I have a $50 gift card to Barnes and Noble. What should I buy? (BTW, Barnesandnoble.com has free shipping this weekend.)

Also, I want a soft cover (preferably leather) notebook, about 5x8 in., filled with unlined black pages. It'd be nice if it has a mechanism, such as an elastic strap, to keep it closed, but this is not necessary. Apparently nobody makes such a thing. Why?!

To the mathematically inclined friends in my address book I sent the following explanation of what I have been studying. If you've ever taken a calculus class you should be able to understand it.

I'm studying several complex variables, which is analysis in C^n. Basically, it's calculus with complex numbers in many dimensions, although it looks and feels very different from freshman calc. I am studying open sets in C^n that satisfy a certain kind of convexity condition. You probably remember that an open set in, say, R^2 (the two dimensional plane) is convex if for any two points in the set the entire line segment connecting the two points is also in the set. Informally, the set doesn't "dimple inward" anywhere. This is convexity with respect to affine linear functions, sometimes called linear convexity. It turns out there are other kinds of convexity, too. You can define convexity with respect to a family of functions other than the linear functions. So in C^n, convexity with respect to complex differentiable functions is called pseudoconvexity. I study pseudoconvex sets.

Now let's go back to regular (linearly) convex sets in R^2 (the two dimensional plane). If you think carefully about the definition of convexity about connecting two points in the set with a line segment, you realize that our set, call it D, is convex if and only if the intersection of D with any one dimensional line in R^2 is connected. So it's clear that you can detect whether D is convex using only one dimensional information.

Well, what about pseudoconvexity? Can you detect whether or not a pseudoconvex set in C^n is pseudoconvex by only looking at one dimensional slices? The answer is no, and for a silly reason which I won't get into. Ok, so how about two dimensional slices? If ever two dimensional slice of a set is pseudoconvex, is it true that the original set is pseudoconvex? It turns out that the answer is yes. This is the problem I solved last summer. Right now I am thinking about questions related to these ideas.

Feel free to ask questions.

--Robert

I recently tried to explain to my non-math cousin what math problem I've been working on lately. Here's what came out.

The name of the branch of mathematics that I study is called several complex variables, but that probably doesn't tell you a whole lot. I study blobs in space, but not just any blobs, special blobs called pseudoconvex domains. What I have been working on lately is, I have been trying to see if I can determine everything about the shape of a blob by only looking at cross-sectional slices. So, to make a simple analogy, if you take a potato and slice it into very very thin slices, can you tell only by looking at the slices what the shape of the original potato was? In the case of the potato the answer is yes, but the blobs that I'm working with have more dimensions than just three, and so detecting certain properties of the original blob just by looking at thin slices is more difficult. The special kinds of blobs that I'm studying have been a central topic of study in several complex variables. The math that I am studying really doesn't have applications outside of mathematics as far as I know. But it is useful to other mathematicians. In other words, the math that I study probably isn't going to help someone directly make a better widget, but it might help another mathematician develop some math that can help make better widgets. The reason that this stuff is interesting to me is that it sits at the intersection of several different branches of mathematics. The stuff I'm doing involves algebra, topology, geometry, analysis, functional analysis, among others, and it's neat to me to see these different areas of math interact.

It has been about a year since I sent out a mass email about what I am up to, but not much as changed. I am still working hard in the math PhD program at Texas A&M. I expect that it will take me a couple more years to finish. I'm pretty much finished with the coursework on my degree plan, so the next step is to achieve some results and write a dissertation. (How hard could that be?) Last summer I got a tiny result that might be worth publishing, so I am in the process of writing an article and submitting it to a journal. If it is accepted, it will be my first publication. This summer I am doing research and studying for my preliminary exam which I hope to take in the fall. The preliminary exam is different from the qualifying exams in that the preliminary exam is administered by a student's committee and covers specifically the material the student is studying for his dissertation. In my department it is often an oral exam and is far less stressful than the qualifying exams.

My living arrangements might be changing soon as one of my long-time roommates, Kevin Christman, is finishing his masters degree in mechanical engineering by the end of the summer. My second roommate Korben Rusek (Stefan Rusek's brother), who is also in the math PhD program, is away at Sandia National Labs for the summer. He will be returning in the fall and has at least as long to go on his PhD as I do.

The Adventist student organization that I have been involved in is still going strong. We are about the same size as we were last year. For the first time this year we will have undergraduate student leadership. If anyone knows of any Adventists who will be attending Texas A&M or Blinn College, send them our way. Our little church needs all the help it can get!

There is at least one thing new with me. I've discovered that being healthy actually makes me a better mathematician. I have been learning about nutrition and exercise, and together with my roommate Kevin I have been attending a martial arts class that challenges me and keeps me active. I have found that the time I take to exercise is more than offset my the benefits I receive in terms of mental and physical energy and ability. Yay, health message!

Since people tend to tune out when I talk about math, I've kept the math content of this email to a minimum. But if you are even vaguely interested in what it is I'm actually studying on a day to day basis, just ask! I'd be happy to explain it, even if you aren't particularly mathematically inclined. Also, I'd like to hear about what is going on in your life. What's new? Send me an email. And feel free to pass this email on to anyone you think might be interested.

Sincerely,

Robert Jacobson

During the break between the semesters I picked up Hollingdale's Nietzsche biography. Very fascinating. There's this great Nietzsche quote that--I couldn't resist--I used in my sermon today.

"I have already experienced so much—joy, sorrow, cheerful things and sad things—but in everything God has safely led me as a father leads his weak little child. . . I have firmly resolved within me to dedicate myself forever to His service. May the dear Lord give me strength and power to carry out my intention and protect me on my life's way. Like a child I trust in His grace: He will preserve us all, that no misfortune may befall us. But His holy will be done! All He gives I will joyfully accept: happiness and unhappiness, poverty and wealth, and boldly look even death in the face, which shall one day unite us all in eternal joy and bliss. Yes, dear Lord, let thy face shine upon us forever! Amen!"

--Friedrich Nietzsche

Just when you think you know a guy....

Hey, Adventists! Have you seen this?
http://spectrummagazine.org/blog/2009/05/29/unravaling_witch_hunt_la_sierra_under_seige

Looks like Southern-in-the-early-'80s all over again.

Just today I was talking with the head of a science department at one of our Adventist universities and I asked him if the Adventist church even wants scholarship. He told me unequivocally, no. I loaned him my copy of Redbooks: Our Search For Ellen White.

This is a topic that comes up a lot among my Adventist science graduate student friends. Adventist intellectuals feel profoundly alienated and marginalized. They have been abandoned and betrayed by the community they love. A lot of them leave the church. A lot of them stay but won't bother working for Adventist universities or even contribute their unique gifts to their church at all. Who wants to go through that heartache? At the same time, Adventist universities are struggling desperately to fill vacancies with qualified people who also hold church membership. It's a problem that everyone knows about, and everyone knows why it's a problem, and it can't be fixed.

This is part two of a (for now) two part series on interesting people I've met at my martial arts class.

Person 2

John is 5'11", 285 lbs and is out of shape and overweight. He looks about my age, but it's hard to tell. He keeps his hair in a pony tail and has tattoos on his arms and shoulder, but he looks more like a band geek or theater nerd than a thug. He started in the taekwondo class maybe a month ago. Like most white belt beginners he is awkward and uncoordinated and a little too... enthusiastic. That is to say, he's dangerous. He doesn't know hard he's striking, and his strikes are wild. I was probably the same way.

One day we both stayed after class talking. I told him that he was really ahead of the curve in terms of his aggression but that he should really focus on his control and technique. Then he just started talking, telling me his whole story, and he didn't stop for an hour. His father was a raging alcoholic and he used to beat him and his mother. There is an 11 year gap between him and his younger siblings, so when he was a teenager he felt a heavy burden to protect his little brother and sister and his diminutive mother. He continues to suffer a great deal as an adult from his traumatic time growing up. When he spars me or another adult male, he says, his brain switches modes, so to speak, and he sees in his opponent his own father. Then something will happen, maybe he'll kick me too hard and I'll grimace, and he'll see me again as I am and himself as his father inflicting what in that moment feels like violence on another person, and he hates himself. He hates that part within him. And when he spars a child or an adult female he is terrified. He says that there have been some episodes in his adult life where he has encountered someone being abusive to a woman or child and he has blacked out or experienced "red out" and doesn't remember anything about the episode afterward, even though, he says, he brutalized the guy.

John has ADHD and is bipolar. ("I have ADOS: Attention Deficit--Ooh, Shiney!") The man has such a hard time doing drills in class. He just can't focus. He has bad knees, I think from an injury he received in the navy. He has had a hard time finding a job. A few years back he got really desperate. He tried to get on food stamps but there were technicalities that prevented him from being elligible. So he stole $52 worth of food from Walmart. He got caught, was fined $7,000 and got deferred adjudication and community service. For five years, though, "deferred adjudication for theft" remains on his criminal record, so nobody will hire him. His knee issues limit the kind of manual labor he is able to do.

He was telling me all of this, about his frustrations with finding a job and about how hard it is to live with being bipolar. Then he got sober and asked, "Do you have any idea what it's like to have no idea who you are?"

"I... no, I guess I don't."

"You don't understand. You are the second person in the world I've told this to," he said. Then he proceeded to tell me a story from his childhood. It was an uninteresting story about how when he was very young he went with his father and mother to a baseball game and they took a wrong exit and wound up in China town. He said he could remember every little detail of that story. Then he said when he was in the navy he was part of EOD dealing with explosives. He says that he remembers a lot of things from Iraq and they still really trouble him. He told me one story in particular where his group got a call about a house in which militants were stockpiling munitions. He had to put a charge around the door of the house, and when the door blew they would rush in and storm the house. But he put too much, and the door splintered inward, flying like bullets into some of the people in the house and killing some of them. It turned out, though, that it wasn't a munitions depot but a family. Just a family. He is still so upset by this memory, he said with tearing eyes, that just thinking about it makes him cry. "Here's the thing, though," he said. He just got some documentation in the mail from the navy detailing everything he did. The documentation says that he never left the states. He never went overseas. And that story from his childhood? His mother swears to him that he was not there. He has all of these vivid, detailed memories--of the accidental trip to China town, of his tour in Iraq--that never actually happened. He asked again, "Do you have any idea what it's like to have no idea who you are?"

He comes to taekwondo, he said, and for just that one hour a day he can escape all of that. He can learn to control his problems from his childhood violence through sparring, he can learn that inner discipline, and he can forget that he is bipolar ADHD and that he can't find a job and all of the rejection that accompanies being turned away from jobs, and he can forget that he can't buy food and that he's a burden to his roommate and her husband and the conflict that generates in his life. He can just train. In all of his awkwardness, in his uncoordinated flailing he can hit the heavy bag and find that peace.

My martial arts school attracts some strange people. I'll tell you about two of them. I've split it into two entries.

Person 1

We'll call the first kid Mike because I forgot his real name. He started showing up to random MMA classes and sitting on the side watching. He's an obese 15 year old kid. Eventually he worked up to participating for 5 minutes at a time, then 10 minutes at a time. One day I came to class to find a cop, the kid, the school owner, my instructor and another woman in conference at the front desk. Drama! A few days later the story leaked out that Mike had stolen the woman's cell phone. The Front Desk Council had agreed that for penance Mike would be required to train in the MMA class and if he missed a day the school owner would press charges, which for some reason she had the right to do for up to a year after the theft. Mike started participating nearly the whole class. We work pretty hard in that class, so I'm sure he was dying. Heck, I was dying! After class one day I was sitting down to take off my gear and I struck up a conversation with Mike. He said he just got out of jail, that he was on some sort of parole. I asked him what he did and he said he stole stuff because he needed money for drugs. Then he just started talking, telling me his whole story, and he didn't stop for 45 minutes. He said he would sleep all day long and at night he would sit on the couch and smoke pot and eat junk food all night long, and that's all he did. Eventually he didn't have any money for drugs so he started to steal for it. Then one day his mom took him with her on what she said were some errands but then took a different turn and she dropped him off at a rehab and mental health facility. He spent several months there undergoing intensive therapy. They take everything you have away from you, even your clothes, and they make you wear flip flops so you can't run away. While there he spent some time in solitary confinement in a padded room. They told him it was a way for him to feel all of the feelings he was afraid to feel.

"Did you feel them?" I asked.

"Dude, I felt everything," he said.

When he got out he would freak out whenever his mom would drive him somewhere on a route he didn't recognize. "Where are you going? Where are you taking me?" he'd ask.

He seemed partly resentful that they were making him train at the school. The owner saw it as an opportunity to make a positive difference in Mike's life, and really Mike saw it that way, too. But he kept saying, "I swear this can't be legal." He seemed excited about the prospect of losing weight. I told him that's going to take changing his diet dramatically. He said he already has, he eats tons of fruits and vegetables and he doesn't eat junk food anymore.

Not too much time passed before I'd notice him at the beginning of class waiting in front of the school, then get in a car with another kid and drive off. Soon he disappeared from the school completely. I have no idea what happened to him.

A friend of mine wrote on Facebook, "I can't wait until school starts tomorrow... SIKE!" She is a psychology major.

One Sabbath afternoon another friend admitted to us that he didn't know the moon was not a self-luminous body. He thought it made its own light. He didn't know it only reflected the light from the sun.

Then there was the time we were all together watching Obama's acceptance speech and one of the guys there turns to us and with complete seriousness says, "That's a pretty good speech just to give on the spot like that." As if Obama just thought it up as he was standing there.

Another friend didn't like the funky smell of the upholstery of her car. So she took it to a self car wash and pressure washed the interior.

This last week my office mate explained to one of the undergrads who just finished his junior year that the space shuttle is a relatively recent addition to the space program, its first mission occurring in 1981. The undergrad was under the impression that we had the space shuttle from the very start. Not unmanned rockets, not satellites. No, we started out with the space shuttle. And this undergrad? Yeah, an aerospace engineering major.

One of my best friends has only read one book in his entire life.

In a conversation with my mom she told me that to her great surprise a lot, maybe most, of her friends do not know what event the phrase "the grassy knoll" is associated with. I didn't believe her. "I bet every one of my friends knows that!" I said. So with her standing by I called them up on the spot, almost everyone I had in my cell phone. Nobody knew.

The Friday after April Fools day we were sitting around talking about who did what prank on the internet, and someone was describing Google's 3D web browser hoax, complete with "3D" glasses that you print out on your printer. "Wait, how do you see through them?" someone asked.

One of my roommates didn't know the difference between a lemon and a lime, and the other roommate wasn't entirely sure.

My pastor--in a sermon!--in comparing NASA to the iPhone said that NASA was a big waste of money whereas the iPhone "revolutionized technology". That's right, the iPhone did more to further our technology than NASA.

I was commiserating with a science grad student friend of mine about all of this, and we were expressing our exasperation over the apparent ubiquity of ignorance surrounding us. I said, "It's incredible. What's next?! People don't know that your heart is on the left side of your chest?"

"It's not on the left," he said. "It's in the middle. You feel it on the left because the left ventricle is stronger."

"...Oh."

I ordered my judo gi (uniform) today. Yesterday was my first class. I wore a t-shirt and fight shorts. We did so much ground work my knees and elbows have scabbed over. I wore a ratty extra gi top for free grappling. Holy cow, grappling with a gi is totally different from grappling without it. In MMA you have nothing to work with but your opponent's body. In judo, you can grab your opponent by the collar and choke him out with it. And your opponent can grab you by the chest and toss you around like you have a set of handles. Not only that, but the rules are different. In judo, you can't push someone's face away. You can't even touch their face. Which means no spider guard! In MMA, moving your opponent's head is a basic tactic employed in positioning your opponent. It's just so different. The judo class works really hard. I went directly from judo to taekwondo, exhausted. I need to fine tune my nutrition and hydration.

Let me tell you a story about why I will never forget to wear groin protection. We started the taekwondo class with a combination drill where we got with a partner and practiced the combination front kick-->front punch-->back punch, all techniques directed with very light contact to our partner's abs. I got paired with an enthusiastic white belt, a new guy. He's still at the stage where his front kick looks like he just stepped in dog poop and he's trying to fling it off his foot. He did ok for a couple of repetitions (kick-punch-punch, kick-punch-punch). Then he got tired, and for the next kick nailed me straight up into the crotch. HARD. I had to step back and collect my thoughts--it took my brain a few seconds to figure out I wasn't hurt. I thanked God for His bountiful blessings, with particular emphasis directed to the cup He bestowed unto me, which I was wearing with gratitude and new found humility. My partner felt like a dope. You always do as the new guy who did something stupid, and every new guy eventually does something stupid. "It's ok, it happens. I'm alright. Let's keep going." The next one...KICK! Straight up into my crotch. Again. HARD. And at that perfect angle that would have devastated me had I not come prepared. I got my revenge in my own subtle, secret way by thrust-kicking him in his clavicle instead of front kicking him in the abs. Ok, it's not very vengeful, but still, you feel even more foolish for not being able to kick higher than your partner's crotch when he can effortlessly jab you in your upper chest with his foot with more control and speed than you have in your hands.

Oh, here's another story about my balls. On Tuesday the air conditioning unit in the martial arts school broke, so our taekwondo class ended up being significantly less structured due to heat-induced mental lethargy. So I just free grappled various people the whole time, especially my roommate Kevin. I have had a lot more ground fighting training than him because I spent some time in the MMA class, while Kevin has only been to the kickboxing-centric taekwondo class. His favorite method of escaping my guard is to jam his knee straight down into my crotch and push as hard as he can against my genitalia to break the grip of my legs. The joke's on him, though. I was wearing my trusty, battle worn groin protection.

He actually isn't terrible, mostly because he works like a dog. My strategy was to just wait until he wore himself out, which worked basically every time. That's what happens when you are new to grappling: you try to muscle it while your more experienced opponent just chills and trusts his technique. Again, though, white belts can be dangerous, and when it comes to grappling Kevin belongs in the white belt category. Dude was flailing like a wild man. He accidentally palm-healed me in the throat. Three days later and I'm still talking funny and coughing a little. Ugh. Add that to my scabbed knees and elbows and inexplicable bruises on my shins (sparring? grappling in judo?) and I look like I got shook down for my lunch money. But my testicles are intact!

I sparred really well yesterday, despite my exhaustion and near-death experiences. It's really bizarre how some days I can't throw a decent kick to save my life while other days I give my instructor a run for his money. I think it's all about technique. If I can throw my techniques without having to think them through, that frees up my brain to think about movement and strategy. But if I'm stuck trying to execute a side kick without falling over, I'm toast. Which means to get better I need to make my fundamental techniques automatic. I need to do a thousand side kicks to the bag, then I need to do a thousand more. It's the boring repetition that makes the difference. I don't yet have that muscle memory.

Today is Completely Random Martial Arts Entry day, you know. I expect a similar entry from reong.

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

"Love after Love" from COLLECTED POEMS 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott.

I've been keeping a meticulous log of several things related to my health lately. I've been doing it more because it's fun to play with the data than because it makes me healthy. In the last few weeks I got some beautiful data, so I thought I'd share.

Every day I record three pieces of data: my weight, my percentage body fat, and my caloric intake. After two weeks I felt I had enough to give meaningful information. To mitigate natural fluctuations in the data, I applied a 3-day sliding average, i.e., I smoothed the data out just a hair. Here's the graph:

This is stunningly regular data! A few things to keep in mind: the absolute numbers probably are not accurate, but what's important here is the trend. Also, these graphs do not start at zero, and the plot range is chosen more-or-less arbitrarily, which means that trends may be artificially exaggerated. Nonetheless, it seems to be this data is too regular for these trends not to be real.

What do these graphs tell me? First of all, percentage body fat is falling way too fast. I need this curve to either be exactly flat or else climb slightly. Secondly, I do actually appear to be gaining weight, which is what I'm wanting.

But are these trends real? Or is it a product of some hidden variable or coincidence or something? My daily caloric intake for this two week period is 2750. I increased it by 250 calories to 3000 and waited. Here's what I saw after a week:

These graphs are for three weeks of data and include the data from the previous two graphs. Great news! My weight is climbing fast and my percentage body fat has flattened out. Sort of. The spiky fluctuations in percentage body fat is easily explained by the (relatively) dramatic changes in weight.(Edit: The spiky bit turned out to be a bug in my spreadsheet. Fixing the mistake gave me a better graph! I've updated the image. But this illustrates how easy it is to explain away irregularities.)

There are still reasons to doubt this data. For one thing, we're looking at very small scales, here, fractions of a pound and fractions of a percentage point. Real weight gain/loss should be measured on timescales of a month or more. Another reason to doubt the data is that it looks too good to be true. If it's correct, I've been gaining a pound of lean muscle mass a week. That's a very fast gain in lean muscle mass. Also, I don't have a good feel for the accuracy of my instrumentation. Finally, there could be changes I've made to my lifestyle that could explain these measurements. Have I been exercising less rigorously before going to bed and therefore retaining more water weight over the night? Have I changed my eating/drinking habits before/during the night? I'll have to wait and see.

If you live more-or-less on your own, and unless you have a medical condition, losing weight is actually pretty easy. (Edit: Although see the comment by fenrah below. Every body is different.) I know this because I accidentally lost 30 lbs in a very short time without even realizing it. (Which was a big mistake on my part, as you will see.) Here's how to lose weight¹.

The key to losing weight is very simple: proper nutrition. Exercise is important and provides a truckload of health benefits, but 90% of weight loss will be through proper nutrition. It's not hard to justify this view once you know a few facts:

• Weight loss occurs only when you burn more calories than you take in. That's it.


• If over time you accumulate a 3500 calorie deficit, you lose 1 lb of fat.²


• The majority of your calories go into just making your vital body processes function (the chunk of calories called the basal metabolic rate), NOT into mechanical movement.


• Burning calories through exercise not only sucks, but takes a long time. An entire week of cardio can be completely undone by a large piece of cheesecake on Saturday night. Don't believe me? Do the math. My stationary bike exercises burn ~350 calories. I do it maybe 3 times a week. That means I burn 1050 extra calories in a week. There are 950 calories in a large chocolate milkshake from Burger King. (And a Tripple Whopper with cheese has 1230 calories.) I promise, it's far easier not to drink the milkshake. You SHOULD exercise, but it's a distance-judging jab, not the knock-out cross.

Step 1: Record everything that you eat.

This is of paramount importance. In my opinion, this is the only way to safely lose weight. You need need need to know your caloric intake. But recording everything you eat is VERY EASY. It's also a lot of fun! There are many websites that make it a snap, too. Here are a few:

• http://www.fitday.com (This is the one I use.)
• http://www.thedailyplate.com/
• http://caloriecount.about.com/

When you start recording your intake, don't radically change your diet from day 1. Your body doesn't like radical change anyway. Just eat normally for a week and see what the website tells you that you are consuming. You will find that merely from the fact that you know you are going to write it down you will start eating far fewer junk foods. I personally stopped drinking soda altogether, and my desert intake dropped radically, all through the mostly subconscious effect due to recording my intake.

Step 2: Monitor your weight.

Recording your intake is absolutely useless if you don't know how many calories your body needs. In order to safely lose weight, you need to a) make sure you're even losing weight in the first place, and b) make sure you're not losing it too fast. And the only way to do this is with a scale. But be careful! There is a WRONG way to monitor your weight! Here is the right way:

• Buy a digital scale. Don't buy a scale with the fancy pants body fat electrodes and stuff. They are too inaccurate (and expensive!) to be useful.


• Only weigh yourself in the morning, in your undies, after you have used the bathroom but before you eat, drink or shower. Yes, it makes a big difference, because body weight fluctuates throughout the day. Throughout the day I personally get almost 3 lbs of swing in either direction. This is due primarily to water weight and is normal.


• Your body weight will not be constant from morning to morning. I personally have a 3 pound range that my weight always lands in, even though I am following the previous tip. Again this is normal. BUT, what it means is that to truely measure whether or not you are losing weight you need to take measurements far apart in time. Here's what I do: I weigh myself three days in a row, then take the average of the three numbers I get. Then I wait three or four weeks and do it again.

Step 3: Put steps 1 and 2 together and adjust your caloric intake.

The first two steps should give you an idea of how many calories it takes for you to maintain your current weight. You will need an estimate of this number for this step, so if you're not sure, try to figure it out. There are several different calculators online that will help you with this estimate. Google it. In this step you are going to adjust your diet, a little at a time, until you are running a calorie deficit. Don't go nuts with the fine details of your nutrition. All we're looking for is a slight caloric deficit here. Don't worry too much if you're eating too much protein or carbs or whatever. You'll just frustrate yourself. You'll tweak your diet in the next step. Here are a few rules of thumb:

• You should never consume fewer than 1800 calories if you are male, and 1600 calories if you are female. You will not be getting the nutrients your body needs to function with so few calories. That's why it's so important to know what you are eating and how fast you are losing weight.


• You should not feel like you have to struggle to not exceed your calorie target for the day. If you are always hungry or if you are constantly fatigued, you are doing something very wrong. If you don't even notice the deficit you are doing it right!


• Try to lose between 1 and 2 pounds a week. Any faster than that isn't healthy. (Consult with your doctor.) For the mathematically challenged, since 3500 calories = 1 lb, you should be aiming for a calorie deficit of between 500 and 1000 calories a day.


• Do not stop consuming fat. Fat is a vital nutrient which your body requires in order to functin. Calories from fat should be between 20% and 35% of your total calorie intake.

Step 4: Start tweaking things.

In this step you make small adjustments to what and when you eat to fine tune your nutrition and optimize your workouts. This is also a convenient time to introduce a healthier menu into your lifestyle. Choose foods with less fat, eat more vegetables, cut back on soda and alcohol, etc. You need to eat far more healthier foods than unhealthy foods to reach the same caloric content. Here are some ideas about tweaking your diet and lifestyle.

• Don't worry about whether or not you are getting enough vitamins or minerals. If you are eating a normal amount of a reasonable variety of foods then you are almost certainly getting more than enough of the vitamins and minerals you need--even if you are a vegetarian.


• You are probably getting plenty of protein, too, even if you are a vegetarian athlete. But there's a lot of debate about how much protein is optimal for very active people. It's recommended that you consume 0.36 g or protein for each pound you weigh. If you weigh 150 lbs, you should eat 54 g of protein. Other recommendations suggest that the 0.36 g/lb number should actually be from 1 to 1.4 g/lb for athletes and body builders.


• It matters when you eat. Eating many small meals throughout the day keeps your metabolism up and running and gives your body a consistent supply of energy. Also, consume protein-rich foods no more than 30 minutes after lifting weights. Replenish your body with complex carbohydrates two hours before a long workout and immediately following exercise.


• Protein supplements are fine, but don't go nuts. You should really be getting your nutrition from your food, so use protein supplements only to mitigate the timing of your intake (as in the previous tip). For example, immediately after a workout eat a protein bar if you can't eat dinner. Eating too much protein can be very harmful to your body. (But "too much" is a lot. You'd have to try pretty hard.)


• I aim for 60% of my calories from carbs, 20% from fat, and 20% from protein. Sometimes I'm way off, and that's ok. In fact, I'm rarely spot on, averaging 25% from fat and 15% from protein. I'm fine with that.


• Learn what complex carbohydrates are.


• Incorporate aerobic exercise into your lifestyle. A 500 calorie deficit can happen by either eating 500 calories less than normal, or by eating 250 calories less than normal combined with a light exercise that burns 250 additional calories. Plus, exercise is good for you for an ocean of other reasons above and beyond weight loss. You should exercise every other day to give your body a rest. Get plenty of sleep.


• Incorporate weight training into your lifestyle. A more muscular person will burn more calories just sitting on the couch than a less muscular person. Also, you body doesn't just burn fat on a calorie deficit, it also burns muscle. To maintain muscle mass while losing weight you have to simultaneously stimulate muscle growth. Make sure you let your body rest for at least a full day or else you will actually be hurting muscle growth rather than stimulating it. Get plenty of sleep, too.


• Try to plan your meals the day before, or even the week before.


• Read books on exercise and nutrition and tweak some more.

The psychological aspect of changing your lifestyle and body.

There are many reasons why people want to lose weight. In my case, I didn't particularly have a desire to lose weight at all! It just happened when I tried to improve my nutrition without monitoring myself the way I should have. Here are some disjointed thoughts on the psychology of improving diet.

• If you're not in it for the long term, don't bother. It takes time to change your body.


• You can "reboot" your appetite through a one-day fast. Make it a spiritually meaningful time. The next day you will have significantly more control over your mental and spiritual life, and you will be empowered to do what you know is right. Never fast for the purpose of losing weight. That's self-destructive behavior that is also counter-productive for weight-loss.


• Make your grocery list on a different day than you actually do the shopping. Be thoughtful about what you put on it. Never go to the grocery store hungry.


• The trick to not pigging out on junk food is not buying it. If you buy it you will eat it.


• Make small changes over large timescales. Only change a little each week. It's not just your body that doesn't like big changes, it's your mind, too.


• Don't "diet" on Sabbath. That's your day of rest. Record what you eat, but don't stress about hitting calorie targets. Just don't undo the previous week's work.


• Being thinner will not make you feel better about yourself. It just won't. You need to manage your self-image in other ways if it is a problem for you.


• Being thin and muscular will not make you less self-conscious about your body. It will make you more self-conscious about your body. Be prepared to have to manage this phenomenon.


• Don't set goals. At least, don't set time-based weight goals. Instead, set consistency goals. If you set a goal, make sure it's reasonable and conservative. Remember, you're in it for the long term. Losing 40 lbs in a month is not reasonable. Even 30 lbs in 3 months is too aggressive.

Step 5: Maintaining weight.

Stop restricting calories when you reach a reasonable and healthy weight. By this time you should have a very good handle on the estimate of how many calories you burn. Increase your caloric intake to this number, but continue to monitor your weight. If you keep losing weight, add 200 calories/day to your intake and continue to monitor your weight. Repeat this until your weight stabilizes. Continue to record your food intake, and continue to increase the healthiness of the foods you eat. Vary and/or increase your exercise routines. Start thinking about increasing muscle mass as a next health project.

---

1. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. My advice is pretty run-of-the-mill and conservative, but you should consult a qualified health professional if you have any doubt whatsoever. If you are very overweight some of my numbers may not be applicable to you, and so you should consult a qualified health professional before monkeying with your health. The same thing goes if you are of normal weight or are underweight.


2. Ok, this is a simplification, but close enough.

Writing my last entry I was reminded of a quote I came across by Robert Wilson. He was a researcher turned head of the National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) which wanted to build the largest yet partical accelerator in my previous home town of Batavia, Illinois. In 1969, Wilson had to go before congress to justify the millions of dollars it would take to build this partical accelerator. People in congress were asking, "But what does this have to do with national defense?" He replied,

"It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending."

This is the third installment of the Robert On Politics series. This one is about (formerly) recent statements about science funding made by the McCain/Palin camp. It may sound a little one-sided, so let me just say at the outset that there are a few stances that Obama takes on science and technology that I don't particularly like either. But these things I describe here are the ones that made huge waves among science people that the average person on the street might not have noticed. I want to explain them.

Palin and Fruit Flies

On October 24 Sarah Palin gave a speech about the Disabilities Education Act in Pittsburg. She vowed to fight earmark spending, budgetary provisions directed at specific projects often tacked on to budget bills by lawmakers wanting to "bring home the bacon" for their district. Said Palin,

"Sometimes these dollars, they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not."

This one little quote was a huge deal in the scientific community. I'd like to explain why.

Research on fruit flies is one of the pillars of genetics research.^* Like white mice, fruit flies are one of the most important model organisms science has. Our understanding of all of the basic principles of heredity are all due to studying the fruit fly. To drive home the point: Wikipedia tells me that 75% of known human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genetic code of fruit flies.

"Drosophila is being used as a genetic model for several human diseases including the neurodegenerative disorders Parkinson's, Huntington's, spinocerebellar ataxia and Alzheimer's disease. The fly is also being used to study mechanisms underlying aging and oxidative stress, immunity, diabetes, and cancer, as well as drug abuse."

Saying that fruit fly research isn't important is exactly like saying research on white mice is not important. I kid you not.

Another reason that science people went nuts over this quote is this bit about "Paris, France". The scientific community is a global community. And the number of people working on any given problem is very small. If an American scientist doesn't collaborate with the four other people in the world working on her particular problem then her research will die and work on that problem will slow by 20%. It's that simple. Half of the people on my advisory committee were not born in the US. There just isn't any room in science for xenophobia. You just can't do science without Paris, France.

I think there is another facet of this quote that really evokes a visceral reaction in science people that I haven't heard discussed elsewhere. Science people have a vision in their minds of a certain level of understanding of science that they feel like everyone on earth should have, and they are acutely aware that most people in the US don't measure up to their vision. If you want to get science people excited talk about American science education. That fruit flies are important for science research is one of those elementary facts that science people think everyone should know. When science people hear Palin say this they react violently, because here's someone at the top of this nation's leadership who is, in their view, apparently antagonistic to everything they stand for out of ignorance of elementary facts they demand all Americans should know.

McCain and Grizzly Bears

For quite some time, most notably in the first presidential debate, John McCain has been bringing up an appropriation of (more than) $3 million^** in a 2003 bill to study grizzly bears in Montana as an example of government waste and pork barrel spending.

"I don't know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue, but the fact is that it was $3 million of our taxpayers' money. And it has got to be brought under control."

This has been really upsetting to science people. Let me explain why.

First there is the political aspect of the thing, which frankly has little-to-nothing to do with science. It turns out that McCain voted to approve the bill in question after suggesting changes to the bill to reduce appropriations to certain projects it contains, but he made no attempt to reduce the appropriations to the bear study. Also, the federal government is required by law to do this (or some similar) study. This is because the grizzly bear is a threatened species as defined by the Endangered Species Act, and the law requires the government to aide in its recovery. In order to do this one needs to know how many there are. In other words, this is not some senator's pet project, and nobody is trying to pull the wool over the government's eyes.

But what about science? Is this a worthwhile thing to spend so much money on? Here's where science people get really worked up. To us, the answer is a resounding yes, and it bothers us that it isn't a yes for everyone else, too. I would argue that there is no other activity that our society does that contributes to our every day quality of life as much as basic science research, and--and this is the kicker--fewer things are as cheap! The benefit-to-cost ratio is astronomic.

Nonscience people might hear this and think, "Yes, ok, I get that, but $3 million? And for bears?" Yes. And not just for bears. There is no greater value in science than that studying things in the world around us is good in and of itself. Studying the grizzly bear, a species that has seen a 97% population decrease in the last couple of centuries, is a perfect example.

"Yes, but $3 million?" Here's the thing: $3 million is a pittance. It's nothing in the science world. That's not to say that science is busting at the seems with cash. On the contrary, it's grossly underfunded. But in science we are spending far more money on things that, from some points of view, are far "less important". But this isn't just about extracting facts from the population of grizzly bears in Montana. It's about everything else that goes on in science. It's about developing noninvasive techniques for studying widelife, employing and training lab technicians, developing research programs, (possibly) furthering someone's phd dissertation, contributing additional discussions and data to the worldwide scientific community, and countless other contributions to mankind that would not have been made without this study over its six (plus?) year lifetime. How many young scientists were trained through this program? How many people received a science education through this program? How many graduate students were supported, and over how many years? To science people, that's what this money is about. It's about everything we believe in, everything we think is important about science. That's why it is upsetting to us. If you cannot accept $3 million for grizzly bear research then you cannot accept my career as a graduate student or research mathematician. It is that simple.

---

_{*It's thought that she was referring to a project to study fruit flies affecting olive groves in California and, naturally, France, and not to a genetics project, but this is immaterial.
**The research program actually cost nearly $5 million.}

At my church we have what we call AY ("Adventist Youth", though it's mostly university students) which meets on Sabbath afternoons to read the Bible and have a short discussion. It's headed by a couple of undergraduates. Pretty much all of the regular ACF members go. This last weekend they decided that instead of the usual program they would have a movie night and show Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. They made a special announcement in ACF the night before and invited the entire church that morning.

As soon as we heard what movie they planned on showing, all of the graduate students got on a conference call. None of us had actually seen the film, but we had heard of it and read reviews, and what we heard wasn't pretty. What do we do? Do we just not show up? How will we respond if the movie calls us Nazis and accuses us of trying to stamp out God and religion? What if it gets really personal? Do we leave? Will we be able to respond intelligently to conspiracy theories? How will the rest of the church family respond to us when they realize we self-identify ourselves as scientists or methodological materialists or even evolutionists? What responsibilities do we have to the rest of the church to educate them about our point of view? Will it be an Us Against Them? We were all pretty intimidated by what faced us, and not everyone thought we should even open our mouths. One of my friends, a grad student in biochemistry, said that if we fail to say anything then we are responsible ourselves for the perpetuation of this anti-intellectualism because we have the power to stop it. He said that we have a responsibility to our church family that we need to uphold, and we have a responsibility to ourselves and our scientific communities. We need to be there, he said. We need to be the voice of reason. We need to say something.

He was right. I declared that we all need to be there, defending each other together, or else nobody should go. And so we went.

The movie was far worse than I had feared. The first half of the movie could have actually made an interesting film. It explored the stories of several scientists who claimed variously that they were fired, or not hired, or otherwise blackballed in the scientific community for their positive views of intelligent design. Of course, there's always two sides to the story, and there's plenty of reason to believe the stories presented in the film are not all that the film makes them out to be. But could people have been fired inappropriately for their religious views? Absolutely, yes. That would have been interesting to see.

The second half of the movie made the claims that

• there is a conspiracy within the scientific community to stamp out belief in God,
• scientists are actively trying to wipe out religion and religious belief,
• the scientific community is working actively and collaboratively to repress free inquiry and free speech,
• methodological materialism implies evolution which implies atheism which implies amorality which implies Nazism, gas chambers, euthanasia, and every other great evil the world has seen in the last 200 years.

By far the bulk of time was spent on this last one. It is also the most egregious, most offensive part of the film because it is NOT an indictment of people who made bad hiring and firing decisions. It's an indictment of the entire scientific process. It's saying that anyone--me, you, John Polkinghorne, Joe the plumber--who believes that science should have a method that is materialist in nature is working to promote Nazism. Writing it out matter-of-factly like this sounds like I am overreacting. "Surely it's not that bad!" But it was. That was the message of the film. Science and scientists are amoral, anti-God Nazis.

When the film ended I walked to the back of the church and prepared a mic. We were dismissed, the pastor prayed, and then I said into the mic, "Can we have a discussion?" I walked up front, sat in a chair, and in front of half of the church struggled with what to say. What do you say to that?

"This film was very disturbing to me. The first half of the film claimed that it wasn't about religion and politics. It showed us some stories. There's always two sides to the story, and I encourage anyone interested in this to get on the internet and hear the other side. But then the second half of the film talked about nothing but religion and politics. I don't believe there is a conspiracy in the scientific community against Christians. And if you believe the message of this film, then you have to believe that my life's work is to promote Nazism."

We then took turns passing the mic around. I was amazed at how civil the conversation was. One women gave her testimony about how she was a grad student in the biology department at A&M and how she witnessed first hand how creationists were denied positions. "It happens," she said. One of the grad students, another biochemist, with visible nervousness, explained how unsettling the film was, said that she was an evolutionist, and explained some of the philosophical and scientific fallacies of the film.

Towards the end I had another chance to speak, so I tried to explain: "I am a Bible-believing, fourth generation Adventist you-name-it. We have to be careful about how we decide which things are true. When we search for truth, we need to decide what methods we are going to us to decide which things are true. What science does is, it restricts itself artificially, from the very beginning, by saying that for the purposes of doing science we are going to pretend that the only explanations in existence are materialistic, naturalistic explanations. This is an assumption, not a conclusion, that is taken on not because it is true, but because it's a useful way to do science. This is important because it means that the conclusions of science may not be in fact true. When we personally are looking for truth, it would be foolish to artificially restrict ourselves in this way. It's absolutely important and legitimate to have discussions about theology and science and religion and how it relates to the finds of science. But when you stray from this fundamental assumption of science--which, again, is completely legitimate!--then you are not doing science. This is a crucial, crucial fact. It isn't science."

Was it helpful? I don't know. I hope so. At the very least it opened peoples' eyes to the fact that not everyone in their church believes like they do. You can't expect to be able to respond to an hour and a half of allegations in a 30 minute discussion. But hopefully it convinced people that scientists aren't evil and that the goal of science isn't atheism or Nazism. Who knows, though. Maybe we science types will be the new thing to be disgusted at in the whispered conversations in our church from now on.

Here are some random thoughts that I am sharing with you for no good reason.

Thanksgiving Themed Random Thoughts

I look a lot different from how I looked a few months ago. In early June I started taking a martial arts class. I really got into it, and it inspired me to try to be a healthy person in other ways, too, so I started to keep track of everything I eat with fitday.com. I didn't "go on a diet". I ate when I was hungry and I ate well. But when you see the numbers staring back at you, it's a lot harder to get the chips and a drink every time you purchase a sandwich. I've avoided soda. I started eating a lot more fruits and vegetables. I eat out a lot less. The result is that I spend a lot less on food. Up until recently I haven't really noticed any visible changes in how I look. But then I saw a picture of myself walking with my uncle on the beach taken in early September. Wow. I don't look like that anymore. The difference is dramatic. I have veins and muscles where I didn't have them before. I guess it happened too slowly, drawn out over 6 months, for me to notice.

It turns out that nutrition is really, really complicated. The truth is that I have no idea what nutrients I am ingesting, or even how many calories I eat. I approximate the food item ("It's, er... meatless lasagna."), approximate the quantity ("Um... half a cup?"), and approximate the nutritional content with nutrition labels, which are not accurate (you knew that, right?). But I pretend that the numbers I get over time give me data that can be compared to itself (i.e., "I ate more carbohydrates this week than last week."). I am saying all this in order to tell you that the numbers I'm about to give are completely science fiction and probably bare little resemblance to reality.

So here's the scoop. Over the last three months I've averaged 1950 calories per day. On Thanksgiving day I ate 4665 calories. According to my calculations, that means that I will gain 0.7 lbs from the Thanksgiving day meal. That's right, nearly a pound from one holiday meal. It is by leaps and bounds the single biggest data point in my data set. It was worth it.

Other Random Thoughts

• I have more money these days than I did before. A part of this is because my healthier eating habbits are also a lot cheaper. Also, I'm single and too busy to spend money on entertainment. And I have parents who show their appreciation for me by buying me clothes and a laptop and other things. I've decided to buy more martial arts gear. What else am I going to spend my money on?

 

• I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the fact that I just don't have time for ideas anymore. A few weeks ago I needed to study but decided to take The River Why by David James Duncan to a local coffee shop instead. It was like remembering why I was born.

 

• There have been so many times this last month where I have realized how bless I am to have the advisor I have. Other graduate students are often very nervous when they have to meet with their advisors. I hear all kinds of stories of how students take great pains to avoid their advisors. My office mate works like a dog the day of his meeting with his advisor. My apartment mate barely sleeps the night before because of anxiety. I have never been afraid to meet with my advisor. He has been nothing but understanding, patient, and supportive. This is partly because a lot of grad students slack off more than I do, but that hardly explains it all. Also, my advisor and my other complex analysis mentor are the best and second best complex analysts in the world respectively. (At least that's what I'm told.) Finally, they are both fantastic teachers. I am very lucky to have found them. My future success as a graduate student is now up to me and luck in research.

Yeah, I know this entry is late. Stop bugging me. I'm a graduate student. My life is hard enough. Here goes.


I really don't like politics. Here are a few reasons:

• Politics pretends to be about something it's not. People get elected based not on policies but on slogans. The best candidate is the best looking candidate. People delude themselves into thinking they engage in rational analysis of the facts, but in reality they make their decisions based on the best sounding sophistry, the slickest theme music, their surrounding political environment, and the million other unconscious things that have nothing to do with who would make the best president or senator or whatever. I probably make my decisions the same way.

 

• Politics makes people crazy. They say and do things to other people because of politics that in any other circumstance they would never say or do. Even to members of their own family. Like name-calling. Like accusing people of being a part of a conspiracy. Why would someone accuse their own family member of being a Nazi because they disagree on a political issue? Why would you accuse a family member of moral bankruptcy because they hold a particular political view when you know the righteousness of their character from living with them for decades? The tenor of today's political discourse that we ingest through talking heads and radio programs and angry bloggers programs us to react to dissenting points of view with a level of vitriol that brings me great shame. This happens so often, and it's very sad to me. I am sorry for the role I've played in this. I am sorry for every mean thing I've said or thought about anyone close to me because of politics. I want no part in this.

 

• People lie in politics. Like, a lot. A huge amount. And we expect it and repeat those lies and stand behind them like a sports team, only it matters.

 

• People are duped into thinking the most inane things are profoundly important. Like Obama's pastor and William Ayers and the proximity of Russia to Alaska and a million other things that just. don't. matter.

 

• Here's one that is particularly frustrating and saddening to me: people think that by listening to politics they are being educated and informed. I'll write more on this example later, but it's worth saying here: Science is really, really hard to do. And it's hard to interpret what science tells us. You cannot begin to understand global climate change by reading through some websites. Unless you have a PhD in geophysics, the simple brute fact is that you do not have the skills necessary to evaluate scientific evidence. You just don't. I'm not at all saying you aren't smart enough. I'm saying you don't have the necessary prerequisite education. I don't care how good of a critical thinker you are. You can't do it. This isn't only true for climate change, but for a thousand other issues as well. The systems by which the world runs are incredibly complex and often extremely difficult to understand to any depth. And yet people listen to news "analysts" and Barack Obama saying that the current economic crisis is the "result of eight years of failed economic policy" and really and truly feel that they are informed about the issue. The current crisis isn't Bush's fault. It's not Clinton or Carter's fault either. It's complicated. But it's politically expedient to spew out a bunch of "evidence" to "educate the viewers". And this is so very effective! We WANT to feel like we understand things. We really want to feel like we have a solid explanation for how things work and why they are the way they are. Real life is far more complicated.

"The world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence."

As someone who doesn't like politics the last few months have been particularly unpleasant. I'd like to describe a little bit of the political climate where I live.

But to understand it I think we need to back up 50 years. I remember watching documentaries about the civil rights movement as a kid. I think my parents thought it was important that I understand what happened in that part of America's history, to expose me to those images. I remember watching the footage of fire hoses and police beatings. I remember watching a documentary about the freedom riders in particular, about how in one instance their police escort abandoned them knowing that they faced a brutal mob, how they were beaten with pipes and chains and rocks while the local police looked on. I remember seeing footage of the sit-ins, of regular people on the street, women and children, being screamed at and being pelted with rocks and vegetables and eggs. I don't remember how old I was when I first saw these images, but I was young, and my reaction was amazement. I did not understand how those events could happen in my country, in my culture, with people who spoke my language.

Fast forward to the present. I'm still in awe at those images. And I'm in awe at how recently they happened. Many of those people are still alive. My friends' parents and grandparents were there, participating in those events and experiencing that hate and brutality. I think that some white Americans forget that black Americans still remember.

A few months ago students at campus started wearing shirts that read, "Beat the hell outta Obama". And not just a few students. A lot of students. White students. It's not quite as bad as it sounds. The phrase, "Beat the hell outta ____" is something of a school saying. We regularly say things such as, "Beat the hell outta Texas Tech!", meaning, "Win the football game against Texas Tech!", or "Beat the hell outta cancer!", meaning, "Support our cancer-awareness initiative!" But the phrase certainly takes on a different tone when it is applied to a real human being rather than an abstract concept. Worse, though, is that students chose to wear this shirt knowing full-well the profoundly racist connotation the shirt takes on when it's divorced from its Texas A&M context. Wearing the shirt despite knowing how someone outside of College Station would take it makes a statement. It makes a big statement.

This last Thursday the Young Conservatives of Texas, an official student organization at Texas A&M, hosted an anti-Obama "fair" in front of the student center. While my African-American colleagues and students remember the stories of their parents and grandparents having things thrown at them on the street, the Young Conservatives of Texas chose to tack up a giant picture of Obama's face and invite passers-by to hurl eggs at it. It was ostensibly a metaphore for throwing away a nest-egg at Obama's economic policies. But even those students who agree with their politics couldn't help but notice that it wasn't a giant picture of Obama's economic policies that was getting egged.

The crowd of 300 student onlookers started to get increasingly upset, and the event was ultimately voluntarily halted. The next day they held a "retooled" version of the event. They kept the egg throwing, and even kept Obama's face, but they made it a little smaller, added other (white) Democrat's faces, and hung a list of economic policies above the pictures. Somehow that's more respectful.

Dr. Elsa Murano, president of the university, sent out a university-wide email in response to the fair. She encouraged the student body to express their views in a respectful way and characterized the event as "the actions of [a] small group of students." I overheard one of my students explaining how she (the student) was going to organize a "free speech" event in response to the outcry over the egging. Since nobody's free speech was violated it's hard not to interpret that kind of thing as anything other than support for the YCT's actions. Free speech doesn't mean good speech or even moral speech, and racially insensitive speech, even if free, doesn't deserve celebration. Dr. Murano can say that it was a "small group" of students, but those of us who live and work here know better.

In light of the increased racial tensions on campus, the shirts, the shouting matches in front of the student center, the Black Graduate Student Association held an emergency meeting with its members and representatives from the local police department to discuss possible threats and safety issues if Obama wins.

So nobody here was at all surprised to hear about the noose hung on a tree on election day at the school up the road. Again, a Baylor University spokesman said it was "one person--or a very small number of people". No. No, it wasn't.

I've felt a lot of pressure from my family to be more engaged in politics. I hate politics. I have a lot of cynicism about politics. But in an effort to appease my mother, I'm going to make some kind of attempt to express some thoughts about political things in the next few entries. Don't expect a lot of political opinion. But it's the most you're going to get out of me.

Here's an outline of what's in my mind:

1. Political expression in College Station is whacked.
2. Why I hate politics.
3. A mathematician looks at federal income tax.
4. A mathematician looks at recent statements made about science funding.

To be honest, I really only contribute to the political conversation in #3 and #4. My political opinions are extremely narrow in scope because my expertise is extremely narrow in scope. I am informed about science and technology, and so that's what I feel I am qualified to discuss. But hopefully what I have to add is helpful.