A Homebrewin' Xmas To Us!

Last year, Coley and I made an anti-consumerist pact to never buy unwanted, expensive crap for eachother for Xmas. Last year, we simply took eachother out to nice dinners. This year we really upped the ante. We gave ourselves the gift of homebrew!

We sampled a bunch of yummy darker brews last weekend to try to decide what to make for our first batch. My advanced brewing friend Andy recommended darker beers as "easier not to f*!$ up on your first try." We settled on an Alaskan Amber. Then yesterday, Andy accompanied Coley and I to Brew Your Own Brew to help us pick out our equipment. (More like, to dictate exactly what to put in our pile. When the employees saw us with Andy, a regular at the store, they totally backed off and went back to their internet porn searches.)

On this lazy-pajama Sunday, we started the actual brewing process. So far, so good. So far, so FUN! You start by just boiling a giant pot of water on your stove, with your chosen grains bobbling around in there in a net. It looks like you're steeping tea for a giant. After it's steeped enough, you add in the yummy, yummy malt powder (tastes just like the malt sugar in Whoppers). Then you bring it to a boil. Andy started to warn me on the phone about the pot boiling over when I added the hops. But then he just said, "well, you'll see," like it was just inevitable the first time anyway. Inevitable indeed. After cleaning off the stove-top and boiling some more, the next step is to pour it into a big fermenter (glorified plastic bucket) and add some water, and then wait for it to cool before adding yeast. We just did that, and put it in a dark closet now for a few days. I think all that's left is transferring it at some point to another bucket, and then waiting a few more weeks, and then bottling it, and then waiting some more. And then the drinking part!!! I can't wait to taste our home-made beer.

That Annoying Science vs. Religion Debate Rages On...

I found "Taking Science on Faith," a recent op-ed in the NY Times really annoying. Paul Davies, a cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University (U of A's rival!) argues in that column that science is ultimately faith-based just like religion. All of scientists' research endeavors, Davies says, are based on a faith that the universe is an ordered place, and is "governed by immutable... mathematical laws of unspecified origin." Without the belief that such order exists to be discovered, he argues, one could not be a scientist.

I strongly disagree with Davies' implicit characterization of the mathematical laws of physics, on which he bases much of his argument. Perhaps the problem is with the literal way he seems to understand the word "law." In a social context, social activity unfolds according to some pre-existing set of laws, with the result of social order. For example, I drive my car on the right side of the road in the U.S.A. because it is the law to do so, and I stop at red lights, because of the law, and as a result, I've never been in any messy, disordered car crashes. Thank goodness for the law. But in physics, the mathematical relationships we call laws are simply descriptions of the order we observe existing in nature all around us. The heavenly bodies form and gravitate the way that they do, and mathematics is just a convenient shorthand to describe their motions in a concise and general fashion. Davies takes an essentialist viewpoint of science, in which mathematical laws somehow precede the invention of the universe and at which point they are "plugged in" to the universal machine to make it run.

Believing in order does not require a leap of faith on the part of the scientist. Order is an observational fact, which rigorous science describes in a unified framework we colloquially call "laws". Perhaps most importantly, it certainly doesn't require any leaps of faith to appreciate the majesty and beauty of nature around us, and to be amazed by existence.

Settling for Starbucks?

Whether over lunch, the phone or just g-chat, catching up with old friends these days inevitably turns into a discussion of how the hell to carve out a meaningful and satisfying professional life. We're all just a few stints into the career game that we'll keep playing until we're 65 (or much older, considering how social security doesn't look likely to pan out for us these days). But even with so little time elapsed since college graduation, it seems like my friends and I have all flip-flopped at least once between idealistic visions of healing the world and feeding ourselves solely on our passion for our work, versus the simpler, perhaps more jaded aim of making a good buck to maintain the Starbucks habit and live in trendy lofts.

I think that there are only very few freaks with an intense driving passion that directs their career path and makes choices along the way easy. And yet all of my overachiever friends and I feel like we should be one of these (lucky!) freaks on a straight fast track to exactly where we want to go. But it takes work to even bring the ultimate destination into view, let alone focus. And it's hard to remember to value the process of trying out multiple experiences and learning, especially about oneself, from each.

The only way to keep it fun along the way is to continue making time for friends and such excellent events as Sausagefest.

I Finally Take Advantage of Where I Live

A few days ago, I went on a road trip with two good friends to defray some post-qualifying exam stress. (No, I haven't heard the results of the test yet.) We drove about 6 hours, hung-over after a celebratory kegger, from Tucson to Lake Powell, which is smack in the center of the border between Arizona and Utah. It's a cool drive; you get to watch desert turn into pine forest as you drive up a mountain through Flagstaff on the way and the temperature drops 30 degrees. Then it gets friggen hot again as you come back down and drive through the Painted Desert, which consists of blobby dunes that look like some little kid's crayon set melted into the sand.

Lake Powell used to be Glen Canyon, yet another magnificent geological feature of the area carved out by the Colorado River. In the early 1950's, the Bureau of Reclamation build the Glen Canyon Dam under Eisenhower, which flooded the canyon for the purpose of creating a reservoir for the southwestern states. Environmentalists of the time strongly opposed the whole dam construction, but Lake Powell is still a very beautiful spot to visit. The water is a caribbean turquoise blue against the canyon walls-- totally unnatural looking, but gorgeous nonetheless. I have to say it's nice too that there's a body of water for desert dwellers to go in the summer to motor boat around, go swimming, and escape the heat.

Megan, Lori and I rented kayaks for a day, and did some awesome canyon exploring by water and our own arm power! We found some cool canyon walls to jump off of into the water below for an adrenaline rush.

On our way back toward civilization, we stopped in Page, AZ to hook up with a tour of Antelope Canyon with Navajo guides (access to this canyon is restricted to the Navajo tribe). This narrow canyon, carved out of sandstone by rushing floods, is gorgeous for the vibrant color of its walls, and for the smooth, awesome shapes of the walls. Some of the "rooms" of the canyon are shaped like a corkscrew from a whirlpool effect. We took some pictures of the canyon, but here are a couple taken by professionals, since ours don't really do the experience justice.

How cool is it that all of this was just a car ride away?

I'm Waiting for the Locusts....

A dust storm rolling in on Phoenix (see Chase Field at right).
Just to give you a sense of what we're dealing with here.

I just experienced my first Southwestern dust storm.

I was driving back to the math department this evening after dinner, and noticed as I was pulling out of my parking spot that the sky was a really strange dark orange color. It's officially been monsoon season for a few weeks now, and the sky often looks pretty crazy before a monsoon, so I thought we were only about to get hit with a ton of rain.

But as I rounded a corner and pointed my car south down the street, I saw a wall of thick yellow fog a few blocks ahead moving toward me head-on. God, I thought, how bizarre to have such thick fog in the middle of the dry desert. I have only even seen fog this heavy roll in on the harbors of Cape Cod a few times.

Curious, I drove out of my way a few blocks south to investigate. The way it blotted out the ever-present mountains was absolutely ominous. Even apocalyptic, I thought, as the wind now picked up to scary speeds. The palm trees started bending like you see in footage of hurricanes in Florida. Metal construction signs on the side of the road rippled like pieces of paper. I had to drive around an industrial strength, rock-sided trash can that got toppled over into the street, and I heard the sound of glass smashing around me. I felt like I was driving through a scene from War of the Worlds.

I finally realized it was dust, and not fog, when a big gust of it picked up off the road in front of my car, temporarily blinding me as my headlights reflected off of it. Lightning slashed through the pea-soup sky as I parked and hurried into the math department for safety.

I've been waiting excitedly for the dramatic storms of monsoon season ever since I moved to Tucson. I have not been dissapointed. Arizona delivers a caliber of storm I never could have imagined!

Season of Love (and Civil Rights) in Massachusetts

Last Thursday, June 14th, the legislators in Massachusetts voted not to put an amendment that would ban gay marriage on the ballot for public vote. (Translation of confusing double negatives: gay couples in MA continue to have the right to marry and have the same legal rights as every other married couple in the state. Conservative hicks in the state will not be given the opportunity to vote to change those rights.)

Last Friday, June 15th, my best friend Megan (left in the pictures) and her fiancee Lori (right) were married in a beautiful ceremony at scenic Harrington Farms in Princeton, MA. The day was a wonderful celebration of their lifelong commitment to one another among close friends and family from all over the country. It is hard for me to imagine two people not having the opportunity to say their vows before all their other loved ones, especially when they have loved and supported each other through as much as Megan and Lori have. I feel simultaneously grateful that Massachusetts allows them this opportunity, and indignant that this right is something anyone should have to feel grateful for.

At any rate, politics played absolutely no role in Megan and Lori's wedding day. It was a lovely and memorable experience for guests and brides alike. Congratulations, Megan and Lori, and best wishes for your future together!

Revealing Climate Change with MATH!

About a year and a half ago, I had a little spat with one of my very best friends.

"It's SO getting warmer in Massachusetts," I declared off-the-cuff, and without any qualifiers. "We only got snow once this year. This is totally global warming. Our kids will never get to play in the snow like we did when we were young." (As in this picture from the Good Ol' Days... when the walk to school was uphill both ways.)

"Nah," said my friend, "some years are just warmer than others. The climate goes through natural cycles, and everyone's way too hyper and quick to cry the global warming wolf these days. You are completely full of shit, Suz." (This friend is extremely articulate, and my paraphrasing here doesn't do justice to the way her razor-sharp rhetoric sliced me to shreds.) So, I put my tail between my legs, and didn't think about climate change in Massachusetts for a whole year.

BUT..... the saga continues. This past semester, I did a term project on some recently developed tools in signal processing. A signal is any time-varying quantity, and signal processing is a set of methods that allows us to glean information from a signal. In fact, one example of a signal is the temperature over a number of years in any given place.

The method I researched is called Empirical Mode Decomposition, or EMD if you want to sound cool and in-the-know. This is a way to decompose the signal into a number of modes which add back up to give the original signal, but each helps us understand different aspects of the signal. Let me explain in English. If you ever took high school physics, you might remember vectors. These were little arrows pointing in perpendicular directions (x and y directions, eg.) that you could pin together tip-to-tail to describe more general motion in two-dimensions. Here, let me refresh your memory with a picture:
So in this case, the vectors along the "Up" and "Right" directions decompose the "Up and Right" vector, which describes the actual motion of, say, a baseball flying through the air. This is a useful way to break up the motion of the baseball, as you might remember from your homework sets, because it's much easier to understand the motion in the horizontal and vertical directions separately. Then at the end of the problem, you can just add 'em back together to describe the entire motion.

A standard generalization of this idea can be applied to functions or signal, where the different components that add up to give the function are sine waves of different frequencies. (A sine wave is just a nice, regular wave, as shown below. The red sine pictured below has a frequency three times greater than the blue sine wave.)
An amazing, beautiful mathematical fact is that any function can be represented as the sum of a bunch of these nice, simple sine waves (modulo a few technical details). This is exactly analogous to the way that any 2-D motion vector can be written as a sum of vectors along vertical and horizontal directions. The different sine wave modes are "perpendicular" in a general sense, just as vectors along x- and y- axes are. This lovely decomposition is called a Fourier Series for this signal, and is the bread and butter of any undergraduate education in physics or mathematics.

Norbert Huang recently developed Empirical Mode Decomposition, which is a different way to decompose a signal. Instead of a pre-prescribed set of modes, as in a Fourier Series, EMD creates a decomposition which is specific to the signal being analyzed. The power of this method is that this special decomposition separates phenomena occuring on different time scales from the original data series. What's more, EMD leaves behind a "residue, after subtracting off the fluctuating, cyclic modes, which reveals the trend in the signal, if one exists.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency has free weather data on its website dating back to the 1920's. For my project, I took a look at some temperature data from 1988 to 2005 (roughly the length of my memory) taken in Amherst, MA (the closest data site I could find to where I grew up). Unfortunately, the image files of data and decompositions look like crud when I try to upload them to this blog. But, running EMD on this data subtracts off seasonal and other cyclic fluctuations, to give this punchline: The mean temperature in Amherst, MA has increased unambiguously by a little over a half a degree Fahrenheit over this 17-year period. Kind of scary... but the mathematics is absolutely beautiful.

Don't Mean A Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing

Sometimes, I think I was born in the wrong era. Because I absolutely love swing dancing. I just can't get enough. Maybe I should have lived during a time where everyone was as obsessed with swing as I am.

I went Lindy-Hoppin' last night at a great monthly dance in Tucson put on by the University of Arizona Swing Cats. I tried to take some photos, but let's just say that for now, I'm a better dancer than photographer. (Hopefully I'll get some good dancing action shots for this blog in the future after I master my manual settings).

When two people swing dance together, one is the leader, and the other follows (usually a man and a woman, respectively). It took me a long time to get used to this format. At first I felt that as a follower, this left me little room for my own expression and creativity. But as I've matured as a swing dancer, I've realized that the dance is a conversation, and the leader-follower structure merely allows that conversation to happen. When you're talking to your friend, you could both just talk at once. But this modus operandi pretty much guarantees that your conversation won't be very interesting. You need to be able to hear one another so that you can play off of each others' ideas and achieve a unity in the topic and mood of the discussion. It's the interplay between friends' ideas that can make a conversation fascinating and engrossing and fun, and the same goes for a swing dance. The leader-follower scheme is the channel for this interplay.

Learning to follow well, so that you can feel and react to your partner's signals, is a technical skill that takes a lot of practice. The leader must be able to read, react, and adjust to the follower too. Getting to this point in partnered dancing can take on the order of a year of consistent practice after you've got the basic steps down. But after reaching this point, swing goes from "pretty fun" to something you're addicted to and want to do all the time. You dream about it at night, and get pumped up every time you hear about a swing band playing in your city. Because finally, you've got the tools to create and explore your own chemistry on the dance floor.

There's just nothing more satisfying than catching your lead's unexpected funky break, or feeling the synchrony lock in when you figure out his unique rhythmic gait and reproduce it in or your own steps. Or maybe it's most satisfying to surprise your partner by throwing in a double turn where he'd only planned for a single, or making him laugh as you add in some outlandish embellishment inspired by the saxaphone. Actually, with so many great moments in every swing dance, I don't really feel the need to choose.

Math Gives me Fever

The good and the bad kind, it turns out.

I sacrificed my whole weekend to study for a midterm I had today. Really, the whole weekend-- Friday day and night, Saturday day and night, and Sunday day and night. The exam was long and tough, but I do feel extremely pleased with having all these new techniques and methods solidified in my mind. That's the good kind of fever.

The bad kind is the actual fever and wet cough I came down with today. BLECH. So since I'm just lying here burning up in bed, pouring Vitamin Water down my throat like it's my job, and since Shel Silverstein is my preferred bathroom reading lately, here's a little poem I wrote to commemorate the day of my Math 583b midterm.

Professor, O Doctor of this stuff, come quick-
Advanced mathematics is makin' me sick.

Contours for integrals tangle my hair,
singular points fly like knives through the air.

Limits that threaten like time-bombs to blow-up
wreak havoc on guts. They just might make me throw up.

My codes iterate- IF WHILE FOR- so inane!
The looping forever short-circuits my brain.

Interior complimentations of sets
in this space may be dense, but they sure make me sweat.

Staying up late every night for analysis
Surely will usher in spinal paralysis.

Doctor, Professor, please tell me the cure.
I guess you know best. Better study some more.

Amateur Photographer Suz!

For my birthday, I got a new camera. It's not a super-fancy SLR, but it is a high-quality digital manual with a great lens and lots of options. This purchase was just in time for my one-week March vacation, and I took the camera on a road trip to try it out.

I still have lots to learn about taking pictures with my camera-- especially how to deal with different kinds of light and make the colors in my pictures come out true. Nevertheless, my photographic dabbling greatly enhanced my enjoyment of my trip. Here are a few of the shots I am most proud of.

Cholla Ghost, Joshua Tree National Park

Spring Training at Tucson Electric Park

The Pitch.

Tucson Bike Path.

Sarah's Break

Laguna Beach

Pure Beach Joy

The rest of my vacation photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/suzski/MarchVacation2007?authkey=mujQDUgCqt0

The Sparsity of Women in Science

Stop the abstract theorizing. Halt the heated debates in academic institutions everywhere. I've solved the great mystery of why scientific fields (in particular mathematics and physics) have such a hard time retaining women:

Because it sure can suck sometimes to be a woman in science.

Let me flesh that idea out just a bit. First, a young woman who dreams of being a scientist must sit through four years of being the only woman (or one of few) in her undergraduate classes. Let's be honest here: 9 times out of 10, being in the minority is just inherently uncomfortable in any situation. People tend to choose to spend their time and energy in environments where they feel they can be part of a community and a culture. Merely being a different gender than everyone around you makes it more difficult to feel you are part of the culture of science.

Then you get to grad school, where (and I don't care how smart you are) you are bound to run up against some serious academic challenges sooner or later. The kind that makes you wonder if you can hack it. Suddenly, you realize that you've got a choice between plowing through some of the shit on your desk, or keeping in touch with old friends/spending time showing your boyfriend you care/calling your family members once in a while. Not to mention taking care of yourself. Meanwhile, by this time, you're in your mid-twenties and starting to think about when in your life if ever you are going to be able to start a family, especially if you're living on a graduate student salary and time budget until well into your thirties. I don't think that I'm going too far out on a limb when I say that in general, interpersonal relationships probably weigh more heavily in importance for most women than for most men.

I don't know from personal experience how the story continues post-graduate school, but the statistics certainly seem to indicate that it's not "happily ever after."

At some point, no matter how much you love science and mathematics, there comes a time when the grueling uphill climb to establish a career in these fields makes you wonder whether it's worth the sacrifice. In my experience, this is true of both men and women. But with a much steeper gradient ahead of them, women seem to question it far earlier.

Anyway... time for vacation. (Deep breath.)

A Tucson Dive

On my birthday a couple nights ago, I went to check out a local Tucson dive bar called The Buffet. This bar sits under its flickering neon sign in the middle of a decrepit block next to only tumbleweeds, with no other businesses in sight. The windowless walls of the joint are covered with graffiti, and filled to the brim with the skeeziest low-lifes of the Old Pueblo. Thursday night, that included me and 15 or 20 friends. The Buffet features Happy Minute (11:00-11:01), free birthday shots and a birthday yard-of-beer, and surly bottle-blonde bartendresses with throaty, nicotene-glazed voices that wish you "a happy birthday, sweetheart."

The Buffet also has table shuffleboard, a game I have never played before. According to Wikipedia, the origins of this game remain mysterious. My brother tells me its trendy in NYC bars, though. The white dust covering the table looks like salt, but is actually a sea of tiny plastic beads that make the surface close to frictionless for sliding pucks across. (Ask my friend Brandon; as birthday queen I ordered him to lick it just to make sure.) The object is basically to slide your puck as close to the opposite side of the table as possible without having it slide right off the end. You get more points the closer you get. You take turns with an opponent who stands on the same side of the table as you, and you can slide your puck into theirs to whack it off the table, too.

If only I had known about this fabulous game when I taught conservation of linear momentum to my high school physics students last year. I have no idea whether I won or lost the game I played (mustuv been that free tequila shot), but I sure as hell had a great time.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

My Dad is:family caretaker, idea-lover, bicyclist, birthday-party thrower, armchair philosopher, armchair physicist, hiker, possessor of old-man strength, enthusiastic singer, sports commentator, political commentator, wooden-boat builder, wooden boat lover, puttanesca grand master, worthy debating adversary, joyful kitchen dancer, road tripper, information superhighway engineer, cold ocean swimmer, sailor, kite-flyer, Big Questions asker, sunbather, lifelong learner, fearless poetry-attempter, self-teacher, pancake man, tickler, balletomane, shark-attacker, a DO-er, 57 years old today!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!!!! I love you.

Obama: Not Black Enough?

I don't know much 'bout politics. But I was annoyed by an article in yesterday's NY Times: "So Far, Obama Can't Take Black Vote for Granted." The gist of the article is that many African Americans don't feel Obama is "black enough" or "one of us," and that as the son of a white mother and Kenyan father, he doesn't share the struggles and experience of a typical black American.

But, A: neither do most white presidential candidates share the struggles and experiences of the average white American. It seems to me that many white presidential candidates were born into wealth, often belong to families that are already politically prominent, and have enjoyed the benefits of private education and ivy league degrees. This is obviously not the experience of your average American of any color. Also, I know that my elected officials are supposed to represent me and my fellow "average" Americans, but they don't have to be "average" themselves. In fact, I hope they are a lot smarter and more educated than I am.

Secondly, I have a big problem with this analysis of Obama's lack of support, as given in the same article:

The black author and essayist Debra J. Dickerson recently declared that “Obama isn’t black” in an American racial context.

To me this is reminiscent of one analysis often given to explain the persistence of the achievement gap in schools between black and white students. In her book "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", psychologist Beverly Tatum expounds on the idea that as black adolescents begin to form their racial identities, it often seems "white" to do well in school, and that black students who do excel academically face being ostracized by their peers. Dickerson's analysis suggests to me whole masses of the kids in Tatum's book growing up without growing out of this mindset and thinking, "you know what else 'isn't black' in an American racial context? Being a politician. Therefore I don't think I'll support Obama."

It seems silly to me to think that anyone would decide on whether to support a candidate based on whether or not they fit into a certain racial paradigm, or whether they're somehow representative of any vague notion of the average American experience. On the other hand, I guess politicians are always trying to show us that they come from backgrounds "just like us" to secure our votes. And as a nation, we did vote for Bush, a non-intellectual cowboy, just like the rest of us Amuricans. So is my thinking on this naive and overly idealistic? I welcome your comments.

A Snowy Day in Tucson

Last night, as I watched the Pats v. Colts in the AFC championship game at a friend's house, it started SNOWING! I know-- I didn't believe it at first either. When someone shouted it was snowing, I looked out the window and said, "that's just a slushy rain, you whimps" (gotta maintain the New England superiority when it comes to matters of heartiness). But it really did snow. And it stuck! And it was still on the ground this morning when I started biking to class (I turned right around to take these pictures).


My roommate, a Tucson native, tells me this is the first time she's seen snow here in about 8 years, and that it's the first time she's seen it stick in about 18 years (when she was 6 and made a snowman). This is more snow than I saw in New England over my winter break. I might have to study the nonlinear dynamics of climate change.


If it's snowing here, hell must have frozen over. Which is the only possible explanation for the outcome of last night's game.

Dillinger Days

The historic Hotel Congress in downtown Tucson was the site of the capture of the infamous John Dillinger's gang of bank robbers in January of 1934. The gang was laying low in the Old Pueblo after a major robbery, and two of Dillinger's men were staying on the third floor at Hotel Congress under aliases. When a fire broke out in the hotel, the robbers had to be rescued by the Tucson fire department through the window. Apparently they tipped the firemen handsomely to go back into their room and retrieve suitcases, which were full of guns and the money they had just stolen during their latest heist. Later, while leafing through some FBI reports, the firemen recognized the outlaws, and the local Tucson police were able to do what several state police forces and the FBI previously could not-- capture Dillinger and his gang.

The City of Tucson and the Arizona Historical Society sponsor "Dillinger Days" each year, a free and extremely entertaining public re-enactment of the capture of Dillinger and the events that lead up to it, right outside of Hotel Congress. The show is performed by a group called Action Unlimited, and includes great street and gun-fights, dancing flapper girls, impressive gun twirling, 1930's band music, antique cars, and witty dialogue.

This is just one more reason that I love this hotel, which also houses and restaurant, a cool performance venue, and several bars. I was just there listening to some local rock and drinkin' some brews in the wee hours of yesterday morning. Thanks for the great weekend, Hotel Congress!

MLK Day, Arizona, and FOOTBALL

The conservative state of Arizona was one of the very last states to observe Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Congress passed the King Day bill in 1986 with a veto-proof majority, and Reagan (himself an opponent of the holiday) signed the bill into law, thereby creating the federal holiday. However, it took until the year 2000 for all 50 states to recognize the holiday and pay employees for the day off. (At least Arizona came around before South Carolina. Not only was this state dead last, but also previously offered employees the choice between MLK Day or three different holidays honoring Confederate war heroes.)

Lawmakers in Arizona prevented legislature creating a state holiday in honor of Martin Luther King from reaching voters for many years. Even when it did make its way onto a ballot in 1990, the voters rejected it. Meanwhile, the National Football League had awarded Superbowl XXVII to the Sun Devils' stadium on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe. But because of the politics surrounding MLK day and the large number of African-American football players, the NFL decided to boycott Arizona. The Players' Association voted to hold the Superbowl that year in Pasadena, California instead. Arizonans certainly seemed to regret the loss of tourism, and approved the state holiday in 1992. (The following year, Sun Devils Stadium was promised to host Superbowl XXX in 1996.)

A revealing historical tidbit about Arizona politics, I thought.

The Ivy League Club

I was just briefly introduced to a friend of a friend. In the three minutes that the introduction was made, my friend made it a point to announce that I had attended Brown, and this other woman had graduated from Columbia. This comment was meant to somehow give my new acquaintance and I something in common. Instead, it just made me feel weird and uncomfortable. Did my friend expect this woman and I to bust out some secret ivy league handshake or something? I don't know the first thing about Columbia as a school, or have any friends who went there. Nor do I feel that having attended an ivy league university makes me any more sophisticated or smart or interesting than any of the grad students I've met at University of Arizona, for example. And no matter where you go to school, I think your education is largely what you make of it. At first, knowing that this woman had attended Columbia didn't make me feel that she and I had any kind of shared experience.

Of course, ivy leaguers do really have something in common: social advantage. Doors probably often open more easily for those with a brand-name school on their resumes. Also, it is often (though of course not always) the case that those who attended brand-name schools were able to do so because of coming from a background of financial advantage. Finally, ivy league graduates have in common the experience of some people's strange reactions upon learning that the graduate attended such a school. I usually think the people who raise their eyebrows at those with an ivy alma mater are the ones creating a class barrier that doesn't really exist. But maybe I've thought wrong. In any case, having had an ivy league education
certainly didn't make me feel any immediate connection to my new acquaintance. I will have to find something else to talk about with her.

My Newest, Favorite-ist Desert Fact: Creosote

When I stepped outside my friend's house tonight to go home after an evening of merrymaking, I immediately smelled something so characteristic of the desert, it made me exclaim. "What is that desert smell?!" "Creosote." My roommates answered me definitively, without any hesitation. I made them say this name to me several times, and then spell it. I have never heard of it before. We got back out of the car for them to point out the green bush on the side of the road, and to put our noses in its little leaves. Now I know that creosote is that Sonoran desert smell. It is a mild but very distinctive smell, and I like it a lot!

I Give Tucson a Bad Rap

Yesterday evening was my last night of holiday vacation on the east coast, and my boyfriend and I went out to dinner with my godparents. I hadn't seen them in a long time, so they asked me all about graduate school and how I like living in Tucson. I found myself on autopilot, spewing my little rant about the ugly southwestern sprawl and how I dislike having to drive to get anywhere.
Later though, I realized I forgot to say how much I like the alternative artsiness that characterizes this little city, and how it is tinted by vibrant Mexican culture too. (Check out this cool photo I took from the Dia de los Muertos parade- a truly awesome experience.) I wake up to gorgeous mountains drenched in sunshine almost every day, and the people are liberal and earthy and interesting.

As I flew into Providence and drove into Boston over my break, I distinctly felt like I was coming home, and that New England is a deeply rooted part of who I am. But flying in over Tucson just a few hours ago, I experienced a genuine happiness to be back here too. It was exciting to find that I could recognize the geography from above. The wide, bone dry washes winding down the mountain sides and through the residential areas told me which direction I was flying in, so I could recognize which of the four mountain ranges I was looking at (the Catalinas). And when I touched down, all the saguaro cacti and palm trees welcomed me back to my new home. What a pleasant surprise, that I should be so glad to see Tucson!

What, me blog?

I've been mentally whining to myself lately about the lack of creative outlets in my current life. Hence, this blog. I am certainly not a writer (you'll see as you read, for sure). Instead, I've just started graduate school in the ridiculously broad, ambiguously defined field of Applied Mathematics. As a first year student, I'm required to take many rigorous core classes to build up my arsenal of fearsome mathematical weaponry. At this point I could wipe out whole armies of fire ants with epsilons and deltas, and use Fourier transforms to decompose the most formidable enemy into a pile of dust. It's not that science isn't a creative endeavor, even when we take the most reductionist approach to a given phenomenon. But I miss constructing something out of my own guts and sharing it with the world. I fear that if I don't soon, I might wake up one day and realize my guts are empty.