25 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(04/26/10 11:31pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Seduced by an essay contest, I read Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” last summer. The book was as seductive as the cash. I began to think she might be right, at least about freedom. I mean, who doesn’t like freedom?After a while, though, I realized Rand’s literature has little merit and that her philosophy opposed my own thought. I never entered the contest. I have no problem with idealism. It’s not that I don’t think there should be a vision for an ideal society. I just wouldn’t want to live in Rand’s utopia.Rand’s ideal society regards gifts as allowable but inessential. I began this school year writing about simple gifts, ones the giver doesn’t expect to be returned. A gift economy creates a closely bound community because a simple gift creates a connection between the giver and receiver.The novelist’s Shangri-La is a pure exchange economy. Exchange maintains distance between people. Buying a burger from someone doesn’t make you their friend. In fact, exchange requires some distrust, to ensure that the transaction is fair.Her novels are vehicles for her philosophy of Objectivism. As literature, they are forced, repetitive and melodramatic.Rand essentially has two types of characters: the honest industrialist and the evil communist. One naturally identifies with the former. Who wouldn’t want to be a great industrialist (John Galt) over a weak, insecure looter (James Taggart)? As she praises her noble “movers,” the reader’s ego inflates. Meanwhile, hatred builds for the “looters,” the ones who take our rightful possessions.This dichotomy is also gendered. Although one of the protagonists of “Atlas Shrugged” is the female industrialist Dagny Taggart, it’s not difficult to see through Rand’s characterization, which codes Dagny as masculine despite her sex. Likewise, James Taggart’s weakness is coded as feminine, associating him with the traditional dependent role of wife.Even though she has men acting like girls and vice versa, there is still a rigid role for each.John Galt’s insufferable monologue in “Atlas Shrugged” is pure ventriloquism. He tells us what to think for sixty pages. At some point, the heavy-handed propaganda gets old.Comically, Casey McGlasson began her laudatory column on Rand that appeared here last week by warning against platitudes but then followed up with eight of her own. However, this style is appropriate for praising Rand.After all, Ayn Rand doesn’t do subtle. One platitude follows after another.Harry Binswanger, a philosopher friend of Rand, left a comment on McGlasson’s column, ridiculously placing Rand’s novels “in the top rank of all post-Renaissance art.”Sorry, but James Joyce would eat Ayn Rand for breakfast.One thing is certain: Rand remains relevant as a cultural phenomenon.Every time a major social program gets passed, she gets dragged out of the closet to provide an intellectual foundation for the opposition to “socialism,” or the “welfare state.”She’s great for lending a veneer of legitimacy to diffuse anger about taxes and “handouts.” Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society sold as many Rand books as health care and bailouts.I read Rand, considered her and rejected her. Make up your own mind, but remember that saying something over and over does not make it true. E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(04/19/10 10:05pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>This last August, thousands of khaki-clad, over-excitable teenage boys descended on Bloomington. They were Boy Scouts, and they were here for the National Order of the Arrow Conference.While being surrounded by so many uniforms might have been a strange experience for other IU summer residents, it seemed almost normal for me. The only weird thing was not being one of them myself. After all, I am an Eagle Scout.Most impressions I had of scouts during NOAC were positive. However, I closely scrutinize the actions of scouts since I know the principles the organization professes. Moreover, I especially expect the Order of the Arrow, as Scouting’s honor society, to exemplify these values.However, on two occasions at NOAC, one general and one specific, scouts came up short.First, I was angered by a group of scouts who obnoxiously taunted cars as they passed by Collins. Such behavior I expect from fraternity houses, not scouts. I do commend, however, several nearby leaders who quickly handled the situation after being notified.The general public also holds scouts to high standards. One powerful negative impression such as this could forever taint that reputation.Second, after the conference ended, I found the campus littered with NOAC materials. “Leave No Trace” applies equally to campus as wilderness.My scoutmaster, who made us canvass every campsite for trash, would have been appalled.These instances speak to a wider concern I have about trends I notice in Scouting.Boys are reaching the rank of Eagle Scout too young. Some troops, known as “Eagle factories,” help boys get boxes checked off but don’t ensure that they have reached the required maturity. Fourteen-year-olds generally do not undertake meaningful, independent leadership projects. I don’t have the space to properly address such ills as rampant pseudo-militarism or the accompanying Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell-style intolerance. I do not approve of the latter, and the former should be tempered, even though it is more structural.These concerns raise the question of the purpose of the Boy Scouts. Is the focus on getting badges or gaining the knowledge they represent? After all, a visit to an embroidery shop would be a more efficient way to decorate a uniform.Does the organization exist to teach wilderness survival skills or suburban survival skills? If the latter, then the young Eagles get all they need out of the program: a nice looking medal and a resume bullet point.The first objective of Scouting should be putting boys in contact with nature. In a time when we are constantly bombarded by meaningless communication, going to the woods is more important than ever.Humans in a modern world are still human. We still need sunrises, exhaustion and fresh air. We still need the basic skills to contend directly with nature. We still need to “be prepared” to make fires, wield an axe, tie knots and grow plants. We still need to know the land.Scouting is supposed to serve those needs, while teaching boys to be “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(04/12/10 10:09pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Rejoice: it is the season of transformation. Why be joyful? Ask the trees this question, and they will respond with blossoms. Ask the birds, and they will reply with song. Ask the campus, and it will answer by sprouting sunbathers in every quad. Spring, a time of transformation, is here.The in-betweenness of spring is exciting. A threshold, it marks the beginning of something new. Nature is transforming herself: casting off wintry laundry and donning clean, new clothes. We trade snowshoes for sneakers, scarves for sundresses.But transformations are not limited to the natural world. We need constant personal transformation, or else we risk spiritual death by the familiar. Transformations don’t just happen; they require energy, a push forward. The energy of the sun itself triggers spring.Personal transformations get their forward momentum from open spaces, gaps in which we yearn for something new. The gap between satisfaction with a current state and the desire for freshness creates a drive to fill that space with new life. Transformations also need a physical removal, in time and space. Daily routine doesn’t schedule in time for transformation: “shower, shave, spiritual renewal, eat breakfast.”Where do we go to be transformed?College is one of those places. Sitting in between the naive wasteland of adolescence and the looming “real world,” college is almost by definition a site of transformation.In particular, it should be a time when we dare to ask hard questions about what were taught as children and either reclaim or reject those things. Are your parents liberal or conservative? In either case, what do you call yourself? Is it the same as them by default or by choice? Sometimes, though, we must also get away from college to be transformed. The daily teeth-grinding we do to keep up studies and appearances is exhausting and prevents the sort of contemplative work necessary for serious change. Getting away, whether to an organized retreat or just for a walk, helps create that silent space that is the beginning of transformation.Two weekends ago was Easter Sunday. If you celebrated that holiday, I ask you: why?Were you there because your mom called to nag? Did you show up to church because that’s “just what you’re supposed to do on Easter?”Or were you there to be transformed? Easter is the season of rebirth and transformation. After all, it celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Easter isn’t over yet: it continues through the end of May. It is an entire season, the true season of joy. For everyone, but especially those for whom this season is part of the tradition you know, this is an opportunity to make space for something new. Now is the time to let some joy seep into the in-between places, the silent gaps. In the midst of spring, Earth provides constant reminders of natural transformation, and spring is a great time for our own new beginnings.E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(04/05/10 9:17pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Dozens of law students read from enormous tomes while a collection of spiky, colorful objects suspended by wire from the ceiling three stories above quietly rotate. I have walked past the sign on the door of the Law Library warning pesky undergraduates to keep out. I have ascended the lightly stained wood stairs and now peer out at these pleasantly regular yet surprising works of art. I admire the intricately balanced color scheme which complements the complex symmetries of form. But I am the only one to notice these blueprints of stars from a universe more ordered than ours.The geometric sculptures of Morton C. Bradley Jr. form my favorite collection of art owned by IU. They pique my imagination not just as a math major but as a human.I love trying to uncover the structure behind the work. I circle underneath, staring at the backbone (is it a stellated dodecahedron?) while being stared at by those who have lifted their eyes away from their laptops long enough to notice me.A friend and I received equally curious glances from seemingly apathetic MBA students when we made a pilgrimage last week to view the Bradley sculptures above the stairwell in the graduate side of Kelley School of Business.We discovered Bradley’s use of negative space, highlighted by the white wall behind the sculptures. This phenomenon was especially striking with one particular piece, an example of what Bradley termed a constellation — a grouping of star-like objects which collaborate to yield an emergent form.Only when viewed at certain angles, a pair of arrows pointing in opposite directions appeared, as if some cosmic coincidence had fated these reddish stars to align in perfect syzygy.There are only five completely regular three-dimensional solids, the so-called Platonic solids. Every (finite) rotational symmetry in space is built from the symmetries of these solids (or the symmetries of a 2-D regular polygon).Sculpture limited to strictly regular forms would be boring. Instead, there must be some surprise, some artistic twist to the geometry. While Bradley draws extensively from the Platonic forms (especially the dodecahedron and its dual, the icosahedron), he also explores a tremendous range of variations. He uses curves, truncations, stellations, self-intersections, twists and most importantly, color.Bradley was a color scientist. He systematically investigated the relationships between colors and created “color orders” — indices of the numerical labels for colors which produce particular visual effects. By combining the possibilities of color with the variations of geometric form, Bradley invented his own artistic palette.The IU Art Museum has an extensive web module dedicated to the collection, with a background essay written by Rachel Huizinga that I have found indispensable. I recommend exploring the web module; however, the proper way to experience these sculptures is in person. There are a few in the Wells Library and the Art Museum itself and many more in the graduate wing of the Kelley and the Law Library. I encourage you to check them out. Maybe then I won’t be the only one staring at the ceiling. E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(03/29/10 10:27pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Schools can learn a lot from television. After all, a class in school and a television show both aim to tell a story — whether it be the history of Rome or the adventures of Arthur (the aardvark). Moreover, television succeeds: It holds the attention of millions of children every day. How does television construct its narratives to string people along, begging to see the next episode?Sean O’Sullivan, a professor of English at Ohio State, delivered a lecture Friday in which he examined the power of serials. He explained how serials — from Dickens novels to the TV show “Lost” — engage audiences through a push and pull of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. O’Sullivan posited three parts of a serial: “the new, the old and the gap.” The new is the excitement of the next installment. The old is the nostalgia for what readers or viewers fell in love with originally — often the beloved Season One. But maybe most important is the gap, a period of time between parts of a serial — the week between new episodes or the summer between seasons. The gap is the time when viewers fill in for themselves what might come next. They spin their own theories and revel in the manifold endings which exist simultaneously in their own minds. How can education exploit the power of serials to engage students?Teachers need to write, direct and produce a TV series for the classroom. They need to continually satiate the desire for the new, in other words, the genuinely interesting content. They need to refer back to the old, to beloved books and ideas which fired up interest in years past. They need to construct the gap by opening up spaces in their students’ knowledge, whetting an appetite for more of the new to fill them.Like television, which is constructed in discrete parts called episodes and seasons, education is organized into parts called class periods and years. In order to sustain the energy from day to day and year to year, educators must tease students, keeping them guessing what the next piece in the puzzle might be.O’Sullivan examined the widespread anxiety and dissatisfaction surrounding the end of serials. Anyone who knows a “Lost” fan knows the worry that questions won’t be answered, that the loose end they’ve been carrying since Season One will remain untied. Fortunately, education will not suffer from this problem. Education is a lifelong process. It is an open-ended serial. Gaps in knowledge can always be opened and then filled. In college, the gap should become a gulf. An essential experience of an undergraduate education should be the soul-crushing revelation that one’s knowledge is pathetically small. College students, even the best ones, should at some point hit a brick wall. They should encounter something that is more than “really hard,” something literally impossible to understand. If it takes reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” so be it. At this point, it is your responsibility, not your professor’s, to see those mind-numbingly large gaps and start filling them. If college is easy, you’re doing it wrong. E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(03/22/10 9:44pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In elementary school, we learn how easy it is to multiply by zero and one. Anything times one is itself, and anything times zero is zero. Things seem to be going well when we next learn that anything divided by one is itself. By analogy, we guess that anything divided by zero is zero.But when we test this theory and divide by zero, all we get is an error message from on high. The teacher-prophet comes down from the mountain and delivers the First Commandment of Mathematics: “Thou shalt not divide by zero.”Unfortunately, the teacher gives little more explanation for this immutable prohibition than “because it’s undefined.”To see why we can’t divide by zero, we should back up and ask what it means to divide.Division is just a name for multiplication by the reciprocal. The reciprocal is the “multiplicative inverse” or “one over” a number. So to divide by zero, we’d need to know what “1/0” means. Except that if we assume the usual properties of numbers (precisely speaking, the ring axioms), it becomes difficult to define “1/0.” Let’s pretend “1/0” is a number, called n (in honor of Chuck Norris, who supposedly can divide by zero). Then what’s 0*n?Well, on the one hand, 0*n = 1, because that’s what we wanted n to be: the reciprocal of 0. And a number times its reciprocal is 1 by definition. But on the other hand, 0*n = 0, since zero times anything is zero. So 1=0. Yikes!This is not good: multiplying the last equation by any number shows it is equal to zero. Thus, using the normal rules of numbers, we can divide by zero only if we are willing to live in a universe where the only number is zero.However, there are ways of changing our definitions to allow division by zero.After learning about limits in calculus, students often think that “1/0” should be infinity. But even in calculus, this limit does not exist. Approaching zero from one side, we get positive infinity, and from the other we get negative infinity. The other problem is that neither “infinity” is a real number. One can, however, add an unsigned “point at infinity” to the real numbers to get the “real projective line.” Here, anything nonzero divided by zero is infinity. However, there are still problems with defining 0/0.Some work from the past 10 years has created algebraic systems which allow division by zero. Called “wheels,” these extensions of the usual numbers have somewhat aesthetically perverse axioms.Division must be defined not as multiplication by the reciprocal, but as a separate operation. Also, anything times zero is not necessarily zero in a wheel. The problem with discussing division by zero (and other tricky issues like why 0.999...=1) is a lack of clarity in definitions. Internet arguments on such things often devolve until nobody knows what definitions are in force. Thus, except in some exotic or trivial settings, division by zero is not defined. Usually, it’s just not allowed. In other words: you can’t divide by zero, except when you can. E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(03/09/10 12:41am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I never write in cursive. My elementary school teachers promised, “When you get to middle school, you’ll have to use cursive.” However, my teachers later on generally preferred print, for the sake of legibility.In middle school, my teachers warned, “You might get away with turning in late homework now, but when you get to high school, you won’t be able too.”But to my surprise, late papers were often accepted by my high school teachers.In high school, the teachers preached, “When you get to college, nobody will make you go to class, and your whole grade will be based on a couple of tests and a term paper.” They used to talk about giant classes and professors who don’t know your name. Yet again, I encountered none of these when I actually stepped onto campus. None of my classes have been larger than those in high school, and absences often have negative grade consequences. My professors know my name and often much more.Why do we spend so much time anxiously anticipating the next stage of our educational careers and not focusing on the present one?High school students today now spend more time thinking about college than high school. College application deadlines have kept up with presidential primary elections, creeping ever earlier in the year. Students incorrectly think applying early significantly increases their chances of admission and rush to apply.As soon as students hit high school, the college admissions test game begins. Schools that desperately need to boost test scores drive teachers to incorporate test prep from day one.Freshmen receive SAT vocabulary lists, practicing for a test they won’t take for another two or three years. Juniors take the PSAT, locking in their eligibility for National Merit Scholarships almost two years before their first college class.But now we’ve made it. We’ve reached the promised land of college, and the rat race is behind us. Right? Wrong. The pre-med crows start gearing up for the MCAT with freshman biology. Business majors practice mock presentations and start thinking about internships and networking. Even humanities departments bill their programs as resume builders. Science majors get into labs to get research experience. The most ambitious begin taking graduate courses early or do multiple majors just for the sake of it.Instead of living in the next stage of the game, instead of trying to be somewhere we’re not, let’s chill. Let’s just live here, at this time and place, for a while and not in the future. We spent four years prepping and jockeying to get here. Let’s not anticipate so much we forget where we are now. E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(03/01/10 10:56pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“What do you do with a B.A. in English?” asks Princeton, the character from “Avenue Q” for whom “the world is a big scary place.”Today, I’m eating my words. Last September, I lampooned the “proliferation” of majors, trying to combat the overcredentialization happening in college today.Now I plead guilty. Last Wednesday, I officially declared a second degree, a Bachelor of Arts in English. I find ways to circumnavigate my previous stance, rationalizing that back then I was really only lashing out against the bad reasons people use for adding majors. For example, I still find it indefensible to add a major because “it’s only a few more classes.” These evasions, though, still seem hollow, so I’ll just concede the hypocrisy and move on. While this addition might come as a surprise to the people who know me as The Math Guy, it is not foreign to me.I come from word people. My father is a word man, as was his father before him. They are English teachers. The love of words is in my blood, and this inheritance evokes a silent stirring which draws me back to the word.Along with surprise, I often get kudos for being “well-rounded” or using “both sides of the brain.” I find this frustrating. First, it exemplifies the tendency to only treat interests which are legitimized by a degree as genuine.Second, I dislike the right-brain/left-brain conceit. It assumes that just because the brain is split into hemispheres that the mind is divisible into two meaningfully distinct halves. Based in some science, it has been overextended, overused and oversimplified. There is one reaction I don’t receive. My math major shields me from the interrogators who demand of most English majors, “But who will hire you?” It is a common lament among English majors who, after so many rounds of questioning, have resigned themselves to the expectation of post-baccalaureate unemployment.The imperative of economic value extends beyond individuals. Increasingly, cash-strapped universities and society in general force the humanities to justify their existence.These trends have followed from the commodification of the college degree. Because universities are now the gatekeepers to the white-collar professional world, students see the campus as a marketplace and the college experience as an exchange of goods. We pay a (rapidly increasing) price for a diploma, which we then try to trade for a comfy, salaried position.But as the “Avenue Q” song observes, our technocratic society views a B.A. in English as a “useless degree” because it does not give students a specialized set of skills.Indiana University should be different. IU’s roots are in the liberal arts, and its core unit, the College of Arts and Sciences, is a liberal arts institution. Moreover, we do not have an engineering school.However, even here, we have a business school whose careerism is borderline dangerous and attitudes toward the humanities that are inappropriate for a university like ours.While reality can be harsh, I’ll end on a note of idealism courtesy of Princeton:“But somehow I can’t shake / the feeling I might make / a difference to the human race.”E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(02/15/10 9:58pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“My dad’s stronger than your dad!” “No he’s not!” “Yes he is, times a million!” “No he’s not, times infinity!” “Yes he is, times infinity plus one!”We’ve all heard some variation of this exchange between children. In the heat of a superposition contest, eventually they confuse (how cute) infinity with a really big number.Everyone knows that nothing is bigger than infinity. Silly kids.Except the infinity we know and love — the counting numbers — is only one of many infinities, each new infinity larger than the last one in a meta-infinite version of the playground dispute.In fact, there are an infinite number of infinities. The silly kids were right all along.Here is where the common-sense police come to put a stop to this nonsense. Gather the pitchforks, light the torches: we will not have infinity escaping on us.We like the old infinity, the tame one. The one that wasn’t so ... infinite.Common sense is exactly what it claims to be: common. It refers to the intuition most people have about the world. As such, common sense is great for choosing what to eat or whom to trust.But common sense never discovered anything. It never set foot in any place where intuition fails at first. Scientific intuition, for one, takes years to build.The challenge of an introductory physics class is to break the intuitions built up by living in an environment dominated by subtle forces like air resistance and friction, and replacing them by Newtonian laws and algebraic equations. The challenge of a modern physics class is to break the intuitions built up in the introductory class in the cases when things are very fast or very small.Quantum mechanics is weird. Richard Feynman even said it “describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.”Last week, it snowed a lot in Washington D.C. This fact was used by climate-change skeptics to appeal to common sense: Sean Hannity even said the snowstorm “would seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global-warming theories.”This claim is more absurd than quantum mechanics. First, it presumes that one man, Al Gore, fabricated global warming. Instead, thousands of scientists have established it beyond a reasonable doubt.Second, Hannity spouts a common-sense fallacy: that local weather proves anything about global climate. This is untrue. Bill Nye the Science Guy went on the Rachel Maddow Show to set the record straight, explaining that such flawed reasoning is anti-scientific and even “unpatriotic.”New ideas always contradict common sense. Newton was absurd because he contradicted Aristotle; likewise, quantum mechanics was absurd because it contradicted Newton. Both quantum mechanics and climate science are unsettling. One says the universe is uncertain and strange. The other predicts dire consequences if we don’t change our comfortable lifestyles. But they each hold the legal tender of science — evidence. We cannot afford to ignore what is true for the sake of common sense. E-mail: brownjoh@indiana.edu
(02/08/10 11:34pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to visit the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and see one of the rarest books in the world: the Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever printed on a movable type press.There are only 48 copies extant in the world. It’s quite a special object to behold.Last week I found myself in Washington, D.C., again – this time at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Located across the street from the Library of Congress, the Folger is home to the finest collection of materials related to the Bard in the world. In particular, they have 79 copies of the First Folio, one of the most important books ever printed.Published in 1623, the First Folio was the first edition to contain all the plays of Shakespeare in one volume. Eighteen plays, including “Macbeth” and “As You Like It,” only exist in the Folio. Without it, they would all have been lost to history.But before you pack your bags for the district to bask in the greatness of the Gutenberg Bible and the First Folio, know that there’s a way to view them with a smaller carbon footprint.You can see them everyday: no plane, train or automobile necessary. And I’m not referring to some newfangled electronic catalog. I mean you can see thousands of rare books, including these two, any day of the week.You probably pass these treasures on the way to class: The Lilly Library is one of the top rare-books libraries in the world, and it’s right here at IU. Until May 8, the exhibition “Treasures of the Lilly Library” celebrates the 50th anniversary of the library, displaying some of its most famous and important holdings.The exhibit includes the First Folio of Shakespeare; Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “Apocalypse,” which depicts the four horsemen; and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” the first book printed in English.The library is not just for English or history majors. As a math major, one of my favorite books on display is an edition of Euclid complete with 3-D paper pop-ups of the geometric figures.I’m also fond of the Puzzle Room, where you can play with some of the mechanical puzzles from the Slocum Puzzle Collection. The Lilly’s collection has different strengths than the Folger’s. However, it has one advantage over many other world-class institutions that particularly benefits students.Without academic credentials and specific research proposal, you’ll never see the majority of the collections at other rare book libraries. On the other hand, the Reading Room of the Lilly is open to anyone, including students. There, one can look at (and even touch) nearly any item in the collection. So take a minute during the day, and drop in to see the exhibit at the Lilly Library. I promise the visit will be well worth the cost of admission (free) and transportation (a walk across campus).
(02/01/10 10:37pm)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I don’t know what happened at the Battle of Gettysburg. It was never covered in my advanced placement U.S. History class. We didn’t take a bus trip to the battlefield or memorize anything that begins “Four score and seven years ago.”But we did learn that Lincoln didn’t fight the Civil War to free slaves.My sister, a seventh grader, recently complained that American history is “War, war, war. All we do is wars.” My history class skipped wars. Well, not quite. My teacher’s version of World War II was, “There was a war, and the Allies won.” Instead of wars, we studied the Palmer raids, the Pullman strike and poll taxes. We learned about the systematic removal of Native Americans under pretense of paternalism through a series of broken treaties.In short, we learned a history seventh graders rarely do. The reasons? A teacher who jokingly calls William Henry Harrison his favorite president because he did the least damage in his month in office.But more importantly, our textbook wasn’t an optimistic fable. We never touched “Land of Promise” or “The American Pageant.” We read “A People’s History of the United States,” written by Howard Zinn, who died last Wednesday at age 87. I’m not here to write an obituary but an account of how he changed the way one group of students thought about history.The sorrow was evident among my former classmates, who memorialized him in Facebook statuses.After all, “A People’s History” first taught us to question the stories we tell ourselves.Zinn showed us that our founding fathers were not demigods of the Enlightenment who crafted a perfectly balanced government, which progresses inevitably toward democratic utopia. He told the story through the lens of the losers, the downtrodden and conquered.Or as one classmate, Zahed Haseeb, put it: “Zinn helped us realize there’s almost always more to a story.”Critics often attempted to neutralize Zinn by labeling him a radical and not a serious historian. But Zinn never pretended to be fair and balanced. After all, his memoir is titled “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.”By being so constantly contrarian, Zinn forced us to question even his own history. He was as selective as the storybook texts he overturned but for that he never apologized. After reading Zinn, much of my class became cynical. His narrative of slaveholding presidents, imperialist wars, Native American genocide, disenfranchised women and the violent oppression of workers wore heavy on our hearts, the hearts that we had so many times pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Zinn constantly reminded us, though, that the heroes of the American story are the nameless, ordinary people who fought for freedom not under the Capitol dome but on the picket lines.Howard Zinn remained hopeful that change would come, “From the bottom up, from the people themselves.”And in times like these, shouldn’t we stake hope not in one man but in all the people.
(01/26/10 12:08am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I think every man needs a little bit of land to work. Mine happens to be a six-by-eight-foot red and gold rug. It really ties the room together. I sow my land every morning, dropping crumbs as I eat an Otis Spunkmeyer muffin from the C-Store.Every night (or at least the ones when I’m not tired) I harvest my crop. My combine is a Shop-Vac. Seeing the nice furrows as the nap of the carpet is raised by the vacuum is pleasing somehow to the ancient part of my brain.That part wants me to plunge my fingers into the black loam of fields of wheat and corn, wants me to come down from the mountaintop of abstraction, which towers over the fields of the real and complex numbers. Yet my land produces as many fruits as the green of a golf course.The annual yield of my very fashionable rug is on par with the other bald patches of earth called lawns, which grow nothing but a testimony to the staying power of the American dream aesthetic.It’s a Kodak moment, as manufactured as plastic: white house, picket fence, boy and father tastefully arranged on the freshly cut yard playing catch.What if we put all the energy and pride, resources and time that we spend on manicuring identically useless fields of short green plants into gardening?Or instead maybe each subdivision could buy a flock of sheep and pay a shepherd to let them munch each yard in the neighborhood. The wool would make great socks.At least then the grass would be something more than eye candy as we wait with the kids at the bus stop in an idling SUV.It all sounds absurd. I’ve seen a woman vilified for turning a yard into a garden. She was called crazy for taking things too far.But I say it is absurd to be able to forget that we exist only through a flow of energy from the sun into plants into our bodies. I say it is absurd to see land not as a holy means to harvest that energy but as a canvas to paint homogenous green landscapes.The beauty of the land is in its power to produce life. Whether harnessed by humans or left to its own devices, the land will bring forth. The wilderness and cultivated land are equally beautiful.But to pin the land down, force it into submission, clear the wilderness, just to plant grass? It is not tasteful landscaping. It is a profane affront.And as the subdivisions spill out of suburbs into the countryside, as the McMansions tower over two-inch-tall monocultures, the land is devoured by the hope that your neighbor will envy your fertilized masterpiece and say, “their grass really is greener.”
(01/19/10 1:20am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Gas up the minivan, dig out your “I Heart Isaac Newton” T-shirt and head on down to the grand opening of the Museum of Introductory Physics Assumptions. The building itself is a wonder. The walls meet only at angles of 30, 45, 60 or 90 degrees. A state-of-the-art climate control system keeps the building at standard temperature and pressure, so bring a sweater. It can be chilly at 0 degrees Celsius. The utilities are the best that money can’t buy: the pipes carry incompressible fluids and are laminar flow only, while the wires are all infinitely long and superconductive. Every object in the building is carefully calibrated to have only integer mass, preferably in multiples of 10 kilograms. But enough about the building – the exhibits are fun for the whole family. Mommy and Daddy can play tennis while neglecting air resistance.(Disclaimer: Participants should supply their own supplemental oxygen if wishing to play on a vacuum chamber tennis court. Play at your own risk. The museum is not responsible for asphyxiation or head trauma caused by unexpectedly fast moving balls.)The kiddies can ride the bumper cars – perfectly elastic collisions only. The wheels roll without slipping and they run on Carnot engines: more efficient than a Prius. Too bad they’re just not powerful.In the Electricity Room, hold a point charge up to an infinite plate. Outside, check out the high ropes course with massless pulleys and inextensible ropes. Before you come, however, a few rules: First, we follow a very strict Newtonian-only policy at the Museum of Introductory Physics Assumptions. Every entrant to the Museum must pass through a security check, including a modern physics detector, with the possibility of a full body scan. Probability and uncertainty are strictly forbidden – no dice, especially. God doesn’t like them. Also, blackbodies are not allowed. Leave at home any maybe-dead cats in boxes. We will confiscate all boxes containing maybe-dead cats and open them. No personal watches are allowed, as the absolute time of the museum is kept by the master clock, which uses an ideal pendulum with a small angle and a massless rod and resets to zero whenever anything important happens. Any twins must sign a written affidavit swearing that they have never travelled in space near the speed of light. As long as nobody tries to ruin the day and make things complicated by insisting on “realistic” assumptions, we won’t have any problems.But, for every action of smuggling contraband, there will be an equal and opposite reaction of defenestration. And if we do have to throw you out the window, we will neglect air resistance.
(12/09/09 1:26am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>My eyes are anti-technology. They don’t like staring at a laptop screen for hours while reading online articles or e-books. Apparently, the Amazon Kindle has solved this problem by using “electronic ink,” a new material that doesn’t require backlighting. But I still want books. I want the tangibility of books, their physical existence. Margin-scribbling, underlining and dog-earing are all part of how I consume a book and bring it inside myself. After spending a long time with a book, you get to know its geography: the physical location of each important passage. But this familiarity comes from hunting through page after page to find that one quotation, not by hitting Ctrl+F and doing a keyword search.Knowing a book is like knowing a place: You build a mental map, internalizing the relations among the peaks and valleys of the book’s landscape. But I’ve never known the landscape of a scroll bar. For me, there’s freedom in writing with pen and ink, which is stifled at the keyboard. Typing feels more concrete, more finalized. It’s easier to let go of a critical voice in a notebook than a Word document. Script also has a subtle beauty. Type is regular – every letter “e” is identical. Handwriting attempts to be consistent but fails slightly. One letter influences the next, forming a continuous stream instead of a line of marching soldiers. This handmade quality is more powerful than mechanical precision. While writing with a pen, the words you form are close, an inch from your fingertip. When typing, there’s a distance between your body and the product of your labor. Likewise, there is a certain physical pleasure in doing mathematics on a chalkboard versus a whiteboard. It’s not that I don’t like whiteboards. I have one in my room. It was cheaper than a blackboard and lighter to carry into a dorm room.But there’s something more earthy about chalk. When you finish with chalk, there’s dust on your hands, evidence of work accomplished. After covering a board with the hieroglyphics of mathematics, I feel a kinship with the cave painter. At some level, we are the same. Both of us are scratching rocks against each other. But from that physical process springs something human. The cave art and my equations are worth creating because they represent ideas. The painter’s marks represent the story of a hunt or a great war; my symbols represent the story of a problem and its solution. The Greeks did geometry in sand. Writing on a glossy white surface with a plastic cylinder filled with synthetic ink makes me feel distant from my mathematical ancestors.Mathematics is a mostly frustrating endeavor occasionally punctuated by epiphanies. The physical actuality of paper and pencil, chalk and board, is suited to such a task.The traditional methods of reading, writing and doing math are more satisfying because of their physicality. They are old-fashioned. But not “fashion” in the sense of “style.” Instead, “fashioned,” as in “forged” or “created.” Creation requires work, and satisfaction comes from the physical effort spent in creating.
(12/01/09 2:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Black Friday has become as much of a holiday for Americans as Thanksgiving. It’s not surprising, since the themes of Thanksgiving – gratitude and shooting animals – are less in vogue than those embraced by Black Friday – shopping and vegetarianism. Okay, maybe vegetarians had nothing to do with the rise of Black Friday. But I’d still like to think there was a conspiracy to eclipse the holiday most dedicated to consumption of meat. Whether you belong to PETA or the NRA, Black Friday still begins the holiday shopping season. And so I’d like to run down my list of things not to buy for Christmas gifts. Or gifts anytime, for that matter. Actually, never buy them. I call it the not-for-my-bucket list. As in, I wouldn’t trade my 10-gallon bucket for any of these items. Just think of the many uses for a good solid bucket: step-stool, dunce cap, washing machine, chamber pot. None of the following products can boast such varied utility. First up is men’s designer underwear. I thought the idea of designer clothes was to flaunt money and fashion sense. News flash: women do not have X-ray vision. So what’s the point? Unless you parade around in only your $24 Armani boxer briefs, nobody sees designer underwear. If you’ve made it to the stage of revealing the Hanes tightie-whities, hopefully she won’t care. Given the choice between a Calvin Klein man-thong and a 10-gallon bucket, I’d take the bucket. Second is Pasta n’ More, the microwaveable pasta maker. Apparently, it makes “perfect pasta, without the hassle.” Cut to black and white video of the poor people before the invention of Pasta n’ More. Look how they burned themselves on the stove! Please. I’m no Emeril, but even I can boil water. It’s a plastic bowl for $19.99 plus $7.99 shipping and handling. No way am I trading my bucket for that flimsy thing. I could even make pasta in the 10-gallon jack-of-all trades, if I could find a big enough microwave. Next is the ShamWow. I’m sure you’ve seen the Billy Mays wannabe peddling this rip-off on TV. “Holds 12 times its weight in water!” It’s a towel. And an ugly one at that. That bright yellow definitely does not gel with the decor in my powder room. I challenge the ShamWow to a duel with a regular old towel and my bucket to wring it out in. And I’ll win any day of the week, twice on Sundays. Finally, the “Easy Button.” This one is a real coup for marketers at Staples. They turned an ad campaign into a product that does absolutely nothing. Actually, it does accomplish something: It advertises for Staples. When you push the big red button, it repeats the slogan from the commercial, “That was easy!” I know what you’re thinking: “But it would make such a great gag gift for the office white elephant!” Yes, yes it would. That is, if you are willing to pay a company for the privilege to advertise for them. As for me, it’s not for my bucket.
(11/11/09 3:53am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Sometimes college seems a bit too much like Lake Wobegon, the fictional town created by Garrison Keillor, where “all the children are above average.”Stuart Rojstaczer, a professor at Duke, has been culling information about college grades from official databases and posting his findings on his Web site, gradeinflation.com, since 2002.The data is impressive: grade inflation is widespread, spanning private and public schools from coast to coast. Overall, he estimates an increase of roughly 0.1 GPA point per decade.Interestingly, he points out that Purdue is among the few colleges immune to grade inflation. The average GPA of a Boilermaker has only increased 0.01 in 30 years.On the other hand, IU’s average GPAs from 1995 to 2008 increased by 0.21, an annual growth rate 45 times that of our rivals to the north.Grade inflation eliminates any room for excellence in the grading scale. Even an A+ is not scarce enough to be worth a second glance.For contrast, consider the French grading system, which uses a score out of 20. They have a saying: “20 is for the good Lord, 19 is for the professor, and 18 is for the best student.” A grade as low as 14 is equivalent to an A here.College today is a consumer item. Students (or the parents putting pres- sure on them) are paying big bucks, and they expect returns in the form of good grades.We also incentivize easy grading by providing students easy access to grade distribution data on specific classes. A professor whose numbers show they are a tough grader could see a drop in enrollment the next year.I respect professors who have the spine to resist this economic pressure and stand up for the purpose of grades – to honestly evaluate students.However, I do not agree with crusading instructors who see themselves as the last defenders of the old order by intentionally lowering grades.For instance, deciding to award a specific number of A’s at the beginning of the semester is not a good practice, because it overcompensates for inflationary dishonesty with an equally dishonest deflation.Some have attacked grade inflation critics for missing the point.Alfie Kohn, for instance, points out that “the real threat to excellence isn’t grade inflation at all; it’s grades.” He argues that, as an extrinsic factor, grades don’t help motivate students to learn.However, the worth of grades themselves is a separate issue. Either we should restore grades to their original purpose or abolish them if we decide that purpose is no longer important.Jason Ellenburg, a mathematician and Slate online magazine columnist, said that the oft-cited problem of grade inflation compressing the scale does not prevent differentiation between students across an entire collegiate career.Ellenburg shows that even with a measure as coarse as just two grades, superior students still end up with higher GPAs than inferior ones.But an individual class grade does not exist to be factored eventually into a GPA. It exists primarily to differentiate students within a class.And when everyone has A’s, who can tell the difference?
(11/04/09 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Next time you walk to class, look around.No, not at the half-asleep people chugging Starbucks before their 8 a.m. Nor at the trees, which have blanketed the campus in yellow leaves.This time, keep an eye out for a carved stone duck.Or notice the sculpture on the side of Ballantine titled “Truth, Daughter of Time.”While taking that not-quite-allowed dip in Showalter Fountain, take a second look at the recently-restored sculpture of Venus.Next time your morning class in Woodburn 100 isn’t so interesting, try to pick out all the events from Indiana history in the Thomas Hart Benton murals.The reason we can enjoy these works is a commitment that our University has made to campus art.IU pioneered the protection of its public art by hiring a full-time campus curator.Sherry Rouse is responsible for managing the countless (literally, as in she hasn’t finished counting) works of art owned by the University that are not in museums.Rouse believes campus art furthers the mission of the University to be a forum for intellectual exchange.“Almost any art that’s worth its salt creates turmoil,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important on a college campus. It creates an environment that inspires us to think.”This commitment to public art on campus needs to be continued in the new student housing being built to replace Ashton Residence Center.An effort has been made to make the new building fit in with the rest of campus. The exteriors will be genuine limestone and existing trees were saved.But where’s the art?Decorative stonework, University Architect Robert Meadows explained, was not considered for the New Housing 2010 because there is no room in the $80 million budget.Teter and Wright Quads, the two adjacent resident halls, both have exterior stone artwork.Maxwell Hall, one of the most beautiful campus buildings, has an abundance of stonework; the gargoyles are especially memorable.The tradition of building with limestone decorated by carved ornaments connects this University to the state it serves, highlighting the rich heritage of Indiana stonework.Recent buildings, such as Simon Hall, have embraced that tradition. But according to Meadows, it only happened because faculty were “adamant” about having carving on their building, even to the point of sacrificing interior amenities.We, as students, must be the agents who push for the beauty of our new building. This is the first new residence hall since 1969, and we should not let a shortage of money stop it from having exterior art.I call on all of us, as students, to raise the money to make this happen. Then it will be our residence hall, something we’ve helped bring into being.The purpose of campus art is to help create, in the words of Herman B Wells, “a pleasant and attractive campus providing physical beauty which soothes the spirit.”Let’s uphold that vision, first by noticing the art on campus, then by realizing its importance and finally fighting for its future.Seriously, look for the duck.
(10/28/09 1:29am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>“A clean car is a happy car,” my father used to say. He also used to say, “A clean bike is a happy bike.” Actually, anything that could conceivably be cleaned – boats, saws, countertops, iron skillets and even toilets – was, to my father, only happy when it was clean. I called him the other day, and he was – surprise – vacuuming out the minivan. Maybe I inherited it, but I like being clean. Last year I would (gently) move my roommate’s laundry, books and trash to his side. He got the hint when he couldn’t walk to his desk. This year, I requested a single. It’s not that I don’t like people. I just don’t like their stuff. Back home, I used to vacuum the floor of my room every night before bed. It was my routine: pajamas, brush teeth, then Dirt Devil. In the dorm, unfortunately, it might bother the neighbors. So when I saw that a play entitled “The Clean House” was playing at the Wells-Metz Theatre, I knew I had to see it. It’s a delightful comedy by Sarah Ruhl about a doctor named Lane with a maid who gets depressed by cleaning, a sister who secretly cleans her house and a husband who falls in love with his mastectomy patient. The set begins as a pristine apartment – white carpet, white couch, white everything. But at the end, there’s dirty tissues, rotten apples, potted plants, magazines, and a yew tree strewn all around. The symbolic dishevelment of the “Clean House” is an inversion of the characters, who are ultimately cleansed from their toxic lives – by humor. The final image of the play is a sacred ritual. Amid the filth of her house, Lane washes the body of her husband’s soul mate, whose cancer has literally been cleaned out by the greatest joke in the world. Billy Collins, a former Poet Laureate, wrote in his poem “Advice to Writers” that before starting their work, writers should “clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.”“Spotlessness,” he continues, “is the niece of inspiration. The more you clean, the more brilliant your writing will be.”In math, there is a notion of a proof being “clean” when it is somehow free of extra baggage: extraneous assumptions, superfluous tools, clumsy arguments. A clean proof is clear and concise.I’ll alter Dad’s favorite saying for this case: a clean proof is a pretty proof. Traditionally, the aesthetic value of a proof depends on its tidiness, its elegance. A sloppy proof can be correct, but not beautiful. Clean can be happy, routine, funny, inspiring or beautiful. But it’s not the most important thing. Life is messy. Sometimes, like Lane, we have to let go of the superficial clean to find an inner clean. My house is never clean. But I never heard my Dad say “A clean house is a happy house.” Instead he would say, “Only when the kids are grown up and moved out will the house be clean. “But then – the kids will be gone.”
(10/21/09 2:35am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I romanticize the ’60s. Bob Dylan is on continuous loop in my car.My favorite Halloween costume as a kid was not the chess piece or Einstein, but the astronaut, complete with paper mache helmet.I’m so attached to “Mad Men” that when I found out IU cable doesn’t have AMC, I swiftly downloaded it. Legally.Ah, to return to that age of tailored clothing, social change, great music, and of course, slide rules.Yep, slide rules. I’m sorry, but that scene in “Apollo 13” when the mission hangs in the balance while Tom Hanks does math just wouldn’t be as hardcore if the guys at Mission Control were gingerly poking their TI-89’s instead of whipping out slide rules.Back in the day, slide rules were da bomb. One manual, published in 1961 by slide rule manufacturer Keuffel & Enser, was particularly enthusiastic: “A slide rule is a masterpiece of efficiency which, if correctly used, makes solutions to mathematical problems pop up as if by magic.”Unfortunately for the 10-inch wonder, pocket electronic calculators were introduced in the early 1970s.Calculators didn’t require lining up tiny markings or practicing locating numbers on a logarithmic scale.And so The Reign of Terror of the Calculation Revolution began.By the end of the nightmare, millions of innocent slide rules had gone the way of Robespierre, straight to the guillotine.Now the species (Calculatorsaurus slide-rulius) is effectively extinct; only a few fossils remain.An ingenious device, the slide rule works by exploiting a fact about logarithms: “The sum of logs is the log of the product.”In other words, it translates multiplication into addition and division into subtraction.Using a slide rule would change your perspective on calculation. Some things you learned in math and physics classes that seemed pointless would actually be extremely useful.For instance, a slide rule does not tell you where to put decimal points.Estimating the order of magnitude used would be part of the calculation, not just a double-check mechanism.Scientific notation, which may seem like only a space-saving notation now, would make these calculations much easier.My interest in slide rules began when my grandfather recently passed down to me his c.1942 K&E 4083-3S Log Log Duplex Vector slide rule.Mahogany frame, engine-divided markings on a white celluloid face, orange sewed-leather case – it is a beautiful thing to hold in one’s hands.The original Keuffel & Esser catalog advertises that this model would be “of particular value to electrical engineers,” which is appropriate since my grandfather got this rule when he was my age and studying electrical engineering at the University of Illinois.Vaguely resembling a dagger in a sheath, it even comes with a metal ring to hang it on your belt.Now all I want to do is carry it around on my hip, like a monk’s rosary or Clint Eastwood’s .44 Magnum.From now on, those inverse tangents better watch out, because I’m packing heat.Go ahead, square root of 347, make my day.
(10/14/09 2:58am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>They’re huge. They’re gross. They’re giant mucus-like blobs, and they’re coming for us. Called mucilages, they are made up of dead and living organic matter that has aggregated into a slimy, whitish blob. Found most often in the Mediterranean, they can reach more than 100 miles in length. And they look like Poseidon’s snot. Or maybe this is what the ancients were referring to in the myth of Aphrodite’s birth. Supposedly Uranus was castrated and his genitals fell into the sea, creating aphros, or sea foam. From this fecund foam arose the goddess of love. After taking a quick look at some pictures of these gooey blobs, I can tell you: It’s not much of a stretch to guess they came from Uranus’s junk. Saying the blobs are “gross” is an understatement. They’re putrid. They’re sticky. They’re slimy. They’re disgusting. Serena Fonda Umani is one of the Italian scientists who authored a recent study about the mucilages. She recalled the experience of diving through marine snow – the less dense forerunner of mucilage. Umani said it was like swimming through a sugar solution, except afterwards the “sugar” got stuck in her hair and wet suit. “The suit was impossible to wash totally, because it was covered by a layer of greenish slime,” she said. Thankfully, no normal person would try swimming through one of these things. They are certainly not “the kind of seascape one goes to the beach (for),” as marine biologist Farooq Azam put it. You might think that maybe mucilages are like their brothers who live in our nostrils: icky, yet harmless. Sure, watching a kid go hunting in his nose, bag a booger and then make a snack out of his prey can make you want to vomit. But it won’t hurt the kid, right?Not so with mucilages. They can kill fish by suffocating them. The biggest ones can even sink to the bottom and form a blanket over the ocean floor. The sea boogers are literally threatening the Earth’s oceans.Worse, though, are the viruses and bacteria that thrive in the mucilages. E. coli, among others, is harbored by the blobs, and the release of such pathogens so close to beaches may become a future public health risk. The most concerning thing about the blobs, however, is that they might be getting worse. A recent study by three Italian scientists found that mucilage outbreaks are correlated with above-average sea temperatures. And that means – you guessed it – climate change could be the culprit for the almost exponential increase in mucilage formation in the past 20 years. Think of it as the Earth being stuffed up by a sinus infection, and its 103-degree fever isn’t helping. Mucilage outbreaks are an example of the consequences of global warming we weren’t aware of until recently. Though silly-sounding, sea boogers might be a symptom of a much more serious diagnosis. How long will it be before we begin to treat this disease?