On the phone with Verizon

I do not own any land-based phone line, but my parents-in-law still use Verizon. Recently their phone stopped working, and Verizon sent a technician to fix the problem. Having revived the phone service from outside the house, the technician suggested that he could also change a wall jack in the bathroom. Why not, my father-in-law thought. So he got a new water-proof jack in the bathroom.

To their dismay, the phone bill for that month came to more than $100, out of which $91 was for "Labor Charges for Inside Wire Repair Visit", and $24 for the wall jack. Since it was unclear why there was a charge for "inside wire repair" as the actual repair took place outside the house, I called Verizon to have the charge explained.

Having punched in a long sequence of number options on my dial pad, I finally got a representative, to whom I had to repeat again the phone number that I was calling about, which I had keyed in before. The representative must have waken up on the wrong side of the bed as she sounded confrontational in the very beginning. She informed me that since the technician replaced a wall jack inside the house, there would automatically be the labor charge. When I patiently explained to her that the wall jack was not relevant to the repair, she insisted that once the technician did anything in the house, there would be a $91 charge. Seeing that she was beyond reason, I suggested that perhaps Verizon could send an invoice to me that explains exactly what was done to fix the original disruption of service. But that's not her problem, the representative argued, and had me transferred to the repair department.

The repair department apparently did not keep a record of what repair had been performed by its technicians. The new representative, a woman who seemed not to have waken up at all, told me that the only way I could find out the actual repair job was to speak with the technician who did the job. She said that she would have the technician call me the next day.

The next day, no technician called.

So I called Verizon again. This time a Theresa answered my call. I suspected that she was the same representative from last time, for she had the same confrontational tone in her voice. Or maybe that was inherent in the training of all Verizon employees. This time, I got a slightly different story - any time a technician comes to a house, regardless whether the repair is performed inside or outside the house, there will be a charge of $91. It was then insensible, at least to me, to call the charge "inside wire repair". Nonetheless, I said that all I wanted to know was what repair had been performed. When I visit the doctors, I always get a notice from my insurance that list exactly what procedures the doctors have performed and charged for. Should not the phone companies do the same, as a check against dishonest technicians who wantonly charge more than the necessary? Can Verizon just send an invoice explaining the problem and the repair? That seemed, however, too much to ask from Theresa, who repeatedly told me that the service was already explained in the bill. Perhaps to Theresa it was clear what "inside wire repair" actually entailed, but to a person not working for a phone company, that was opaque. So I asked to speak to the manager.

The manager was a man who sounded like he was jerked out of his siesta. Sorry, there was nothing that he could do, since he worked in the billing department, and I had to speak to someone in the repair department. Apparently, in the same company of Verizon, different departments do not share information. In this case, perhaps there was no information, except for the technician's words.

I gave up.

When God retires from heaven

Men used to believe that distinct laws governed the heavenly bodies and the earthly objects .The motion of the planets followed different rules than the motion of a catapulted stone. The genius of Issac Newton changed this view forever. Gravity, the first universal force discovered, follows the same inverse square law in heaven as on earth. Much of modern theoretical physics strive to unify all the interactions, and to reduce all matter to the composition of elementary particles. Modern science no longer separates the celestial realm from the terrestrial regime; the same laws apply to both.

This new affinity for unity between celestial and terrestrial affairs may be sound so far as the immutable laws of physics is concerned, but it can be dangerously misguiding when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial life. Most of astrobiology searches not for life but for life as we know it on earth: carbon-based, water-dependent forms that amazingly share the same genetic material. Yet the life on earth is nothing more than a historical accident, in that it happened to have evolved in a water world and in the temperature range where proteins and nucleic acids dissolve in water. It could happen differently in a different environment. On a much colder planet, for example, liquid carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide can provide life's matrix that water is on earth.

Whenever a new paradigm sweeps away the old, it is often adopted beyond its proven applicability. The unification of the celestial and terrestrial phenomena, successful as it has been in the laws of motion, has yet to find any evidential support in the discipline of biology. Until then, it may be beneficial to keep an open mind, and regard life in the heaven as something different than that on this earth.

Congee

We were in Congee Village on Allen Street, eating porridge, Dungeness crab, and stir-fried frog legs. Viola said that the food reminded her of the movie The Wedding Banquet. All four of us at the table had seen movies of An Lee, so we talked about them, going through each one. Yang questioned whether there was a unifying theme in An Lee's movies. What did "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman", and "Brokeback Mountain" have in common?

"Tolerance", I said. In his movies, An Lee showed the audience how much grief intolerance could afflict.

All agreed. Amelie lamented that today people were no more tolerant than they were two hundred years ago. We might seem a bit more accommodating toward our neighbors, but we remained hostile toward foreign regimes with different ideologies. Half of the people still detested homosexuality.

"Why can't all the people in the world be like us?" one of us asked. We were all liberals educated in Columbia University. Then we laughed. We had found the source of all intolerance.

Santa Fe

I haven’t been to any scientific conference for a year, so attending one in Santa Fe is refreshing. I have been in this field so long that going to a conference is like attending a family union: lots of familiar faces, with a few new additions. There are a few people whose presence can be depended upon. There is one man who has indefatigably come to every conference that I recall going to, and he asks the same set of questions and makes the same set of comments in the sessions that his attendance can be accurately reproduced from recordings.

In conferences, the audience often pretend that they understand the speaker. In one lecture, the speaker opened with a mathematical problem. He went over the problem so quickly that I did not understand it. Seeing no confusion in the audience, I assumed that I was the dumb one. After the session, I asked around for a clarification of the problem. Yet no one understood the problem enough to explain it. In a conference, none of us is as dumb as all of us.

Someone spoke about the state of the field. It was essentially a summary of the unsolved research problems. It was depressing to hear the list because I had heard the same list years ago. It upset me also to observe that most people, who could all eloquently critique the status quo of the field, were attempting nothing to change it. Moreover, there were skeptics who outright reject any possibility of significant advance in the field. They arouse in me a sense of pity. Why keep doing something that you don’t even believe in? Inertia is the source of all misery.

Creativity

I am not fond of contemporary art – most of it, at least. Nevertheless, I went to see Cai Guoqiang’s exhibition “I Want to Believe” in Guggenheim. I went because I had corporate membership so I did not have to pay. I went because Chinese modern art had been fetching skyrocketing prices in art auctions, so I felt that I should be more in the know. I went also because I liked novelties, and creating art using the violent means of burning gunpowder, the technique that Cai pioneered, sounded convincingly novel.

I still entertain the old-fashioned thought that art should serve life. Art for art’s own sake offends me. I feel sorry for contemporary pieces that exist only to question the definition of art, as much as I feel sorry for an amnesiac person questioning “who am I?” I am appalled when art tries to include every triviality in its domain: a shark suspended in formaldehyde, castrated human figurines, a plume of black smoke in the air, an array of jars labeled as a variety of fluids including human urine. Are they art or just children’s mischief? Some argue that abolishing all rules of art makes the possibility of artistic creativity boundless. But does creativity without bound even make sense?

Scientific creativity, for example, is creativity with constraints. A creative theory explains experimental mysteries; a creative experiment tests a theoretical hypothesis. We regard Einstein’s theory of relativity as the culmination of scientific creativity as much for its completely new view of space-time as for its success in explaining many astronomical observations that were previously inexplicable. Only with constraints can we separate true creativity from lunacy.

Architecture and fashion also call for creativity with constraints. No matter how twisted a building is – take a look at Turning Torso in Sweden – a building has to be above all functional. The architect at no time can forget that he is creating a shape and space for human use, as an office, a store, or a home. No one, upon seeing the most outlandish building, will mistake it for something else. The same is true for fashion. The most outrageous design still has to fit a human body for willing customers to pay for and wear.

I enjoyed Cai’s exhibit, that is, I liked a few pieces, hated a few, and was indifferent to most others. I liked the pieces that Cai created for specific commissions, in which he used gunpowder to burn in identifiable images. There was an image of two barely visible wolves in a black forest. In another was a rainbow of fireworks over a historical town. In memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Cai created an image of many mushroom clouds, aligned in rows and columns, by controlled burning of powder under cutouts and arranged grass.

But when Cai was given a free reign to express his artistic ideal, things can go really wrong. The installation of nine cars flying through air – an attempt to capture the dynamic sequence of an exploding car bomb in frozen motion – was confusing, childish, and almost laughable. There was also the film showing the burning down of a house with exploding fireworks, a dumb and pointless show. Cai also went around the world to make rainbows of fireworks: exploding gunpowder in midair in a rainbow shape. But nothing tops, in absurdity, Cai’s Extension of the Great Wall by Ten Thousand Meters, in which he ignited a belt of gunpowder of ten thousand meters outside Jiayu Guan, the western end of the Great Wall. There is no lamer form of art than obvious and trivial symbolism.

Philadelphia

She got on the train at Princeton Junction. It was seven and already dark. She looked twenty seven. She smiled friendly and sat down next to me. There was a man asleep in the opposite seat. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. The train departed, leaving behind the light of the station. Outside the window it was but emptiness. Except for the lamp posts that threw periodic patches of rolling brightness. The light rolled over her face, illuminating a transient and soft profile against the darkness all round us. Then it went away, and came again, and was gone. I dozed off.

When I woke up, she was reading. I knew then that she, like me, was a scientist, for she was reading the latest issue of Nature, the preeminent science weekly. I just read the same issue. I said to her that there was an amazing report in that issue that some people had managed to turn adult human cells into pluripotent stem cells. She paused her reading and looked at me for a second, without saying anything. Then she said yes, it was a real breakthrough. The ice was broken.

She was a Ph.D. student in the University of Pennsylvania, in the department of chemical engineering. She was writing her thesis on computer simulation of amyloid formation, and was visiting her collaborator in Princeton. She said it was quite boring. She felt that she was wasting her life doing things that she didn't believe in, while other people were doing great things like making stem cells out of human skin. She said that she went into science with illusions of grandeur, but all there seemed to be for her was mediocrity.

I assured her that it was fine. I told her that it could be mathematically proven that at least 90% of people wouldn't make it into the top 10%. I told her that research was just another profession, above all one should find a high-paying employer.

The train stopped, a few people at the far end of the car got off. But no one stirred near us.

She said that she had dreams of doing great science. She had ideas of unifying biology into a theoretical framework like physics. She had hoped to invent cure for a disease. But that was before graduate school. Now she only wanted to publish as many papers as she could, so that she could eventually find a faculty position in a decent school.

She said that these days the number of publications alone does not count. Nor does the quality of the science. What matters is where one publishes. You are nobody if you haven't published in Science or Nature. She had just submitted a paper to Science, after it was first rejected by Nature. If Science would reject it, she was going to try Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Plos Biology, Physical Review Letters, Biophysical Journal, in that order.

"Last time my paper ended up in PRL. It is like a dumpster and pretty much publishes any biological paper written by physicists." She said. "This time I hope I can at least get into Plos Biology."

I told her that I had a paper initially submitted to Science but it ended up in American Journal of Physics. She laughed. She thought that I made up the name of the journal. I didn't.

We both felt that bitter irony. We doubt the scientific merit of our own work, therefore we seek vindication by trying to publish it in high-profile journals. We are content with the illusion of doing great science as long as others get the same illusion about us. We are happy fooling ourselves as long as we can fool others. There is no need for true greatness as long as we put up a great front.

We griped more about the status quo of science. We felt trapped.

Then for a minute we were both silent. We looked into each other's eyes and knew that we shared the same sadness, that we were tormented by the same self-pity of unfulfilled lives. Suddenly it was unbearable. Our sadness reflected in each other's eyes began to multiply, like a tortured soul standing between two mirrors. We both looked away. Then she turned to me and took my hand into hers. It should have surprised me but it didn't. It was company in shared misery. Our eyes met again, but in them lust had taken place of sadness. She kept her eyes open until our lips touched. She lead my hand onto her breasts and then let it go. I slided my hand underneath the bra and felt her flesh, pulsating with the movement of the train. Then her hand sought me. When she touched it, it answered. She leaned against me so that her body covered both our hands. My hand glided down her body and found her wetness. A moan. We breathed heavily. Crushing every sound of ours was the noise of the train. All around the train was emptiness. Except for the lamp posts that threw fleeting patches of light over us. Sometimes her hand halted, withdrew, hesitated, afraid, expectant. Then it came back. Her grip tightened as I tapped her intensifying wetness. Then the train stopped. More people got off the train. The conductor walked through the aisle. Her body left mine. We knew it was over. The sorrow had returned to us, the sorrow of feeling cheated by our circumstances, the sorrow of missed lives that could have been. More stops in endless emptiness. We pretended to sleep. When the train arrived in Philadelphia we parted like strangers.

The Last Ottoman

Every Tuesday afternoon, when I take my bath in Cağaloğlu Hamami, Mustafa Ozkan appears fatter than I remember him from the week before. How my masseur manages to develop that corpulence despite his strenuous profession – all day long he pummels and presses and twists and kneels and steps up and down on his customers, in all that heat in the sauna room – puzzles many bathers. “It’s the baklavas.” Mustafa will say, with a carefree smile. Yet fattening Mustafa more than the sweet pastry is the melancholic abandon that has bound him since the day Seifka Pamuk left Istanbul. It was twelve years, three months and four days ago that the auburn-haired girl from Aksaray of central Anatonia flew out from Ataturk airport, made a connection in New York City, and arrived in Pittsburgh to study the soulless magic of chemistry. Feeling that some flesh inside his chest was torn away, Mustafa has been eating ferociously to fill in the void. Seifka has sent three letters. The first one came within a month of her arrival in Pittsburgh. Page after page, she complained of the tasteless food in American diners and the drab city street lined by houses of uniform fabrication, painted in colors one indistinguishable from another. She wrote nostalgically of how she went to the same and only Turkish restaurant near her school three days in a row, even though its döner kebab was too dry. That she missed the sight of the sea, and the hours that she spent with Mustafa on the Galata Bridge fishing for sardines, as the sun cast its fading rays over the waters of the Golden Horn. She mentioned the imminent dreadful qualification exams in three weeks. Four weeks later, Mustafa received the second letter. Seifka had passed the exams but was now occupied with laboratory research. The third letter followed shortly, telling him that she had met a music student from Mexico. There has been no more Seifka in Mustafa’s life.

I lie face down, my chest on the marble slate heated by the steam circulating in the octagonal room. Mustafa takes off his T-shirt, revealing his hairy chest and pear-shaped belly. He puts his hands on my back. “It’s tense here.” he says, as always, and starts to rub along my spine. Mustafa has very strong hands, which is why I choose him for my massages. He presses his fingers deep into my flesh, and I can sense his almost sadistic pleasure of inflicting the transient pain on another man. After the pressing comes the pummeling, and then the twisting backward of my arms as far as they will go without dislocation. In the culminating act, Mustafa steps onto my back with both his feet and walks from my waist to just below my neck and then down again. Soon we are both covered in sweat, Mustafa’s sweat. I feel a little disgust, but soon enough soap comes in and dissolves it.

Mustafa steps out of the room – it’s tea time – leaving me wash off the soap myself. The afternoon sun pours in through the star-shaped windows in the domed ceiling, and, when shining on my skin, it elicits a different sensation of warmth than the moist steam. I turn the faucets fully open, and wait until water has filled the marble basin. I reach in and touch the bottom, just as I touched it when the bath first opened its doors in 1741. I let my fingers register how the stone has become polished by two hundred and sixty six years of running water. Sultan’s subjects, rich and poor, have cleansed themselves under this same roof. Now it caters to the city’s well-heeled residents and Western tourists. The place has otherwise changed little, like me.

The place where a man truly belongs is where he wishes to die. My city is Istanbul – I have peregrinated the world but have always come back to the banks of Marmara – yet I cannot die, not since my fateful encounter with Shabalba when the crushing snow cut off the pursuing Russian cavalry but also stranded me for a week in the high Urals. I will live my endless days of ennui, in this city of solitude and melancholy.

I take a stroll through the Grand Bazaar. In the northwest quarter of the labyrinthine complex of shops, I drop in No. 49 to buy a pouch of oleander that I place next to my pillow at night. Bahar, fifteen-years in age, with a smile that can sweeten earl tea and long eyelashes that pierce like Cupid’s arrows, persuade me to buy a pack of rosehip tea and get the oleander for free. Turning away to greet her next customer, she never notices the resigned sadness in my eyes, the shaking of my hand at the touch of her fingertips when she gives back my change, or the tremor in my voice as I say good-bye. How she resembles her grandmother, Yelda Seyh, the courtesan whose chamber I frequented after returning from the bloodbath on the shores of Cyprus. Yelda, the Red-Leafed Oleander – at that time the most beautiful belly dancer between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea – exorcised my nightmares of raped little girls and mutilated human bodies with her ecstatic cries in orgasm. But how do I make Bahar believe that her mother is the fruit of my loins? In a few years she will look to be my older sister.

I walk by cafés where people are smoking hookah and playing backgammon. I walk by restaurants where American tourists applaud Dervish dancers. I don’t stop. I pass by a small mosque in disrepair adjoined by a dilapidated wooden house, in front of which a wrinkle-faced woman is hanging her washed clothes. In an ice cream stand, a man in white robe is performing the traditional trick of serving Turkish ice cream: his swift wrist keeps the ice cream at the tip of a long rod tantalizingly close to yet always out of reach of his customer's grasp. The onlooking Chinese backpackers laugh in amusement, but I walk on. Oh, the simple delight of seeing something for the first time! Now, I am cursed with a jaded memory, like a film that has been exposed so many times that on it only blank remains.

I spend the rest of my evening sitting on the north wall of Istanbul University, a stone’s throw from the great Süleymaniye Mosque. At sunset, as the sky turns purple and the cruise ships on the Bosporus light up, the speakers on the minarets sing Koran. As the tunes from mosques near and far reach my ears, they interweave with each other like a counterpoint of Bach. On the narrow street below, an old Muslim is selling watermelons and cherries from his wheelbarrow. Waiting for customers that never come, he sits there and eats sunflower seeds. Mechanically he cracks each seed, pops the kernel into his mouth, and throws away the shell. There is a pile of shells by him. He has not sold anything. But he is not worried. Neither am I. I sit there watching him. I have eternity to do nothing.

Mechanism of Na+/H+ antiporting

Desalination of E. Coli. in Homeric hymn

Heed, the readers of Science,
Secret ways of the antiporter.
This family of membrane proteins,
Trading one sodium inside cell, with
Two protons outside,
So all life is alive, in acid and brine.
Its structure recently unveiled,
Using extraction from E. Coli.;
Yet its method of act,
Hitherto uncomprehended.
This method we tell, by a host of
Molecular simulations;
By thinking and rethinking of
Clues already seen in labs:

Three membranous aspartates,
Protonating and deprotonating,
Move the protein in action.
Asp a hundred sixty four,
Deprotonating and protonating,
Binds and releases sodium ions;
Asp a hundred sixty three,
Protonating and deprotonating,
Opens the gate to peri- and cyto- plasm.
Asp a hundred and thirty three,
Be the pKa high, be its charge negative,
Keeps the antiporting in flux.
To ascertain our theory,
We return to the bench,
Modifying the protein by
Mutagenesis.
Happily the outcome,
With our predictions agreed.

The Worth of Chinese Blade

My blog is worth $1,129.08.
How much is your blog worth?

Keep the Change, Stupid!

Bank of America's new gimmick is its Keep the Change program. The ads are all over the places: TV, radio, billboards, subway trains. They feature coins idling on escalators, in dryers, under the carpets, and in other odd crannies. These are the loose changes that BOA vows to help you save: if you use the BOA debit card, your purchase will be rounded up to the next dollar, and the difference will be deposited in your BOA savings account.

Keep the Change, this concept of aided saving, is laughable at best, if not entirely senseless. Having outgrown my piggy bank in teens, I only saved quarters for parking meters and washing machines, and I had barely saved enough quarters before the smart cards caught on in the laundry rooms. If you count on loose changes for your savings, you'd better vote for a financially responsible president so that social security will always be there for you. With two purchases a day, 50 cents of change per purchase, you will save $30 a month, $360 a year. Not exactly helpful for your retirement, or your children's college tuition.

That's why BOA disguised this laughable concept in their advertisements: it's not just about helping you save your money; it's about putting those otherwise lost coins into real use. A misdirection, but a clumsy one. If you are using a debit card, there will be no loose change to begin with. So why round up the price and put the difference into the savings account? Why not just keep the change in the checking account for your next purchase, and put aside larger sums regularly into savings? Why is a BOA debit card better than any other debit card?

When a good magician pulls off a trick, he uses enough misdirections to ensure that the audience cannot reconstruct the mechanism by logic deduction. A good magician knows that people are not stupid. If only the brains of BOA knew that too.

A Stem Cell Called Sputnik

In April 2004, 206 members of Congress signed a letter urging President Bush to loosen the restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research.

Stem cell controversy is another knot in the long string of conflicts between ideology and intellectualism. As it is more a rule than an exception, intellectualism has been on retreat. In 1995, President Clinton signed into law the Dickey Amendment, banning federal funding for all research in which human embryos are destroyed. Although Clinton later considered revising the restriction to applying only to research that directly destroy human embryos, George W. Bush took office before the revision took place. On August 9, 2001, the new president announced that no federal funding would be available for research on new human embryonic stem cell lines.

On the surface, the focus of the stem cell debate is this: is the blob of scores of embryonic cells, 8 days since conception, a human life? Or more poignantly, does it have a soul? To most biologists, the answer is an obvious no. Without a beating heart or a thinking brain, this blob of cells is no more human than a severed, wiggling tail of a lizard. To the God-fearing people, the answer is an obvious yes. According to the church's interpretation of the Holy Script, God gives each human egg a soul at the time of its insemination., which, blasphemously, makes God the greatest voyeur ever, as He must be watching all the fucking on earth in order to promptly mete out the souls.

Questioning the inception of human soul, of course, has been a popular pastime since Aristotle first heard it from Plato. But the current participants of the debate argued with a vigor unsurpassed in history. Although emotional involvement is not unheard of within the pale of metaphysical debate, legislative actions have been rare. Clearly, the current debate is not just about the definition of human life. There is more at stake.

In this fight over stem cell controversy, the two sides are not fighting about the definition of the human soul; they are fighting about whose definition matters in present-day America. Has science firmly established its persuasive upper hand, or does the religious belief still holds its doctrinal sway? The outcome of this conflict will not only determine whether God gets to keep his job of administering the souls, it will also call into question whether God will continue to manage heaven and hell, or to keep calendar for Judgement Day. God already got a black eye when the earth turned out to be orbiting the sun. If the church concedes this time again, God may start to claim unemployment benefits very soon.

So far, God gets to keep his job, as long as George W. Bush keeps his. Bush, in his moment of epiphany, saw the unity of faith and democracy. Perhaps in his reading of the Declaration of Independence, Bush subconsciously added the words "by God" to the end of the sentence "all men are created equal", thereby uniting creationism with democracy. Regardless of his source of inspiration, Bush formulated Bushism in the same spirit as the Chancellor in V for Vendetta:

Hegemony through democracy.
Democracy through faith.

By refusing federal funding to the human embryonic stem cell research, Bush unequivocally demonstrated his resolve to promote God in American life. In this, he was not only restoring faith in this hedonistic country; he was also reviving the tradition of anti-intellectualism in American politics. Face it. Capitalism, and American business, stand to gain as much from brainwashing as Communism or Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. The technique is the classic one from George Orwell's 1984: exaggerating the threat from an external enemy. McCarthy did it in the 1950s; Bush does it fifty years later. Invariably, the Congress goes along. The problem is, although the Capitol Hill is full of white men, there are only a few balls, and they are often black.

So what caused the change of hearts of congressmen in April 2004?

In March 2004, the leading scientific journal Science published a paper entitled "Evidence of a pluripotent human embryonic stem cell line derived from a cloned blastocyst", where the now crestfallen Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang reported the first cloning of human embryonic stem cells. Technically, Hwang's work would also be eligible for federal funding in the United States. Nevertheless, the report sent shock waves across the stem cell research community across America. Overnight, American policymakers realized that if America did not foster a favorable environment for stem cell research, it would lose its race in this promising arena of medical research. The next revolution of medicine may take place on foreign soil. The thought of having to order their transplant organs from Korea along with Hyundai cars in the future was scary enough to frighten 206 congressmen into advocating hESC research.

In October 1957, the Soviet satellite Sputnik disillusioned the American public from their ingrained belief of capitalism's superiority over communism. It also brought American scientists and intellectuals back into relevancy to American life. Hwang's cloned stem cell achieved a similar, albeit shorter-lived effect, until sadly the scandal broke out that discredited Hwang and his research. But with the current anti-intellectualism mentality in America, and the government's negative stance on hESC research, it will be only a matter of time when America wakes up to find that regenerative medicine has become a reality overseas, that its sons and daughters are the last terminally ill to die.

Cabaret von Einstein

For two hundred, you can learn general relativity from a brunette.

Cabaret von Einstein sits at an obscure corner off Langestrasse. Zurich, like most European cities, is small, and its Langestrasse is no more than a mile long. I crossed the Sihl River from its north bank, where I was staying in a small hotel for the night, and walked from one end of Langestrasse to the other in less than fifteen minutes. Just as I read on my guidebook, this red-light district of Zurich was extraordinarily clean, and aside from a few short solicitations from heavily perfumed women, I walked alone untroubled.

I passed by half a dozen cabarets, and dropped in one of them. It was surprisingly empty, especially for a Saturday evening. A few customers sat sipping Champagne with their consorts, and long hiatus passed between girls who came on stage to dance around the lonely stainless steel pole. Men walked in and out. Few sat down. I sat down for a few tunes. But when a girl put her hand on my right knee and suggested that I buy her Champagne, I apologized and left.

It was on my way back to my hotel that I discovered Cabaret von Einstein. Trying to avoid the enticing offers of the pretty ladies, I walked along a side street parallel to Langestrasse. Nothing stirred on the street, until I approached the crossing of the river, where I noticed a neon light spelling E=mc2. Below, a lanky, bespectacled bouncer stood at the entrance. Painted on the wall was "Cabaret von Einstein. Unsere Mädchen lassen dich Relativität verstehen." (My translation to English: Cabaret of Einstein. Our girls let you understand relativity.) No one was waiting in front of the door.

The sign scratched me in the loins. I walked in, and was shocked to see a full house: scores of men sat everywhere on the couches, beanbags, tatamis, barstools, arranged in a cleverly designed close packing pattern. More than three dozen ladies, attired in diverse styles, some casual, some prudish, yet some sensual, bustled around. On the right of the entrance door was the dancing stage, but instead of the stainless steel pole, there hang a whiteboard like one used in a college classroom, and it was being covered with mathematical equations by the slender hand of a full-bosomed woman, thirty-something looking, and wearing reflective lipstick. I heard her speak, as I entered the room, with an Australian accent and a pulsating prurient undertone:

"Thus I have shown that a black hole has no hair."

This, of course, refers to the famous result in relativistic astronomy that a black hole is always spherical and without magnetic field lines, regardless of the deformities and magnetization of its generating star. But told by that voice, it etched in my mind forever.

I sat down on a lazyboy, facing the stage. There was some lingering giggles from the crowd in response to the lecturing woman's concluding remark. But most men seemed to be engrossed in their conversation with their companion girls that the sentence fell silent on their ears. Now the woman on stage, finishing her performance, put on a casual jacket checkered in red and yellow, and walked to my side.

"Mind if I sit down?" She asked.

"By all means; it would be my pleasure." I replied, a little despite myself. I ordered two glasses of Champagne. She gulped.

She was the mistress of the house. She was an assistant professor of physics at Harvard before, but had been running the cabaret since 2002, shortly after she was denied tenure.

"I was doing well, publishing in Physical Review Letters and Nature, and getting grants from the Department of Energy. Everyone saw promotion coming my way. Then Larry Summers ascended to the Harvard throne." She paused, and, raising her Champagne flute over her hazelnut eyes, she examed the yellowish liquid against the flickering blue track light. "I was running against an African American dude. A brainy guy, I hold no grudge against him. It was really a match of gender versus race, and the trophy went to the latter." She searched my face for clues of my siding. I had none. She finished her Champagne, and asked me: "What's your field of study?"

I am a physical chemist. I was in Switzerland for a one-week conference on computational chemistry. I was staying overnight in Zurich on my way back to New York. I told her that my research interests included allosteric effects in proteins, computation of free energies, and signal transduction in living cells. I added that I would also be happy to pay extra to have a wavy-haired lady explain to me the essence of string theory while wearing a G-string.

She sneered, and opened the menu on the table. It was the beverage list. The top items were:

• Veuve Clicquot de Relativité, CHF 200

Enjoy a bottle of Brut with a blondie or brunette and have a discussion on Einstein's space-time invariance.

• Laurent-Pierre de la mécanique quantique, CHF 300

The Champagne is dry, but our ebony temptress will wet your experience with an exposition of Dirac's bra and ket.

• Gloria Ferrer avec la biologie moléculaire, CHF 300

Toast to the discoveries in biology since Watson and Crick with an Asian butterfly.

The mistress told me that those were the most popular, unless I cared to hear about the special: a bottle of Bollinger special Cuvée and a well-endowed woman to discuss active research on the premises.

"All the girls here are working on some cutting-edge problems when they are not entertaining the guests. Most girls have Ph.Ds, but they can't find other fit employment. Some girls are studying toward their Ph.Ds in the nearby Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, a.k.a ETH, where Einstein also got his Ph.D. They are remarkably undaunted, knowing where they will most likely end up after getting their degrees." But the Cabaret provided steady employment, and an intellectually stimulating environment for the girls to do ground-breaking research. The mistress earnestly informed me that her cabaret was the largest employer of women in scientific research.

The price of the special was jaw-dropping. But it was worth the money, the mistress assured me. Stanley Prusiner learnt of the prion knock-out mice from a girl working in the cabaret in the early 90's; Andrew Fire got an inkling of RNA interference when he drank champagne with Lily, a girl who had since abandoned science altogether and was now working in the Malibu Bar , a cabaret on Langestrasse.

"Extraordinary girl, that Lily. She could please with her brain as well as with her booty." She sighed.

We chatted more. I was astonished to learn how many scientific milestones could be attributed to these Cabaret specials. Nearly everyone who ran up his tab on the special went home to publish major scientific breakthroughs, and reaped ample reward of a flourishing career and generous grants. All told, Cabaret of Einstein had indisputably shaped the landscape of today's scientific research.

"Of course, sometimes some girls grunt about not getting the credit of their research." The mistress went on, "But really, giving the results away to the man scientists in academic institutions was the only chance that these valuable discoveries could be made known to the community. Just imagine the editors' reaction when they get a submission from a Cabaret off Langestrasse." Then she looked at me expectantly,

"So, special for you?"

Looking around the packed room, I recognized a few figures. Some had been to the same conference with me; some I had seen pictures of in magazines or met in prior conferences. It was a mixed crowd of old and young. Whereas most of the young men ordered off the menu, one after another the older men requested the special.

I stood up, left money on the table, and put on my jacket. The mistress was incredulous: "Leaving already?" Nodding, I made for the door. I needed to get in that Malibu Bar before Lily got off work.

Il Violino

Il Violino is an Italian restaurant on Columbus Avenue behind the Sony Theatre at Lincoln Square. Many a violinists seemed to have dined there, maybe for dinner as they performed at the nearby Lincoln Center, as their autographed photos covered all the walls. How these photos come into the restaurant is unknown. Did the artists bring a photo of themselves wherever they dined and gave them away as endorsements for the restaurant (a megalomaniac act), or did the owner of Il Violino anticipated the artists' visit and ordered the prints in advance (a precognizant act)? Most likely the owner simply stocked the portraits of all the violinists that have scheduled to perform in Lincoln Center and brought these out for autographs when the violinists dropped by. With scanty restaurants in the vicinity, the violinists are bound to show up in everyone of them some day.

My wife and I went to the Sony Theatre to see The Curse of the Golden Flower, which, incidentally, turned out to be an expected disappointment. Having two hours for dinner before the movie, we strolled into Il Violino for some pasta. It looked busier than its neighbors, but here even the busiest had tables readily available. The waiter, a stocky, balding man with well trimmed goatie, passed by our table. "What would you care to drink?" "Water will be fine." -- We never start with anything other than water, except for once in Dao, where we drank cocktail and my wife had some mishap for imbibing alcohol in empty stomach. The waiter continued on his way to the kitchen and disappeared.

Countless minutes later, the headwaiter came to our table and asked us if someone was waiting on us. Of course, and we were waiting for him. The headwaiter then apologetically took our order. The entrees were duly served, and their taste, considering their convenient location, lived up to the moderate price.

Dessert time, and our waiter was still no show. So we asked a passing waitress, who instructed a handyboy to bring us the dessert menu, who also took our order. Our waiter continued to block us from his sight even after the icecream started to elevate our blood sugar level. My wife suggested walking out without paying, as there was no check, but I refused to leave with a bad conscience on top of a bad dining experience. Again the aforementioned waitress came. "The waiter not doing his job?" She asked, rhetorically, and sent for our waiter, who came to our table the second time to present us our check, and vanished with my credit card into the backroom. Only after we asked the sympathetic waitress for help again did he return, one last time, with the receipt for my signature.

I wrote a small tip for our waiter. He was the waiter, but we did most of the waiting.

Book of Job

The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; at least the shipping and handling is free.

The Tipping Misgivings

It is almost Christmas and I tipped my doormen. This is the first time that I have given the year-end tip to the doormen of my new apartment, therefore it is important and difficult for me to choose the right amount. Too little, the doormen can be unhappy and that will jeopardize my relationship with them; too much, it will set an expensive precedent that I will have to follow in the years to come, and that may jeopardize my wallet -- there really are quite a few door staff for my apartment. I did some research, and decided to err, if I would, on the generous side. Nonetheless, the moment I handed the tip to a doorman I dreaded my next encounter with him. Did I tip enough? From the body language, facial expression, and tonal voice in the doorman's next greeting, I looked for clues of his satisfaction. Was he making more eye contact or less? Did the vowels in the "Good night" get longer or shorter? Was he two seconds later in opening the door?

Year-end tipping is really undemocratic, since there is no mechanism for the tippers to act on fair ground. Each tipper, especially the inexperienced tippers, has to guess the amount with insufficient information, and that causes unnecessary anxieties, and often, because most people would rather be generous than stingy to avoid attrition with the recipients of the tip, inflation of the tip. By the same token, bribery in a corrupt society causes unnecessary economical attrition.

A free but not so super haircut

I got a coupon from Supercut offering a free haircut. I thought that there was no harm in saving a few bucks. So I went.

In retrospect, the big mistake that I made, aside from stinting on what I should have splurged, was that I presented the coupon right after I entered the shop. Every barber turned her head and frowned: here comes another person who is in just for the free cut. The head barber apparently had no interest in wasting her time. She disappeared immediately after finishing with her previous customer, leaving me waiting on the bench. The second barber available had no choice but to take me on the chair. But she cut my hair with as little care as if she were mowing down the remaining stalks in a wheat field after a year's harvest, paying no attention to either what fell off or what was left standing. I, conscious of the cut being free, patiently and politely pointed out the unevenness on my head, which she reluctantly corrected. By the end of ten minutes, she set down her clippers and scissors, and gestured that I was done.

My poor haircut did not escape being noticed the second day at work. My colleagues all wondered, some a little too loudly, why a man of decent salary would accept a messy head of hair for a saving of a few bucks. I wondered ruefully, too. But I feel as sorry for Supercut as for myself, for it just spent a few bucks to lose a potential customer. The management clearly lost touch with its employees. The free haircut that the management handed out in hope of promotion was taken by the individual barbers as an opportunity for the free-loaders to take advantage of their labor. What should have been a chance to attract new customers is thoughtlessly squandered, and that expended labor is lost forever.

My fear of ghosts

I have always feared ghosts, and this fear grows stronger as I grow older. Every strange movement of untouched objects, every mysterious apparition, every inexplicable sound rouse my suspecion of an encounter with the unliving. Never could I watch a horror film without being on my toes for days afterwards; so I have quit those films altogether for a few years now.

This fear rather perplexed me, since I am an atheist and I never really believe in ghosts. But recently I start to rationalize my fear. I do not really fear that the ghosts, if they were there, would do me bodily harm. After all, my folklore knowledge tells me that the dead and the living cannot interact physically. What I truly fear is their mere existence. If there were ghosts, there would be an afterlife, and there might very well be a judgement day for us all. There might even be a God, who would probably have been very angry with me for years of unbelief. I would have to answer for all the things that I have done in godlessness. I might be roiling on a gridiron in hell for eternity. Worst of all, I would not know whether I would still have time to redeem myself in the remainder of my life, by giving up all the joys that God disapprove and all the liberal thoughts that the Church condemns. If I would be a good Christian for the rest of my life but still go to hell because of my earlier sins, I would have lost both in this life and the one after, and that thought would drive me mad.

Now I understand. It is not the ghosts that I fear. It is the perdition.

The Gene of Art

Imagine an island, inhabited by aborigines untouched by civilization, innocent of art. Imagine a plane crash on this island, and the cargo, the treasures of western art, miraculously survives the crash. Imagine the aborigines, coming to the site of the crash, find that for their grab are Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a canvas spoiled by Jackson Pollack, and, for their complete introduction to modern western art, Duchamp's signed urinal. Which piece of art will the aborigines vie for?

Such a hypothetical question has never been asked in reality. Surprising, considering the long debate throughout history about the meaning of art, and more specifically, whether we are innately conditioned to recognize certain objects as art. Simple experiments may help to answer this question. Art, like all things under the sun, can be dissected by methods of science. A recent paper, published in no less a journal than the most prestigious Nature, attempted to rationalize the structural harmony of a Japanese garden. A more famous example is the mathematical analysis of Pollack's paintings, which revealed that the fractal dimension in a true Pollack is consistently higher than the imitators. Such studies, few there may be, are more for scientists' self-amusement than for artists' enlightenment. They are usually scattered in scientific journals, and, as few artists read scientific journals, they are seldom heeded in the world of art, except sometimes as subjects of ridicule. The real artists prefer to debate the meaning of art based on subjective and metaphysical opinions, not on objective facts. Art, to the artists, is divine; to reduce art to its atomistic elements is preposterous and contemptible. In the world of art, science has no dominion.

Art, like Christianity, like science, is an institutionalized religion. The artists, art scholars and critics are its clergymen and evangelists. Like the evangelists of Christianity, the artists want to spread their influence. Art, they like to say, should be enjoyed by all men. Like the clergymen of Christianity, the artists try to keep some privileges to themselves. Art, they also say, can only be truly enjoyed by the initiated few. A layman can read the bible and follow the teachings of Jesus, but only the Church has the authority to interpret the Holy Script; anyone can go to the museum and contemplate the exhibition of art, but only the insiders of art can decide what to include in the collection. The doctrines of art are negotiated by the artists' Council of Nicene; there is no genuinely disinterested definition of art. The promoters of art, the critics, the scholars, and the dealers, do not share the same interests with the creators of art, the painters and the sculptors. The outcome of any debate of what makes art is a compromise among different interest groups, and it evolves with time.

By and large, art must be sold, to the elites of the society who can afford it. In the middle ages, art was sold to the nobilities, the Church, and the Venetian merchants. In modern days, it is sold to the industrialists, the financiers, and the Saudi princes. Among other reasons, the elites patronize art as a means of distinguishing themselves from the mass. The more the art can distinguish, the better. Yet the distinction must be subtle. The bourgeois should appreciate a decade later what the nobilities are enjoying now. The critics' job is to direct the Avant-Garde of art, so that the buyers of art are always a few years ahead of the commoners. When everyone is accustomed to Monet and Cezanne, they introduce Matisse. When Matisse becomes well received, they bring out Picasso. And so on, until a piece of warped metal appears in Christie's art auction.

Are we genetically predisposed to perceive certain combination of light and shadow, color and shape as art? Probably not. If art is beauty, and beauty is what attracts us biologically, we should see as the most beautiful a woman's vagina, or a man's penis, which of the two depending on, of course, the gender of the beholder. No, art is an acquired taste, and it needs a formal introduction. So much as a man unlearned in mathetmatics cannot see the beauty in a man cannot appreciate the wonderful play of space and color in Matisse's The Piano Lesson without first being familiar with the paintings of the classical masters. Art, in this sense, is what the artists tell us should be.

Back to the lucky aborigines who have the chance to choose between Da Vinci, Picasso, Pollack and Duchamp. Will they recognize the perfect symmetry and harmony in Mona Lisa, the grotesque beauty in Les Demoiselles, or the universal fabric hidden in Pollack's splashes of paint? Or will they marvel at the smooth, glossed surface of the urinal, its clean curves and solid construction, and see it as the acme of artistic creation? In all likelihood, the aborigines may scour through the wreckage and find a half-charred suitcase the most aesthetically appealing. But most probably each individual will have a different favorite and everyone will be happy with his share of the windfall. After all, in a world unspoiled by institutionalized art, everyone is entitled to an opinion.

Amazing Ronaldinho

This Nike commercial is making rounds on the internet. Ronaldinho, yet another Brazilian soccer genius, casually puts on a new pair of white Nike cleats, foot-juggles a football along the penalty line, and kicks the ball at the goal. Four times in a row, the ball hits the crossbar and bounces back, and Ronaldinho catches the ball with his foot and continues to juggle the ball. Incredible.

Is it real or fake? As much debate has surfaced on the web as that about whether Ben Affleck and J Lo were dating for real. Opinions range from total credulity to complete disbelief. One person thinks that the first two hits are real, while the other two are processed; another amusingly proposed that only the first hit is real, but it is unintentional and has inspired the following digitally-processed sequence.

When I first saw the video, I was so utterly amazed that I did not even consider the possibility of its being fake. Having recovered from my initial amazement, I now think that the video has been retouched. In fact, now I am amazed that there is even a debate regarding the video's authenticity. It is certainly impossible, ruling out that the gods were guiding the ball between him and the crossbar, that anyone, anyone, can kick the ball from 35 yards away, hit the crossbar four times in a row, have it bounce back each time precisely to himself, and catch it in mid-air with his foot. But many people think that the gods are indeed watching over Ronaldinho's shoulders. Many people think that Ronaldinho is indeed THAT good. Nike did not choose ANY soccer player for this video; they chose Ronaldinho to lend it credibility.

We all have this superhuman complex: we tend to believe that superhuman abilities exist, and that they must be found, if not in our mediocre selves, in other exceptional individuals. Don't we all love to tell the story of an extraordinary feat of some genius's doing? The vicarious accomplishment is truly, deeply satisfying.

Ill Formed URLs

Internet! There seemed to be a webpage for everything. And every webpage needs a URL. The most thoughtless, and easy-to-remember way of forming the URL is to concatenate all the words together. My apartment building, Ritz New York, has its own webpage: www.ritzny.com, and one AIDS coalition's website: www.walkforaids.org.

But this concatenation can misfire. The URL string can be parsed into completely different word combinations than originally intended. Just like the founders of the Super 8 Motel chain neglected to look up the meaning of suppurate, many advertisement men forgot to look out for the alternative and often compromising meaning of their web URL. This blog celebrates such negligence.

Go red for women, the new campaign of the American Heart Association, has its dedicated webpage. The URL is simply www.goredforwomen.org. Unfortunately, it also reads

www.gored for women.org

which, amusingly, may evoke similar visual images as the original slogan.

The O'Neill building in New York's Flatiron District, once a fashion emporium, is being converted into a new luxury condominium. It too, has its own URL for sales promotion: www.theoneillbuilding.com. Well, the potential buyers might want to think twice about purchasing a unit in

www.the one ill building.com