Knots, Zhenyi

11/06/2024 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

People at a coffee shopZhenyi is not the least bit interested in how you tie with your shoelaces.

Slip knots, square knots, Windsors and all manner of Boy Scout knots are not knots at all

To mathematicians like Zhenyi, a ‘knot’ is a very specific phenomenon. It’s a continuous circle, a continuous ring with no openings. Rubber bands, wedding rings and fan belts qualify as a knot. So do the tangles found in your DNA molecules.

Give a ring a half twist and you have a figure eight. Wrap it around your fingers in certain ways and you create a cat’s cradle which can changed into any number of playful knots.

Since the beginnings of Knot Theory in the 1800s, mathematicians have tried to classify and tabulate all possible knots. More than six billion different variations have been identified to date. In fact all prime knots up to 16 crossings have just recently been tabulated.

Theorists don’t “discover” knot variations so much as they classify and tabulate them. Zhenyi’s PhD efforts center around finding new ways to help classify all knots.

Different looking knots may actually be the same one. Proving or disproving ‘equivalence’ is part of what gets Zhenyi out of bed in the morning.

His work is not aimed at practical applications – it’s ‘pure’ mathematics. However, much mathematics once considered “pure” did end up finding applications years down the road. For example, non-Euclidean geometry as developed by Riemann became the foundation of Einstein’s theory of relativity decades after its conception.

Along with the elegance of the math, Zhenyi is fascinated by the labyrinthine calligraphy and knot motifs that have graced manuscripts and mosques for millennia.

The knot shown on his computer screen, the Legendrian trefoil knot, is central to his dissertation.

This is a time of stress for Zhenyi. He’ll soon submit his findings to pre-publication review and then beyond that to formal peer review journals.

The man who works standing upright in the windows of our coffee shop will be standing there for at least some part of next year.

Trump and kid / 2024

10/13/2024 by Pat Shiplett 10 Comments

Fiction“The Robert” began to model himself after the president who single-handedly saved the country from itself.

For a kid his age, he watches more that his share of C-Span.

He doesn’t care about wonky issues but he likes to study powerful people. He’s especially impressed by how they call people names and use outrageous lies to humiliate them.

The boy kept his hair long so when he decided to sweep it across his forehead, all he needed was hairspray. At the same time, he began to pretend he didn’t hear kids when they called him Bobby.

I’m “The Robert,” he insisted. When a seventh-grader used his old name, he made up rumors that destroyed her. It felt good.

Strutting and bloviating – “everyone loves me” – he came to dominate his school.

As they did every Sunday, his family went to his grandparents. His aunts, uncles and cousins hooted with laughter when he launched into his Trump routine.

“Aunt Caroline’s a fat slob,” he announced as potatoes were passed. The Robert told his cousin she was a H-U-G-E loser. “Jason wimps out during gym.” He reproached his father for not having an advanced degree and taunted the housekeeper with a fake Guatemalan accent.

After dinner his grandmother invited him into the living room. She’s an adoring woman and each of her nine grandkids believe they’re her favorite.

When they were alone she pulled Bobby close and held him long enough for it to mean something. She took a step back to look at him, paused briefly and then she slapped him hard, but not as hard as she could have.

Comfort Food

10/03/2024 by Pat Shiplett 1 Comment

LisbonThey travel the world in the search for ‘authentic’ experiences but here they stand, lined up fifty deep, desperate for a fix of comfort food.

“How was the food?”

That’s a question friends will ask when they return home from the far ends of the earth.

Experiencing a region’s cuisine, whether Sri Lanka, Hungary or Patagonia is part of what we have in mind when we book our itineraries.

Travel only exacerbates the reality that what we eat and at what time of the day we eat it, plays a role in our well-being. Hotel breakfast buffets are filled with foods your stomach may refuse to recognize before noon.

Sometimes the miseries we blame on food poisoning is actually caused by overindulgence – too many shop windows with irresistible temptations.

We crave simple sustenance when we’re under stress from boarding the wrong train or reserving a hotel room for the wrong date.

Travel sites know that ‘comfort food’ is an powerful magnet, ditto for burgers or the mention of bacon (although what’s served up as such may be unrecognizable.)

The draw of an insanely popular restaurant in Lisbon’s Restauradores Station district is a humble roasted chicken. Travel-weary tourists stroll or uber back to their hotels with renewed strength to face yet another day on vacation.

Note to world: Is peanut butter too much to ask?

Ten years of Spanish, 2

09/08/2024 by Pat Shiplett 13 Comments

Spanish FeverAfter ten years of Spanish, you‘d think a guy could order from the menu of the day with absolute confidence and even a little flair.

That’s an easy mistake to make given that Babbel (I haven’t tried it) promises to get you “speaking Spanish in just 3 weeks.”

But according to Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand-hours theory on peak proficiency, yours truly is barely half way to fluency.

The idea of studying a new language materialized in the shower one random morning.

Twenty-five hours of classes a week in Barcelona, I speculated, would allow me to be with interesting people while spending months alone in a foreign city. The daily commute on the Metro would give me the sensation of working and living there.

Why Spanish? It’s widely spoken in the U.S. and shares its Latin roots with English. The sounds of its alphabet are familiar.

After ten years, I now read Spanish well enough, and I can make myself understood. But grasping things said to me is still hit and miss. It’s not easy to decipher a phone number, for example, before the next commercial comes on.

Like us, Spanish speakers are fond of swallowed syllables, shortcuts and non sequiturs. Textbooks lay things out as best they can but you grope to find your own individual path through the maze. Learning a third or fourth language, my friends in Barcelona say, gets much easier.

Nothing’s quite like finally breaking through a barrier and realizing you’ve reached the next level – it’s a crossword puzzle with no end of discoveries in sight. The irony is I now understand Spanish grammar better than the English I learned as a child.

Taking on a language is not for everybody of course. Both English and Spanish have a expression for us enthusiasts who get seduced by a pastime like this.

It’s the same word in both languages: a nerd, un/una nerd.

Tony Runaways (2024)

08/22/2024 by Pat Shiplett 4 Comments

Out Among HumansWhen the boys found a car with keys, they stopped to consider the pros and cons of Grand Theft Larceny.

As soon as she realized her middle boy was missing, she started calling around. It was a relief to learn that two of his friends were also nowhere to be found.

America still held a Tom Sawyer view of boyhood. For better or worse, they didn’t think to put pictures of children on milk cartoons.

The three ran away because the parents of one them was in his face about something. The other two went along for the ride. Who would notice, really? School wouldn’t start until after Labor Day.

None of the boys had seen an ocean so they decided on California. There would definitely, absolutely, be an ocean there. They didn’t have a map but one of them was sure west was that way.

When the boys found a car with keys, they stopped to consider the pros and cons of Grand Theft Larceny. Miraculously, they decided against it. None of them had a license anyway.

They spent one night sleeping in a rusted tractor-trailer cab in a junkyard. One of them remembers the cold. They survived on snacks from filling stations and country stores. They did not steal.

The runaways had gone about 50 miles and were approaching Versailles State Park when a friendly older man stopped to gave them a ride. They were in luck. He happened to be going their way.

It wasn’t long until he pulled up to a small-town police station and told the boys he was an off-duty officer of the law. He got on the phone and told their parents the kids were here and they were safe and they seemed like nice-enough young men and you don’t need to be too hard on them.

She sent her oldest son to bring them home. He liked to drive his Mercury and she gave him gas money. None of the boys’ parents bothered to go along. There was silence on the way home.

“Your dad and I were worried sick.” his mother told him.

In return for his solemn promise never to run away again she pulled a baking sheet out of the oven. Drop Sugar Cookies — his favorite — soft, not browned. He hated when they got the slightest bit crispy on the edges. She had made them just right and he told her they were good.

Drop-Sugar Cookies For Runaways
2 cups sugar
1 cup shortening
3 eggs
¾ cup sour milk
1 tbsp baking soda in the milk
2 tbsp baking powder
2 tbsp vanilla
¾ tbsp salt
5 cups flour
Cream sugar and shortening. Beat until light/fluffy. Add eggs and mix well. Add remaining ingredients. Drop by spoonful. Bake at 375º until they look right and not a second longer.