Budapest

It is hard to say whether my fondness for Budapest should be attributed to its own merit as a city or to my general longing for a big city after spending a month in the small village of Cambridge. Either way, I was very happy when my advisor extended an invitation to everyone in our group to spend one week in Budapest visiting him. Highlights of Budapest included the nighttime views of the city, the hills, the architecture, the Turkish baths, and the bakeries.

The Danube River runs right through the center, dividing the city into Buda (west) and Pest (east), which were originally two separate cities that gradually grew together. Across the Danube stretch several bridges, which are all lit up spectacularly at night, along with many of the major buildings. My initial impression of the city was that it was proof that communism is a recipe for poverty and ugly buildings, but walking across the bridges after dark and pausing for views of Parliament and Castle Hill quickly reminded me that Hungary has done fairly well for itself after leaving the nest of Mother Russia.

In the mornings, I took advantage of Buda’s steep hills (especially Castle and Gellért Hills) to get in some proper runs¹ (the steepest thing I can run up in Cambridge is the curb) and soak in more views of the city. I even had the opportunity to go for a nice run with a friend from the States who happened to be visiting the city for a conference.

By day, I worked at the Central European University with my advisor. Without the distractions of Cambridge, the week turned out to be very productive scientifically, including the initiation of a collaboration with an experimental neuroscientist in Budapest who is willing and able to test a model of single-cell computation that I have been working on.

By night, I took long walks and reveled in the array of non-British restaurants. While Hungarian cuisine is not known for catering to vegetarians,² I managed to find several excellent vegetarian or vegetarian-friendly restaurants and cafes (especially Govinda-Buda, Hummus Bar, Edeni Vegan, Falafel Önkiszolgáló, and Napos Oldal Ökocafé), as well as sample the goodies of several famous Hungarian bakeries (especially things filled with spinach, poppy seed, or chestnuts, and especially from Ruszwurm).

On one weekend afternoon, I also visited one of Budapest’s lavish Turkish baths – Gellért fürdő. Known for its spectacular art nouveau architecture, the bath (like most) had co-ed, male- only, and female-only sections. The main attraction was the hot tubs, though there was also a (freezing cold) pool for swimming. While the co-ed area was impressive, the male-only area had larger hot tubs, smaller crowds, and spectacular tile work. It also had saunas but they were so hot and foggy that I could neither breathe nor see and so left after approximately three seconds. The price to pay for these additional luxuries was a constant stream of naked old men going to and fro. While the baths are definitely worth a visit for solo travelers, the steep price of admission makes it a better deal for small groups who might stay and chat for several hours, as I found myself leaving after about an hour (admission tickets are good for the day).

My next visit to Budapest is scheduled for early April, during which time I look forward to checking out the zoo and another bath (Széchenyi), in addition to running in the hills again.

Granada & Sierra Nevada, Spain

The theoretical neuroscience community has a superb tradition of scheduling major conferences near ski resorts. Thus, my winter travels kicked off with several days in Granada at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) main conference, followed by two days of workshops (and skiing/snowboarding) in Sierra Nevada.

The “Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation” was founded 25 years ago as the first and only (at the time) professional society devoted to theoretical and computational neuroscience. Since then, the “NIPS” conference has gradually drifted more towards research in machine learning.³ Many theoretical and computational neuroscientists see this as a “hijacking” of a conference they founded and nurtured, but others (including myself) see it as an opportunity to get an update on the latest in machine learning, while simultaneously meeting up with the few neuroscientists who still attend.⁴

Those few neuroscientists can be divided into two groups. The first are those who command an expert knowledge of machine learning and allow it to strongly influence their neuroscience. This group includes my own advisor and several collaborators. The second group include the old fuddy-duddies who cannot seem to let go of NIPS and accept that it is no longer a neuroscience conference. This group is disproportionately represented on the board and hence gets the opportunity to deliver incongruous speeches each year on the exciting new research on “neural” information processing systems that their conference features.

One (unforeseen) benefit of having so few neuroscientists present was that I find the conference much more manageable and relaxing. With only half a dozen or so posters to see each evening, I found myself with plenty of time to grab dinner and sleep (luxuries I do not enjoy at the other main conference I will attend this year – Cosyne).

Another (also unforeseen) benefit was that I find myself with enough time during breaks to see a bit of the city. As the main conference was held in Granada and this was my first trip to Muslim Spain, this was a welcome opportunity. Two friends and I spent one day during the lunch break wandering through the Muslim “medina” in the northeast part of town. Built on a hill just across from the Alhambra,⁵ the medina offered stunning views of the palace and the rest of the city. We managed to find a terrace bar and sat for a while, enjoying the sunshine and high viewpoint foreign to the Cambridge-bound. We also stumbled upon a turnstile inside on the outside of a nunnery with pictures of baked goods. Curious, we put 5 euros in it and turned it. We heard some scurrying around and out popped a huge bag of homemade cookies and sweets! By far the best mysterious turnstile into which I have ever put money.

The conference itself was divided into three pieces – tutorials, main conference, and workshops. The tutorials, delivered on the first day, are 2-hour introductory sessions on exciting new areas of research. Among them was a tutorial titled “Flexible, Multivariate Point Process Models for Unlocking the Neural Code”, which is related to my own work at Cambridge and which I found quite helpful. I ended up spending several hours over the course of the conference discussing my current project with the professor who gave it and received a number of interesting suggestions to follow up on.

The main conference included both talks and poster sessions. As I have a strong preference for conversations and poster sessions over talks,⁶ I skipped many of the talks to meet with other researchers at the conference but spent 4-6 hours each evening browsing and discussing posters. Due to the relatively small proportion of work in theoretical and computational neuroscience, I was able to see all that I wanted to see, as well as catch a few posters on machine learning.

Finally, the workshops feature a series of talks on more specialized topics in rooms that can accommodate only 20-40 people and are thus meant to promote more discussion than the talks at the main conference. Unfortunately, out of almost 30 workshops, there was not a single one on theoretical neuroscience. Fortunately, I still found a number of interesting talks embedded in workshops whose topics I was not particularly concerned with. Even more fortunately, the workshops were held in the Sierra Nevada mountain range a little over an hour from Granada, so I also managed to squeeze in an afternoon of snowboarding.⁷

Despite the (relatively) relaxed pace of the conference for me, I found myself simultaneously exhausted yet bursting with ideas I wanted to work on back in Cambridge. However, it would be almost a month before I would get the chance to do so, as I was immediately headed for Italy for a couple of days of ice climbing, followed by a series of other holiday trips. In the future, I will likely try not to tack on vacations at the end of conferences, as I often find myself most inspired to work at those times.

All in all, I would say that I benefitted greatly from the conversations, posters, tutorials, and location of NIPS, but that the lack of neuroscience at the workshops was a bit disappointing. Although I would not consider NIPS a “must-see” for me, I will likely drop in periodically when working on an appropriate project.

Torino & the foothills of the Alps, Italy

The first serious research opportunity I was ever given was for a summer internship at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy with USC physics Professor Paolo Zanardi. In addition to hooking me on science, Paolo also introduced me to mountaineering and the Alps. Ever since that summer, I have been looking for opportunities to return and when Paolo heard I would be in England for the year, he invited me to fly out to Torino for a couple of days of ice climbing in the foothills of the Alps. We were joined by a childhood friend of Paolo and our expert mountain guide Muyo, who had also led our initial mountaineering trip in the Alps.

Like any proper Italian outing, each of days began at a café with espresso, cigarettes, and croissants and was, in remarkable incongruence with the physically demanding sport we were pursing, dotted with frequent cigarette breaks. The ice park we climbed in was absolutely stunning. Massive icicles and icy stalagmites formed an intricate, deep blue playground that I could have spent (and did spend!) hours staring at.⁸

Though I was a bit worried about my ability to ice pick my way up those beasts with only two days of rock climbing experience and a cushy Cambridge life-weakened body, Muyo made the introduction as gentle as possible. We spent the first half-day in “ice school” on a notably- less-steep-than-everything-else ice sheet, learning proper position, and navigating our way through pick ax “courses” that Muyo would engineer. By the end of the first day, we took our first stab at the real deal – vertical sheets of ice stretching perhaps 50m in the air. Though I was neither graceful nor fast, I did manage to make it to the top.

My rappel back to earth introduced me to a phenomenon the Italians refer to as the “boils” – the feeling of blood rushing into your hands after being raised above the heart for the duration of your climb. It is one of the more painful things I have willingly inflicted upon myself.

Our day finished with (what else?) espresso, wine, and cigarettes, followed by dinner.

The next day was spent conquering three different (and more difficult) faces of the same ice sheet we had climbed the previous day. By the end of the day, I was utterly exhausted and spent a significant fraction of my time dangling pathetically from one ax, with only a rope saving me from a very unpleasant fall. Nevertheless, I did manage to make it up every climb we attempted and so left with (most of) my dignity intact.

Munich, Germany

My winter travels next took a marked turn for the urban. Courtesy of a night train from Torino, I met fellow Churchill Scholar Samantha Strasser in Munich where we spent the next two days exploring Christmas markets and museums.

Since I arrived a few hours before Sam, I first visited Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany, after which all subsequent camps were modeled. Less than half an hour outside the city center and free to all visitors, Dachau was one of the most powerful museums I have visited. Virtually the entire site, from the bunkhouses and work yards to the gas chambers and crematoria were open to the public. The combination of the (excellent) audio tour and bitter cold and snow that day made the experience even more, well, depressing (which, in this context, felt appropriate).

Sam and I’s first targets were the Christkindlmarkten, or “Christmas markets.” Despite their angry-sounding language, the Germans apparently have no shortage of Christmas cheer and flood their streets with little booths selling ornaments, handmade crafts, baked goods, and ample supplies of Glühwein (mulled wine) and other warm alcoholic beverages. Sam and I were careful to keep warm by stopping for Glühwein frequently.

Knowing the German penchant for science and engineering (and suckers for both ourselves), Sam and I next visited the Deutsches Museum, Munich’s monument to all things involving science and technology. The highlights included a huge sailboat with cutaway hull, a massive collection of early computers, and plenty of old scientific instruments. Another notable feature was the German no-nonsense approach to explaining science. While most American science museums I have visited try to dumb down the science and replace it with flashy demonstrations and games to attract children, the Germans had no qualms about using words like “eigenvalue” and “resonant frequency”, as well as equations and laws of physics, to explain their exhibits.⁹

That evening, we had dinner at the Ratskeller München – a restaurant beneath the town hall.¹⁰ Upon looking for the rest rooms, we discovered that there was not just one restaurant under the town hall but rather a vast complex that stretched seemingly forever in every direction, shifting atmosphere as one passed the (not at all obvious) borders between restaurants. We both found ourselves using the rest rooms far more often than necessary.

We spent the night at the Wombat Hostel, one of the nicest, cleanest, and safest hostels I have ever stayed at (highly recommended for visits to Munich) and Sam’s (entirely unrepresentative and misleading) first hostel ever.

The next day we were led on a 4-hour tour of the town by a flamboyantly gay, black R&B singer named Ozzie.¹¹ The fast-paced tour took us to the site of Hitler’s infamous Beer Hall Putsch, pointed out the few original buildings that had survived the bombings during World War II, and educated us on the difference between Bavarian and German culture (the former is responsible for the “German” stereotypes of lederhosen and well-endowed females serving beer and pretzels, for example). Though I rarely go on tours and even more rarely enjoy them, I would most definitely recommend Ozzie’s tour (leaving from the Wombat every day at 11am) to anyone visiting Munich.

The remainder of Sam and I’s time in Munich was spent pursuing Glühwein, smoked fish, and hearth-baked bread in the Christkindlmarkten.

Vienna, Austria

The next morning (December 23) we took a train to Vienna. True to form, the German trains arrived and departed precisely on time, contrary to those of some other countries.¹² We had decided to spend a week in Vienna, after a friend at Churchill, Frederica Stahl, had offered her family’s apartment while they were spending the holidays in New York City.¹³ Thankful to have free housing, we were unprepared when we found that we were staying in a three-story penthouse overlooking the former summer palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy. We decided immediately that we were slightly indebted to the Stahl family and spent the remainder of the week buying them gifts to assuage our embarrassment (of riches).

Also meeting us in Vienna were another Churchill Scholar Jonathan Wang and another Churchill student Sherry Gong. Our first day there was spent checking out the Christkindlmarkten, which were similar in spirit to those of Munich.

Christmas Eve and Day turned out to be the least traditional of my short life. On Christmas Eve, I met up with a Viennese friend and his girlfriend and they took me up into the hills northwest of town to get some nice views of the city and to marvel at the art nouveau architecture of the insane asylum located there. Part way through our (frigid) walk, we decided that a coffee would be hit the spot and found a nearby café. As we sat down and awaited the arrival of our drinks, we gradually noticed that the other customers seemed a bit more disheveled than the typical fashionable Viennese resident. When one of them suddenly burst out yelling in monologue, we realized that the café was actually run by and for asylum inmates. We shrugged and soaked in one of the more entertaining cups of coffee any of us had ever had.

That evening, hungry and without groceries, I ventured into the city to find something to eat. Not exactly sure what to expect to be open (I had never spent my Christmas Eve wandering a foreign city), I found that it was just me and the Turks and so settled down to a non-traditional Christmas dinner of falafel, hummus, and pita.

Christmas Day was even stranger, as the four of us ventured to the western edge of town to visit Schönbrunn (the former summer palace of the Habsburgs), which, in addition to the palace, contained a Christmas market, several greenhouses and cafes, extensive gardens, and the world’s oldest zoo. Although I usually loathe palace tours (too ostentatious), the included audio tour made it a tolerable, perhaps even enjoyable, experience.

My favorite part of the visit though was the zoo. Given that it was winter in Austria and that we had never heard of this particular zoo, our expectations were very low. Thus, we were stunned to find penguins, giant pandas, elephants, koalas, hippos, tigers, orangutans, naked mole

rats, and pretty much every zoo-worthy animal you could imagine. It is very possibly one of the finest zoos in the world and certainly the highlight of the Habsburg summer estate.

Though Jonathan and Sherry left the following day, Sam and I spent the rest of the week exploring Vienna’s famous kaffeehaus culture and museums. The kaffeehausen range from magnificent marble palaces with tuxedoed waiters (Café Central) to cozy, intellectual retreats for those who wish to read or discuss philosophy and politics (Café Hawelka) to smoky, 50s diner- like cafes that only the Viennese could love (Café Prückel). At each location, a simple espresso can be quite pricey (3-4 euros), but you are really paying for the right to sit in the café for a couple of hours, chatting with friends or reading a newspaper or book, which just so happens to come with a free cup of coffee. My personal favorites were probably Hawelka, Central, Sperl, and Savoy,¹⁴ albeit all for different reasons.

In addition to the kaffeehausen, the Viennese are also known for their bakeries and, in particular, their cakes. While I am not an especially big fan of cake, the multi-layered pieces of art that we did try from Oberlaa (several locations throughout the city) were the pinnacle of cake evolution, while the chestnut dishes and cheeky service at Sluka (near the Rathaus) were alone reasons to return to Vienna.

Of the museums Sam and I visited, my favorite by far was the Haus der Musik (“House of Music”). Although I was unimpressed by three of the four floors of the museum (those hero worshipping Viennese composers and hosting puzzling demonstrations for children which tried unsuccessfully to make connections between music and the brain), the floor on the science behind acoustics, sound perception, and music production was excellent. Combining the German tradition of no-nonsense science education with the American penchant for showy demonstrations, the exhibit was entertaining and informative and I spent perhaps two hours in that section alone.

The ultimate (in both senses of the word) highlight of our visit to Vienna was a walk from the top of the hills north of the city down through the heurige (vineyards). Not one to usually spend my vacations in cities, I was eager for something approximating a hike and Sam was kind enough to oblige me. The walk turned out to be far more impressive than either of us anticipated. We wound our way along and through several heurige, enjoying unmatched views of the city the entire time, before finishing at one of the few that was open in winter. Occupying a complex that included an alleged former apartment of Ludwig van Beethoven,¹⁵ the Mayer am Pfarplatz was a cozy, rustic tavern-like space, complete with pretty courtyard and, most importantly, excellent house reds and whites, all for surprisingly reasonable prices (2-3 euros per glass).

After a week of luxurious Viennese living, we finally packed our bags, arranged a pile of wrapped gifts and thank you notes for the Stahls, and headed to London for New Years’ Eve.

London, England

Unfortunately, I awoke that morning with a cold and decided not to stick around London for midnight. After meeting several friends from Churchill for a dim sum dinner, I caught the train back to Cambridge. I was not too disappointed with my fate, however, as the overwhelmingly large (and drunk) crowds deter me from wanting to ever spend a New Years’ Eve in London anyways. I spent the next two days nursing my cold and preparing for my trip to Morocco.

Marrakesh, Fes, & the Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Joining me for this 9-day trip were fellow Churchill Scholars Alicia Schep and Ethan Schaler. Our trip included three days of hiking in the Atlas Mountains, two days each exploring the medieval cities of Marrakesh and Fes, and two days riding trains between the two cities.

The time we spent in the mountains was the unanimous highlight of our trip. Our trek took us through Berber villages, snowy mountain passes, and terraced farms, and along snaking rivers and high mountain ridges. For 150 euros per person, we received a private taxi to and from Marrakesh, accommodations in Berber guesthouses, all meals, two mules, a muleteer, a cook, and a guide. Though we had some idea of what we paid for in advance, the luxury far exceeded our expectations, to the point that we were actually quite embarrassed on the first day when we found out that we had a 1:1 ratio of support staff to hikers, that the mules could carry everything, and that the cook was going to make us hot meals even on the trail. Furthermore, it turned out that the Berber guesthouses, which we were expecting to be no more than a mat on a floor, possibly amidst goats, actually had hot showers, toilets, beds, and satellite TV. Thus, our second night was spent watching Bollywood movies and Rambo II. Our embarrassment of riches felt slightly less undeserved on the second and third days, during which our journey included some serious elevation gain.

Besides the fantastic weather and views, a key component of our enjoyment was the interaction with our guides and the Berber villagers, all of whom were nothing but hospitable. Our guide, who had grown up in a nearby village and spoke fluent English,¹⁶ was eager to answer any questions we had about the Berbers and Morocco as well as ask his own questions about England and the US.

Besides the luxury, another big surprise during this part of the trip was the lack of foreigners. We were the only white people we saw until the very end of the third day when we approached the largest town in that part of the country, where some Europeans were staying in hotels and making half-day treks into the mountains. We seemed to be the only ones who were actually doing multi-day trips through the villages. Given the dismal weather and depressingly short days in the UK and much of Europe throughout the winter, we were shocked that more British and Europeans did not spend their holidays walking in Morocco. Apparently, winter is even low season in Morocco, and those who do visit tend to do so in the summer, at which time the temperatures in Morocco often reach 40C (104F). This seems entirely backwards to me. If I find myself again spending a winter in the UK or Europe, Morocco will be my go-to outdoors retreat.

While the Moroccans we met in the mountains were unfailingly hospitable, the cities were a considerably more mixed bag of hospitality and hustling. Common greetings included “Hey, my brother!” and “Remember me?” My favorite, offered by one restaurant owner, was, “You and me, we have same color blood. Its red, no?” In most (all) cases, however, the goal was to sell us something or extract a tip. Males young and old all eagerly offered directions… after which they staunchly demanded a fee, offered to take us to family stores where we would get a great discount… when in reality the price was hiked to cover their commission, and pointed out that wherever we were going, be it a hotel, restaurant, or historical site, was closed, regardless of the time of day, and that they would show us to an alternative location… which of course would

have been happy to offer our benevolent guide a commission. Beyond these more standard requests, however, I had the questionable honor of being offered marijuana approximately once every fifteen minutes. That Ethan and Alicia received not one such offer is a clear statement by the Moroccans about my appearance. After only a couple of days in the cities, we were quickly trained to be pessimistic and misanthropic, ignoring, frowning at, or even scolding anyone who approached us unsolicited.

To be clear, however, the Moroccans whom we approached were consistently friendly, helpful, and hospitable. This leads me to propose the following rule of thumb for traveling in Morocco – if they approach you, expect a hustle; if you approach them, expect hospitality.

Although we managed to escape unrobbed, unconned, and unrepentant, our closest brush with being hustled occurred on the train ride from Marrakesh to Fes. Having paid for first class seats in a small cabin for six, we felt reasonably safe and well-protected from the second class cars, the suspected haunt of the hustlers. Among others, an older man with a newspaper sat down across from us. After a bit of conversation, we described our trip and told him that we were headed to Fes and would be staying in a riad called Dar Hafsa. We chatted for a bit longer before he excused himself for a phone call. A couple of hours later,¹⁷ the man returned and introduced his friend, whom he claimed was an official tourist guide. The friend quickly flashed a badge at me, which I neither had time to see nor knew what to look for anyways, and then unleashed a five-minute tirade against our riad. Highlights included his prediction that a dark man would offer us tea, but that we should not trust him, for he was in cahoots with the maid and together they would steal our bags. They were also, allegedly, involved with the mafia. When the man concluded and rocketed out of our cabin, Alicia, Ethan, and I were left slack jawed, wavering between nervous laughter and a serious reconsideration of our plans. Deciding to continue to our riad but to remain alert and leave if uncomfortable, we departed the train in Fes and made our way towards the riad. It was by now after dark and we were having considerable trouble finding our way. We finally identified our intended path as a small, dimly lit alley off the main road. As we entered the narrow passage, a man shouted, “Be careful! The mafia operates there!” Right on cue, loud wails began blaring on unseen speakers and a swarm of children began running behind and around us. My heart was doing gymnastics in my chest. Nearly ready to turn back, we stumbled upon a dark wooden door labeled “Dar Hafsa.” We desperately knocked on the door and were immediately welcomed in. The interior of the building stood in stark contrast to the alley outside – beautiful tile work stretched for three stories above on all four sides, a large comfortable-looking couch wrapped around a glass table with a silver tea set, and a host that could do nothing but smile. He was also, however, a dark man and offered us tea, as the prophecy had stated. Over the next day and a half, we remained suspicious and responded to any offers to show us around, clean our rooms, or otherwise interact more than minimally necessary with nervous rebuttals. The man’s sister, and co-owner, finally approached Ethan and asked what was wrong. Eventually, we realized that the train had tried to scam us, that no one travels from Marrakesh to Fes with just a newspaper, that “a dark man will offer you a tea” was about as vacuous as Moroccan prophecies come, and that the loud wails we had heard were an announcement for Muslim prayer time. Relaxing our trigger fingers, we thoroughly enjoyed the rest of our stay at Dar Hafsa.¹⁸

Although we explored historical sites and museums in both Fes and Marrakesh, the obvious highlight of both cities were the medinas – the medieval, walled, inner cities free of cars and full of narrow streets and bustling marketplaces. While the medinas were initially sensory and social overloads, their excitement and charm quickly grew on us. Other favorites in Fes included the views from the Merenid Tombs and the food at Café Clock and the restaurants near Bab Bou Jeloud (“The Blue Gate”) and in Marrakesh included the Jardin Majorelle, a beautiful garden established by French fashion icon Yves Saint-Laurent, the ornate Saadian Tombs, and the Djemaa El-Fna, one of the largest and busiest squares in Africa (and the world).

For only about £50 and 3.5 hours each way, Morocco was not only inexpensive and accessible, it was likely my favorite of my winter travel destinations, and for my own sake, I hope the British and Europeans continue to unjustifiably ignore its opportunities for winter hiking.

This post is part five¹⁹ of a six-part series on my first four months in Cambridge adapted from a mid-year report I submitted to the Churchill Foundation – the sponsor whose generosity is allowing me to spend one year at the University of Cambridge. It was written in January 2012.

Photo gallery: click the “i” in the upper right for captions, the “SL” in the bottom right for slideshow mode, and the “FS” in the bottom right for full screen mode.

Life £20 North of the Continent

travels during my first four months at (or at least in the same hemisphere as) Cambridge

Széchenyi Chain Bridge in Budapest
Dobos torte and carrot cake at Augustz in Budapest
view from Budapest's Gellért Hill
Gellért fürdő: one of Budapest’s Turkish baths
magical baked goods turnstile run by nuns in Granada
important conference business meeting
CBL group dinner overlooking the Alhambra in Granda
"ice school" in the foothills of the Italian Alps
"candela de giacco"
striking fear in the hearts of ice sheets everywhere
Dachau concentration camp outside Munich
warming up with Glühwein in Munich
site of Hitler's "Munich Beer Hall Putsch"
pandas at the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna
the high ceilings of Vienna's Café Central
walking through Vienna's Heurige
trekking in Morocco's Atlas Mountains
walking through the farms in the valleys
watching Bollywood movies in a Berber village
generic snowy mountain pass
summiting on the final day of our trek
the beautiful Dar Hafsa in Fes
wood work in Fes
shoes... omg...
picnic on the rooftop terrace of Dar Hafsa in Fes
marveling at the only mosque in Fes open to non-­‐Muslims
We ate all the bread in Fes for breakfast. None is left. I am sorry.
views from the Merenid Tombs in Marrakesh
Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh
Marrakesh's Saadian Tombs

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part II – Life in England
2. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part I – Life at Churchill College
3. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part III – Life in Cambridge

Cambridge is a much smaller and quieter town than I expected. Besides the early café closings, most stores close by 5 or 6pm and bars and pubs close by 11pm. Ethiopian, Israeli, and many other ethnic cuisines are nonexistent, while those cuisines that are represented (e.g. Indian, Chinese, Thai, British) are not represented particularly well. While I initially thought that I would revel in the quaintness of Cambridge, I found it almost unbearable after a month and arranged for twice a week visits to a research institute in London. More recently, however, this aspect of Cambridge has been growing on me, especially as I have made friends and figured how to find the activities and stores I need access to.

Another feature of Cambridge that gradually swooned me is the atmospheric setting it is known for. Riding my bike home through dark and fog, past the ominously lit facades of several hundred year old colleges to the sound of church bells only gets better each day.

An annoying and unexpected drawback of Cambridge’s ambience is the hordes of tourists that pour into the city every day. While we are lucky enough at Churchill not to have tourists peeking in our windows, it is impossible to avoid them. In particular, it is quite difficult to avoid them when riding down the street on a bike. Apparently foreign to the concept of roads, they wander on and off the streets with not so much as a glance over their shoulders. I make a sport of trying to ride as close to them as possible without hitting anyone. My hope is that, over time, this may help educate them about the dangers of the road and that my humble self may play a small role in making Cambridge a better, safer place.

Besides the colleges, another major target for the tourists is the market square. Because of this, I was initially hesitant to venture there myself, expecting overpriced, inferior quality goods. However, when I finally did muster the misanthropic courage to brave the crowds, I found that the market was one of the best places to go for fresh-baked bread, soaps and shampoos, bike repairs, and many other edibles and non-. I now drop by at least once a week.

Despite the hordes of tourists, Cambridge is still dominated by students, faculty, and other university personnel. The snippets of conversations at pubs and restaurants that I overhear are among the most intelligent conversations I have ever overheard in public. I once sat on a train to London on which two men in front of me were chatting across the aisle about how to design some new genetics experiment. In most parts of the US, I am impressed if the people sitting in front of me on a train manage to speak in complete sentences.

With the positive benefits of an old, prestigious university come the negative, including bureaucracy. And given 800 years, Cambridge has perfected the stereotypical enormous, multi- layered, and inefficient bureaucracy. It took me three days to get internet access at my college and another two weeks to get wifi access to the three (!) different networks in my department. Getting my university card activated for department access took another several days,¹ and woe be it to he or she who attempts to arrive in Cambridge before his or her official start date. I moved in three weeks early to get settled and my arrival at the department inflicted mass panic and, I kid you not, meetings about how in the future to handle such situations. It was as if no human being in the 800-year history of Cambridge had ever arrived before the term began.

Despite its impenetrable bureaucracy, there are things that the University does well and one of them is student clubs. With two wine tasting societies, two math clubs, a tea club, a sci-fi club, a dozen or so dance clubs, another dozen or so science clubs, a club for just about every ethnicity represented at Cambridge, a cheese tasting club, multiple clubs for any sport you can name, and half a dozen outdoors groups, you would have to be comatose not to find a group of like-minded people. The standard way to get acquainted with your options is to attend the “Freshers’ Fair” in early October, during which pretty much every club sets up a booth over two floors of a nearby gym (Kelsey Kerridge), as well as a large park across the street.

The existence of half a dozen outdoors groups was one of the biggest surprises for me. Located in the flattest part of one of the flattest countries, Cambridge actually has far more outdoors clubs than my previous university (USC), which was nestled among the mountainous paradise of Los Angeles. There is the Hillwalking Club,² the Mountaineering Club, the Rambling Club, the Caving Club, the Orienteering Club, the Scout and Guide Club, and the Rock-Climbing and Trekking Society, among others I am likely missing. In case it is not eminently obvious, the Hillwalking Club goes on biweekly weekend hiking trips, the Mountaineering Club climbs mountains, the Rambling Club goes for day/half-day walks near Cambridge, the Caving Club organizes weekend caving trips, the Orienteering Club competes in orienteering competitions (races with compasses), the Scout and Guide Club is involved with the British co-ed equivalent of Boy Scouts, and the Rock-Climbing and Trekking Society climbs a few days a week at a local climbing wall, as well as climbing outdoors every weekend.

My only (very positive) experience so far was with the Hillwalking Club. While only one of their trips has coincided with a weekend I have been free, that weekend was my most enjoyable in the UK. For ~£30, their trips include transportation, accommodations in a bunkhouse (which includes a kitchen, living room, and beds), and excellent company. The trip I went on was to Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales, though other common targets include the Lake District, Peak District, and Snowdonia, all of which require about 3-4 hours of driving. Trips depart early Friday evenings, conveniently from the Churchill Porters’ Lodge,³ and return late Sunday, employing a combination of cars and mini-buses. Friday is spent driving, unpacking, and hanging out in the bunkhouse, while Saturday and Sunday are spent hillwalking during the day and hanging out or driving back to Cambridge in the evening. While I was convinced that I liked the club on the first day (it is made up of scientifically literate outdoors enthusiasts – an easy sell), my first experience with hiking in the UK was unconvincing to say the least. After a muddy scramble to our first “summit” (elevation gain ~100m), I realized that I had made a big mistake in not bringing waterproof boots. This notion was reinforced as the fog closed in around us, the wind and rain were unleashed with hurricane force, and the temperature flirted with freezing. The ultimate summit we reached that day featured us huddled together trying to stay warm and peering off into the thick fog, imagining the views one might enjoy on a fictitious clear day in Wales. As I lost all feeling in my body and was repeatedly blown over only to fall into a muddy puddle, my inner monologue consisted only of repeatedly wondering whether this was the most miserable day of my life. I concluded that it was. All of this changed, however, when we finally, after ~7 hours, returned to the bunkhouse and I discovered what turned about to be the greatest shower stall in which I have ever had the pleasure of shivering. I nearly cried with joy. The rest of the evening⁴ was spent gorging on all sorts of food, mulled wine, hot tea, and biscuits. Although most folks had arranged in advance to collectively cook a pesto spaghetti, I had chosen to go solo due to a staunchly anti-pasta philosophy. My own dinner consisted of falafel, beets, and peanut butter and banana sandwiches. After dinner, we spent several hours chatting and playing music. Although I was tempted not to don my soggy boots and return to the harsh Welsh weather the following day, the surprising sight of sunshine changed my mind. Fortunately, the nice weather held for the day, and we enjoyed a beautiful hike past several waterfalls and through the classic rolling meadows of the British countryside. Although we still found ourselves knee deep in a bog, praying that our boots would not be sucked into the earth, by the end of the afternoon, that day of hiking prevented me from leaving Wales with nothing but spite. I look forward to more hikes with the Hillwalking Club, though perhaps after the purchasing of waterproof boots and the arrival of warmer weather.

A final note on life in Cambridge for vegetarians – I am sorry. Cambridge is not particularly accommodating. There exists just one vegetarian restaurant in Cambridge, the Rainbow Café. Although almost every restaurant will offer vegetarian options, they will not necessarily be impressive (by British standards, baked potatoes qualify as vegetarian “entrées”). Often the best bet for vegetarians is an Indian, Thai, or Chinese restaurant, though there are a few British/European restaurants that do cater particularly well to vegetarians (Zizzi and All Bar One being among them). The most economical options for vegetarians, however, are the college dining halls or cooking for one’s self. As for the colleges, I believe all serve vegetarian entrées and offer a salad bar on a daily basis. As for cooking, the major grocery stores do reasonably well at catering to vegetarians. Sainsbury’s and Tesco in particular sell tofu and plenty of vegetarian proteins and ready-made dishes. If ever there is something you cannot find there, Revital on Bridge Street, Arjuna Wholefoods on Mill Road, and the several Asian and Middle Eastern grocery stores also on Mill Road are all great options for vegetarians.

This post is part three of a six-part series on my first four months in Cambridge adapted from a mid-year report I submitted to the Churchill Foundation – the sponsor whose generosity is allowing me to spend one year at the University of Cambridge. It was written in January 2012.

Photo gallery: click the “i” in the upper right for captions, the “SL” in the bottom right for slideshow mode, and the “FS” in the bottom right for full screen mode.

Life in Cambridge

my first four months in Cambridge

Enjoying the views while they last.
Pen y Fan peak - Soon after this picture, I became too cold and sad to take any more pictures. Midway through this afternoon, I was convinced that this was the most miserable day of my life. California has made me soft.
The better half of the weekend.

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part I – Life at Churchill College
2. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part II – Life in England
3. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part V – Life £20 North of the Continent

Life in England is an endless series of miscommunications. If you go to the store wishing to purchase eggplants, zucchini, shrimp, rubbing alcohol, or q-tips, prepare for disappointment; the English only sell aubergines, courgettes, prawns, surgical spirits, and cotton swabs.¹ My persistent lack of knowledge on the names of products, brands, and stores has made mundane purchases into scavenger hunts.² While one does gradually assimilate, I still find myself regularly consulting my British friends on what things are called and where I might buy them.

Consulting my friends before I go to the store is essential, as asking a British person for advice in a store is among the greatest of personal intrusions. On my first trip to Sainsbury’s (the standard British grocery store), I found myself overwhelmed by a wall full of soups and asked the gentleman next to me, who was also eyeing them, whether he had any recommendations. He snorted and immediately scurried away. Thinking that perhaps he did not speak English or was just in a particularly bad mood, I waited until another person, this time a young woman, wandered up to the soups and asked her the same question. Her eyes widened in fear and she too scurried away. Though I was tempted to conclude that this whole episode was due to my hulking frame and intimidating masculinity, I found it slightly more plausible that the British are incurable introverts and now do my best to avoid eye contact or conversation with anyone I do not know.

An even better way I have discovered of avoiding conversation in grocery stores is to avoid them altogether. While I would rarely consider the British to be on the cutting edge of anything related to technology or food, they have made surprising advances in online grocery shopping. Just about every major grocery store in England, as well as a few that do not even have brick & mortar storefronts, offer the ability to shop online and have groceries delivered directly to your door. The advantages of this method of shopping include easier searching (search by food name instead of wandering up and down aisles), not having to haul your groceries home, and, if you are British, avoiding the awkward event of having American strangers ask you questions in the store.³ If something you order happens to be out of stock, the store will offer a substitute item which you can either decline or choose to purchase for the price of the original or substitute item, whichever is cheaper. It is also still possible to take advantage of in-store specials, read nutrition and ingredient labels, purchase household items such as detergent and soup, and amend your order up until the evening before your delivery. All of this can be had for a modest delivery fee of £3-5.

While we may agree about the joys of online grocery shopping, the English and I perpetually disagree about the culinary status of the potato.⁴ They believe it is the pinnacle of vegetable evolution. I believe they are insane. I have seen “vegetarian” menus that consisted entirely of jacket potatoes (baked potatoes), chips (French fries), and mash (mashed potatoes). I also once ordered broccoli and brussel sprouts from an online grocery vendor whom I shall not name (rhymes with “Stainswury’s”) and had substituted for them two giant bags of potatoes. As a friend had accepted the grocery order on my behalf after I had gone to bed, I awoke to find myself stuck with the embarrassing excuses for vegetables and threw a mild temper tantrum.

Perhaps the final characteristic of the English worth noting here is their ability to conjure up tea in the strangest of places. I was once hiking in Wales in some of the worst weather I have ever experienced (think of a hurricane… on a mountain… at nearly freezing temperatures) and another hiker offered me a cup of tea. I thought he was mocking me and replied, “Only if you have some biscuits as well.” He had both. I could do nothing but stare in amazement (and hypothermia) as he poured me a hot cup of Tetley’s from a thermos (the lid doubled as a tea cup) and produced a sleeve of biscuits (a hybrid between an American cracker and cookie). Another time, the driver who was delivering my grocery order called me to let me know that several trucks had broken down and that it would be of great convenience to him if he could drop off my grocery order a few hours early. I replied that this would be fine but that I would not be home for another half an hour. He replied, “Oh that’s perfect! That will give me time to make a pot of tea.” Apparently, electric tea kettles are standard appliances on delivery trucks. A final story on this note – Churchill College once sent three men to paint the walls in my kitchen and hallways. They arrived early in the morning with their set of tools: paint, brushes, sheets to protect the floor and tables from the paint, and… an electric tea kettle, a box of tea, three cups, and a jug of milk. In the 2-3 days it took them to paint our house, I saw far more tea drinking going on than painting.

This post is part two of a six-part series on my first four months in Cambridge adapted from a mid-year report I submitted to the Churchill Foundation – the sponsor whose generosity is allowing me to spend one year at the University of Cambridge. It was written in January 2012.

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part III – Life in Cambridge
2. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part I – Life at Churchill College
3. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part V – Life £20 North of the Continent

I live in college accommodations known as the “Pepperpots” – 10-bedroom homes with a shared kitchen, living room, and laundry facilities, so named for their alleged resemblance to a pepper shaker (falsely accused, in my opinion). In particular, I live in Pepperpot 63… if you ask the college. Or 40a Storey’s Way if you ask the postal service. Or Broer’s House if you ask the wealthy man who ostensibly paid for its construction. In typical Cambridge fashion, my house has three names, depending on the particularly bureaucracy involved. Whatever you choose to call them, the Pepperpots are undoubtedly among the most luxurious of Cambridge college housing. My room is large enough that, if it so pleased me, I could make snow angels on the floor and not injure myself. I have more storage space than I know what to do with, massive windows, a private heater, and my own bathroom (with a heated towel rack!). The only drawback of the latter is that I must clean it (eventually). Although the single washer and dryer we share among the ten of us tends to get backed up on weekends, the convenience of not needing to leave the house to do laundry is appreciated. The enormous kitchen and living room are wonderful for hosting dinners and parties. With two ovens, three fridges, six burners, and acres of counter space, it is quite possible for half of the house to make dinner simultaneously. Perhaps our best use of the space yet was to host about 25 people for a DIY pizza baking night, during which almost 40 pizzas were baked.

Such an event would not have been possible at most colleges. Churchill has the distinction of being one of the furthest colleges from downtown Cambridge. Although the 15-minute schlep (by Cambridge standards) to my office at the engineering department is a slight inconvenience, Churchill’s remote location gives it something most colleges seriously lack – space. Churchill’s vast sporting fields and tennis courts are a luxury other colleges can only dream of. Our distance from town also helps to deter the hordes of tourists that plague the other college grounds.¹

A major surprise for me about college life is how often I eat at the dining hall. Mind you, this is definitely not due to the quality of food. The English have yet to discover any spices beyond salt and pepper (and even these they seem reluctant to use), seemingly too preoccupied with inventing new ways to wrap sausages in bread (and oh how many ways they have found). The main draw of the college dining hall is the opportunity to meet other members of the college. Undergrads, grad students, faculty, and sometimes even staff gather thrice daily, sharing tables and good conversation.² I regularly dine with a linguist, several lawyers, a German scholar, the son of Nobel Prize winning physicist Ernest Walton, and a cadre of scientists and engineers that dominate the Churchill population.³ This spontaneous interaction across disciplines and between students and faculty is one of the great benefits of the Cambridge college system.⁴ In addition to being a convenient way to meet others outside your discipline, the dining hall is also surprisingly more economical than making dinner at home, at least for vegetarians. A large plateful of hot vegetables and cold selections from the salad bar runs between £2 and £3. Moreover, the salad bar always includes an array of protein options (beans and meat daily, hard boiled eggs and tuna often, and salmon all too infrequently).

Three times a week, the College also hosts a “formal hall.” This is essentially an opportunity to dress up in formal ware, pay three times as much for the same food that was served at the normal dinner, and be restricted to not leaving your seat for approximately two hours. Needless to say, I am not terribly enthusiastic about this tradition, however it is certainly worth indulging in on occasion and provides a reasonable excuse to meet friends for dinner.⁵ Although I have not participated in it, attempting to attend one formal hall at every college (there are 31) is a popular Cambridge sport.⁶

Another highlight of the Cambridge college system is the social life. The student body, especially the graduate student body, is among the most international groups I have been a part of. Among the ten people living in my house, for example, we have four Americans, a Greek, a Thai, three Chinese, and a Sudanese. This diversity has had three main effects on my life at Cambridge. First, on any given day, there is a significant probability that someone’s country is celebrating a holiday, providing ample excuses to throw a party or go out for drinks (I am writing this on a stomach still full from an “Australia Day” barbecue). Second, the diversity in our culinary backgrounds not only encourages us to collectively host several dinner parties per week, but the results are almost unerringly delicious.⁷ Third, I have found myself acting more obnoxiously American than I did when living in the States. While I am not quite ready to don cowboy boots and overalls, I do find myself talking about the joys of American national parks, highways, and football more often than I ever was tempted to do in the past.

Despite the diversity of the student body, Churchill is certainly guilty of hosting the largest contingent of Americans at Cambridge, likely due in part both to the Churchill Scholars program (and the requirement that all applicants specify Churchill as their preferred college) as well as Winston Churchill’s fame in the States. One entertaining manifestation of this infestation is that Churchill College is, to my knowledge, the only college which attempts to host an annual Thanksgiving dinner. I say “attempt” because our dinner was notably lacking in pumpkin pie, stuffing, and several other key components of Thanksgiving, but we could not help but be flattered at this gesture.⁸

A final important staple of social life at the Colleges are the “common rooms”, including the “junior common room” (JCR) for undergrads, the “middle common room” (MCR) for graduate students, and the “senior common room” (SCR) for the imminently deceased (ok, for faculty). The Churchill MCR includes both a TV/game room, as well as a bar/lounge with beautiful views of the Churchill fields and unprofitable drink prices (e.g. £1.25 for a glass of wine). The bar is run by grad students on a volunteer basis and seems to be open most nights of the week. The MCR also hosts several parties (e.g. welcome, Christmas, Super Bowl), trips to London (e.g. British Museum, National Gallery), dinners, pub quizzes, pub crawls, and other events, all free or heavily subsidized. These events are yet another great excuse to meet people outside of your discipline.

One of the more disappointing features of Cambridge in general and Churchill in particular are the gyms (or lack thereof). Since the colleges operate as their own fiefdoms, there is no motivation to build a large, central university fitness center. Instead, each college operates its own woefully underequipped facility. Although Churchill’s is considered among the best, the existence of just one treadmill, one bench press, and no more than one of anything else leads to a complicated strategy game to find a time when no one else in the college wants to use the same equipment as you.⁹

This post is part one of a six-part series on my first four months in Cambridge adapted from a mid-year report I submitted to the Churchill Foundation – the sponsor whose generosity is allowing me to spend one year at the University of Cambridge. It was written in January 2012.

Photo gallery: click the “i” in the upper right for captions, the “SL” in the bottom right for slideshow mode, and the “FS” in the bottom right for full screen mode.

Life at Churchill

my first four months at Churchill College

Pepperpot 63
Pepperpot 63 - what she lacks in outer beauty, she makes up for with a massive kitchen + dining + living room.Churchill fields
Churchill College - what we lack in quality, we make up for in quantity. Built in the 1960s, Churchill does not exactly have the charm or location of Trinity or King's, but it does have more open space than any other college in Cambridge (another benefit of being ugly and far away is that we don't wake up to tourists peeking in our bathrooms).The sculpture
Legend has it that Churchill College once had the opportunity to buy this sculpture or a swimming pool. It was decided that swimming pools were much too fun for the English.First formal hall
Our first formal hall at Churchill College. I had fantasies of running and diving across the table like a slip n slide.Churchill Scholars
The Churchill Scholars posing with our sugar daddy.DIY test pizza
The "test pizza" for DIY pizza night two days before the real deal - kale, butternut squash, sweet potato, red onions, peppers and pine nuts on a homemade wholewheat flax crust.DIY pizza night
DIY pizza night - "Nice choices on ingredients, but do you think you could have bought more mushrooms?"

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part II – Life in England
2. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part III – Life in Cambridge
3. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part V – Life £20 North of the Continent

Why Standardized Tests are Unnatural
Wrong temporal scale of pressure
Time management is an important skill in any field, but the majority of exams probe this skill on far too small a scale. In life, time management on the order of days, weeks, and months is far more crucial to success than time management on the order of minutes and hours. Standardized tests demand that not a minute is wasted, that essays be churned out in 20 minutes a piece, and that quantitative results be produced so fast that reflection is impossible. Who works like that?

Too close to purgatory
Unless you’re a deceased pagan in 14th century poetry, you probably spend very little time working in purgatory. Why then do tests take place in empty, silent, foreign rooms, devoid of pleasant stimulations such as music, window views, or our favorite cushy office chair? There’s a reason that people are so particular about their work environments – because it matters. Learning research shows that information learned in a particular context is often best recalled in that same context. By placing students in such unnatural conditions, ones they are unlikely to ever encounter again, we’re placing them at an unnecessary (and uneven) disadvantage.

Isolated from other people
It’s time to give up the myth of the lone genius. Successful people, regardless of their field, know how to work with others. Yes, those people also know how to work independently and produce unique and creative contributions, but they balance their time. Tests too should strike a balance between collaborative and independent work.

Isolated from information tools
It’s also time to stop ignoring the fact that just about every worker in the world has Google at their fingertips. No one needs to memorize the periodic tables of elements, the quadratic formula, or how to spell “paramecium.” Far more important is how to find and use information. Let students bring books, iPhones, and laptops to exams and start testing skills that matter.

A Marketplace for Metrics
So what kind of metrics do we need? To argue for one or a few in particular would only serve to bias the educational system in favor of certain social classes or types of learners. What we really need is a vibrant marketplace of metrics. Allowing a single metric (i.e. the SATs) to so fully dominate a measuring process as complicated as predicting the lifelong success of an eighteen year old is naive and irresponsible. I doubt a small group of middle-aged white male “experts” gathered at a roundtable in Washington, D.C. are going to solve the problem either. Instead, we need a wide field of people with different strategies competing to provide better measures of student aptitude.

Exactly what types of metrics this competition would converge on, I don’t know. I imagine students taking one or more general exams as well as a few less common ones focusing on the particular strengths they would like to emphasize. This test selection process would not only be a great exercise for young students in reflecting on their own strengths and weaknesses, it would help schools and employers better understand which characteristics a student most wants to emphasize.

That said, there are two particular skills alluded to above that I would hope to see quickly worked in to some of the competing metrics – collaboration and long-term time management. I’ve never seen a standardized test that probed either skill and yet, I can’t think of any two more important to my daily success.

This rant was inspired by a lunchtime discussion with Phil Zager and David Livingston. Thank you to both for providing such great conversation.

Related posts:

1. Idle Hands and Docile Minds: The Need for Independence, Play, and Feedback in the Workplace
2. Book Review: Transcend by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman
3. Hangzhou: Rolling Out the Red Carpet for Foreigners

I’ve asked myself this question over the past few weeks and here’s what I’ve come up with.

When I Teach
Teaching someone else what I’ve learned forces me to clarify my thoughts. It also encourages me to focus on the aspects which are most difficult. When learning on your own, its easy to sweep the most confusing bits under the mental rug and pretend they don’t exist. But when you teach someone else, you’re forced to anticipate and respond to their confusion on those same topics. In many of my college courses, I’ll invite friends over to study for exams or do homework, even if I’ve already studied or completed the work myself because it gives me the opportunity to teach.

Now imagine if teaching was actually a built-in part of our education system instead of an accident that some lucky students discover. Grad students teaching undergrads, undergrads teaching high school students, high school students teaching middle school students, and so on. Sure, some of this happens already through teaching assistant positions and volunteer tutoring services, but I imagine a much richer system in which students would teach topics immediately after learning them, testing and solidifying their learning experience.

Another interesting strategy I would like to try are “symbiotic learning relationships.” Let’s say I’m taking a class on quantum mechanics, but I’m also interested in 14th century feminist architecture and, quite fortunately, you are taking a class on 14th century feminist architecture, but you’re interested in learning a little quantum mechanics. We would make a deal to meet once or twice a week and tutor each other in these subjects, teaching as we learn. This could be an interesting side program that students can participate in voluntarily.

When I Prepare a Presentation or Write Out My Thoughts
Presenting and writing are helpful for the same reasons as teaching. Blogging has the added benefit that, while sometimes I won’t be able to find someone nearby who shares my interests and gives me the opportunity to teach, I can always blog on even the most obscure of lessons. In the context of a unified learning strategy, I see blogging as a great backup for face-to-face teaching.

When I’m Corrected After Realizing I’ve Made a Mistake
I’ve noticed there’s a significant difference between whether I’m corrected before or after realizing I’ve made a mistake. If I’m corrected before, I’ll often brush off the correction, superficially adjust my thinking, not truly appreciate my own mistake, and simply make it again in the future. However, if I realize I’ve made a mistake and struggle a bit with correcting myself first, then a correction comes as a welcome insight and I appreciate much better the change in my mental model that needs to take place. Good teachers don’t rush to correct students; they first encourage them to recognize their mistake and try to correct it themselves.

When I Summarize an Approach
After I solve a problem, write a proof, or otherwise come to understand a new concept, taking the time to review the approach I used is crucial to storing that lesson for future use. After a particularly difficult homework problem, my first instinct is often to run away in triumph, but resisting that urge and taking the time to reflect is probably the most important opportunity for learning in a course. Every problem is a chance to learn something new… if you stick around long enough to do so. A policy I’ve found helpful is to write myself a little note (in the book or on the assignment) after every problem I’ve solved, summarizing the general approach I used and any new insights I gleaned.

When I Read Slowly and Think in Pictures
This is a little trick I picked up from Richard Feynman. Don’t read faster than you can picture what you’re reading. It’s easy to read a paper or book at breakneck speed, superficially recognizing all the ideas and their connections and convincing yourself you understand everything. But for me, there’s a huge difference between keeping track of concepts as words and doing so with pictures. With pictures, I’m less likely to forget any particular detail, I can watch how different ideas interact, and I can tell myself a story as I read. Without pictures, concepts are represented in my mind as lifeless words and I’ll miss much of the interesting consequences of what I read.

So as I read, I’ll make sure to represent each concept or detail with something visual. Say I’m reading about an atom – I might picture a little ball. Then I read its positively charged – I add some hair to the ball. Later on, I won’t forget that the atom is positively charged because I’ll always be reminded by the hair. The pictures can be total nonsense; the important thing is that I have some visual representation to work with.

When I Take Action on Something
I asked one friend the motivating question for this post and his response was, “When my learning is directly responsible for saving me from a charging bear.” While not every educational moment can be this epic, immediately using the information I’ve gained through a new or existing project makes it far more likely to stick with me. What project means here really depends on the lesson learned. For particularly abstract lessons, like a new mathematical theorem or definition, a “project” might be a proof whereas for a new physical phenomena (like the dispersion of light through a glass of water), a project might be as simple as a quick experiment.

When I Learn Collaboratively
Figuring something out on my own can be fun, but the exciting back-and-forth that takes place when I do so with someone else is often even better. I find those moments energize me for the rest of the day and often lead to vivid and fond memories.

So what about you? Have any to add? Taking the time to reflect on a list like this for yourself might be very helpful in making the best of your time.

Related posts:

1. What’s Your Ideal Classroom Experience?
2. Better Metrics for Education
3. From Himalayan Monasteries to the Halls of Universities

That proper, burly-looking, mountain man’s target? Monte Rosa – at 4634m above sea level, the 2nd highest mountains in the Alps.

Day 1: Which Way Do I Hold the Ice Pick?
To climb a mountain, one must start from the bottom… but walking all the way there would take a really, really long time. Instead, we drove through the beautiful Aosta valley and took a cable car well above the tree line to about 3000m. From there, we trekked about two and a half hours over rocks, along cliffs, and across fields of snow. I was told ahead of time this would be “a nice, easy hike” and wasn’t expecting any excitement. To my surprise and delight, there were several sections that required hanging out to ropes and teetering over several hundred meter drops onto jagged rocks. I also got the chance to practice jamming my ice pick into the slippery, snow-covered slopes to gain traction and balance, a trick that would be needed the following day.

Our destination for the first day was the Rifugio Citta di Mantova. My expectations of a tiny hut with a few cots and an old hermit selling boiled mountain goat were (fortunately) quickly dispelled. The refuge offered incredible panoramic views of the Alps, a hearty vegetable & bean stew for dinner, and Tempur-Pedic beds with huge, fluffy down comforters. Even at 3500m in altitude and forced to shuttle in supplies by helicopter, the refuge whipped up a meal that trounced the glorified microwave dinners back at my hotel in Torino. I was stunned by this at first but realized that great food must be in especially high demand for climbers who will need all the strength and morale boosts they can get. More often than bad food, its lack of sleep that kills the morale of a would-be mountaineer. At high altitudes, the lower levels of oxygen in the air can make it difficult to breathe and its not uncommon to wake up exhausted and puking. The effects vary highly from person to person and since I had never been above 1500m in memory, I again didn’t know what to expect. The wake-up call was set for 4am and departure for 5am. As I snuggled into bed, you might expect I would have been fantasizing about epic ascents up sheer ice walls or worrying over tumbling into a deep abyss where I’d be forced to draw straws and eat a climbing mate. Nope. In a confusing act of recursion, all I could think as I fell asleep was “I wonder what I’ll think about when I climb a mountain…”

Day 2: Will the Mountain Have a Bathroom?
At 4am, I found out that I am not particularly sensitive to altitude sickness. In fact, it was the best night of sleep I had had since arriving in Italy and I asked if we could climb up to the refuge every night (the answer was no). I was not sure how my body would react to the day’s physical challenge and subzero temperatures so I stuffed myself with enough crackers, nutella, and jam to put a 6-year old into a diabetic coma. Combined with the effects of two envirogirating bowls of tea, I was wired. At that point, I barely knew a crampon (spikes you fasten to your boots) from a harness (used to connect climbing partners via thick ropes), so I had to be dressed like a baby by our infinitely patient guide, Muyo. By 5:30am, we were ready to start our ascent.

As we steadily marched up the first rolling field of ice and snow, my mind raced with excitement and clarity. I think I was more curious about the mental effects of climbing a mountain more than anything so I paid close attention to my thought pattern throughout the day. At first, I contemplated the history of collective knowledge. I thought about all the years that humans and pre-human species spent living, learning, and dying without passing on any learned lessons. I thought about the great revolution that language enabled – the passing of lessons onto the next generation. I thought about how these lessons were, at first, drawn from philosophical musings, religious faith, and idle speculation and that an even greater revolution occurred when humans begin to compare their ideas very carefully with Nature (roughly in the 16th century but on and off in various cultures before then). I tried to characterize this gathering of knowledge and the best I could come up with was that humans are highly evolved to recognize, appreciate, and cultivate the impossible. Now, what do I mean by that? By “the impossible”, I mean the “thermodynamically unlikely” – that is, states of unusually high order and low entropy. In fact, you could replace “the impossible” with “order” in the above quote if you like (“order” is more clear but lacks the epic flair of “the impossible”). I could apply this statement to appreciating the order in a scene of natural beauty, but what I was moreso trying to characterize was the gathering of scientific knowledge. This activity basically amounts to watching the world around us, noticing patterns in its behavior (“recognizing order”), getting those oh-so-sweet dopamine hits we long for (“appreciating order”), and using the knowledge we gain from extrapolating the patterns to create and engineer more and new patterns (“cultivating order”).

Next, I thought upon expertise. As I stumbled my way up the icy mountain, I realized that our guide seemed to be moving much faster with far less effort. I noticed that he didn’t slip nearly as often as I did and maintained a stable, steady pace, in contrast to my fits and starts as I would gain and lose traction. I recalled a word that physicist Lee Smolin had once used to describe a great scientist who notices a regularity in the world that no one else does – a seer. I generalized the term to one who sees order where others do not and determined that it could be applied outside science just as easily. To me, the icy slope was a uniform plane to be trudged up with stubborn persistence. But as I carefully watched and followed our guide, I noticed that his steps seemed far more discerning. He would aim for little nooks of flat or stable ground that I at first had not even noticed. He periodically altered his course up the mountain, walking slightly left, then slightly right, a pattern that greatly reduced the effort required and likelihood of slipping. I learned as much as I could from him without asking him how he did it. One, I wasn’t sure if he was even conscious of how he did it. Two, and more importantly, we had enough trouble communicating in broken English, let alone broken English masked by howling winds and exhausted gasps for air. Even so, I felt I learned a lot from him and decided that seers could exist in all lines of work, not just science, and that following them and learning their ways was a good way to capitalize on humanity’s gradual, perpetual accrual of knowledge that I had been thinking about earlier.

As we continued and I started to become a bit tired, I started wondering why humans would do something so seemingly silly as to climb a mountain if they’re not trying to get over it or find something on top of it. What kind of evolutionary pressure would ever drive us to do something so dangerous and inefficient? That’s a very complicated question and I don’t have an answer, but I suspect that there are two general categories of motivations for such “adventure sports.” The first group, which I will call “conquerors”, seeks the challenge, strives to overcome and endure, and is driven by pride and competition. The second group, which I will call “explorers”, seeks to enjoy nature, participate in good conversation and thought, and clear their minds. The two groups might share a lot of interests, but the distinction in motivations is important. I first noticed this split when I went running with a friend in Torino. I fall almost entirely into the “explorer” category above and run to clear my mind, explore new areas, and stay healthy. I don’t often run for more than an hour because I can achieve my above aims in around 30-45 minutes. An hour and a quarter into the run with my friend, I was getting bored and a bit too tired to do much thinking. To me, further running seemed pointless, but my friend seemed quite intent on continuing. The difference was in our motivations for running. He is a distinct “conqueror” and, to him, the importance of the run was reaching the peak of a large hill within a specific amount of time. Conquerors and explorers will often share interests and seek to do similar activities like climb mountains, dive shipwrecks, and hike through rain forests, but the way they go about it might be very different and understanding this difference in motivation can be key to avoiding misunderstandings later. That said, the two groups are not mutually exclusive. No one falls entirely into one group and there are certainly people who are equally both conquerors and explorers. I think often about motivations people have for doing things (especially my own!), so even though its not absolute, I still found this distinction important and interesting.

As I thought more about my “explorer” motivations for climbing mountains, runnings hills, and hiking trails, I started thinking about why these activities seem to promote creative thinking and good conversation. I suspect it might work something like this. Engaging the body or senses while thinking triggers activity in different areas of the brain than are normally activated by just thinking while sitting. Despite the illusion that we have full conscious control of our brains, there are many studies that highlight the significant effects of our environment on our decisions and behavior. I suspect that our environment can play just as significant a role in the creative process. Just as different musical instruments enable different symphonies, reading or thinking on a hike, by a fire, in a park, in a cafe, on the move, or in an airplane are different neurological experiences. This is why I find roaming parks, haunting cafes, and exploring cities while reading, studying, and thinking to be such a rich experience.

I also thought about neuroscience and evolution’s effect on the direction of science (something that I will write more about in a future post) and whether information could escape from black holes via entanglement. I had heard of a problem in cosmology called the information paradox in which a black hole collapses and “eats” all the information that was trapped inside it. I don’t know about you but I was pretty angry at black holes for destroying information, which seemed a direct assault on the basic idea that physics conserves information. I had been thinking about the problem for a few days and was pretty excited when part way up the mountain I realized that entangled particles (one inside the black hole and one outside) might be able to “save” the information from destruction, since entanglement doesn’t seem to rely on light or matter to transmit information and shouldn’t be stopped by a black hole horizon. Anyways, once I returned to Torino and looked around at a series of recent papers, I found out that this is indeed roughly how some physicists have resolved the paradox. So even though it wasn’t a rigorous result, I was pretty proud that I was able to come up with the right idea on my own.

You’re probably wondering when I’m going to talk about the mountain again. The truth is, during the ascent, we were so focused on a steady pace of continual climbing that I didn’t get much of a chance to appreciate the mountain. I was mostly buried in my own thoughts and speculation because it was the only solace I had from the bitter winds, subzero temperatures, and gradual exhaustion creeping up my legs. There are two moments, however, that I will never forget. The first was when I saw the Matterhorn.

Never before had I seen a piece of land so menacing and dark. The other glaciers we saw were awe-inspiring and beautiful slopes of gleaming ice and snow; the Matterhorn resembles an obsidian tooth jutting from the bowels of Hell. She is, to say the least, intimidating.

The second moment was when I first reached our destination – Capanna Margherita, the highest mountain refuge on Earth.

The final hour had been a brutal series of switchbacks across a steep, icy face that left us exposed to winds howling so loudly that we could no longer communicate. My fatigue had reached the point that I began to no longer feel safely in control of my body and brain. I would teeter dangerously back and forth on the steep slope and, worse, although my brain would rationally recognize that this was not safe, it was still extremely difficult to focus, act on this recognition, and regain my balance. As we reached the crest of our steep climb though and I got the first glance of the view in the picture above, I was immediately re-energized and my thoughts came into sharp focus. At 4559m, we were higher than any point in the continental United States and it felt like the top of the world. Even this incredible view from the deck couldn’t keep us from the nice, warm refuge and a chance to sit down and rest. We raced inside, ordered a round of hot teas, and broke out a supply of chocolate bars rivaling that of a fat kid on Halloween (Ritter Sport Dark Chocolate, you never looked so good…). Our guide informed us that although the ascent usually took 4-6 hours when he led groups from Italy, Japan, or elsewhere, we had made it to Capanna Margherita in under 3.5 hours. We had flown up the mountain and, in hindsight, we had good reason to be exhausted. Nevertheless, our journey was not even halfway done. We still had to return to the lower refuge that we had slept at, then back down to the cable car, and finally drive all the way home to Torino by that evening.

The ascent had been a test of willpower and endurance. The descent, however, was a test of control and focus. After waking up at 4am, climbing 1000m in elevation in under 4 hours, and spending the last 24 hours breathing the thinnest air ever to pass through your lungs, you start to get a bit tired. And when you’re tired and the only thing standing between you and rest is a wide open downhill slope, running, sliding, and rolling down it at full speed all seem like wonderful ideas. They are not. They are instead very good strategies for quickly discovering crevices and cliffs. My feeble, exhausted mind had trouble grasping this and it took much effort by our guide to keep me stable and on my feet. Even without giving into the sweet siren call of the human sled, we did manage to descend to the lower refuge in about an hour and a half, stopping just long enough to strike manly poses in celebration of our successful climb. The rest of the descent back to the cable car was far more difficult than expected, requiring every ounce of effort not to give in and just roll the rest of the way down the mountain. I was actually somewhat disappointed that the journey ended up being so mentally taxing on me. Perhaps it was the altitude, perhaps it was dehydration, perhaps it was a day’s diet of crackers, nutella, and chocolate, but by this time, I was on auto-pilot. Needless to say, I never appreciated the overwhelming comfort of a cable car as I did that day.

Day 3+: The Aftermath
One week later, I visited Torino’s Museo Nazionale della Montagna, a museum on this history of the Alps and the sport of mountaineering. It is appropriately located high above the city, next to the church and monastery Monte dei Cappuccini. I say appropriately because (a) this location offers panoramic views of the city and (b) after climbing a glacier, the distant outlines of mountains that used to be merely “cool” become objects of religious awe. Once you’ve been exposed to the world that exists atop those mountains, they take on a new meaning to you. It is difficult to describe but directly analogous to the new importance and significance that the ocean takes on once you’ve begun scuba diving.

The museum itself is, in my opinion, the most underrated attraction in Torino; it doesn’t even appear in most guidebooks. It outlines the history of mountaineering, from the pioneering adventurers who first explored the Alps in little more than fleece pajamas to the mass influx of “mountain tourism” enabled by the automobile to today’s extreme athletes who travel the world seeking to conquer the infamous fourteen “eight-thousanders”. The museum’s rich collection of old equipment including picks (read: walking sticks), jackets (read: wool blazers), and tents (read: burlap bags) made me feel like a princess in my Goretex parka, Tempur-Pedic bed, and heated hotel with running water and full-service restaurant. The stunning photography of Vittorio Sella, the scale model of the original Capanna Margherita, and all the rest of the mountaineering porn in the museum rekindled my excitement and I soon raced back to my hotel room to watch the 2003 documentary Touching the Void, the true story of one of the most incredible mental and physical battles a human being has ever fought and won. I refuse to offer any details because the movie is much more effective when every turn for the worse is a surprise. All I offer is the description from the friend who recommended the film to me; in his words, Touching the Void is one of those few stories that “grapples with what it is to be human.” I’m sure it is even more meaningful if you’ve done some climbing, but I recommend it to all.

Besides the many ideas and thoughts I rambled on about above, the end result of this climb is that I seem to have fallen in with the cult of mountain fanboys who worship glaciers almost religiously. And like every good cult member, I’ve already scheduled another pilgrimage. This Friday, I return to the Alps to spend 4 days on the Tour du Mont Blanc, 170km of raw mountain goodness skirting the borders of Italy, France, and Switzerland.

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The medics show up soon. My friend is clearly terrified. She has had little experience with medical emergencies and is genuinely fearful for her life. She is pale and in tears and her state of mind is clearly visible to anyone who bothers looking at her. As the medic saunters up, he asks to see her arm. She pulls away the towel covering her wound and he leaps back, whistles, and says, “Oh yeah, it’s bad.” My friend howls in further terror.

We hop in the ambulance and are soon being led into the emergency care division. I glance back to my left and notice a large waiting room full of sad-looking locals. They are complaining of headaches, stomachaches, and lack of care. I’m grateful than we won’t have to wait behind all those people for care (again, my optimism was unfounded).

I anticipate admittance into an emergency room within minutes; obviously, my friend is losing blood fast. We’re assured that a doctor will see us soon. We had entered the hospital at roughly 9pm.

At 4:30am, seven and a half hours later, my friend was admitted to see a doctor.

July 2009, Torino, Italy
The jagged edge of the can lid slices effortlessly through my palm. Despite weeks of practice opening cans of beans (the cheap staple in my Italian diet), I still don’t have the hang of it. I curse my carelessness and vow to not pay more attention when handling sharp objects. My hand is bleeding surprising fast for such a small wound. I examine it and realize that while small in length, its a fairly deep cut. It doesn’t hurt much so I wrap my hand in toilet paper and descend to the breakfast room where I will pop my beans in the microwave and sprinkle them with curry goodness. My hand quickly bleeds through my ad-hoc toilet paper bandage. I apply another. I go through the majority of a small room of toilet paper throughout breakfast but the bleeding seems eventually to have stopped. I grab my backpack and head into the city for a stroll in the park and a visit to one of my favorite restaurants.

After a great walk and incredible lunch, I’m browsing a market just outside the restaurant. The restaurant is actually a giant “mall for foodies” that not only uses fresh produce from all over Italy in their dishes but offers these products and more for the interested diner (more about this place in another blog post). I discover an incredible table of strange cheeses resembling organs and take out my camera to snap a picture. As I pull my camera down, I realize my wound has reopened – and it’s bleeding fast. Luckily, I packed another roll of toilet paper, anticipating this possibility. I wrap my hand and continue through the market and back towards the park.

After another hour or so, my hand is still bleeding. By now, my toilet paper supply is dwindling and I wander into the Borgo Medievale (a mock medieval village for tourists) to ask if I can borrow some bandages. The woman at the desk suggests I go to the hospital.

The hospital?? Is she nuts? It stopped bleeding once; it’ll stop again! Besides, I’m in a foreign country and I have no idea whether my insurance will cover the steep medical charges I’m bound to encounter at the hospital. Furthermore, I’d rather not spend my entire Sunday in a waiting room.

But emergency medical care is free in Italy, she tells me. I’m surprised but still reluctant. I agree to sit in the lobby of the Borgo Medievale for a bit to see whether the bleeding slows when I’m not walking around. After 20 minutes, it does not. I agree to let her call a taxi to take me to the hospital. Twenty minutes later, I’m walking through the entrance.

The registration area is vaguely reminiscent of that from the hospital back in Los Angeles and I’m immediately regretting coming to the hospital. On a positive note, there don’t seem to be that many people waiting, and most of those that are waiting seem to be family members of people receiving care.

Within moments, I’m called into the initial triage room where my hand is disinfected and bandaged. After considerable gesturing and miming, I have conveyed what happened and they lead me to a second waiting room just next to the surgical facility. After about twenty minutes, I’ve bled through my bandages and dripping on the floor seems imminent. Another waiting patient encourages me to notify a nurse. I can’t imagine they’ll be sympathetic after my previous experiences in Los Angeles but I give it a shot.

I’m immediately led into the surgical room. No one speaks perfect English but through the combined English/Italian language overlap of a Russian nurse, a South American doctor, and me, we’re able to communicate. Within fifteen minutes, the smiling doctor has sewn two stitches into my right palm.

Still not convinced as I get up to leave, I ask the surgeon what the cost is to me. He laughs. “This is Italy; you don’t pay anything.” When I gawk and tell him that is unheard of in the United States, he asks how much such service would cost in the US. I’m not sure but vaguely recall paying $60 or $70 for stitches when I was in 2nd grade. At the very least, I remember being charged for every single piece of medical paraphernalia used on or distributed to me. He tells me that this is not the way his country works and hands me a veritable first aid kit of supplies to change my bandages over the next week. He then asks that I return the following Sunday to have the stitches removed. I tell him I can’t because I’ll be climbing a mountain and he pushes the return day back to Tuesday. I leave the hospital astonished. The check-in time on my record is 5:07pm. The check-out reads 5:57pm, just 50 minutes later.

When I return the following Tuesday to triage (the only location I know how to get to), it’s clear that I should go somewhere else to have the stitches removed. I don’t speak enough Italian to figure out where. The only English-speaking nurse in triage walks me around the hospital and stays with me as translator until I’m seated in a room with another surgeon ready to remove the stitches. She could have treated me like a number, as a case to process as quickly as possible or pass along to someone else. Instead, she treated me like a human being that she could assist.

Lessons from Abroad
I do not know what is wrong with the American healthcare system or how to improve it. It is much a too complicated problem for me to profess to have solved on limited anecdotal experience. But I do believe two things:

(1) If there is anything that a government should be responsible for providing its citizens, it is free, prompt, and professional emergency medical care. One of the most basic reasons societies emerged is to assist one another in times of medical emergency. When this need is not met, a government has failed in one of its most fundamental roles.

(2) If there is one place where people need to be treated as human beings, and not numbers, it is the hospital. In times of medical need, humans are in their most vulnerable and confused state. They know not how to help themselves and are entirely reliant upon others. When they are treated like numbers, abandoned for long periods of time under the veil of uncertainty, every moment is spent in terror and anguish. But when they are treated as human beings and made to know exactly why they are waiting or what the doctor is going to do next and why, it can fill them with an unbounded sense of pride in humanity (something I personally had not felt in a long time).

Italy may have its inefficiencies, but I know where I’d rather be the next time I’m in an accident.

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Labs are the popular image of science and rightfully so; experimental tests are how science distinguishes its efforts at truth and knowledge from philosophy, literature, and religion.

Yet fewer and fewer scientists actually spend the majority of their time in a lab. In the early days of modern science (the Renaissance), pretty much all scientists spent some of their time doing experiments in a lab. Since then, however, physics and other disciplines have increasingly divided into “theory” and “experiment.” Essentially, this means some people (theorists) spend most of their time trying to explain and describe the world with mathematics, while others (experimentalists) spend most of their time designing and building experiments to test whether those mathematics do indeed describe the world. This divide freed theorists to, if they chose, go decades without entering a lab and work anywhere they wanted. More recently, computers have done the same for experimentalists. For instance, many of those working on the famed Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland live outside the country and do their work from computers in their home countries. Even experimentalists who live just across the street from their lab can do much of the work analyzing data and buying new equipment from their home computers. I know one graduate student who can actually move lasers and mirrors around on a table to set up optics experiments in the lab, all from his living room. Although some scientists might need a computer to do their work, laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries make it possible even for them to work anywhere.

Now, if I told you that you could work anywhere you wanted, I’m guessing the following wouldn’t be high on your list:

Yet despite the increasing freedom to work from anywhere, most scientists I’ve met still choose to spend the vast majority of their time sitting in front of a computer in an office – theorists and experimentalists alike. There are certainly some advantages. For instance, it’s easy to talk to others you are working with if you are all in the same room. But mostly, I think it’s a mixture habit, lack of trying other approaches, and the “guilt of waste” – someone gave me an office, so I better use it.

This freedom to work anywhere has always seemed to me to be one of the best perks in science and to see it unexploited was a little disheartening. Inspired by those such as famed vagabond mathematician Paul Erdos, I spent all day yesterday roaming parks, haunting cafes, exploring crypts, and traipsing about downtown Torino, books, papers, and thoughts in tow. The goal was to see whether this would merely be fun or if it actually be more “productive” as well. For me, itinerant science was a clear winner; I’m both happier and more creative on the move.

The Experiment
When studying a topic or problem that is very new to me, my mind tends to gets saturated after a short time. If I continue after reaching this “mental saturation point”, no new info seems to stick. Later in this post, I’ll explore this idea more, but for now, what it means is that a few hours of spin interactions, characteristic functions, and other physical and mathematical paraphernalia in the early morning, it’s time to head to the park!

The long walk from atop my mountain abode through winding forests and old stone walls gives me time to digest the new ideas I encountered in the morning. I see if I can rederive everything in my head and highlight the most important results. I also get a chance to play with the new ideas. Wandering along the beautiful bank of the Po River, I imagine possible ways to build computers and memories out of the new physical models I’ve encountered. Rowers skim gracefully across the river to my right, lizards scurry across the path in front of me, and birds flit back and forth across the path from tree to tree. The subtle balance of the calm park and the activity of life provide just enough stimulation to keep my mind happy but not distracted.

Walking and thinking is about the fastest way for me to work up an appetite so I wander into one of my favorite cafes in Torino. The solitude of independent thinking and problem solving in science is made of two parts excitement and satisfaction and one part loneliness (Einstein called it the “solitude which is painful in youth but delightful in maturity”). So bumping into people you know at cafes is nice dose of humanity! While enjoying my meal, I also get a chance to toss around a research problem I’ve been working on, requestioning certain assumptions we made, rethinking whether we are asking the right questions in the first place, and considering the relation of our problem to others I’ve encountered in the past.

The cafe is nice but the staple of my adventures is wandering about in parks. USC neuroscientist Irving Biederman once pointed at a lecture on the neuroscience of pleasing visual stimuli that the reason we might enjoy natural scenes is that its beauty is of a type that doesn’t require a great deal of complex computation and active thought to enjoy, as opposed to the cognitive pleasures of reading or thinking about new ideas.* Whatever the reason, my brain appreciates these strolls through the park and I linger a while to review some bits of probability theory that I’ve encountered in a few scientific papers but never studied myself.

*I’m likely mincing words here, but I searched for a transcript of the talk or a related paper but couldn’t find anything that was both relevant and free.

One of the other key elements of these strolls through the city are the surprises. While wandering around the beautiful Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista (home of the famous Shroud of Turin), I discover a stairway down to the crypt, which reveals the remains of several ancient Roman buildings that occupied the same location over the last couple millennia. Soon after, I stumble across the team room at the and its insanely extensive walls of dining sets for a range of social occasions I didn’t even know existed. I find these surprises to be extremely helpful when thinking about difficult scientific problems for a couple reasons. One, they may provide inspiration. Bumping into a strange geometric pattern of Roman tiles might give me an idea of how a bunch of magnets might be able to stably align or might get me thinking about history at which time I’ll question the historical development of the scientific problem I’ve been thinking about. Two, they provide a short distraction. Now distraction is not usually the first thing you desire when trying to think but I believe a minimal level can be helpful. Picture a tree. When thinking about a problem, you usually start with the big picture and work your way down to the details. You make assumptions and small decisions along the way – “I’ll take the limit as the system size goes to infinity before I let time head that way” or, maybe more familiarly, “I must leave on Saturday so that I have an extra day to arrive by Monday”. Each of these choices represents you choosing a branch as you move your way out from the trunk. You continue making small, “local” choices and eventually you end up a “leaf” – a conclusion. You might find that you don’t like the conclusion and might suspect a better one exists, but you think you made every decision the best you could along the way. Now what? A short distraction at this time is essential. It takes your mind away from the problem. When you return to it, you start at the “trunk” again – the big picture. You get a chance to review all those tiny decisions you made along the way, this time with the hindsight of realizing what the consequences of each choice is. Sometimes, you’ll make the same assumptions and sometimes you’ll choose different ones. You may arrive at the same conclusion or a new one. Without the distraction, you might be so convinced that you made good choices along the way, that you aren’t capable of questioning your approach at that time. All in all, a short distraction gives you the opportunity to requestion your assumptions about a problem with the benefit of hindsight about the conclusion that those assumptions led to.

With all this rethinking and requesting going on, by now I’ve got some things I want to calculate. The only drawback to thinking while wandering is that it can be inconvenient to do calculations on a busy sidewalk or in an ancient crypt. The Italians have a fantastic tradition called the “aperitivo” – an evening drink with friends and an array of unlimited snacks. Not just potato chips or salted peanuts but a delicious selection of local vegetables, cheeses, grains, fish, and meats from grilled eggplants and sautéed spinach to hearty orzo dishes and fresh fish fillets – a proper meal. The change of scenery and stimulation again brings with it fresh inspiration and ideas.

After a meal and some calculations to confirm some thoughts of the day, its time for a walk and my final study location of the day is the St. Giovanni Battista Hospital. That, however, is a story that will be saved for another post.

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Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, one of the above ice cream delights is from Grom gelateria in Italy, the other from Cold Stone Creamery in the United States. Without reading the labels, can you guess which is which?

If an alien life form visited the Earth, he might conclude that Americans are some kind of storage vessels for large amounts of food and energy, perhaps bred to preserve the entire species in times of scarcity. Yet it seems fairly unlikely that we are preparing for such harsh times. So what are we doing?

“No Thank You, My Eyes are Full”
Research has shown over and over again that humans aren’t quite so adept at judging what amounts to a human-sized portion of food. Instead of judging on caloric density or volume, our brains find it easier to judge on relative sizes. For instance, if I offer to give you a piece of pie on a large plate or the same piece of pie on a small plate, you should choose the small plate – you will consistently report feeling fuller afterwards. In one recent study, some participants drank soup from “self-filling bowls” while others drank from regular bowls but could ask for as many free refills as they wanted. At the end of the meal, both groups reported being about equally full and estimated that they had eaten about equally much, but those using the “self-filling” bowls had eaten 73 percent more soup.

Why do our brains fail us so miserably in these situations? For starters, our brains evolved for consumption in a time of scarcity. Evolution trained our brains that food was a precious resource to not be wasted. Finish your buffalo because we might not have more for a couple days. That’s the traditional answer. Second, there’s a significant information delay from the tummy to the brain. If you think of your stomach as a computer, it takes 15-20 minutes to “process” the food data and send signals to your brain letting it know that you are full. In contrast, your brain can access visual information instantly. So for this reason, it makes sense for your brain to use visual cues.

An Arms Race of Epic Portions
Americans buy more diet books than any other country on Earth and are obviously somewhat concerned about their weight. Now imagine if American restaurants served smaller portions. These people would find it easier to lose weight, people would likely feel just as full, and the restaurants would save money on the extra food. Everyone is better off! So why the escalation to epic portions anyways?

To answer this question, we need one important fact about how the brain makes decisions – relativity. When we make decisions, we don’t judge the quality of two things independently; we compare them. We put them next to each other and we look for differences… any differences. An easily detectable difference will often play a stronger role in our decision making than differences that are more important to us but harder to detect.

Food is about the cheapest cost for a restaurant, especially in the US. Labor and real estate are far more expensive. Larger portions are an easy way for one restaurant to distinguish themselves from others. It’s also an easy way to get people to pay more.

Most cafes in Torino offer only one size of coffee. Starbucks offers four. You could order a “short” (which still dwarfs the typical coffee cup in Torino) but you won’t, because it’s not even on the menu at most Starbucks. You could also order a Tall at 12 oz., but again, you probably won’t, because for just a couple of dimes more, you can get a Grande at 16 oz. But why stop there? For even less dimes, you can upgrade to a Venti at a colossal 24 oz. Never mind whether you want that much coffee. Economically, it’s a no-brainer, you take the “good” deal. And Starbucks is happy you did; it’s a good deal for them as well. The extra cost of giving you the extra fluid ounces of coffee is pennies. Just as for other restaurants, their costs are labor and real estate. The product itself is dirt cheap.

Now imagine if instead of 12, 16, and 24, your brain was presented with a different list of easily ordered numbers: 340, 470, 600. Those are, respectively, the number of calories in a Tall, Grande, and Venti Vanilla Bean Frappuccino Blended Creme. Your brain might now seize upon the easiest criteria for distinguishing the three and go with the Tall, the obvious candidate for “healthiest” drink of the bunch.

Why US?
So why Americans? The brain quirks we’ve discussed are universal and not limited to only those in the US. So there must be something else about us.

For starters, food is incredibly cheap in the US due to our relative wealth and huge farm subsidies. It’s easy for restaurants to offer those “great deals” that let you get twice as much food for only 20% more money.

A second answer is offered by Michael Pollan in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The United States has a relatively nonexistent food culture. Other countries like Italy have strong traditions on food that dictate what constitutes a good size and content for a meal. A coffee simply is that tiny little cup pictured above. These traditions were established many years ago when food was not so abundant. Americans on the other hand are more susceptible to diet crazes, eat out more often, and don’t have a long history of established food traditions.

If Americans want to avoid becoming sedentary blobs of consumption (see the recent Pixar film Wall-E), something will have to change and it won’t be our brains. Or will it? Biological engineering might one day allow us to upgrade the signal pathways from our stomach to our brain, so that we realize we’ve had enough long before that third piece of pumpkin pie.

More immediately (and maybe less invasively), the government might limit the size of portions offered in restaurants, dole out subsides for smaller portions, or require restaurants to post nutritional information as prominently as size and price.  Vast amounts of government money are spent paying medical costs that result from obesity-related illnesses so they have both an incentive and some measure of legitimacy in interfering.

Some ending questions.

• Any other ideas on why large portion sizes are so prevalent in the US?
• Would you accept biological engineering to help you make better food decisions?
• Would you support government intervention in this problem?
• Do you have a better solution?

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3. Introduction: Goals