Travels

So, since it's been a solid six months since my last post, it seems like a good time to update the blog...

Since April, I...

left Italy (and the EU) to get a new visa. Visited Geneva and spent a weekend in the Alps with my aunt and uncle. While there, I built a dry stone wall (which I have always wanted to do) and, much to the amusement of my psychiatrist aunt managed to hurt the ring finger of my RIGHT hand. A classic Freudian response to upcoming marriage I'm told...

Then off to Spain to visit a friend. Turns out that very little English is spoken in Spain, and even though Spanish may sound like thickly accented Italian to you, speaking Spanish-accented Italian yields strange looks and mixed results. Oddly enough the bus ride from Madrid to Valladolid comes with The Life of Brian dubbed in Spanish. The next morning I was introduced to the Spanish equivalent of a 1950's dinner -- you order giant pieces of fried dough that you dip in thick hot chocolate. Tasty and a wonderful hangover cure, but it makes the Tasty 29 look like healthfood.

From Madrid, back to Rome where I got married (you were probably there, so no pictures), and then headed south to the Amalfi coast, which is stupidly picturesque.

Southern Italy also has the tastiest fried food ever as well as the best seafood. It helps when your dinner was caught in the next town over.

Then, back to Rome where we revisited out favorite sights/sites -- the high point was Pentecost in the Pantheon. We got in by claiming that we were Catholic faithful (the Italian lessons paid off) and watched as thousands of red rose petals were dropped through the oculus at the end of the service.

Then we packed and left for Geneva -- there was a country-wide taxi strike on the night of our departure, so this was far more difficult than it needed to be.

We got to recover in Geneva, where my aunt and uncle filled us with excellent wine and food, and then let us use both their chalet in the French alps and their tiny little Citroen Saxo.

France is amazingly nice - particularly so because there are no Italian cab drivers.

We took the Saxo down to Provence. The driver's side controls of the automatic window broke on the way down, so I spent an evening cheerfully taking apart the car door while parked down the street from our hotel near Avignon. Window was beyond help but cat was safely stowed in the husk of a medieval church that had been gutted during the Revolution.

Even with a window that is taped shut (which makes you look totally French) Provence is amazing. I don't blame the popes of the Great Schism for wanting to hang out there for a few years.

Then (more or less) back to DC and from there... (stay tuned)

What to do with grass clippings?

So I'm sure you've faced the problem of what to do with all of those piles of grass clippings that pile up when you mow your lawn... ignore them? compost? burn? pack them into trash bags?

Apparently the Italians have a new solution: wrap cheese in them.

No longer only happy when it rains

Ever noticed that cities look better in the rain? They do. Not as many people, softer light, nice reflections (especially if you happen to have cobbelstones). I took a lot of good pictures of Rome on rainy days when I first arrived, and now that the rain has stopped, the tourists have begun to swarm I kind of miss it.

Except that last weekend we went to Tivoli to visit Hadrian's Villa and the Villa d'Este -- the day was a perfect 70 degrees, and I have to admit that Italy can look pretty good in the sun too.

Seeing things

So as part of my dissertation research I'm going through various early books and letters describing the oddities of the natural world in Southeast Asia. The current one is particularly cool -- it's a printed book from about 1700 in which the author has collected material from various other books, letters, and treatises (and when I say collected, I mean plagiarized). He then had them illustrated and printed and sold them as a sort of coffee table book for polite society. The analogy is pretty good actually, since coffee had just been introduced to Europe and this is probably just the sort of thing that you would discuss at your local coffee house.

Some of the illustrations in this book particularly cool:

I mean, eagles with moustaches and tropical birds with teeth?!

Clearly what happened is that a set of field sketches were delivered the printer who had to have the illustrations cut into metal plates for printing. The artist in charge of this was apparently a little confused by what he was seeing, and just changed things around so that they looked better. Thus, the dead mouse in the eagle's mouth becomes a moustache and the...well I don't know why the toucan has giant teeth.



Still not convinced, check this out:

Our engraver gets a drawing of a monkey with its young clinging it. It doesn't look like the little guy has a very good grip, so the artist helpfully tied him on with a piece of vine. I think the mother's expression says it all.

Toast

When I was in second grade, the Food Pyramid was still gospel. At one point, we had to draw and illustrate a menu for a day that had the proper number of all of the daily requirements.

Now, keep in mind that my ideal of a balanced meal at this point was probably alternating peanut butter and honey sandwiches with my peanut butter and jellies. Turns out that you actually needed to eat a lot of “bread group,” and I was running out of new starches to slip into my menu, so I figured that you could just eat two slices of toast with breakfast instead of one.

My teacher didn’t think so. No, she said, that had to be different things – a single tater tot on the side of your lunch would do the trick, but apparently not another slice of bread in the same sitting.

So, I went back my desk and did my best to draw “n” pieces of breakfast toast. I was only 7, so n=19, which is still a lot of toast to draw with a crayon.

Skip ahead 20+ years: Amelia and I had a dinner party last weekend, and one of the leftovers was a half a round of Roman bread a foot and a half wide. So, for breakfast the next morning, I had a single piece of toast eighteen inches long and an inch think. Only one serving of bread though -- take that Ms. Dalton.

Comedy

Comedy it turns is explaining to two Italian plumbers how to take the top off of your new German dishwasher. It's like introducing Neanderthals to fire.

Pidgins and creoles

Last week a friend of mine posted a blog entry discussing the oddities of created languages and created cultures. This got me thinking about the relation between culture and language in various (real) subcultures and reminded me of a particularly resonant analogy I ran across while doing my orals reading last year.

First some back story: There’s a professor at Harvard named Peter Galison – PhDs in physics and history, turned down the directorship of The Institute for Advanced Study by the time he was 50, who is, by all accounts, a colossal prick. Last year I waded though the 982 pages of his book, Image and Logic: a material culture of microphysics, in which he makes some fascinating observations while showing off the fact that he is too important to have to take stylistic advice from his editor.

The book itself studies the sorts of social structures that accompanied the development of particle accelerators during the 20th century, particularly within the groups which designed and built the detectors which make sub-atomic particles visible. These detectors are where theoretical physics meets reality, transforming the subatomic shrapnel from unspeakably high-energy collisions into visible tracks and measurable quantities. They are particularly interesting sites of study because the detectors embody types of training, theoretical approaches, and intellectual lineages in their design and they are the focal points of individual research teams which then compete with other groups for all-important "beamtime". One detector, for instance, might try to capture a picture of a certain particle, for which a single picture – a “golden event” – is enough to prove the existence of a particular species, while others gather statistical data to test various competing theoretical models. As particle accelerators grew bigger - expanding from Lawrence’s table-top cyclotron at Berkeley to the 27 km main ring at CERN - the ever-increasing scale and complexity of the experimental apparatus has driven this fragmentation. These research groups, can exist for years, developing their own languages, methodological approaches, social structures, etc. An anthropologist who studied the physicists at SLAC (the Stanford Linear ACelerator) as her “tribe”, has some good examples of the different sorts of cultures and cultural markers that develop – ranging from dress codes, to office decoration, where they sit in the auditorium, to whether a given physicist will walk down the accelerator tunnel while the beam is active (experimentalists – yes, theoreticians – no).

So back to the language/culture problem: Communications between these distinct scientific subcultures is often difficult because of the lack of a shared language about what is actually happening at the experimental level. This realization is, of course particularly powerful, because we’ve been conditioned to believe that physicists communicate in timeless, exacting mathematical utterances. Sadly not true (see Bruno Latour, Science in Action).

To make sense of this problem, Galison draws out an analogy from anthropology. In anthropological terms, there are distinct sorts of linguistic blending that occur at cultural interfaces: Pidgins and Creoles. Creoles are the result of two languages blending together to form a new, complete language. Pidgins are languages of convenience that spring up in trading zones and contact points between languages. While children can be raised speaking a creole, there are no native speakers of a pidgin.

Within the umbrella language of physics, experimental subcultures create creoles that can last for decades. New students are raised within these particular cultural frameworks eventually learning to speak a “language” of experimental physics, but it’s different from what other groups of physicists working on different experiments of on different instruments learn. When they communicate with other subgroups, there is no common language to resort to, and without a common language, they construct pidgins which enable them to share ideas but which force both groups to use foreign abstractions, approximations and analogies. As particle accelerators increased in scale, “trading zones” in which instrument makers, theorists, and experimentalists exchanged information became vital for science to function. These problems emerge, when different research groups talked to one another, or had to interface with funding agencies, or engineering firms etc. Sadly, Galison never really expands on this analogy, but for me, it’s an interesting starting point for the problems of organizational culture.

It’s an interesting analogy to think about for organizational subcultures in general. Have computer techies created their own creole which separates both their communication and culture from the rest of the organization? Is management communication inherently a pidgin in that it is a language of convenience that allows ideas to be communicated to numerous subcultures?

I'm particularly fond of this analogy because the issues of culture and communication are immediately recognizable in any large organization. If you've ever wondered why you could never understand the salesforce/programmers/line cooks/marketing department etc -- this is your answer. They actually are speaking a different language, and behind that language is a different culture. You can communicate with them - through pidgins - and if you spend enough time with them, you may even become bilingual, but the problem is more serious than simply not understanding their jargon. Blaming communications difficulties on jargon alone suggests that it is simply an issue of using abbreviations and shorthands that the uninitiated don't understand. The pidgins/creoles analogy, on the other hand, suggests that the communications problem is rooted in deeper, cultural divide.