Thursday, 30 June 2011

Summer break

Just like the other Fred, I will also leave our beloved Ghent for a trip abroad. Hoping to gain more insight into myself and the world I'm living in, ready to prepare enough blog blurbs to keep you all entertained after the summer break.

May your summer be hot and sticky, devoid of mosquitos and long enough to reset what needs to be reset.

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

(G. K. Chesterton)

Tuesday, 28 June 2011

Happy Manta!

One of the most exclusive things you can order from the sushi menu in an upper scale Japanese restaurant is shirako. You may have a liking for raw tuna and salmon, but hold your seahorses: when you order shirako, you will be served a bowl of frothy, spiral-shaped white objects, exuding an unmistakable deep-sea odour. Sadly enough, this is the euphemistic description, as shirako is nothing but a bunch of sperm-filled reproductive glands of male cods. Yups.


Look, with more than 171,476 entries for words in current use, it is pretty obvious that the Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains more than one combination of words that isn't such a good match. But if you'd ask me: 'sperm' and 'food' are definitely in the top 10 of the list of most unconventional word combinations.

This could be the scientist in me taking control of the keyboard, but when I read about things like this – fish's penises being served as food – I always find myself wondering: why and how? There might be something wrong with my imagination here, but tell me: can you picture a fish tank filled with horny cods who are trained to almost ejaculate upon command? I can't.

Which is why I devoted two whole weeks to this captivating riddle. Two nerve-wracking weeks, to be more precise, since few things are more frightening than having a partner who is eyeballing you from across the dinner table, ready to fire the Mother of all Ugly Questions in your direction.

“What exactly are you thinking about?”

Because I am pretty sure that 'how to breed horny cods?' is not just a weird question, it's also a very weird answer... In the end, I found my answer where my chubby neighbour found his wife: on the World Wide Web. This time, the cliché turned out to be true: the explanation was there, right in front of me. Porn.

“Porn? For animals?”, I hear you asking?

Let me remind you that this would not be the first time: in 2006, zoologists at the Chiang Mai Zoo in Thailand have let their sluggish giant panda bears watch panda porno, in order to promote sexual arousal and boost their mating efforts. Somewhat inspired by this fact, I got convinced that before you can serve your daring clientele a non-standard portion of proteins in the form of shirako, you have to feed their soon-to-be-meal porn. Fish porn, that is.

My only problem is that I do have a few moral objections against this idea. I mean, just imagine you are a male fish, watching a porn movie. You are horny as hell and you have a huge erection. Not the worst of situations, right? Until you realize that your fins are too fucking short to masturbate! Now thàt is what they call tantalizing.

On the other hand, it does explain why the Manta ray is happily flapping its way through the ocean. After all, it's the only creature in the deep blue that can spank the monkey...



Monday, 27 June 2011

Why I'm proud to be a classicist, but not that proud.

A few days ago, after some random comment, I was playfully accused of elitism by my friend E. I didn't think much of it, but reading the papers of late, I cannot help wonder whether she might be right...

Recently the debate has reopened on the relevance of Latin in our educational system. Our gouvernment would like to get rid of the stigma surrounding a technical education and might therefore cut back on Latin. Of course such news immediately gets classicists' panties in a bunch (including mine) for a variety of reasons. Some claim that by abandoning Latin we'll lose our view of history and our cultural roots (1). Others stress the importance of Latin as a basis for abstract thinking or acquiring other world languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese) (2). Still others defend the general point that we cannot have our production-oriented capitalist economy dictate our educational system (3).

But let's be honest; these reasons (and others you might think of) seem in fact a bit elitist. Still, I share these concerns. So am I elitist too? I wouldn't like to consider myself better than anyone else, not in a gazillion years, but I would agree that having studied Latin I feel I can make better sense of our world and culture (1), that I speak better French or Italian because of it (2), and that I feel better about myself doing something in this economy that is not directly related to making even more money or stuff no one needs (3).

So again, am I elitist too? No, I'm not. Because, you see, the word better in the above sentence need not imply better than someone else. It means better than if I hadn't taken Latin. Still, I'm not so sure this comes across very well in the traditional classicists' defense of Latin. And maybe that's where the problem is. Have classicists ever considered that they're not doing their business any favours by trying to defend it with pseudo-elitist arguments?

So instead of coming up with a million reasons why Latin should be kept in schools, classicists should perhaps cry out against the prejudice that a Latin education is the best you can get. It's not. And even if it seems like it, that's only because those who have taken Latin benefit from the opportunities they get later in life based on that same prejudice. Let's not perpetuate the stigma, shall we? I'm proud to be a classicist, but not that proud...

PS (and keep the jokes about ps standing for post scriptum to yourself, thank you): this is going to be my last blog for a while. This Fred is going off to the Tour de France to do the washing up for the Sporza-team. And frankly, I'm very excited at the prospect of leaving my precious Latin education at home for a month.

If you want to follow my adventures, check http://timentomindetour.blogspot.com for pics and updates!

Friday, 24 June 2011

Quotes from the book (4)

I just love laughing out loud on the train, hunched over a book, secretly enjoying my fellow travelers trying to find out what it is that makes me smile. The following passage, from Paul Murray's "Skippy Dies" really cracked me up...

'Mario -' Dennis sits up '- what makes you think any girl is going to get anywhere near you? Let alone like fifteen different girls.'
Mario hesitates, then says conspiratorially, 'I have a secret weapon.'
'You do?'
'You bet, mister.' He flips open his wallet. 'Read it and weep, boys. It's my lucky condom, which never fails.'
A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, 'Uh, Mario, in what way exactly is there anything lucky about that condom?'
'Never fails,' Mario repeats, a little defensively.
'But -' Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed '- I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn't you have used it by now?'
'How long have you had it in there, Mario?' Geoff says.
'Three years,' Mario says.
'Three years?'
'Without using it?'
'Doesn't that sound more like an unlucky condom?'
Mario looks troubled as his unshakeable faith in the luckiness of the lucky condom begins to show cracks.
'It was definitely pretty lucky for the condom, to wind up in your wallet!'
'Yeah, Mario, your wallet is like the Alcatraz of condoms.'
'It's like the condom Bermuda Triangle!'
'Condoms tell each other stories about your wallet, "Oh, he disappeared into Mario Bianchi's wallet, and he was never seen again."'
'Yeah, I bet right this very second your lucky condom is in there whistling the theme from The Great Escape and digging a tunnel out of your wallet with a plastic coffee stirrer -'

Thursday, 23 June 2011

De gustibus et coloribus

Although partners will usually not appreciate you bringing this up in the heat of a battle, I do believe that it's more important to ask the right questions than to give the correct answers. So when I say "Where do you think Fred will spend his summer holiday this year?", the correct answer is not "Malaysia!" but the right question is "Why Asia again?". And I'm stressing the word 'again' here, because I may still haven't found what I'm looking for, but I'm pretty sure of one thing: if I am really meant to find it in Asia, someone did a terrific job hiding it.

I will not waste your time trying to explain what attracts me in our world's greatest continent - de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum - but let me at least give you a modest piece of advice: there is a first time for everything, but don't let India be your first travel destination in Asia, as this would be the equivalent of letting a rock festival be your introduction to outdoor camping. And then again: once you start thinking it through, there's not really that much difference between traveling India and attending a rock festival.

To start it of with, it's not like you can just walk into these places. Rock festivals require you buy an entrance ticket, and in order to get into India you need to apply for a visa: both are too expensive nowadays, and unless you really want to try your luck you'd better not buy them from a Pakistani in the street, as official documents are rarely made in Bangladesh. Moreover, and this will be confirmed by anyone who has ever had a serious bowel obstruction and therefore spent a few hours on the toilet with a new book and a fresh toilet roll: bringing the appropriate pieces of paper is by no means a guarantee for succes.

At the gates of the festival camping, your luggage is usually screened by a team of security agents holding at least a bachelor's degree from the MacGyver Institute of Technology: anything that even remotely looks as if it could serve to build an improvised crossing between a hovercraft and a nuclear warhead launcher is held behind and thrown into a container. Drugs (don't tell me MacGyver was sober when he opened a sound activated security lock by filling four glasses of wine at different levels and playing the tones in ascending order), knives, BBQ-sets and bottles of alcohol: I suppose sometimes even garbage men enjoy extra legal advantages. At the border, it's not just your luggage that will be scrutinized: you also need to get through the immigration officer, whose intense stare is switching from your face to your passport as if he's playing "find the seven differences". Next time I need to go to a photographer for passport pictures, I seriously consider wearing comfortable clothes for a long-haul flight, in order to make it a easier to look like myself.

Once you've made it inside, it feels like you just set foot on another planet. A crowded one, that is, because the first thing you'll notice is way too many other people. In front of you, behind you, to your left and to your right. Depending on your moves, they may even end up under you or on top of you. I guess most people are not too familiar with Kepler's sphere packing problem, so allow me a few lines: back in 1611, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler posed a famous problem, asking for the most efficient way to pack equal-sized spheres together in a large crate. Should you pack them in identical layers, one on top of each other, with each sphere in one layer sitting right on top of the sphere directly beneath it? Or can you get more spheres into the box if you stagger the layers the way greengrocers stack oranges? It took mathematicians nearly 400 years to find the solution to this question, but the answer has always been out there: replace 'sphere' by 'personal bubble' and 'box' by 'festival ground', and you've got yourself a groundbreaking paper.

Now, the good news is that you can get used to this unnatural proximity of unfamiliar people, the bad news is a rather bizarre cosmic principle, which says that during your favourite band's gig, there will always be a taller person right in front of you, ethusiastically clapping the rhythm with both arms pointing towards the sky. Not only will this guy be blocking your view, he will also force your nose to be trapped inside his armpits. Sweaty armpits, of course, because the security dork at the entrance decided to classify his deodorant as potentially dangerous.

Needless to say that in India, the very concept of packing people in public places is taken to a whole different level: I remember taking a bus from Mahabalipuram to Pondicherry which was so crowded that I was no longer able to tell where my body ended, and my neighbour's began. Distraction was somehow provided though, in the shape of a colourful Bollywood flick on the shabby television screen at the front of the bus, but that didn't really work for me: I'd read in my guidebook that Indian movies are full of sexual references, and the last thing I needed was collective arousal...

There are more analogies to be found, for example when it comes to food, but that will be for next time. And it's about time you start using the comment box - right?

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

Quotes from the book (3)

As I spent a lot of time on trains the last few days, I had a chance to finish Roland Barthes' Mythologies which describes itself in the introduction as 'a corrosive, insolent, strange, cold, and yet witty book'. Having read it, I guess this description is accurate (if a little negative), but still it lacks one very important qualification, in my opinion, which is 'wildly interesting'.

What Roland Barthes - a French cultural critic (1915-1980) - meant to do in this book is make a semiological analysis of contemporary cultural myths. Now before you stop reading this, let me rephrase that in normal language. Barthes' approach is simple. He investigates elements of French culture, like soap-powder and detergents, toys, wrestling matches, news pieces and other, apparently ordinary cultural trivia and reads them like myths, i.e. he explores how they represent a deeper cultural disposition. In doing so, he is able to make some extraordinary analyses of how French culture (mind you, it's French culture from the 1950s!) represents its values.

If all this still sounds too hoity-toity for your taste, let me give an example. Barthes takes Jules Verne's story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) about a man exploring the deep sea in a submarine (science fiction at the time!), and uses it to analyse a very common cultural idea which we all share: the enjoyment of being enclosed. It's true, we all love being in a small space where we are the supreme master. It's why children love huts and tents, why adults like driving a car: you may be shut up in a small place, but within it you have everything under control. Yet there is one extra element: it's the combination of inwardness (being closed in) with the outside that we like. Indeed, you might be stuck in wooden (hut) or a steel (car) box, but from it, you can see the whole world. And that's what appeals to us.

If you think about it, this 'myth' returns in many elements of our culture. Watching TV when it's raining outside, surfing the internet, riding glass elevators in tall buildings, having an apartment with a terrace, sunbathing on a towel on a beach, and perhaps the best example of all: reading on the toilet. They're all examples of combining unbroken inwardness with the vagueness of the outside, to use Barthes' words. And all of these situations give us a hugely pleasant sensation. It makes us feel safe and in command at the same time.

And that's why Barthes' Mythologies is a wildly interesting book. It takes very familiar things and situations and explains what the cultural motivations behind them are. Like no other book it takes the ordinary out of the ordinary. And to be frank, humbly trying to piece together a piece of cultural criticism myself once in a while, I'm insanely jealous of Barthes' talent for doing just this.

To finish it off, just one quote which struck me as very relevant even today. Something Vic Van Aelst should keep in mind next time he criticizes Di Rupo's or Milquet's Dutch:

Whatever the degree of guilt of the accused, there is also the spectacle of a terror which threatens us all, that of being judged by a power which wants to hear only the language it lends us. (...) To rob a man of his language in the very name of language: this is the first step in all legal murders

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

Less (meat) is more

Japanese scientists have recently synthesized meat from human feces.

Say what?

Let me repeat that for you: Japanese scientists from the Okayama Laboratory have recently successfully created artificial meat from sewage mud containing human feces. And although this might open up some interesting possibilities for replying the waitress at your favourite burger joint,
- "How did you like your burger Sir?"
- "Perfect, it tasted like shit!",
or talking yourself out of a stinky embarrassing situations,
- "Did someone just fart over here?"
- "Errr..., no, I just opened my lunchbox!",
I am not really sure I can follow the motivation behind this. Having to apply for research grants myself every once in a while, I really would have loved to see the commission treating this team's proposal. A fourteen-page file, dumped onto a big, black desk, ready to compete with applications from people eager to investigate whatever it is about whales that requires you to catch at least 200 mammals: 'Poop burgers: can they solve the hunger problem?'.

Somehow, this whole idea of eating my own excrements - albeit shaped like a steak - makes me think of Escher's waterfall. No matter where you start, you eventually end up in the same place but still you feel like there's something wrong with the perspective - right?


It's only fair to say that Professor Ikeda and his team of researchers understand that 'there are some psychological barriers to be surmounted knowing your food is made from human waste'. When it comes to world class understatements, I believe this one can actually compete with 'Hugh Hefner is not a virgin anymore'. However - and I would like to get an amen for optimism, they hope 'people will be able to overlook that ugly detail in favor of perks like environmental responsibility, cost and the fact that the resulting meat will have fewer calories'.

How about surmounting the barrier that your food spent its life behind barriers, gnawing the days away, oblivious of that thing outside we tend to call 'the Earth'? How about taking up our environmental responsibility, not eating meat, adopting a vegetarian life-style? Even Professor Ikeda has to support this idea, because I suppose I'm not the only vegetarian who noticed the dramatic influence of a animal-friendly diet on the Bowel Factory and Co.

Or how less meat may equal more meat...

Monday, 20 June 2011

History of Hair

I have always had a love-hate-relationship with my hair. Or better yet, scratch that: I have always hated my hair. For starters, it’s blond and even as a child I realised this means I will never be the cool guy (in the movies they always have dark hair). Moreover, it’s thin and dry. Sure, if I were ever in a survival situation, it would be extremely useful for starting a fire. For the rest, its as useless as a solar powered flashlight.

I was acutely reminded of this when today I found myself at 10:02 at a hairdresser’s which opened at ten sharp… with three people before me. Still, I was in desperate need of a haircut, so there was nothing to be done, except sit and wait. And while I was waiting for my turn, I found myself going over the different hairstyles I have sported in my soon to be thirty year-long life. A history of hair, so to speak. And (I must be going crazy), for some strange reason, I have decided to share this history of hair and some thoughts about it with you…

1. The first hair-cut I can remember was something we called the mushroom-cut. It looked like… well, you can guess already. Kind of as if you had put a casserole over my head and cut off everything that stuck out from under the rim. Awkward in hindsight - especially since it once earned me second place in a Jommeke-look-alike competition, although I can’t decide whether first place would have been more or less embarassing!

2. After a while, though, my mother decided I needed a change and dragged my ass to a new trendy salon which talked her into a new look for her son: the right part with combed and gelled tuft. This meant that from then on I had to comb my hair in two parts and use gel to create a wavy tuft to the right. A nice job for a twelve year old with two left hands. Plus, became of the utmost importance that I faced the wind in the right direction or I looked like Cameron Diaz in There’s something about Mary.

3. When I went to secondary school, I soon tired of this hair-cut and started my teenage rebellion , which also had its capillary consequences. There’s nothing that says teenager louder than long hair. So I started to let my hair grow long. Understandably, this resulted in a constant row with my mum (who said it was too long) and myself (who said it was still too short). Therefore, the end result was what I call McDonalds hair. Picture the M from McDonalds, now picture it in your hair framing your face.

4. Next I started rebelling against my teenage rebellion and since I was massively into Buddhism at the time, I decided to shave my head. Not completely bald, but three to five millimeters long. Great success. Now I looked like someone with a terrible illness, and not nearly as wise as this guy:

5. When I went to university, I finally started to realize that the Germans were right when they said In der Beschränkung zeigt sich der Meister. So I was done with the extremes and started to ask for a short, but fashionable haircut. Unfortunately, most hairdressers seemed to interpret this at the time (early 2000s) as: ‘Cut everything on the sides, leave everything on top’. Together with some gel and riding a bike to classes, I must have looked disturbingly alike to Pauly from MTV’s Jersey Shore. Fabulous.

(See that painful look in his eyes? I had the same thing...)

6. This continued for quite some time until the Gods decided I still had to reach my ultimate hair-disaster. (Deep breath) Indeed. I have, in fact, for a while, in full capacity of my mental faculties, tried to imitate…David Beckham’s hair style. The one with the headband. There, I’ve said it. My God, at times like these, I’m really grateful that most of you don’t know the difference between both Freds yet. Besides being immensely awkward and taking forever (growing your hair back out from Dalai Lama-style takes time!), perhaps the strangest thing about this phase is that there are so few pictures of me with that hair. Luckily, it seems this episode in my history of hair will be lost for future generations. Phew!

And for the last few years I have tried every short hair style possible. With a parting on the left, with a parting on the right, with gel, with wax, without anything, combed, uncombed, ... You name it. Lately, when they ask me what I want in the salon, I just shrug and say with some je m'en fou 'Do what you want with it'. Sometimes something half-decent surfaces, which is then gone the next morning, only to be replaced by Cousin Itt.


Gosh. That was cathartic. Unfortunately, as I was making this history of hair, I realised that Hegel already said: 'We learn from history that we do not learn from history'. Crap. Oh well... Maybe, what I need is not a history of hair, but a revolution of hair. Maybe I should douse it with petrol and light it on fire? That seems to have worked quite well recently…

Sunday, 19 June 2011

Definitions

One of the hardest things about my job as a professional mathematician is trying to come up with the correct definitions. And I am not talking about the boldfaced ones, silently introducing the arrival of a theorem like the text message "You've got plans for tonight? Fancy a beer or two?" portending a mind-numbing hangover. I am talking about the actual definition of my job.

Be it on a reception of a friend who finally found a job, toasting to the arrival of a new rat in the race, at the airport, anxiously awaiting the arrival of your bag, on a party, hastily downing a beer or two until the buzz in your brain is big enough to safely ignore the first chapters from the unwritten textbook on 'Social Engineering', or at the Christmas table, spending a stiff first night with your parents-in-law, there's always this one particular moment - usually marking the ending of a silence which would otherwise become even more awkward - in which someone ignites the dreaded conversation:

-"So, what do you do for a living?".
-"Errr, I'm a mathematician."

This may seem like a perfectly harmless opener to you, but it is nothing less than the socializing mathematician's nightmare. Either you get a puzzled face blankly staring at you ("A mathematician? Not wearing glasses? Having a beer?"), often followed by an almost robotic "Oh, how interesting!" and two eyes nervously scanning the place for the nearest exit, or you get an overly enthousiastic "Oh, so that means we're colleagues! What are you working on?". The latter scenario results in me scanning the room for the nearest exit - I meet enough mathematicians at work, no need to do so outside our habitat - the former in trying to steer away from the subject.

Not that I don't like to talk about mathematics though, it's just that people's attitude towards mathematicians is rather polarized. For some strange reason, meeting a math-whizz evokes either scientofobic laughter in people, or an almost pious admiration - as if we are Chosen Ones, spending our devout lives staring at codes that need to be cracked. When someone tells me he's very good in reciting sentences backwards, I feel absolutely no urge to apologize myself for the fact that I can't. But when I tell people I'm a mathematician, things are different: "Oh, mathematics. Sorry, I've never been too good in that." Underlined with the compassionate look I try to keep for special occasions, like a blind colleague telling me his wife left him when she heard he has testicular cancer.

Next time you meet a mathematician, people, there's no need to be so humble. We're lucky bastards after all, being able to do a job which consists of doing things we're good at. Staring at an equation holding on to its solutions like a lioness guarding her cubs, slurping coffee all day long (which is actually Paul Erdos' definition: 'a mathematician is a machine turning coffee into theorems'), locking ourselves into our brain, playing a formal game of beauty. Next time, please proceed as follows:

-"So, what do you do for a living?".
-"Errr, I'm a mathematician."
- "Pft, big deal. Can you say that backwards, by the way? I met a guy who can do that in a second, he's amazing!"

Definition:
A mathematician is like an IKEA closet: always a few screws loose, but put them in any living room and they will perfectly blend in with the wallpaper.

Saturday, 18 June 2011

Pod-heads

6,971,963,078.
According to the website I just checked, that is the current world population. Plenty of strangers, that is. Or, hereby referring to Will Rogers' famous words "A stranger is a friend you haven't met yet", plenty of future friend requests to be confirmed. Which brings us to a tricky point: how many friends do we ideally need? Too few, and people might think you're a loser. Too many, and you might look like a social tramp.

As opposed to the other Fred, I don't believe in numbers. Especially not the ones published in scientific papers. I believe in personal criteria. And although I have more than one entry on my checklist - ranging from the number of poems you know by heart to your ability to turn four random ingredients into a meal, there are two criteria that play a crucial role. Books, and music. So the first thing I usually do when someone invites me to his or her place, is to have a peek into my host's record collection and personal library.

"I don't buy CD's, I usually just listen to the radio."
Killer number one.
"I don't like reading, I prefer watching the movie."
Killer number two.

As we are constantly trying to share our thoughts with you, let me use this occasion to let you peek into Fred and Fred's record collection. Because, after all, we are both Pod-heads.



Venetian snares: "Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding" (2004)
Electronic music in its purest form. This album, one of Aaron Funk's less aggressive-sounding breakcore releases, sounds more or less like a soundtrack from a different planet. One housing a highly advanced technology, because the fourteen tracks on this masterpiece often make me think of a manual for a machine we don't know, in a language we don't understand. They are not meant to be digested on a lazy sunday afternoon, quoi. Employing unorthodox time signatures, switching back and forth between emotional outbursts and rhythmical eruptions, ignoring standard song patterns and structures, yet leaving you behind with a strange feeling of melancholy.

Google is one of your friends, "Vida" by Venetian Snares the stranger you are looking for. Enjoy.

Friday, 17 June 2011

Does my ass look big in this (car)?

This week, Fred and I are both going for a visit to what I fondly call The Far West, the West of Flanders that is. Since per chance we both planned to leave by Sunday noon and to return on Monday evening, and since I was going to drive over there anyway, we’ll be carpooling, obviously. But today Fred sent me an e-mail in which he - and I quote - ‘demanded’ to give me gas money for the ride…

Now this reminded me of something which I have been meaning to bring up. When people say (or write) things, they can basically do two things. One is: make a statement. This constative language, like ‘It’s raining outside’. It’s a statement, it’s information. The other thing is: do something. This is performative language, like when you told your mom ‘I promise I won’t hit my brother again’. It’s not giving information, it’s doing something, namely making a promise. We call that a speech act, doing something through language. By saying ‘I promise’, you do what you say, you promise. To put it succinctly: in constative language we say what we say, in performative language we do what we say.

But if you look closely at language, there’s performance and speech acts everywhere. The same sentence ‘It’s raining outside’ which was purely constative when mentioned above, can also be performative. For instance, when you use this sentence as an answer to someone asking you how you are doing. In the dialogue ‘Fred: ‘How are you, Fred?’ - Fred: ‘It’s raining outside’ Fred is not really giving information in his answer. Instead he is performing a bluesy feeling. He is suggesting he’s feeling a bit down. This too, is a speech act.

Of course, I didn’t think of this myself. If I did, I wouldn’t be wondering once in a while what I’m going to do with my life - or better yet, how I’m going to afford my life - when I run out of a job in 2013. Instead it was the British philosopher J.L. Austin came up with it in his book How to Do Things with Words?

Now it’s fun and really interesting to consider the performative dimension of what we say or what people say to us, as it might clarify some puzzling situations. For instance, if you visit someone and they ask you if you’d like a cup of coffee, you might respond ‘Please don’t bother!’. In this case, you are saying no, but your speech act is rather different. Your speech act is actually saying you might like some coffee, but feel socially awkward that the person in question should have to go and brew a pot on your behalf. Most people, however, are intuitively aware of this performance in ‘Please don’t bother!’ and will insist ‘I was just going to make a pot anyway!’. The performance in their insistence tells you to get over your awkward feeling. Net result: a nice cup of coffee.

But make no mistake, the performative dimension of language can also be a big problem between people, even between best friends or married couples. For instance, when breaking up, people will say ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ - which most of the time isn’t true, but the speech act is: ‘I know I’m hurting you. Please try not to take it out on yourself’. However, most of the times, we do not hear this speech act. It gets lost in the communicational distrust that tends to arise when people hit a rough spot in their relationship.

And the queen of all problems in speech act theory can be summed up in the famous, but dreaded seven words ‘Does my ass look big in this?’ to which there is no answer no matter which speech act you take into consideration. Answering ‘No’ (considering a speech act of uncertainty) only gets you ‘You’re only saying that because you know that’s what I want to hear’. Answering ‘Yes’, even as a joke, or in pure performative desperation, is no option either. Obviously.

So when Fred sent me the e-mail with the demand to pay for the gas, I first felt a little bit annoyed. We’re good friends, I thought, it shouldn’t matter whether I drive or not. I’m not asking to pay when we’re having drinks at his place. Does that make me a bad person? And then it hit me: Fred’s insistence to pay for gas money, is actually a performance of his social awkwardness over the fact that I have a car and he should benefit from it. Of course, I’m fine with him coming along on the boring ride, and he probably knows it, but still he cannot help himself from saying ‘I insist I pay for gas’. But in a way, this a good thing because it means that his speech act is really his way to say thank you for the other times he rode with me.

So I’ll try to respond to your mail with your speech act in mind, Fred: ‘Sure, you can give me gas money. And no problem for all the other times. You’re welcome to ride with me any day!’.

Thursday, 16 June 2011

Guerilla-style

Yesterday, I was at my brother's place. At some point during the evening, while heavy downpour was making its tumultuous point on the roof, we started watching television. Guerilla style, randomly zapping through the channels. A few things caught my attention:

(i) A commercial for dog snacks. Having spent a week in Bujumbura, only not too long ago, I suddenly found the very concept of advertising canine treats a bit strange. Living on this planet where hunger is unfortunately still the staple diet - and I am not talking about the uncomfortable feeling we all get on a late Saturday night, when the greasy scent of fried food is wafting into our drunken nose - it made me scratch my head and wonder where things went wrong. I also thought: what if Vietnamese people were to see this add? They'd probably be thinking "Ah, that's how you catch them! You just buy a bag of bait.".

(ii) A scientist on National Geographic, enthousiastically elaborating on what seemed like the biggest thing in years. The superlatives he used, the gestures he was making, the anticipating intonation in his voice: it all pointed towards a major breakthrough in engineering. "Oh my God, they finally did it", I thought, "they invented cars running on urine!". It turned out that the guy was talking about light bulbs. And I suddenly realized how wacky I must sometimes look to my students, (d)avidly trying to introduce them to the world of basic calculus problems...

(iii) Another commercial, this time for beer. A rather funny one I'd say - well, the standards where not that high - with the first man on the moon bringing his gay green fridge box, grabbing a cold beer, watching the earth from his foldable camping chair. Opening his rewarding bottle, only to hit the screen of his astronaut's helmet when he tried to drink. The thing is, I can't remember the name of the beer. And you want to know why? Because there was an obvious mistake in the commercial. When he opened his beer, liquid was bubbling out of the bottle - like Homer's bag of chips when he was weightless. Obviously, apart from two golf balls, there is also gravity on the moon. So yes, this bothered me: if you do the efforts to let your commercial take place on the moon, you might as well think the details over, right? Especially when the geeks are watching, because they focus on things like that. And forget the brand name...

Wednesday, 15 June 2011

The Communist's Constant

I don't really know why, but I feel like explaining something today. Maybe it's because the semester is over, which means that I'll have to wait another four months before I can start teaching again? Well, I could also be in a nerd mood...

Here's a question: apart from the number of fruits that allegedly fell on Isaac Newton's head, what do you believe to be the best-known number in physics? I'd say it's the speed of light, with its astronomical value of (approximately) 300.000 kilometers per second. Most people are probably familiar with the fact that Albert Einstein postulated that the speed of light is constant - for any observer, regardless his or her frame of reference, whether you like it or not - but the subtlety and counterintuitive character of this claim, dating back to 1905, is often misunderstood.

First of all, this means that the speed of light neither depends on your position in the universe, nor on today's date; you, hopefully still reading this, Genghis Khan and the Emperor of Antares, a red supergiant star in the Milky Way galaxy, would all measure the same speed of light. And apart from physics textbook printing companies, who would have loved it if the speed of light were to change over the years, nobody should be bothered by this. Nor suprised. What is harder to believe however, is the fact that your measured value for the speed of light does not depend on the speed of the source, nor on your own movement (away from or towards the source). As this is probably the more difficult side of the equation, let me give you an easy analogy to illustrate the weirdness of Einstein's assumption, on which his celebrated theory of special relativity is based.

Imagine you are about to be chased by a killer hamster, ready to plunge his widely underestimated pointy fangs into your juicy calf muscles and reduce you to a pile of undigestible leftovers within mere seconds. The angry creature is 100 meters away from you and will approach you at 5 meters per second.

Your options are:

a) Stand still, which is the lazy way of spending the last 20 seconds of your life. Note that a lot can be done in 20 seconds, as I will elaborate in a further post.

b) Run towards the creature, which is in fact the best way to make your life even shorter. Before you all start posting the same comment: no, wearing an armoured body suit will not change this; although killer hamsters are known to prefer fresh food to canned food, this will absolutely not prevent them from violently murdering you.

c) Try to run away from the creature. Bear in mind though that recent research conducted by a team of world leading authorities seems to suggest that killer hamsters have no sense of “giving up”. This is a preliminary result however, as the rodents under observation and - therefore - the experiment are still running. Some say that this exceptional stamina is due to the fact that killer hamsters are sent to special Shaolin treadmill camps once they reach puberty. We refer the interested reader to the recent paper “If what they say is true: the Shaolin and Killer Hamsters could be dangerous” (W. Tang et al.), to appear in Journal of Bloody Scary Animals which are not Rabbits.

Anyway, my point is the following: the time it takes this fluffy monster to reach you heavily depends on your own speed and direction of movement. Or, put differently, insofar as you'd be interested in trying to determine the killer hamster's speed at the moment it launches its famous final blow - which seems like a rather unconventional way to spend the last moment of your life, you'd not always find the same value. If you'd be running at more than 5 meters per second away from your certain death in furry disguise, for instance, you'd have the impression that its speed would be a negative number as it would appear to be moving away from you.

However, and this is the upshot of today's lesson, for photons (light particles) this is fundamentally different: regardless of the direction in which and the speed at which you are moving, light will always move towards you with the very same speed. I am not convinced God is a DJ, especially not when tuning into the wrong radio station, but I'm pretty sure that if He is behind all this, God is definitely a commie...

Monday, 13 June 2011

Tofu and burgers...

The price for the biggest mystery in the veggie food rack has to go to tofu. Undoubtedly. When you buy this stuff in a supermarket, it has no taste, no colour and no smell. I don't know to what extent physical lingo is a part of your daily vocabulary, but this basically means that tofu is a culinary vacuum.

(phone ringing)
- Hello boss, you've got a minute there? I successfully extracted all flavouring and colouring from this product. What shall I do with the residue?
- Errr, what does it smell like?
- Nothing.
- Wrap it. Put a sticker on it that says 'tofu'.

My guess? Tofu is the biggest unresolved question within the field of culinary philosophy: apart from trying to figure out whether the poached egg came before the fried chicken or not, and whether a bag of chips in the middle of the forest is still crispy when there's no one around to taste it, academics should really be trying to find out whether tofu actually exists, or whether it's just a soy-based illusion.

Luckily enough, there's also burgers. Vegetarians have a choice between oodles of burgers. However, there's nothing worse than ordering a veggie burger and having to face the resolute meat-eater who feels the urge to point out that this is ridiculous, 'because you choose not to eat meat, yet you do buy things that look like meat'.

Listen to me, you bloody moron, since when is the round three-dimensional shape exclusively reserved for meat? The day you will start buying yourself cow-shaped pieces of steak, I will start to cook myself carrot-shaped burgers, deal? Thank God you're not the head of the 'Food for the Future'-think tank.

(guy entering the office)
- Hello boss, you've got a minute there? I just invented this new type of food, and I believe it's a winner: it's highly nutritious, very tasteful, super cheap to produce, can be grown in the most extreme weather conditions and has a negligible carbon footprint.
- Sounds interesting. What shape?
- Errr, I haven't really thought about that boss. Round slices, I guess?
- That's impossible: that's for meat.
- Ah. Erhm... square slices?
- Sorry. For meat.
- Balls?
(shakes the head)
- How about... cauliflower-shaped?
- Sorry, that's for veggie burgers.
(thinks hard)
- A collection of colourful interlocking plastic bricks, which can easily be stacked and rearranged?
(giving the are-you-serious-look)
- Dude, you're fired...

Saturday, 11 June 2011

Compact message

Often, which – as a temporal adverb – doesn't say that much because it gives no real clue about the frequency of what is about to follow, people who have been reading my writings, and I guess this applies to most of my blogs and (triggered by the clinical ping announcing the arrival of an unread message in my inbox) even some of my emails, complain about the length and downright complexity of some of the sentences I produce to convey my messages (or even the message itself, although this obviously depends on the kind of books you are used to read – since I would think, for example, that anyone who has enjoyed Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics has wrestled himself through more than one sentence consisting of at least half a page), as they frequently contain long enumerations, references to certain websites and nested structures – using either brackets, quotation marks or, as I just learned from the Wikipedia page covering this particular punctuation mark, one of the many dashes in our language, varying in both their appearance and function – which apparently cover the point I intend to make under a thick layer of irrelevant data (although I deliberately think about any word I put on – the sometimes proverbial – paper), like the crust of our Earth covering important lessons about the history of mankind and its origin (think about fossil sediments or human artifacts from ancient, extinct societies) under a collection of rock strata and volcanic residue, and therefore confuse my readers – sometimes even the most stubborn ones, willing to understand every single thought – ending up in complete despair, lost in transcription, desperately trying to make sense of what they just read by jumping to the beginning and rereading the whole blurb.

I don't know where they get this...

Friday, 10 June 2011

Insomnia

I couldn't sleep last night. Once again. It seems like the sleep department, which is the brain section situated right between the dream factory and the loathsome collection of cells whose sole purpose seems to be 'waking you up in the middle of the night, leaving you staring at the ceiling, wondering whether you need to go to the toilet - or not', hasn't been too active lately, as if they're all dozing off up there. Which sounds a bit paradoxical, doesn't it? I tried to put an end to these sleepless nights - not touching alcohol before hitting the bed, drinking just a few trappist beers, finishing a whole bottle of wine, knocking my shitfaced self completely out - but nothing seems to work. Last night, I started wondering: could it really be that I am an insomniac? That would be pretty scary, as this could change my life rather drastically. And then again, unless I'd decide to take up flugelhorn classes, it probably wouldn't affect other people's lives too much. But this could have been completely different in a parallel universe...

I mean, imagine I were born in 1888, under the name of Irving Berlin. Now that would have changed the shape of your life: working yourself through the Christmas shopping list might have been possible without you having to focus on keeping under control that overwhelming desire to violently decapitate random supermarket customers, driven to an almost murderous insanity by the seasonally adjusted elevator music flowing through the speakers like maple syrup through a newly openend squeeze bottle. Listening to the radio during wintertime might even have been possible without feeling to urge to find the nearest toilet, wanting to barf last night's meal through the sewer. For I, widely considered one of the most important American songwriters to have lived the planet, would simply not have dreamt about a white Christmas. Not even about a standardly rainy one, let alone a peep of hot chicks in red sexy outfits, curling up their smooth seductive bodies against my naked skin. I wouldn't have been dreaming at all. I would have been wide awake, listening to my snoring wife roaring her way through a forest the size of an average European capital. Pretty sure that this would not have been that good a song title...

It could have been different in the other direction as well. Imagine yourself in Washington, August 28, 1963. The Coca-Cola company advertising its first diet drink, the free-wheelin' Bob Dylan blasting through a set of crackling speakers, surrounded by thousands of black brothers and sisters eagerly awaiting one of the most well-known speeches to be held in history. A speech which changed the whole concept of taking a bus in the States, as the colour of your skin suddenly no longer determined your position. Your position on the bus, that is, not in everyday life. But can you envision a world in which I, Martin Luther King, entered the stage - salty pearls launching themselves from my sweaty face to my white shirt, a throbbing vein on my forehead revealing my nervosity, my slightly shaking hands holding tight to a jug of strong smelly coffee, my bloodshot eyes overlooking a massive crowd of people holding on to their breath - only to end up addressing the world with the words: "Brothers and sisters, erhm... Sorry guys, I really couldn't sleep last night."?

I'm telling you, not being able to sleep can be both a dream and a nightmare of its own...

Thursday, 9 June 2011

Quotes from the book (2)

You might have noticed that Fred and I are quite alike. It seems our mental clocks run remarkably similar. Just yesterday Fred finished his book Our tragic universe, and today I finished mine, by Cees Nooteboom: 's Nachts komen de vossen.

It's a great book; it skifully weaves together wafer-thin but intense stories about Dutch expats, death and love. I once read about someone who had the habit of skimming the first and the last sentence of a book as a rule before buying it, which makes sense as a lot can be gauged from those two (the hardest) sentences. So, in the spirit of 'Quotes from the book', here are a few of the opening and closing lines of the short-stories in Nooteboom's booklet, hoping that they might give you a taste of the sublime prose Nootemboom writes. From the majestic, almost baroque rhetoric in the quote from Gondels to the staccato prose-poetry in Paula II. This man is a master of the Dutch language and his fragile stories are deceptively gripping...

(from Gondels): "Gondels zijn atavistisch, hij wist niet meer waar hij dat gelezen had, en wilde daar nu ook niet over nadenken omdat er dan, dacht hij, iets van het pathos van het ogenblik zou vervliegen (...) Hij antwoordde niet en keek naar de wiegende witte papiertjes die langzaam in het assige, avondkleurige water wegdreven, tot er een gondel voorbijkwam en hij ze niet meer zag".

(from Heinz): "Eerst een ronde bedrog. Ik kijk naar een foto van een groep mensen, waar ik zelf tussen sta. (...) Wij zijn onze geheimen, en als het goed is nemen we ze mee naar waar niemand erbij kan".

(from Paula II): "Je hebt me opgeroepen, je krijgt antwoord. Of je het hoort weet ik niet (...) Afscheid, het echte, het laatste. Je hebt je raam opengezet. Windvlaag. Dat was ik. Geritsel, gefluister. Het geluid van vossen, een nacht in de woestijn. Gedachte vossen. Geen echte. Alles heel vluchtig. Zoals wij zijn. Weg".

I love a good book.

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Quotes from the book...

'But isn't the point of being alive to try to answer the big questions?'
I shook my head.
'For me it's about trying to work out what the questions are.'

(Scarlett Thomas, Our tragic universe)

Tuesday, 7 June 2011

Old t-shirts

One of the things I disliked about being young is the fact that I grew up as a kid under a Fashion Fascist regime. My mother - aka die Führerin - bought my clothes, decided where and when to wear what (wondering why not being allowed) and dictated what was in. Well, out is the more appropriate preposition here, since 'fashionably alternative' was not in her dictionary. Nor - as I later came to understand - in the budget.

Luckily enough, this all came to a halt during the Great Era of Textile Revolution - more commonly referred to as 'puberty' - when I managed to end her supremacy over my wardrobe. The price I had to pay was high - literally then, as I didn't get too much pocket money - but step by step I was able to climb the young adult's sole scale of relevance: the Ladder of Coolness. Sneaking out of the house in an old pair of trousers from my dad (there used to be a cheap alternative to baggies), donning a shirt from a favourite band underneath the jacket that went into my backpack as soon as I rounded the corner, and wearing a legendary pair of old-school Adidas shoes I once won through a television show (long ago, in a time where answers to television quiz questions were still answered by post-cards, not by speed-dialing): puberty started to feel not so bad after all...

And although I don't wear my old shirts from the Offspring or the Beasty Boys anymore, I can't really get it over my heart to throw them away: they are still part of the pile, like withering witnesses of the numerous battles fought for Freedom of Fabric. Battles it were indeed, because there was an annual counter-movement: during the spring break cleaning, the Fashion Police launched unannounced raids. This meant Government intrusion into my kingdom - a four-walled room plastered with posters and rock star pictures - relentless wardrobe inspections and the annual deportation of anything that didn't match the official taste.

Resistance was futile, as I once experienced. The victim was a self-made shirt. To be more precise: a white, tight Fruit of the Loom shirt customized with my very own graphic design in black marker, turning it into a piece of an imaginary band's merchandising. In all my haste, I had forgotten to hide this unique member of the censored collection when I heard my mom marching up the stairs. And as she crawled herself through a pile of clothes that were even out of fashion to her taste - which, in view of her perspective on the concept of being in fashion, meant that they were almost ready for an afterlife as a retro style piece of clothing - she bumped into the unfortunate politically incorrect refugee in the closet. "This one," she said with a look of disdain on her face, "does not belong here." And the fearful words fell, the equivalent of a shirt's condemnation to death: "This one has to go." I tried everything I could, even a rather far-fetched "But mom, this one brings good fortune!", but nothing could prevent one of my favourite shirts to be banned forever. Off with a bunch of other clothes, in a big yellow plastic bag, direction Africa. "The poor little kids over there will be more than happy to get these clothes," she always added, addressing my conscience and thereby suppressing any further inquiries for justification from my part.

Last week, I visited a tiny village in Kirundo, the northernmost province in Burundi, close to the Rwandese border. Across lake Cohoha, walking a mile inwards, through banana tree forests and randomly scattered huts housing a family, a few chickens and - in the best case - a goat or a cow. It was one of the weirdest moments of my life. I was literally surrounded by a whole village, more or less 200 people, with the likely exception of the unfortunate guys lying passed out under a tree, probably still regretting having knocked down too much impeke the night before when they heard the news of the day: a real muzungu, from across the water, in the middle of their village. According to my guide I was the first visitor in five years, and judging from the stares I got I don't think he was exaggerating. If you'd ask me, this should be a standard part of our education: standing alone amidst dozens of black people, including the poor little guy bursting into tears in fear of the unknown, pointing at you and your white skin.

I have to agree, I felt rather uncomfortable. Not that I was afraid that something might happen – I was accompanied by a guide from the village after all – but the average dictionary contains more than one entry whose meaning I don't necessarily want to understand through experience, and 'a mob' is definitely one of them. So I felt rather relieved when my guide suggested to walk me back to the boat. Until one particular man suddenly caught my eye. A shy, slender guy, sheepishly peering at me from a distance. I couldn't help myself, but I give him a long incredulous stare. Back where I live, in the so-called civilized world, this is often considered as an application for a fight: looking for a fraction of a second too long at someone - or, as is often the case, his girlfriend - usually induces a rhetorical "What you looking at? Am I wearing something of yours?", and may result in your face meeting that someone else's fist. This man though, did nothing like that. He just stared back at me.

Strangely enough, this was the first time the aforementioned question would have been justified, as he was wearing a not-so-tight, not-so-white Fruit of the Loom shirt. Customized with red soil streaks, bloody stains and hardly visible black markings referring to an imaginary band. The only thing that crossed my mind was a genuine repetition of my earlier plead: "I hope this shirt may bring good luck to you.".

Monday, 6 June 2011

Algebra of Guilt

Sure, I don't like mondays is a phrase that's used too often. Especially when you consider the tragic story behind that beautiful song. But still, today was one of those days... Again.

In fact, I actually tried to amuse myself in the train by calculating the shittiness of stuff that happened today. Of course, I only engaged in this truly breath-taking mirth because I was bored as hell thanks to another horror show of my good friends NMBS & NS.

So my first exercise was to think about train delays and how to calculate their influence on your day. So I came up with value d, which is the time it actually takes you to get to work divided by the amount of time your commute usually takes. The higher d (especially d > 1), the more reason you have to complain. In my case, today d = 442 / 330. I then tried to refine the equation, by splitting up this total value d in d at any given point in time: d(t). So I could then calculate how much shittier delays get as you progress through your commute.

Anyway that's where it ended, as I'm pretty sure the math was getting dodgy there (it's not really right I know), and moreover, I couldn't find any other interesting values. I tried some stuff with m, which is text messages received minus text messages sent (ideally your value should be positive), but that wasn't much fun either.

But while I was thinking about shitty stuff to count and ways to calculate its effect, I started thinking of other things that proved more difficult to count. Like how many times I had genuinely said hello to someone today (zero). Or how often I had thought about my citytrip next weekend (zero). Or the amount in euros (zero) I had given to that guy who came up to me in Antwerp Central Station at the end of my 'shitty' day, asking if I could spare something for the homeless.

I even knew his name, for fuck's sake, and I'm sure he recognized me as well from all those years ago...

As one mathematician once said: Sometimes it is useful to know how large your zero is.


Three-bit-liner

Apparently, Burundi has an "anti-corruption Brigade".

We found out about this on our way from Bujumbura to Kirundo, when our vehicle was pulled over by an officer.

We came away without inspection though: 20 000 Burundi Franc did the job...