Math Geek Adventures is live again

Dear Friends,

I am making Math Geek Adventures public and accessible to all again. I'm not sure that I'll be posting going forward, but my previous posts are available.

Best wishes,

John Bardsley

Taking a break from blogging

Writing these blog posts has been a joy, but for a variety of reasons, I am taking an indefinite hiatus from posting. I won't go into the reasons, but for all of you who've joined me on this journey, thank you for your interest.

Melbourne Journal #7: Fall & Music

It's fall here, and just as happens back home, daylight savings hit and it was suddenly getting dark soon after work. We're doing our best to soak up the last of the warm days. Last weekend, on a beautiful day, we took the 70 mile RT ride down to Mornington for pizza. And yesterday, with the temps climbing into the 80s, we rushed to Brighton Beach after work to catch the sunset. 

It's been strange seeing the photos of spring back in Montana. I can smell the moist air and recall the expansive feeling in my chest that comes with spring. I miss it! The feeling of fall - of a pleasant contraction and turning within - abides, instead, in Melbourne. 

There's not much time left for us here. In two-and-half weeks, Alex comes for the final three weeks of our stay, and it'll rush by in a flash. Melbourne is a lovely, energetic city. I've loved living here and will miss it. 

Here are a couple of mixes I've made while here. The first is a collection of recently released electronic music, and the second is a collection of recent alternative pop/country.

Recent Listening: Melbourne #1
Recent Listening: Melbourne #2

Melbourne Journal #6: New Zealand and Fate

Last week, we visited Dunedin, New Zealand, our old home town. It was a surreal visit, bringing us back in time 8 years, when we lived there. And Dunedin is one of those towns that doesn't really change, which amplified the effect. 

For the few days prior to our week stay in Dunedin, we did a three day driving and camping tour, from Christchurch to Lake Tekapo, on to Wanaka, and then through central Otago to Dunedin. This is a spectacularly beautiful drive, but the tourism is at such a pitch these days that it feels like Glacier Park in summer, and is a bit too busy for my taste. 

I preferred our time in Dunedin, where I visited my colleague Colin Fox at the University of Otago. During our week there, we did some of our favorite bike rides and hikes, which were great to revisit, and we saw some old friends and haunts. But our entire stay was tinged with nostalgia and the feeling that Dunedin is our past not our future.

The topic of fate has come up more than once in recent conversations with Jen and my friend Al Parker. I have a strong sense of what Fate means for me but have realized that others recoil at the use of the word. This morning, I read Emerson's essay on Fate, and it fits my conception of it. 

WHAT I MEAN WHEN I SAY 'ACCEPT YOUR FATE'
wording in italics are from Emerson's essay Fate

We are human beings with the inborn limitations of our species: we only see certain wavelengths of light; we only hear certain frequencies of sound; we have a limited lifespan; etc. In addition, we have individual limits due to our genetic inheritance from our parents, and due to our culture: from that of our families outward to that of our country, the world, and our era. All of these limitations could be grouped under the term Nature, which also can act upon us in a random and vicious fashion. In Emerson's words,

Nature is no sentimentalist, does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.

It is the sum total of all of our limitations that defines our Fate. Indeed, according to Emerson, 'The book of Nature is the book of Fate.' But that is not all, as Fate is not fixed. Human beings are free, through acts of Will, to affect their Fate. Again, Emerson:

If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate and say Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the Soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. 

This definition of Fate - which balances the restrictions placed on us by Nature with the ability to affect our Fate through acts of free will - agrees with my sensibilities. It is this definition of Fate that I use when I say 'accept your Fate.' Emerson puts it exceedingly well in the following quote.


We can afford to allow limitation if we know it is the meter of the growing man. We stand against Fate as children stand up against the wall in their father's house and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall and builds a new and bigger.

Melbourne Journal #5, The Grampians

Last weekend, Jen and I visited Grampians National Park, which had come up multiple times when we asked for recommendations for places to go near Melbourne. National Parks in Australia are toned-down versions of what they are in the U.S., requiring no entry fees and receiving significantly less management and volume of people. On the way there, we experienced some small town Australia, camping in the town of Creswick and going to a Saturday Farmer's Market that somehow reminded us of our time Eugene in the late-90s. On the second night, we stayed at a cool youth hostel in Halls Gap, and then we did a one night backpack, bagging a couple of peaks along the way. After a long second day, we had a beer and pub food in Halls Gap, and then camped out one last night before heading home. The Grampians are hotter and drier than Melbourne, and both of us felt that they had a similar feel to the Desert Southwest, which we love. It was yet another enjoyable trip. 

I want to say one final thing about the philosophy of Emerson after my last post, which focused on his notion of self-reliance, by which he means the use of a person's intuition and reasoning faculties to define what is right and what is wrong for them. The pitfall of self-reliance, defined in this way, is that one can go astray. A famous recent example of this (at least in my mind) is the story of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, as told in John Krakauer's book, Into the Wild. The counteracting, and balancing, idea is contained in the essay Compensation, which for Emerson is the law of give-and-take (or balance) in the Universe. Here is Emerson on the topic in Compensation:

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they do not touch him-but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death. 

Here is one of many specific examples that he gives:

Treat men as pawns and ninepins and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave their heart, you shall lose your own.

Moreover, 'every advantage has its tax,' so it is important that you pay your debts.

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. 

There are many more such examples in the essay, and there is good news as well. 

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm.

Melbourne Journal #4: The Overland Track, Tasmania

This past Wednesday, we returned from a one week trip to Tasmania, on The Overland Track, which is a very popular 5+ night hut-to-hut hiking trip through Cradle Mountain-Lake Saint Clair National Park. This region is wild and feels on par with Glacier National Park, both in terms of beauty and popularity.  We had a fantastic trip, taking 6 nights to walk the route and bagging several peaks along the way. We had the gamut of weather, with a temps well into the 90s early in the trip and cold and snow on the last day. The trip is reminiscent of the backpacking trips we did in New Zealand, with the same comradery that develops with the group that you walk along the route with.

I'd like to say a bit more about the philosophy of Emerson. On the Overland Track, I read Self-Reliance, which is one of his most famous essays, in which he presents his vision for how a person becomes 'whole.' Despite the essay's fame, I am confident that very few individuals are called to implement its vision, in part because it represents an ideal that is, basically, impossible to perfectly implement. And even for an individual, such a calling can depend upon time-of-life: when I read the essay at 30, it made no impression, whereas upon re-reading it at 45, the impression it made was significant. 

The basic message of the essay is that the force of Nature flows through each of us, and that we become whole only once we have aligned ourselves entirely with this inner-flow. This requires, first, that we accept our fate. From Self-Reliance:

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. 

Second, it requires that we listen to our inner-Nature, becoming our own judge and rejecting the judgement of society and/or of other people when necessary. Again, from Self-Reliance: 

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It love not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.  

And here is where the rubber meets the road. Being a nonconformist (i.e., self-reliant) is extremely difficult, because it invites the judgement of others, or in Emerson's words, "For nonconformity, the world whips you with its displeasure." However, self-reliance is the path we must take to achieve wholeness. One final passage from Self-Reliance:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Melbourne Journal #3: The Great Ocean Walk

This past week, Jen and I did the Great Ocean Walk. In the Melbourne region, the Great Ocean Road is a famous tourist attraction. Fewer know about the Great Ocean Walk, which is a hiking trail hugging the same section of coast. It's not particularly remote by Montana standards - you pass through a car campground, or cross a road, every day - but it's unique, challenging and worthwhile. It's 100 kilometers long and can take anywhere from 4-8 days. We took six days to do it, with 1/2 day travel (bus and train) on the first and last day. It was challenging, with three 13+ mile days, but not oppressively so. It got us into shape for our next backpack in Tasmania, which we start this coming week.

Along the  hike I read Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nietzsche mentioned him, positively, more than once in my reading of his work, and since I've been wanting to read Emerson for a long time, I picked up one of his 'selected works' at Shakespeare Books while I was in Missoula. Emerson has hit me hard and deeply, bringing spirituality and love back into my philosophical reading. I had a similar experience reading the Brothers Karamazov last fall, through the character of Alyosha. Here's one Emerson quote about gratitude and perspective: 

The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens.

Emerson's writings (at least what I've read so far) focus on how to live from our inner-nature and promptings. Like Nietzsche, he believes that Western morality has taught us not to listen to our inner-Nature/guide/intuition, and also like Nietzsche, he believes that we must do a better job of listening to our inner-Nature. Here is a quote from the book Nature about the flow of nature through us. 

We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or though ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.

And here is a quote, later in Nature, in which Emerson says that a person should act from his/her own inner-sense of right and wrong and not from the dictates of an individual, a group, or the dominant culture.  

Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. On the contary, the absence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation. As is the flood, so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, and the very words it spake and the things it made become false and hurtful.