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A Boat, a River, and a Tunnel: Applying Renormalization Groups to Electrical Circuits I’ve been hemming and hawing for a few months about a mathematical topic about which to do creative research. The main reason hasn’t been lack of curiosity, but rather a lack of a mental model for success—and, frankly, fear of producing total nonsense. In academia, success in my lifetime has meant publishing lots of highly-cited papers, getting grant funding, being a tenured professor at a prestigious university program, and advising grad students who go on to do those same types of activities. In my world up to this point, people who publishRead More →

A Quotidian Approach to Serving Others It’s of great personal importance to me to remember 2020 keenly in this new year. Yes, it was the year that COVID-19 changed things profoundly, and there’s a popular sentiment on social media and in the workplace of wanting to wash our hands of and forget 2020 as soon as possible. I fully acknowledge the seriousness of the pandemic and its devastating effects, though it’s important to note that I have so far had a pretty cushy time of it. The first main idea I invite myself and you to consider here is that COVID-19 could end up doingRead More →

On Becoming One’s Own Master I invite you to join me for a bit of self-reflection throughout this post, opening with some beloved words from someone I like to think of as a dear friend and teacher. The only adaptation I’ve made is to un-gender the pronouns originally used; for some reason, the author decided to only refer to painters as female! Just kidding.>:-| “Chap. CCCLXIII.—A Precept for the Painter. The painter who entertains no doubt of their own ability, will attain very little. When the work succeeds beyond the judgment, the artist acquires nothing; but when the judgment is superior to the work, theyRead More →

On Science, Engineering, and Feeling Every community into which I’ve entered views itself as the protagonist in its own story: the musicians, the scientists, the mathematicians, the poets, the engineers. Each has a focus (itself) and the periphery (everyone else and how they’re living, what they’re doing). They can all be important, but they can’t all be “most important” in an absolute sense, even if they certainly can be from their “first-person” viewpoints. This observation informs my practice of not taking any one thing too seriously or as being valuable at the wholly depleting expense of other things. This includes myself, of course! Certain combinationsRead More →

Engineering Desire: The Problem of What to Want One of my favourite stories from antiquity is that of King Midas, who famously was granted the wish of turning everything he touched into gold, only to become dissatisfied with life after receiving this wish. The force of desire seems to place human beings in a stunning array of challenging situations. The two that I’ll focus on in this post appear very similar if you look only at the language of their statements, but they’re profoundly different if you consider what it takes to solve each of them. The first problem is knowing that you don’t knowRead More →

Physicality and the Female Body Systematic physiological differences between women and men has been a popular topic over the ages. In my own time, there are certain platitudes that I’ve heard thrown around about women as a population, such as women having inferior upper body strength and greater flexibility than men. I have not heard a clear and satisfactory account of what this claim and others like it really mean when you break them down. For example, this particular statement could be interpreted as the claim: “The average woman with no athletic training has inferior upper body strength and superior flexibility compared to the averageRead More →

I Am a Craftsman, and So Can You! I doubt that anything I will write in this post will be novel in terms of strict content. What I hope is a bit novel is talking about technology from the perspective of an old-world-craftsman-at-heart, which is partly how I approach my work and the world. Madonna was wrong in many ways about us living in a material world. Material stuff seems to have always been a major desire and motivator of human behavior and endeavor. At the same time, I think that the depth of human relationship with material objects is subject to tremendous change. IRead More →

How I Get Things Done Preamble: I get up to a lot of activities and produce a substantial amount of creative work outside of a full-time job. The vast majority of the time, I feel neither busy nor stressed. In getting to this point, I’ve done a fair amount of observing and experimenting. Some of the results of that are recorded below. The intention is not to prescribe to others how to be engaged with life and do more meaningful activities, but to catalyze some rewarding personal reflection for the reader. Hack 1. Why I get things done: I have a cluster of motivations actingRead More →

Committing to Creating Positive Racial Change My interest in racial dynamics and inequitable/abusive distribution and application of power along racial lines is about a decade old. At the same time, I’ve sadly done very little to effect change on the scale of my own priorities and personal interactions. I would call myself during this time ‘racist by complicity’. Have I gone out of my way to be cruel to POC? No. Have I gone out of my way to help POC? Until the last few months, really, no. I have done year-long stints in NYC and Providence, RI as a teacher in schools with manyRead More →

A Personal Reflection on Race [Before I start, I acknowledge how relatively fortunate I am to be able to give this post this title after 28 years of life as part of the dominant racial group in the U.S. and Canada. Those who are wrongly deemed lesser in the racial hierarchy have had to live with this cruel reality their entire lives.] I am a white, intelligent, well-educated woman from a middle-class American family. Given only this information, maybe you are surprised that I am a space engineer with a master’s degree in mathematics who can do a set of ten pull ups and whoRead More →