Exclusivity and marriage

Today at the Mirror Maze, we discussed exclusivity and marriage. Here are some of the interesting pieces:

We discussed the various social norms involving marriage, and how they have varied, even in recent times. For example, in the culture we are in now, sex before marriage is normal, people marry late after their careers have settled, and the social norm after marriage is exclusivity. In Mitka's and my parents' generation, sex before marriage was less accepted, people married in their late teens or early twenties, the social norm was exclusivity, but divorce was very common. In Mitka's grandparents' generation, people married later, divorce was uncommon, but cheating was more socially accepted. I concluded that people's behavior stays the same, but what changes is what they keep secret and what they talk about, as well as the labels they use.

Next we discussed the mechanisms of cheating, the breaking of an exclusivity agreement. Mitka and I proposed the usual trope of being unsatisfied with one's relationship, failing to end it, for whatever reason, yet nonetheless intentionally either seeking another partner or accepting one that comes along. Hannah proposed a more interesting mechanism, that a person can change or be placed in a context where they no longer identify with their past self who made the exclusivity agreement. It's certainly more interesting than the "lapse of judgement" trope, and, as far as I can tell, reasonably common.

We also discussed our personal preferences. Mitka favored exclusivity. I favored exclusivity for more serious relationships, and non-exclusivity for less serious ones. Hannah did not have a general policy. Mitka and I also claimed to be unlikely to cheat. Hannah challenged this, saying that we couldn't really predict what we'd do in sufficiently different contexts. I countered that I had, at one time in the past, considered this exact possibility, and decided to not be exclusive because of it, and that, another time, I had turned down a tempting offer because of an exclusive relationship. Hannah suggested that I still couldn't predict what I'd do in the future. I agreed that I couldn't rule anything out completely, but said that past experience made it fair to say that cheating in the future would be unlikely.

futon

Sometime during the summer, I got an email from Yasha's subletter, saying that a pipe had broken and the guest room was covered with water, and asking me to please tell the landlord to help.  By the time I answered the email giving the landlord's contact information (which the subletter already had), the situation had been resolved.  When I got back, Mitka had thrown out the guest-room futon, which had been damp and rotting, but that was all the water damage I could detect.  Mitka had arranged to buy another futon from the office of a departing math postdoc, so I went and wrote a check, and we figured we'd determine eventually how to transport the futon from the department to the guest room.

This morning, when Yasha and I talked to the landlord, he told us that he'd been so impressed by how polite and helpful Mitka had been when the pipe broke.  He explained that the polite way was not to compliment Mitka directly, but to deliver the compliment behind his back.  Mitka was indeed sleeping.  Between 2 and 3 he woke up, and then we rented Dan's car and went over to the department to get the futon.

As we were borrowing a spare office key from department headquarters, Padma and Hans came in with some people who presumably were new first years, to get mugs so they could go to tea.
Padma:  "I like your haircut."
me:  "I didn't get---  My hair only got longer, not shorter."
Padma:  "Yes, yes, that's what I meant."

Carrying the mattress out to the car, Yasha could only offer one arm, because he's had an elbow problem for a while and recently was directed not to use the elbow too much.  He'd also cut his heel the other day while trying to enter a dirty lake to go swimming.  Yasha, walking backwards to support the front end of the mattress with his one arm, commented, "Walking backwards is actually a lot easier on my foot.  I was worried that I'd have trouble with the futon because of my foot, but this is fine.  Maybe I should walk backwards all the time."

Yasha and Mitka drove away with the futon mattress, and I tried to disassemble the futon frame but eventually figured out that it requires two different sizes of "hex key" to unscrew, of which we had only the larger.  I stated that our choices were (a) buy the right hex key and then try to disassemble; (b) try to roll the frame home on a dolly that Mitka swears the department has; or (c) try to sell the frame without moving it.  We chose to (d) leave the frame in Mitka's office and he can try to find a mattress for it.
me:  "But then... what did we just move this mattress for?"
Yasha:  "Because it's going to take another year before Mitka actually gets around to buying a mattress."
Mitka:  "You don't need a mattress, necessarily.  You can just cover it with pillows or something."
Yasha:  "See?"

So, now we have the new futon mattress on the old frame, and we can sit on it again, and watch movies together or read bedtime stories to each other.  And have guests, which was the more pressing issue.

In the evening, I went to audition for the choir which has a name but which in my head is called "choir with Mira".  I answered some questions about my occupation and musical background, and then sang some warm-up exercises as directed.
director:  "Can you tell me if you have any idea what this note is?"  (plays middle C)
me:  (pauses in surprise)  "C?"
director:  "You have perfect pitch, don't you."
me:  "Sort of?"
director:  "I thought so."

pot of honey

When Yasha and I both came home last weekend, we found a jumbled assortment of foods: some left by us at the beginning of the summer, some left by Mitka a couple weeks before, and some left by the subletters.  I tend to blame everything on Mitka, so when there were two open bags of tortilla chips, one quite stale and one not as stale, I assumed that the more-stale was Mitka's and the less-stale was a subletter's.  Yasha pointed out that we'd had a beginning-of-summer party involving lots of chips, and so the more-stale chips might have been from then and shouldn't be blamed on Mitka.  When I cleaned and organized the pantry, this time I taped signs all over, camp style, labeling which foods and non-foods go where.  I don't think this will cause anyone to keep the pantry more in order, but it will give me a stronger feeling of superiority when they don't.

Yesterday I looked in the fridge to see what was in there and if any of it should be thrown out.  I'd been looking particularly warily at a quart-size plastic container of light brown liquid.  The top centimeter or so was transparent light brown, and the rest was more opaque.  I worried that Mitka had decided to keep a large amount of bean liquid, or perhaps very moldy meat broth.  When I picked up the container, it didn't slosh.  "It's frozen?  How is it frozen?"  I opened it and smelled carefully.  It smelled like honey.  The surface was smooth and shiny, like honey and unlike frozen things.
me:  "Yasha, do you think this is honey?"
Yasha:  "Maybe!  Does it smell like honey?"
me:  "Yes, that's why I asked."
Yasha:  "I guess it's honey, then."
me:  "But... why is there honey?  What happened to the original container?  Why would you keep honey in the fridge, anyway?"
Yasha:  "Maybe Mitka bought it in bulk or something.  Why the fridge?  Well, I don't know, that's where you keep food."
me:  "I guess that makes sense.  Well, good, we definitely don't need to throw this away, so it can go back in the fridge.  This time I'll label it."

The late bird also sometimes catches the worm

As the white rabbit said, I'm late! But I claim time reversal invariance. It's too bad that my mammoth post is right after Hannah's short and sweet description of reading things "right". Read hers first -- mine stands to no comparison.

First, here's my version of how the blog was named: The ends of the universe needed for our apartment to have a blog and it was to be called "mirror mortals". It took a couple of tries for Yasha and Hannah to arrive at this name, and there was a close call where Yasha was led astray for a moment and the universe had to momentarily create the blog mirrorthoughts@blogspot.com and fill it with some spur-of-the-moment inanity to prevent him from turning down the wrong path. In the end the idea dawned on Hannah and took root, and so the blog was named.
 A blog is a place for all of us to write down our random (and in some cases useful) thoughts, mostly, it seems, for the benefit other wannabe bloggers who for some reason want to name their blog "mirrormortals". It might be because I'm a fatalist that the first thing I thought of when I saw the name of this blog was the mirror of death -- which, after all, is birth, something very different that also happens to mortals. So I'll open with a very extended pun on the title (of whose origin I wash my hands), and write about the physics of time reversal.

I've wondered for a while why time goes forward. We experience the future as different from the past, but all the noticeable laws of the universe are invariant under the "temporal" mirror. If you suddenly reversed the momentum and spin of every particle in the universe, time would start to go backwards and recreate our past (there are some questions about chirality of certain atomic reactions, but it's doubtful if we'd notice notice much if only these were switched -- time, for one, would still go "forward"). After asking a bunch of physicists, the explanation I've come to believe is that the "arrow of time", as it's called, is an accident of where we are in the evolution of the universe. I'll give my layman's version of events, and let people who know more explain why I got it all wrong.

The universe (or at least one time-end of it) started with the big bang, where space was infinitesimally small and everything that there was in it -- really close together. The universe then expanded very quickly in the forward time direction, and for reasons of its own that physicists still have a hard time explaining, the stuff that there was in it didn't expand quite as quickly and uniformly as the space in the universe. We live pretty close to the big bang (in an appropriately grandiose time frame), still during the time of the "housing boom" where there's a lot of room, but matter and energy are still clumped in a more organized manner, residual from a time when the universe was small. Notice that this isn't the same as claiming that time goes forward because the universe is expanding -- it's going forward because it expanded a lot recently, and isn't about to contract a lot that near in the future. (Such a point of view would imply in particular that if the universe ends in a time-reversal opposite of a big bang -- something physicists today usually doubt -- then we're probably much closer to the beginning than to the end). And with this point of view, the characterizing property of the asymmetry of time is that stuff tends to spread apart (if time were reversed, it would tend to clump together -- which would be, after all, different). If you made some measurement of the "clumpiness" of the universe -- say, integral of density of matter squared (maybe with some relativistic correction for energy), then it would tend to decrease as you move your slice of space forward in time. The word "tend" here describing dead matter is somewhat suspicious, but can be given rigorous meaning. If you take any configuration of matter with a high level of clumpiness and allow it to develop for a second according to the laws of physics in a universe of our fixed size and energy, then with overwhelmingly high probability if you measure clumpiness again the second measurement will come out smaller than the first. The physical notion of "entropy" gives a way to quantify this tendency. Any measure of order -- including our "clumpiness" -- has an associated entropy. (Without qualification, "entropy" means something different -- in particular, it doesn't change with time in a closed system. This terminological imprecision confuses a lot of people.)

But what I've always wanted to see is a series of explanatory steps linking the big bang's introduction of time asymmetry into the world and our day-to-day perceptions of this asymmetry which are much more nuanced, and in many cases counter to the general tendency towards disorder, to quote Achebe, that "things fall apart". Say, how do you explain the fact that we remember the past farther than we can predict the future, or the fact that we process food into energy and not the other way around? The first step in any such explanation is the sun -- a "clump" of matter and energy from early in the universe, thinning itself out by releasing light into space. The sun's rays that reach Earth are reflected in a more disorderly fashion, and as lower-energy photons than they arrive, and if I'm not mistaken, this provides the initial push for all the time-asymmetric processes associated with life, including us. But how exactly does this explain our ability to remember? Why are we so much more concerned with being mortals than with the mirror property of having been born? I think there's a lot here to think about, and I wonder whether physicists have done so.

paying attention while reading

Checklist for solitary intellectual activity:

1. Take a 20--40 minute walk.
2. Sit somewhere where you won't do anything that interferes with working. No computer!
3. Continue to sit even if nothing is happening.
4. Write down every on-topic thought on scratch paper.

I'll be doing a lot of math reading for the next few months, I think, as I get started with having an advisor.  Math reading is slow and requires a lot of scratch paper.  First I tell myself to look at the text by writing on my scratch paper, "Okay, what's the next part about?"  Then I look at the text and read a sentence.  I paraphrase the sentence onto my scratch paper.  I explain on my scratch paper how the parts of the sentence refer to earlier parts of the text.  I write down, "Good, fine," and then look around the room for a while.  I write down, "Pay attention!" and then repeat from the beginning with the next sentence.

Practicing violin can be done without paying attention.  I would assert that reading cannot be done without paying attention, any more than driving a car can be done while napping or chopping onions can be done with one's eyes closed.  But I remember that in high school I read Catch-22 entirely without paying attention, so I caught the funny parts but couldn't remember any of the characters' names on the quiz.  I don't think reading math can be done without paying attention, so I direct my attention using scratch paper.  Presumably this would help with reading non-math as well.  Maybe this is why my high-school English teachers always wanted me to write in my books.

name

I wrote this post below before seeing Yasha's post about the same interaction.  I am amused by the comparison.

When we wondered what to call the blog, our first thought was Mirror Maze, which is the name of our apartment.  Both mirrormaze.blogspot.com and themirrormaze.blogspot.com held blogs that had not been updated since 2006.  Yasha said, "Maybe Mirror Thoughts?  Because the maze is _where_ we are..." but mirrorthoughts.blogspot.com is a blog with exactly one post.  I thought that Mirror Musings sounded silly, and suggested Mirror Mortals.

Yasha:  "'Blog not found'.  Well, that's good."
me:  "I like Mirror Mortals.  Let's be Mirror Mortals."
Yasha:  "Man, now it's all dark, with death and stuff."
me:  "But it's punny!"
Yasha:  "It is?  Mirror Mortals?"
me:  "'Mere mortals' is a thing.  Like, it exists as a phrase.  So we're mirror mortals, as residents of the Mirror Maze."
Yasha:  "Wha---OH.  OhhOHHHoh."
me:  "Hahahaha!"
Yasha:  "First I was thinking mermortals, like mermaids, and then I thought of werewolves.  Like, weremortals are people that turn mortal at the full moon...?"

How you name a boat is how it will sail...

After some discussions about Livejournal, Facebook, and online communication in the past, present, and future, we decided to start a joint blog about interesting discussions, funny quotes, or whatever else happens in this apartment. Or rather, Hannah and I decided unilaterally. Later today, I'll tell Mitka that, surprise, he has a blog now.

The discussion then turned to what the blog should be named. We had named our apartment the Mirror Maze, and so our first thought was mirrormaze.blogspot.com. Unfortuantely, that one was taken. How about themirrormaze.blogspot.com? That one was also taken, but turned out to be an interesting read. Over the span of six posts and ten days, the author goes from being excited about getting engaged and life in general to wanting to mutilate her roommate, at which point the blog ends. I hope that starting a blog will not have the same effect on us.

We then considered mirrorthoughts.blogspot.com, but that one was taken by a blog with just one short post about blogging. It was fun to read in a serious tone of voice. Hannah then considered synonyms, like mirrormusings.blogspot.com, which led her to come up with mirrormortals.blogspot.com.

I was initially unimpressed and thought it sounded mildly morbid, but then Hannah patiently explained to me that it was a pun on the phrase "mere mortals". I then for some reason started thinking of some combination of mermortals and weremortals, which I guess must be underwater creatures that turn into mortals when the moon is full. Anyways, once I fully processed English, I agreed that it was a cool name for a blog, so here we are.

Oh, and the title of this post is a reference to a Russian cartoon, in which the captain of a sailboat sings about how important a name is to a boat, blissfully unaware that two letters of the name had fallen off, changing the boat's name from "Victory" to "Calamity".