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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 →

[This post has a technical-sounding title but is not technical in its contents. That will come in follow-up posts; I generally think that mathematicians should take the reader to dinner, first;-).] When I studied mathematics in my master’s, I conformed my interests, for practical purposes, to those of my supervisor. This did save some anguish in choosing the topic for my thesis, but it meant that the only soul I had in the game was that of the artisan who wants to do things as well as possible. Maybe I was just too sensitive, but pushing so hard in an area that didn’t at leastRead More →

In classic mathematics-style, I begin with a couple of definitions. Definition 1: ‘Power’ is the ability to influence or change an outcome. Definition 2: ‘Personal power’ is influence or authority that a person has over that person’s followers because of who that person is perceived to be, and not because of that person’s position. Aside: I am officially punting (for now!) on the philosophical status of personal power (which we might think of as being of a similar degree of dubiousness to free will). I want to discuss personal power this week, in contrast to political power, partly because present political situations and the enormousRead More →

Technical Disciplines as Ethical Disciplines This post is inspired by mathematician and luminary Cathy O’Neil and her book, Weapons of Math Destruction, which is an eye-opening and disturbing survey of how society has constructed opaque and damaging systems on a mass scale, many of which are based on quantitative models. Having been hit deeply on an emotional level by this book, and seeing its significance to my own professional presence, I want to share some of what I have learned, as well as my own ethical principles surrounding the use of mathematics in society. I am an applied mathematician not by training, per se, butRead More →