What happened?

The lead-up to the April, 2003, U.S. invasion of Iraq was a pretty frustrating time for me. It seemed obvious to me from the fall of 2002 that the Bush administration was consistently lying about everything, and was just itching to get at it regardless of whatever its stated reasons were. It boggled my mind that otherwise reasonable people were willing to give Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, etc., any credence at all. Why? Because very quickly a pattern emerged of a Bush admin official making a claim, and that claim being refuted or at least significantly "clarified" a day or two later by an independent source, such as Hans Blix, Mohammad El Baradei (International Atomic Energy Agency), former National Security Advisor under (G. H. W. Bush) Brent Scowcroft, centrifuge experts at Oak Ridge National Labs, the CIA itself, the head of Czech intelligence, etc. The easiest explanation for all these contradictions was that there was no evidence that Iraq was a threat to anyone, and that the Bush admin wanted to invade for reasons it was not telling the public. This is not that hard to put together, if you see all these news stories, and this is where sources become important. I was reading lefty sites which culled relevant stories from the worldwide English-speaking press, such as Truth Out and Common Dreams. In contrast, most people were reading headline news, which was dominated by eager support of adminstration talking points. For a discussion of how critical pieces were buried in the back pages by major papers, see the story Now They Tell Us in the New York Review of Books (link to non-NYRB site because NYRB now requires payment). At least this is the explanation I have for most people going along with the whole thing. More, related, thoughts later.

My Favorite (Bay Area) Coffee Roaster

I stopped by Cole Coffee today and picked up a half pound of their featured "Red Sea Blend" of Yemeni Mocha and Ethiopian Harrar for $5.25. Haven't tried it yet, but it smells great. The cup of Timor Organic I got at the same time was very tasty. Sorry I'm not as developed at describing coffee flavors as I am at wine flavors.

Update: The web site linked to above is printed on the coffee bag, but doesn't seem to work. It's the place on College just off Claremont, across from Safeway, which used to be called Royal Coffee. When I made the Red Sea blend this morning in the drip coffee maker, it was okay, but a little disappointing. While it had the hard earthiness of coffees from East Africa, it lacked the mid-palate body and richness that I like. Then I made a cup as described in the comments here, and it was much better, rich and full, with greater complexity.

Noam Chomsky on the current situation

Chomsky: 'There Is No War on Terror'

Excerpts:

Same with global warming [as with terrorism]. They're not stupid. They know that they're increasing the threat of a serious catastrophe. But that's a generation or two away. Who cares? There's basically two principles that define the Bush administration policies: stuff the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increase your control over the world. Almost everything follows from that. If you happen to blow up the world, well, you know, it's somebody else's business. Stuff happens, as Rumsfeld said.

What gives me hope actually is public opinion. Public opinion in the United States is very well studied, we know a lot about it. It's rarely reported, but we know about it. And it turns out that, you know, I'm pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion on most issues. ... I think the United States ought to be an organizer's paradise.

TMI

Several months ago, there were a few days in a row in which I saw someone with a t-shirt that said something like "I see your lips moving, but all I hear is BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH", or "It's cute how you think I'm listening". Perhaps my running into this series of shirts was just a fluke, but I found this barrage of apparent indifference to other people rather disconcerting. How, I felt, could we possibly function as a society, especially a society that will increasingly need more connections with the rest of the world, not fewer, if we went around shutting out all attempts at communication? It made me want to get a counter-shirt that read, simply, "listen", or, if one were more sarcastically inclined, "to listen, perchance to hear".

Of course, this is not to say that I give the same level of attention to all forms of demands on my attention, nor possibly could I. (My wife or Fox News? Hmmm....) It is quite true that in most of the U.S., at least anywhere that people watch TV, there are constant demands on our attentions: attempts to sell us things, requests to contribute time or money to a legion of good causes, queries about the completion of work projects, desires to go to lots of fun entertainment possibilities, and the never-completed household tasks... just reading all that is tiring. Of course people resent it sometimes. And the absorption with one's self to the exclusion of others has a long tradition in the American character.

But, nonetheless, surely we can accept what we want to listen to and politely refuse the rest. I hope it's not just I who would privilege interactions with the people directly in front of me, the people who will be reading my t-shirt. Part of the reason I take offense at people being proudly inconsiderate is my own self-effacing personality. I'd usually rather be mildly inconvenienced myself than know that I was annoying someone else. But I think the deeper reason it bothers me is the irony that people who ignore others probably aren't paying attention to themselves, either. If we never pay attention, life becomes an endless series of preferences and distractions before we die, with no way to become aware of what we all have in common.

What to make of it all?

I mentioned in perhaps the first post here that my graduate advisor and I had finally sent off a paper based on my thesis work. The reviews came back a week or so after I returned from Eritrea, but at that time, planning the wedding was foremost on my mind. Afterwards, I got in touch with him again and we started the revisions. To be fair, he did nearly all the work. In the last couple weeks, about the same time frame that I was in the midst of early conversations with the trader I'll be working with, he resubmitted the revised paper. In one of the final emails about the paper, he wrote:

I like it. In fact, the odd thing is, now that I really think I understand it, I believe it to be a really brilliant piece of work. Far more original and compelling than that done by my other students (don't tell them that). [I don't think any of them read this blog, or would really care if they did.] It's unfortunate that this work is being delivered to the planetary audience; it will be a case of pearls before swine, and they won't understand it. You should really stay in science.

What came immediately to my mind is the truism that the lover who leaves you and breaks your heart and never calls finally decides to get back in touch right when you're starting to date someone you might truly care about again, e.g., Swingers. Although the idea of staying in science is nice in some ways, I didn't really see how it could work. My original and compelling thesis used fairly basic numerical methods and would not be obviously interesting to any particular community of scientists. Besides, I'd probably have to take another post-doc, maybe two, probably outside the Bay Area.

Although the dream of being an academic scientist is almost certainly dead, it nonetheless appears that this trading gig will get me most of what I think I would have wanted: learning about a diverse field with branches into lots of others, freedom to think creatively about technical subjects, and interaction with a collaborator. It also has a stronger financial incentive than being a scientist, something which, particularly after being unemployed for a year, doesn't hurt (as long as we're successful :) ). To close, this quote from the insightful and entertaining Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb:

Particularly thoughtful are those who had to abandon scientific studies because of their inability to keep focused on a narrowly defined problem. Without excessive intellectual curiousity, it is almost impossible to complete a Ph.D. thesis these days; but without a desire to narrowly specialize, it is impossible to make a scientific career.

Yet another field change

After returning from Eritrea (free trip there for the work done, but no pay otherwise), I made another promising connection in the renewable energy / energy efficiency business. However, that led to neither work nor pay. It seemed that there was little need of someone with my sorts of skills and interests in the field. There are companies running weather simulations for wind prospecting and forecasting, but there are only a few in the country, and none in the bay area. Instead, it seemed more likely that I could find interesting employment in San Francisco's financial services sector, something that physicists have been known to do since the 80's or so. Basically, I'm a modeler, and I thought that I may as well see if I can earn a living and keep myself entertained modeling dynamics of markets instead of atmospheres. It would be nice to be doing something which felt useful, but one thing at a time, I guess.

When I mentioned this shift to a friend, she mentioned that she had recently met someone already in the energy business who was having a hard time getting into renewable energy. Another friend, a consultant in wind energy, opined that most of the challenges in renewable energy involved figuring out new ways to sell it, not how to analyze it better. So there I had it.

In response to posting my resume on Craig's List, I'm involved with a guy who's been successfully trading on his own for six to seven years who's putting together the ability to manage client money. He wants me to help him develop trading models to use for his clients, which sounds like fun to me. I've started reading Intro to Econophysics and have ordered Dynamics of Markets. Yum!

So let me join the chorus of folks thanking Craig's List: apartment, wife, job! Next: bicycle.

Holidays and afterwards

There hasn't been that much to this holiday season. The highlight for me was probably a mushroom hunt up in Marin a couple days before Christmas. It had been rainy and warm, just how fungae like it, for several days, so it seemed very promising. We drove up to some woods in Marin, and I have never seen so many mushrooms in my life. The forest floor was littered with mushrooms, both in quantity and in variety, many things I'd never seen before outside a mushroom guide: cup fungae, jellies, conks, corals, and the russulas! if they had decided to attack, we'd have been dead in minutes. Also, the forest was magical with the fog drifting through the tall trees, little streams cutting across the paths, meeting other people only very occasionally. For all that, there wasn't much in the way of prized edible species. We found some young chanterelles which were delicious in a pasta meal for two, but the main edible turned out to be shrimp russulas (R. xerampelina). They were in dense clusters of large mushrooms all over, and we were limited only by what we could carry. Also, I had never positively identified shrimp russulas before, much less eaten any, so I was rather wary about collecting large amounts, especially since I believe that some similar-looking russulas can be vomit-inducing. However, that night, we cooked up a few with the single (although very pretty) coccora (Amanita lanei) we found, and they were both delicious. Moreover, neither of us had any digestive issues with them, so the next day we put a whole bunch of the most "typical"-looking shrimp mushrooms in a rice pilaf to take to the family Christmas dinner on Christmas eve.

While on Thanksgiving, everyone came over to our place, for Christmas, everyone went over to the parents' house. In contrast to a relaxed and gluttonous Thanksgiving, Christmas dinner seemed to me rather cramped and tense. But as far as family duties go, it was hardly onerous. There were no mushroom poisonings that night, either.

Now, the holidays are finally past, and the rain is gone for the moment. Both seemed kind of stifling this year, mushrooms or no, and I'm glad they're over.