An autumn leaf lies on the ground
but darkness falls too soon

A warm breeze blows through the air
but darkness falls too soon

The cold truth of winter is so near –
for darkness falls too soon

In computer science, there is a common mode of thinking: you are trying to solve a problem and your adversary, virtually interacting through your computer, does everything in their power to stop you.

This isn’t the problem-solving approach they taught us in physics or marketing, so I always found it a little odd when I encountered it. Why would I have an evil adversary inside the computer? Can’t I just write code that tries to solve a problem in the most efficient way possible? How does having an adversary help me do that?

I’m still not sure whether to find that mode of problem-solving helpful, but at least I know now where the idea came from.

Computer science was born out of World War II cryptography efforts. In cryptography, your aim is design algorithms that can’t be broken by some adversary or, alternatively, to break an algorithm designed by someone trying to make your job as hard as possible.

In short, in cryptography, there really are adversaries.

This makes the association of “The Adversary” with computer-based thinking even more intriguing – during World War II, it wasn’t just impressive algorithms, but the real complexity of language that created the most “unbreakable” codes.

On the front lines of WWII were “code talkers” – bilingual speakers of English and native American languages. Most notably, Navajo code talkers played a critical role in cryptography during the war. Each English letter was associated with an English word, and that English word was translated into Navajo, and many common expressions were given shorter nicknames. Additionally, Navajo has complex tonal qualities and syntax structures, making the language “unintelligible all other tribes and all other people,” according to one Major General Clayton B. Vogel.

Importantly, one of the reasons Navajo was particularly good for cryptography was that, at the time, it only existed as a spoken language. This was because, as Vogel pointed out, “Navaho [sic] is the largest tribe, but the lowest in literacy.”

These Navajo, many forced into boarding schools where they had been forbidden to speak their native language, then used their language as a crucial tool in American war and defense efforts.

Declassified in 1968, the Navajo code remains the only oral military code that has never been broken.

On the train home this evening, there were two women having an impassioned discussion about how to best organize books. In particular, one was debating the best organizational scheme for her collection – should she mix her fiction and non-fiction? Which books did she want to have more accessible?

This is a big dilemma.

When I was young and fancy free, I used to take great care in organizing my bookshelf – a habit I have since not found sufficient time for. The last time I organized my bookshelves, I realized my shelf space was tragically insufficient for my book collection – a problem I solved by acquiring more books.

Irregardless, strategies for organizing books fascinates me. Most of us don’t use the Dewey Decimal system at home, leaving many questions on organizational schema.

Personally, I like to organize my books first by topic, then by author, but – just for fun – I like to put a little randomness in there so you never know what you might find next to each other.

Below is a network of my Facebook friends. Each node is a friend of mine and each link indicates mutual acquaintances (friends who are friends with each other). Node are sized by degree – so a bigger node is someone who I have more metal friends with.

The network is colored by modularity – showing some of the distinct communities within my network. I have labeled many of the larger communities below.

This shows a lot of interesting things. For one thing, at my first job out of college, I worked with a woman who had graduated from my college a year before me. She was a great connector and brought many groups of people together. The result is a segment of my network which is a mashup of people I went to college with and people from my first job. Not all of them know each other, but the connections are dense enough that this stands out as a community.

Another friend from my first job was once – totally coincidentally – roommates (in Boston) with someone I went to high school with (in California). The result is a weak link between my “young professional” network and my high school network.

Before high school, I went to school in the wonderful community of Canyon, CA. A few of us “Canyon critters” went on to the same high school as me – creating connections between the Canyon community and my high school network. Additionally, I had cousins who went to Canyon and others in my family are close friends with many in the Canyon community – linking Canyon to my California family.

My California family is connected to my Massachusetts family (my in-laws), which in turn connects to the rich network of my Somerville community. There are many connections between Somerville and colleagues from my last job at Tisch College, and there are connections between Tisch College people to Civic Studies people.

So, that’s a little tour of my Facebook network.

I’ve officially been a doctoral student for a month now and I’m starting to settle in.

I’ve met a bunch of new people and can even remember most of their names. I know what my class schedule is and no longer have to actively navigate trying to find the classrooms. I’m getting a sense of the culture, the expectations, and how to manage my time. I have organized my desk.

I am having so much fun.

People keep telling me to hold on to that feeling: that flush from the first year of grad school where everything is exciting, commitments are minimal, and I just feel so privileged that this is how I get to spend my time.

I imagine someday I’ll be the one advising first year students to hold on to that feeling, but for now I’m just savoring every moment.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so at 2am I got up and worked a bit on my homework. It was so much fun. Even when it’s hard its fun.

But the little things are remarkably disorienting. This week I had a different commute every day – different buses, different trains – all varying by where I needed to be and when. On more than one occasion, I got momentarily “lost” on commutes I’ve done many times. Where am I? Where am I going? The answer is not always clear.

It’s hard to compare the pace of school to the pace to work. From work, I’m used to long days, working all the time, and constantly having to put out fires. In school, I have long days and work all the time, but the overall stakes seem much lower (for the moment!). I haven’t had to deal with a single crisis. There’s something amazingly luxurious about that. I’m savoring that for sure.

But at work, I knew what I needed to do. I could put out fires because after 8 years I’d developed the skill I needed, the connections I needed, and the knowledge and experience to troubleshoot effectively. The pace was intense and the hours were long, but I could accomplish an amazing amount in a relatively short amount of time.

School is very different. I’m still developing the skills, knowledge, network, and experience – in fact, developing those is precisely why I’m here. The pace is slower, but it’s by necessity – each task takes significantly longer. I have to figure out what I am trying to do before I can figure out how to try to do it.

I have been particularly tired for the last month. Tired in a specific way that is different from usual. Interestingly, it’s the kind of tired I felt the whole time I was living in Japan. At first, I’d thought it was the jet lag, but after six months I was still just tired. I was tired then because I was constantly processing – mentally translating Japanese into words I could more familiarly understand, learning new cultural skills, and continually inundated by unfamiliar input.

So I guess that’s kind of what grad school has been like. There’s been a lot of new sensory input. I am learning a lot, but there is always more to process. It’s like I can feel my neural pathways forming.

It’s a slow, deliberate and incredibly exciting experience.

Hold on to that feeling.

After nearly 8 years of having a leisurely half-hour walking commute, I’m back to regularly commuting downtown. This ritual is reacquainting me with a being I’d very nearly forgotten: the cranky commuter.

I don’t mean to make too light of this state – I have certainly been a cranky commuter on more than one occasion. But there’s a certain disagreeableness one finds only amid the packed walks of a subway train.

It reminds me of all the self-important adults in The Little Prince. I commuted largely by public transit in high school, and it always amused me to watch the people in business suits frantically racing for the train. And this was in the Bay Area, so there really was another train coming soon. What could possibly be so important that it was worth that much stress?

I told myself I would never run to catch the train. No matter how important I thought my journey was, I could always wait for the next one.

Update: I have often run for the train.

And when I’m packed into sardine cars, thinking about all the things I need to do and all the places I’d rather be, it’s easy to get grumpy. And when someone gets annoyed that I accidentally bumped into them after someone accidentally bumped into me, it’s easy to get annoyed back.

But that’s where I try to catch myself. Life is hard enough, and far too short for such simple misery. All things considered, this isn’t that bad.

So when I see a cranky commuter on the train, my instinct may be to judge or get annoyed, but really – I mostly just feel bad for them. What hardships are going on in their life, I wonder, that makes this moment the last straw?

I’ve recently been finding it harder to blog than usual.

At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

When I really stop to think about it, though, I realize that I’m always imaging the present as an aberration to the norm. As though there were some time in the past when every day the words just flowed naturally.

It’s one of those tricks I taught myself, I suppose. Just as I often tell myself – it’s always busy this time of year. Of course, the truth is – its always that time of year. It’s always busy and blogging is always hard.

The writing itself isn’t so problematic, and finding the time to write isn’t as challenging as it once was. But putting a coherent thought into words – figuring out what to write about. That’s the hardest part.

This challenge has come into focus in the last few weeks. In the past, I’d occasional decide against tacking a topic if I felt like I wasn’t well enough versed in the broader context of that topic. If I knew that my thought or idea was just a tiny strand leading to a rich field I knew nothing about – it seemed wiser to leave that area to the experts. Or, at least, to wait until I’d developed more expertise.

But in school, nearly everything is like. There are so many thoughts, all leading in different directions and all wonderfully enmeshed in their own intellectual architecture. There is just so much to learn.

The challenge to the student is to use your time well. To identify a narrow focus, to allow sufficient time to delve deeply into that thought.

But such focus quickly becomes tiresome for a blog.

Over the next five years, you will watch me narrow my research focus. I’ll articulate a dissertation topic and no doubt spend a great deal of time exploring it in this space.

But, as someone reminded me today, it is good to have hobbies. And that’s exactly what this space is. My writing here will frequently cross the bounds into my “work” of graduate school, but ultimately it is a space separate from that:

A public space for incomplete thoughts.

I recently finished re-reading The Stranger, a novel which, judging by the MBTA pass I found folded in the pages, I last read in 2006. Like much of Camus’ work I could read the novel again and again. Every time I find something new.

The story is told from the detached prospective of Meursault, a passive hero who one day shoots and kills an unnamed Arab. Why he does this he could not say. It just all plays out, between the sky and the sea.

Meursault is sentenced to death. He does not repent, but he does find peace, having laid his “heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.” In the end, he declares, “all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

No matter how many times I read The Stranger, I’m not quite sure what to make of Meursault.

He is not a good person, to be sure, but – he’s not quite the bad person the story condemns him for.

That is to say – Meursault killed a man. Without cause or reason. That is almost certainly immoral. But his victim is never named, only referred to generally: “the Arab.” Throughout The Stranger the racism of French Algiers is clear – characters who are described as “Arab” or “moorish” are consistently belittled by their aristocratic French peers.

No one in the book seems to care that much that a man has died.

Indeed, rather than focus on the crime of a life that was taken, Meursault’s trial focuses the natural death of his mother. He is derided as a monster not because he committed murder, but because he didn’t love his mother – or perhaps, more plainly, because he didn’t display the expected affection for his mother.

Most of the characters in The Stranger are not good people. But unlike Meursault, they know their place in society and play their part well.

Ultimately, The Stranger is an exercise in a seeming problem of absurdism: if nothing matters, if there is no God, and we are each free agents of our own will – what’s to stop anyone from committing murder? Can there be morality under such a regime?

This is a challenge that comes from nihilism – as Nietzsche quotes in On the Genealogy of Morals, “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus rejects the common interpretation of that statement, arguing: “Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden.”

One can interpret that on entirely practical grounds. While perhaps we don’t have standing to sit in moral judgement over Meursault, we still ought to have laws forbidding murder. If a society permitted murder, moral or not, it would be chaos.

I’m not convinced that’s what Camus means, and I’m not convinced he intends for readers to pardon Meursault.

Again in the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus quotes Dostoevsky’s Kirilov saying, “everything is permitted.”

Camus counters: “The essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: ‘what does that prove?'”

Camus goes on to write: “All is well, everything is permitted, and nothing is hateful – these are absurd judgements. But what an amazing creating in which those creatures of fire and ice seem so familiar to us. The passionate world of indifference that rumbles in their hearts does not seem at all monstrous to us.”

Passionate indifference. Fire and ice. Camus’ writing is full of such seemingly conflicting metaphors. He describes Sisyphus as “powerless and rebellious.”

These things may seeem to be contradictions, but to Camus they are not. These seemingly contradictory sentiments are at the heart of absurdism.

Thus Camus disparages Man’s right to sit in judgement of man – Meursault imagines his jurors as passengers on a bus. Camus disparages God’s ability to sit in judgement of man – Meursault yells at the chaplain that he has committed no ‘sin’, only a criminal offense. All men are condemned, he argues.

While the logical conclusion of this seems to indicate that Meursault has committed no wrong, I’m not convinced that’s what he meant. Even if he did nothing wrong, that doesn’t mean he was right.

Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. We are free to live and act however we choose, with neither god nor man sitting in judgement of us. But there is still a certain morality, contradictory and ephemeral, that tells us Meursault is wrong. We can not prove it, we cannot define it, but we know that what he did was wrong.

Thus despite the absurdity of life, despite the seeming contradictions, Camus can conclude that “all is well.” And, as he writes, that remark is sacred.