There is a universe I do not even know I do not know — unknown unknowns, in the parlance of Donald Rumsfeld. One of the purposes of education is to be confronted with the frontier of our ignorance, to be turned around and led to the edge of a previously unperceived precipice so that someone can point to the wide canyon before us and say: here is something you don’t know. That is, one role of education is to turn an unknown unknown into a known unknown.

I have many known unknowns, things I know I do not know. I cannot speak the primary languages of most fellow humans on this planet, build a fence, name the succession of English monarchs (or describe the detailed history for nearly any country besides the US), start or even simply maintain a garden that could sustain the family, land or even fly a plane, identify nearly any contemporary popular singer from the past two decades (to the simultaneous embarrassment and delight of my children), and so forth.

The breadth of my ignorance is extensive. Yes, I continue to learn — for example, this evening at home I advanced my knowledge of Spanish (tomar functions similarly to take in English: taking medicine, taking money, taking the train, taking a drink), drilled myself on the locations of European and South American countries, and began to read Randall Munroe’s latest book How To, including the chapter on landing a plane. But life is finite. I will always be helplessly lost about something.

…

As for the things I do know, my known knowns, I tend to take them for granted. Teaching general chemistry this fall has made more aware of how easily and often I regard objects and processes through the lens of chemistry.

On Saturday I finally took the ALCOSAN plant tour to witness how our wastewater is treated. I was fascinated at how chlorine served as a disinfectant until 9/11, which forced reassessing the risk of railroad cars filled with poisonous gas running through high-density population areas. When the tour guide mentioned they now use sodium hypochlorite, with sodium bisulfite to neutralize the excess before discharging the effluent into the Ohio River, I immediately imagined the chemical reaction. This is a reflex. It was only later that I realized probably no one else on the bus had been thinking in those terms.

Over the weekend I also found occasions to learn about the agents used in Class B fire extinguishers, as well as the Haber-Bosch process and other methods for nitrogen fixation. On the first homework set I wrote problems on using a propane heater and on thermite reactions, which both interest me personally.

…

Two weeks ago my mother, who in recent years has developed drastically different political views from mine, argued the root cause is that we were raised in different educational environments. I am willing to concede my education influences the ways I perceive and don’t perceive aspects of the world.

However, I am not persuaded that education is the root cause of our difference. Her upbringing hasn’t changed, and yet she has changed political parties. I believe the problem is that she has narrowed her current sources of information. She has inoculated herself against listening to younger people who express different views as well as to anyone who delivers news that challenge her point of view. I don’t know how to break through this dogma, or whether that is even wise, given that it seems now to have taken hold as a deep part of her identity.

Life is finite. I love my mother. I will always be helplessly lost about something. Chemistry is easier than politics.

Please charge the emergency jump charger, Marissa said as she headed out with the children for Boy Scout camp, and don’t put it in the trunk of the car. What? I said. We needed it when were up in Erie, but it was in the trunk, which wouldn’t open because the battery was dead. Oh, I’m going to write about this, I replied.

…

Last month I looked for a stove. For car camping and home emergencies, it didn’t have to be incredibly portable or ultralight. However, the stove has to be reliable, even when used infrequently, and easy to maintain. For international camping and emergencies, it would also be best if it could burn multiple fuels — not just the canister fuels (so-called because propane, isobutane, n-butane, etc. must be contained under pressure), but also the more energy-dense, widely available liquids that burn at low temperatures (such as unleaded gasoline, white gas, and kerosene).

Multifuel stoves do exist, but it seems camping stoves these days are designed to minimize mass and volume. I would prefer to have something built like a tank. A good piece of kit that is going to last and, if it doesn’t work, it’s relatively obvious why it’s broken and how to fix it. I started to reminisce about the Optimus stove, a bulky metal box that I carried (and that carried me) through three weeks in the Wind River Range on my NOLS trip during the summer of 1986. This was either an Optimus 8 or 111 — the same model I relied upon during canoe trips on the Saco and hikes through the Whites when I led Search & Rescue trips at Andover in the early 1990s. Optimus seems to have discontinued this design years ago, with the Hiker+ the end of the line.

I don’t understand why old reliables like the Optimus 8 or Svea 123 aren’t made anymore, at least by their original manufacturers. Of course, on the Internet there is a community entirely devoted to these and other Classic Camp Stoves that continue to function perfectly fine after many decades of use and disuse.

…

Earlier in the summer, I was looking at backpacks at the REI Garage Sale, where I snagged a heavily discounted Osprey Ozone Duplex — perfect for international carry-on travel, as long as I can fit the smaller integrated knapsack underseat. While shopping, I realized that every single pack on display was an internal frame. I don’t understand. When did internal frames take over the world? I own an external frame that I bought from an actual garage sale when we lived in Santa Fe. When my daughter was planning to go on a camping trip, she scoffed at its alien exoskeleton. But my wife and I reassured her that even though it weighs more and is less common, an external frame is great for carrying loads, built strong, and easily accommodates straps to attach other objects. I recalled my wilderness medical training on how it can be modified to carry someone over long distances.

…

I’m not a Luddite: I am on a laptop, own both a tablet and an e-reader, and have continually maintained an email address since 1986. But I do not own a smartphone. They require coddling because they won’t hold a charge for longer than a day, their screens crack easily, and their bodies need to be wrapped in cases.

My flip phone, on the other hand, delights me because it looks like a communicator from Star Trek TOS. It snaps closed with a satisfying sound and feel. It contours comfortably from mouth to ear. It suffices for occasional calls; otherwise I use the landline in my office, and Google Voice at home. 

For email, I have WiFi at work and home. WiFi also allows me to track the bus for my daily commute before I leave. If I need driving directions, I examine the route ahead of time and memorize it, or take notes, or print the map. I don’t text because I can easily be reached by other means.

I am not alone in rejecting phones that want for updating every few years. I had lunch with a computer science professor who took out his Palm Treo, which must be over a decade old. He warned me that my flip phone would brick at the end of this calendar year as Verizon shuts down their legacy networks.

…

I am grateful that my chemistry classroom this fall contains a chalkboard. Between chalk and dry-erase markers, there is no contest. Chalk is a more tactile medium, responsive to pressure, allowing shades of subtlety. It is not subject to technological failure or dependent upon a particular canvas — I can pick up a thick piece and take a seminar outside to draw proofs on the sidewalk. I can tell at a glance if it is there, whether it will work, and how much remains. The dust comforts my hands as though I were about to ascend a climb.

…

When I was growing up (“Back in my day,” said the old man), we hand-cranked our car windows. I’m not going to add and we liked it. However, I still believe we should have manual backup to be able to open windows when the electricity fails, including after a car accident, or when the motor is too weak to budge a window in the deep freeze of winter.

When we bought our Forester a few years ago, the salesperson pointed to the electric moon roof as an advantage. I did not see it that way at all. “One more thing to break,” said the old man (and it turns out we hardly ever use it). It is ridiculous that the only manual switch for that car’s hatchback is hidden behind an internal panel, so that Marissa could not access our emergency jump charger without stretching across the back seat inside.

The other day the director of the health professions program, who has an electric BMW that rides like a dream, mentioned how someone had sideswiped the mirror on the driver’s side when the car was parked. The replacement cost over a thousand dollars in parts and labor because there are so many sensors and other paraphernalia stuffed inside. In some of the narrow streets and parking spots around here, mirror damage is not a rare occurrence.

…

Stoves, backpacks, phones, chalk, automobile equipment. I prefer durable objects over ephemeral ones. Sometimes (not always) but sometimes, sometimes the old ways are best.

I support inclusive language that recognizes and respects a person’s individual gender identity. People have enough troubles making their ways through this world. The very least anyone can do is to refer to fellow human beings by their preferred names and pronouns. And focusing on pronouns is good-intentioned. To quote from the Wikipedia article on declension, the one situation where gender is still clearly part of the English language is in the pronouns for the third[-]person singular.

However, I don’t understand one particular form of virtue signaling that I have encountered at work.  When some people introduce themselves at meetings, they say:

My name is <so-and-so>. Preferred pronouns: she, her, hers

or in email signatures, they write:

Pronouns: he, him, his

Pronouns: she/her/hers

At first glance, this provides more information than any native English speaker would need. Just state your pronoun as she or he; we can figure out the rest. Any information beyond the nominative case is not merely a waste of time, it presupposes the audience does not know the grammar of the English language as well as the speaker. As a brown person, throughout my life I have experienced assumptions about how well I know my first language, so I find this style of virtue signaling rather insulting.

(Just between you and I, the great irony is that someone who introduces themselves with preferred pronouns often misuses grammar, as in the beginning of this sentence.)

However, a short list of three grammatical forms actually provides less information than a native English speaker would need: consider the four elements necessary to express {they, them, their, theirs}. If someone prefers less commonly known pronouns, such as ze, that person also needs to provide more than three grammatical forms, because there are different ways that ze could decline. In contrast, a person who provides only three pronouns is broadcasting their ignorance of grammar, their assumption about the audience’s ignorance of grammar, and/or the privilege of being associated with a common gender identity.

Listing only three pronouns reveals privileged assumptions about how grammar operates — namely, that everyone else’s pronoun grammar should operate the same way as one’s own. Consider the following table, also from the Wikipedia article on declension:

	Masculine	Feminine	Neuter (non-person)	Neuter (person)
Subjective	he	she	it	they
Objective	him	her	it	them
Dependent possessive	his	her	its	their
Independent possessive	his	hers	its	theirs

 

To make patterns more obvious:

	Masculine	Feminine	Neuter (non-person)	Neuter (person)
Subjective	A	A	A	A
Objective	B	B	A	B
Dependent possessive	C	B	B	C
Independent possessive	C	C	B	D

Someone who states she, her, hers is imposing the ABBC pronoun declension structure and is privileging that feminine structure over others. Someone who states he, him, his is implicitly assuming and imposing the ABCC declension structure.

I could wish English did not distinguish gender, as in my father’s Visayan language, although this did cause him to switch between he and she within the same conversation, which may have been disconcerting to his medical patients. I have heard pronouns in some Chinese languages also lack gender. Perhaps gender distinctions will eventually disappear from English. Languages do tend to simplify, like the dual disappearing after Homeric Greek or, just between you and I, the objective case.

But no one can wish away the history of the English language. The problem with any set of pronouns that decline ABCC, ABBC, AABB, or ABCD is that they incline towards existing gender roles. A truly revolutionary pronoun, in order to break out of traditional gender roles, must decline differently from these patterns.

In the meantime, what should we do about preferred pronouns? Someone may claim the perfect is the enemy of the good, stating that they were doing the best to their understanding when listing only three pronouns. That was then, before this essay. This is now. And now someone who wishes to support inclusive language that respects gender identity has several viable options:

0: State no pronouns, yet support those who do through useful actions. These could include the propagation of systems that encourage others to express their pronouns, active listening to those who confront challenges with expressing their gender identities, and other advocacy.

1: State one pronoun, for the sake of brevity and to display more explicit support of those with less common pronouns. Understand that less common pronouns may have different case declension patterns.

4: State four pronouns, for the sake of comprehensiveness.

I currently exercise option 0. The challenge is that I can be perceived to be ignorant of gender issues or to be declining virtue signaling. On the contrary, I do believe in the power and significance of inclusive language. To that end, we need to be more careful about the declension of pronouns, both in the expression of our own preferred pronouns and in the construction of new vocabularies that recognize the constraints of existing grammar.

A moment ago a sunbeam mottled through the neighbor’s trees, casting on the motes dancing mid-air. I remembered

An infant’s fascination with the lit-up stained glass of Nor’easter as she swung in Flip-Away 1-2-3

Awake to stay on Eastern time, camped near Yosemite, sunrise warming trees and ground and air, standing balanced on a stump as everybody slept

Alone in the basement in Devola, the dust fastening on sunlight through the basement window, where toads lived to fascinate a boy as much as lightning bugs and robin’s eggs

Learning the word “mote” in middle school when a friend said he was reading The Mote in God’s Eye, to realize words could be small yet unknown

Lying on the immense yard of Grandview Avenue, staring at the blue sky in search of contrails, watching floaters drift past and return with each blink

Studying Brownian motion, amazed at how much atomic detail can be derived from the close observation of random macroscopic motion

Coding workers in the puzzle game 7 Billion Humans to perform random walks in their tasks, leading to surprisingly highly optimized, though not guaranteed, results

The moment no photo can capture has passed. The sun now lights the trees in the front yard a brilliant summer green. Birds chirp their songs in the cool morning air, cars occasionally pass sounding like surf. A dog barks outside, rousing a dog sleeping belly up on the belly of a sleeping woman. A boy reads on the purple chair, remarks he has theater class but not piano today, asks Can we have pancakes for breakfast?

I attended a joint symposium a week ago Friday. Sharmila Sen read from her recent book Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America, while Nico Slate read from his brand-new book, Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India, which Sen had edited. Both texts confronted issues of race and identity politics, and both authors were thoughtful during the Q&A. The idea to celebrate their books together was brilliant.

However, the event led me to reflect uneasily on my own experiences with race. In particular, I was disturbed by some of the questions. One person related, with what seemed to me an element of envy, that when she lived in Chicago she had a friend who could pass for many different races, and all the other parents at the school were friendly to her. The implication was that being of uncertain race is a great advantage.

I lived in Chicago twenty years ago and it remains the place where I have been most keenly aware of how others perceived me in terms of race. Chicago is the most racist city I know. The problem is that Chicagoans perceive race starkly in black and white, with a vague awareness there also some brown-skinned Latino people. If you do not fit into those preconceived categories, you are not merely invisible, you are existentially impossible.

Earlier that same day, I had discussed combinatorics with one of my advisees. During the Q&A for this symposium, I realized the concept of race claims to partition a human population into sets, with every individual belonging to exactly one set. The error in Chicago, from my experiences living there towards the end of the 20th century, is the partition {White, Black} is faulty; it is an incomplete description. Nevertheless, when I lived in Chicago, I was confronted with all the negative prejudices of being brown.

The problem of being neither this nor that — of being perceived as belonging to a community when that community itself wouldn’t accept me — extends beyond the Upper Midwest. Growing up in small-town Ohio, other children asked whether I was Chinese or Japanese, because in their minds there were only two possible types of Asian people. My own daughter and son, growing up here at the head of the Ohio River, have also been subject to the erroneous {Chinese, Japanese} partition. When I was my daughter’s age, one of my classmates apparently had partitioned the world into {White, Black}, taunting me under his breath with the N word.

When I moved from Chicago to New Mexico, I began inhabiting the racial partition {Anglo, Indian, Hispanic}. When people heard me speak, they classified me as Anglo, even though in other places I had been taken for Native American or Central American. I was greatly confused by this because anywhere else “Anglo” would have closely mapped to “White” or other phenotypical characteristics. However, race classification in the American Southwest is more concerned with geographic origin, cultural background, and linguistic practice.

At the symposium, Sen pointed out Asians themselves don’t consider themselves as a single race. When she moved as a child from India to the United States, she was puzzled that she was classified with other people from the same continent but with whom she shared practically nothing in terms of food, clothing, history, language, religion, or appearance. This is an obvious truth to anyone of Asian heritage, yet the US Census lumps everyone into “Asian”.

In summary, we human beings perceive race because it is advantageous to notice patterns. The trouble with racial classifications is how they blur the distinctions among not only individuals but entire populations, bundling people who have real differences, sometimes even centuries of conflict. Being of uncertain race is not an advantage, because that person is lumped into grossly inaccurate categories, simply for the mental convenience of the classifier. The Chicago mother who could pass for many different races was welcomed by others at the school only because it was psychologically comfortable in that particular setting for those who met her.

Racial categories render entire populations as invisible or impossible. The Voyager Golden Record, while a monumental achievement and hastily assembled, excluded all of the native languages of the Philippines, one of the most populous countries in the world.

When visible, I am seen as a Filipino-American. Legally I can claim both nations, yet I do not know what that term means. I understand but do not speak Tagalog; for years I ate native foods but have not cooked any besides rice and lumpia; I was raised Catholic but no longer embrace that faith; I have visited but never lived in the Philippines. On the other hand, on many occasions and in many places around the United States, my outward appearance leads my fellow citizens to prejudge me as not-American. I am liminal between Filipino and American — or rather, I am subliminal to both, not quite there. In the chemical sense, to the much of the rest of the world I am not of solid substance: I have been sublimated; I am sublimed.

Two weeks ago I watched Chungking Express, inspired by the Hong Kong episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown that features the idiosyncratic cinematographer Christopher Doyle. As Bourdain and Doyle talked about the influence of the camera on how we perceive and interact with the real world, I thought: I should see one of the films they are mentioning.

After I watch an outstanding film, sometimes I’ll look back at the trailers and check out those DVDs from the library too. I’ll also, more rarely, seek out movies with a particular actor. With Chungking Express, I thought: I should see more films by Wong Kar-wai. How did I not know about him before?

The first vignette takes place during the spring of 1994. We apprehend this because our protagonist is going from store to store in search of canned pineapple with an expiration of May 1, 1994, the date he will give up hope of reuniting with his girlfriend. This slyly humorous plot device reminded me of how I used to mark time towards the end of Mookie’s life, looking first at bottles of shampoo, then at gallons of milk, wondering if they would last longer than he.

Certain memories of spring 1994 are vivid. Friends and colleagues at Andover surprised me with a birthday party. I interviewed for a job at Bard College. My students in Bartlet wore T-shirts screen-printed with Mookie, including when they played a concert on the lawn behind the dorm.

25 years ago, the protagonist was 25 years old, and I was near that age too. Half a lifetime ago.

I truly attended to Chungking Express, engaged by the snappy cinematography, fine acting, and iconic locations like Chungking Mansions and the Central/Mid-Levels Escalator. But also because of the subtitles. When watching at home, with many distractions available, it can be challenging to watch any film, and most of the Chinese films I’ve watched before have focused on action. This time, the subtitles helped to focus my attention.

I intended to watch it again, because it strikes me as a film that rewards multiple viewings, but someone else has requested it from the library. Good on them. I will watch another Wong Kar-wai film instead, having just requested Ashes of Time Redux and Fallen Angels. And I am awakened, after also watching Crazy Rich Asians with the children this past week, to how enjoyable a film can be when it takes on a different cast.

The annual AAC&U Diversity, Equity, and Student Success conference occurred in Pittsburgh this year at the Omni William Penn. After lunch last Friday, during the discussion on the Tree of Life tragedy, one of the rabbis said if you speak with two Jews, you get three opinions.

I retreated from the emotionally laden conversation to the peace of Diophantine mathematics, and asked myself: what is the general case? With n Jews, how many opinions O(n) will be present? I started to consider possible functions that satisfy the following conditions:

1. O(2) = 3
2. O(n) is a counting number for all counting numbers n
3. O(n) is a polynomial function
4. O(n) should admit of some reasonable answers in the special cases when n = 0 and n = 1 

O(n) = n + 1 provides the entertaining result that one Jew, being alone, will nevertheless harbor two opinions. When n = 0, the function indicates is there is still one opinion, which could be interpreted as that of God. While this null case is interesting, the interpretation of cases when n > 1 is increasingly dull. The number of opinions is always simply one more than the number of Jews present.

O(n) = 2n – 1 is slightly more interesting with its the steeper slope. As n becomes large, the number of opinions approaches double the number of interlocutors, suggesting that Jews are able to entertain two sides of an argument that each is individually interpreting. However, when n = 0 (the case of “God alone”), the number of opinions is negative, which is not a meaningful result.

Other linear polynomials, such as 3n – 3, yield nonsensically negative results for n = 1 (the individual case) or don’t provide integer solutions across the domain of counting numbers, such as 1/2 n + 2. Likewise, higher-order polynomials such as n^2 – 1, n^3 – 5, and n^4 -13 fail to give meaningful results when n = 1.

O(n) = 3 is the trivial case. This function satisfies all four of the given conditions. However, it doesn’t pass the “sniff test” –I would expect a group of Jews to hold more than 3 opinions among each other.

O(n) = n^2 – n + 1 has the lovely quality of growing faster than the other three viable options. As n approaches infinity, the number of opinions approaches the square of the number of Jews. To put it another way, the number of interactions increases as the number of pairwise interactions between n argumentative, intellectual, inquisitive people: n (n -1). The constant at the end could represent God’s opinion.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to prove that other polynomial functions besides these four cannot fulfill the conditions above. As for me, I favor the last of these possibilities.

 

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