Friday, February 25th

It is the changes and transitions in life that are always the most interesting parts. My life has always been full of changes. The longest I have ever lived in the same building is about 8 years. I went to five different schools before college. My hobbies also seem to be all about changes. Change ringing is the music of combinatorics, square dancing is the rhythmic moving from one formation to another, and ba gua is a martial art focused on stability in transitions. Even my research is about how to get from the initial point to the final point, and what the best transition is. Then there are the deeper changes within myself that happen all the time. Two of the most significant transitions in my life were centered around Friday, February 25th. I remember both of those days and the events which occurred on them very clearly.

The first day (17 years ago) I remember laughter, smiles, balloons, and rain as I waited to be picked up with my cello. It was a day of beginnings, a day of happiness. The spring that began then was one of the happiest seasons of my life, in which basically everything just went the way I wanted it to (this also happened in the fall of 1999, fall of 2003, and summer of 2007). That weekend and the following week were just about perfect.

The second day (11 years ago) I remember snow, a turning away, a question, an answer that wasn't an answer, "heads will roll", a ball, and a pair of parallel conversations. It was a day of endings, a day of sadness. The spring that followed was the worst season of my life, in which almost nothing went well. There was a certain happiness and optimism that I had had which faded out and never fully returned. I lost touch with quite a few people that spring, though I have recently found some of them again.

The major transitions associated with those days did not actually occur on them, as they were far too big to be completed in just a day. Those days were just the turning points at which things could never be the same again. They were the catalysts which forced the transitions to occur, forcing the changes which I could at best attempt to control. Those two days and the transitions associated with them are linked in more ways than I could count, because as different as they seem to be, they are in many ways just the opposite sides of the same thing. Separating everything out into basic components and then putting them all back together again. The story of the canon and the rainbow, of the sun and the flame. A story of discovery and exploration.

And now it is Friday, February 25th again, for the fifth time in my life (although the first time I was only 2 1/2 years old and probably didn't notice). The next time this will happen is in 2022. I'm not expecting any major events today, although my life is full of transitions right now. I remember thinking in the spring of 1994 that the only way I could ever have a better year would be if I graduated, got married, had a child, and got a job I really liked all in one year. Two of those have happened in the past year, one of them was longer ago than that, and the fourth one I am still working on. Where will things go from here? I don't know.

Thank You

I just turned in my PhD thesis. Many people helped me get to this point. Here is the acknowledgements section:

I would like to thank everyone who made this research possible: my committee members - Olivier de Weck, Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, and Ray Sedwick - for providing advice as I navigated the depths of differential geometry; NASA and the MIT School of Engineering (through a TA position for 1.00) for providing funding as I worked through the mess of equations to create a small amount of order in the chaos of Newtonian gravity; my official readers Thomas Lang and Paulo Lozano for feedback as I completed my research; and my unofficial proofreaders Dale Winter, Rachel and Alan Fetters, Sarah Rockwell, and Allen Bryan for helping me to realize where my explanations needed more clarification.

I would like to thank my many friends for making life more enjoyable while I toiled on a seemingly endless task of translating PhD level theoretical math into moderately usable engineering concepts. I would especially like to thank the Boston change ringers for providing a steady rhythm in my life, Tech Squares for reminding me to peel off from my research and shoot the stars every now and then, Metaphysical Plant for reminding me that all hunts for knowledge are eventually completed, and MIT Hillel and TBS for the services and prayers that provided regular cycles in my life to mark the passage of time. I would like to thank my high school cross-country team for training me to have the endurance to keep going forever, my high school math club for encouraging me to study math beyond what I was taught, and the Cows for being good friends.

I would like to thank my parents for everything they have done: providing a good home for me to grow up in, encouraging me to explore the abstract world of ideas, letting me rush off to MIT where I got stuck for years in an endless maze of equations that I may have finally found a path through (suboptimal as it may have been), and most of all for teaching me the value of hard work, honesty, and persistence. I would like to thank my many siblings for living their lives so fully while I was too busy to do so on my own, providing me with many niblings to enjoy, and making the holidays so full of love and excitement. I would like to thank my in-laws for providing some local family and support as Mira and I toiled through the challenges of graduate school. I would like to thank my extended family for being a good and supportive family, and Mira's extended family for welcoming me so quickly and filling our lives with love and happiness. I would also like to thank my son Jesse for making the final months of this work much more exciting than they would have been without him.

And most of all I would like to thank my wife Mira, without whom I would never have made it all the way to the end. She has provided support and encouragement at every step of this process. I have learned how to move the heavens and the earth for her and I would like to remind her that some things really are rocket science. Melanyecce iluvòrënenya oio, mo bhean chéile luinnar silamiradilenya.

Goodbye!

When I was in grade school, we used literature books published by Prentice Hall. They were full of short stories and essays. We typically had to read at most about 1/5 of them, but I normally read all of them anyway. One of the extra readings that I particularly remember is from ninth grade: "Sayonara" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (an excerpt from her book "North to the Orient"). It is an essay about saying goodbye that looks at what we are really saying when we say goodbye in different ways. Goodbye (short for God be with you) and Adios are blessings and wishes for the protection of those who are leaving (Farewell and Slan are non-religious wishes for things to go well). Auf Wiedersehen, Au Revoir, and such sayings are a statement of hope that the time of separation will be short. But Sayonara means "since it must be so." It isn't a statement of hopes or expectations, it is a simple acceptance of what is happening. It is, according to Mrs. Lindbergh, the most beautiful of all goodbyes. I don't entirely agree with this, as I think it depends on the situation.

As a student for the past 12 years, I have watched many people graduate and leave. Sometimes the blessings seem appropriate (people going off to grad school or a job). Sometimes I really do expect the goodbye to be temporary and using one of those forms is best (summer jobs and short breaks). I can only think of a few examples where I really felt that Sayonara would have been most appropriate (mostly people leaving for medical reasons).

I first recalled this essay when breaking up for the first time. Sayonara had never seemed as appropriate as it did then. After a lengthy period of trouble in our relationship, it was clear that things were over. "Since it must be so" is a good description of how I felt about it. Two and a half months of happiness followed by six weeks of uncertain misery led to me understanding that we wanted different things. Sayonara, an acceptance of reality as it is rather than as we want it to be. And as we broke up, we agreed that we would remain friends, which is the part that mattered most to me.

This summer I again thought of this essay. My time at MIT is drawing to an end, and it is time to move on to the next part of my life. But how can you say goodbye to an institution? I have been at MIT for about two fifths of my life, nearly twice as long as I have been anywhere else. For so many years, MIT has been my home. I have learned all the twists and turns of the hallways, where the bathrooms and water fountains are, and how to quickly get between points even when classes are switching. I have explored the innermost parts of the buildings and found the places of true beauty on campus. MIT has taught me my limits. I have watched the campus grow and change as new buildings were added and old ones were renovated. I have watched the world be completely transformed while I hid in the safety of MIT's academic halls. There are many stories I have made about the things I did and failed to do at MIT.

But now it comes to an end. I don't expect to be back, so some variant of "until later" wouldn't be right. And I don't think that blessing MIT makes any sense. But sayonara isn't right either. There is an edge of sadness in that expression. It suggests a premature parting. I want something more like 2 Timothy 4:7 - "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." I have done what I came to do, and MIT has little more to offer me. I also have little more to offer to MIT. It is time to go, because I am done. This is not a time for saying "since it must be so." There is no significant difference between reality as it is and reality as I wish it could be. I have been at MIT for long enough; I have done what I came to do. I suppose the appropriate thing to say is "Thank you."

There is another parting in my life right now. Someone I have been friends with for a long time is leaving. We were for a while very close and for a while very distant, but in the past few months our friendship has been pretty much right where I wanted it. And now, almost exactly 6 Martian years from when we first met, she is moving halfway across the country with her family. They have an opportunity which is too good to pass up. And as much as I would like to continue seeing them regularly, I want even more to see them continuing to succeed in life. This is a situation where the proper goodbye really is Farewell, Slan, Good Luck. And so to Erin, Ben, and Blaise, I have this to say:

Slan go foill. Go raibh mile maith agaibh. We will miss you, but we wish you well. Good luck in North Dakota.

How a Thesis is like a Newborn

In the following, I use the term thesis to refer to all the work involved in completing a PhD.

Ways in which a thesis and a newborn are similar:

• both consume all of your time, significantly cutting into your social life and making you lose contact with some friends
• both seriously interfere with getting enough sleep
• both are something you put a lot of effort into in the hope that someday they will produce a meaningful benefit to the world, but you have to accept that most likely they will both go unnoticed by the world at large
• both are capable of making you feel completely incompetent and unable to do anything right for what feels like forever
• both are a good way to meet other people doing the same thing
• friends and family give you advice on both, which is only sometimes useful
• both have a very frustrating way of telling you that something is wrong, but not indicating in any way whatsoever what is wrong
• both are expected to triple in size over the course of a year (different years of course)
• both produce lots of meaningless gibberish

Ways in which a thesis and a newborn are different:

• your thesis is never going to smile at you
• your thesis never seems to be satisfied with what you have done
• your thesis's problems can't be solved in a few minutes
• nobody has claimed that putting your uncovered thesis on your naked chest is good for anything
• your thesis didn't come into the world looking like it came from an alien race, you had to spend years working on it to provide that appearance
• your thesis doesn't smell good
• your thesis doesn't look like you, your partner, or any of your relatives
• your thesis does not become more independent over time
• your thesis will not be damaged by unexpectedly rolling off a table while your back is turned
• you don't have to thesis-proof your house
• you are not genetically programmed to fall in love with your thesis
• people offer to make food for you when you have a newborn
• people do not come over and ask to hold your thesis
• people are actually interested in your newborn (some people, not everybody)
• your thesis isn't your responsibility for 18 years (I sure hope not anyway)
• you can drop out of a PhD program
• neglecting your thesis is not illegal
• you don't have to pay people to watch your thesis when you are unable to
• you get to choose a partner for raising a newborn (most of the time)
• you can't accidentally apply to, be accepted by, and enroll in a PhD program
• there isn't a committee that decides when your newborn is good enough for you to move on with your life
• removing a useless appendix from your thesis does not require major surgery
• random strangers on the subway don't comment on or try to touch your thesis
• when you first bring your thesis home, your pets don't react to it at all
• nobody asks you to track how much waste your thesis produces
• the soft spots in your thesis won't go away on their own
• if you fall asleep with your thesis on your chest, you won't wake up to the feeling of something sucking on your neck
• you don't have to buy any furniture for your thesis
• most people know what a newborn is, but have not heard of sub-Riemannian geometry or astrodynamics
• people never mistakenly think you study stars when you say you have a newborn
• you are allowed to physically damage your thesis when you are mad at it
• your thesis is not at risk of suddenly dieing because you put it down the wrong way
• nobody thinks your thesis is "the cutest thing ever"
• people don't post pictures of their thesis on facebook (or at least not large numbers of pictures)
• you don't normally put your newborn on your resume or expect him/her to be useful for getting a job later
• your thesis never learns to sleep through the night
• when your thesis does something strange and unexpected, you can't call somebody and ask if it is actually normal
• all your ancestors successfully raised at least one child, but most of them did not do academic research
• when you talk about your child, people understand the words you are using
• you can backup your thesis in case you make a mistake later or a hardware problem causes you to lose it
• most parents don't pressure their children to get a PhD
• you can pretend to not have a thesis for a few weeks before it causes a problem

Significant dates in my life

This is a list of some important days in my life. Some of them have an explanation of what was important, some of them I don't want to explain.

Jan 16, 2000
Feb 19 - Michael's birthday
Feb 19, 2000
Feb 25, 1994
Feb 25, 2000
Mar 1, 1994
April 10, 2000
May 7, 2005 - Mira and I got engaged
June 17, 2007 - Mira and I got married
July 3, 1999 - Rebecca's wedding
July 17 - my mother's birthday
July 23 - Daniel's birthday
Aug 2 - Darlene's birthday
Aug 22, 1998 - the day I arrived at MIT
Aug 24, 1992 - Hurricane Andrew
Aug 24, 2002 - Darlene's wedding
Sep 4, 1990 - we met Kim
Sep 24, 2010 - I passed my PhD defense
Sep 28, 2002 - Michael's wedding
Oct 4, 1999 - I first tried change ringing
Oct 7, 1999 - I first tried change ringing on tower bells
Oct 5 - my parent's anniversary
Oct 11 - my birthday
Oct 24, 1999
Nov 9, 2003 - Mira and I started dating
Nov 17 - Mira's birthday
Nov 17, 2000
Nov 22 - Rebecca's birthday
Nov 24, 1992
Nov 30 - my father's birthday
Dec 19, 1995 - my Eagle Scout board of review

By my count, 5 of those days were the happiest day of my life (up to that point). 2 of them were the worst day of my life (up to that point).

Joining Together

Earlier this week was Simchat Torah, the day when Jews all over the world press the rewind button on their Torah scrolls (this results in lots of dancing and jumping, probably because nobody wants to be the person with enough energy to actually rewind the scroll - and because dancing is fun). Which means today we started at the beginning again. I was amused that there is a page of commentary on the first half verse in the Torah, which consists of about 6 words. Most of that commentary was basically saying that the Biblical story of creation should not be taken literally and explaining how someone can deny that the story is literally true without claiming that it is false. It's nice to know that some people really don't have anything important to do with their time (an interesting thing to write in a blog).

Moving on, we had the first story of creation. The commentary pointed out that after the second day of creation, God did not end the day by observing that things were good. So according to God, Mondays are not good, but all other days are. Tuesday is the day of earth and fertile lands, which I find interesting for personal linguistic reasons.

Then we get to the second creation story. This is the one with few details about the world being made and lots of details about people being made. I've always liked the bit about how man and woman were separated and are supposed to rejoin in marriage. I've had four girlfriends for a total of just over 9.5 years of romantic relationships, and somehow that just seems like the right way to put things. The brother of one of my girlfriends asked why she would date someone when she had no intention of getting married ever and how it was different from being friends. But it really is different from just being friends, because there is some amount of joining together. Everyone I have dated has left an impression on me - some part of themselves that will always be with me. The closer we got, the stronger the impression is. My friends have changed me too, but in much weaker ways.

This summer I spent a lot of time thinking about my time at MIT, which inevitably included a lot of thinking about my past relationships. One thing that I realized is that while I had a good time with my previous girlfriends (and have many good memories involving them), Mira is the one who properly completes me. She both makes me a better person and has strengths where I have weaknesses. The two of us together are far more capable than either of us would be alone. There are many examples of how we work well together as partners. At this point I really do feel like I was an incomplete person waiting for Mira to fill in the areas that I was missing.

But this joining together goes beyond just helping each other out. When I asked Mira to marry me, I wrote an essay describing why I loved her and wanted to marry her and what that means to me. Part of that was based on this section of the bible, with two people joining together to become one. People can be joined physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. I think that's the right order. Physical is definitely first, because it is the easiest and also the only one that can't be maintained indefinitely. Being emotionally joined is a wonderful experience, although you have to be careful about emotions traveling between people. Mental and spiritual joining are more subtle and I don't think we've really gotten there yet. Mira and I have spent very little time apart from each other in the past 5 years, but we have felt the separation each time. I really can't imagine my life without her.

Going back to the Torah reading of the day, I also like the Jewish concept that God started creation and left it to us to complete it. More on that later.

(By the way, I don't think the male/female thing is particularly important to this concept, and I recognize that other people have different concepts of dating, love, and marriage which I respect as equally valid)

What is a blue fluffy cotton ball?

I have told many people that I am a blue fluffy cotton ball, but I haven't explained how that came to be many times. The story involves three people, but I am only certain about the identities of two of them. The third one was a resident of Loop Floor, who I will identify as E for the purposes of this story, although that may indicate the wrong person. The other characters are me (J) and someone I won't name (R). The setting is Loop Kitchen, early September 1999, sometime in the early evening. E and I were sitting at the tables in the middle of the room facing the wall with the mirror, and under the mirror there was a table on which somebody had left some junk they were throwing out with a note saying that anybody could take whatever they wanted.

R: (walks in and looks at the table)

R: What's that?

E: It's just some useless junk that somebody is getting rid of. I don't know why they didn't just throw it out.

R: (walks over to table, looks through the things, and picks up a bag of cotton balls and a cardboard rectangle with the center removed)

R: This isn't just junk. I can make abstract art out of it.

E: And what's that supposed to be?

R: It represents how we are all trapped by the rules of society, like how these cotton balls are trapped in this bag. And I have a frame for it.

J: Oh yeah, that makes sense. I'm the little blue cotton ball right there.

R: (looks at the bag of cotton balls. Looks confused and looks more closely)

R: There are no blue cotton balls in there.

J: I know, I escaped.

So that's how I became a little blue cotton ball. But that quickly morphed into a blue fluffy cotton ball, because it sounds better.


Also, when I say cotton ball here, I mean little pompoms, which are fluffy balls made out of cotton. I don't mean the things that are generally called cotton balls, which are almost always white and used by small children to make clouds. Sorry, I'm a rocket scientist, not an artist. How am I supposed to know the proper names for these things?