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Sit Down and Read

College was a reading blight for me. I had other things to do, classes pulling my attention, and a pretty damaged ability to focus due to the introduction of a smartphone in my life. I was on-and-off reading books for fun, and felt pretty bad for accumulating books that I just was not getting to.

When I was an intern the past summer, I was hoping to change that. Yet I only made it through one book. Now that I’m in my real adult life, and settled in a bit, I’ve finally boarded the reading train yet again, and it is fantastic. It kicked off with reading Neuromancer by William Gibson over the course of a couple weeks. It was touch-and-go for a while there, but I made it through and very much enjoyed it. The past few fiction books I’ve read were sci-fi or technology thrillers of some variety. But I wanted to get back to where I was in high school and early college: able and willing to read just about any book I came across, even if it wasn’t very good. So, I recalled a recommendation an acquaintance gave to me, Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. It is classified as a science fiction novel, but really is just a post-apocalyptic novel taking place in modern day, after a particularly deadly strand of swine flu wiped out most of the world. I read the book in only two days.

Inspired by this quick finish, I went to the website whatShouldIReadNext.com and selected the first book I could find which was available as an eBook from the local library. It was The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. This was further afield than most books I read, following a librarian whose sister, mother, and other females going back have all worked in various circuses, and all die via suicidal drowning. It’s unclear how much fantasy magic or legitimate “curses” are involved, but it was a surprisingly engaging read. I finished that in two days as well.

The book I am currently on — which has taken me longer mainly due to the holidays — is Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd. I started this book completely on accident: I thought I was getting a different book from the library, and just started. Luckily, it’s actually quite engaging. It takes place in WWI-era Europe, and may simply be a “follow this person’s life” book. Either way, I’m enjoying it.

It’s felt great to finally just sit down and read for long stretches of time. I’ve avoided some of the other tempting media (podcasts mostly), allowing my attention span to rebuild; this also puts me in a quiet mental space, giving my brain time to process and enjoy the ride a bit more.

While I am not as disconnected as CGP Grey is, and I still go on reddit and participate on the internet, it’s been nice to have these quiet moments with a book. It reminds me of when I had far fewer responsibilities, less to worry about, and I believe that’s been healthy for me. I suggest finding a way to be quiet, to be comfortable being alone without being lonely. It’s a good thing to be able to do.

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Holes in a Paper Towel Roll

At work the other day, we had a bit of a break to celebrated the month’s birthdays. During this time — my coworkers sitting around a large table, munching on pie and ice cream — a conversation broke out. How many holes are there in a paper towel roll: 1 or 2?

Of course, there is the joke that if you claim 1, then there is only one hole of consequence in the human body: that which leads from your mouth to the escape of your digestive system. At that point you’re just talking out of your ass.

But, being a company full of nerds and pedants, those of us who were sensible had to claim 1; after all, a paper towel has width to it and is thus homeomorphic to a torus (think, bagel).

Topology is a fun subject. Imagine taking geometry, and saying “I don’t really care about angles, or lengths, or these things that make geometry what it is. I mainly just care if I can stretch something to make it into something else, and how many holes there are in the shape.” That’s the base level of topology. An introductory topology course teaches you about homeomorphisms, which means you can continuously stretch, pull, push, or generally manipulate an object without cutting or tearing it.

Imagine you had a very flexible, putty-like bagel. If you mad the bagel very thin, skinny, and tall, you can imagine forming yourself a paper towel roll. This is what we mean when we say they are homeomorphic. We don’t put an extra hole anywhere, we just squish and shape things to our will.

Some people may ask why this is useful, particularly when you learn a coffee mug is also homeomorphic to a torus. The easiest explanation is math is about abstractions and patterns. Sure, a cube and a non-cubic rectangular prism have some differences, insofar as the rectangular prism doesn’t have three equal edge lengths. A cube and a triangular prism seem even further removed. Yet, any prism, or more generally polyhedron (which includes pyramids as well!), are all homeomorphic to a sphere. These three dimensional figures share certain properties, most notably that they are solid objects with no holes in them. And there’s something to be said for that!

While topology goes well beyond this idea, it gives a good grasp at what mathematicians are interested in. They noticed that we can generalize some of these properties, and map between objects using these homeomorphisms. So, instead of topology being about classes of objects which are the same in some small way, it is really about how we relate these similar objects. Topology is about showing the similarities and patterns between objects. It’s interesting that with a consistent set of rules, we can say “cube is to sphere as bagel is to paper towel roll.” We notice this pattern, and figure out how to make it rigorous and useful.

This is an under-appreciated aspect of math. It is not about rules that have no reason, or about abstraction for no reason. It is about finding a pattern, and seeing how other objects follow a similar pattern. This is what make mathematics a very fun subject, yet it is a mindset very few people are able to have. I hope this can change in the future.

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Coffee Shop Blogger

I’ve been curious how cultural trends adjust our feelings toward various habits people have. The biggest change to me has been that of the hipster blogger, sitting in a coffee shop with their MacBook, doing some personal photo-journalism for the benefit of mankind. I think the common notion of what, and who, a writer is has changed dramatically. No longer is it necessarily someone cramped up in an attic, papers everywhere, a drink at hand; it can be anyone with just about any device. I’m sure there are people out there who write posts from their phone — I know I’ve at least edited a few posts from mine.

Of course, there is still some tongue-in-cheek (and I’m sure for some people, legitimate) ridicule for such endeavors. With so many people opening themselves up to the internet in this way, they are also opening themselves up to the critical eye of the internet populace. Many people wanting to blaze their own path end up falling into a broader statistic. But this isn’t new, nor what I want to focus on. Particularly because I’m writing this post in a Panera before I go to work this morning.

I want to focus on whether this development is good. Is the ability for people to have these platforms for themselves, to bombard more and more servers with their thoughts, photos, and any other media they wish a positive change in society? My initial reaction is yes, it is good. People are writing more, sharing their ideas, helping others out, and making their experiences known for others to learn from. Not only is it good for a society to voluntarily participate in efforts to make themselves more literate, it is also beneficial to have more information available to compare and make use of.

If I attempt to remove my optimist hat, I must acknowledge some of the legitimate gripes people have with this shift. Perhaps the biggest is the lack of credibility on the internet. Due to relative anonymity, people can claim what they want about themselves, and subsequently write what they want about the world from a perceived position of authority that is entirely undeserved. This is what we see in anti-vaccine movements, issues with climate change, and many other anti-science positions that flourish in certain corners of the internet. People with very little knowledge or background in a subject dishonestly post what they believe, framing it with the intent to make it come off as fact, especially to some particularly vulnerable people who roam the internet.

This extends to relatively innocuous aspects of thought. For my little corner of the internet, these people are largely crank mathematicians. Prior to the internet, amateur mathematicians would simply mail their ideas to professors, who could pretty quickly disregard anything that said “Trisect” or “Squaring a circle“. Now, many a young student gets drawn into arguments provided by people with insufficient background, wondering how it could possibly be that 0.999… is equal to 1, or why Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems don’t invalidate all of mathematics. I’m sure there are similar situations for just about any field of interest. For example, consider video creation and YouTube. That was quite the democratizing effort, and has provided amazing content. And some horrifying results.

I don’t wish to be so naive as to suggest that only people who “should” be talking about a particular subject can be allowed to. Ultimately the democratizing aspect of the free internet should win out. We can provide due diligence by educating people (particularly our parents who did not grow up with it) about how to properly navigate information on the internet, but beyond that I still firmly believe that having these platforms is good. Despite very few people reading this blog right now, I’m happy this opportunity exists. The same goes for podcasts. It is exciting to create the type of media you enjoy consuming. 

While I still do not identify as a coffee shop blogger, and likely will never own a MacBook, I’m happy people can do it. More power to them.

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No Keyboard for Old Men

As I come to the realization that a significant part of both my work and personal hobbies involve sitting at a computer, I have become increasingly wary of the stories I hear about things such as repetitive stress injuries (RSI), and what will likely be the impending damage to my eyes. In an effort to avoid, or at least delay, the former issue I have tentatively purchased an ergonomic keyboard. Specifically, the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard from Microsoft. I say tentatively because it’s not cheap. I may return it, but so far I’ve put a few thousand keystrokes on it and it’s feeling pretty good. This review is meant to get as in-depth as a keyboard review can be when written by someone who has never written a keyboard review. I’ll briefly explain my rough, but sufficient, testing procedure and what I found out. Then I’ll get into some details and comparisons I noted to other keyboards I’ve used.

Continue reading “No Keyboard for Old Men”
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Traveling Takes Practice

At this point in my life, I’ve driven from Minnesota to California twice, and done the reverse trip once. I’ve also road-tripped from Minnesota to Virginia, Kansas City (twice), and Nashville. I feel pretty confident that if I needed to, I could hop in a car and get where I needed without much effort or worry. It’s a mode of transportation I am extremely comfortable with on any scale, and am well-versed in some of its intricacies.

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Why Linux? Part 1: Free As In…

During sophomore year of college, I embarked on a project to put a Linux operating system on my laptop. I had been interested ever since using a computer in one of the engineering labs which ran Ubuntu, one of the most mainstream, user-friendly distributions out there. I was intrigued both by the visual design, and the ease with which complex programs could be run. There was also the intrigue of feeling like a cool hacker, using a terminal and typing commands to get around a file system. I was hooked, and since then I’ve had a Linux distribution running on every computer I’ve owned over the past three years.
I want to spend a good chunk of time explaining my growing passion for Linux, and why I think more people should seriously consider it as an option for the computers in their lives. This first post will focus on two of the oft-repeated phrases in the Linux community, and its main inspiration: Linux is free.
Continue reading “Why Linux? Part 1: Free As In…”

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New Blog

Yesterday I switched over from using WordPress.com to hosting my blog on Bluehost and using the official WordPress blogging environment. The main difference here is when you are using WordPress.com, there is some gray area about who really has control over the content. You are ultimately at the whims of their hosting structure, and also you must pay through the nose to access the various features of the actual WordPress blogging platform it claims to deal with.

WordPress is an open-source blogging platform, and is very widely used. Wonderful plug-ins are created to increase its functionality and customizability, and I have enjoyed dealing with it. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a company run by one of the people who created the WordPress platform in the first place, but has various hosting options built in. For people who just want to get things going and keep things simple, that’s fine. I still run OHAC on WordPress.com, and things are going fine. But, I wanted more ability to be in control of my personal blog, and not have to worry about something going wrong that I didn’t have control over.

This is in large part influenced by the post I have written which will be published this upcoming week, the first part in a long series about why I use Linux. As you will understand once you read it, one main part of using Linux is freedom to customize the software you’re using, as well as software being actually free. WordPress.com provides neither of these; WordPress as a platform allows both. So, I switched things over, created a simplified dark template, and I’m loving it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it a bit as well.