Thoughts from the T
Haymarket to Park via the green line, Park to Central via the red line, Central to Watertown via the 70 bus. Once outbound, once inbound - my commute every day. I’m an ardent supporter of public transit, but between you and I, if there were parking anywhere near my apartment I would be behind the wheel in a heartbeat.
My trip is an hou-rish each way, which is becominga really interesting chunk of time. It’s longer than my attention span to solely music and I’m in between podcasts at the moment.So visual stimulation it is. If I had a level surface and an uninterrupted hour, I would surely spend it poking around at some art or code on my laptop. Hell, it might even be the perfect time to knock out the tasks I’ve been putting off for weeks. But between the velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap, and crackle of the T (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_derivatives_of_position), as well as my changeovers, I find myself in a balancing act, caught somewhere between center of gravity and time.
So what then? I read! My childhood was comprised solely of wading through piles of Legos and devouring stacks of books, but finding time to read in school (outside of what was assigned) was no easy task (or at least that’s the excuse I’ve been telling myself). That time has now been found again, courtesy of the MBTA. But what to read?
I started with Killing Commendatore, a Murakami novel that I picked up because the author’s name was familiar from somewhere - that somewhere turned out to be a Slaughter Beach Dog lyric, believe it or not. The prose was beautiful, and the narrative as well, but the plot (or at least as far through the exposition as I read) was… sad. Maybe in the spring, when the sun is waxing through the day as opposed to waning, I’ll pick it back up again, but for now, onto a different title!
The Mathematics of The Gods and The Algorithms of Men, a translated work by Paolo Zellini on the cultural history of mathematics, was up next on my reading wishlist. This time, I got sucked in. My background in math, pre-college, was far from rigorous. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I ran out of math my junior year of high school, when I would have needed to drive 90 minutes a day to go somewhere with multivariable calculus. I loved math, and the way in which the workings of our world could be inferred and relations defined and exhaustively fleshed out, but simply wasn’t exposed to mathematical schools of thought or terminology or history or philosophy. I got to MIT and saw this gap in knowledge firsthand, demonstrated no more clearly than problem sets where “the proof is trivial and left to the reader”. I worked to get my head back above water, and really enjoyed the rest of calculus->diffEQ, but never ventured into proof-based mathematics or any sort of meta-analyseis of numbers and operations. So, reading through Zellini, I was entranced - mankind has been teasing out the empirical relations found in the natural world for as long as there is a historical record, with knowledge of irrational numbers and accurate estimations of geometric values such as the square root of two and pi dating back as far as 8,000 BC. ADD
That, to me, is indescribably cool. Sans any computational aides, the ancestors of our modern knowledge saw the well-defined relations along which geometries and values increased or decreased, and were able to consciously describeemploy these relations to describe and/or understand other relations which are less apparent at the surface level.
I’m admittedly only up to page 70-something, so I both will not and can not spoil the rest of the book, but obviously it has my recommendation! Taking a step back from the specifics of the book that I happened to choose, reading again is something I’m really enjoying. I love knowledge, and also love learning about root causes behind physical phenomena. More recently, I , but largely had been getting my fix of it via the research abstracts or coding documentation that I found useful along the way of my work, professional or personal. It feels good to take that step back from learning from necessity, and just absorb information for the hell of it.
As of right now (1:53 PM on a Tuesday), I’m an afternoon of meetings and data collection away from making my nightly jaunt back to Boston via the T. But when it rolls around (and the 70 bus rolls up), those pages will certainly be a little more well worn.
