Travels & Tales. A bit long.
A variety of topics, with recent events but a way to string them together.
Wednesday
I'd just like to say that while I've been to passover seders before, as a non-Jew, I don't usually help run them. Still, the really informal apartment-style seder was in many ways way cooler than the real version, since we got to make things up if we couldn't quite remember the next step. Mmm, and the haroset was really good.
---
Thursday afternoon
On the bus ride to Washington, I got a fairly unique experience- I watched a movie that I didn't know or could even guess not just what the title was, but what it was in general. This is actually pretty cool, and allowed me to evaluate what was going on much more from the perspective of the characters. The bus-operator started the movie a bit after the title, I guess, with a movie-making charlatan from the thirties trying to convince an actress to join him, followed by them getting on a ship, fleeing from the cops, and meeting an eccentric script-writer. After that, things are very mixed- a love story? A drama? A sarcastic comedy? I had just no clue what the movie was trying to do, but it seemed pretty interesting. I could only guess that this must have been some arty movie that Adrien Brody did before The Pianist in the early 90s, although the cinematography and direction seemed extremely modern, which was weird.
Luckily for my ego I figured out what the movie was roughly 5 minutes before it became obvious, but still, if I'd known, I don't know if I could have appreciated the early parts of the movie as much. I'd have been in the wrong mood.
As a more general comment, if possible, I really do like to approach movies & TV series knowing nothing other than an assurance that it's good. I'm not even talking spoilers; I'm talking about basic plot or themes. I saw "The Shawshank Redemption" not knowing anything about the movie, but just that it randomly appeared on cable; for starters, I did not know the major spoiler trumpeted from sources like, oh, the back of the box and many reviews. I watched "Memento" on nothing but a "see it, you'll like it" recommendation; same with RahXephon. Best way to do things; there can't possibly be any sort of expectation effect skewing your perceptions.
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Thursday night
I don't recall ever bringing it up much at Oberlin, but one topic I've always had very strong feelings on is immigration reform. We abolished the quota system in the 50s, theoretically... but still have it, really. Your chances of being admitted to the US in a hurry are entirely proportional to how much we want to humiliate your country. You're from Cuba? Instant pass in, congratulations. You're from a dictatorship that we're "friends" with, and want asylum (which would imply that not everything is perfect)? ... never mind. Why should peaceful people not be allowed to cross borders freely? I mean, don't get me wrong. Criminals & terrorists can be refused entry, and I'm not saying that we have to instantly grant citizenship to all people who ask for it. But we should allow them to come here if they want. This would have the additional benefit of making all immigration above-board, legal immigration- we'd have some sort of papers and records for everyone. What benefit is
gained by randomly forcing some people to work under the table? I'm confident that our social services net, for those worried about that, can tell the difference between an immigrant & a citizen... not to mention that new workers are what help SUPPORT the social services net. I think I read somewhere that immigrants pay 10 times the money that they "take" from the government, which sounds about right.
Anyway. I decided to walk around Washington to kill some time, so I walked south to Union Station, where I saw a copy of the National Review with some ridiculous headline on immigration, and I peeked inside. Apparently America is a nation of "legal" immigrants, so we can't tolerate illegality, and need to deport the evil illegals! But immigration is a problem, so we should widen legal immigration afterward.
....
ARGHHH YOU IDIOTS. Sorry, but after people decided that Prohibition was a bad idea, did we require that all people who wanted to drink now prove that they had followed the law before, and pay any back fines or serve jail time for previous violations of the law? (Hint: The question is rhetorical.) If we CAUSE the problem, there should be some understanding that people who break the law may have good reasons. I'm not justifying it, but when a law is changed, there is an implicit admission that the law before may have been non-optimal. Duh.
Anyway. There are plenty of lovely schemes from Operating Systems on how to prioritize tasks without starvation; priority tables and so on. If we insist on still funneling somewhat, I'm certain we can better formalize our current messy waitlist system, assign priorities, and let applicant priorities increase with time. At least people would know where they stand, that way.
The one thing I will say for us is that at least our system is far saner than most countries- say, oh, France for a good example as we were reminded a few months ago.
---
Friday
Back to Washington; I wandered around Foggy Bottom with my parents for most of today. This is where the George Washington University campus was, and thus is where my mother went to college (on a full ride, too. Yay mom!), so I got odd stories like "and this is where I hid the fish to let it get nice and ripe." I also found out that the State Department doesn't take tours to the public without asking waaaaay in advance, so no luck on that. We got to eat at chez Watergate, which was interesting (I had a slice of pizza), then saw the Renfield Gallery which had a Grant Wood exhibit (you know, American Gothic, which was in fact on display). He had a surprisingly modern & humorous style of drawing- some of his paintings look like something from a Pixar film. I was also amused that a lot of his earlier works were "Grant Wood & Middle school class of Cedar Rapids, Iowa" in attribution. It was good stuff. (Upstairs, they had George Catlin's Indian exhibit, but not nearly as well-displayed as when it was in New York. The NY version had all sorts of interesting commentary on what he was doing with it & amusing stories... perhaps for another time.)
---
Saturday
I got to see my cousin locamotor, which is always interesting. In the vast sheaf of college pamphlets I received while in high school, only one stood out from the vast blending together of "At XYZ University, we care!" (Oberlin didn't send me anything. Frown.) That was St. John's College, which offered something authentically different. For those who aren't familiar with the place, they all study the "Great Books" Program, which means marching through history to see knowledge as it evolved, and learning it for themselves. As you might guess, it's basically all source material; you don't read a commentary on Machiavelli or an economics textbook, you freakin' read The Prince and The Wealth of Nations. I can easily say that if I'd wanted to take a humanities degree, I probably would have gone to St. John's, for the whole super-well rounded philosopher idea. (Read the Wikipedia article linked above for the Great Books they actually read, if you're curious.)
Anyway. Now that that background is out of the way, a neat thing about the Johnnie curriculum is that you study things in the order they were learned in real life. Now, for Math, this is fine, since Math is one of the rare disciplines where elementary school is basically antiquity, High School is the 1700's, and college is generally the 1800's to the present. Go ahead and start with Euclid; what he said was right. However, this gets a bit funny for other disciplines, since this means spending time learning systems that, in retrospect, were just wrong. The Four Humors of Galen, anyone? Interesting to see the system that the real pioneers (like Harvey) had to fight against, I suppose, but still odd. Anyway, I noticed that we never actually read Aristotle in any courses I took at Oberlin, or even excerpted him; my suspicion was that he was a long-winded pompous type, and it seems that is confirmed. Aristotle, in his "physics" (ironically enough, Newton called his work "natural philosophy..."), had this fun proof on why fire goes up and earth goes down. Well, more a disproof; he disproved that this could be because of the shape of the container (buh?) or perhaps small amounts of void (someone snuck some void beneath the rocks, so they fall; a bit of void above the flame makes it dance upward to try and fill it). Except these ideas are stupid. So, Aristotle concludes: the reason fire goes up and earth goes down is because... it is their nature to do so.
Well, that solves things.
(And oh yes, I got to see the campus a bit, which was tiny yet neat. But Annapolis sucks, apparently, a charmless town of well-to-do bureacrats. Shame.)
---
Sunday
The principles of symmetry demand that I return to an in-transit movie, which happened to be My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I'd just like to say that the family practices in that movie crossed the line from "cute" to "grounds for justifiable homicide" a few too many times; there's a large difference between inviting someone to celebrate your traditions, and demanding compliance because there could be no other way. The characters in the family just acted plain selfishly often, not bothering to ask the bride who's getting married what she thought... but then I suppose they needed SOME conflict to make a movie. Oh well.
After that was over, I finished reading up on symmetry from The Equation that Couldn't be Solved, which was a general-interest rendition of symmetry & group theory. For the non-mathematicians here, Group Theory is awesome, and this book is warm & fuzzy & non-technical, so you needn't be scared away. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's a little too fuzzy even for a book not demanding any mathematics background, since I think the basics of Group Theory are simple enough for anyone who made it out of middle school, but most will probably consider this a benefit, not a downside. Anyway, if you're interested in mathematical duels in Italy along with gun duels in France, I'll definitely recommend the book; the best parts are definitely the biographies of various mathematicians, since mathematicians tend to lead exciting, bizarre, and short lives.
Wednesday
I'd just like to say that while I've been to passover seders before, as a non-Jew, I don't usually help run them. Still, the really informal apartment-style seder was in many ways way cooler than the real version, since we got to make things up if we couldn't quite remember the next step. Mmm, and the haroset was really good.
---
Thursday afternoon
On the bus ride to Washington, I got a fairly unique experience- I watched a movie that I didn't know or could even guess not just what the title was, but what it was in general. This is actually pretty cool, and allowed me to evaluate what was going on much more from the perspective of the characters. The bus-operator started the movie a bit after the title, I guess, with a movie-making charlatan from the thirties trying to convince an actress to join him, followed by them getting on a ship, fleeing from the cops, and meeting an eccentric script-writer. After that, things are very mixed- a love story? A drama? A sarcastic comedy? I had just no clue what the movie was trying to do, but it seemed pretty interesting. I could only guess that this must have been some arty movie that Adrien Brody did before The Pianist in the early 90s, although the cinematography and direction seemed extremely modern, which was weird.
Luckily for my ego I figured out what the movie was roughly 5 minutes before it became obvious, but still, if I'd known, I don't know if I could have appreciated the early parts of the movie as much. I'd have been in the wrong mood.
As a more general comment, if possible, I really do like to approach movies & TV series knowing nothing other than an assurance that it's good. I'm not even talking spoilers; I'm talking about basic plot or themes. I saw "The Shawshank Redemption" not knowing anything about the movie, but just that it randomly appeared on cable; for starters, I did not know the major spoiler trumpeted from sources like, oh, the back of the box and many reviews. I watched "Memento" on nothing but a "see it, you'll like it" recommendation; same with RahXephon. Best way to do things; there can't possibly be any sort of expectation effect skewing your perceptions.
---
Thursday night
I don't recall ever bringing it up much at Oberlin, but one topic I've always had very strong feelings on is immigration reform. We abolished the quota system in the 50s, theoretically... but still have it, really. Your chances of being admitted to the US in a hurry are entirely proportional to how much we want to humiliate your country. You're from Cuba? Instant pass in, congratulations. You're from a dictatorship that we're "friends" with, and want asylum (which would imply that not everything is perfect)? ... never mind. Why should peaceful people not be allowed to cross borders freely? I mean, don't get me wrong. Criminals & terrorists can be refused entry, and I'm not saying that we have to instantly grant citizenship to all people who ask for it. But we should allow them to come here if they want. This would have the additional benefit of making all immigration above-board, legal immigration- we'd have some sort of papers and records for everyone. What benefit is
gained by randomly forcing some people to work under the table? I'm confident that our social services net, for those worried about that, can tell the difference between an immigrant & a citizen... not to mention that new workers are what help SUPPORT the social services net. I think I read somewhere that immigrants pay 10 times the money that they "take" from the government, which sounds about right.
Anyway. I decided to walk around Washington to kill some time, so I walked south to Union Station, where I saw a copy of the National Review with some ridiculous headline on immigration, and I peeked inside. Apparently America is a nation of "legal" immigrants, so we can't tolerate illegality, and need to deport the evil illegals! But immigration is a problem, so we should widen legal immigration afterward.
....
ARGHHH YOU IDIOTS. Sorry, but after people decided that Prohibition was a bad idea, did we require that all people who wanted to drink now prove that they had followed the law before, and pay any back fines or serve jail time for previous violations of the law? (Hint: The question is rhetorical.) If we CAUSE the problem, there should be some understanding that people who break the law may have good reasons. I'm not justifying it, but when a law is changed, there is an implicit admission that the law before may have been non-optimal. Duh.
Anyway. There are plenty of lovely schemes from Operating Systems on how to prioritize tasks without starvation; priority tables and so on. If we insist on still funneling somewhat, I'm certain we can better formalize our current messy waitlist system, assign priorities, and let applicant priorities increase with time. At least people would know where they stand, that way.
The one thing I will say for us is that at least our system is far saner than most countries- say, oh, France for a good example as we were reminded a few months ago.
---
Friday
Back to Washington; I wandered around Foggy Bottom with my parents for most of today. This is where the George Washington University campus was, and thus is where my mother went to college (on a full ride, too. Yay mom!), so I got odd stories like "and this is where I hid the fish to let it get nice and ripe." I also found out that the State Department doesn't take tours to the public without asking waaaaay in advance, so no luck on that. We got to eat at chez Watergate, which was interesting (I had a slice of pizza), then saw the Renfield Gallery which had a Grant Wood exhibit (you know, American Gothic, which was in fact on display). He had a surprisingly modern & humorous style of drawing- some of his paintings look like something from a Pixar film. I was also amused that a lot of his earlier works were "Grant Wood & Middle school class of Cedar Rapids, Iowa" in attribution. It was good stuff. (Upstairs, they had George Catlin's Indian exhibit, but not nearly as well-displayed as when it was in New York. The NY version had all sorts of interesting commentary on what he was doing with it & amusing stories... perhaps for another time.)
---
Saturday
I got to see my cousin locamotor, which is always interesting. In the vast sheaf of college pamphlets I received while in high school, only one stood out from the vast blending together of "At XYZ University, we care!" (Oberlin didn't send me anything. Frown.) That was St. John's College, which offered something authentically different. For those who aren't familiar with the place, they all study the "Great Books" Program, which means marching through history to see knowledge as it evolved, and learning it for themselves. As you might guess, it's basically all source material; you don't read a commentary on Machiavelli or an economics textbook, you freakin' read The Prince and The Wealth of Nations. I can easily say that if I'd wanted to take a humanities degree, I probably would have gone to St. John's, for the whole super-well rounded philosopher idea. (Read the Wikipedia article linked above for the Great Books they actually read, if you're curious.)
Anyway. Now that that background is out of the way, a neat thing about the Johnnie curriculum is that you study things in the order they were learned in real life. Now, for Math, this is fine, since Math is one of the rare disciplines where elementary school is basically antiquity, High School is the 1700's, and college is generally the 1800's to the present. Go ahead and start with Euclid; what he said was right. However, this gets a bit funny for other disciplines, since this means spending time learning systems that, in retrospect, were just wrong. The Four Humors of Galen, anyone? Interesting to see the system that the real pioneers (like Harvey) had to fight against, I suppose, but still odd. Anyway, I noticed that we never actually read Aristotle in any courses I took at Oberlin, or even excerpted him; my suspicion was that he was a long-winded pompous type, and it seems that is confirmed. Aristotle, in his "physics" (ironically enough, Newton called his work "natural philosophy..."), had this fun proof on why fire goes up and earth goes down. Well, more a disproof; he disproved that this could be because of the shape of the container (buh?) or perhaps small amounts of void (someone snuck some void beneath the rocks, so they fall; a bit of void above the flame makes it dance upward to try and fill it). Except these ideas are stupid. So, Aristotle concludes: the reason fire goes up and earth goes down is because... it is their nature to do so.
Well, that solves things.
(And oh yes, I got to see the campus a bit, which was tiny yet neat. But Annapolis sucks, apparently, a charmless town of well-to-do bureacrats. Shame.)
---
Sunday
The principles of symmetry demand that I return to an in-transit movie, which happened to be My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I'd just like to say that the family practices in that movie crossed the line from "cute" to "grounds for justifiable homicide" a few too many times; there's a large difference between inviting someone to celebrate your traditions, and demanding compliance because there could be no other way. The characters in the family just acted plain selfishly often, not bothering to ask the bride who's getting married what she thought... but then I suppose they needed SOME conflict to make a movie. Oh well.
After that was over, I finished reading up on symmetry from The Equation that Couldn't be Solved, which was a general-interest rendition of symmetry & group theory. For the non-mathematicians here, Group Theory is awesome, and this book is warm & fuzzy & non-technical, so you needn't be scared away. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's a little too fuzzy even for a book not demanding any mathematics background, since I think the basics of Group Theory are simple enough for anyone who made it out of middle school, but most will probably consider this a benefit, not a downside. Anyway, if you're interested in mathematical duels in Italy along with gun duels in France, I'll definitely recommend the book; the best parts are definitely the biographies of various mathematicians, since mathematicians tend to lead exciting, bizarre, and short lives.