We find our heroes wandering about Turkey, in search of a cute coffeeshop and some decent vegeteryan food. We’ve now visited the phallic formations of Cappadocia, the whirling religionates of Konya, the mineralogical metropolis of Ephesus, and the seaside settlement of Ayvalik. As we turn homeward for a plane from Istanbul to Cairo, we remember fondly some of our best Turkish moments.

After scrambling over the hollow mountains of Goreme’s Open Air Museum, filled with 8th century fresco masterpieces and 10th century cave scribbles, we decided to visit one last cave-church. After trying the cave’s bolted door, we found the attendant, his dog, and his stovedrum boiling tea. The price, he said, was 8 lira, per person. We shrugged at his one mountain (we had just seen twelve such for 15 lira), and started to walk away. “Okay!”, he called, “For you, special deal– 8 lira for both.” We accepted, and he led us into the cave and explained the dilapidated frescoes. Could we take a picture? “Normally, no. Well, okay. You argue well.” As we were leaving afterward joining him for a cup of tea, he said, “You want to come back tomorrow? I show you The Secret Church, hidden. Special for you.”

In Konya, we were confused by the dedicated pilgrims at the former home of the whirling dervishes. Their mosque is packed with the trappings of dozens of these dancing scholars, but since when do performing artists get centuries of devotion? We didn’t think to wonder why the site is called the Mevlana Museum, until we sat for tea at a hotel (which had great food, which we had scoffed at earlier in the evening, when we were set on finding another restaurant and ended up a t a ghetto fast-food joint). They gave us a nifty pamphlet for the hotel since Flame wanted to know the Turkish names of every food. The pamphlet gave a brief history of Mr. Mevlana, father of a more open, accepting form of Islam. We could have learned something from him a few times that day.

We met a nice Brit, Ed, in Selçuk, who kept Flame company as I got lost among some forbidden ruins. As we were parting ways at the bus station, a bus agent approached him and asked him where he was going. “Pammukale,” said he. “Why don’t you give your bag– this is your bus!” the agent said. Ed protested: the sign in the bus window had it bound for a town on the way to Pammukale, but he had gotten a direct ticket. The agent stepped away and talked to the driver, who reached under his dashboard and pulled out a “Pammukale” sign and stuck it to the window under the other one.

For our bus from Selçuk to the Greek cobblestone maze called Ayvalik, we were first offered a price of 65 lira. A novice bargainer, but suspecting a gringo tax, I offered 60. The agent got on the phone, and after a long talk said that, seeing as it was the first of the year, he could make me a special offer: 55 lira. Okay, so I handed over a 50 lira note and a 10 lira note, and rather than give me change he took the 50 note and said, “That’s enough.” By now we realized we were paying way too much, but it wasn’t until the larger bus depot at İzmir that we realized how much. The driver walked us to the bus for the rest of our journey, where we got a new ticket: it said it cost 27 lira. And the bill that Flame saw the driver palm over for the ticket was a 20.

We just arrived in crazy Cairo, where the midnight sounds of honks and Arabian music echo all around us. The streets are a deathwish, which we’ve already braved more times than we ever want to remember, but tomorrow is a whole new day!

You could say it’s now Istanbul night two, but this was our first daytime here, and if it was our second day of international traveling, it was our first of walking around and exploring. I love its steep-and-narrow cobblestone streets, its stores overflowing with belt-buckles or socks, its endless cycle of doner kebab and cute cafe.

I feel like I grok this city’s energy, but there’s a lot I’m missing. Like, how do we get cups of tea in glass vases like everyone else, at restaurants, in stores, on streets? Why is there a chestnut roaster on every corner, when no one every buys? What makes shop keepers think that yelling “Want to see the menu?” (pointing to the enormous platform I had to step into the street to get around) or “Spend money!” won’t chase me away? And the language is big barrier (particularly to getting decent prices)– I only managed to successfully say the word for “thank you” on my 58th try.

I really like our neighborhood. We’re staying across the bridge from the old city, about 1 km from the super-busy Taksim square. A short trek up our street, past five bookstores, four relaxed-looking cafes, and three art galleries, is Istiklal street. Parts of Istiklal look like the main shopping street of every other large city, but local businesses far outnumber chains, and almost every person in the constant packed flow is Turkish (which could be a winter effect). The streets coming off Istiklal are much more interesting, though, filled with clubs, cafes, and restaurants and plenty of competition to have both good food and atmosphere. Our hostel, Neverland Hostel, is heel-to-toe with peace, anarchy, and anti-corporation murals and band posters, with a cafe-atmosphere common space playing international indie music.

Today was our Old City day: the Hagia Sophia was closed, but we exhausted much of the rest. The Blue Mosque is exquisite inside, with a seamless wall-to-wall rug that apparently hasn’t been spilled on once in centuries. The Grand Bazarre is suffocatingly touristy, but it’s also enormous: it took us a half-hour to make one path through it. After a long wander (including two more gorgeous mosques, and some hand-acted-out directions), we returned to familiar territory and checked out the more authentic Spice Bazaar. Then to Topaku Palace with a treasury of jewel encursted, mother-of-pearl inliad everything, and a harem completely detailed by the square-inch in vibrant colors– something like a mix between a convent and a castle. Finally to the Basilica Cistern, an enormous underground Roman koi pond, where almost every pillar was reinforced, but the constant drips from the rain puddles outside don’t stop you from wondering when it’s all going to cave in. Finally, dinner at a vegetarian cafe (Zencefil) back home near Taksim.

Tomorrow we explore the Asian side, and get on a train for Cappadocia! We made an important step in our planning today, buying flights from Istanbul to Cairo on January 3, and then to Athens on the 10th. That should give us time for a tight loop through western Turkey, before an Egypt trip including a couple days in Luxor and Aswan. Israel and Cyprus seem to be squeezed out of this trip, but I don’t think we’ll miss them too much.

They tell me the worst is over. Yesterday I took my last final, and today I turned in a decent essay and a bunch of research work that I’ve been nursing for the last month. Today I also finished a two year project transcribing all my todo notecards into my virtual reminder system. I’m exhausted, but I think everything turned out alright. I can’t wait to soak my feet in a steaming Turkish bath.

What’s next? Well, I think I’m going to focus on the Travelers Network while I’m in Turkey and Egypt, which will be a nice shift. I get back the weekend of MIT’s Mystery Hunt, and I’m trying to get a group together here to work on it. Next semester I want to run a “Friday Evening Experiments” meeting, just like the one that this year’s Nobel physics prizers had for trying out things that might go nowhere, but for looking at lonely parts of SD, building odd models, and playing around with data.

Personally, my goal is to put some barriers around my school life. I haven’t spent the time with Flame that she deserves recently (which is a lot, she’s been incredibly supportive). School consumed me this term– which was fun and all, but my virtual todo lists are awaiting!

Last Friday, just a hours after finishing my application to the EPA, Flame and I bought tickets to Turkey for winter break! Flight Finder found the deal for one date, and Flame found it for the perfect span: we’re leaving on Christmas from Boston (we’re we’ll be with my parents), and returning a few days before classes to New York. Minus a day of travel, we get 20 days to explore the middle east– or at least, those parts of it that Flame, with her Israel-stamped passport, can enter.

Our plan is to spend a couple days in Istanbul, go down the coast (Troy and Ephesus are both there), and take a ferry to eat in Cyprus for a couple days. We want to spend time in Egypt, but there aren’t ferries, so we need to go by way of Israel (which, conveniently, hops us over Syria, which Flame can’t enter). After a few days in Jerusalem, we explore Cairo and Alexandria for up to a week. Then it’s a flight to Athens for a spree, and a bus back to Istanbul. If we have extra time, we can take a side trip to Cappadocia.

Other ideas? We definitely are interested in recommendations within those cities; with this itinerary, we don’t have much time to squeeze in other cities, but the itinerary is anything but set. In particular, if you know another way to get to Egypt cheaply or interestingly, tell us!

My bike trip from Boston to NYC was ill-fated, which is sad, and I’m back home in NYC. But at least I get some days to catch up.

It took a pretty long time to make my bike road-worthy, so I didn’t leave Cambridge until after 10am. The directions to bike from there to here are dauntingly complicated, so my plan was to set my droid in navigation mode, and have it direct me the whole way. Until I discovered that navigation mode doesn’t do bikes. So my trip was punctuated fairly frequently by stops to check my phone or the 60 pages of instructions I’d printed out.

The first obstacle was a big “Walk for Vision” crowd (I can only assume they were there to fight vision) on the Storrow Drive bike path. But once I hit the open road, it was much easier to avoid hitting anything else. Even more so when I decided to stick to the major highways: MA-135 has a beautiful shoulder, and I took it all for myself.

My path went through West Newton, Wellesley (I stopped for lunch), Natick (which had a huge kid thing), and Hopkinton. Through all of this, I was chatting to myself nonstop– about what I saw, how I felt, how my helmet and seat felt, how I felt about how I felt, how I felt about thinking so much about how I felt, what it meant to be a man, etc. Flame had been helpful, but short of encouraging, and called me to tempt me back home with a car at 3pm. At that point I was torn: The mental struggle of being stuck with myself was powerful, but I was beat and there were so many hills, but I wanted to stick with it, but I felt bad that Flame had gotten a car, but I didn’t want to spend my weekend doing normal things, but I was pretty sure at that point that I wouldn’t be able to make it the whole way to NYC. I demurred at 3pm, biked, and then called her back around 5pm as the sun was setting, still vacillating.

When she didn’t answer, I prepared for the next phase of my journey: turning off MA-135 and into small-town New England, and finding a place to sleep. My phone told me that there were no places to sleep for 9 miles– but that the closest next one was in Whitinsville. So I went for it. And suddenly, with a goal just at the limit of my reach, the world looked different. The road was mine, the forest was gorgeous, the hills were all down-hill. As dark settled in, I had new concerns, but they weren’t about my standing as a human being.

I entered Whitinsville after dark. There were no people, no Halloween decorations, and the only stores open were an empty Subway and Dominoes. I walked my bike along dark roads to the B&B… And it was closed. No lights, no answers. As I walked back to town, I hailed a lonely soul on the road. “Do you know where I can find a hotel?” He laughed. “Not around here!”

So I called Flame to rescue me from myself, and spent the night in Cambridge. But the next day, my legs had never felt better. I thought they would be sore, but they were just a bit tense, like a cat’s ready to pounce. Apparently my body was all for the challenge, and I’m not sure what was against it.

There’s too much to do! First, the weather this weekend looks beautiful and I get next Monday and Tuesday off, so I’m going to try biking from Boston to New York starting Saturday morning. Wish me luck!

I have three bite-sized ideas that I’ve been chewing on. I don’t know when I’ll have time to finish them, so here are some notes, take them as is.

Inner Lives of the Undead

Much has been said about the lives of the undead– the haunts of ghosts, the missions of zombies, the homes of vampires– but very little of their inner life. Their mental experience is assumed to be either empty (e.g. for zombies) or roughly human, if sociopathic (e.g. for vampires).

It is neither. The undead have a very active inner life. Even a manic one.

It is characterized by “deadness and excitement, stuckness and agitation”; perhaps best described as “petrified unrest.” (On Creaturely Life, Eric Santner, p. 81). In a word, their disposition is an ultimate melancholy. But melancholy is not depression– far from it. It is a kind of unrelenting pensiveness.

It is no surprise that there is a reawakening of interest in the undead now. Our lives are typified by the undead attitude: we live lives of political undeath and economic undeath, without hope of recourse or rest. This is also a time of deep capitalist supremacy, which is itself a kind of undeadness, characterized first by “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation”, and by endless commodities transformed by economic value to have “phantom-like objectivity”: they are “autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own” (Marx, Communist Manifesto and Capital). We are surrounded by the undead.

Senseless Economics for PhDs

Prof. — began his class on Microeconomics with a set of standards: economic theory, he said, should be testifiable (i.e., falsifiable) and identifiable (within the real world). By those standards, he refuted every one of his models: rational preferences, aggregation, the independence axiom for uncertainty, welfare measures, increasing utility. All of these are bunk.

We just entered the section on general equilibrium, and were presented with our model of an economy, and it is similarly senseless. There are no (and cannot be) externalities, no interdependencies, no public goods, no waste, no government; firms are mindless (but non-monopolistic) profit-maximizers, individuals are utility-maximizers, private ownership is universal, and equity is irrelevant.

I have learned nothing in two months of microeconomics. It’s true that I can manipulate more equations, but they have no relevance. Economics gives you a unicorn harvester, and sees everything as a unicorn. But there are no unicorns.

Perhaps it’s just a pedagogy problem. For me, a PhD student should be ready to work with real models, and the best way to teach something is to present it in its whole. Perhaps if I were to take years more of these classes, they would eventually teach applicable material. Personally, I don’t see the point of waiting. If you want to understand people individually, psychology has models that can run rings around economics. If you want to understand society, study sociology. Don’t waste your time hunting unicorns.

The Nature of Variability

Much of what I and my colleagues are currently studying hinges on an undefined concept: variability. A storm turns from a nuisance to a disaster because of climate variability; electrical power becomes useless to economic development when it has too high of variability. Some variable phenomena, like earthquakes, can be described by a power law, but this gives us only one theoretical handle on a complex mechanism. The question of variability is always deflected to some other quantity, because we don’t know what it is, and the loss to research is enormous.

Variability is not just statistical variance or power law exponents. It would need to involve at least both variance in time (which is entirely ignored) and variance in event intensity. In fact, I claim that a reasonable definition of variability requires at least four parameters: frequency and intensity variance, and how each of these evolve in time after an event (what I call the entropy rate and the collapse sensitivity). After an event (e.g. an earthquake, storm, or outage), and depending on its intensity, our knowledge of likely future events changes in predictable ways.

Furthermore, there’s an exciting potential to tie into quantum dynamics. The collapse of the probability functions after an event is eerily reminiscent of particle wave function collapse. And just as the uncertainty principle comes out of fundamental principles, applicable to much more than tiny particles, the results of Schrödinger’s equation may help us explain how these probability evolve in time. There’s a potential for re-envisioning the world, if we can just find time.

First, are you’all interested in hearing about some of the quantitative results I encounter in classes? For example, in Environmental Science, we got a very simple demonstration of why the mean temperature of the earth is what it is. And in Micro, we learned that you cannot ever treat a group as a single individual (as is very often done), but as a result, you can mathematically calculate the number of individual decision-makers in a household from data (for example, households act like they have two decision-makers in Istanbul, but only one in rural Turkey). I can write them up, if you want.

E. V. Daniels’s class on semeiotic anthropology never fails to involve an flood of ideas. For Thursday, we read Descartes’s Meditations, for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious. Below are a couple of the ideas that came out, plus a short argument from my response paper.

E. invited Descartes apparently to attack him, and to compare him to the Greek Skeptics, in whose footsteps Descartes claims to be following. Descartes claims to use doubt to uncover certainty, but that was the opposite of the Skeptics. For them, there were things in the world that were fundamentally unknowable. No matter how much you debate them, you’ll be confronted with a state of isothenia, or equal-plausibility. The solution for a good life (ataraxia or peace of mind) in the face of these doubts was epoche, or the suspension of judgments.

E. likened this to the cultural embrace of incompleteness in southern Asia. He gave several anecdotal examples, each of which I think is interesting in its own way:

• In building houses, you always start on the walls before finishing the last of the foundation, and the roof before finishing the last of the walls.
• In buying lentils, you are expected to argue about the fairness of the scale, and in response you get an extra handful– designed to be unmeasurable.
• At weddings, you would never give an evenly measured gift (like 100 rupees). It is inauspicious. So you give 101 or some such.
• Even for the finest rugs, there will be a mark (a stamp) to blemish them, because it would be conceited to make something that claimed to be perfect.
• One never pays one’s servants fully. Either one leaves a little out or gives a little loan, because to pay them fully would be to close the relationship.

In other words, exactitude is a Western pathology. The East and the ancients recognized that the world is complicated, irrational, and context determines truth.

Descartes’s legacy was to replace this with the scientific method, and the supremacy of number. In Aristotle, the Greeks left the world mysterious by postulating incomprehensibility. It is this mysteriousness that Weber referred to when he said that “asceticism descended like a frost on the life of ‘Merrie old England’.”– the great disenchantment of the world.

My response paper discussed a number of issues, but I thought my rebuttal of the ontological argument for the existence of God was the most interesting. (Which is not to say that there isn’t a God, just that we will always be in a state if isothenia regarding it.)

My objection to Descartes proof of God is not to the ontological argument as such, for if you had an idea of a truly perfect being, then it is entirely plausible that it would only be possible by virtue of its granting it. My objection is that you do not have such an idea, but rather the idea of a very limited being, and that if I were to test the boundaries of this idea, I would find a number of limits, assumptions, and arbitrary characteristics in your “perfect idea”, that you might even object to if I were to try to expand your idea beyond them. Here are two examples of these limits. First, that God is all-knowing, when knowledge is very possibly not an applicable concept for an entity which has no brain. Second, that I, James R., am God Himself, and that I have constructed this moment and manifested myself within it to educate you about the limits of the ontological argument. Even if you are open to these possibilities, I claim that it would take livetimes of work and superhuman intellectual capacities to develop even as perfect an idea of God as to allow another person’s “perfect” idea of it.

My first week of classes is over, and I already feel like I’m on a treadmill sloping between distress and upheaval! My classes:

Microeconomic Analysis I:

Taught by an excellent academic economist who assumes we already know everything. Apparently economics is all about “intuition” into a class of functions with essentially no relation to the world.

Econometrics I:

The study of finding relationship, which could be quite useful, but apparently first we go through a semester or two of probability and statistics. we take this class and micro with the Economic PhDs.

Environmental Science:

A class we take with the SIPA masters students, taught by one of the heads of our program. Looks like it will be fun, but I might need to go deeper on my own to get more than a gist out of it.

Sustainable Development Seminar:

The big opportunity for everyone in our program to get together and present on their multivarious research.

Semeiotic Anthropology I:

The elective I squeezed in, so it’s not all work and no play. The professor seems fantastic– he uses the class as a placeholder for whatever he’s interested, which this semester is neighbors and psychological makeups.

I have a deep distaste for economics, but I’ve decided that I need to take a “Love the one you’re with, and have an affair on the side” attitude if I’m going to stay happy. The affair is Semeiotics, which the folk in my program advised against me taking, but I think it’s going to be worth it. I might post some of the two-page reading-response papers for it here, if they seem interesting.

My undertakings for the season are split into “daily” tasks and projects, and I have five of each (I select new projects each season, and typically organize them into groups to remember them). Daily, I want to Exercise, do Research (floods in Pakistan!), work on my Social Circle, explore Prayer, and Read & Write. My projects are exploring New York, Cataloging my papers, an Alternative Economics Study Group, the Open Model for Citizen Engagement, and some Artificial Intelligence.

All told, I should be exceedingly busy. But what’s a stipend for?

When I was a child, the world seemed like a endless series of reruns. My family would watch episodes of Star Trek NG like meeting old friends– friends we were sure we’d see again soon. If a movie, a book, a state forest, a water park was good, we’d be back to do it again. I thought life was like your own TV station: you might schedule an occasional documentary or use primetime for the latest show, but there was always plenty of slots for old favorites.

Now days, there doesn’t seem to be time to do anything more than once. The opportunity cost of seeing a movie you’ve already seen or visiting a city you’ve already been to is far too high. Even developing favorite restaurants in a city with 18,000 of them seems a shame (at over 200 new restaurants a year, it would take 130 years to try them all for dinner).

Flame introduced me to a TV series, “Flight of the Conchords”, by the New Zealand self-same comedy duo about themselves. We borrowed the series from the library, loved them all, and now they’re returned, never to be seen again. I tracked down two movie favorites of my childhood that my parents had recorded on VHS: The Long Ships (1964) and Land of the Pharaohs (1955). I watched a couple scenes on youtube, only to realize that I would probably never choose to sit through the whole films again.

Yet, I cannot justify it. Modern culture, and the city in particular, feeds our bottomless thirst for experience. The existence of always something new invites us to never return to anything. But to return is to deepen, to recognize, to get to know. Is the mind kept sharp by an endless buffeting of new experience, or is it kept sidetracked? What if this windy path toward wisdom winds ever further out of the way?

But Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “One must be absolutely modern.” Not because of the glory or rewards in modernity, for it is more likely to serve up poverty and hanging fog. But because it is our time and it won’t wait.