• Government Data and the Case for Not Running Me Over – A good short note on how open (but still semi-broken) government data can help make all kinds of policy discussions more substantive. And how much better it would all be if it weren't so borken. As applied to the question of who pays for roads (everyone, it turns out, including cyclists).
• Boulder is a city "wired for biking" – The Denver Post – Well thankfully I'm not the *only* person who has noticed how nice it is to bike here! Boulder has a whopping 10% modeshare for bikes (commuting), and a 46% increase in bikes downtown over the last 2 years. Please please please let this be a runaway process.
• Xeromag | Polyamory? – A decent devil's advocate type description of what "polyamory" means. Lots of continuum variables…

• Boulder Green Streets – Boulder is experimenting with temporary de-motorization of some streets, semi-Ciclovia style, and half a block from my house!

• Tell me again why we mandate parking at bars? – One of the many perverse outcomes of our automotive infatuation.

• Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected – Go Iceland! Strange things happen in countries the size of cities. And even if you don't agree with this particular iteration, we need more experiments. More long tail governmental experiments. What we've got today just doesn't cut it.
• The Real Science Gap – A much broader and more data driven historical look at how gradschool, and the system of science in the US, got so broken. Freakishly published only a couple of weeks ago. I had no idea it existed when I wrote my essay.
• Something Deeply Wrong With Chemistry – An infamous letter from Erick Carreria, still kicking around the interwebz 14 years later.
• Tuna’s End – We will eat them all. Every. Last. One.
• Don't Become a Scientist! – Jonathan Katz, a professor at Wash U., advises us not to become scientists. Not because science is evil or untrue, but because the system we have constructed for doing science, at and beyond the graduate level, is fundamentally broken.
• Elena's Inbox | A Project of the Sunlight Foundation – Ever wonder what a SCOTUS nominee's inbox looks like? Sunlight took Kagan's Clinton era e-mails under FOIA, and parsed them into (*gasp*) a usable format, a la gmail.
• Hoboken’s Corner Car Program – A city-wide car-sharing program in Hoboken, NJ, intended to help deal with the dearth of parking, and so-called suburban refugees, who don't realize you can happily live there without a car.

I say to you that we are full of chemicals which require us to belong to folk societies, or failing that, to feel lousy all the time. We are chemically engineered to live in folk societies, just as fish are chemically engineered to live in clean water—and there aren’t any folk societies for us anymore. (Kurt Vonnegut)

Wolfgang Pauli apparently once said of a student’s work: “This isn’t right.  This isn’t even wrong.”, to deride it for being unfalsifiable.  Grad school isn’t quite that bad.  We’re all running the experiment together every day.  We can tell whether or not it’s working, at least in theory.  But only if we’re willing to look.  I’m looking; I say it’s not working, at least not for graduate students, not on average (mean or median, pick your poison).

Think about the flux of people through this system.  Have you ever heard anyone talk about thesis advisers kind of like they’re talking about a genealogy?  My adviser’s adviser is my grand-adviser.  I’m descended from Heisenberg.  It’s a kind of asexual species, the PhD.  You have only one parent.  That’s not universally true, but it’s a good approximation.  And like aphids, we are prolific.  How many students might you graduate in a career?  On average one a year for 30 years?  Even only one every three years results in the population growing by an order of magnitude every generation.  But obviously that’s not happening.  Not all those PhDs become advisers.  Not all of them stay in academia.  And by not all, I mean something like 90-98%, if we assume the population of academics scales roughly with the overall population.  And maybe that’s not a valid assumption, but if it’s not, we should at least think about why we would want to accumulate an ever growing slice of the population in academic contexts.

It’s not entirely surprising that academia is so focused on itself.  It is, after all, entirely composed of people that thought it was so great they wanted to dedicate their life to it.  And fair enough, for lots of them, it’s probably the right place.  Or a right place anyway.  But it’s not the only place.  The other possible paths get undersold, because they aren’t the ones the salesmen bought.  And who knows, maybe there’s not just a little bit of self justification in there.  Some of them must have a tinge of buyer’s remorse.  I don’t believe this underselling is acceptable.  If for every 10-50 students who come in, only one reaches academic reproductive age, what you’ve got is r-selection, or worse, because those at the bottom are ultimately vital to the functioning of the research complex as a whole, what you’ve got is a pyramid scheme.  We are paid in classic pyramid scheme style, with paper.  Just letters, in front of or behind our names.  And who, other than a graduate student, can you imagine working for their entire winter break, trying to get the same reaction to run repeatedly, working through every single solvent in the lab in alphabetical order, all the way up to nitromethane?  Who, other than the person who actually did that, can you imagine using the story as a pep talk?

My beef here is not with the pyramidal structure per se, but rather with the fact that very few within its upper echelons seem willing to describe it in these terms.  My cynical self suspects that at some level that is because doing so would reduce the influx of fresh meat for the grinder.  Now, we could retain this structure without being dishonest if we wanted to.  It’s the same structure as a tournament.  The only thing that’s different is what the participants believe about the plausible outcomes.  People behave very differently when they think virtually everyone can win than when they think virtually everyone will lose.  There are some people who value participation in a tournament for its own sake, not because they think they’ll win, but I don’t get the feeling that’s true of most graduate students.  Not incidentally, this is also the same basic structure as the Cravath system, used by law firms and business consultants and even the US military’s officer corps.  It’s up or out.  You will be periodically evaluated.  You will either be promoted or fired at each evaluation.  It’s one thing to work 70 hours a week while getting paid $70k a year at a law firm or consulting company where you know you’ll eventually either be fired or make partner.  It’s something else entirely to work 70 hours a week for $17k a year (and no retirement plan, bonuses, or decent healthcare) while being told you are taking part in the Great Scientific Endeavor.  You’ll have your quals, your props, your orals, your defense.  And we all know a PhD is not enough. Did you get a post-doc?  A second post-doc?  Two years in DC on a National Academies fellowship.  A third post-doc?  And only then, at the age of 36, the first thing you’ve ever actually called a “job”.  Academic adolescence.  Trying to grant PhDs before you’ve actually gotten tenure is like trying to get pregnant in high school.  You could do it, but is it really a good idea for anyone involved?  At halfway through your lifespan, you might then find yourself with a lab to really call your own.  Indefinitely.  Or at least, as long as you can find funding, and stave off your mental illness or dementia of choice.  Congratulations!  You are now a Winner!  You may proceed with the in vitro fertilization.

The cost of playing in this tournament is huge, and it’s not made clear up front.  Who joins a poker game without knowing the initial stake?  One cost is social vagrancy.  It is wholly outside our evolutionary history to pick up and abandon our entire social sphere every few years.  Graduating hurts, unless you’re sociopathic.  It is a discarding of everyone you know.  All the people you ran with, biked with, cooked with, ate with, drank with, cried with, talked to, fucked.  It feels that way.

But you tell yourself (and it’s true) they were all going to just discard me too.

That’s the plan.  The only plan anyone seems to have.  It’s a dumb plan.

One day you notice people start trickling away.  The people you became friends with even though they were further along, or people who were unusually productive and finish quickly (but who really gets close to them; they never leave lab).  The spell is broken.  The illusion falls apart.  It’s not a community really.  It’s a kind of simulacrum, created I have to wonder just how inadvertently by the larger institution you’re part of.  From then on, the new students look different.  They are no longer social potential.  You’ve been ditched.  You know you’ll be ditching.  What’s the point in investing the time to get to know them?  Better to concentrate on the people you’re already close to.  Better to buckle down and finish up.  Are you lingering?  Do you feel abandoned?  Advisers watch out for older students who consistently make friends with younger ones.  It’s hard to get rid of them sometimes, without actually kicking them out.  That loneliness is a motivational tool wielded by the institution.  Your friends and peers are gone.  You better get gone too, but there isn’t anywhere to go.  Nowhere in particular anyway.  People are everywhere, but they aren’t staying there.  They are the white noise in the background of your life.  The ironic static.  So you let your ambition guide you instead.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. [...] It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious. (Paul Graham)

How many times do we have to do this?  College, grad school, most post-docs are too short for it to seem worthwhile.  The beginning is already the beginning of the end.  Then we’re pushing 40, and realize the “circumstances” we’d imagined for say, having kids, don’t exist.  They aren’t just around the corner somewhere, after this one last hurdle, one last hoop.  Anyone who actually makes it as far as looking for a faculty job has been both trained and selected for a kind of tolerance of transience.  An ability to disconnect from or devalue the people around them on command, or at the very least to be satisfied with email romances and conference friends.  Our tribal attention spans are slightly greater than unreliable narrator Jack‘s single serving airplane friends.  Are these the people we want engineering our antigen injecting mosquitoes and non-lethal pulsed energy weapons?  Apparently.

You could be forgiven for getting confused.  For thinking, “Surely I haven’t been inducted into some kind of celibate monastic cult without my knowledge and consent?”, and then one day finding yourself torn between being looked down on by your colleagues for not prioritizing your work above all else, and being looked down on by yourself, and maybe someday your kids, for not being the kind of parent you wanted to be.  You could be forgiven for getting confused.  It’s not your fault.  But that may be cold comfort in a bubble world that isn’t built for real lives.  For personal lives.  Communities.  Folk societies.  You will be justified in moving back to your mountain.

Good luck at your defense tomorrow!  Just think, so soon you can be unemployed and working on whatever you want.

But this was always true.  I probably took my last (required) formal class when I was 15.  As in, physically compulsory.  Everything has been electives ever since, but nobody bothered to tell me, or I wasn’t listening.  I think that mistake is getting harder to make.  The knowledge box is cracked a little bit too far open.  Someday we’ll wake up and realize many of our younger colleagues are self-educated.  They grew up in Kibera, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, or Mumbai.  They used Khan Academy, Wikibooks, and Open Courseware.  And somehow, they do not have any student loans.

I’m all for education, but at this point I’m not sure how I feel about schooling.  I’m even for conspicuously excessive education, if such a thing exists.  If we’re going to take something to excess, I’d much rather it was education than violence, or logging, or mining, or fishing, or population, or the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

You are not your job.  You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. (Tyler Durden)

You are also not your research.  Not your thesis.  Not how happy your adviser was about the plots you made this morning.  You are not your fucking PhD.  Unless the process itself makes you happy, what are you doing?  If the process doesn’t make you happy, how do you convince yourself that those occupations you can only have access to through the degree will make you happy?  Why would that be true?  Even if it’s not making you miserable, if the process is just bearable, how long are you willing to put up with the hurdles and hoops required to stay on track?  You’re not a train.  You can leave the tracks without being a train wreck.  With or without the letters and the paper, you’re smart and motivated.  I’ve actually seen job listings that said “PhD or dropped-out-of-a-PhD a plus”.  The difficulty is in dealing with the amorphous inhomogeneous reality.  Breaking ranks is freedom.  Freedom is chaos.  How will you know what you’re supposed to be doing if someone else isn’t telling you?  You could start a business.  It would probably fail.  Just like the first three research projects you worked on.  That’s okay.  It was financed with somebody else’s fiat currency anyway.

Next time you abandon ship remember: you can choose by decree to control some things.  Your job is not one of them.  The career trajectories, ambitions and ultimate locations of people you thought you were close to are also out of your hands.  But if you’re stubborn, you can choose your zip code, and some zip codes are better than others.

My room, which is not Michelle’s room, is filled with boxes.  Next week my zip code is 80302.  If you’re ever in Colorado, let me know.

• Boulder's Energy Future – The City of Boulder's page tracking their ongoing negotiations with the local investor owned utility (Xcel Energy) over the next 20 years of the City's electricity provisioning… It should really be zero carbon by 2030. But how?
• Jon Stewart’s Stinging Rebuke of Presidential Promises to Get off Oil – Eight presidents later, we're still sucking up the black stuff with a monstrous straw. Un-f*ing believable. I thank we jus' gonna haf to do this tha hard way.
• Boulder County Bike Map for 2010 – Indicating slopes and traffic levels for many of the county's major roads, including the mountain canyons. Also shows shoulder widths on those roads.
• Recycled Windshield Greenhouse Grows More Glass – An organic structure, made of post-industrial waste. Windshields, bent and overlapped into enormous transparent scales or roof tiles, and draped over a scrap wood scaffold. Looks like it was built by some kind of apocalyptic garbage fairies.

Thank you for your invitation to participate in the peer review process which is so vital to the progress of scientific knowledge.  However, I unwilling to contribute any review or editorial work to publications which do not satisfy very liberal Open Access criteria as set out by, for example, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing from 2003, or the Creative Commons Attribution license used by the Public Library of Science Journals.  I look forward to a day hopefully not too far off when Elsevier decides to support free access to scientific knowledge (PDF) for all, and especially for scientific knowledge which was gained in part through publicly funded research.

Peer review is only one necessary ingredient for science to work.  Open access and systemic transparency are others.  All of them need work.

• The Female Factor – In Sweden, the Men Can Have It All – An amazing portrait of Sweden's attempt to equalize family responsibilities across gender boundaries by setting aside some paid leave which can only be used by fathers. Heady stuff!
• BP and Officials Block Some Coverage of Gulf Oil Spill – NYTimes.com – BP is giving "corporate governance" and "corporate media" new meaning. Welcome to the future.
• Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized for Asperger’s – Another strange tale at the intersection of disease diagnoses and societal norms.

• Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it – The situation in the Niger delta isn't as clear as the author makes it out to be, but the amount of oil spilled there one way or another is on par with what's spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, and boy, nobody really seems to care.
• Medical Pot Sold In Boulder Colorado Must Be Grown With 100% Renewable Power. – This should be in the Onion. Seriously.
• Boulder County Zero Waste Plan – Boulder has drafted a zero waste plan and they're asking for resident comments either in person or online. They have to be received by June 11th.
• Bowties, metabolism and disease (PDF) – A (scientific) op-ed piece on the bowtie architecture which metabolic networks appear to prefer, in which a common biochemical currency (such as ATP) sits at the "knot", with many input paths, and many output paths. These structures provide efficiency and centralized, transferable evolvability, at the expense of being prone to parasitization. Analogs are given for (non-biological) technological systems.
• The Center for ReSource Conservation – A Boulder based cash-flow-positive non-profit that works with the community to reduce resource consumption. I'm most familiar with their ReSource center, which takes relatively high-value fittings and fixtures from deconstructed buildings (windows, cabinetry, tile, etc) and makes them available for sale.
• Boulder Community Tool Library – Boulder is trying to get a tool library started at the ReSource Center. Would be awesome. Hopefully someone's written a business plan though!
• Society of the Spectacle – A funktastic place to get glasses in Eagle Rock.
• The Yes Lab for Creative Activism – Are you irritated by the one-sided drivel that passes for mainstream journalism these days? If so, support the Yes Lab, a project to train teams of activists for culture jamming media operations, organized by the Yes Men.
• Folk Tales – A literary review of Kurt Vonnegut, across his lifetime of works, their themes, and his commentaries on modern society in contrast to what he called folk societies, and the evils that result.
• vintage bicycle posters – A collection of vintage bike posters, many French. Perhaps a new decorating scheme…
• People You Think You Know – An Iranian family in diaspora, making a film about the difficulties of cross-cultural communication, especially between the US and Iran. Continuing production has been funded through Kickstarter.
• Debra S. Goldberg – A CS professor at CU Boulder focusing on computational biology problems. Lots of interesting looking network analysis stuff, looking at gene function, and extracting information from a noisy, error prone system. Reminds me of my GSN work a little bit.

In our dealings with that outside world, it’s dangerous to let these two truths diverge.  The rules of material existence are inflexible.  They are non-negotiable.  They do not care how you feel about the situation.  You must either adapt yourself to the environment, or re-arrange the environment in a way that conforms to the laws of nature.  When it comes to connections between our separate inner worlds though, between our personal experiences, our experiential truths, the landscape becomes less fixed, more varied.  Macroscopically, this is politics, religion, marketing, and the huge network of human interactions that make up the fabric of our society.  We are continuously tinkering with our collective experience, and so it evolves over time.  Occasionally, we try to overhaul it altogether in a revolution.  There are more ways to be human than we give ourselves credit for.  Most of them haven’t been tried and never will be.  Societies, like genomes, are grotesquely non-repeating.

At the individual level, the inner life is love and friendship and familial ties.  In these interpersonal spheres the experience is the reality. Do I love you?  If I feel like I love you, and you feel like I love you, then by a consensus of size two, I do.  Obviously these experiences are shaped by the outside world, but two people can have very different experiences of the same shared situation, so some of the experience is coming from inside.  Love can only be maintained by conspiracy.  Love lost by one is still love lost.  Relationships are stories we tell about ourselves and other people, but we and they have to agree on the story, or get close anyway.  If narrative discrepancies get too large, if we let them drift without regular collimation, continuing the conspiracy becomes more difficult.  The code gets forked irreconcilably, and one day, we might wake up in different books.  In different states.  In different places.  And those differences may be painful to resolve.  They may never be resolved.  Different people tell different stories about the same happening, as anyone who has taken an eyewitness deposition knows.  Do all differences need to be resolved?  Are there mutually compatible narratives which are not identical, which intermingle and fit together, maintaining the illusion of continuity on long timescales?

Managing the daydream, the storyline, the fever, the collusion, and maintaining it, means managing the experiences of those involved.  It’s not accounting or actuarial work.  Not for most people anyway (though some of us are more inspired by numbers than others).  The quantitative external existence is an important input, but unlike in science, it is not ultimately the thing that matters.  It is secondary and may be productively subjugated to the shared experience.  Quantitative fairness may not feel good.  What feels good might not be quantitatively fair.  Which would you rather have?

Maybe I’m late to this game.  To this realization.  Maybe I’m just slow.  If so at least it’s not just me.  Robert S. McNamara only realized decades later that the Vietnamese were fighting a different war than the US.  Is this kind of collective dreaming so second nature to most people that they can’t or don’t distinguish it from objective reality?  That’s the underlying premise of James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed.  People a hundred or a thousand or even ten thousand years ago (but maybe not 100,000 years ago) were the same animal as we are, lived in the same world we do, were subject to the same physical laws, observed the same natural phenomena.  But they lived in different worlds too.  Their collective dreams about this same world were not ours.  Their gods and demons.  Their goods and evils.  Their social contracts.  The so-called Enlightenment was in some ways a broad realization that there even was an inflexible external reality we could approximate, and that all the other rules and norms we’d accumulated over the centuries were mutable, and up for debate.

We still have not fully absorbed this realization.  We still do not understand culturally that We and They can be having wildly different experiences of the same interaction.  Certainly many individuals see this, and some can work with it, seeking out narratives which are at least mutually acceptable, if not the same.  But we also fail to recognize the difference between problems we can solve by rewriting our social, cultural, and economic narratives, and problems that can only be solved by quantitative changes.  For we also have a relationship with material reality, with this planet, with the laws of nature.  We and our institutions are so used to the flexibility of human relationships that we are having trouble admitting to ourselves that in this case, the other party will not budge.  These are the highest laws of the land.  There will be no out of court settlement.  No bailout.  No appeals process.  No amendments.  No synod.  No peace and reconciliation.  No effective outreach campaign or rousing oratory will make the difference.  We will not experiment with an open relationship or have a trial separation.  At least not any time soon.  We can either accept the law and work within it, or somebody is going to have to move out.

And it’s not going to be the Earth.