For the next ten days, I'll be in Beijing, China (specifically "The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China", I kid you not...) as a part of HSYLC, the (Harvard Association for US-China Relations) Summit for Young Leaders in China. Yeah, it's a mouthful.

More specifically, I'm here to teach math. I'll be teaching 3day*1.5hour seminars to four groups of 10-15 gifted students from high schools around China. In addition to that, I'll hold office hours, run a workshop on applying to college in the US, and lead extracurricular activities. (Mine will very likely be something dance-related.)

If you're curious about my actual curriculum, then rest assured that I'll write about it...later. Today's post is just a series of travel-journal snapshots from the past day-and-a-half-long day. Tomorrow, we begin checking in students, and on Thursday, we'll actually start classes. Until then, I'm adapting to life in a country where I literally can't communicate with most of the population... (On the bright side, they have air conditioning here, which couldn't be said of Cambridge.)

11-12 August

(1) JFK Airport

I walk up to the cash exchange. "Three hundred Chinese." The teller is bored half to death. "Three hundred dollar to Chinese?" "No, three hundred renminbi." I slide a credit card through the cash slit. "Cash only." Of course. "How much?" Sixty-six. Which is a problem, because I think I only have...sixty-nine. Okay.

There's still time to kill. Shopping list: power adapter, money belt, pepto-bismol. The store clerk tries to give me an all-in-one power adapter; I return it to the shelf in favor of

For those of you following along at home, I've re-named this here weblog. I wrote the first few posts under "Turtles and Turtles", which might be a fine title, were I writing about physics. ("Turtles all the way down" is a common metaphor for infinitely recursive layers of increasingly precise physical theories, each model of the universe underlain by a "deeper" physical law.) But I'm not a physicist (nor writing about physics). Depending on the day, my mood, and the transit of Venus, I may be a mathematician, computer scientist, or aspiring rationalist, but in any case, physics is a hobby, not my art.

The new title, "My Faults My Own" is firstly a (not-so-humble) litany for humility, and secondly a nod to the great popularizer of mathematics Vi Hart (autoplay warning: youtube channel). Her brilliant piece, Doodling in Math Class: Connecting Dots (a lament of the state of twenty-first century mathematical education, masquerading as a lesson in curiosity-driven mathematical exploration, masquerading as a lesson on constructive geometry in the cartesian plane, masquerading as the ramblings of a student bored by an uninspiring high-school math class) concludes with a rallying cry for rationalists, explorers, and doodlers alike:

Here's the thing about connecting dots. You can have all the steps laid out for you, taking whatever next step is easiest and closest and be sure of what you're getting the whole time. This way is safe and comfortable.

Or, you can try new ways of connecting dots and not know what you're going to get. Maybe it will be something great, maybe it will fail. And when it fails it will be your

(The title of this blog post brought to you by "potential romantic comedy plots in five words or less")

(1)

A few months ago, Harvard's George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics recommended a movie to his freshman Real Analysis class -- on some tangent in class, he noted that "it's a fantastic movie; you should all watch it."

The movie was Spring Breakers. So, the other day, a few friends and I borrowed the Jefferson 250 lecture hall (where we had once-upon-a-time taken RA with GVL Prof. Gross) and threw the movie up on the giant projector screen.

We turned it off after thirty minutes of nauseating dialogue, uncomfortable soft-core pornography, and implausible montages of "college kids" drinking "beer". It was bad. Really bad. I'm really not sure how Prof. Gross managed to sit through the movie himself.

But really, the problem here is that I still don't know why we were told to watch this vapid, gratuitous, teen-star nonsense. What I've considered so far:

• Benedict Gross has never seen more of the film than the opening party scene and the stuck-in-history-class scene, and made a suggestion off-the-cuff. As I recall, he went so far as to reference the latter in the discussion of the fact that no one was going to pay attention to Real Analysis the day before spring recess, anyway.
• The man wished for his students to associate excessive drinking with stupidity. It's true that, speaking to his Linear Algebra class before The Game, he told us "I used to be Dean of Harvard College, so I know what weekend it is. But if I'm walking through the

(1)

It's become apparent to me in the past few days that, when I wrote last week's post on the theory of sleep, I didn't know what I was talking about. Or rather, I had an incomplete picture of the subject at hand, and oversimplified a system that was more complicated than I was giving it credit for.

A little more digging has revealed that there is, in fact, evidence that SWS may be important for consolidating declarative memory, which breaks down into episodic memory (events) and semantic memory (facts). By contrast, REM consolidates procedural memory and spatial memory (both of which are more or less exactly what they sound like). Previously, I had dismissed it as "useless". Oops.

Of course, that's not the whole story, either: non-REM sleep is split into periods of "light sleep" and periods of SWS. Altogether, an 8-hour monophasic sleep cycle includes something like 1-2 hours of REM, 1-2 hours of SWS, and 4-5 hours of NREM2 light-sleep. The goal of the E3 schedule, then, isn't so much to absolutely reduce needless SWS, but to restructure the sleep cycles to reduce NREM2, at minimal cost to SWS/REM. (Note that E3 differs from other polyphasic schedules in this respect; notably, Uberman almost entirely eliminates SWS, and packs two hours of REM into just six short naps.)

Now, it makes intuitive sense that, if the brain is using SWS for consolidating certain types of memory, there's an additional "rest state" where it's actually doing nothing but resting. And so,

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After today's core, I feel tired. Not sluggish or droopy (yet), just a vague sense that I might rather be asleep than awake. It probably doesn't help that my naps yesterday were mixed up and haphazard, or that I went to bed with too much on my mind (which likely increased the amount of time it took to fall asleep. Of course, it's entirely possible that the higher-order bit is that I'm tired because I'm still not getting enough SWS.

Though, it's suspicious that I often feel very much better after my 8am nap. Perhaps it's simply circadian.

(2)

I've noticed a recent change in the subject matter and timbre of my dreams. Warning: extreme pointless navel-gazing ahead.

Typically, I'm used to abstract, 'feeling-focused' dreams, where real people that I know appear as characters only when my brain needs to put a human face on something -- people I know tend not to appear as reasonable models of themselves. The scenarios, in general, are unrealistic, often fantastical, and perhaps deeply symbolic (though I've never been one to lay much stock in trying to interpret my or anyone's nighttime mental gymnastics).

Recently, though, I've experienced a string of 'concrete-feeling' dreams, where, so far as I can remember, I've been interacting with real(ish) characters in realistic(ish) social situations (e.g. X meets Y for the first time in a classroom, Z is having relationship trouble with A at a study group, B feels happy/sad/stressed and wants help at a nonspecific local restaurant), both from current life and past contexts. It appears that people that I have strong emotional responses to (positive or negative) tend

(1)

Why should this polyphasic thing work at all? A fair question; I too was once skeptical. Here's a quick explanation, though, to approximately the best of my understanding.

Prevailing neurological understanding of sleep distinguishes between Rapid Eye Movement cycles (REM) and Slow-Wave Sleep (SWS): REM comes in brief bursts, but is crucially important to mental function and consciousness in complicate ways that we don't quite understand. SWS, on the other hand, appears to be a simple 'resting state' that allows the body to recover from the day's stress. Thus the 8-hour monophasic sleep cycle typically breaks down into:

As we subject our bodies today to much less physical stress today than was present in the ancestral environment, I think it's reasonable that modern-day, modern-living humans can healthily survive on less SWS than we evolved to desire. REM, on the other hand, is a complicated mess of complicated that we understand incompletely, if at all, and which it might be unwise to tamper with. Thus, the Everyman-3 schedule that my roommate and I are transitioning to retains six REM cycles, but cuts out much of the SWS:

The first segment is three hours of "core" sleep that covers three REM cycles; the remaining cycles are placed throughout the day in 20-minute naps (it turns out that 20 minutes is almost

(1)

I'm blogging now? Apparently. Expect a hodgepodge mix of assorted things, roughly corresponding to the set of things I'm interested in, in no discernible order. Maybe at some point, I'll get my act together and start composing sequences of posts, but for the initial brain-dump phase, expect no more than, well, a brain dump.

(2)

Today, I begin transitioning to a polyphasic sleep schedule. If it works, I'll develop the ability to REM sleep in naps of twenty minutes, and survive on fewer hours of nighttime sleep by napping during the day. (The particular cycle I'm aiming for is "Everyman-3", three hours of night-sleep and three twenty-minute day-naps.)

Well, perhaps the word 'survive' is misleading. I'd like to do a lot better than 'survive'; I'd like to continue functioning at my present mental capacity, for extra conscious hours. While efficiency-times-duration calculations indicate that I should be willing to accept up to a 20% drop in efficiency along with the 25% increase in waking-hours, I suspect that the nighttime hours that I'll be awake will be less useful than the daytime hours I'd be taking a productivity-hit in, which means that an 20% hit is a loss. I'd like to see no more than a 5% dip in mental-function test scores, and if I see more than a 10% drop, I'm going to need to seriously evaluate the utility of being awake when everyone else is asleep.

My outcome expectations are as follows:

• 50% I give up before completing the transition
• 20% I observe significant mental-function decline post-transition
• 30% my test results exhibit no significant decline

Within the 30% chance of success, though, I expect a 1/3