Arabic Math Notation

The W3C's MathML interest group notes on Arabic math notation brings a few thoughts to mind:

• MathML looks like a pain to do by hand. Much easier to use texvc to convert from LaTeX.
  
• Math users everywhere are all a bit obsessed with having their math look pretty, regardless of the language.
  
• The use of the letters 'hg' (the initial letters of the Arabic for 'sum') as the summation sign in Machrek notation, instead of the Greek capital Sigma, is a reminder of how most Western math notation evolved from similar abbreviations (e.g. long s as the integration sign)
  
• Although the Arabs write their numbers left to right, they write their math right to left, except for the Moroccan style (which is influenced by French math notation). This must be quite confusing for n00bs.
  

Institutionalized

I've been dining institutionally for the past four years, and for most of that time also living in institutional housing. Not to mean that I have been institutionalized (though sometimes I wonder if I should be); by 'institutional dining' I refer to food served up in cookhouses, staff canteens, and dining halls. Likewise with institutional housing: barracks and dorms. What defines institutional dining as an experience? How is a dining hall a special place, compared to other kinds of places where one can eat? While musing on this point I was thinking about school canteens: do they count as institutional food? After all one is likewise obliged to be commensal, messing together (both in the sense of consuming one's viands and exasperating the custodial staff) under some protective roof. Given this common trait, the act of eating together in a big space with people from a given institution is not what defines the experience of institutional dining. The true answer lies in the relationships of power and patronage at work when we are served our meals.

What I finally concluded truly defines an institutional dining experience lies in who prepares and serves up the food. In a canteen, with its multiple vendors, one has the pick of whom to patronize. A dining hall, by contrast, even if there is a wide and diverse buffet spread to pick from, has really only one kitchen, one group of cooks, one master mind and deciding hand behind the menu. The principles of competition do not apply. Instead of playing patron to the vendor, the roles are reversed and the consumer becomes patronized by the all-powerful hidden power that dispenses food, drink, and sustenance. From having a buyer's dignity of choice (however limited), to being beholden to an anonymous kitchen in order to stave off starvation, how great a gulf! The cornucopia laid out on the tables is not a vision of plenty, it is instead an act of disdain: take as much or as little of this food as you want, for we hold the keys to it and your present plenty is at our whim. More fruit? Less homogenized mush? A choice of beverages other than colored sugar water? Fill out this slip with your thoughts, and drop it into the forbidding maw of the feedback box and we shall retire to contemplate your respectful memorial.

So this is the great lie we have to recognize: that plenty is prosperity. The hand that feeds is also the hand that takes away, otherwise why would we be warned against biting it? In our mortal condition we are powerless to fight or contend against the various powers that hold our lives in the balance, some of which inspire reverential worship, and others fearsome loathing. So it is also with the quality of food in different dining halls. My greater point, though, is that the sooner one realizes the truth about one's situation, the easier it is to come to terms with it, and the more urgently one pushes oneself to find a real job, live in a real home, and eat TV dinners heated in a microwave like real people do.

Not My Party

Yesterday was July 4, my dear sister's birthday. Coincidentally, it also happens to be Independence Day in a country some of you may know as the United States. Woods Hole, the village that I'm in for this summer, has a charming little parade down the two blocks of streets that constitute the center of the Hole. It has some of the trappings that you'd expect from a Fourth of July parade - the Stars and Stripes, a marching band (drum and fife, and a random trumpeter who later got attacked by a giant mosquito, but more on that later), and watermelon - but the highlights are the floats and displays put on by the students and faculty of the various courses at the Marine Biological Laboratory. They're biology-themed, very campy, and very nerdy, as one would expect (a video of last year's parade to prove my point).

The Embryology course did their classic gastrulation dance, dressed up in three colors to represent the three embryonic germ layers. The neurobiologists had big floats of their favorite organisms, which this year were a blue lobster and a three-eyed mutant frog. More diverse were the favorite microbes represented by the microbiologists, who to a large extent had a different costume each (giant Vibrio and a giant host squid, two really cute kids who were tottering along in bacteriophage costumes with big capsid caps, a very fetching anaerobic methane oxidizing consortium, etc.) though there were some symbiotes in the crowd, too. Several giant parasites (including two huge mosquitoes) hovered around while immunoglobulins and other components of the host immunity swatted them away, and the cell physiologists did something too arcane for me to interpret, though it involved aggressive popping of balloons and lots of water bombs. And those same water bombs (and water guns, which are the only weapons that Massachusetts doesn't strictly regulate) were involved in warfare between the different contingents - the mutant frog got totally spattered, the microbes and parasites fought back with high-powered squirt guns, and general chaos ensued in the streets. Aside from the courses, there were other groups too: local residents, the Children's School of Science group which went as Darwins and the Finches, and assorted independents, including myself as a (hastily assembled) sea squirt, the result of a (similarly hasty) commitment made the night before.

That was all great fun. Later in the evening, as the sun set, I walked around hoping to see fireworks. The town of Falmouth, I knew, has a great display every year at the beach, and I was hoping to catch a glimpse from the shore here. Eventually I followed the sounds of explosions and found my way to the private neighborhood just some way off from my dorm. They were having their own small fireworks party at their shared beach. Not being a resident, I could not go in after dusk, but walking down a side-road to find a better vantage point, I ended up standing in front of someone's driveway, joining a Slavic family that was there also to watch the show from the opposite side of the cove. It was brilliant, to see the pyrotechnics from so close. Each of the sparkles and whizzles was clear and sharp, and the noise was thrilling. Being downwind on a gusty evening, I imagined that I could smell the peppery spent gunpowder. It was also a lonely experience. There were children shouting and running about - the glowing dots of their sparklers gave away their positions in the darkness. Out to sea on the horizon, there was an even bigger show of fireworks on the mainland, but from the distance it was reduced to minuscule sprays of silent, glittering pixels. It was then that I knew that this was not my party. It was mine to watch but not to revel in, looking on from across the bay as someone else sets the charges off to light up the sky, briefly.

Motorcycle Diary

The motorcycle is a much more democratic vehicle than the car - and not just on the principle of one man, one engine. The pedestrian struck by a car is more grievously hurt than the driver, who is cossetted by the crumple-zone, seat-belt, air-bag, and other hyphenated accoutrements of safety. The lot of the motorcyclist, however, is much closer to that of the pedestrian. He is exposed to the dangers of the road with nothing more than a helmet, and sometimes not even that, and so in a crash is just as likely to be tossed and killed as the pedestrian he strikes. Acquiring an independent means of transport brings many benefits to one so blessed, including freedom of travel and the ability to bring goods long distances, which can do no harm to one's socio-economic position. Vehicles are hence, well, vehicles of inequality, widening the gulf between haves and have-nots. But cars set one apart much more markedly, dehumanizing the motorist, because the road-unit that the observer sees is not the driver but the car. The motorcycle, then, with its equality of possible harm to pedestrian and rider, is the vehicular equivalent of the Golden Rule, of turning the other cheek.

But that is not why I like motorcycles. I like them because they feel fast. Not that they are fast, which undoubtedly many of them are capable of being, though not the ones I have ridden. What they do possess is the ability to make even relatively slow speeds feel faster, to make one viscerally conscious of what is otherwise only a number on the speedometer. Speeding is hence a much more deliberate act for the motorcyclist: the driver can claim that he didn't know he was hovering five kph above the limit - it doesn't seem that much different to him whether he goes fifty or fifty-five. A motorcyclist can feel the difference, and he knows that he is speeding. Speed becomes palpable, speed becomes real. For TE Lawrence, perhaps, the speed itself held more reality than the country road that he sped through towards his death. Psychologically disjointed from what was supposedly his own society, abnegating himself by serving as a lowly enlisted man under a pseudonym, knowing that one could not possibly ever top a former life as Lawrence of Arabia, maybe that was why he took to the engine with such gusto.

Aside from speed itself, I believe that the exercise of one's faculties of balance also makes motorcycling attractive, just as one's balance is constantly tested on a bicycle or on horseback. One becomes part of one's vehicle in a way that a regular driver of cars could never understand. Leaning into turns for example, subtle adjustments made to one's body, shifting one's weight just so. I remember being kept in training overtime by my riding instructor, just going at the figure-of-eight until I was sick of that shape. When I finally understood how to execute it, however, realization came suddenly, it became intuition rather than learning. Practiced movement done skilfully is pleasing and satisfying, and that is what I think every motorcyclist knows, consciously or not, at the back of his or her mind.

Having not ridden for almost three years now, I probably should not be trusted with any class of vehicle. But I still can remember how it was, going just a bit faster on a hot day to cool off, stopping at the traffic lights and surveying the other dumpy, boxed-in motorists from a high perch. One day soon I'll go and get licensed again, and put these vaguely equestrian longings to rest. And the first thing I'll try, of course, will be figure-eights in the parking lot.

Matured Tastes

As a child there were some things that I resolutely would not eat or would pick out of my food, among them ladies' fingers (or okra - I never understood the name, because any lady with green ribbed fingers like those must be some sort of vegetable witch), sea cucumber, and Chinese parsley (cilantro). Even in 'normal' food like chicken I would carefully remove the little bits of vein or clumps of fat, and much preferred the big homogeneous chunks of white meat even though they had, in my parents' view, much less flavor. In retrospect it seems silly to have done so, but to a little kid, gristle and schmuck looms larger and is harder to ignore - a full sized adult with a full-sized appetite can wolf things down quickly without pausing to inspect too carefully. A child with a penchant for close inspection (elsewhere applauded as inquisitiveness and curiosity but here slapped down as fussiness) sees all the gory details of cooked flesh. If anything, the fine dexterity developed by my young fingers for the purposes of my little neurosis has surely benefited my present skills in dissection.

Why these foods deterred me had as much to do with texture as it did taste. The gooey insides of okra was like so much mucus and slime. Sure, there are more disturbing examples of the use of slime in food - the gong-gong is a kind of conch that produces copious amounts of slime as a self-defense mechanism (as I discovered trying to dissect it), and it is precisely this slime which is favored for thickening certain seafood stews. Somehow, vegetables seem less icky than animals, but when I got it on my lips and fingers, I still could not help being reminded of a messy sneeze. Spices that taste odd are a little easier to understand. The cause of spiciness is usually some manner of small molecule produced by a plant, as a form of deterrence against herbivory. Hence my dislike of these pungent tastes simply means that these chemical defenses were doing their job well.

But tastes change, and to my surprise I found myself, within the last week, very much enjoying a salad with lime and cilantro dressing, and chewing contentedly on the chunks of clam in a bowl of clam chowder. Being accustomed to having cilantro as a garnishing on my soup or chicken rice, having it with something sour was a novel sensation and piqued my interest. Similarly, chunks of okra in gumbo no longer faze me. What happened? Why have I disavowed the carefully curated avoidances of my childhood? Were all those accumulated hours spent picking out every little offending leaf or morsel spent in vain?

Perhaps my sense of taste is deteriorating; maybe taste and smell are dulled with age much like hearing. Things that use to jar and offend now become mellowed and tolerable. But I don't like this particular hypothesis, because first it means that I have begun this inexorable slip down the slope of senility, and my vanity forbids that I admit it. More objectively (as objective as one can be with an unmeasurable thing like smell and taste), the foods I used to avoid but now tolerate or enjoy are no less slimy or pungent than what I remember them to have been, and I hardly think a deterioration on the agricultural stock could be an explanation (have clams become less squishy?). No, they taste exactly the same as they had before, but now I have learned to like them. Psychologists call this a 'hedonic shift', and this principle has been applied to explain how people come to enjoy the heat of chili peppers. It's not that one becomes desensitized to the burn after eating lots of chilies. The burn is just as strong (evidenced by the fact that one can still detect the active principle at similarly high dilutions) but because one knows that the pain, while thrilling, does not cause lasting harm, one learns to enjoy the sensation, a sort of dissonance between what one's body is screaming (and scream it does) and what one's head knows (just a spot of bother). The same can be said of skydiving or 'taking very hot baths' (an illustration that the authors of a paper on this subject used), but I'm not so sure that the latter does not have lasting effects, at least on men.

Maybe, too, it is a search for novelty that drives me to sample things that I wouldn't have before. The texture of boiled cabbage can only hold one's fascination for so long. Sooner or later the child is seduced by the charms of arugula and thence becomes a man. I am sure that my earlier food avoidance has helped me in this respect, because having avoided so many kinds of food before, there is still much that is new to me. If I ration out my time and schedule my hedonic shifts appropriately, I might learn to like blood cockles and other squishy foods in my late dotage, saving these foods most appropriate for toothlessness to the very end. I would not want to succumb to the curse of prosperity and plenty, where the very abundance and variety to be found in modern supermarkets have driven the bored, rich consumer to the ghastly concoctions of molecular gastronomy. After all, who needs bacon ice cream when the mushy amorphousness of braised sea anemone (good with oyster sauce and some sautéed leafy greens) is just as disconcerting? There is still much to be eaten before we have to resort to the manipulations of chemical cookery to thrill and excite us.

So that might be the substance of my new-found tolerance and widened appetite, learning that these foods really won't kill me. Thus it is that more than two decades after being weaned off milk, I finally learn and accept that food is mostly harmless. (Vindicating exasperated mothers around the world, almost-pleading that 'it won't kill you to try!') I still draw the line, however, at eating cephalopods. Molluscan meat in general used to be my bête noir, but I have come to terms with clams and (soon enough) oyster (scallops were down my gullet long ago - they are too juicy to resist). Cephalopods, though, I still cannot bring myself to eat. Their knowing eyes speak to me when I peer at them in their tanks as they flutter their tentacles, silently intimating: one day, it shall be your kind who shall grace our maw....