reading

Date a Girl Who Reads

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I can’t remember where I saw it first, but this is lovely:

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

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(via Rosemarie Urquico)

Higgs Boson Explainer

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The physics world is all abuzz about the potential discovery of the Higgs boson, so-called the “God particle.” Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider say that two recent experiments hint at the particle’s existence (though the data is not conclusive). But what exactly is the Higgs boson, and why is it so important?

Here is how Roger Cashmore from the University of Oxford explains it:

What determines the size of objects that we see around us or indeed even the size of ourselves? The answer is the size of the molecules and in turn the atoms that compose these molecules. But what determines the size of the atoms themselves? Quantum theory and atomic physics provide an answer. The size of the atom is determined by the paths of the electrons orbiting the nucleus. The size of those orbits, however, is determined by the mass of the electron. Were the electron’s mass smaller, the orbits (and hence all atoms) would be smaller, and consequently everything we see would be smaller. So understanding the mass of the electron is essential to understanding the size and dimensions of everything around us.

It might be hard to understand the origin of one quantity, that quantity being the mass of the electron. Fortunately nature has given us more than one elementary particle and they come with a wide variety of masses. The lightest particle is the electron and the heaviest particle is believed to be the particle called the top quark, which weighs at least 200,000 times as much as an electron. With this variety of particles and masses we should have a clue to the individual masses of the particles.

Unfortunately if you try and write down a theory of particles and their interactions then the simplest version requires all the masses of the particles to be zero. So on one hand we have a whole variety of masses and on the other a theory in which all masses should be zero. Such conundrums provide the excitement and the challenges of science.

There is, however, one very clever and very elegant solution to this problem, a solution first proposed by Peter Higgs. He proposed that the whole of space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. the larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. Thus the existence of this field is essential in Higg’s hypothesis for the production of the mass of particles.

We know from quantum theory that fields have particles associated with them, the particle for the electromagnetic field being the photon. So there must be a particle associated with the Higg’s field, and this is the Higgs boson. Finding the Higgs boson is thus the key to discovering whether the Higgs field does exist and whether our best hypothesis for the origin of mass is indeed correct.

For another interesting explainer of the Higgs boson particle and the Higgs field, see this quasi-political explanation by David J. Miller from University College London.

The Largest Wealth Gap in America

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From this Bloomberg piece, the surprising (?) answer to the place where the wealth gap is the highest in the United States:

Nowhere is the contrast between rich and poor clearer than in the metropolitan region abutting New York, stretching from Greenwich on the west to Bridgeport on the east. This 625- square-mile swath, where subsidized housing complexes sit blocks from multimillion-dollar mansions, is home to the widest income gap of any metro area in the U.S., according to Census Bureau data compiled by Bloomberg. If this region were a country, it would be the 14th-most unequal spot on the planet, ranking just below Brazil, based on figures in the CIA World Factbook.

The region is described as the microcosm of the United States:

Connecticut’s per capita income is the highest of any state in the nation at $36,775, according to the census. In the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metro area, 53,076 households took home at least $200,000 — and 16,505 earned less than $10,000.

And the startling statistic about Greenwich, perhaps the world capital of hedge funds:

One doesn’t need to leave the town to see disparity. About 2,150 of its 60,000 residents live in poverty, defined as less than $22,113 for a family of four, according to the 2010 American Community Survey. More than 10 percent of public school students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, the United Way’s Greenwich chapter says, and there are 1,195 units of subsidized housing.

On a related note: how is income inequality measured? It is via the Gini coefficient, defined per Wikipedia:

The Gini coefficient is a measure of the inequality of a distribution, a value of 0 expressing perfect equality where everyone has equal shares of income and a value of 1 expresses maximal inequality where only one person has all the income. It is commonly used as a measure of inequality of income or wealth. Worldwide, Gini coefficients for income range from approximately 0.23 (Sweden) to 0.70 (Namibia) although not every country has been assessed.

The United States’ Gini coefficient increased from 0.46 in 2000 to 0.469 in 2010. By comparison, the Gini coefficient for Bridgeport, CT was 0.537 in 2010, up from 0.459 in 2000.

Batman and Iron Man in Academic Literature

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E. Paul Zehr, a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria (Canada), writes how he was able to make scientific concepts accessible through the incorporation of popular characters from the films Batman and Iron Man:

Hugely popular movies like Iron Man, Captain America, The Dark Knight, and its forthcoming sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, illustrate the public interest in participating in the transient experience of being a superhero—at least for the duration of the movie. For scientists, those movies offer a way to communicate with the public about our work. The result for me has been two books: Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero and Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine.

I settled on Batman and Iron Man because both icons are pitched as real humans who used training (Batman) or technology (Iron Man) to achieve extreme outcomes that seem believable. That part of their mythologies is what makes them attractive and grounded in a reality of hard work, invention, and achievement. In my books I have turned that mythology around and essentially asked: Is it really scientifically possible? And if so, how would it work, and what would it mean?

I settled on Batman and Iron Man because both icons are pitched as real humans who used training (Batman) or technology (Iron Man) to achieve extreme outcomes that seem believable. That part of their mythologies is what makes them attractive and grounded in a reality of hard work, invention, and achievement. In my books I have turned that mythology around and essentially asked: Is it really scientifically possible? And if so, how would it work, and what would it mean?

In both books, I explain neuroscience concepts to the general public, using the physical and technological marvels of the fictional characters to expose the real-life workings of the human body. Those concepts include: the hierarchical organization of the nervous system; supraspinal and spinal reflex control of movement; neural adaptations to skill training and motor learning; the neuropsychology of martial-arts training and combat; pathophysiology of concussion; neural plasticity associated with injury and training; cortical somatosensory and motor maps and phantom limbs; and the concept of neuroprosthetics including brain-machine interface.

My goal in writing this essay is merely to encourage other like-minded academics to understand the value of engaging the public in an accessible way, and to think about integrating pop-culture touchstones into their own outreach and teaching practices.

A natural extension: how (else) could teachers and professors around the country use popular culture to make what they teach more accessible?

Airline Safety Pamphlets as Art

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Avi Steinberg’s post “The Unlikely Event” at The Paris Review is fantastic. He analyzes the relationship between airline safety cards and art:

The best airline-safety-card artists know how to amplify these details without creating too much noise. They are, after all, artists. They work within and bend the conventions of their form by playing with allusions to earlier work. Take, for example, a current US Airways safety card that portrays the conventional water flotation scene. We see a beautiful woman, with lush red hair, floating effortlessly, gazing ahead in an attitude of easeful melancholy. The airline artist has recruited Dante Rossetti’s 1877 Mary Magdalene, with perhaps an ironic nod to Botticelli’s Venus, as the heroine of our worst-case scenario. Thus the “fallen woman” motif is reimagined in the most urgent terms: this airline Magdalene is a woman who has quite literally fallen. And this is where we find her, floating in limbo, clutching a lily-white life preserver to her breast (instead of a vase, as in the 1877 portrait). Like Rossetti’s romantic Pre-Raphaelite Magdalene, this woman’s lowly state serves only to magnify her elemental beauty. Here she is, Our Lady of the Plane Crash. “I will make you fishers of men,” says the Christ. “We will rescue you in any corner of the globe,” says a Pan Am safety card. The fallen woman will not remain cast away forever—and, if we follow her lead, the artist assures us, neither will we. It is a pretty vision of earthly salvation.

My favorite part is this bit about the AeroMexico safety card that resembles René Magritte’s The Son of Man:

The artist behind a current AeroMexico safety card is not convinced. In an echo of The Son of Man, the 1964 painting by Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, the AeroMexico man is rendered in realistic detail—from rolled up sleeves to tousled hair—all of which is, however, a set up for the darkly comic punch line: the man has no face. This bit of surrealistic surgery, more than the yellow life preserver, is what we remember. It is plain to us that this creepily inanimate son of man is, in struggling to preserve his life, in some sense already dead.

Click through to see the whole post and the accompanying images.

On Inspiration vs. Imitation

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Jessica Hische has a great post about inspiration vs. imitation. While the focus is on the design community, her advice is applicable to all kinds of creative work.

One advice that resonates is that you shouldn’t publish everything you create. Put only your best work online:

When you’re starting out and have a teeny portfolio of student work, it can be very very tempting to publish everything you’re working on, whether it’s practice or actual published work. It’s especially hard because, more often than not, the work you’re doing at your day job is less than inspiring when you are starting out. It will be really hard to resist showing off the illustration you created that was inspired heavily by one of your heroes, because in reality it is probably one of the nicest things you’ve made. But that’s the thing, every new thing you make will be (should be) the nicest thing you’ve made so far, because you’re learning and getting better with each and every new project. Resist posting the practice—the piece that you know is too close to its inspiration. Let that practice fuel original work and then publish to your heart’s content.

Some cool-headed advice on what to do if you find out your work has been ripped-off (published without permission, etc.):

Whenever I’m alerted of a possible rip-offer, I try my best to educate rather than chastise and gently nudge them to find their own voice. If you see someone ripping-off someone you know or admire, I suggest you do the same—initiate the conversation as a helpful and concerned new friend, not an angry enemy. Most of the time the offenders aren’t aware of how obvious their inspiration sources are. We’re all guilty of it when we’re starting out, but hopefully this article will remind some of you to keep that practice work out of your portfolio, which will keep the angry blog commenters off your back.

Read the full post to find Jessica’s thoughts on finding your own voice, training your eye, and diversifying your inspirations.

Why Do Nice Guys Finish Last?

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Jonah Lehrer has a post summarizing the research behind the infamous “nice guys finish last” proclamation:

In 1948, the legendary baseball manager Leo Durocher declared that “nice guys finish last.” Although Durocher would later deny the quote, his pithy line summarizes a popular and pessimistic take on human nature. When it comes to success, we assume that making it to the top requires ethical compromises. Perhaps we need to shout and scream like Steve Jobs, or cut legal corners like Gordon Gekko: the point is that those who win the game of life don’t obey the same rules as everyone else. And maybe that’s why they’re winning.

Well, it turns out Durocher and all those pessimists were right: nice guys really do finish last, or at least make significantly less money. According to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Beth A. Livingston of Cornell, Timothy A. Judge of Notre Dame, and Charlice Hurst of the University of Western Ontario, levels of “agreeableness” are negatively correlated with the earnings of men.

Let’s begin by defining our terms. There are six facets to agreeableness: trust, straightforwardness, compliance, altruism, modesty and tender-mindedness. Those are all nice character traits, right? Why would someone lacking those traits have a competitive edge in the workplace?

To understand why niceness might be a disadvantage, it helps to understand the essence of disagreeableness. Because being disagreeable doesn’t mean you behave like Ari Gold. It doesn’t mean you are a sociopath or intentionally inflict pain on others. Instead, those on the disagreeable spectrum are generally pretty decent folks, described by their peers as mostly amiable. However, these disagreeable people do consistently exhibit one special trait: they are willing to “aggressively advocate for their position during conflicts.” While more agreeable people are quick to compromise for the good of the group – conflict is never fun – their disagreeable colleagues insist on holding firm. They don’t mind fighting for what they want.

So guys who are “agreeable” tend to lose in getting that pay raise or promotion. But it’s not all bad news:

A new study points out that kindness is the single most salient variable that women look for when choosing a significant other. (Not surprisingly, those looking for a quick fling care most about looks.) So being agreeable won’t make you rich. But it just might help you fall in love, which will make you much happier than a marginal boost in income.

That is interesting. So do nice guys finish last? In some aspects yes. But as the latest research goes to show, perhaps it balances out in the end.

The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2011

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The New York Times has unveiled their list of ten best books of 2011. Here’s the list, with five fiction books and five non-fiction books:

Fiction:

1) The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

2) 11/22/63 by Stephen King.

3) Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

4) Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson.

5) The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht.

Non-fiction:

1) Arguably by Christopher Hitchens.

2) The Boy in the Moon by Ian Brown.

3) Malcolm X by Manning Marable.

4) Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

5) A World on Fire by Amanda Foreman.

I haven’t read any of the ten books in this list, though I previously mentioned that Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is on my radar. From the non-fiction titles, I probably will read Daniel Kahneman’s book first, as I am generally interested in psychology.

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A question for the reader: what are some books on your “Best Books of 2011” list?

The World’s Best Airport

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I’ve never been, but I’ve heard great things about Singapore’s Changi International Airport. This Wall Street Journal piece gives some details of the perks you can expect:

The airport offers amenities found elsewhere only in airlines’ fancy lounges for premium passengers. There are comfortable areas for sleeping or watching TV, premium bars, work desks and free Internet. A nap room is about $23 for three hours; a shower can be had for $6. If you want to put your feet in a tank with tiny fish that eat dead skin, that’s $17 for 20 minutes.

The pool is free to guests of the airport’s in-transit hotels; otherwise it’s about $11 a person. A bus tour of Singapore is offered free by the airport. The tour is arranged so that passengers don’t have to clear immigration—the airport retains passports so passengers don’t run off.

Simple steps matter, like minimizing annoying announcements and honking carts and instead playing soothing music to reduce stress. Placing rival currency-exchange booths and clothing stores side-by-side stimulates competition. Touch screens in bathrooms let travelers send text messages to supervisors when toilet paper runs out, for example.

Click through the article to see a video as well.

The Life of Lana Peters, Stalin’s Daughter

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“He broke my life…I want to explain to you. He broke my life.”

This is a quote from Lana Peters, the daughter of Josef Stalin. According to The New York Times, she died in Wisconsin last week (where she lived in a cabin with no electricity). She’s led a remarkable, though haunting, life, as the obituary in the NYT attests:

Long after fleeing her homeland, she seemed to be still searching for something — sampling religions, from Hinduism to Christian Science, falling in love and constantly moving. Her defection took her from India, through Europe, to the United States. After moving back to Moscow in 1984, and from there to Soviet Georgia, friends told of her going again to America, then to England, then to France, then back to America, then to England again, and on and on. All the while she faded from the public eye.

Ms. Peters was said to have lived in a cabin with no electricity in northern Wisconsin; another time, in a Roman Catholic convent in Switzerland. In 1992, she was reported to be living in a shabby part of West London in a home for elderly people with emotional problems.

Born Svetlana Stalina, she changed her name numerous times in her life:

In her memoirs she told of how Stalin had sent her first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia for 10 years. She wanted to study literature at Moscow University, but Stalin demanded that she study history. She did. After graduation, again following her father’s wishes, she became a teacher, teaching Soviet literature and the English language. She then worked as a literary translator.

A year after her father broke up her first romance, she told him she wanted to marry another Jewish man, Grigory Morozov, a fellow student. Stalin slapped her and refused to meet him. This time, however, she had her way. She married Mr. Morozov in 1945. They had one child, Iosif, before divorcing in 1947.

Her second marriage, in 1949, was more to Stalin’s liking. The groom, Yuri Zhdanov, was the son of Stalin’s right-hand man, Andrei Zhdanov. The couple had a daughter, Yekaterina, the next year. But they, too, divorced soon afterward.

Her world grew darker in her father’s last years. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as Soviet leader, wrote in his memoirs about the New Year’s party in 1952 when Stalin grabbed Svetlana by the hair and forced her to dance.

What an incredible, tragic story her life has been.