Sometimes I think I should have stuck to being a software developer– it would have meant less time at the computer. I’m looking forward to summer being over, when things should get a little less hectic.

I recently put together a presentation of my current researchy projects for my new advisor, Upmanu Lall. I discovered that no one at Columbia does what I want to do (most recently: Fisheries and Complexity), but Upmanu has an encyclopedic knowledge of new techniques and is super supportive to let me pursue my own projects. Here’s the presentation, for anyone interested:

The biggest piece this leaves out is a cool iPad app startup that I’m working half-time for to support Flame’s impending master’s program (Climate and Society at the Earth Institute!) and our summer travels (see below).

My uncle Bill from New Mexico visited NYC for the first time last weekend, reminding me of all the reasons I love my father’s side of the family. I don’t often keep in touch with them– on the whole, an open, troubled, intelligent, down-to-earth clan– but that is something I need to remedy.

My non-research plans for the summer have coalesced into a strategic odyssey across half the globe. It’s strategic because I can get financial help for three of the four main stops, and the two others are enroute to them. It will be an odyssey since each main stop is only for a week. Here’s the plan:

• June 12 – June 20: Stockholm, where I’ve been invited to share ideas for my fisheries research.
• June 20 – June 28: Northern India, my first trip to India, for a not-to-be-missed wedding.
• June 28 – July 4: Paris, for a Science and Policy Summer School I’m helping organize.
• July 4 – July 5: A train from Paris to Geneva, a day there, then a cheap flight to Tel Aviv.
• July 5 – July 12: Israel, joining a trip of Flame’s family to visit relatives.
• July 12 – July 15: Kiev, a convenient stopover on the way back home.

Anyone want an apartment in NYC at Columbia-subsidized rates for those dates?

I just went to Ireland for spring break (I flew back on St. Paddy’s day)! It was the most relaxingly enjoyable trip I’ve had in years. If you want to read about it, see http://travelersnetwork.org/luckybreak. I had a pile of posts to write– about a zine of spirituality, psychology, and politics I want to start, and a rant about positive psychology– but this has been on my table longest:

People often mistake me as being from another country, and I always blush. Who wants to be from the great monster of imperialism, unhindered capitalism, waste, and environmental myopia? There are a lot of reasons to not be proud of the actions of my country– its government and the collective effects of its people– but I’ve realized that there are core traits of American culture that are wonderful and I hold deeply. Surely many come from privilege, but there they are. Not all American’s live by these values, but they strike me as quintessentially American, and I am proud to share them.

• Work Ethic. If I could work all the time, it wouldn’t be enough. I love working, accomplishing tasks, building something. Whatever gifts I have, they come from this greatest one.
• Puritanism. The body and mind work best when neither coddled nor poisoned. Give me water pure, beds simple, and a life without distraction.
• Forthrightness. Things should be said and done as directly and brutally honestly as the situation allows. And if I err on crass bluntness, it’s a beautiful crassness that has its own virtue.
• Questioning Authority. What good is authority but to offer an thesis to build an antithesis for? Authority seems like a straw-man to be undermined and humanized.
• Independence of identity and thought. I am my own person, and no matter where I go, I carry my independence with me and want for little else. This allows me to be creative and think new thoughts without fear.
• Love of Liberty, or self-determinism. If independence is a psychological state, liberty is its corresponding locus of action. I thrive on the potential to make any decision for my own affairs.
• Entrepreneurship. Wherever the questioning of authority bears fruit, it’s time to make fruit salad. All good ideas deserve to be embodied in the world, through work and liberty.
• Mutt-ism. I am not a pure-bred anything, and this hybrid vigor gives me strength and contributes to my identity. It is exactly my middle-class, cross-roads origins that give me potential.
• Love of Diversity. The surest source of both beauty and truth is the creativity that comes from mixing together differences. Let all the peoples of the world jumble together and humanity will flourish.
• Save the World Complex: This is probably more a Western thing than American, but I do think there’s a potential to save the world, and that we are well-situated to “do” it. Doing it might not mean leading it, but it surely includes helping with ideas, building, and communication.

These are only a small share of the values I hold, and without doubt community, sharing, love, travel, and play all are very important to me. But for some reason, they don’t seem as American, and who would want to just be an American?

I’m reading “The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World” (Owen Flanagan) for my program’s bookclub. The book rolls around what strikes me as a fruitful intersection of pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy (“neurophilosophy” and “eudaimonics”), and I don’t want to critique the value of this project. But the book presents itself as a rigorous philosophical inquiry, and this I struggled with. The author is a naturalist (“The world is material; we are social animals; meaning is to be found in human ‘spaces'”), which would be fine if he didn’t make such a shoddy attempt to argue against other philosophies.

I’m a agnostic mysticist– I believe that the material world is a consequence of a non-material existence from which consciousness derives. But I’m interested in other philosophies on their own terms, and open to discovering that the mystic world is an illusion. But neither mysticism nor naturalism seem capable of proving the other wrong, so intelligent people become comfortable with the unresolvability.

From his naturalist stance, Owen points out that people’s first aim is to survive, and have basic needs met. With this, they feel a drive toward the good, true, and beautiful. Here, “meaningful human lives… involve being moral, having true friends, and having opportunities to express our talents, to find meaningful work, to create and live among beautiful things, and to live cooperatively in social environments where we trust each other”. But in the rich world, most of us (or at least most of us educated, white males), we have all those things. We are happy. So then, do we strive for contentment or nirvana?

I claim that at this point, people turn to, and develop, a philosophy. This helps them decide how to employ happiness and navigate meaning, and a philosophy is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, many of them then imagine that “a philosophy” is “the philosophy”– that is, the right one– and strive refine their philosophy to try to make it that right one, and then argue for it and against others. This path is useful to a point, and there is great progress that can be made refining one’s philosophy. But if there is a path toward “true philosophy”, I don’t think this is it. As much as the modern approach to philosophy involves refining “a philosophy”, it is psychologically fruitful. When it attempts to exclude other philosophies, it is a source of unhappiness and bigotry.

If these practices constitute philosophy, and we would rightly all call ourselves philosophers, then we need a new word for the work of Plato and other ancient philosophers. I call this line of inquiry “philosophology”. Plato asked, “What does it mean to be a philosopher?” That is, what ties all of these philosophies together and what distinguishes them? How do we shape a philosophy, and how are we shaped by it? What are they reaching toward, and how is it attempted to be grasped?

These are not quite psychological questions, though they aren’t too far from them. They are questions about the nature of meaning and existence, the relationship between human and universe, and the potential for right action– but instead of philosophies, which are about answering these questions, philosophology asks questions about those answers and the questions that resulted in them. It recognizes that all of these questions have many and ambiguous answers, and takes that as a natural state worth studying. I believe that if there is a path to truer philosophy, it must be from this basis.

No day is typical. The last two Fridays represented the proto-climaxes of weeks of curating after months of research, with a Prezi on Complexity and a Update on Melt-Flooding. This Friday was an opportunity to skype to Paris to discuss paper topics with our professor of Global Governance. I said “institutional change”, and she said, “Cross-scale dynamics”.

Then to a sustainability career fair. The African Wildlife Foundation and the EPA’s oversight branch recognized the potential for software skillz plus sustainable development knowledge. Or they just had nicer folk at their tables.

After Information Theory (English text has 1.34 bits of information per letter; learning how to compress data from arbitrary discrete distributions to “fair bits”; wondering if it could be used to make continuous distributions Gaussian), a wonderful dinner with Prodigal. We went to the oldest tavern in NYC, from 1793, with the largest collection of whiskies. And apparently I really do like Rye liquor– the 21 y.o. Vintage Rye was delicious. For mixed drinks, give me something girly and sweet, with a cherry if possible, but in liquor I guess I run manlier.

I’m TAing a class called “Progressive Alternatives”, an exploration of the situation of the left, and an attempt to definite its future goals. If anyone would like to be involved in the wiki/discussion board, get in touch.

One student asked, “What does it mean to be Progressive?”, positing that it has something to do with progress. I’m half-crossposting my response.

I think one answer is more than we can hope for, but I don’t think that progressivism has much to do with progress. Progressivism is a catchy title, and sounds like an appropriate opposite to conservativism, but they aren’t opposites anyway. Several socially conservative values are liberal, and the right’s approach to economics seems to have almost nothing to do with conserving anything. Both sides want political change, and both the left and right would recognize things they like and dislike about different kinds of progress.

There seem to be two approaches to this problem. One holds that the left has a vision of a better society, based on personal empowerment. That society would be flexible and changing, but it wouldn’t necessarily be characterized by aggregate progress. Sachs seems to take the other approach: the left has underlying values– of justice and stewardship mostly, I think.

There are plenty of pitfalls here: associating progressivism too closely with current politics, trying to delineate the camps too starkly, or building out different axes that plot the space. Does anyone have a statement that they think pegs either left’s ends or its values?

My progressivism is closely tied to ecocentrism, and the recognition we have responsibilities to the whole continuum of life, including other species, other places, and other times.

One of the books originally planned for the course on this topic was “Left & Right” by Norberto Bobbio. I haven’t read it, but I’m curious if anyone has and can report the answer.

Flame and I went to see A Dangerous Method, the Freud and Jung movie yesterday. It’s quite good, but don’t go expecting to learn more about Freud, Jung, or their relationship.

The movie turns on Jung’s relationship with Sabina Spielrein. We see her therapy, her tangled relationship with Jung, bits from their BDSM affairs. Everything except for the development of her ideas on psychotherapy.

After all the movie time spent developing that, there’s precious left to explore Jung and Freud’s relationship, much less their ideas. What emerges is a kind of false friendship, where Jung first uses Freud as a reluctant sounding-board and maintains the relationship of hollow lip service.

The strongest character in the movie is Otto Gross, on screen about 20 minutes. He philosophizes, seduces, psychoanalyzes, fucks, and leaves. In his wake, we are told he had a lasting impact on Jung, but we have to take their word for it.

For all that, the movie is well-constructed, intelligent, and engaging. Go see it, but look elsewhere for the psychology.

An interesting question came up in class last semester, with a few different forms. Answer any you choose.

• As a researcher, how would you spend $10,000 in the pursuit of your questions?
• In the interest of sustainable development, how would you spend $10 million?
• In the interest of sustainable development, how would you spend $10 billion?

How many of the richest people in the US have a combined wealth equal to that of the 120 million people in the bottom 40% of the US? Two.

December was lost down the gullet of school. I did manage to go to the enormous AGU conference (“What do 16000 earth scientists look like? This is what 16000 earth science posters look like!”) with a Poster on the Himalayas, and write two papers on Optimal Slash-and-Burn Farming. And I started work on a plan to build a spaceship (plan, model) and built a spinner for risk experiments. But I am so exhausted from the whole thing. I wasn’t done with grading until New Years Eve, so I’ve just started recovering.

I want to write a rant on how school makes people stupid, because there seems to be no way to not come out of it a mess.

While I’ve been away, the semester has been rushing over me like a crashing wave. I can’t claim to be keeping up, but I haven’t fallen behind yet. I have lots of fun projects to show: this one is from NYC’s huge Halloween parade. Flame was the 1%, and I was the 99%. My props were protest signs that she made, and she was covered in these, my OWS bills:

Depending on how you count them, there are 11 changes on the front and 3 on the back (one of which is the gaping hole, which when we printed them, we filled with percentages from 2 – 99). You can print your own, six to a sheet with these two documents.

Modifying these takes a lot of time, and I welcome you to help make it better. Download the Gimp files for the front and the back and let me know!