a microbus, a metro, and many people’s broken English to find a recommended lunch restaurant. Then we struggled through solid humanity and nameless alleyways to find our way into and back out of the Khan Al-Khanili Bazarre. Then we secured two sleeper car tickets to Aswan, the details of which (e.g. that we would need to get them today), we only heard over breakfast this morning. And we finished the day with tea and sheesha at one spot and takeaway Mediterranean food from another. And finally we stumbled to the safety of our hostel in one piece, with the possible exception of our feet and calves.

Day three was for the tourist-crawling Egyptian museum, with so much exquisite ancient art that every step I wished we were able to use our camera. After another visit to the island for French-Italian delights, we wandered around Cairo’s old city, a mix of cement-formed entrances to touristic markets, and a grid of run-down buildings, dirt roads, playing children, and hookah-smoking old men. The train to Aswan was a nerve-racking half-hour late (we watched each train pull out wondering if we should be on it), but an unexpected comfort as our hotel-room-on-wheels started and stopped without concerning us at all until the butler-like Joseph told us to pack our things out the next morning.

The area around Aswan is a fantastic discontinuity between barren desert and fertile farmland. The Nile is deep blue, peppered with small ferries and faluccas, and bordered with river-smoothed boulders and palm forests. The pedestrian market street down the middle of town is lively and colorful, but the attitudes of shopkeepers may have poisoned our experience there. We took the public ferry to Elephantine Island (we were the only ones who seemed to pay), and wandered blindly between mud-brick and herds of goats to Abu, a sprawling 3rd millennium BC city, lovingly excavated and reconstructed. Finally, a long walk along the hills south of town brought us within sight of the famed First Cataract at a quiet Nubian restaurant that all the tour buses had just left.