Cheese...

So, the best thing in my world over the past few days was definitely talking on the phone with folks on Thanksgiving. Friday morning was first spent on the phone with Eric (and Alex, and even Aaron, who says, "Ack!" quite well - not sure it it means Zack or Eric or Alex) in Santa Fe. They had had a good sized crowd over for dinner at the new place out by St. Francis and I-25. Alex asked when I would come over, and I asked him how he was doing on the transvator that he's been telling us for quite a while. World travel would be a lot easier if he would hurry up and build it. Apparently a bicycle chain and one more trip to the junkyard should do it, and then I could just teleport over.

After this, I moved over to my office to try Fall City with the computer. There were some issues with the microphone, but Josiah soon had them sorted out and I spent a while talking to everyone, who told me all about the Ride for Pies 2. If it's going to be a tradition, I'll try not to miss it next time.

It also seems that it is becoming winter in other parts of the world. While I'm not complaining about the continual 80 degrees and sunny, snow is nice.




On Friday evening, TIFR was throwing its annual terrace party, which takes place, oddly enough, on the rooftop terrace of the building next to the one where I live. My evening began there, but before I had known the date of the terrace party, I had made plans to join Laurent and Agnes at a Beaujolais nouveau party hosted by the federation of French expatriates in Bombay. I considered bagging the whole evening on account of the rumblings in my gut, but they seemed calm enough to deal with for the time being, and the French party promised to have cheese, which is the one food item that I miss the most.

At the terrace party people milled about and talked in small groups and a few danced awkwardly. It was somehow obviously a party full of scientists, but I'm not sure how to describe what makes it obvious. So I guess if I was trying to mathematically prove that it was a party of scientists, I'd avoid the word obviously. But I'm not, so I think I'll use it and feel just fine about it.




(idea stolen from Kevin's wife Megan)

We picked up a taxi to Breach Candy, which is the name of a very fancy district of Bombay. The name must be a British leftover. Why they feel the need to rename half the main streets in the town but don't exorcize a name like Breach Candy seems beyond me. I guess Salaman Rushdie is from this part of the city. The Breach Candy Club is one of the most extreme examples of upscale Bombay that I have yet seen. Inside the walls are multiple large swimming pools with fountains, a large lawn coming up against the sea face, and some buildings that are presumably full of nice things. On the lawn was set up a tent where the wine and cheese were served, and a number of tables where they were consumed. We picked up some of the offerings. The wine was not great, but I never have high hopes for Beaujolais and even the cheese was a little bit of a let down. Oh well. Asked if it inspired nostalgia for France, Agnes replied that it might have if the wine were good.

We met a few people, and we made plans to go out after the temperance laws governing this sort of gathering kicked in at 11pm. We ended up at Polly Esther's - as the name suggests, it was exactly the sort of too loud, bad music, bad beer nightclub that one would expect. Freedom, it seems, is being able to go to one of these places in any country of the world. I didn't stay long.



I spent the rest of the weekend being sick. It was bound to happen at some point. I'm guessing that it was the samosa that I had in Chennai when I ducked into the nearest tea stall to avoid the rain one day while I was out walking. The place was not a crowded one, which is generally a bad sign, and the samosa was not even warm, so it had been sitting around for long enough for many a fly to take a stroll on its at one time crispy exterior. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was something else. There is something going around here, I'm not sure if it is what I have or not, so maybe it is just something in our water supply, or something in the dal that comes out of the East canteen. In any case, I got hit, but not too bad. My gut began telling me that something was amiss on Wednesday or so, and continued to degrade throughout the rest of the week. When I woke up on Saturday, it was clear that I wouldn't be doing much for the weekend. I seem to be doing better now, but I am really feeling like getting out of the city, and had been planning to take off for the weekend and find someplace green without so many millions of people.

Sometimes I feel like mathematical research is a long and arduous process of having an idea and then figuring out who already had that idea.

Thoughts on Thanksgiving morning

When Satadal and I were riding to dinner in the auto-rickshaw through Chennai last Saturday evening, I could feel the blue prickling in my fingers of oxygen deprivation coming on. We had been swimming through the sea of exhaust since entering the city. I wished that I'd had my handkerchief to cover my nose and mouth as a few of the cyclists and motor bikers do. The auto-rickshaws run on two-stroke engines and the busses have old diesel engines, both of which are noxious polluters, especially when inadequately maintained. America may have lax emissions standards for our autos compared to the rest of the world, but we sure as hell enforce them better in Washington than they do in Tamil Nadu. It is easier to breathe riding a bike hard through rush hour traffic in Seattle than taking a working class taxi ride through the streets of that city at any hour of the day. On the other hand, riding through South Mumbai, where the auto-rickshaws are not allowed and the busses and taxis run on CNG is lots better than Chennai and at times comparable to Seattle. I hope that this small pocket continues to grow.

While we navigated the streets, dodging potholes that had become small lakes and oncoming vehicles that turned on their headlights at the last second, I looked through the haze and imagined a glimpse of my Utopia (not sure I like that word - nonexistent place). In this world, these fume spewing beasts are replaced with modes of conveyance of a more human powered sort. Pedal rickshaws exist now, but are few and far between. And the demons of social and economic hierarchy do their best to keep the bicycle relegated to those who cannot afford an engine other than themselves. But in my mind's eye, I could see this world, where the ringing of bells, snippets of passing conversations, and the chirping of the frogs that becomes overwhelming as soon as one steps off of a busy street replaced the revving of out of tune engines and the unstopping honking of horns. Passengers of neighboring rides discussed the evening's plans, politics, and the latest Bollywood movie. Pedalers jockeyed with each other just as the drivers do, but in my fantasy thay are testing their legs instead of an overheating block of metal. And Instead of zipping around in the latest tricked out Hundayi, trendy young Indians cruised about on Campy and Dura-Ace, or better yet, Hero Cycles' answer to the high end market. Best of all, I could breathe.

Of course, this idea is ridiculous to most people. Nobody would be willing give up sitting in an effortlessly air conditioned moving box, or even a much less protected seat on the back of a motor trike in favor of riding to dinner on a bicycle or being hauled to the theatre in a pedal powered trike. Certainly not enough people to make the honking stop.

So, I thought, what would it take? First off, not everyone, in fact, not most people are going to be willing or able to pedal themselves all the time. Especially in the heat or heavy monsoon. So there would have to be a huge pool of rickshaw pedalers. And how could this possibly exist without pushing a struggling society back towards Feudalism? One partial answer that came to mind is really quite simple, and would generally promote equality rather than stifle it.

What about compulsory service? Many countries are hesitant to give up their systems of universal conscription, and are instead phasing in alternative service options. Suppose that instead of being drafted into the military for a year, every 18 year old had several options, and suppose that one of them was pedaling a municipally subsidized rickshaw around the city. The work would be incredibly hard, but it would not be so viewed as the demeaning task that it currently is, and the fact of its impermanence would make it much easier. Who knows, some people might even like it.

After the reception that the first part of my idea got from Satadal and Munish at the bar, I didn't bother with the rest that night. When I brought up ditching internal combustion for human power, it moved us on to the topic of the reluctance of India's middle class to take jobs in the service sector. Satadal claimed that if the economic obstacles were overcome, that he would not refuse to take a job as a dishwasher. But over breakfast this morning I posed a similar question to some of my friends here. They agreed that the social pressures to see education almost exclusively as a means to a career and not as development of the self were intense. I asked whether my friends could change paths if they found that they were tired of math in 10 years, supposing that the economic disparity between doing what they wanted to do instead and staying put were removed. They shook their heads slowly. Once again, I include the caveat that the people who I am surrounded by are far from being average. I get similar responses when I talk to people in PhD programs at top tier departments in the US. But there, the reluctance to leave that is expressed tends to be more personal, and not less social.

So then I checked my email after breakfast this morning, and found a forward from my mom of an article in the PI that makes reference to another social upheaval. It turns out that Donald Rumsfeld owns a piece of farmland in Maryland containing a hill that earned the name Mount Misery, where Frederick Douglass and many others were once tortured. Perhaps a place can hold a curse. The article finished with a quote from Douglass.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

I took a look at what other news the PI had to talk about, and was surprised by the luck that dropped me on this article, not twenty minutes after describing my idea downstairs. The subject of the article is the increase in power that will come to Congressman McDermott, reviled by some as "Baghdad Jim" for vocally standing up to Bush and daring to suggest that his reasons for going to war might not be totally honest. But, come 2007, he will be a senior member of the party in power, with a ranking position on the Ways and Means committee. And some of the legislation he might be proposing? One year of universally obligatory public service. In the twenty years of no draft, he maintains, our citizens have lost a great degree of any sense of obligation to contribute to the greater good of society. He suggests that if service were broadened to include things such things as working at a national park or in health care, that this would turn the social evil of military conscription into a social good.

My father graduated from college in 1966. One advantage of continuing on to law school was the deferment. But then when that was done, the war was still going on. Doing legal aid for natives on the Navajo reservation, on US Territories in the Pacific, and in the wilds of Alaska earned him enough of a reprieve that he managed to not end up going over to Southeast Asia and ending up in a very different world. Perhaps he would have taken the same path anyway, but perhaps not. In any case, he found his own alternative option, and was smart enough to make it work. The contacts that he made professionally in those years are still the most important professional contacts in his career, and have led to a lot of good being done at pretty much all levels of our legal system. (Though he did just get snubbed by the Supreme Court, I'd say that's a snubbery to be proud of.)

What if McDermott's ideas became law? What if we didn't require a war and the creativity of someone determined to not fight in it to get people into adventures like my father's that they wouldn't have otherwise? And what if it also served to bring more social and economic equality to the pool from which we draw our current "all volunteer" military?

In fact, what if this didn't just happen once in a life, but every twenty years or so? I could be quite happy to take a year at the end of another decade to go and spend every other weekend heading a crew of 18-year-olds maintaining trails and removing invasive species from the mountains. I'll probably do something of the sort anyway, but I think it would be a better place if we all did. It is all a matter of what choices we are presented with.

Just some thoughts. But remember, Jim once took to the campaign trail on a bike.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the day.

Adventures in Madras

After a week away, I returned home.

While in Chennai, I had a few adventures. Some were mathematical, some explored India as it is, and some explored India as it was.

Mathematics is the justification for my time here, so I did my best to be a good guest. The department at the IMSc. is smaller than the one at TIFR, but the coffee is a lot better. I gave three talks in as many days, one on rational connectedness, one on drawing pictures using the computer, and one on arc spaces. Kapil Paranjape and I made friends and we talked some about math, but nothing really took off. In some ways, I'm still kind of treading water research-wise, reading a lot and looking around for something to really sink into. I have a few examples that I plan on looking at that will hopefully give me some ideas.

My talk on rational connectedness was probably the best of the three. I realized at the end of the talk that the guy sitting in the front row who asked the questions about rational connectedness of open varieties (which luckily I could reply to intelligently because of an article that I read last month that happened to point out a major gap that had existed in my understanding) was Seshadri. It is always interesting to meet someone whose name you recognize from their theorems. He was very nice, and invited me to come to the Chennai Mathematics Institute, a school that he founded about fifteen years ago and is one of the very good places to do mathematics as an undergrad in India. It was there that I gave my talk on arc spaces, but I had to turn down his offer of a longer stay for the time being.

My drawing pictures talk was fun. I just sat off to the side and showed off some of the graphics I have collected. I started with some of the Poincaré disk pictures that I did at Reed and am still getting good mileage out of, but those were mostly just to segue, via Klein's quartic curve, into things done with the program surf and its derivatives. I showed off the animation and how to make it. Kapil at least was interested enough to install surf on his computer that same day and start playing around. The main point of my talk was that to understand math well enough to get a computer to draw a picture of it is one way to learn it well, because the computer that understands commands like, "draw me a K3 surface in an asthetically pleasing projection," is yet to be built. I know that Josiah probably wants to build one though.

Kapil did pose the following interesting question: Can you find a K3 surface whose real points, when viewed as a Riemann surface, are a curve of genus g? Without the K3 restriction it isn't too hard, but he thinks that it should be possible with it, at least to some extent.

My talk at CMI on Friday was a bit of a trek to get to. The institute has a new campus (well, one building really) a bit south of town, in a rural area that is beginning to see a lot of development as an IT park. The building is very nicely designed. It is very open, with courtyards and rooftop terraces and covered outdoor alcoves with chalk boards. I was reminded of the UNAM institute in Morelia, Mexico where I first met some of the Indians. Seshadri and I got to talking and someone had to come and remind us that I was supposed to be giving a talk about five minutes after I was supposed to have started. I was a bit flustered throughout, and though the first forty minutes or so went off fine on autopilot, the end was rather rushed as I couldn't actually decide how much to say about motivic integration or the Nash conjecture, so I ended up saying not enough about either to really make the end of the talk make sense.

Anyway, I plan on collecting my notes into a popular math account of some of the ideas that I talked about last week. At some point in the near future, you should get a glimpse into how I think about moduli spaces.

So, India as it is in the small corner of Chennai that I chanced to explore is noticeably different from the small corner of Mumbai that I have explored.

The day I arrived in Chennai, I took a walk around town, to the beach, where the Bay of Bengal makes a much grater ruckus with its waves than does the Arabian Sea. As I was walking back to the institute, I saw a couple of westerners at a bus stop, one of whom was playing with a Rubik's Cube.

"Excuse me, did you get that cube here, or did you bring it with you?"

"I got it here."

"Could I ask you where you picked it up?"

"At a shop just near here. In fact, ... here you go."

And with that, I met Koen and Patrick, two Belgian computer folks here helping an Indian company set up their mainframes and using the excuse to explore the country, and Koen gave me a Rubik's Cube. I'd been looking for one since I found one in a drawer in my apartment. It was taken apart, and when I put it back together, the red-green edge piece was missing. I tired to mess with it anyway, but it was more an exercise in keeping it from exploding than figuring out the algorithms. Eventually, the springs holding the face center pieces snapped.

So I was a strangely fortuitous meeting. We had a cup of tea at one of the roadside stalls that seem to be every other business in Chennai and exchanged email addresses. We didn't end up meeting up again last week, but Koen did tell me that he is a few cube solves closer to his goal of simultaneously juggling and solving three cubes. I did manage to solve my cube, but of course I cheated and used the internet. I'll try to figure out some of the different methods by looking less in the back of the book. The Rubik's cube is a great way to introduce people to group theory and algorithms, so I'll claim that time spent messing with it is mathematics education research.

The campus of MatScience is interesting. There is a large road in the process of being built right next to it. The road is called IT Corridor, and is supposed to encourage a certain sort of economic development. But for now, it is still pretty much the southern edge of town, in the middle of a swamp. At night, the frogs and other critters make the loudest such noise I have ever heard. I'm in the fourth largest city in the second largest country in the world, but something about it feels like the middle of nowhere.

There was a TV in my room, and I watched part of an Indian game show. Contestants were asked quasi-literary questions such as the name of the villain in Oliver Twist (though that one was asked by showing a clip from the recent film and not mentioning the names Oliver twist or even Charles Dickens). Three pairs smiled and did the head wobble to indicate they didn't know before the last pair got it. The host told them, "That's the right answer!" with great enthusiasm. She dropped the w in answer even further than I am used to hearing. Somehow, there was an w-antiphoneme in between the sibilant and the vowel.

On Thursday night I joined Kapil and his family on an outing to hear some
jazz. A local pianist who was once a mathematician played with a couple of guys who were visiting him from Paris. The former mathematician was still apparently a bit of an academic, because although he was apparently restraining himself (Kapil's daughter was dreading his lengthy explanations) his manner of introducing the pieces sounded more like he was about to prove a theorem than play the piano. The drummer was one of the most creative musicians I have ever watched perform. He was clearly enjoying himself tremendously, and the way he played with his instrument made it clear that he saw it much more as a collection of objects with the potential to make some interesting noises than as a preset array of surfaces and strikers to be combined and arranged. For example, he would modulate the pitch of his instruments - his snare by leaning on the head with his elbow, and his cymbal by flexing it against his chest.

Afterwards, we went out for Chinese food, or at least for the Indian version of Chinese. Apparently, in New York, it is possible to find "Indian style Chinese food". It is certainly unlike what I have had either in China or in the US. In any case, I don't think I've ever had Chinese food that made such use of chickpeas.

As to India as it once was, on Saturday Satadal (who I know because he was visiting TIFR earlier this month) and I went to Mahalabipuam, or Mamallapuram, about an hour's bus ride south of the city. After a little bit of initial confusion, we found our bus, and with a diesel rumble and a blast of air horn, lumbered towards the outskirts. Our driver was very excited to use his horn whenever possible, and I swear it was mounted inside the bus rather than outside. Conversation was a little difficult, because every thirty seconds at the longest I had to plug me ears or risk arriving at our destination deaf. Unbelievably, the guy in the seat next to us slept the whole way. The road was not particularly smooth either.

We arrived in the center of the village where we are headed and the sky, which had been darkening for the past half hour opened up. Ducking into a tea shop to sit through two cups of chai (I am finally learning to order chai without sugar and strong, to avoid getting a cup of tea flavored hot milk), Satadal and I talk about travel. We would both like to visit the middle east at some point, but there is no way that I am going closer than Turkey with the present political climate. Satadal suggests that I pretend to be Lebanese. The tourist population in Mahabalipuram is large. It was a little disconcerting to see so many palefaces about.

Eventually the rain let up and we wandered out to see the sights. The town wraps its way along the flatness of the seaside around a small hill made from a large lump of stone that is more resistant to the weathering than its surroundings. At the base of the hill near the center of town there is a wall of stone carved with scenes in bas relief. The Ganga (Ganges) is a split running vertically through the stone, decoratively indicated with snake-bodied deities. A yogi stands in meditation, his ribs stark after even ten centuries of seaside air has tried to smooth his hunger. A god stands next to him, supplying him with the weapons he needs in his spiritual quest. Humans, gods and animals gather around to witness this spectacle. At a shrine to Krishna four holy men are seen praying and three students whose heads had fallen off recently (a hundred years ago or so) continue listening to a teacher.



"Why the temple?" Satadal asks. Our impromptu host - a man from the Indian Archaeological Mission or some such office replies that in the noise and nonsense of the city, it is hard to meditate, one needs a special place for practice. He wears the initials of his office scrawled in red pen on the pocket of his blue shirt and the smear of white and mark of red of a devout Hindu on his forehead. He carries an umbrella, but still the rain has washed away much of the color.

Up from this cliff there was a large round boulder precariously balanced on a slope. I was reminded of the (formerly) balanced rock at Chaco Canyon. Continuing, we found another of the many carved out caves. It struck me as odd that the caves were carved out as rectangularly as possible, the tyranny of the right angle extending into this construction where it could be of little practical use but as architecturally familiar comfort to the excavators.

At the top of the hill was an unfinished or collapsed temple. A woman was selling some mangos and some kids were selling little marble trinkets. On the way back down, I remarked that some of the paths through the park were marked out by low fence made of barbed wire. This rusty deterrent would have brought down the lawyers in the States, but in India, it didn't even raise an eyebrow. Later, at lunch, I noticed a steel slide and merry go round where some kids were playing and thought about how these things no longer exist in the US. It is as if our system has created a culture of incompetence, where if there is an opportunity to harm oneself, however minor, it is certainly the fault of the person who built the merry go round instead of the kid who slipped or the parents who never let the kid go outside and learn how to stand up on their own.

After walking back down the hill, we made our way out to the shore temple. It was a fenced off monument, and there is an Indian/Foreigner fee scale at this sort of place that increases the fees about 1000% for non Indians. Sometimes, like at The Museum Formerly Known as Prince of Wales, my TIFR card works to get me in as an Indian. But that place is in Bombay where they might know TIFR, and this guy was just being honest.

The shore temple was badly weathered but stunning nonetheless. It is situated on a piece of land that juts out from the beach, and is capped by a breakwater of large boulders. There are a lot of statues of cattle placed around the temple, ghosts of the ancient bovines that milled around browsing and pooping a thousand years ago just as their descendents do now. The temple itself was apparently covered with carvings of asparas, or nymphs, but I couldn't see anything that survived as more than a vague humanoid form. The beauty of the place was a ghost anchored in a setting of cloud and sea.



Soon enough it started raining again, so we ducked into the government run handicraft center and admired some of the beautiful stuff that I would love to bring home with me at some point. But it would have been hard to carry a chandelier of elephants holding acrobats swinging oil lamps back with me on the bus.

As I write this and another small ant crawls across the screen, I wonder if there are some ants trying to live inside my computer. I hope that they don't do any permanent harm.

After the second rain let up, we made our way down the road to the third main attraction of the place, which was the thoroughly uninspiring Five Rathas. Or maybe they were amazing and we were just hungry. We walked back and had lunch at a seaside restaurant. From my viewpoint, I could see the shore temple and the ocean. It was quite nice. There was a picture on the wall of what the place had looked like pre-tsunami, with a different roof supported by nonexistent concrete pillars. The second floor balcony sported a mark indicating how high the wave went.

After lunch, we wandered back through town and caught a bus back to Chennai. It was crowded and I stood the whole way back. Back in Chennai, we switched to an even more crowded bus and took it to a bookstore called Higgenbothams where some prices were still marked in pounds. I picked up a copy of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a book of poetry by the Bengali poet Tagore, and some selected Indian short stories.

The air in Chennai is not good. The fact that Bombay runs on CNG taxis and busses makes a big difference compared to two cycle auto-rickshaws and diesel busses. When I got back to the guest house, my clothes smelled like smoke. Our busses engine compartments were not well sealed, and the auto rickshaws made their way through the smoke with open sides.

After a dinner at a somewhat upscale and very tasty place, we went to Zara, a "tapas bar". It was clearly unsure about whether it was a bar or a restaurant. TPosted by the door was their request for "Elegantly Casual" attire. The night before, we had tried to go out to a different place, but the sandals of one of the guys who was with us kept us out. In any case, at Zara, we were greeted by two people who tried to turn us away. First they said that the place was full, but then they decided that maybe we could stand by the bar. One of them ran up to check on this. The other kept looking at our shoes, perhaps with a hope that they would turn into sandals. Or maybe he was just an extroverted mathematician. We weren't particularly scruffy or anything, it seemed more a matter of wanting to keep the gender ratio balanced. A group of women who arrived while we were there were ushered right in. It was finally they decided that there was space for us to stand near the bar. Inside, a DJ in a booth was playing crap, six people were sitting at the bar with a few more standing around, and the rest of the space was taken up by people at tables. We got our drinks and stood around.

It is interesting how India deals with alcohol, at least as far as I can see things. Much of the middle class seems to look down on drinking, and tolerates it sort of like vegetarians tolerate meat eating. In Chennai especially, the bars seem to be aimed at people whose wallets and minds are closer to a western economy. My whiskey and soda was 140Rs., which is closer to an American price than an Indian one. At Gokul in Mumbai, the dark beer den that is the frequent haunt of the non-teetotaling TIFR crowd, it would be maybe 50Rs. Also, the bars in Chennai close at 11pm. The other option, as Satadal mentioned that he had observed, seemed to be to get a bottle and drink it right away in front of the liquor store.

We met a guy who was sitting at the bar, and found ourselves in a discussion about the Indian national character. This guy's point was that there is a middle class Indian stigma against doing manual labor, and that this is one of the reasons why the percentage of the country that is actively trying to "catch up with the west" is relatively small. Satadal agreed that this stigma existed, and probably hampered some creativity or adventurousnes, but he contended that that was because in India, labor doesn't pay. If one could make a comparable wage driving a taxi or washing dishes in India, it wouldn't have the stigma that it does. In the US, it is not really worth batting an eye when one's espresso is pulled by someone who could critique Schopenhauer or your landscaper happens to have an advanced degree in Physics. In India, there are intense social and economic pressures to keep on whatever path you find yourself on. I took a year off in the middle of college and basically loafed around Santa Fe, teaching skiing and tutoring math and doing lots of SCA stuff. This is pretty much unheard of in the (admittedly very small and of very skewed selection) collection of Indians who I have talked to about this. And then after finishing college and getting a job that paid quite well, I ditched it to drive a cab and tutor math in Santa Fe again. Apparently, this would have gotten me disowned from some Indian families, but my situation was quite the opposite. An example of how this attitude plays out is the idea of tipping in this country. It is not that it isn't done, but it is different from the custom in most other places where I've been. It correlates somewhat to the amount of the bill, but sub-linearly. A tip here is what most Americans who complain about leaving tips wish it was - an indicator of really exceptional service. I'd be fine with this, if the social and economic differences between a waiter and a business person was not so marked.

I have a lot more to learn about this country.

a family of blue sextics

I'm in Chennai this week, visiting with Kapil Paranjape and the rest of the people here at MatScience (it's hard not to want to pronounce it "Mad Science"). I'll give a talk tomorrow morning on my thesis work, but I'm also giving a talk on Thursday about illustrating mathematics. So this has given me cause to geek out with surf and create some nice animations.



Of course, one of my great mathematical inspirations in this direction is the artistic work of my friend Lun-Yi Tsai. Lun-Yi recently gave a colloquium talk at the UW where he presented his work and asked for mathematicians with theorems that they visualize to share their ideas with him.

On not passing go

When Jace and I were arrested in June, we were taken out from the van in a garage/loading area under the King County Jail. One of the most reassuring things at that point was the moderate degree of trust I had that the system that I found myself suddenly within would sooner or later (and presumably sooner) spit us back out again, and that nothing really terrible was going to happen in the interim. One of the good things about the US penal system is that, at least close to the surface level, things are generically not so unpleasant. I'm not saying that there are not serious problems close by, but I was pretty much right in figuring that we weren't likely to disappear into anything too horrible. But it was easy to imagine a slightly different situation where our fortunes were not so easy to predict.

Reed College sends out emails every so often keeping me posted on what notable things people associated with the school are up to. In today's mail, there was a story about a guy who graduated the same year I did, and also grew up in Santa Fe. I must have run into him at Reed, and we probably went to the same preschool for a little while. (For some reason, I apparently attended just about every preschool in Santa Fe). Even so, I can't say I recognize him. Anyway, he was arrested for creatively trying to woo his girlfriend with some stencil art, and for being of Afghan origin, and now every time he reenters the US, he is detained and questioned. Here's the story in the New Mexican.

In this same email, Reed told me about an article in Slate by Darius Rejali, a political science professor and general interesting person. The last time I ran into Darius, I was walking across the playa at Burning Man in 2003. In the article, he links to an interview that is posted on the white house web page which includes the following endorsement of torture by Dick Cheny:

Q Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me, ...

Darius goes on to make clear the connection between torture in a military or intelligence gathering context, and in a police context. It's pretty obvious really. Somebody learns all sorts of fancy torture techniques while off in Iraq or Afghanistan in their early twenties, and then comes back home for a long and distinguished career in their local police department. Meanwhile, terror suspects, or perhaps just graffitti artists, it is hard to tell these days, are pulled in off the street for something minor, and suddenly life is much less pleasant. Jail wasn't fun, but in most parts of the world (here for example) it is a lot less so.

And while I'm on the subject of torture, I'll link to this very sad story.

So I'm really glad that there are some long overdue checks to be put in place as of this week. And I'm glad that Valerie Rumsfeld's daddy is finally out.

Traffic

Here is a video that somebody else took of traffic at some random intersection in India. This is not an exceptionally high traffic spot.

Notice how there are no signals and it is all rather chaotic, but somehow it just works.

Towards the end is an event of the sort that led to the coining of the name Critical Mass for a certain monthly bike ride.

Climate change

So, here is the story of last Sunday's adventure. Anupam, Arati, Alok and I met up and took the early ferry (6:30 early) over to Mandwa, where I had gone before. They took the bus and I rode th 20 km to Alibag. We had breakfast at a hotel in the middle of town and got directions to Kashid beach, about 35km away. (Breakfast included a "paper dosa" that covered about a third of the table.)

I set off out of town, asking directions frequently. I stopped by a pond covered with amazing lotus flowers, huge and pink standing on stalks at least two or in some cases three feet out of the water. I need to fix or replace my camera soon. I stopped to admire them for a little while, and watch the women in their bright saris washing clothes at one end of the lake. As always, a small crowd gathered to inspect the ferengi and his bicycle. Among the six or so things I have learned how to say in Hindi (which is close enough to Marathi that a large number of people speak both), "Mai cycle kud banaya hai." (I built my bike myself) is one of the more useful, since it answers or diverts a number of questions that do not have answers like "America" and "yes". After a few kilometers, I was instructed to turn off the main road to the right. The new road passed through some swampy areas and then wound through villages that kind of merged into one another. The road was quite bad.

After about 17km of this, I came to a big bridge over a river that was letting out to the sea. On the other side was a police checkpoint, but they were not interested in me. I turned right onto a much nicer road that wound along the coast and up and down a couple hills. It was a very pleasant ride. Quite a few cars packed full of beach goers passed me, and most of them slowed down to look and take pictures.

I arrived at the beach at around 11:00 and found the others sitting in the shade of some trees at one of the tables set up by a concession stand. They had not been there long. I had a coconut and we decided to head down the beach a little away from the crowded part. The water was nice enough to swim in, and the slope was very gradual. The others could not swim, so they didn't venture far out into the water. I swam out a fair bit and was surprised that I could still stand with my head out of water and my toes on the sand. We played in the waves for a bit. Anupam and Alok were quite excited by the fact that one could duck under a wave that was about to hit them.

By 1:00 we headed back to the cover of the shade, had some more coconuts, and moved our chairs to try to stay in the shade of the scraggly beach pines. Some neighbors moved in with a car stereo and really bad taste in music. Eventually they switched from whiny sap to Eminem, and while this is certainly not what I would like to lounge about on the beach listening to, it was infinitely better.

At about 3:00 I started back. I was not really full of energy, but the first part of the ride was nice enough that I enjoyed it. The second half of the ride to Alibag, the part after the bridge, was probably the hardest 17km I have ever ridden. This was entirely situational; the combination of the villagers burning trash, the exuberant horn use (probably 20% of people passing me in either direction honked before and while doing so), the bad road and my lingering cold combined for a less than fun ride.

At 5:00 I met the others in the restaurant where we had breakfast. They had just gotten there, the bus having beat me but only just barely. They had had to stand the whole way. So we were all a bit dazed and tired. We had some tea and snack, and at about 5:40 I started back towards Mandwa to catch the 6:45 boat. By the time I was getting back near to Mandwa, the sun had gone down and the 15 minutes of twilight were gone. By the time I realized that I had made a wrong turn, it was pretty clear that I was going to miss the boat. When I finally got to Mandwa, it was 7:00, and it appeared that the last boat was gone. A group of motor rickshaw drivers stood around saying, "No boat, climate change." I didn't understand the second part, but no boat was clear enough. Alok, Anupam and Arita were not there, so I assumed that they had gone ahead without me.

One of the drivers offered for me to stay at his house for the night, and I figured that this was my best option, since I didn't really want to ride back to Alibag and look for a hotel. I loaded my self and my bike into the seat of his trike and was annoyed and amused at myself for taking a wrong turn, but glad that things seemed to be working out. I was a little annoyed when he decided to name a price after driving me a few miles down dark unfamiliar roads, but since it was only mildly exorbitant in the local economy and not at all in dollars, I didn't seem worth it to care.

At his house there were two more trikes parked. I was introduced to his family (who then stayed in the other room for most of the rest of the time), drank some tea, and watched cricket on TV. I was exhausted, and I find televised cricket as boring as televised baseball, so I went to bed quite early. (Not that I don't enjoy going to an occasional baseball game, but the enjoyment has more to do with having an excuse to sit around outside than the details of the game. Cricket seems to take this picnic idea even further. Instead of innings, there are breaks called tea and lunchtime.)

Anyway, in the morning I got up and caught the ferry back to Bombay. I met Anupam and Alok in the hallway outside my office. It turns out that there was an unseasonal storm on Sunday night in Bombay (where I was there were dark clouds and a bit of wind) and the 6:45 boat did not leave without me, it had been canceled. The bus that was going to take them from Alibag to Mandwa was canceled as well. They thought that I would figure this out, and so they waited until about 9:30 for me, and then took bus and train the long way back to the city. I guess that is what the motor rickshaw-wallahs meant by climate change, no boat.

So, it was a bit of an adventure, and I'm going to finally put the bigger tires on my bike. I seem to get some points here for having ridden 100km. Cycling for fun is almost unheard of for many Indians, especially the wealthier sort. Bikes are seen as transportation for poor people and toys for kids. Of course, this philosophy exists in the US too, but it seems more entrenched here.

So, what else...

Today I got a bank account at the branch of the bank that is here in the institute. It only took two and a half hours. Plus whatever time I spend when I go back to pick up my checkbook and ATM card. I'm hoping that this will be not much.

Srinivas has arranged for me to go and spend a week at the Chennai Institute of Maths, to meet Paranjape. I'll go on Sunday.

Dipankar pointed out this article by Terrence Tao titled Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture; a nonlinear PDE perspective. It seems somewhat unreasonable that looking at anything from the perspective of nonlinear PDE would clear things up for me, but this paper is quite lucid, and I feel like I understand something deeper about these ideas after an initial reading.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that fascinates me about mathematics is how some very interesting structures are particular to three dimensions. My favorite easy example is that this is the only place that one can tie a nontrivial knot in a piece of string (two or fewer dimensions and there is no room to cross the strands, four or more and there are enough dimensions to untie anything you like). Clearly, there is something special about three dimensions, because this is apparently where we live.

The string theorists Andreas Karch and Lisa Randall seem to share this fascination of mine. Their work explores the idea that somehow the universe starts out with lots of degrees of freedom (dimensions) and then, following the basic principle that the universe is essentially lazy, reality relaxes, folding dimensions into each other until something stops up the process. This something is a collection of structures that happen to exist in three dimensions. I'm probably horribly misrepresenting their argument already, so I'll say no more.

Another thing that three dimensions does with its weirdness is make proving the Poincaré conjecture a lot harder. Some of the reasons that this basic topological problem is so difficult are similar to the reasons why tying a knot in a string works; there is just enough room for really tricky complications to arise, but not enough room to avoid any of them easily. In three dimensions, the topology (that flavor of geometry in which a donut and a coffee cup are the same - a point made the other way by Vivek this morning when the cart carrying the cups was late coming to breakfast, but there were plenty of savory Indian breakfast-donuts) is really entangled with the geometry (that flavor of geometry where one actually measures things) of things, and the geometry is sufficiently complicated. This is the basis of Thurston's geometrization program. It says that any 3 dimensional topological manifold has a canonical decomposition into a set of parts with specific geometric structures, and that understanding the topological structure can be achieved by understanding these geometric structures. Problem is, understanding the geometric structures is rather hard.

Hamilton's idea was to write down a differential equation, the Ricci flow, which would take an arbitrary geometric structure and relax it to the canonical one. The equations of Ricci flow are similar to the ones that describe the tendency for heat to flow from a hotter part of an object to the cooler parts, but instead of flowing heat, it flows curvature, sort of like when a squashed balloon bounces back to round. There are some problems with this process, like the fact that regions can develop where the curvature is infinitely high, like a balloon that wants to lose all of its air until it collapses to a point. The plan was to use some sort of surgery-like procedure to cut those parts out and replace them with more well behaved parts in a way where the topological information that was hopefully to be extracted would not be affected. The problem then becomes finding information capturing quantities that scale perfectly, so that as the singularity develops with all of its infinities, the quantity is not changed drastically.

Perelman's accomplishment is that he did this.

Tao's paper caught my attention because he focuses on this idea of a critical quantity, one which scales perfectly in the presence of a singularity. I've been thinking about moving information across scales a bit lately. My brain wants to build an analogy between space-time relativity and scale-observation relativity, but exactly how this analogy looks is somewhat elusive. Stuff that is very far away runs into the observational problem of it being seen closer and closer to 14 billion years ago, and hence outside of our concept of time, and stuff that is very small exits our observational paradigm. So then a critical quantity would be one that would pass through the too-small-to-understand barrier and tell us something interesting. Of course, I immediately thought of the stories that my dad would tell me while we were on road trips when I was a kid. The incredible shrinking man was a scientist at Los Alamos who started shrinking, and every so often, he would pop through a quark or into a black hole and out into a new universe.

I tend to think about a lot of this stuff sort of like I think about science fiction stories. I don't know enough physics to really separate possibility from nonsense, but perhaps enough to come up with lots that sounds like it might be one or the other. It's sort of like how I play with installing software on unixy machines instead of playing computer games. In that case, I tend to know just enough to make something good and broken if given sufficient time.

Anyway, back in reality, I wasted far too much time today paying attention to American politics, which was spouting better news for once. I hope that some worthwhile changes are in the works.

the wall

100+Km on bad roads in this country of exuberant horn users, burning trash, and overhead sun. The beach was nice though.

On the way back I made a wrong turn and ended up missing the last boat back to Bombay. Stayed at the home of an enterprising motor rickshaw wallah.

I'll expand yesterday's adventure later, but don't really feel like it now. It was bound to happen eventually, but I feel I've hit the culture shock wall. At least I'm not tired of Indian food, and I have a nice secluded cave I can hide in. And when I decide to venture out again, I'll still be in this very interesting place.