Lahm Tag

NaBloPoMo 11 (Make Up Day 1) The external impetus of NaBloPoMo was obviously insufficient to overcome my immense blogging inertia, and the posting streak ended after a mere seven days. Let's try this again, refreshed after a restful national holiday.

Which holiday, you ask?

The administrative staff at BU were mercifully absent today due to Veterans' Day (a somber memorial whose observance I support), and in Cologne they celebrated the start of Karnival, but in this Familie the eleventh of the eleventh is Lahm Tag, being as it is the birthday of the all-time number world class Außenverteidiger, FC Bayern München star and German National Team captain, our Topfavorit Philipp Lahm.





Philipp Lahm is Numero Uno!

Why I Wake Early

Because daylight saving time ended this morning, among other reasons.

For the final day of our recuperation weekend, M. and I were thrilled to attend the season opener for Coro Allegro and to hear the singing of our friends J. & T. The choral concert was held at Sanders Theatre at Harvard and comprised three pieces. The first was In the Beginning, Aaron Copland's first choral composition, musically staging the first verses of Genesis, and it featured the lovely mezzo-soprano voice of Hanna Penn for the solo.

The middle piece, Frogs, set a series of Edo period haikus (all involving amphibians and translated by Harry Behn) to music. Incredibly, rousingly fun, especially the a capella rendition/imitation of

Frog-school competing

with lark-school at dusk softly

in the art of song…

The concert finished with a familiar piece, Why I Wake Early, which melded the music of Ronald Perera and the poetry of Mary Oliver. The verses, written over the course of 30 years, trace a day's cycle through the observed natural world, and though my appreciation of poetry is meager and uncultivated, even I found Oliver's words lovely.

The evening finale (a perk of having friends in the band) was dinner with the musicians, including soloist and choral director, at Rani, the excellent Indian restaurant at Coolidge Corner we'd been meaning to try for quite some time. Delicious.

The music was gorgeous, always, and the meal with friends was a wonderful cap to a terrific weekend. With an extra hour of sleep, I think we'll be able to face the coming week.

 

Bébés

NaBloPoMo Day 6: After M. taught readin' and 'ritin' (but not 'rithmetic) to her German high school students, we took the afternoon off and walked the Battle Trail of the Minute Man National Historical Park. Quite nice, especially since so few people were there, but we discovered that we are far out of practice just walking around. By the time we'd made it to the end and back (four miles at most), the light had faded and we were pooped!

Our postprandial entertainment was the film Babies, which tracks four infants, from Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo, and San Francisco, through their first year of life. It was pretty, but also pretty simple. Lesson for would be parents: raise your child in the desert! Life in a marginal environment appears to instill a rough, effective discipline yet does not subtract from playfulness. The children develop faster and the parents don't act like overanxious froofroo goofballs who rolled up their sense with their yoga mats and left it in the trunk of their SUV. Just let the kids roam together (goat and human alike), and they'll probably turn out fine. Worked for me, anyway.

Va, Tosca!

NaBloPoMo Day 5: M. and I have just returned home from an absolutely and deservedly (especially for M.) wonderful Friday evening out. Especially deserved for M. because she mailed off the 400 page final draft of her dissertation to her committee at the start of the week, culminating months of arduous, unceasing, carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing intellectual labor. She needed a break (and a round of applause)!

Finally, an opportunity for a date. First we dined at our favorite French restaurant in Boston, the ever-exquisite Petit Robert. Warm, crusty pain baguette, melt-in-your-mouth boeuf bourguinon, incredible apple tart. Oh la la, c'est deliceaux!

Following this gustatory delight, we attended the opening night of Tosca at the Boston Lyric Opera, which will likely be our only opera this season. This was the first time either of us had seen this particular opera. We arrived with high expectations, and neither Puccini nor the players disappointed. I am too ignorant a music listener to say more than that the singing and the score were beautiful, and the acting near superb. I will say that the BLO's artistic sensibilities impressed (as they usually do): in this rendering, the story was set in 1930s fascist Italy, a staging choice that worked perfectly. Bravo to the director and to the set and costume designers.

And the youthful denizens of Beantown also contributed to an authentically Friday Night Boston experience. Walking from the theater to the Boylston Street station, we were overtaken by waves of rude young men stumbled after by throngs of hooker-chic clad young women in totteringly steep high heels. They pushed past us into the T, but fortunately a clique of more completely dressed students were crowded around us. They were BU students who had also just seen Tosca from the cheap seats reserved for the college constituency. Give them cultural participation points for choosing opera over Bros and Hoes night with the Dekes, but shake your head at the level of rhetorical sophistication $50,000 a year buys these days:

"And you know that Scorpio dude, I was like, girl, that guy is going to play you hard. He was just like downright untrustworthy, you know what I'm saying?"

A Dog's Eye View

NaBloPoMo Day 4: After such a long hiatus, it has been very hard to get back into blogging with any regularity (though of course, even at the best of times posting here has been quite irregular). November's NaBloPoMo challenge seemed to present a good opportunity to use an external stimulus to get back into the swing of things. Even in the midst of a more stressful job application period last year, M. and I found the time and energy to post something each day of November. Yet just four days into this year's NaBloPoMo, I'm struggling to maintain blogging momentum! And the posts have been pretty boring, even by my standards. Yesterday's post satisfies the conditions of NaBloPoMo only by the thinnest technicality, and I would normally be embarrassed to report on celebrity comings and goings in the Twitterverse.

My excuse is that I was in the midst of reading The Hippopotamus at the time, and nothing else popped to mind to remark upon. I finished reading Fry's novel last night, and I can report that it is a satisfactorily entertaining, if thinly plotted, little story, stitched together from the sort of silly, supercilious banter which the BBC has trained us to expect from the waning British aristocracy. Perhaps most enjoyable was the vocabulary — I learned a new word every chapter. (Apologies to Mr. Barfield, my high school Latin teacher, but "balneal" required a visit to Mr. Webster. But then again, I seldom bathe.) And if the author's wit and diction are as fluent in person as on the page, he must be iridescent as a cocktail party guest. Still, the book is only worth reading if you're in the right kind of mood, say you've just watched a Wodehouse adaptation and want more of the same, only a bit more modern. I wouldn't rush out to buy the next Fry novel, but I'd pick it up on remainder and keep it on the shelf for when fancy strikes.

For no good reason, other than my affection for dogs, be they full-furred or fictional, I'll end with a quote:

Soda jumped and barked with pleasure. Never occurred to her to wonder what the fuck we were doing playing games like this late at night in the middle of a thunderstorm. Still, I suppose if you're a dog and are used to watching humans zooming around at high speed in metal boxes, staring at large sheets of paper at breakfast-time and breathing in smoke from short white tubes, then nothing the species does has the power to surprise you.

Not even supporting the Tea Party?

 

 

 

 

 

NaBloPoMo Filler

Until tomorrow ......

Twittering Hippopotami

Jeeves is giving up twittering because of the uproar/controversy/negative response to some comments he made recently. I have no comment on his comments, other than that they seem pretty foolish, but when it struck me when I read them that they sounded awfully familiar. Indeed, the sentiment, spoken by a dissipated poet making an ass of himself at a dinner party, appears almost verbatim in a novel he wrote some fifteen years ago, The Hippopotamus. Art presages life.

 

Mmm ... tasty!

I spent the middle of last month in Edinburgh attending a vastly overpriced and underwhelming conference on systems biology, a still nascent field which lies (face down in a puddle) somewhere near the intersection of computer science, physics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, statistics, mathematics, entrepreneurial finance, and, to a slight extent, biology. I'd had high hopes for the conference, but by its third day I was thoroughly convinced that my time would be better spent exploring the city and the surrounding area than being bored into a coma listening to another talk whose chief scientific conclusion was "The system turns out to be a lot more complicated than we originally thought."

More complaints about the conference (followed by lauds of Edinburgh) to follow in another post. Here let me just say that though I found the Scots to be far friendlier than their neighbors to the south, but their culinary taste leaves just as much to be desired. Exhibit A:

 

Vastly Overrated Technology

(Ithaca, NY) -- Taking up the topic Toby introduced, I would add to his summary of Amusing Ourselves to Death the following: A central image in Postman's essay is the contrast between the predictions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley of how mass media would be used for social control. In 1984, Orwell foresaw state control of media (and education, historical records, etc.) leading to omnipresent, blatantly intrusive (and coercive) propaganda in the style of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century (fascism, Nazism, and the manifold varieties of revolutionary communism), where social control via thought control is accomplished through repetition and the subliminal threat of violent retribution against those who resist the official message. Fear is the ultimate guarantor of obedience. North Korea and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge come to mind as partial realizations of the world Orwell envisioned.

In Brave New World, social control is maintained through the manipulation of desire and the distribution of pleasure. Order is maintained by controlling what individuals crave, deciding what they will believe they love, by creating and sustaining addictions. Interestingly, it is saturation with pleasure, rather than its withdrawal, which is the most effective method of subjugation.

In either case, like sheep, most people follow along, all too happily. And in either case, the social system inevitably becomes unmoored from its founding goals, forgetting that there had ever been a reason for its existence beyond self-perpetuation. But in Oceania, there is always a war to be fought against the outside, while in the brave new world, aimlessly adrift in an ocean of entertainment, one's (sightless) orientation is ever only inward.

(My understanding of economics is somewhat naive, but I speculate that the Orwellian model is best suited to situations in which the economics of scarcity obtain, while the Huxley's parable provides superior guidance to those who would rule the affluent society.)

Postman argues that America is best studied under a Huxleyan lens, and he focuses his attention on the role of the media of communication, specifically television, in abetting the unplanned stupidification and social control of American society. His essay is well worth reading.

I agree with most of it, including the assertion that the computer is a "vastly overrated technology." The idea of computation has come to dominate discourse in the sciences, the humanities, and what is left of middle-brow culture. It is a commonplace that thought is simply a form of computation, and the idea that perhaps the universe is just a giant computer running a version of Conway's Game of Life has tipped from novelty to banality in the span of thirty years. We take the Church-Turing thesis for granted, and we don't even know it. (We don't know any better, or we think that we know that we can't know any better.)

Do we realize what we are taking for granted in allowing the metaphor of computation to overrun our thinking, to dominate our analogies? I don't think so.

That the Internet is a "transformative" or "disruptive" technology is indisputable, even if the definition of these adjectives is vague (to the point of meaninglessness in the business world). For scholars it reduces the time and effort needed to track down a reference, to transmit a data set, to submit a publication. But is finding an answer (by typing in the right keywords to a search engine) really the same as answering a question? A popular idea (especially among Google employees and fans, for whom it is also self-serving) is that cognition is really just a form of search. I doubt it, and I find the fact of its suggestion disturbing, for it serves to narrow the mystery of thought through the rhetorical trick of redefinition, rather than enlightening it. It is an example of the detrimental trend in the evolution of our dominant thought-cliches that Jaron Lanier discusses at length in You Are Not a Gadget (also highly recommended): rather than adapting our machines to ourselves, we, being highly adaptable, change our definitions of human-ness to match prevailing technology and its interfaces. We first scheduled our lives according to the chiming of the town clock, then learned the rote maneuvers of the factory, and now we structure our actions to appease badly written software.

This is particularly pernicious in the case of the internet, the social web, where we are amused to distraction, yet never satiated, and where we fear above all else disconnection, to be out of the loop, to miss a pseudo-event or skip a tweet. We define ourselves to accommodate the categories available on our Facebook profiles, we measure our social valuation by the number of links pointing back to our homepages, and we continually tweak our web presences to attract more hits. Are we happier? Wiser? Better?

Sustained discourse? Hard to say, but I am skeptical.

I like the internet, but I would like less of it.

Like Postman, I find aspects of it to have been "great value to large-scale organization but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

Amusing Ourselves to Death 2010

Erik recently loaned me Neil Postman's 1984 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman chronicles and analyzes the Huxleyan transition of an American media and culture based primarily on typography to one based on light-speed communications and images (perfected in television). The basic thesis is that, in 1984, American culture and discourse (politics, religion, education, etc) has devolved by means of its primary medium (TV) into entertainment where attention spans are measured in TV commercial spot times and where the substance, consistency and veracity are not the metrics of discourse but rather the way the message makes us feel. (This latter issue reminded me of the people who preferred GW Bush because "they could imagine sitting down and having a beer with him.")

Flip to 2010. The Internet is gaining ground on TV as a medium of discourse. In the final paragraph of his book Postman writes:

"I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology -- that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data -- will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organization but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

I smiled at "vastly overrated technology." Clearly the speed-of-light retrieval of data has fundamentally changed how we, as individuals, work and even think. The answers are a click away. The Internet, unlike the TV, is a place where sustained conversation and exposition can exist. One might worry, however, that our attention to discourse will measure no longer than a wikipedia article and that the noise of email will drown out any sustained thought. The question I thought would be interesting to discuss here is whether we, as a country, are clicking or tweeting ourselves to death.

Birthday Adventure, Part I: Reisepass Lost

While I wait, for the second time this weekend, to fly to England, allow me to tell you a story.

Friday two weeks past I celebrated a birthday, my first and probably last non-trivial fifth power natal commemoration. To treat myself on that special day, I went to the RMV, what Bay Staters call their Bureau of Vehicular Regulatory Perdition. This was not purely for pleasure: my Hospitality State driver's license was due to expire on my birthday, and I was unable to renew online. (Gone are the days when I could fill in a web form, input my credit card information, and receive from the Magnolian DMV a newly laminated identity card, sans signature and photo, holographically embossed with the phrases "Valid without Photo", "Valid without Signature" -- a treasured novelty possession I was loathe to relinquish the last time I renewed my license in person.)

Relatively proximate to our house is the Watertown Mall RMV branch, just fifteen minutes' bike ride away, albeit an automobile and highway fraught ride. Having no teaching duties the day before my birthday, I planned to spend Thursday morning getting the new license. I filled in the paperwork at home (print your own PDFs), collected the requisite proofs of identity, citizenship, and residency (old license, passport, utility bill), and biked out to Watertown, careful to secure my documents in my zippered vest pocket, and to bring reading material (How Fiction Works) -- for it was sure to be a long wait.

The route to the mall uniformly has more commuter traffic than most stretches of my usual commute, passes by the offices of WGBH and the New Balance warehouse, and passes over the Mass Pike. The day was sunny and clear, but very, very windy, and at times each turn of the pedals seemed a tachi-ai against the wind. I made it to the mall area, but didn't see the RMV where I expected it, so I pulled out my trusty iPhone and asked Google Maps to steer me to my goal. I was only a few hundred feet off. The RMV, it turns out, is the anchor store of the waning (decript) half of the mall. And anchor the mall it does. Twenty minutes before ten, the RMV still secured by a steel portcullis, a line of two hundred supplicants already snaked through the main hallway and out to the rear parking lot. I took my place at the tail and began to read. The gates clanged open and the line crept forward. Halfway to threshold, I checked that my papers were in order. Application forms, check. Old license, check. Electricity bill, check. Passport, ....?

Passport? Passport? Passport?

No passport.

Not in the vest pockets. Not in the bike pannier I carried as ersatz backpack. Not on the floor in the mall. Not at the dinky rack where I'd locked my bike. Repeated searches produced the same null result.

Best case scenario thinking: Had I left it at home? I called M. just as she was rushing to Brandeis to teach. She quickly checked the most likely places. Not on the desk. Not in the lockbox. Not on the table. Not in my normal dumping spot for pocket paraphernalia. No luck, must dash.

Damnit.

Maybe I dropped it. Probably when I pulled out my iPhone to check directions. I returned to the bus stop where I'd oriented myself. Nothing there.

I retraced my steps further, eyes to the ground, walking my bike the two miles back to the apartment. There was nothing to see, just broken glass and rusty car bits, the detritus of old collisions. Some newsprint swirled in eddies of wind, reminding me that chances of recovery were miniscule if I had dropped it. Most likely it had blown away, maybe even onto the Turnpike.

A thorough search of the house, including ransacking every paperwork repository, turned up no trace of the passport.

This presented a problem. In two weeks I was scheduled to fly to England, where I would meet up with M. and attend the nuptials of our friends E. & J.  This was not a trip to be missed, not at all.

Could I obtain a replacement riki-tick? Maybe. The State Department's website insisted that I report my passport lost immediately, so that it could be decommissioned and invalidated for travel. Then I would have to reapply, not for a passport renewal, but for an entirely new passport. All supporting documents, photos, etc., starting from scratch. Social security card, birth certificate, utility bills, and two forms of current photo identification. Id est, valid state-issued driver's license.

No driver's license, no passport. No passport, no driver's license.

And now we see that Mr. Heller has been ghostwriting this narrative.

But he's relaxed a bit in the afterlife. There are exceptions to the rule these days.

To get a license, I could redo my paperwork, take a different set of identifying documents to the RMV (birth certificate in lieu of passport to prove citizenship), surrender my old license, and hope that the bureaucracy would be mercifully expeditious in this particular circumstance. Estimated wait time for a new license: two weeks. Until then, no valid ID.

To get a passport, I could request an emergency hearing at the regional passport issuing office (luckily located in Boston) and bring U. S. citizens who have known me for at least two years to attest and certify that I am who I claim to be, upon pain of imprisonment. So I would have to get my pal J. and his wife M.  (a different J., a different M.) to take off work and wait in some dim, claustrophobic holding pen downtown in order to sign an affidavit swearing that I am indeed that dude who lost his passport. And I would have to pay a considerable sum to have the passport hearing, with no guarantee of success.

But first, I would have to deregister my passport. Should be easy enough, just call this toll-free number. And wait. And wait. And wait.

Forget it, I had to go to work.

To be continued …

 

 

 

Point Omega

I picked up four books on our first excursion to the Fanueil Library: The Daughters of Cain, by Colin Dexter, How Fiction Works, by James Wood, The Suicide Run, by William Styron, and Point Omega, by Don DeLillo. The last two I plucked from the New Additions bookshelf. Styron hasn't been writing for a few years, sadly, but his short stories are being collected and periodically (re)issued; The Suicide Run is folio of five Marine Corps stories. I enjoyed Styron's slender martial story-novella The Long March, and I expect these stories to be good.

Point Omega is a Deep Book about a Deep Subject laden with Deep Meaning. Like many a Deep Book, its setting is lonesome and isolated, its descriptions spare, its dialogue terse, its characters unburdened by personality. Blankness equals deepness, not to be confused with depth, which is really a shallow novelistic affectation. A ghostly mental chosisme is the ideal. Let the reader fill in the blanks.

Don Delillo is a very good writer, but I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about his novels. White Noise was a delight to read, and very cleverly done, but was its point even memorable? Underworld was superbly written, page by page, sweeping and endlessly layered, like its grand subject, a book to be read twice (though I've only managed one pass through), but was it enjoyable to read? Point Omega may pose an important metaphysical conundrum, one that deserves pondering or even savoring. I don't know. In style and subject, it seems to be a book that might have, nay, should have been written by Paul Auster. It probably would have been more interesting, and definitely would have been more fun.

Save the Fanueil library

In the late afternoon of Thursday a week ago, M. and I took a walk through the nicer parts of our neighborhood, meandering along the streets of the river-facing slope of the hill atop which our apartment sits. In the sunshine, the houses shed their wintertime drabness and seem cheery and quaint, and we are able to imagine Brighton as a real neighborhood, rather than a noisy entrepot jumbled with students, pseudo-yuppies and working stiffs.

We didn't have a fixed destination guiding our wandering, but as we neared Oak Square we decided to check out the small branch library on Fanueil Street. It's rather tiny, but stocked with an excellent selection of books from every leading digit of the Dewey Decimal System. The new fiction section didn't necessarily boast the month's latest releases, but I did find several books that had only been published in the last four to six months, and of course classic literature was well represented. And there were a lot of detective novels and a decent set of science fiction books (though not so many by the old grand masters) available.




The library was even full -- there adults being tutored for the GRE, census workers, internet browsers, readers like ourselves casually scanning the shelves. The art deco children's room, which has a stage for readings, muralled walls and ceiling, a fireplace, and beautiful old wooden bookshelves, was full of quietly busy children, several apparently well known by the library staff, who took their phone calls: "Jerome, it's your mother. She wants you home. Right. Now." The front foyer was plastered with flyers advertising concerts, art lessons, museums, and volunteer opportunities -- working with distressed veterans, reading to the blind, spending time with homeless children. The atmosphere was wonderful, and it stirred neighborly feelings for our fellow Brightonians.




Thrilled as we were to discover a relatively convenient library branch, one with plenty of books to read and movies to watch, we were dismayed to learn, from the same bulletin boards, that the library is slated for closure due to budget woes. If it is closed, we will have no active library branch within walking distance. The main Brighton branch, which lies a hair closer to our apartment, albeit in an uglier direction, is a moldy cinderblock dropped beside the local courthouse, and it has been closed for renovations all year, with no outside indication that it will reopen anytime soon. The closure decision is not yet final, but multiple-choice budget cut proposals presented to the public seem slanted towards just this outcome. The numbers for the past few years---budget reductions of 60% accompanying a 30% increase in library use---seem crazy. I'd happily pay an extra percent in sales tax if I knew it went to the library. Or even a library tax on book sales in Boston. Whatever -- save the library! It's one of the few nice things Brighton has going for it!

In a nutshell

After a teasingly warm and sunny workweek, we've had dreary, dismal weather all weekend: cold, grey, rainy. Nonetheless, M. and I decided to make a brunch excursion to Coolidge Corner, tired as we were of being cooped up indoors for so long. Despite the pluvial weather, there was a line out the door at Zaftig's, and we opted to try a new deli, Michael's ("The Corned Beef King") just down the street. Not bad, indeed, quite good, but not Zaftig's. Afterwards we made our obligatory rounds at the Booksmith and TJs. In the bookstore we were drawn to the "dealing with your job"/"finding a job" section, as we retain our membership in the ranks of the academically frustrated and underemployed.

I was drawn to this book, which I first mistook for a potential candidate tome to be handed out to each new university employee: Dealing with Difficult People



Upon reading the subtitle, I realized it was the wrong book.

E: "I don't need '24 lessons for bringing out the best in people.' I want '24 lessons for punishing the worst in people!'"

M. skimmed a book intended to help find the right job for you, based on your Myers-Briggs personality type; from our experiences in this year's academic job market, professorships may not be the right jobs for us. She's an ENFJ/P, I'm an INTJ/P, almost affirming the "opposites attract" maxim. We are both situated midway along the "Judging/Perceiving" axis, though M. would surely attest that I am more judgmental (not one to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise, am I) and less perceptive (particularly in matters of fashion and household cleanliness) than the inventory reveals. My ideal jobs, whether J or P, seem just right: mathematician, writer, software entrepreneur, judge. Hers seemed wrong: flight attendant? receptionist? At home we realized that we'd looked up the wrong type: ESFJ, not ENFJ. The new suggestions made more sense: actor, diplomat, executive management, politician, social worker, teacher--college level humanities.

We amusedly browsed the subject on the web, finding more possibilities and role models.

E: "Famous INTJs include Neils Bohr, Isaac Newton, Dwight Eisenhower, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Nietzche, Peter the Great...."

M: "Well, I'm in between Oprah Winfrey and Martin Luther King, Jr."

E: "So I'll rule the world, and you'll make people feel better about the situation."

M: "Honey, that's our relationship in a nutshell."

BU vs. CAM

The past several months have been very difficult for us. Here's hoping that the advent of spring, soon to be summer, means better times ahead.

We're in the home stretch of the semester, thank goodness. Teaching, at least for me, has been quite a burden, one piled on top of a hundred other responsibilities requiring more effort than can possibly be mustered. M. has had a much better teaching experience (and she's a better teacher), but she, too, has been worn down by the semester.

This summer we will be back in Ithaca: I will be working for the Cornell Summer Math Institute, and M. will wrap up her dissertation. We are quite excited by the prospect -- summer in Ithaca is always terrific, and we need a respite from Boston.

I was asked recently to give advice to a prospective graduate student, interested in mathematical biology and dynamical systems, who had been admitted to both BU's math department and Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics. I had fun sharing my opinion:

Dear ***,

It's taken me a while to find the time to answer your email, as this was a very busy week for me. I'm happy to give you my two cents about BU and CAM.

I think the academic strengths of the two departments are similar in many ways: both have very strong programs in dynamical systems and in probability/statistics. If either of those are your main mathematical interest, you would be well served academically by either institution.

With that said, I will express my opinion forthrightly: I would choose Cornell.

Academics: I don't have direct experience with the grad courses at BU, but I do have firsthand knowledge of the undergrad program (since I teach in it) and I know many grad students. The math grad students I've interacted with at BU are generally quite good, more or less on par with those at Cornell. The undergraduates at Cornell are considerably better than their BU counterparts, if that makes any difference. In terms of your grad focus, you should know that BU's dynamics group has three camps: one doing complex dynamics, one doing mostly PDEs and multiple time-scale systems (centered around *** and ***) and one with a focus on applications to neuroscience (centered around ***). Each group is quite good at what it does, but there are a few things to note. First, there's essentially no connection between complex dynamics and mathematical biology. Second, the students doing work with the PDE group seem to be quite well-trained in the relevant mathematics, but their projects have little or nothing to do with biology, and they are not trained in bio-speak to any significant degree. Students in the neurodynamics group, on the other hand, tend to have a good grasp of the relevant neuroscience but are weaker on the mathematics. Third, the only real biology applications that are actively pursued at BU are in neuroscience. As far as I can tell, there is no other bio component to the math bio program at BU.

Cornell is very strong in dynamics, probability, computer science, biostatistics, etc. etc. Within the dynamics subcommunity of the math world, you will find people working on applications to neuroscience, ecology, climate change/sustainability, social networks, animal movement/behavior, gene dynamics, and so forth. Many of the mathematicians work on applications in multiple fields, e.g. Guckenheimer and Strogatz. The main applied dynamicists, Guckenheimer (my advisor), Strogatz, Rand, Ellner, Wang, Vladimirsky, Healey, and others, are very good, and so are the more "pure" dynamics people, like Illyashenko. It's hard to go wrong, unless you have a very specific interest that doesn't match one of those people. It happens: I had a friend who was interested in modeling cardiac dynamics and in PDEs, and there just wasn't anybody working on that at Cornell. She left for U. Utah (which also has a very strong math bio program) after a year and was much happier after she transferred. (You should realize that you are not completely locked in after choosing a particular grad school, but transferring is not a completely trivial process.)

Finally, the facilities---buildings, computers, and especially libraries---are much, much better at Cornell. And the BU bureaucracy is an awful zombie-hydra that continues to torment even after its manifold heads have been lopped off and the necks cauterized. Inanity and incompetence are inescapable. At Cornell, by contrast, people seemed to know what they were doing, be able to get it done, and make a real effort to do it well.

Ithaca vs. Boston: I loved living in Ithaca, even in the winter (which is cold but not brutal -- it's the grey, seemingly interminable transition to spring that gets to you). "Ithaca is gorges," as they say, and the town and its environs are great, if you are comfortable with small town life. Ithaca has 30,000 year-round inhabitants, and there is plenty to do off campus, with very good restaurants, several cinemas (including independent theaters that are as good or better than the ones we have in Boston), a few clubs, bars, etc. You can walk, take the bus, or ride anywhere with no problem. If you like outdoorsy stuff, you will have much to choose from. If you are a devoted urbanist or a clubber, you will be understimulated in Ithaca and continually itch to get away, but be stymied by Ithaca's "central isolation" -- an hour from Syracuse, four hours from NYC, two hours from Rochester. You may also get annoyed with Ithaca's laid back, hippie-dippy granola atmosphere (which I found charming, though I'm hardly a tie-dyed tee-shirt and Birkenstocks kind of person).

Boston seems to be a good town for the young and single---neither of which I am anymore---with a huge student population and a lot of nightlife and other activities. The dating scene in Ithaca is more difficult, simply because it's smaller and dominated by people on an academic track, who all tend to be just a little bit weird -- else why would they want to go to grad school? That being said, there is a very active social/dating scene, partly centered around the Big Red Barn grad student center (where I met my wife) and partly located at the downtown bars, and there is plenty of fun to be had. (I recommend trying to cross the science-humanities divide). These considerations might also not apply to you.

If you're into sports, Boston is a good place to be, unless you favor the Yankees. There is plenty of music for all persuasions, but the art scene is pretty lame. Because it is small and the town is dominated by two colleges, Ithaca is, on the average, pretty intellectual and cosmopolitan (this is not the case for the rest of upstate New York), but also homogenous in a weird way that's difficult to put into words (everything is different in the same way, somehow). Boston is much more diverse, with the Brookline and Cambridge areas being yuppier and hipper, Newton older and more upscale, Jamaica Plain and Somerville middle of the road, Allston and Brighton a mix of students and working class, and the rest of Boston pretty solidly working class. You can find just about anything here, but getting to it might be a problem. Public transportation is but a cruel joke for anyone who has spent time in Europe or NYC. Automobile traffic is an absurd nightmare. (I now bike just about everywhere, though Boston is not a particularly bike-friendly city, and in this it is somewhat dangerous -- two days ago a cyclist was killed by an MBTA bus, for example -- but if you do decide on Boston I suggest you bike for health and happiness. Since giving up on the bus my blood pressure is down and I no longer arrive home after work contorted in apoplectic rage. I still have more encounters with the rude and the insane than I would like, but this is unavoidable since such people constitute the vast majority of Boston drivers.)

The cost of living in Boston is quite high. Housing is particularly expensive, and to find an apartment one typically deals with the local mafia of real estate brokers, who take a month's worth of rent as fee for finding you an overpriced apartment. (If you come to Boston, avoid brokers when looking for housing.) My wife and I pay about $1600 for a relatively large 2 bedroom apartment in an okay but by no means great location. We would pay around $800 - $900 for the same apartment in a much better location in Ithaca. Food, entertainment, and just about everything else (except gas) cost 30-50+% more in Boston. In Ithaca you can live very well on a grad student stipend; in Boston you will feel poor.

A final note: One of the great things about CAM, when I was there, was that we had a very fun, active social community, where people hung out together, went hiking, movie watching, running, biking, you name it, either as a big group or in small clusters. We were, by and large, friends and friendly. We didn't spend all of our time talking math, a topic which eventually gets boring to all but the most obsessive. (However, the small townness of Ithaca means you can't escape the presence of Cornellians, and there is a strong proclivity to talk about work and stress at social gatherings, a bad communal habit that should be avoided. The many external opportunities in Boston would tend to counteract this tendency towards inward focus and preoccupation.) Even when I was stressed out by work (as we all are at some point), I had a great time with my fellow CAMsters. I get the impression that there is no such community at BU. We go out for a Friday afternoon beer now and then, but after an hour or so people scurry off to their apartments for weekends (and weeknights) spent independently. We don't hang out together, and we generally don't live close to one another. As a general rule, there is little or no social mixing between departments, and I don't know of much of a social connection with other universities in the area, either. If you want to build a social life independent of your school, this is fine, but if you expect your cadre of work/school associates and free time friends to overlap significantly, this might be a problem.

There you have it: my clear though probably biased opinion. I hope you find it helpful, and I wish you the best in your decision-making and your grad school career.

New Year's Resolve

Given the length of the interval since the previous TDC post and the intention to post more frequently and regularly proclaimed in the year's inaugural post, I have to confess once again to overpromising and underdelivering so far this year. I blame, in part, my inability to keep up with my resolution to blog (daily!?) on the demands of our other resolutions, which we have stuck to so far, with good results.

This semester is going to be a demanding one for us, with increased teaching responsibilities piling upon already burgeoning research requirements: M. is wrapping up the big Dissertation and teaching at Brandeis, and I'm founding a new math course and trying to publish, publish, publish in preparation for next year's job market. (It already appears that this year will be a wash in the employment department, but somewhat perversely this is a bit of a relief, as at least we are spared the anxiety accompanying tentative plans to move on to new jobs and new vistas.)

Along with the rest of the planet, we took the opportunity presented by the opening of a new calendar year to pledge ourselves to leading more virtuous lives and embracing salutary habits. We take heart in the investment brokers' caveat that past performance is no guarantee of future returns: Last year I resolved to

• take a walk each evening.
  
• watch no more than one TV show per night, and at most three per week.
  
• stop surfing the web and reading the news online on weekends.
  
• quit reading the news and checking email first thing in the morning.
  
• quit reading the news and checking email immediately before bed.
  
• avoid restaurants with televisions.
  

To remind myself I posted the list conspicuously close to my computer screen, always within my visual field when typing, but then I proceeded to ignore it assiduously. Resolution success rate? Approximately zero, though mindless TV consumption plummeted when we killed our subscription to cable TV.

This year our goals were no more modest, but we have approached them differently, and we have external support in meeting them. My teaching duties begin at 9, and we agreed that we wanted to exercise before work so that we would have the entire workday available, uninterrupted by nagging thoughts about when and whether to head to the gym. (The cost in time of traveling to work, home, gym, stores, etc. imposes significant limitations on our flexibility. Getting around Boston is simply a pain in the posterior.) In order to have time for all of the lifting, running, etc. we want and still be able to arrive punctually at BU and Brandeis, we have to hit the gym close to opening time. We spent a week acclimating ourselves to a radically different schedule: Five days a week, we awake at 5:15, pull ourselves together and catch the 5:45 bus. We arrive at the gym by 6, then lift, run, etc. for two hours. M. heads to Waltham by 8:15, and I go to my office to review my lecture notes. I teach, prepare more class notes, and then try to work uninterrupted until 6 or so. M. also teaches in the morning, then has the afternoon hours available as a solid block of writing time. We reconvene around 7 at home, cook a preplanned meal together, eat without electronic distractions, and then have an hour or two of free time before we wind down for sleep by 10.

One strict rule we follow is that we turn off all electronics (internet, television, radio) at least one hour before bedtime. Our brains settle and the hyperactive buzz of the pointlessly distracting outside world fades. We sleep well.

The biggest initial obstacle was adjusting to the sleep schedule, which appeared to be a self-constructed temporal cage. (Back in my pseudo-martial phase, early to bed, early to rise, regular exercise was my mantra, so I was mentally prepared to arise before dawn and immediately exert myself, but my body was not.) After a week, however, we were used to it and even felt less tired than before. Now we fall asleep quickly at bedtime and we awaken at the right time without the crutch of an alarm. (The weekend schedule is different, and we sleep in to the decadent hour of eight. There is a kind of secret deliciousness in being awake to enjoy the dawn while the rest of the city slumbers.)

So far, we have kept most of our resolutions (some cribbed from the NYTimes health blog):

• Floss daily.
  
• Eat dinner together at the dining room table.
  
• Get enough sleep.
  
• Turn off all electronics at least one hour before bed.
  
• Sit up straight. (I'd been having back pain from poor posture.)
  
• Pay cash.
  
• Blog daily.
  

The last one is the hardest. (I'll cover a few of these resolutions in more detail in a later post.)

All in all, our routine, which we've now kept up for two weeks, is salubrious and refreshing, not burdensome. We seem to be less stressed, even though we are working as much or more than before. I certainly think more effectively and work more efficiently. But among the consequences are that we spend less time each day with our home computers, and we feel less inclination to do so. That includes spending time blogging. But perhaps a bit of blogging now and then can be worked into the routine. In the meantime, perhaps you, gentle reader, would be gracious enough to fill the void?

Jonathan Lethem, Clothed

At the end of last October, though we were nearly somnambulant from writing papers and job application materials, M. and I convened at Coolidge Corner Theatre to hear Jonathan Lethem read from his new book, Chronic City. I had obtained tickets from the Booksmith a month in advance: I counted Lethem as one of my favorite active authors, even though I had only read a remaindered copy of Motherless Brooklyn (soon to be a movie) found at the Friends of the Library sale a couple of years earlier. The Booksmith had anticipated a large crowd, too much for its used book basement to contain, but the theater was only a quarter full, if that, and I think Lethem and his hosts were rather disappointed that attendance was so far below the mark set by Nick Hornby.

Undeterred, Lethem read almost the entire first chapter for us, and it was fantastic. Though my eyelids were leaden, the reading (and Lethem is quite adept and engaging as a public reader) kept me alert and engaged for the whole hour. (Poor M., much more exhausted by the month than I, did nod off.) He also answered a few questions (Writing a comic book was a life's dream but in the end unrewarding enough for him to do it again; the process of reading for the audiobook is too taxing for him.) before we repaired to the bookshop for the signing. I very seldom buy hardcover books, and I even less frequently stand in line for an author's signature, but this one seemed worth it. (Lethem signed each book efficiently, but did add a few flourishes beyond the normal illegible scrawl of a name.)

As excited as I was when I purchased Chronic City, I didn't find time to read it until Christmas break. It is a great book, extremely well written. (The reviewers at the NY Times, among others, agree with me, and have listed it among the best books published in 2009.) Word for word, sentence for sentence, Lethem is an outstanding writer: It is the quality of his prose which propels the novel much more than the plot, which involves, among other things, conspiracy theories, Manhattan writ large, marijuana (superficially essential, in the fashion of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or The Big Lebowski), and (tangentially) an astronaut marooned in orbit. (The narrative admittedly sags a bit in the middle of its arc but rebounds with verve and intelligence at the end.) Chronic City is perhaps the best novel I've read in the past five to ten years exploring one of the four great literary themes of this (post-?)post-modern era, the Great Metaphysical (epistemological? ontological? it all blends together) Conundrum: What (can I trust) is real? (The other three themes being, of course, We're All Connected (an idea worn thin ever since Go (definitely since Crash) by Hollywood's gimmicky repackaging of intellectually threadbare scripts into "deep" cinema), The End of the World (see Cormac McCarthy), and Zombies.) Though they are very different writers, now that we no longer have Kurt, I'm glad we have Jonathan.

Bonne Année!

After a monthlong hiatus, we are returning to regular TDC blogging and, in terms of content, tacking back in the direction of the blog's original aims. As the marvelous M. has said, referring reprovingly to the thematic devolution apparent in the last few posts, we can't allow TDC to degenerate into yet another repository of "Foolish Crap I Found on the Internet" -- and it shan't.

Happy New Year to all, and stay tuned!