A More Perfect Union

Isn’t it a perverse thing that, for most people, their lives are tied to their birth country? In most cases, a person is born into one country and remains a citizen and resident of that country until death. This is part of what makes nations in the Western Hemisphere so unusual. In countries like the United States, Canada, or Brazil, most people are the descendants of immigrants. In an even stranger turn, most of these children of immigrants will stay in their birth countries. This is especially true in the case of the United States, because our country has the largest economy in the world, one of the highest figures for GDP per capita, and we are not currently fighting any wars on our own soil. Two of my siblings, Diane and Craig, both grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago, got married, own houses, and raised families not more than 20 miles from where they were born. We tend to be the beacon of freedom and hope for people from other countries. But, being born an American citizen, it’s also a kind of entrapment. To become a citizen of another country can require years of work and residency, and in many countries, full citizenship is not even possible for outsiders. For instance, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is full of foreign workers, but almost none of them have a shot at UAE citizenship.




My mother was born in Poland and lived there until she was in her mid-20s (excluding a brief period where she lived in England). She just dropped a bombshell on me a couple days ago – something that hadn’t even crossed my mind until now. My mom is still a Polish citizen, which means that I am technically eligible for Polish citizenship. I could have a Polish passport, live in Poland without a visa, and vote in Polish elections … the typical rights and privileges. As a bonus, Poland is part of the European Union, and one of the “Four Freedoms” of the E.U. is the free movement of persons. From the Wikipedia article: “Workers [in the E.U.] have the right to move to a different Member State, to look for work and be employed under the same conditions as nationals of that State.”



Because of this, if I were to acquire dual Polish-American citizenship, I would have the freedom to work and live permanently in England, France, Spain, Italy, or even Latvia! I could work at a chalet in the Alps, or buy a castle near the Rhein. Perhaps I could even get work at a coffee shop in Amsterdam (cough cough). Rick Steves would be so jealous. Of course, this all sounds too good to be true, and I view every opportunity with cautious optimism. If I ever ran into legal troubles in Poland, the American embassy wouldn’t be able to bail me out because I’m a Polish citizen. And, even though Poland abolished compulsory service in 2009, if they were ever at war and reinstituted the draft, I could be called into the Polish armed forces. I’m frightened of war as it is, but Poland does not have a history of military prowess. Despite the fact that we in the United States owe part of our independence to Polish generals like Pulaski and Kosciusko, Poland has been defeated or otherwise subjugated or partitioned by the Germans, the Russians, the Prussians, the Austrians, the Swedes, the Mongols, and the Tatars, and I’m sure I’m missing a few others. Unlike the United States, which is protected by two oceans, Poland is like the doormat of Europe. But I hope Poland doesn’t get into any skirmishes in the near future.



I find it strange that I could become a citizen of Poland without having spent more than a week inside the country. I find it strange that I could become a Polish citizen without knowing more than a handful of Polish words and phrases. It feels almost like cheating. I find it strange that my mother spent many years fighting a communist bureaucracy trying to get out of Poland, but it wouldn’t require nearly so much effort for me to get back in. If it all works out, I might have the opportunity to be something closer to a “citizen of the world,” where I wouldn’t be as restricted by national boundaries as most people have been in the past. It’s not so much that I want to leave the United States. Rather, it’s nice to know I have the freedom to choose somewhere else.

Explaining a Joke

I just watched the Saturday Night Live episode from last week, the one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as host, and it was shit. The episode was so abysmal that it failed to give me more than the occasional nervous chuckle. The thing is, I know that SNL has its good episodes and its bad episodes, and it can go for years of figurative comedic "dry spells," but the show from November 21, 2009 was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's most disappointing to me that Saturday Night Live is supposed to be a magnet for talent - it draws in people from the best improv groups, sketch comedy teams, and standup acts in Chicago, LA, New York, and around the world to put out something entertaining on a weekly basis. These are the best and brightest minds in comedy, and their combined group of writers and performers had to recycle at least two sketches (perhaps in honor of NBC's pledge to be more green?) and keep rehashing 60s kitsch like they've been doing all season.

But what do I know? I'm a 24 year old kid still living with his mother, and I'm too chickenshit to take a class at the ImprovOlympic. Comedy is hard. Even so, I understand many of the fundamentals. For instance, there's the well-known principle of "Yes, and..." If somebody in an improvised sketch brings up a topic or declares a statment, you have to agree with the premise and add onto it. If a guy comes out holding something imaginary in his hands and says it's a pizza, you can't say, "No, that's a frisbee," because you're interrupting the flow of the joke and you're killing momentum. In a similar vein, I shouldn't be doing what I'm about to do. I'm going to explain a joke, and by doing so, I'm going to kill it.



This is the complex plane. It works similar to the Cartesian coordinate plane that most of us are familiar with from geometry class, except this uses the concept of complex numbers. Complex numbers, in turn, were invented because no one could figure out how to deal with the square roots of negative numbers. So, someone said that i=sqrt(-1), and now we have a whole system of numbers that can be represented by a + bi, where a and b are real numbers. The real numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) are on the axis going left to right, and the imaginary numbers (1i, 2i, 3i, 4i) are on the axis going up and down. On the grid, I've included a point which represents the complex number 2+3i. Now, we can create functions that take these values and produce an output, which can create graphs. For instance, the function f(z) = 3/z produces the following graph. Special thanks to Wolfram Alpha.



Notice how, at one point, the function turns into a funnel that increases to infinity? That's known as a pole, and it's a simple pole because of the way it was constructed (I won't get into the details unless you really want me to).

Do you want me to tell a joke now? Neither do I, but I got started already so here it goes. This is where I got the name for my blog, by the way. Our math teacher in Complex Analysis had gotten through explaining all of these concepts and said, "A man of the Polish persuasion got on a Boeing 767 for a routine flight back to the Motherland. He was getting comfortable in coach when a stewardess screamed out, 'The pilot and co-pilot are dead! Is there anyone left that can fly this aircraft?' The Polish man said, 'I was a pilot back in the war. Let me have a go at the controls.' So he bravely sauntered up to cockpit. When he opened the door, he was awestruck by the array of lights, dials, screens and switches in front of him, and he froze up. The stewardess shook him and said, 'Aren't you going to sit down and take the reins?' He said in a quavering voice, 'I'm just a simple Pole in a complex plane!'"

The class laughed, but don't feel bad if you didn't. I chose it as the name of my blog because it works on so many levels. I'm Polish, so my Polish heritage informs my outlook on life and the world. I love to travel internationally, so I'm frequently on planes. And despite my pedigrees and proficiencies, I still feel like a simpleton in a tortuous machine.

Ricky!

I spent the last couple weeks obsessed with Ricky Gervais. Now, I first heard about him when I watched the original episodes of “The Office” back in college. Aside from that and watching a couple episodes of “Extras” since then, I’d mostly forgotten about him. With the release of his latest film “The Invention of Lying,” I’ve rediscovered him and come to understand his work on a deeper level.

As I understand it, Ricky Gervais had only a mildly successful music career back in the 80s. He didn’t meet up with his future collaborator Steve Merchant until the late 90s when he was working at Xfm, a radio station in London. At that time, Steve was just out of college while Ricky was pushing 40. Steve took a job at the BBC where he had to make a short film for a production course. This is where he came up with the idea for “The Office,” and Ricky Gervais became a star.

Since that time, “The Office” has had spinoffs made in France, Quebec, Germany, the United States, and Chile. Gervais went on to make another series, “Extras,” and has starred in “Ghost Town” and “The Invention of Lying.”

Now, there’s probably no one left reading after all this stuff I plagiarized from Wikipedia, but I needed to provide some background for the most important bit. While Ricky and Steve were working on the second season of “The Office,” they were hosting a radio show on Xfm called “The Ricky Gervais Show.” They were given a producer at random because, as Ricky put it, they “couldn’t be bothered to push the buttons.” What they didn’t realize at first was that their producer, Karl Pilkington, was a comedy gold mine.




At first, “The Ricky Gervais Show” featured Ricky and Steve as DJs every Saturday afternoon talking about British celebrities or about funny things that had happened in their own lives, and Karl worked mostly behind the scenes making sure that the swear words had been edited out of songs – stuff like that. Karl became a celebrity in his own right when Ricky and Steve started to plumb the depths of Karl’s bald round Mancunian head.

Here’s a transcript of an episode early on in the series, from January 19, 2002, where Karl is questioned about the apocalypse and mermaids. If you don't feel like reading, you can download this at http://www.therickygervaisshow.com/index.php?series=01&episode=09 and cue up to the 28 minute mark.

Ricky: What do you think the world might be like if there was, say, a nuclear war and we had to survive underground for a while, until all the waste went away and we could come up and we could eat fruit again and, oh, it’s all weird and we had to start from scratch.

Karl: I’d rather die.

Steve: Okay.

Ricky: Okay.

Karl: Wouldn’t you?

Ricky: Well, supposing it was sort of like Britain, it was just like, it was, all the buildings had gone, right, or there was a bit of scavenging and we hid underground and we came out, you know, in sort of ten years time, don’t keep shaking your head, you don’t know the question, just going “no, no, no, no, I’d rather die.” It was fine, you lived on tinned fruit for a few years, then you had to come up and start again, you had to find other civilizations…

Karl: I’d want that thing that, um, is it, is it Walt Disney had?

Steve: Cryogenically preserved.

Karl: Sort of popped in a fridge thing, and say, ‘look, wake me up when it’s all built again,’ couldn’t be doing with that, walking around with a hard hat on all day.

Ricky: What would you do, set an alarm clock? You’re the only person. What, you get in a fridge and leave a note? ‘If you find this do not disturb ‘til 2012.’

Karl: You know what I mean.

Ricky: No, well yeah, but saying that wasn’t, I mean what would you do first? You’ve just come out right into the light, it was just like, just like, you know, um, Saxon Britain, there was nothing, you have to start again, what would you do, what would you do first?

Karl: I’d probably go and see where I live now, to see what’s left of it.

{Ricky giggles}

Ricky: I love how he thinks.

Steve: Karl, if you, if you were the last man on earth, right, and you had to have one other woman with which to start the human race again, right, and not your girlfriend, who would you start the human race again with? Which person would you, would you wanna, bear in mind it’s not just like the fact that you’ve gotta have kids, they’ve got to be able to provide something in this world, they’ve gotta be leaders.

Ricky: And they might … and they might be all melted … they’ve just got one good eye but now they can tell what you’re thinking, ‘cause of radiation … and, and, and …

Steve: What do you think Karl?

Ricky: And they tried to go through a pod and there was a fish in there for some reason, in their wellington.

Steve: I mean, for me probably…

Ricky: What would you rather kiss, a mermaid or a unicorn?

Steve: Karl, quickly.

Karl: A mermaid.

Steve: No… I want him to answer my question.

Ricky: Why, ‘cause it’s got a lady’s face?

Karl: Hmm.

Ricky: Okay then, what would you rather kiss: a lady with the body of a fish or the body of a horse?

Karl: A fish, wouldn’t you?

{Ricky and Steve laugh}

Ricky: This is the best thing in the world. It’s like, you know when you call a file a rude word and then the computer goes, “Do you want to open ‘tits’?” You laugh ‘cause it’s like, that’s what playing with Karl’s like, you sort of like input it and you always get, get like, d’you know what I mean?

Steve: You get back more than you bargained for.



As “The Ricky Gervais Show” progressed, it gained listeners from the success of “The Office”, but it also drew listeners as eccentric Karl took a more prominent role in the show. Karl would introduce features that he had created and, because Ricky and Steve were too busy/lazy to prepare for the show, Karl’s own contributions became the focus. Here are some of his more famous bits:

Rockbusters: A game show where people had to guess the names of three music acts based on Karl’s cryptic clues. For instance, Karl might give a clue of “That army has got some well nice trenches,” and the answer would be Dandy Warhols (dandy war holes).

Do We Need ‘Em?: Karl would interview a prominent scientist or museum curator about the necessity of certain animals. Not surprisingly, every interviewee defended the rights of creatures like jellyfish to exist, even if they did sting Karl that one time.

Monkey News: Karl would bring in some elaborate unbelievable story, probably from an unscrupulous news source like Ananova, and present it as fact. Usually this would lead Ricky to either laugh about the absurdity of the story or get frustrated at Karl for not having better critical judgement.

I’ve only made it through the first couple seasons of the old radio show, but it continued from 2001 to 2005. Then it went off the air and onto the internet. “The Ricky Gervais Show” got into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most downloaded podcast of 2007. To this day, the combo of Gervais, Merchant, and Pilkington are still releasing audio online, albeit much less frequently.

Okay, so where am I going with all of this? I’ll be shocked if anyone’s still reading, but I had to get this out and over with. I promise that future blog entries won’t be so tedious.

When I watched “The Invention of Lying” a couple weeks back, I had an epiphany. The premise for “The Invention of Lying” is that everyone in the world, save Ricky’s character, is totally honest and totally gullible. Everyone speaks the truth and everyone is expected to speak the truth. I realized that Gervais probably got the inspiration for this movie from being around Karl for so long. Karl has become famous for taking tall tales, like stories about monkeys that foil bank robberies or pet birds that get depressed from being haunted by ghosts, and accepting them as fact.

I’ve tried to present a clear picture of why I find this so entertaining, but if I wrote several more pages, it still wouldn’t do it justice – you just have to listen. It’s especially fascinating and funny to hear Karl talk about his upbringing in Manchester. For instance, one day, Karl’s mom kept him home from school because it was too windy outside. It sounds like something from the Brothers’ Grimm.

Anyhow, if you want to find out more, you can download episodes of the old radio show at www.therickygervaisshow.com or look up stuff on Karl’s bizarre upbringing in Manchester at www.pilkipedia.co.uk. You can also find stuff at www.karlpilkington.com or www.rickygervais.com.

LaTeX

LaTeX has been a godsend to me. I'm not talking about the material used in a lot of folderol that you might buy at Egor's Dungeon near Belmont & Clark. Get your mind out of the gutter! No, I'm talking about LaTeX (pronounced "lay-tek") - the programming language used for making fancy math script. From grade school through part of college, I had all my scholastic stuff divided into two categories: things I could type up on a word processor, and things I had to write down by hand. English and History homework could be typed up in Pagemaker or Works or Word, but I'd have to jot down Math and Physics homework by hand. It was no big deal, either, because I had a pretty light load and the scratch paper was totally necessary. While I was doing "astrophysics research" (I put that in quotes because I didn't get any real research done), I heard people talking about LaTeX to each other as they got their papers ready for potential publication. I didn't investigate any further for some time. Years later, I took a grad-level course on Real Analysis and found that I was doing so much writing by hand that I thought I would get a wrist injury. When you're writing up proofs, it's like you're doing 5-page essays with a bunch of math symbols. So, I tried to do my homework in Word, but it was a real pain in the ass trying in vain to make equations look right. It looked incredibly sloppy and incomplete. I relented and downloaded some software so I could learn and make up PDFs in LaTeX. It was phenomenal! The difference in my homework before and after was like night and day. It was simple, clean and sharp. The pages came out neatly organized, and I didn't suffer from writer's cramp. When I turned in assignments for that class, I may not have had all the answers right, but I know I had the best looking homework.

I'll show you what I'm talking about. One of the most famous equations in physics is Schrödinger's equation. It deals with the wave-particle duality of everything in nature. Too bad I got only a C in Quantum Mechanics, because otherwise I'd start lecturing.



To make this, all I needed to type was

[EQ]\imath\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\Phi (x, t) = \hat{H}\Phi (x, t) [/EQ]

into a LaTeX editor and it comes out all nice and pretty. Planck's constant has a bar in it, the fraction bar is right in the center and exactly the right length, the Greek and Roman letters are elegant - it's a typesetter's dream come true. Now, contrast that with my handwriting.

Wood isn't my usual medium for doing problems in quantum mechanics, but I wanted to start this blog on a classy note. It's just a mess. My delta's and phi's are shoddy, and Planck's constant looks like chicken scratch. You know what? I must be kidding myself. This is totally unintelligible. It's a wonder I made it through any math or science class.

LaTeX is ubiquitous. If you look at almost any paper written in a math or science journal, it was probably written in LaTeX. And now that I'm studying to take the GRE Math Subject test again, I'm going to use it for making study guides. I'm still a novice right now, but I'll probably become an expert by the time I'm writing my doctoral thesis.