Night School

I'm solidly into my fifth year as a graduate student at Stanford and have been out of the classroom for some years now. We finish our coursework in the first year and devote the rest of the time to research, seminars, teaching. This leaves a lot of time to go to talks on campus - I average probably three a week. Many of the talks I go to have to do with energy, food, justice, and writing. At my mom's request I'll try to write about some of the talks, notable and not, to share my secondary Stanford education with you all. (All of you out there!)

These posts will be tagged "night school".

Larissa McFarquhar, author, "Strangers Drowning" (coming out in September)
This was a reading put on by the Ethics in Society program at Stanford. They have had this author three years in a row now, reading case studies form her book on extreme morality. Two years ago, a couple who gave all their money to charity. Last year, another couple who adopted  20 special needs children. McFarquhar explores the specific examples of lives lived wholly for the purpose of helping others. She said her interest in the subject stemmed from an interest in philosophical debates about how to best live a moral life, and that in researching apiece on kidney donation she came across surprising hostility towards the donors (primarily from doctors) who sort of pathologized the altruistic act. This in turn with the observation that sacrifice of family and those you actually know in the pursuit of helping strangers is looked down upon more these days perhaps than before. (For a longer explanation of the project see here).

Anyways, the story she told was of Dorothy Granada, a woman born in 1930 in Los Angeles to a Mexican mother and a largely absent Filipino father. Granada's story starts in the near-present, where she is 84 years old and living in Nicaragua, training midwives from rural villages to save the lives of women in labor. McFarquhar takes us along Dorothy's path - high school in a convent in the Philippines, a calling to be a nurse starting in childhood, life as a middle class nurse and mother and wife in Chicago, and a realization that her religion's teachings could be boiled down to this: Resist violence, and stand with the poor. Dorothy then has a stint (the middle part of her life) as an antinuclear peace activist and hunger striker, before going to nurse the poor of Nicaragua for forty years.

What a fascinating life! It reminded me of Jean Evans, who I spoke with at the Lindau meeting in 2013. Many of us live long enough to have many chapters in our lives if we so choose. It was also very interesting to hear the story of a woman whose path was determined not by her circumstances but instead by her convictions. There was no undercurrent of regret or second-guessing of her decisions; or even lengthy deliberation over her decisions really. I wonder what that stems from -- self confidence, luck, moral certitude. But on top of these confident decisions was a changing path, making it seem possible to evolve throughout your life.

The speaker was thoughtful, eloquent, and expansive in the Q & A session. She skirted most questions about her personal experience in writing the book and encountering so many do-gooders. (I think I'm most interested in process when a creative person comes to speak; rarely do I have questions about their work but always am I curious how they made it). One memorable question was, "What do the do-gooders think of the rest of us?" The common perception is that they may judge us from their higher moral ground, McFarquhar said that those who did judge the rest were not feeling superior but instead thought of themselves as very ordinary people. They were perplexed that other people did not act as they did for this reason.

On Freedom

This week!
On Saturday night I watched Braveheart for the first time.
On Tuesday morning Chris Field gave a talk on climate change impacts and adaptation that shifted my discontent from weariness to action.
On Thursday night I sat in a cold auditorium, belly full of kofta, listening to two badass lady revolutionaries' stories of Syria's transformation from paranoid oppression to hopeful against all odds. On Friday morning I read this piece on Guantanamo Bay.
On Friday afternoon, I left work early, eye-glazed exhausted and greasily exuberant.

On my way home I had a chance coffee with my friend Shara and her friend Claire. Claire does research on a controversial subject, one that has conspiracy theorists sending death threats to her advisor. Coincidentally I've been working on an audio piece about this subject, using an interview with this advisor. Before I realized that she might take it quite personally, I told her our take on the subject in the audio piece was a pretty decisive thumbs down. She told us that she's written an op-ed about her research that Big Deal People have encouraged her to publish in the Times, but she's hesitated. Her future job might be at stake, or maybe she doesn't want her name publicly available to be targeted by the crazies.

My labmate Aitzol, raised in the Basque country, also went to the Syria teach-in on Thursday night. I told him that hearing their stories (and thinking of Braveheart) had made me acutely grateful for my personal freedom. He told me that speaker Sana Khatib in particular had a look in her eyes that he hadn't seen in a long time. The look of full conviction for a cause, of strength, of knowing what it is to really live. To him (I think), this was freedom. Feeling that you have freedom is simply a reflection of your proximity to the power centers in your society, he told me. The farther you are, the more oppressed, the less free you feel. Having freedom is something else entirely.

This summer Shara and I went to see a talk by Lonely Planet cofounder Tony Wheeler. It was about his travels in non-tourist destinations: Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Afghanistan. And so on. I thought it would be awesome, but it was so far from it. I grew giddy on the bike ride back as we tore apart his talk, and realized how good it felt, viscerally, to know exactly where I stood on something. I felt the same way in June in Boston after Harvard professor John Johnson made a powerful case for affirmative action to our little crowd of science communicators.

I am just writing to say that it is exciting to notice that new ideas can change the way you move through the world. This is not profound, but it is exactly where I am right now. 

On Feedback

Hello, humans.

This feeling.
Photo taken by Aleks in 2010, the day we drove across Qatar and watched the sun set over the water.

I went to a panel grandly, intriguingly, titled "Science Storytelling and The Paradox of Suspense" yesterday hosted by mediaX at Stanford. Still hazy on MediaX, and most of the suspense featured was related to the fact that no one ended up talking about suspense . . . However. It featured a Hollywood screenwriter, Scott Z. Brown, who wrote The Bourne Ultimatum and produced An Inconvenient Truth, and came up with the got milk? campaign. These three facts about him excited me more than I would have expected, which is to say: a lot.

I wanted to ask him: "How do you solicit feedback on your work? How do you know that it worked?" I didn't get to, but I did do the crowd-round-the-speaker after the talk until he was whisked away, and overheard him talk about the challenges in getting people to care about long-term risks. People are better wired to respond to short-term risks (stepping out of the way of a car) and much less worried about long-term risks (the jelly donut, the changing climate . . . all of these his examples).

I listened to everyone else's questions and thought about how the questions you ask can reveal so much about you -- your ego, your neuroses. To the tie-dye hair biology-disillusioned grad student wondering "Do you think that science communcation and science should be separate careers, taught distinctly to those who can excel at one or the other?" I thought -- why would this guy know the answer to this question?

But now I see that my question is a little mirror into my ego and worries too. I want my work to change people's minds, change their actions, and for that to incrementally change the world. But I want more than that -- I want to know that these changes are happening, to get feedback, motivation to carry on the charge. The pursuit of long-term rewards is as challenging as the avoidance of long-term risks.

This probably leads to other whirly bits of my subconscious worries, like: have I slipped more deeply into Realism than Idealism in the last five years? How does ignorance, willful or not, play into decision-making? But that is for another time and place.

Meanwhile, here are other places that I am optimistically planning to write more these days. Won't you hold me accountable, dear Internet?

morgen schmorgen

black tea + cinnamon = tastes like chocolate!

(In classic graduate student fashion, I got lazy and hungry at my desk and poured a Quaker Oats Cinnamon Spice instant oatmeal packet into the remainder of my cold cup of tea to make this discovery)

I'm reading COOKED by Michael Pollan and learning many food tidbits (and getting excited about making fermented things to cultivate my gut microbiome). The relevant tidbit here is that we can perceive scents through both our noses and our mouths. The latter is called "retronasal olfaction", as in, I am retronasally olfacting chocolate odors in my cold wet breakfast.

It was summertime in Palo Alto this weekend. Sun tea on the porch all afternoon Saturday and lemons from the front yard. (They're prettier to look at than to eat, sadly).

Then Sunday morning farmer's market for fresh bread and radishes (plus pickling vegetables), for California breakfast with coffee made in my Christmas present Moccapot from Mom and Dad and served in my springtime present of tiny handmade cups from Vanessa.

The best.

1. Slice a cold watermelon in half.
2. Scoop out fist-sized dome with a spoon. This is your appetizer.
3. Blend the rest with an immersion blender, scraping down the sides as you go.
4. Ladle into glasses.  

18 months overdue, and a squirrel

Reporting from lab this afternoon. I am procrastinating from studying for my Final Final (Ever?! I thought I was done in 2009 when I took the Chem 390 exam and happily tripped home afterwards, pausing under a big tree on the Slope to be prematurely nostalgic).

This morning I paused in the drizzle on the walk to work. A squirrel had died on the sidewalk, probably under the wheel of a bicycle, crumpled quietly near a bush. This was nothing particularly new - what struck me was a frantic smaller squirrel that rushed at the fallen one, prodding it and nuzzling it, only to be scared back under the bush by each passing bicycle. It kept darting out, making heartbreaking clucky little squirrel noises and almost lifting the dead squirrel up with its nudges.

I watched the scene for a few minutes and then headed inside out of the rain. The scene got me thinking about writing, and how I want to learn more about squirrels (and whales!), and this sort of thing. And so I have an oddly timed desire to share the following bit of writing with you. I never finished recounting my trip to Lebanon and Syria last September in this blog, but did write about it for a writing class that I took for fun last quarter. The piece is followed by a few pictures.

After Hours at the Roman Ruins of Baalbak

It’s a bit tricky to see the Six Pillars of Lebanon at the most magical time of day. You have to get the timing just so – the ticket office to the ruins closes half an hour prior to sunset, and probably you left Syria later than you meant to, lingering over a Turkish coffee at the bus stop before realizing you weren’t at the bus stop. And even though the border crossing goes surprisingly well, in Baalbak just when you mean to head down to the ruins, a sweet wrinkled mother might invite you, in halting French, to take tea on her rooftop. You will find it impossible to say no. And by the time you’ve met the family and finished your second cup of tea and discussed Syrian cinema and given away your email address on so many scraps of paper, the sun will have dropped deep into the valley, and you’d better let the oldest son Mohammad show you the back way to the ruins to get there on time.

And he will do just that, guiding you down narrow streets while explaining that even if we are late, it should be fine, this is a small town and the guard working the gate to the ruins is his friend from elementary school. But maybe by the time you arrive at the ruins, there is no longer a guard at the gate, just a large padlock across it, and so Mohammad will suggest that only thing to do is throw your backpack over the gate and start climbing the fence. The worst thing that could happen as you vault yourself to the other side is that the guard might return, which he will, and since this is the worst case scenario, he will also be the one stranger to Mohammad in all of Baalbak and so Mohammad probably won’t be able to convince him to let these fence-hopping Americans in, it is too late, khalas. You may think this is a good time to offer to “buy some tickets” from the guard. It is not. Such attempts at bribery will injure the pride of this toiling guard, and he will likely become infuriated, and ask, “You want me to go to jail? You want to go to jail?” Nobody wants to go to jail, so probably at this point you give up.

If you are lucky, though, Mohammad, who has already witnessed the magnificence behind the fence and around the corner, will not be so easily defeated. He may sulk with you a while, but then he may also remember the exit door to the ruins, and walk you over there. At this gate, there will be no guard, just an old shifty-looking groundskeeper counting the visitors leaving the ruins. Mohammad will pull him aside, say a few words in a friendly tone - and the groundskeeper will likely nod in agreement. “You can give him a little money when you leave, if you like, but it is not necessary,” Mohammad will probably explain to you. Later on, when you are running from this man and the police through the alleys of Baalbak, you’ll find that something was dramatically misunderstood, but in the meantime you’re probably just thrilled to have snuck in. If you get the timing right, by now it should be five, maybe ten minutes to sunset. The muezzins of the valley will be warming up their voices for the maghreb call to prayer, the stars will be brightening above the minarets, the ancient stone pillars will be warming under the heat of incandescent spotlights, and you will have arrived just in time for the magic.

The view from Fatima's balcony (where we had tea before the ruins). I was too shy to ask to take a picture of her family.

Taken as the call to prayer began.

The Six Pillars of Lebanon. I didn't realize until looking at other photos just now how lucky I was to catch them at such a dramatic time; the lighting makes everything much more epic.

Revolt, Security, Soda

I'm supposed to be reading up on upconvertors or maybe calculating etch times and deposition angles, but the news in the Middle East is too fascinating right now. I was sucked in by the NYT (the photograph of Tahrir Square is UNREAL), looked for more photographs over at BBC, saw what NPR had to add to the conversation (not much) and finally went to Al Jazeera, knowing well that once I started clicking on opinion pieces there, there was no chance I'd get any work done before my 2 PM meeting. Holy crap! The Arab world has become Revolution HQ and I'm excited to follow the outcomes of the protests. Egypt's been getting the most coverage here in the US, but there are protests going down in Yemen and Jordan as well.

I only know slightly more than nothing about these far flung lands for having traveled to them, and while it's not enough to have a strong clear opinion about what's going on, it's enough to make me curious and sympathetic. The photographs of young Egyptian men and pieces like this about the issues young Arabs are dealing with took me straight to a warm Doha night by the pool in ASAS twin towers. A young security guard - the manager for the night shift - named Amro had invited me to have a soda with him by the pool.

We had met Amro in not-so-dignified circumstances - our affinity for late nights in the steam room and sauna didn't officially fly with building policy, since the girls would sneak into the men's locker room to hang out with the bro bros (long after any sane male residents would be down there). Consequently, security had occasionally crashed our party and sent the ladies packing, until one night Hollin started chatting with friendly Amro, who admitted he didn't really care, and as long as we turned the steam and heat off when we left they'd leave us alone.

Anyways, Amro would occasionally come hang out with us, maybe to practice his English, probably because he was bored at work, and one day asked me if I would like to have a soda with him that week. We met at the beginning of his shift, and I learned that he was from Egypt but had worked in Doha for several years. He didn't love it, but his previous work in Egypt as an English teacher was too frustrating to return to. It was next to impossible to find a job in Egypt, and those who were employed as teachers made fractions of what he earned as a security guard in the Gulf. Amro supervised the Nepali guards contracted to work for the building. At one point, when the fire alarm system in our building didn't work, one task of these guards was to sit in a dark hallway on each floor with an emergency horn, serving as a human fire alarm for an eight hour shift. For an impressively fluent English speaker with ambitions to teach young Egyptians, the job seemed a bit stifling.

But he had no intention of returning to Egypt. The Gulf was where money was, and back home there was no hope for change. So Amro had resigned himself to life in Doha, interacting with English speakers whenever possible to keep working on his English. The best he could hope for was to work for Qatar Gas, which paid better than the gig at ASAS. I rarely saw him after that night he bought me a warm Sprite. Within a few months, I had left Doha to seek opportunities in my homeland. I wish for the same were possible for Amro and his countless brothers scattered throughout the Gulf.