In case you're wondering why things have been so quiet on this site in the last few months, this figure shows the mood of your average PhD student as a function of time. It was generated by a friend of mine who just completed his degree in December after a long and courageous battle. The gray dot indicates my present location -- at least on the time axis.
But dammit it will all be over soon. And I hope that it will end on the "Woo!" side...
This is Benj:
Benj and I have had a special friendship for as long as I've known. He is five years my elder, but when we met (I think I was about 4) we hit it off and became instant best friends.
Benj was handed mental and physical disabilities at birth, which is the first thing anyone will notice when they see him. However, he also has an amazing charisma and infectious love for life. This charisma made him a local celebrity on our street where we grew up as next-door neighbours. Everyone knew him, and everyone took care of him. He could walk out his front door in downtown Toronto at 8 p.m., and his family knew he would be fine. When I first met him we were of comprable "mental age". We would have fun riding our Big Wheels together or stomping on ants on the sidewalk.
As we grew up, however, this changed. At some point I became aware of what was happening...I was growing up faster than him. This was hard to take, and for a few years our friendshp suffered. But with time, I learned to accept this change in our friendship. It went from having a best friend to having a younger cousin or a younger brother. One of his most common questions to me was "Are you happy?" to which my truthful reply was "Only if you are". He became someone I would always want to take care of and always want to have fun with. Suddenly I realized that our relationship haddened actually changed...everything was always about having fun.
His house became a haven for me where I could escape the stresses of everyday adolescence, be it due to school or family or girls or anything else. No matter what was happening, we just continued to fly kites, catch frogs at the pond, watch Herbie movies, or play Hungry Hippos. Throughout my adolescence, we stayed great friends. I wrote essays about our friendship during highschool, and two television documentaries talked about our friendship. In the first one I was 5 and didn't have much to say, but in the second I was 15 and got interviewed extensively. That one ends with me saying something to the effect of:
Sometimes I wonder what will happen. I won't live here forever. What if I move or I go to university and move to another city? [pause] I know we'll stay friends forever.
Two years after the filming, I moved halfway across town. Then I left Toronto to study the in Montreal and Vancouver. Somewhere during that time Benj and his mom moved to L.A. where is two sisters were already living. As I predicted at the awkward age of 15, we've kept in touch. In the two visits I've made to California since he moved there, I've spent a couple of days visiting him. I have asked him to be in my wedding party, and he has accepted and is excited about it.
This week I discovered a something new about Benj. There has been a book published about him. There is something very special about this book. It is written by his mother. Benj's mother is a clinical psychologist that specializes in children with disabilities. So in a sense, he is very lucky to be have been born to her. She knows how to help Benjamin live a full life.
Benj's mother has encouraged his interests and helped his development always. Whether it was getting a dog or a turtle, or learning to play the harp (the Harp!!), or joining the local bowling league, or playing hockey, or finding temp work, she has made it happen. Thanks in no small part to her, Benj is a hard worker, an accomplished athlete, and a musician. He lives a very full life, and is one of the most sincerely happy people you could ever hope to meet.
As I told his mother in a recent letter to her, I am very excited about this book. It is both a personal and a professional description of his development, and will give me a deeper insight into one of the most important people in my life. And in addition, just thinking about reading this book is reminding me of everything our friendship has meant over the years.
Fifty-two weeks ago (plus or minus a couple of hours), I was sitting on a big flat rock on the side of Long Lake, just outside Halifax. I wasn't alone. With me was my lady friend, Allie.
The weeks leading up to that point by the lake had been rather hectic. I had been preparing for a departmental seminar and a conference, and Allie was studying hard for an exam. But we managed to sneak off on a nice warm February afternoon to go for a hike. It was a beautiful walk through the woods with a light mist blowing through the trees. Normally I would not remember these sorts of details a week after the fact, let alone a year, but this hike was going to be a special one. Unbeknown to Allie, I had a ring zipped away in my pocket, and today I was going to stop worrying about her finding it in my sock drawer.
As we walked along the trail through the woods, I was looking for nice spots with scenic views. Noticing one particular spot, I decided we'd have to visit it on the way back. So after walking by a waterfall, and balancing across some fallen trees, all the while hearing the drips of melting snow on a warm day, we stopped at this sun-warmed rock looking over the lake to have a little chat.
Allie, being Allie, was in the mood to talk, which was good. Today she had chosen the topic, How lonely and miserable my life would be if I had never met her. I'm not kidding. What could be better?
Apparently in all of Halifax, she had determined it would have been absolutely impossible for me to ever find anyone as good for me as her.
"Um, yeah, about that," I sheepishly interjected upon deaf ears.
In fact, it sure was a good thing I went to Montreal when I did, and a good thing that I happened to meet her when I did, otherwise who knows what would have become of her and then I would never have met her and I'd be doomed to a love life of failure worthy of its own ongoing saga on some cartoon TV-series*.
At this point I had the ring in my hand - clutched very tightly because I was not dropping this thing into the lake - but the conversation was starting to drift a little past where the time seemed right.
So I waited for a good time, and I tried to steer the conversation back...
... and I waited ...
... and I waited some more ....
and then Allie said, "Well, we better get back to the car before it gets dark." And with that she shuffled off the rock, turned her back to the lake, and started walking back up to the trail.
Quickly, and with mountain goat grace I might add, I managed to scramble to a nearby gravel shoreline. It was there that I mustered all of my intellectual ability to compose the most incredibly suave statement that would both woo her and delay her return to the trail. "Hold on a second."
And I walked up to her.
And I looked at her.
And she looked at me.
And I paused.
And I asked myself why I didn't rehearse this out-loud at least once.
And I took a deep breath.
And before I could say anything her eyes got really big -- I mean saucer big.
"What?" I asked.
"Oh, nothing," she said bashfully.
"No, what is it?"
"Um, I thought you were - well this is going to sound silly - I thought you were going to get on one knee."
And then, with my whole poorly-scripted plan quashed, I just went with the flow and got on one knee. And I said some garble and probably stuttered. And I offered her the ring. And she accepted it.
* To be fair to Allie, I may have embellished this part only slightly.
Sorry it's been quiet for the last few days...it'll probably stay like that this week. I'm hunkered down for a little while. After another realization, it looks like I'm now turning this into a review paper and a methods paper (but still one paper).
Translation: Too much work, too little time.
(picture borrowed from PhD Comics)Have you ever wondered why A440 sounds different on a piano compared to a violin? And then different again on a flute? Well, the short answer seems awfully simple and almost stupid: it's because the instruments make different sounds.
Anybody who has ever played a violin or a guitar or any other string instrument has probably noticed that there are two main things that affect what note comes off a string when you pluck it: the string length and the string thickness. When you pluck the string, the sound you get is due to how the string vibrates, and then how that vibration resonates within the instrument. Most of what you hear is the pitch of the note you plucked. But the richness of the tone of the instrument, that stuff that makes the violin sound different from the guitar, is due to all the other sounds that also resonate.
The exact physics of that difference in sound becomes very complicated very quickly. For example, most violins look more or less the same, but can sound drastically different from one another. It is because of subtle differences that every violin sounds different. Science describes these differences using tools called eigenvalues and eigenvectors. If you took first year Algebra in university you were probably exposed to these things, and you probably hated them.
In a nutshell, the reason instruments sound different from one another is because when you play a note, a whole bunch of other sound waves (lets call them modes) are also emitted from the instrument when it resonates. Which other sound waves (modes) are excited, and how loud they are relative to one another, is what makes a piano sound different from a squealing toddler. As luck should have it, these modes must obey the rules of some specific mathematical equation. Solving the equation may be quite simple for something like a drum, but can get very complicated for something like a violin. This is because the equation takes into account the shape of the object and its composition (e.g. if it is made of plastic or wood or crystal). Not just any random mode will satisfy the equation, only very specific ones do. These very specific modes are called eigenvectors and each one has an eigenvalue associated with it.
If you ever saw the movie the Red Violin, you might remember scenes where million-dollar isntruments are being tested with equipment resembling oscilloscopes. The scientists there would basically be examining how the instrument resonated, or in science-babble they would be determining what its eigenvectors were.
Q: So why are you writing all this, who cares, and what does it have to do with the ocean?
Well, often when people ask me what I do, I have a hard time explaining it. On the bus home yesterday I came up with an analogy to plucking strings on an instrument. Lately I've been fitting my ocean data to the eigenvectors of the Saint Lawrence Estuary near Tadoussac. You see, the tides "pluck" the ocean at specific frequencies, but then physics causes all these other waves to resonate as well. The speed and shape of the resonated waves are governed by the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the water column, constrained by Newton's second law and the assumption that matter is not created or destroyed. By knowing which eigenvectors to look for, I've been trying to find specific waves in my data, separate them from everything else in my data, and then figure out which bloody direction they're going.
I just spent two minutes looking for my coffee mug. When I finally found it, it was about two inches from my keyboard, upon which I have been typing for the last two and a half hours. It was sitting where it always sits, it was in plain sight, and there was nothing else around it to clutter my vision or camouflage it.
Now I just hope I can find the coffee pot.
Mhmmm. Maybe I should explain.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, there is point at a party when Gatsby meets two women that are already in conversation. The reader is priviledged to this segment of their gossip:
"So I says to Mabel, I says... I'll continue this later."
"So I says to Mabel, I says..."
