Rhythm: Beats in the Brain

OED: "Regularity in the repetition in time or space of an action, process, feature, condition, event, etc.; periodic or cyclical change or movement."

Rhythm is pervasive. From music to heartbeat, so many facets of life can be described in terms of rhythm that it seems to be fundamental to human life itself. I've often found songs (especially pop songs) whose lyrics are either incomprehensible or even offensive but whose rhythm is so compelling that I can't help drumming my fingers on any available surface. In fact, I practically always am drumming away to the beat whenever I'm lounging alone or with friends, listening to some tunes. 

And I'm not even a drummer, or a musician by any real standard! So I can imagine how much more important rhythm must be for people whose lives actually revolve around it. I have one cousin who is so in tune with the beat that she got our entire table of 7 pounding away with vim and vigor...at the wedding reception for one of my other cousins. Yet it didn't matter! Another table started copying us, but they couldn't stand up to our mad drumming skills. Even my niece's stuffed animal got in on the action. :)

Of course, life itself has its own rhythms, of days, of sleep, of work. My tempo is a lot faster this semester with all the classes and TAing and research, but hopefully I'll manage to take some time breathing very slow. :)

25:25 Hindsight, 25:25 Foresight: Bifocals Unnecessary

They say hindsight is 20:20. This has always seemed a bit of an overestimation. Memory is notoriously fault-ridden itself, so if we can't even remember the past with perfect resolution, how do we expect to be able to think about it with perfect clarity? Just as we become less and less able to predict the farther futures, we are less and less able to remember the distant past. We fumble to recollect and reconstruct our thoughts, and of course others' motivations are an even greater mystery.

Still, for all that, we do pretty well. We may repeat the mistakes of new and ancient history, but we definitely learn from them too--otherwise we wouldn't exist! :) Any hominid that barely escapes a lion jumping out of a bush that isn't cautious about the next rustling bush he sees isn't going to last very long. We certainly believe that we are smart enough to elect different, hopefully better, leaders if the current ones aren't helping much (although certain elections provide distressing counterexamples). In view of all the learning we do, I'd estimate something closer to 25:25 hindsight. Good enough to survive, learn, and thus progress, but bad enough for history to repeat itself in the worst ways imaginable.

Now what about foresight? Presumably, if people are making such a big deal out of hindsight, it should be pretty bad in contrast. In fact, I'd score it at about the same, 25:25. The future is foggy, certainly, but bad viewing conditions don't imply that our eyesight is worse, do they? Even 20:20 individuals have a hard time seeing in pouring rain. Indeed, when the world seems to be falling around us, foresight often goes out the window as well.

But think about it. We can predict and control our futures to a remarkable degree! In the immediate future, we have enough precision to be able to answer specifically when people ask where we'll be and what we'll be doing in a few hours, and in generalities for days, weeks, even months. We have enough abstract foresight to plan for decades, going through school and college in the belief that it will improve our future. So all in all, we're probably about 25:25 in both foresight and hindsight, though admittedly the future is foggier than the mists of the past. But really, I think that's good enough. :)

Cheese!

Cheese is delicious! Cheese is nutritious (kinda?)! Cheese is smooth, cheese is crunchy, cheese is sweet, cheese is tangy, cheese is everything that you could want out of a foodstuff that you want to be able to eat with something else. At Whole Foods, there is a whole cheese section devoted entirely to this incredible dairy product. When you think "Cheese and Crackers," it sounds delicious, but when you think hard about it, at least 70% of the awesome there is coming from the cheese, if not higher. Cheese is as pervasive as alcohol around the dinner table, whether a cozy family dinner or a fancy Christmas party. Just saying "cheese" makes you smile a little, which is why photographers always ask you too.

Once, when I was walking around South Station, passing the time as I waited for a train to Providence, I saw that I thought captured the glory of cheese.

Indeed, cheese dips are used for everything from pretzels to nachos. And then there's fondue! OMG, fondue. I think the fact that chocolate and cheese are the two most common fondued foods is really a very telling sign of their importance. However, I shortly saw another sign about cheese within the next 5 minutes that really hit the mark:

The Light Fantastic: Lamps, Lanterns, and Chandeliers

I recently became slightly obsessed with chandeliers, during my trip to India. Not even just chandeliers, actually. Even those weird creative lantern things that you see hanging from certain buildings like this cool pine cone in the Rockefeller library at Brown.

And then just this semester, I realized that some lamps are actually really cool too. I helped one of my friends assemble this tree-like one about a week ago. I think the only thing that could have made it better would be if the stalks were lit up too. :)

 

The OED defines a chandelier as "an ornamental branched support or frame to hold a number of lights (originally candles), usually hung from the roof or ceiling." I supposed that what I'm looking for is something that satisfies either part of that condition, that is, either "an ornamental branched frame to hold lights" or "a frame to hold lights hung from the ceiling." Or both, of course. :)

Light, of course, is totally amazing itself, but that's not what I'm talking about not, though I certainly will another day. Rather, I'm talking about the problem of bringing light into the indoor environments we have created, and how the creativity some designers have brought to their solutions is really cool! Chandeliers are stereotypically beautiful, but even structures with no glass at all can not only effectively distribute light but also look fantastic doing it. I'm aware that other kinds of furniture can be equally amazing, but the combination of light and the sheer variety of artistic forms that chandeliers, lanterns and lamps come in is breathtaking. Here are a few more pictures I took in India--I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

Bookshelf: The Organizing Adventure!

As transient as snow in California, a well-sorted bookshelf is rare and does not last very long. Yet the process of removing all the books into a messy pile, planning and organizing, and then putting them back in some semblance of order is really fun and fulfilling, for some reason. This is true of any large-scale organization project, of course, but a bookshelf sits in balance between complete disarray and acceptable manageability. And there are so many serious decisions to be made!

Should I sort first by the owner of the book (i.e. me, my sister, my mom, or my dad), or should I just go by genre? Within fiction, should I separate out all the series? Do brain teasers and number theory books fall in the same category? For each section, should I organize by color or size or author or title? Does any of this even really matter? What are the chances of this bookshelf being organized in two weeks? What's the point of this, anyway?

The point, Vishesh, is that it's fun, and you like order, and when you turn the disarray back into beautiful shelves of books, you will feel so accomplished that you won't feel obligated to do anything else for the rest of the day. Also, books are really awesome. :D But that's for another day.

Frozen Pasta, Foamy Bubbles, and Awkward Turtles

What do these three things have in common, besides being really random? They are all subjects of serious, dedicated scientific research, and that makes me so, so, so happy. :D Every now and then, I chance upon an article that makes me stop and think: "There is someone in the world who studies that for a living!?"

The tolerance of science to any and all possible research is apparent in practically all fields. In fact, these three are even ordered in terms of the relevant scientific discipline. What's that you say? Food, Toys, and Biology don't seem ordered at all? Food and Toys aren't even really scientific fields? Sorry, I what I meant was Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics.

Frozen pasta is a really complicated process, when you think about it. Trying to achieve, after freezing, thawing, and eating, the same shape, texture, and flavor as regular pasta is quite a feat. Freezing causes a frost which, upon melting, can soak the pasta and dilute the sauce. Moreover, the coating of lipids (oil) on the pasta apparently modulates chemical changes that can result in altered pasta rigidity and sauce retention! Wow. Serious business! (In fact, pasta sauce research goes back a while. In the 1980s, Howard Moskowitz revolutionized the food industry, beginning with his research with Prego.)

Foamy bubbles may seem chaotic, but in fact they follow very specific scientific rules governed by physics. Joseph Plateau formulated laws that describe the typical formation of foams. Bubbles that do not satisfy these laws are unstable, and they either quickly change to fit these laws or simply pop.
1) Soap films are smooth surfaces, and the average curvature is constant on any point on a single soap film.
2) Soap films meet in 3's along an edge at angles of 120 degrees (inverse cos of -1/2).
3) Edges meet in 4's at a vertex at angles of ~109.5 degrees (inverse cos of -1/3) .
Foams are so organized! :)

Turtles usually fall within the biological domain, but this study of how awkward turtles (turtles on their backs) are able to right themselves--using mathematics! In summary, turtle shells fall somewhere on a scale between flat and tall. Flat-shelled turtles are usually flat because they live most of their lives in the water and need to be hydrodynamic. Flat shells have 2 stable equilibrium points (the back and the bottom), and so if such a turtle is on its back, it is difficult to right itself by just wobbling, because the back is stable. Interestingly, aquatic turtles usually have an abnormally long neck, and this allows them to reach the ground with their head to push off. Medium turtles usually have stable equilibria on the sides of their shells, but these are less stable than the back of a flat turtle, so they can usually get around this issue by wobbling their head and feet.

The tall turtles (the roundest) are special, because they have only 1 stable equilibrium point, which is on the bottom-that is, on their feet. Any other point on their shell is unstable, so they need very little wobbling to right themselves. This may sound cool as is, but the really cool thing is that mathematicians are very interested in 3D objects with just 1 stable equilibrium point, to the point that this class of objects has a name: monostatic. The coolest thing about the fact that these turtle shells are practically monostatic is that monostatic objects are almost non-existent in nature--one study by Domokos included a systematic study of thousands of pebbles, and none of them were monostatic. So this property really is very special. Yay turtles! :) And come on, honestly. How awesome is it that there are not only scientists working hours and hours seeing how stable pebbles are one by one but also scientists that spend their hard working hours on awkward flipped turtles!?!?!? :D

FroYo: Never Too Cold

There are a few things that have been substantially harder to procure in college than back at home, especially various kinds of food. Perhaps this is mostly because I hesitate to spend much money outside of my meal plan, but fruits like berries, pomegranates, grapes, clementines, peaches, and mangoes have been very elusive.

The other main foodstuff (besides delicious homemade Indian food, of course) that is much rarer without a car is frozen yogurt. Back in California, I would go to Pinkberry and Yogurtland at least twice a month, if not more. The weather is completely irrelevant, although high summer leads to increased consumption; I don't care if it's freezing here, as long as it's not freezing where I'm eating. So many flavors, so many toppings, so much deliciousness! I actually tend to stick to "original" in terms of flavor, only because I love the combination of that simple tartness with tons of juicy and colorful fruits. :D

Fortunately, I found one place nearby (just one, really?) called Juniper last year, and this past summer a Froyoworld opened, but I have yet to try it. On the whole though, there is just not enough bang for the buck compared to the traditional haunts. The tart freshness is missing, the fruits less flavorful and plentiful (just as they are in general, really). As you can see in the picture, I still manage to get a decent array of yellow, red, and indigo. But really, I can't wait to come home. :)