enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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And the eyes were slyly looking...

I'm very tired and (boo hoo!) I think I'm getting a cold.

I did go to the writers' festival today, however, and feel it deserves a few brief notes before I prepare a nourishing risotto.

First, I did not go to the festival to meet men. :) In any event, that would have been a hopeless proposition because again the audience was mostly silver (that and very young "hipster" couples). It reminded me quite a bit of the local film festivals.

On the way home, the economist in me who is, well, analysing everything, asked why there are no young single and/or middle-aged people at these events in this town. The thing is that if I look around my workplace, all I see in the 30- or 40- something age grouping is married couples with young children. Every second woman is pregnant with her second or even third child. That's what you get for having a stable local economy; I saw few pregnant women in Italy.

Ottawa has certain advantages as a city in which to live. I mean, it's not the most beautiful place around. Ten minutes by car, however, and you can be out in the woods or on a quiet lake. Not bad. Ottawa is also the fourth largest city in Canada at the moment (difficult to believe), and as the seat of government many of the best cultural and educational resources are here. And of course, given that government represents such a large proportion of the Canadian economy, anyway, the population here is on average highly educated and securely employed (and often overpaid). We have the highest per capita share of residents with graduate degrees (and also Ph.D.s specifically) of any city in the country.

I remember when I moved here for eight months in 2002, older women at work (married, I might add, but with an interest in matchmaking), went on and on about how difficult it is for single women to find single men in this town. That struck me as surprising. Where have they all gone?

I don't have the slightest clue if there are more women on balance in government than there are men - it seems unlikely, even when one factors in all of the administrative positions, although with women now graduating in greater numbers from Canadian high schools and universities than men, things are moving in that direction (though the pattern is only present in some professional and graduate degree programs) - but one thing that I do believe might be true is that there are more stable marriages here. People here tend to be highly risk-averse. You don't find the polar extremes of personalities that you might find in a city driven by a more diverse economy. It's not that people don't divorce here, but I do seem to be in the presence of a great number of seemingly contented or at least resigned married people. There's a certain stability to everything here.

So I thought to myself - bear with me with this fledgling theory now - that the people in my age group were absent today because they were all at home or out and about with their stable young families. Makes sense, I suppose. And even lacking the element of stability, I suppose that divorced people with children are likely with their children on the weekends. And if I might stretch this even further, I would suggest that most divorced dudes in their 40s (with or without children) are not thinking, "Gee, I wonder if I could meet a nice woman at writers' festival sessions on math, the Bible, or moral courage in the context of civil war (the three sessions I attended today)?"

You see where I generally err ex ante in my planning. ;)

I'm just joking. Don't mind my foolish "theories." I didn't at all go to the writers' festival to meet a man. I've pretty much realized that if I am ever to have sex again it's going to be because some as yet unmet friend of mine is going to take pity on me and invite me to dinner with some eligible and reasonable candidate.

YEs! I really do think this!

Having said all of this, I am more than happy that I am the person I choose to be. I greatly enjoyed the dialogue in and with which I engaged today. It's not a bad life. And when I'm lonely, I only really need to think of my married friends A. and K., who undoubtedly spent today together but who have practically nothing in common and these days mostly speak disparagingly of each other to outsiders. Horrible!

The math session was my favourite today, perhaps unsurprisingly. The reasons for my liking the session WERE, however, surprising. The math itself was distilled so those with no formal math training could appreciate some of the kernels of interest/wisdom in them, so there was nothing new there for me to experience. What resonated for me was the personal philosophy of the author/professor.

HOw to sum this up in a nutshell and not yet diminish the important message contained therein?

First, he talked a bit about how problematic is the fact that many people reject math simply because they "don't get it." He argued a bit that in his observation of the world - and particularly with students these days - the problem is that people don't want to work at things. They want sound bites. They want the google version... Yes, math can be challenging, he argued, but anything worth having in life requires a lot of elbow grease. All good things are "hard."

I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. I observed the same things when I was teaching, and I found it to be particularly disheartening (particularly since I was generally teaching the uni students from families of the greatest privilege in the country).

On the other hand, this professor has done a great deal of research - forensics, shall we say - showing that much great music is written mathematically, even if the "math" is only understood subconsciously by the musician. This professor had at one time been a musician himself, so he conducted a demonstration with his own guitar.

That part I appreciated. I know I wrote this once here but the most fascinating thing that I have noticed in my own life is the link between my math training and music. When my math skills were at their freshest - when I was preparing for my comprehensive exams in grad school - I found that my piano skills, particularly my Bach sight-reading skills were miraculously intact in spite of a number of years of no practise at all. My brain was surprising to me at that time. I felt almost like I was observing IT playing the music without me.

So there were other kernels of wisdom, too. There was a great bit in which he discussed creativity. I mean, obviously, art has a lot to do with math an math with art (fractals, golden rule of proportion, etc.), even though people who are untrained in or afraid of math will often argue the contrary. What he argued - and I thought this was actually brilliant - is that whatever you do in math is built on assumptions. That's the thing - everything is built on assumptions. But the thing with humans is that we get used to assumptions. We FORGET that everything we do and believe is built on assumptions. (And good grief is this ever true for an economist.) What creativity is, he argues, is being able to see hidden assumptions and then breaking them.

Difficult to explain. A lot of creativity/innovation reflects mathematical transformations that are not visible on the surface. Beautiful.

There was one other cool thing that he said that I thought was lovely, though I can't quote it precisely. It was something that a famous mathematician told him when he was a grad student. It was something to the effect that this older man felt that God had made the whole world to be a giant proof. "And man is simply occasionally allowed to see a page of it."

Well. I am not articulating these ideas well. But it was lovely. It was lovely to see someone in the act of living many of the things that you believe on a deep level.

Oh! The other thing was that when the professor was asked about where he had used various branches of math in his life, and also about his area of specialization, he said that he believed in digging into and looking for the connections between a wide variety of branches. As a result, he tries to study broadly in math. I found this very encouraging, because when I was in early grad school one of my professors in Economics - quite a famous one, who oddly made some spectacular connections between disparate things to describe the development of the Industrial Revolution - suggested that the thing was to specialize, specialize, specialize and become the "world's expert in some obscure thing."

I mean, I suppose that that is ONE way to build a career. I loved the idea of breadth, however, because (selfishly) it fits with my own rabbity approach to learning. I mean, I do nestle in and learn some things well. But mostly I want to know something in every field. There are few things that I do not find fascinating. (Perhaps indeed a well-traveled journalist WILL be the type of dude for me.) I've always liked the idea that the interesting thing is not to burrow into only one thing, but rather to find connections between seemingly disparate things. The professor today likened the specialization thing to "digging deeply with a spoon, eventually getting to the bottom...where there might be nothing interesting and whatever it is anyway maybe only three people in the world will understand."

I suppose there's a bit of tongue and cheek to that. Obviously, there's something to specialization. I mean, I'd be rejecting Adam Smith whol3sale were I to believe otherwise, would I not be? ;-)

I'll stop here. I'm sniffly. Tomorrow I might write about the excellent Israeli author I heard speak this evening, if I have time. I want to go tomorrow after work to some sessions involving a renowned Canadian historian, the former Governor General's husband (a well-known philosopher) and some other famous Canadian writers/thinkers writing on "great Canadians." I read some of one of the books being presented tomorrow at one of the tables today, and I learned some new things about my great-grandmother's cousin in her political activities. It's absolutely humbling to have the opportunity to be around the high-level scholarship that will be on show tomorrow evening.

OK. Should "health" myself up with some dinner. HOpe you've all had such invigorating weekends!!

8:23 p.m. - 2009-04-26

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