Deborah Tannen is a sociolinguist at Georgetown University who studies “genderlects” — the speech and conversational patterns that exist both between women and men, and also within same-sex communications. She wrote You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation in 1990, and it explores an interesting way to interpret several types of common (often, explicitly stereotypical) misunderstandings that take place between men and women. Her idea is that generally in conversation women are trying (perhaps unconsciously) to facilitate intimacy, building relationships through social connectedness, whereas men are attempting (also perhaps unconsciously) to negotiate a social hierarchy.
Category: journal
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Carl Sagan is Dead
Before I finished Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age in the Salt Lake City airport Monday, I found a book by Carl Sagan in the bookstore. “The Varieties of Scientific Experience”, based on his Gifford Lectures from 1985 (and published posthumously, in 2006 by Ann Druyan). I read half of it in the airport, and the other half last night. It went fast, because I’d heard it all before. The main piece of new information was that a decade and a half after the fact, Carl Sagan is truly dead to me. I’ve read most of his books, I’ve seen his television series Cosmos several times. I love his ideas; they’ve shaped me throughout my life, but I no longer hope to find anything new in them. So long as there were pieces of his mind that had been recorded, but that I hadn’t yet been exposed to, it was as if he wasn’t quite gone. He was still, from my point of view, a dynamic entity.
Charter Communications, our local co-axial monopoly and recent bankruptee, sent a technician out to our house today, to hook up our new net connection. As is almost always the case, the tech was friendly, helpful and generally knowledgeable, in stark contrast to just about anybody you can ever get on the phone if you call the company. The customer service people are like robots. Sometimes, like robots with buggy firmware. They are, quite literally, running a program written by someone at Charter, codified in a choose-your-own-adventure style script booklet or web application. They seem to have no intrinsic knowledge of the business they work for, or the systems they are meant to support. Honestly, I wish Charter (and other such companies) would just put these resources on the web directly, so I can page through them on my own without having to be on hold first. They probably won’t do this, at least not in full, because one of the most important jobs this script/program does is to retain as much of their customer’s money as possible, whether or not they’re really supposed to have it, and to direct people into more lucrative service contracts, aggressively if need be.
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Checking back in with the world
I’ve been gone. Not just from Pasadena, but from the world at large, for at least six months. I can probably count the number of times I left Mike and Susan’s house in 3.5 months on two hands, or maybe three, but some of those were just hiking. I didn’t see much news. Thankfully I missed the entire healthcare debate. I didn’t spend time with other people. I was checked out. Now I’m starting to check back in, and of course things seem kind of surreal.
I went to a mall last Friday. The one by the Santa Anita racetrack. I went with Ian to see Avatar in IMAX-3D, and to get a little exercise. I’ve mostly been laying around trying to stop being sick for the past week. When we got there, the show had sold out, so we decided to walk around the mall — to literally circumambulate it, not walk around inside like shoppers — and decide whether we wanted to go to the next showing, and kill some time. It was bizarre. The whole place. I felt like an alien, first for having biked there (they have a giant valet-only parking lot), second for clearly not wearing culturally acceptable Friday-night-at-the-mall attire, and third for having a giant crazy-homeless-guy beard. The homogeneity of the people just seemed bizarre somehow. Lots of black and white clothing. Lots of text messaging. Lots of makeup and trying to look tough. The scene was so strange we decided to pee in the bushes in the parking lot rather than try and find a bathroom inside.
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The twenty-oughts, a decade in review
I will remember the past decade as graduate school. Only 6 years actually enrolled, but also another 1.5 or so working at Caltech beforehand, trying to get in. However, all the highlights took place in the other times. The 2.5 years yet unaccounted for. Of that time, about 18 months was spent traveling, and that’s where the memories really are.
A wolf in our camp by the calving McBride glacier. Paddling over Pacific swell with seaweed and a wright whale by George Island. The miracle of getting over sea sickness while fishing for salmon on the M/V Radio out of Pelican. A brown bear and her cubs on the beach. Lonely, wordless, solo backpacking in the Beartooth range. Two weeks in Dark Canyon with the ringtails eating cattail roots. A half eaten deer and mountain lion tracks in the morning by our campsite in the Zion narrows. A night with Concept One and Aphex Twin in a Subaru crammed full of camping gear during a rain storm in the redrock country.
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I’m older than I’ve ever been
In class Peter Goldreich once said “You don’t get smarter in grad school. You just get older.” I don’t know if I agree entirely, but there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere. It is a strange kind of scientific hazing ritual. An induction and an indoctrination. Highly skilled and intelligent people, doing difficult technical work, for years, earning something close to minimum wage. Why? Is it for a chance to play in the tenure-track tournament, with the odds stacked 10 to 1 against you? If you win, you can study anything you like (as long as there’s funding…). Is it because we think having a PhD will get us somebody’s respect? Whose? Our parents? Our advisors? Society at large? It’s certainly not because we’re seeking power or riches. That way lies law school, or the dreaded MBA. Is it because we don’t know how to do anything else? Because our self esteem has been so entangled with school for so long? Because we are a people addicted to understanding? What fraction of PhD students finish feeling good about themselves, or in love with their research? Or even learning in general?
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Doctoral Leaflet
It seems a bit of Vaudeville is still lingering around the Academe…
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
of
THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER
DISSERTATION DEFENSE
of
Zane A. Selvans
FOR THE DEGREE
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Date/Time: 2:30pm, Friday, 20th November, 2009
Bldg./Rm: Benson Earth Sciences (BESC) 380
Examining Committee Members:
- Karl Mueller
- John Wahr
- Robert Pappalardo
- Bruce Jakosky
- John Spencer
OUTLINE OF STUDIES
Major Field: Geological Sciences
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
A descendant of Dust Bowl migrants, Zane grew up near Fresno in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He left as soon as humanly possible, and got his BS in Computer Science at the Caltech in Pasadena. After a brief stint working in Silicon Valley (which unfortunately did not result in any kind of dot-com stock option fortune), he returned to Caltech via sea kayak to work with Mars Global Surveyor data, mapping Mars’ south polar layered deposits. While he has been a student at CU Boulder since the fall of 2002 you may not have seen much of him lately, because in early 2006 his wife and advisor both moved to Caltech/JPL, and like a long period comet, he slid back down into that place’s deep potential well to be with them. Next year, Zane intends to spend a lot of time on his bicycle.
THESIS
Time, Tides and Tectonics on Icy Satellites
Faculty Advisor: Karl Mueller
ABSTRACT
In the outer solar system, we cannot directly use the radiometric dating techniques widely applied in terrestrial geology. We also lack the detailed understanding of the correspondence between crater size-frequency distributions and absolute ages that the radiometric dating of lunar samples has given us in the inner solar system. Additionally, many geologically interesting surfaces on the icy satellites are insufficiently cratered to allow us to infer precise relative ages. Thus it is desirable to find other ways to construct geological chronologies that function well in the outer solar system. In this work I develop two techniques.
The first compares the linear tectonic features covering Jupiter’s moon Europa to modeled tensile fractures resulting from tidal stresses due to the non-synchronous rotation (NSR) of the satellite’s decoupled, icy, lithospheric shell. The amount of shell rotation required to align a feature with the stress field resulting from NSR is used as a proxy for time. This translation is potentially convolved with a phase lag between the tidal potential and the stresses it induces, resulting from the shell’s partially viscous response to the NSR forcing. The geography of individual lineaments is found to be no more consistent with NSR stresses than chance would predict, however, the ensemble of global lineaments displays a non-uniform apparent rate of lineament formation throughout the time period recorded by the surface. This non-uniformity may be explained either by steady state fracture formation, activity, quiescence and erasure, or by a transient episode of tectonics.
The second technique encodes the myriad superposition relationships evident between Europa’s tectonic features as a directed graph enabling algorithmic analysis. The observed superposition relationships are generally insufficient to construct complete stratigraphic stacks, but we can calculate the degree to which they corroborate or contradict another hypothesized order of formation. We find that they tend to corroborate the hypothesis that the lineaments are tensile fractures due to NSR stresses.
Together these results offer cautious support for the idea that Europa’s shell rotates independently of its silicate interior, and demonstrate techniques useful in comparing tectonic features on other icy satellites to hypothesized mechanisms of formation.
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Amateur Earthling on Hiatus
I have lots of draft posts in progress here on the back end, calling to me whenever I log in like internet sirens:
- The Scale and Form of Cities, about how one might design a city from the ground up today, with efficient resource utilization and conviviality in mind. A follow up to What Are Cities For?
- Corporate Paternalism, about the ways in which we (especially conservatives) seem to have more faith in corporations than our elected representatives when it comes to making decisions for us.
- Our Newtonian Hangover, about the non-linear, non-deterministic nature of history and technology, and James Burke’s excellent BBC series The Day the Universe Changed and Connections. Miraculously, they are almost as relevant today as they were 30 years ago, and we are in the process of implementing one of the strange futures he foretold.
- The dunes told me to work on passive buildings, which is a more personal and spiritual response to the NREL interview questions than seemed appropriate for a job interview.
- and a magnum opus entitled What’s Wrong With Graduate School, that examines both how my own graduate career has been uniquely flawed, why I believe the graduate education system as a whole is in general broken, and a vision of what I think higher education might look like by the time any offspring I could conceivably have would be there.
However, at the moment the thing most wrong with graduate school is that I’m still in it. My PhD defense has been tentatively scheduled for November 20th, and I’m going to the AGU fall meeting in San Francisco in mid-December to present my work, so I’m going to be completely occupied until the beginning of 2010. There will be no further blog updates between now and then. Or at least, there shouldn’t be. If you see me making posts, don’t read them. Instead ridicule me in person, or offer up some kind of digital castigation.
Of course, you can still read my mind keep in touch with me via my linkstream, my tweets, and my photos. Oh, and of course there’s always e-mail and the telephone.
While we were both in Colorado last winter, Michelle and I talked a lot about the emotional and physical logistics of moving back there permanently. Our two body problem. Location, career or love, (like sleep, good grades or a social life): pick two. We tried to write an outline of all the decision points we might face. A decision tree. It became a mess. Then we started writing it as a Python program, with zane and michelle objects, and method calls like zane.findjob(loc="boulder"). But it’s not really that kind of problem. It’s not deterministic. This is decision making under uncertainty. Strategic and emotional, not entirely susceptible to reason. It really stopped being an academic problem when I got the interview with NREL, and it seemed to go well. Even if I don’t get the job (they still haven’t said one way or the other, as of mid February August), it was certainly a useful exercise in the sense that It made us think and feel through the realities of what doing something like that would mean.
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Spinning Europa 1: Introduction
Aaron suggested that my paper would would be much better if it read more like one of my blog posts, and less like a litany of torture lab notebook. So here it is in parts, written as if I intended for you, dear reader, to read it. (But don’t worry Bob, I’m actually working on the real paper). It’ll probably be cathartic, as one of the things I hate about writing papers is the formalistic language. It makes the content less readable, less enjoyable, less human. I just don’t see the point. If the content is up here, then anyone who feels the same way can get an idea of what’s going on without wading through all the passive voice crap. It’ll also help me enjoy writing it, and let me feel like I got it out of my system. Plus, on the internet, color figures are free (not $350 for the first page, $175 for each additional page… I mean jeez, that’s like a year’s worth of hosting fees just for one paper), you can insert links, and nobody has to pay $3975 per year for a subscription. Oh, and sweet, I also get to retain the copyright. Honestly, paper journals are so sad. Of course there’s that pesky peer review, but you’ll find a comment form at the bottom of the page, and if you actually make it that far, by all means let me know what you think. In a production environment, the publication would be hosted on a neutral third party site, precluding me from editing or deleting comments, verifying everybody’s identities, and ensuring that the content was archived effectively. Alas, we’re not there yet. Maybe this will seem ridiculous at this point in the grad school experience, but I actually maybe for the first time understand why someone would want to give a talk. I have results, they’re interesting (if you’re into this kind of thing), but I don’t really know what they mean.