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.