In my sophomore year of college, I had the following John Stuart Mill quote over my computer:

"In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, everyone lives under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what only concerns themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves, what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing they think of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done; peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved; they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?"

I suspect I put it there to inspire me when I looked up from my desk, but I can't recall one instance in which I was inspired to do anything in particular. In fact, I had actually read very little of the assigned text, and it was only this particular passage that had struck me. It seems odd looking back on it now: my perspectives on society were very different back then. I suppose I had some residual image of a clique-driven high school at the time, a point of view that seems alien now. Individualism was still just settling in two years into my first taste of freedom from home, and the ultra-academic environment of the university placed philosphers like Mill as a central focus of our lives.

The quote, I think, was therefore supposed to spur me to rise above conformity, but it seems instead that the very act of putting up the quote was the ultimate irony. I had done it to fit in. Everyone else in my dorm could discuss Socrates, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx with a flippant familiarity (I only realized much later that a lot of it was bluffing) so that I felt very narrowly educated up to that point. So I chose a prominent historical philosopher, a densely worded quote, and a self-righteous message to show everyone and myself that I was every bit as well-read as the others. As it turns out in life, none of that really matters once you graduate; the college experience really should be approached more practically than academically.  ¶ 12:49 AM

  This is from the National Review, and I found it to be a very concise and eloquent rendering of how I often feel about extreme liberalism:

"We are learning that resistance never really entailed opposition to fascism at all, much less the need for intervention to support democracy, but was simply a strange desire to vent displeasure with our own culture. That so many of these ideological teenagers mad at their opulent and indulgent parents are affluent suburbanites suggests the deleterious effects of leisure and wealth; that so many enjoy the appurtenances of nice cars, houses, and travel denotes abject hypocrisy; that so many mindlessly repeat cant and fad reflects the power of belonging to a clique that promises status by being more "sophisticated" and "subtle" than ordinary Americans; that so many demand utopian perfection reminds us that their god Reason is an unforgiving totem; that so many are shrill and angry suggests that they seek global causes to assuage personal unhappiness and anger at a system that has not met their own high demands upon it."  ¶ 5:56 PM

  My review for Natalie Angier's Natural Obsessions on amazon.com:

In my senior year of college, we were assigned Natural Obsessions for the relevance to oncology as a science. I had expected, as with all other undergraduate literature, to find only academic value in the book and approached it as such. But what unfolded instead was a journey through the strange and passionate world of research. It is what made me want to become an oncologist.

The nature of the story is of the many races during the 1980s to identify the genes causative of cancer. The narrative largely follows one lab, that of Robert Weinberg at MIT, and details their many setbacks and their even more groundbreaking victories. The author takes an active part, effectively becoming absorbed into the research and drawing the readers with her.

What the book offers, then, is a daily tread through the lives of basic researchers: not filled with sterile labs and stuffy professors, but with the drama, intrigue, and bittersweet triumphs normally found only in fiction. As there are no outright heroes or villains (except perhaps cancer itself), the moral ambiguity of each of the subplots makes the struggles more human. There is as much backstabbing, cut-throat competitiveness, and outright selfishness in the research world shown here as in any other professional field. But there is also collaboration, celebration, and respect. Anyone who thinks basic science is boring should be convinced otherwise.

The other side of the story is, indeed, academic in nature, though interwoven seamlessly with the stories. Despite the heavy scientific concepts throughout the book, Natalie Angier -- a non-scientistist herself -- has taken great pains to evince the most convoluted theories in a light, colorful language. Not all of it will be clear immediately, but the essence of the book doesn't require total familiarity with the technicalities. It is the humanity of the researchers that drives this book, not the research itself.

For undergraduates unsure of thier career choices, I can recommend no better book than Natural Obsessions for deciding if scientific research is for them. For some, like one of my friends who chose med school over grad school, the themes of competitiveness and failure can be disheartening. For others, like myself, it can open up a new perspective on science, one that can be exciting as well as rewarding if you have a passion for it.
  ¶ 5:36 PM

  Carny Math

A few months back at Great America, we watched a woman be genuinely surprised when the booth operator guessed her age within 3 years. In fact, the whole setup -- weight within 5 pounds, age within 3 years, month of birth within 2 months -- sounds pretty amazing at first. Considering the wide range of any of those measurements, the given numbers seem very narrow. One would almost think the operator was psychic or had been trained intensively.

But it's really only numbers and natural human intuition that underlie the game. Let's say you're 27 years old. Three years isn't much of a difference in physical appearance, but that's not where the strength of the game lies. The operator actually has a span of 7 years to guess through: 3 on each side and 1 for the exact age. So all he has to do is guess the right decade and he has a 7/10 chance of winning your money. Similarly, he has a span of 11 pounds to work with, meaning that if he guesses in the right 10's he actually has a 100% chance of being right! As a player of the game, your best bet is to go with the month, as he only has a 5/12 chance (~40%) of guessing. Also, he can't figure it out by any means, so it's entirely luck.

P.T. Barnum was right about suckers, and this kind of game shows that nothing's different in modern times. Don't get me wrong, I was taken in by it too (though I didn't play) as I was watching the proceedings. But it just goes to show that a little careful thinking can go a long way.  ¶ 6:50 PM