On memory.

I read an article today in the New York Times Magazine, entitled "Secrets of a Mind-Gamer: How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete."

The journalist's intentioned story on the U.S. Memory Championships - a series of grueling "events" in memorization administered to a highly-trained group of memory "athletes" - later turned into a participatory self-experiment. The result is a fascinating and introspective take on not only how to sharpen one's abilities to memorize, but also why it is so important that we retain these skills, even in the face of technological conveniences that preclude the necessity to do so.

Occasionally there are those articles that, as I read, I find myself muttering "yes" and "yes" under my breath, and this was one of those. Specifically, this point:

Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” Darnton says. “They had only a few books — the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two — and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.” Today we read books “extensively,” often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. I always find looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, to be a dispiriting experience. There are books up there that I can’t even remember whether I’ve read or not.

Increasingly in the past several years, I have fought to balance my desire to read about as many subjects as possible, with the capacity of my brain to contain it all. I liken the struggle to a never-ending treadmill of information, and I'm always on the brink of falling off from not being able to keep pace.

One thing that I've always been self-conscious about is my memory, and the speed at which I retain information. My closest friends are characterized by being both extremely bright and very well-read (no, these are not synonymous), and always seem to blaze through the information that met them. I wouldn't call it an inferiority complex, but I did envy the ease with which they seemed to read something once, and still be able to discuss it at length months later. It always seemed to take me more time and more repetition to knock things into my noggin, and the consequence of that was feeling like I knew so little about anything.

My first response to these frustrations, a year or two into college, was to increase the volume of my reading. I filled my RSS feed with science blogs, magazine feeds, news feeds, Boing Boing, etc. I spent considerable time and effort poring over websites and articles, in this obsessive quest for all-around knowledge. It took me another year or two to realize that my plan was counterproductive. The good result was that I became interested in many subjects that I'm still fascinated by - for example, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, linguistics, sustainable agriculture - but the serious downside was that I stretched myself out too thin and didn't feel much more conversant about anything than before.

What I had been missing, just as the author of the article pointed out, was intensity of reading. The act of reading a book slowly and learning its contents carefully and thoughtfully, can never be substituted by an attempt to read everything that's published on the internet. It is still important for me to be well-informed on many subjects, but I had been going about it the wrong way.

In the past year, I've come to fully realize the relative efficacy of reading books or good magazines in terms of gaining and retaining knowledge, and have learned how not to be distracted by the overwhelming glut of information online, most of which is useless anyway. Sometimes, I still have lapses of feeling suddenly like I don't know a damn thing, and then feel overwhelmed by all this available knowledge on the internet that I should be constantly feeding to myself. But it is slowly getting easier, and importantly so, because my reading for grad school is necessarily intense and focused. Now, when I'm not reading papers, I have limited reading time for other subjects, and it is important that I learn how to make that time count. (I think that if grad school meant I didn't have time to read about anything other than statistical theory, I would entirely cease to be myself.)

What does this all this have to do with memory?

I spend a lot of time thinking about my memory in the context of retaining the things I read, but as a whole, I think the importance of exercising one's memory is increasingly undervalued in today's world. We don't have to memorize directions anymore - we have GPS devices. No need to memorize a shopping list, or a name or address, or the guitarist in that band, or the setting of that novel. These seem like trivial matters, but trivial matters collectively make up an enormous part of our everyday lives, and for most of these things, we depend on either the internet or other technological tools to do it for us. Memory, just like any other skill, is refined by practice and repetition. To me, dulling our abilities to mentally recall and reproduce would be dulling something that is fundamental to the human experience.

How to be happy.

Ten things:

1. Establish playtime, and hold it sacred.
2. Be always engaged. In surroundings, ideas, people.
3. Eat well.
4. Sleep well.
5. Never idle.

6. Read. Read a lot.

7. Don't hoard.
8. Call your parents often.

9. Be good to your friends. Listen to them. Care.

10. Ensure that happiness is an independent pursuit, the responsibility of which is never to be placed in the hands of anyone else but yourself.

These are things I try to remember.

Lessons.

The year, actually the year-and-a-half, was a formative one for me.

I don’t have a philosophy on life, because having a philosophy on life means that you’ve answered life’s important questions, or that you are satisfied with the answers you have.

My ache to travel is because I want to keep asking and keep looking and keep reformulating. What began as a trip about me, about understanding me myself and I – turned into a lesson that there is nothing you can learn about yourself that is not in the context of someone else.

I learned very quickly that the world is not a scary place. It is filled with people who have all the same fundamental human needs, desires, dreams. The most meaningful friendships I made were from people I knew for a day, a week, an hour. There are big things to be learned from the smallest encounters, and each one began with a simple ‘hello’. Distances between people are easily breached. The unfamiliar becomes the familiar.

In the end, most of the attributes that you pride yourself over – no one cares. No one, except you to an obsessive degree, really cares about how funny you are, or how good your grades, or how pretty, or how athletic. The greatest lesson has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with other people, and how you exist alongside them.

The best decision I made was not just to travel, but to travel alone. It let me fully see that I never once felt alone.

The crucial realization is that I didn't need to travel more than a block to understand this. People relate to each other the same way whether in Cornfield, Indiana or Bhaktapur, Nepal.

I deeply miss my time abroad, but I’m comforted by these lessons that I kept. The new year may not have any more adventures like those of the past year, but I’m going into it with a few more answers.

Vipassana course in Bodhgaya.

The place: The meditation center was a large self-contained compound located on the outskirts of Bodhgaya, with a pagoda, meditation hall, dining hall, and male/female residences.

The pagoda, with about 140 individual cells inside.

Meditation hall where most of our time was spent. The white chair in the front was for our teacher.

The residences.

The people: There were about 50 students -- about a third locals, a third young travels, and a third aging hippies. Surprisingly, only half of us were new to Vipassana. I spoke with many who kept coming back again and again, including one Korean monk and a Bangladeshi woman with several 45-day courses under her belt. We had one elderly Indian teacher who presided over the group meditations and whom we met with once a day to discuss doubts or problems with the technique. In addition, there were two assistant teachers available for personal or material matters.

The amenities: I shared a small room with an older Italian woman named Cinzia. We had bucket showers with solar-heated water, mosquito nets provided, and wool blankets. Contrary to my expectations, the food was great. For breakfast, fruit, bread and jam, and porridge. For lunch, two types of spiced vegetables, lentils, rice, bread, salad (with beets!), and fresh yogurt. For tea, bananas and savory crispy puffed rice. There was absolutely no cost for any of these things, as everything was provided by donations from past students.

My room.

The rules: All students had to observe a set of precepts:

Abstention from killing (yes, even the persistent mosquitoes)
Abstention from stealing
Abstention from all sexual activities
Abstention from telling lies
Abstention from all intoxicants
Abstention from taking food after 12 noon (relaxed for new students with a 5pm tea snack)

Students also pledged to give up distractions of any kind, including reading and writing materials, music, and communication devices. The most significant rule to the course was the observation of a Noble Silence, which not only included speech but eye contact, physical contact, and gestures.

The schedule: Humans are creatures of habit. The time table was followed to the minute, and my adjustment to it helped the passage of the 10 days.

4:00am Wake-up bell
4:30am Meditation
6:30am Breakfast
8:00am Meditation
11:00am Lunch
1:00pm Meditation
5:00pm Tea break
6:00pm Meditation
7:00pm Video discourse
8:30pm Meditation
9:00pm Bedtime

The teaching: The technique and philosophy of Vipassana is true to what Siddhartha Gautama used to become Buddha, "the enlightened one". Vipassana was lost in its native India, and was only preserved in Burma, until in 1969 a man named S.N. Goenka brought it back into its country of origin. Goenka's pedgogy came from a long line of gurus, and the course ran under his teaching, not in person, but by audio and video. We started and ended each meditation session with cassette recordings of his practical instructions. We wrapped up each day with a lecture-style video discourse about the philosophies behind Vipassana.

I'll elucidate the lengthy complicated philosophies in another post, but they were a very big part of my perception of the course and of the experience. For now, I'll focus on the practical rather than the theoretical aspect of the meditation.

Days 1-3: We started off learning not Vipassana ("insight"), but annapana ("breathing") meditation. For the first three days, we were to concentrate our minds exclusively on the nostrils and upper lips, gradually narrowing down the area of focus as the mind became more sensitive to the sensations occurring there. The course began with annapana in order to train the mind for the higher level of concentration required for Vipassana.

Day 4: Formal introduction the Vipassana technique. We were to systematically take sections of the body and observe any sensations occurring there, moving in a direction from head to feet, making sure that the whole area of the body is accounted for. It was starting on this day that it became important not to change positions for the hour-long sessions, which was impossible for me at this stage.

Days 5-8: Refinement of Vipassana. First we practiced reversing directions, so we were moving from feet to head. Then, we tried to concentrate attention on smaller and smaller sections of the body at a time. The nature of the sensations themselves also began to change: instead of feeling only distinct, gross sensations, I could gradually feel subtler, more fleeting sensations throughout the body. The goal by the end of day 8 was to be able to sweep rapidly all over the body and feel uniform sensations throughout, though I never achieved that stage. At least by now, I had found a suitable sitting position and could sit for at least an hour without moving a hair.

Day 9: On this day, advanced students were instructed to penetrate their minds within the body and feel subtle vibrations both inside and outside.

Day 10: After morning meditation, the Noble Silence was broken, in order to try to reintegrate students back into the world. The teaching of Vipassana ended. We continued to meditate to Goenka's audio tapes preaching and singing about love and compassion.

How I fared: Day 1 was excruciatingly long and my morale was very low. Having never done a minute of meditation before immersing myself in this course, my thoughts shot off in a million and one directions. I could not focus on my breathing for over 5 minutes at a time, and the minutes felt like hours. I wondered what I had gotten myself into and how I could possibly last 9 more days like this.

Improvements in my mindset and focus began just the next day. I told myself that if I could just make it to day 6, the halfway point would propel my morale all the way to the end. But day 6 came, and I suffered another depressing day. Vipassana technique was getting harder and harder, and it became more difficult for me to connect the theory with the practice. From here on out, though generally my concentration level and patience got better, I failed to improve any further in the formal Vipassana technique of feeling subtle sensations in the body.

I found it wildly difficult to simply stop thinking. And what's more, not only was my mind shooting off in every imaginable direction, I found that I could actually think about what I was thinking about, which was a bizarre experience. There were the typical thoughts, like memories of my past, and daydreams about my future. But I also spent literally an entire day thinking about food, and dreamed up places I wanted to travel, when and with whom. I sang songs in my head and replayed scenes from movies. Of course, during meditation, I tried honestly to purge thoughts from my mind, but outside of meditation, I had nowhere else to go but my head and the thoughts never for a second stopped.

Reflections: One of the main characteristics about Vipassana and about Buddhism in general is that every human's life is grounded in misery. I couldn't accept this at first, because I feel genuinely happy at all times, but the more I thought about it, the more I considered that maybe some of my approaches to life create a potential for misery that only hasn't yet manifested itself. I'm still trying to figure out what that is. The theory is that misery stems from craving and aversion, and meditation will help purge that misery. But don't craving and aversion make life colorful, negative as they may sometimes be? Without craving and aversion, wouldn't everything just be neutral and bland? Then again, I may be interpreting the definitions of misery, craving, and aversion in the wrong way. More research needs to be done.

Conclusion: Valuable experience, though very difficult. I am going to read more about both the philosophies and then try my hand at this again, hopefully within the next year or so. That's right. I need one more go. I need to feel as if I "did it right", whatever that means.

Bodghaya: I spent the day before and after meditation exploring the small, peaceful town of Bodhgaya. It's the most important place in the world for Buddhists, as reflected by the number of monks from all over the world who make their pilgrimages here.

The main market was teeming with locals selling prayer beads, prayer wheels, Tibetan jewelry, and other knick-knacks.


Located next to the main market was the Mahabodhi temple, where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Its tall spire towers above the town. In the large courtyard around the temple, dozens of monks spread out their cushions to meditate and pray.


The Mahabodhi tree, under which the Buddha forced himself to meditate without moving until he had achieved nirvana. It's not exactly the original tree, but a distant offshoot of it. A sapling from the original was taken to Sri Lanka and planted, and from that, another cutting was taken back to Bodhgaya and this is it.


Tibetan monks under the tree. I sat here with them for a long time, just feeling the vibrations of the place.


I write this all from Nepal! Posting will be unpredictable for the next two weeks, but my next updates will be about this beautiful country.

On language.

I don't consider myself a shy nor clammish person, but I feel totally at odds with people at my workplace, not least because they speak almost exclusively in Hindi. Sometimes I go an entire work day without opening my mouth, save for ordering food at the cafeteria. A colleague's birthday was last week, and I, the lone foreigner, was dragged to the office party. I shoved my hands in my pockets, not knowing how to express myself or when to interject amidst all the Hindi. The only English they spoke was to ask me whether I wanted a soft drink. I'm sure they meant no ill, but I was absolutely isolated.

My discomfort kick-started some musings about language that I've had in the back of my mind since I arrived.

One estimate says that in the next century, the world's current 6000 languages will have dwindled down to just 600. How do languages die? Indigenous peoples, historically living on the edges of modern society, will migrate towards urban centers, where they will mingle with speakers of dominant languages like English. Their children will speak the language to their parents, but not in the public realm. A generation or two later, the indigenous language will be forgotten. Trying to preserve all these tongues against the forces of globalization is like trying to keep ice from melting in the summer.

I've loved languages for as long as I can remember. To me, they are at once aesthetically pleasing, academically interesting, and steeped in the culture and psyche of its speakers. It is hard for me to think objectively about the death of a language, but there are two sides of the coin.

Obviously, language extinction is no cause for joy, but what are the legitimate benefits to having an internationally dominant tongue, for the price of a thousand others? Are our anxieties about culture dying along with language as dire as we instinctively feel?

The second question can be restated: Which came first, culture or language? If you assume that if a language dies then culture is lost with it, then you're assuming that culture depends on language, which implies that language came first. But what about the distinctive culture of blacks in America? And Aussies and New Zealanders and the British? It seems that the culture of these English-speaking groups can still be clearly distinguished from each other, despite the common language. Can the same be said for separate tribal groups who come to share a tongue?

We can think about language like we think about evolution; they diverge on a geographical basis. A lanugage that originates in a central location will mutate and develop in different ways if its original speakers are physically separated. And if the peoples are separated, they will adapt to their respective environments and social situations in different ways. Hence, culture. Now, suppose we once again artificially reinstate a uniform language among these divergent groups. Do the cultures bleed together once again just because their languages are now the same?

Hindi has no immediate threat of extinction, as my office experiences clearly show, but there is evidence of fading. Since English is the official language of India, it is quite easy to live here without any knowledge of Hindi. Everything is written in English. Except for the poorest residents, everyone speaks it, and fluency closely correlates with education level (or, I suppose, years in the tourism industry). Bollywood movies, television, and radio programs often use an amusing "Hindenglish" blend, and countless English words have become integrated into Hindi itself.

Many Indians are now unable to read or write Hindi, and it's not just the younger generation. The father of one of my Indian friends is totally illiterate, being a successful businessman who uses primarily English in his work, and I know he's not alone in that demographic. One colleague told me recently that having grown up speaking Bengali, her English is now better than her Hindi, despite having lived in India all her life.

The most apparent benefit of more English in India is, ironically, cultural exchange. I can talk to more people, read more books, more easily travel, watch more movies, and generally feel more aware of what this country is about. And let's not forget that the reason why I've been able to befriend the other foreign interns here is because they've all shed their home languages in favor of English, but precisely because of this, we can more effectively learn about our differences.

The thought of the world's languages merging into one uniform tongue should, and does, make us feel uncomfortable, but perhaps not because of the potential loss of culture, but because of aesthetic and intellectual reasons.

Give me thoughts, readers. What are some points that I'm overlooking?

Delhi's growing pains.

It rained one day last week, intermittently and not too hard. It was enough, however, to throw the city into mild chaos. The dusty streets turned instantly to mud, outside markets scrambled for their makeshift tarps, and cycle rickshaw drivers cursed their choice of profession. Most astonishingly, my commute to and from work took significantly longer than usual. I sat in the bus, staring out at the sea of unmoving cars all competing for space, and wondered: How can a place that is plagued by heavy monsoons a quarter of the year be so poorly designed for rain?

With highways that are covered with vehicles to the last centimeter, even a slight slowing of speed has immense yo-yo effects collectively. Moreover, improper drainage forces sections of roads to close, which creates a bottleneck effect of remaining routes. I was totally appalled by this. We're not talking about some small city in an underdeveloped country; this is New Delhi! This is the center of some of the world's most spectacular economic development, and not even the basic necessity of rainwater drainage is properly attended to.

I came to India just days after the monsoon ended, and I'm constantly reminded by my flatmates how lucky I am to have escaped those horrors. They tell stories of having to walk knee-deep in muddy stillwater, how it takes two additional hours to get to work, and how offices occasionally flood. One mentioned that a small cut on his foot became infected from wading through dirty water. There are undoubtedly plenty more serious health consequences from the lack of proper drainage.

Is the city, the country, growing too fast for its own good? It's like a child who experiences a massive growth spurt overnight, and his body's necessary functions are unable to keep up.

An exercise in humility.

It’s not that I haven’t seen dire poverty before. The most vivid memories of visiting China for the first time aren’t of family or food or noise, but of how beggars slept outside, covered in flies and dirt, directly under the entrance of the city’s upscale shopping malls. The contrast seemed stark to me even then, at the age of twelve when at any other time I would have been more concerned with my gangly arms than with the social run-offs of a country’s booming economy.

In America, it’s easy to forget about the poor. They don’t send their grimy children to implore you to buy their wares. They don’t clean your house and wash your laundry for almost free. They don’t sleep on the sidewalks a dozen to a block, under torn, weathered tarps. The rich don’t touch them, and they don’t ever have to see them.

Here, it is impossible to ignore the hardship that is behind nearly everything I see and touch. Life is so hard. Why?

Once, I heard a friend state that “beauty is an accident”, and I mulled over the quote with interest. But increasingly I see that not only is beauty an accident, but so is success, wealth, social circumstance. People pride themselves on hard work, integrity, charm, and all sorts of voluntary factors to explain their successes. Out of this attitude comes a sense of entitlement, a sense that you deserve your place in life, that you earned it, that those who struggle beneath you are there for a reason and can struggle themselves out if they really wanted to.

But this is false.

Imagine the trajectory of one’s life as a tree diagram. With each stage of life, we have choices, and each choice leads to more, and more, and more, until we have experienced a complex labyrinth of decisions, interactions, and influences that together determine where exactly we are at present. The key observation, however, is that a huge number of these choices, and certainly most of the important ones, are made for us long before we can talk or think or take reasoned actions ourselves.

Hard work and integrity and all those things are not the deciding factor of where we are, but should be seen simply as details in a life path that is already largely predetermined. Suffice it to say that I doubt the existence of free will, but this has nothing to do with God.

Despite what it may seem, the emphasis in these thoughts is not to deplore the futility of human effort. I’d be stupid to deny the observation that humans do regularly break the mold and beat the odds, and I allow for some correlation between conscious individual decisions and resulting position in life (though, as I said, not to the extent that most people convince themselves).

Rather, I’m simply mulling over the relative efficiency of a bottom-up to top-down approach in alleviating human hardship. Let me explain.

Go back to the tree diagram. Among a million people, there are a million paths through the tree, leading to a million outcomes and a million stories. One way to solve the problems of these masses of people is by working backward, by starting at where they are now and working down, working individually. Aid workers and people on the ground are essential components of any effort to extend help to those who need it.

We need some element of this top-down approach, but there are shortcomings to using it singularly. For example, institutions like the World Bank and IMF throw vast chunks of money at African countries with rosy goals of alleviating hunger and poverty and disease, but the results are disproportionately low to the effort and costs.

The goal of a bottom-up approach is to intervene early, thereby preventing problems from happening at all, and precluding the necessity of solving them if/when they happen. Instead of leaving a cookie jar out and punishing a child for stealing, remove the cookie jar. Relating this to the tree analogy, this involves steering people or protecting people early on from going down certain paths that typically lead to suffering. If providing education to a child saves him from the streets, we have by a simple push set him on a trajectory far removed from the uglier alternative. This is just a small example. There are much bigger and much more compelling ways to change the flow of the system, but all involve altering the source, not the outcome.

I offer, of course, zero empirical evidence for these thoughts, just anecdotes and observations. Even so, it makes some sense to me, and perhaps the evidence will follow.

Social environment.

It’s amazing how quickly people adapt to their social environment. Consciously or subconsciously, it is hard to resist the draw to mimic the behaviors of the bigger group. When social habits are as different as they are here, these behavioral changes can be drastic.

There are the superficial conformities. For example, most people quickly learn to wear more conservative and looser-fitting clothes – good luck warding off the advances from creepy men and blatant finger-pointing from women if you bare shoulders or show leg! Adopting new eating manners is another way to avoid unwanted attention. Some have even learned to nod once to the side to say “yes”; no one nods up and down here.

The most interesting behavioral changes, of course, are in attitude.

Most Indians have blatant disregard for the environment. In Delhi’s case, this is not for a lack of governmental effort. Plastic bags are banned from a fair proportion of establishments (it may even be banned in all of Delhi, for that matter), but I haven’t seen a single place enforce it. Tiny trees are planted around the city center, surrounded by signs urging people to care for the environment, which seems like a rather weak form of advertising. City buses and auto-rickshaws run on natural gas, but there has been nothing to regulate the myriad other forms of transportation that clog city highways. These efforts are well-meaning, but they don’t seem to make a dent in the psyche of the city’s residents.

Without public trash cans, streets are used as a dumping ground. People use small plastic bags to carry everything. There is no recycling; even if it was available, I can’t imagine people being motivated to use it. For the typical household, water bottles and jugs provide the only form of filtered water besides boiling. Forget organic, free-range, local; even the thought is laughable.

The environmentally-conscious who first come to India may wallow in guilt for a little while. But since it’s extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to be green in the Western sense of the word, the guilt goes away very quickly and turns into active habit. If everyone else chucks their bottles in the gutter, and there’s nowhere else to throw it, and no recycling available, why not and who can fault me? I’ve seen this attitude shift with nearly every other foreigner that I’ve met. Even the ones from more environmentally progressive countries like Australia consider me uncommonly ecological for refilling my steel bottle instead of buying water.

One way to explain this is cognitive dissonance. People nurse their conscience by making themselves think in ways that justify their behaviors.

This briefly calls to mind the Stanford prison experiment, conducted in 1971, where participants were randomly assigned to roles of either prison guard or prisoner. In a short time, the prison guards became psychologically abusive and sometimes violent towards the prisoners, and the prisoners became submissive and despondent. It says a lot that the guards were able to justify their actions despite the fact that they never would have behaved in such ways in a normal context.

People are so powerless against social and psychological forces.

On anger.

Recent tweets between Justin and me.

Me: Anger is useless.
Justin: Wrong. Anger protects you from pain.
Me: Wrong. Anger causes pain.
Justin: Tell you what. How about we each write a blog post about our views on anger and pain?

The immediate cause of anger is typically an external source that does some kind of harm or poses some kind of threat. A person becomes angry toward something or someone; the feeling is one of indignance, of being wronged, of needing to preserve one's dignity or position or control.

I allow that there might be some natural reason behind the feeling of anger. Perhaps we're hardwired to feel anger, because as cavemen, it provoked our bodies to tense up and prepare to deal with dangerous and often life-threatening situations. Feelings of anger are strong motivations to act against what has harmed us.

It's true, there is no emotion that makes me feel more like an unrestrained animal than anger. In the very few times I have been uncontrollably angry in my life, I respond with a series of uncontrollable reactions: my voice becomes loud, my heart thuds, adrenaline pumps, my hands wave around wildly, my eyes blaze. This is not the picture of a highly evolved, modern, rational, problem-solving human being.

I say that anger is useless and that it causes pain because it achieves nothing, usually exaggerates or exacerbates the problem, and leaves a person more mentally drained than if he had just thought objectively about the situation.

Of course, anger is impossible to avoid completely. Here, it is useful to differentiate between feelings of anger and actions of anger. Feelings often can't be helped, but the inability to control when feelings bleed over to action can be considered a psychological weakness. I say all this with my recent infuriating experiences in mind. I raged and I screamed into my pillow, but to what end? There was nothing that came of it, and only when my head had cooled could I take useful steps towards solving my problem.

It is difficult to conjure examples of people approaching a situation constructively when angry, and the vast, vast majority of situations in which people get angry are not serious enough to merit the emotion at all.

The floor is open for discussion.

Time as a winding path.

Consider the construction of a Mobius strip. Take a strip of paper, give it a twist, and connect the ends. Now, starting at the seam, trace a line along the length of the strip. Curiously, the line will be on both sides of the paper before it eventually meets back with itself. What this amounts to is that a 1-dimensional line going in a single direction on a 2-dimensional strip will loop back to itself without ever having left the line, and without ever noticing that the strip has been twisting and turning in 3-dimensional space.

Now consider this analogue. I am a 3-dimensional figure moving through 4-dimensional time in a single direction, but there is this possibility that time is actually taking a tortuous route through 5-dimensional space without me ever noticing. The existence of five dimensions would allow for me to loop back to myself on occasion, without having to leave the seemingly unidirectional path of time. This is a much less scientific and much more romantic way to mull over the origin of memories, and for the religiously inclined, of reincarnation.

Reality is much, much more than can ever be conceived.

PS. Ruminations on the Klein bottle next time.

Q & Answer, part one.

What was it like growing up in the bible belt where most of the population is white? Do you ever see yourself living back in TN?

Restricting. Home and family is in Tennessee, but most certainly not my future abode. I could point out specific reasons, but it ultimately comes down to simply not feeling a fit.

What three careers do you honestly see yourself having?

University professor, given I have enough will to trudge through the bitch-work that is required of lower-level profs before getting tenure. This is the path I've been planning for the longest period of time.

Given the burgeoning demand for doctoral statisticians and the range of compelling problems I could solve with a job in industry, this is an increasingly attractive option. Statistics has applications in everything from mapping genes to modeling environmental phenomena to evaluating education policy. I'd be spoiled for choice in choosing projects to work on.

Food writer or professional eater. Something in which I'm required to eat food, create food, make judgments on food, or think about food for the majority of my day. These will always be things I do on the side, but who knows? perhaps an opportunity will somday arise, and I can live the dream in the style of Anthony Bourdain.

Do you think it is okay that fine arts like opera, ballet, classical music, and museums cost so much money for people to audience?

Of course I don't like it. It is always better for more people to have more exposure to these types of things, and lowering the costs of admission would aid that effort. But like anything else, good things cost money, and actors, singers, dancers, and musicians, as well as set designers, choreographers, writers, and directors have to be paid in order to keep them in the business. Raise the prices, you hurt the audience; lower the prices, you hurt the industry. You could ask the government to subsidize fine arts, but that doesn't seem like a viable option at present.

Are you grateful your parents raised you in America? Or do you feel like you were sort of robbed because you were not raised in China?

I don't really spend much time thinking about the what-ifs or the could-have-beens. I certainly don't feel robbed of anything. Growing up in America has undoubtedly given me a better education and a standard of living I wouldn't have had in China, but I don't doubt that had I been raised in China, I would have used whatever resources I was given in much the same way.

What are you doing in life, and why are you enjoying it?

These two questions are the same. What I am doing in life, by definition, I enjoy. I try to learn about everything I can get my hands on, and I place great importance on the warmth of friendships and the love of family.