I have an amazing friend

Well, okay, before you all explode in recriminations, I have lots of amazing friends.

But today I want to talk about one of them specifically. We are both on the board of Stanford Pride, and he is a third-year medical student at Columbia University in New York. His name is Bryan McColgan.

Bryan finds the time, even on days when he spent many hours in the pediatrics department or in the emergency room, to share his life as a medical student, and the important things he is learning, with anyone who cares. He does this on Twitter (his feed) a few times each day, and he also has a video log on Blogspot (here).

I'm almost addicted to his tweets, because they make me realize how complicated medicine is, how intimately connected it is to our society and civilization (e.g., his posts about how parents who look up symptoms on the Internet bring their children to the emergency room convinced that they have an extra rare serious disease, or the way overweight teenagers are victimized by their peers instead of getting encouragement), but also because on a personal basis I am discovering that Bryan is an exceptional individual.

He spent several months in Zimbabwe a couple of years ago, and has developed a deep appreciation and compassion for the plight of people who suffer from bad health care, malnutrition, and a criminally negligent, incompetent and/or corrupt government. And he so much wants to help, that I'm sure he'd go back to Africa in a heartbeat when he finishes his studies... except for the slight problem that he will be at least a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt from the cost of his medical studies. When you watch his videos and read his tweets, you really feel the goodness of this guy coming at you through the screen, and the next minute you're laughing when he tells you how cool it is when urologists blast kidney stones with lasers as if they were zapping aliens in a video game!

Anyway, instead of me continuing, you just need to do yourself a favor and read his tweets or watch his video clips. I guarantee you'll learn something, and one of them will be how immensely talented and generous some people can be.

Speechful People

I went to see Tim Miller perform his monologue "Lay of the Land" at the Vortex Theatre in Austin on January 29. After the performance, I bought him a glass of red wine, to make sure he would recognize me, since that was my excuse to introduce myself last time he had performed here, and was a prelude to a faithful-if-distant Facebook acquaintance with him.

Tim was of course surrounded by admirers, but he kept introducing me to them as "my friend Claude" so that gave me an excuse to hang around for a while. Two of the people who were talking to him, Melissa and Kile ("legally it's Kyle, but in life I spell it Kile, it's my one act of rebellion," he told a judge at the tournament I will talk about later), are part of the UT Speech program, which is not in the Drama department as one might suspect, but in the Communications department. Kile talked about work done with high-school students, for which Tim's monologues were one of the sources, which I found fascinating given how much "in your face" Tim's work can be.

So I asked Kile and Melissa more about the UT Speech program, because I really had no idea what this whole subculture is (since then, I've mentioned this to a couple of people, who both said "oh yes, I used to do this when I was in college"). They said that there is a whole schedule of contests between colleges in different cities, and that in the fall in particular, they are at some event in Houston almost every week-end. They advised me to look at the program's Web site. I then e-mailed the team's director, Randy Cox, to ask if there was a schedule of upcoming events. He said the season was essentially over, but that there was a contest at Texas A&M during the week-end of February 6-7. Since I was planning to drive from Austin to Houston on the 7^th anyway, I decided to make a detour through College Station and see what this was all about.

I ended up attending two of the finals, and was fascinated by this world that was unknown to me until then. The one thing I still do not understand is why these speech tournaments take place in basement rooms and are not made into public events, which might attract donations and at least publicity.

Imagine a bunch of college kids (mostly young men, although there were a few women, and there was some good diversity in terms of ethnic origins), wearing suits and ties, carrying small vinyl binders the size of a book. This makes the men at least look like preachers! The little black book contains the script or story from which they perform, although they have almost totally memorized their texts, so they only refer to the book on rare occasions to jog their memory, or use its opening and closing for dramatic effect. At least this is what they do during the "prose" events, which are basically readings of short texts (composed from key passages of longer works) with some interpretive acting thrown in, and the "duo interpretation" events, in which a couple, usually a mixed-gender one, blends multiple texts into a story they act together.

I often listen to Public Radio International's Selected Shorts while driving between Austin and Houston. During this captivating program, great actors read short stories on stage. The college speech contest was better in several ways: first, I could see the students in front of me, a few feet away; second, they put a lot more passion and dramatization in their reading that is done in a program like Selected Shorts; and third, this was as good as going to a performance at a playhouse... but free.

The typical way these interpretive readings are done follows a specific routine: the performer (or performers, in the case of the Duo event) read a first paragraph of the story, setting the stage and whetting the viewer's appetite. Then they close their book rather ostentatiously, implying that they are now departing from the text, and give a short introduction to the work and its meaning; they conclude that part by stating the title and author. Then they re-open their book (mostly for effect, to indicate that they are going back to the text) and resume where they left off after the interest-provoking opening.

There are other types of events -- one is about persuasive speaking (convincing the listener of a point), another about talking about a subject with minimal preparation, another about giving an entertaining after-dinner talk.

I took some notes about the six stories that were competing in the Prose finals. Today, I used those notes to research the authors and titles of the works (I found four out of six -- thank you Google) because I hate to mention works of art without attribution. I hope these terse notes will give an idea of the depth and variety of the contestants' sources. A common point is that these are texts that carry a lot of emotional weight, a lot of passion, and this allows the performer to express himself of herself very strongly -- again, contrasting with a "normal" reading.

Nathan: in Brian de Leeuw's novel "In This Way I Was Saved," a boy develops a complicated, controlling, and ultimately insane relationship with another boy, and several years later, in college, kills his friend rather than losing control over him.

Brendan: in Joe Meno's "The Boy Detective Fails," Billy tries to make sense of his sister's suicide, the one case he is not able to solve, but ends up in psychiatric care, unable to cope with the reality.

Kyle/Kile: a man literally gives up his right arm for his girlfriend -- a metaphor about commitment, sacrifice and resentment. Creepy but very effectively performed.

Amanda: in Laura van den Berg's story "Where We Must Be," Jane, a failed actress and mother of Jimmy who will soon die from a lethal disease, takes (and then loses) a job impersonating Bigfoot at a local amusement part, providing a comical counterpoint to a poignant story.

Colin: Richard McCann's essay "The Resurrectionist" explores the complicated feelings someone has toward the donor of the liver he received as a transplant.

Jeremy: after his mother dies, a man sorts the contents of her attic and finds nude photos of her that his father had (unsuccessfully) submitted to Playboy Magazine for their centerfold.

Most of the duo interpretation texts had something to do with exposing prejudices, racial or ethnic. This again gave the students an opportunity to do some great acting around the texts they had chosen. The audience often laughed... and then paused when the next sentences in the text made us realize that perhaps we had laughed at something that should have made us upset, or laughed because of a preconceived idea we had about people from a certain background.

Overall, this was eye-opening... and a good incentive to find out more such events in the future and attend them.

The Planets

Saturday is named after Saturn, the greek Chronos, the god of time. That's the day (two days ago) when I went to see the performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets at the Houston Symphony, which promised a movie montage of high-definition pictures from space telescopes, projected above the orchestra, to illustrate the subject matter.

For a while, I didn't think I was going to make it. After consulting with my newly-moved-to-Houston friends David and Brenda to gauge their interest, I called to get three tickets, expecting that it would be fairly easy as usual, and was told that there were only single obstructed-view tickets left for all three remaining performances. So we gave up on the idea of going together on Sunday, but by Saturday evening I resolved to try my old Boston trick. I dusted off my cardboard sign that reads "Looking to Buy ONE Ticket," the one that got me into multiple performances at the ICA on the waterfront there, and went to Jones Hall.

I should have known it was my lucky day when I managed to parallel-park in a space between two cars that was, I swear (I measured it) 4" (10 cm) longer than my car. Of course, strictly speaking, that's pretty impossible. But not to an ex-Paris driver, and not considering the elasticity of car bumpers and of tires: you can (gently) touch the car behind, push a little, then move forward, touch the car ahead, push a little... and pretty soon you're in. Still, you have to get exactly the right angle, and the planets must have been with me.

The very nice usher at Jones Hall told me, within a minute of my taking position in front of the entrance, that there was no way she could let me stand there with my sign. But she said not to worry, she was sure she could do something for me. And sure enough, ten minutes later, she had secured a ticket that someone turned in because someone in their party couldn't come, and she gave it to me! So not only did I get a seat, but it was free. And I even had time left to munch on the tiny overpriced cheese-and-fruit plate sold by the Jones Hall concessionaire. The seat was at the rightmost end of an orchestra row, and the view was in fact slightly obstructed by the underside of the boxes, but barely -- just a little sliver missing at the top of the projection screen, and an excellent view of the stage.

The concert started with the Scherzo fantastique by Stravinsky, whom I tolerate reasonably well. It was followed by Timbres, espace, mouvement (la nuit étoilée) by Dutilleux, and that was much harder for me. But the Holst suite made it up. It was only the second time I heard the entire suite (classical radio stations usually just play the most famous movement, the fourth one, Jupiter - Bringer of Jollity), the first time also being live. I was wondering whether the projection of the film would add to or detract from the musical experience, and I am satisfied that it was an excellent addition. Duncan Copp's movie, using NASA footage from various interplanetary probes as well as CGI, is visually stunning. That is also got the Symphony to give several sold-out performances is very comforting, given how difficult it usually is for classical orchestras to balance their budget and to attract a younger-than-70 audience.

And my car didn't have any more scratches when I retrieved it than it had before — it just took another dozen or so back-and-forth maneuvers to extract it from its parking spot.

Addiction: Conflict Between Brain Circuits

This was the title of a lecture given today at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. I heard about on National Public Radio a few weeks ago, made a note to visit the Web site, registered and drove down from Houston to Galveston today to attend. In case you don't know why I have such a keen interest in the science of addiction, my November 10, 2009 post will explain it.

Dr. Nora Volkow, the speaker is the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Quoting from her biography:

"Dr. Volkow's work has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic effects of drugs and their addictive properties. Her studies have documented changes in the dopamine system affecting the actions of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, drive, and pleasure and the decline of brain dopamine function with age."

Of course, I couldn't resist taking some notes. This is just a sampling of all the interesting things that were said.

• After someone takes either food or amphetamines, you can see the same increase if dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. But drugs don't have the same satiating effects as food.
• Experiments can be conducted on humans using methylphenidate, which mimics the effects of cocaine. It also blocks the re-uptake of dopamine, causing the receptors to be flooded with the stuff. The "high" effect can be reported by the subject, and happens only if the substance is administered intravenously; if it is taken orally, it gets into the brain much more slowly and you see no effect at all, even allowing for a much longer period of time. So the dynamic aspect of drug administration is key.
• Different drugs have different clearance rates, and the "high" seems related to the rate of change of dopamine concentration, not to the absolute level. So if the level of dopamine goes up rapidly, then decays very slowly, the "high" does not persist, but starts dropping quickly as soon as the dopamine level has reached its maximum.
• Her imaging techniques allow her to study the effects of drugs on separate brain functions located in different places: the executive function (decision-making); inhibitory control (which allows a non-alcoholic to decide not to have one more drink, but is evidently damaged in the alcoholic); motivation and drive; memory and learning.
• Tests on animals who have been trained to push a lever to self-administer a drug have shown that causing the overexpression of dopamine D2 receptors causes the rats to lower their usage. As the substance injected to cause this overexpression wears off, over a period of 10 days or so, drug self-administration progressively returns to its previous level.
  
• Changes in dopamine receptors in the striatum correlate with changes in glucose metabolism in specific other parts of the brain, such as the orbital frontal cortex, which are also the effects observed in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Another similarity between OCD and addiction is that when the reinforcement ceases (e.g., a lab rat is no longer given food when he is pressing the lever he had associated with this reward, or an addict no longer gets pleasure from his drug), he/it is still compulsively practicing the behavior.
• In the non-addicted brain, the ability to control actions is decreased by disruptions, such as anger, that affect the prefrontal cortex. That's why, when you just heard that your flight is canceled, you're more likely to go ahead and have that chocolate chip cookie that you had resisted earlier.

Happy New Reading Year!

Today, a friend of mine wrote in his Facebook status that one of his resolutions for 2010 was to "read a book." I have not determined yet, although I intend to clarify this, whether this was a facetious comment, or whether he meant that his work and life have been so hectic in 2009 that he could not find the time to read a book. I think it may well be the latter, unfortunately. As someone said, it's better to be a pessimist because you're rarely disappointed.

His post led me to two thoughts. One is that I have read more books in 2009 than probably in several preceding years. The second one is that my Kindle has helped me read more.

On the first point, those who know that I retired in May 2009 will of course understand how suddenly the necessary time materialized to enable me to read more. I'm no longer filling personnel appraisals that no one will care about, or redoing slides three times because the boss at level N+1 is afraid that the current version isn't right (and is too long) for level N+2, etc. You can't create time, but when circumstances permit, you can stop wasting it.

My retirement present was a Kindle 2, with which I rapidly discovered, stingy as I am, that there was great value to be obtained because Amazon has many classics, not longer copyrighted, available for download for free. Just a few days ago, I found out that this also now extends to French classics in the original language, although I have not taken advantage of this yet. Actually, I would also like to find some Spanish or German texts, so that I can improve (for the former) or try to recover (for the latter) my knowledge of these languages.

So here's my May-December reading list:

• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
  
• Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
  
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes, ibid., because one can never read too many good short stories
  
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (what a delight!)
  
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (they don't make people like this any more)
• Travels in the United States by William Priest (not as good as Alexis de Tocqueville, but still interesting)
  
• The Legends of King Arthur (the version by Sir James Knowles)
• The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (I have only read a small portion of this text, which does not contain the drawings, and is very heavily annotated, making it a rather more scholarly exercise than I was intending
• A Tramp Abroad, Vol. 1, by Mark Twain
  

Currently, I am reading Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Yes, it is about very small people and very big people and very weird people, but it is also a very smart, and very daring for the time, criticism of the politics and mores of Europe. The first focus of these imaginary travels to Lilliput and Brobdingnag and other fantasy lands is to convey the idea that everything is relative. As if that wasn't provocative enough, Swift then proceeds to let his foreign characters express incredulity and shock at what Gulliver tells them of the common practices of Europeans. For example, explaining the concept of war to the Houyhnhnms, who don't know it, he writes, "Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent." Which is eerily reminiscent of Wallace Sayre's saying, which I have been fond of repeating to professors I know, at least when no weapon other than their repartee is available, that “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” Except that Swift was being more daring by attributing this behavior to people who did have the power to do harm to him. And he wasn't putting his potential defenders on his side by adding, a few pages later, that "there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid." No modern lawyer joke really approaches this level of sarcasm, and the following pages just get worse, of if your prefer, better.

I have also downloaded, and intend to read next:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• The Prince by Machiavelli
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (which I only read in French translation several decades ago)

I have downloaded samples, for later purchase, of:

• 30 novels (!) by Jules Verne, in French, in a single file. I'll have to pace myself. I do own an illustrated print edition of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, so I can skip the electronic version of that one, but I never read most of the other books.
• The Spell, by Alan Hollinghurst. I am very fond of his other two books The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty, which I read just a few years ago in print.
• In the same vein is At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill, which I know from the sample will be hard to read because of the Irish dialect, which is faithfully reproduced, and also because of the emotions that will swell until the fatal climax of the book (yes, I've read the synopsis).

I'm not sure there is a conclusion to this chronicle of my reading progress in 2009 and plans for 2010, but here are two observations. First, e-book readers, which some understandably decry for the loss of the special feel and smell of paper books, can actually help you read more, simply because of their convenience. I can carry a large number of books at one time, switch from one to another, keep my place in each book, look up a rare word in the Oxford dictionary on the fly, all within a small box about as long and wide, and half as thick, as a regular book. Secondly, there is a lot of literature out there that can be had for free (only on an e-book reader), and it is often the best literature ever written. As for modern books, they do cost some money, but much less that a hardcover book, often less than even a paperback, and they download in about thirty seconds. So even though I still like to browse in bookstores, this is at least an additional option to get back in touch with the power of words, expertly manipulated by the best writers in the world, dead or alive.

Mathematics and Computation

I have a whole list of things I want to do over the holidays, but I finally managed to put together something that had been bugging me for a while, which is an "illustration and defense" of recursive programming, at least as long as it is done intelligently by considering the mathematical properties of the problem being solved.

The issue itself is not new, nor is my solution to its traditional example, the Fibonacci series. But I have attempted to create a clear, end-to-end explanation of the whole issue and its resolution, which I did not find elsewhere.

To do this, I experimented (as far as I am concerned, at least) with the knol format. Knols are Google's answer to Wikipedia -- a collection of elements of knowledge that are published by specific authors, and kept under their guardianship, rather than being a collective article where the individual contributions tend to get lost, and a team of editors may need to police the contributions.

I am not taking sides in the knol-vs.-Wikipedia debate here, let alone in the higher level discussion about "wisdom of experts" vs. "wisdom of crowds." Enough ink has been used on this, including by myself in a past Cutter Consortium e-update entitled "Control vs. Collaboration: Web 2.0 Meets Knowledge Management." But I wanted to see what it was like to author a knol, and I am rather impressed with the functionality of the application. In terms of ease of use, it's not unlike Blogger, as a matter of fact, but the knol editor offers additional functionality, such as an equation editor, which I really needed for this particular paper.

Which leads me to the second thing I had to practice, namely LaTeX, the mathematical typesetting language derived from my Stanford mentor Don Knuth's TeX language. I've used LaTeX several times in my life, most recently to compose equations in Schlumberger's internal Wikipedia. The equation editor for knols uses LaTeX too, so I had to relearn some features in order to display the equations I needed for my article.

And finally, I really wanted to program the various algorithms and run them, both to measure the time they took to execute in order to illustrate my points about performance, and also for the sheer fun of programming. I suppose that the use of "fun" and "programming" in the same sentence makes me a certifiable geek after all. So I quickly taught myself Python, which is not very hard when you have used several other languages, and installed a Python interpreter on my laptop. While I have only scratched the surface of what Python can do (I have not used its most complex data structures, or its object-oriented features) I am rather impressed by the elegance of the language. The almost austere syntax (no semicolons everywhere, no braces all over like in C, no "begin/end" pairs like in Pascal) seems to actually decrease the chances of making errors: even though I wrote extremely small programs for the Fibonacci calculations, each of them was correct on the first try, which was unbelievable given that I had not programmed, even as an amateur, in over 20 years.

Another reason I like Python is that it implements an idea that Bertrand Meyer and I had when we wrote our French textbook on programming methods over 30 years ago. In the book, we used an invented algorithm description language, which was a sort of Algol or Pascal in which we indicated blocks of code through indentation. To clarify the levels of indentation, we drew vertical lines to the left of each indented block of code instead of using keywords like "begin ... end" or curly braces (my friend Tahar tells me that when he was learning computer science in Algiers, just a few years ago, his professor used our textbook and was very adamant about the use of these vertical lines in students' homework). So it was refreshingly familiar to me to discover that Python also uses indentation meaningfully, to convey the structure of the program, thus getting rid of other forms of block delimiters.

So, knol + LaTeX + Python = the finished product, which I just published tonight, and which you can find here. Let me know what you think, if you are so inclined.

Religious Tolerance on the Runway

Dear American Airlines,

I would like to commend the flight attendant who announced "Welcome to Los Angeles and Happy Holidays" when our full plane, flight 427 from Austin, landed at LAX tonight. It's nice that a professional service person in the U.S. recognizes that we live in a multi-cultural, multi-confessional society.

And to the loud lady in seat 6B, accompanying a girls soccer team, apart from the fact that you should definitely find a better hairdresser or stop pretending you're blonde, because yours is a color not found in nature, listen up: I heard your nasty comment about "Happy Holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas." I also heard that, when your companion in 6A asked you what you had said, you didn't have the guts to explain yourself, but just muttered "oh, nothing." Look, you cowardly bigot: last time I read the Constitution, the First Amendment included the so-called anti-establishment clause. In other words, your religion doesn't legally have standing above others, or above the absence thereof. This plane probably contained Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians (or people like you who pretend to be Christians), and at least one atheist (that would be the guy in 6F, me). The American Airlines flight attendant welcome respected them all by wishing "happy holidays." Your ignorant comment did not.

You should be a role model to the teenage girls you accompanied. Instead, you're a disgrace to your own country's Founding Fathers.

There.