Burnout: physics, sexism and fiction

Posted on July 31, 2026 by tkflor

“Sharing space with anyone else means sharing energy—literally. Connection moves us at the level of our atoms. Each particle we are made of influences and is influenced by the particle next to it in an unending chain that exists on the smallest and largest scales you can imagine, and every scale in between…We’re made of energy. The nature of energy is to be shared, to spread, to connect one thing to another. Sharing space with other people means that our energy influences theirs, and their influences ours. It’s physics. It’s psychology. And unavoidable. And amazing.”
From Burnout the secret to unlocking the stress cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

It is amazing that the nature of energy was not unlocked in a groundbreaking research paper, but was revealed in passing on the page of a self-help book intended for female audience. But was it unavoidable that the authors were not added to the tiny list of women laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics? “The Real Enemy”— the authors’ shorthand for patriarchy, the beauty industry and similar sources of sexism — might be the culprit for the omission. Or maybe, there is a less catchy explanation that separates fiction from physics.

In a literary work, “We’re made of energy” may be taken as a metaphor. Burnout is a self-help book. It begins with a promise to be “different from anything else you’ll read about burnout. We’ll figure out what wellness can look like in your actual real life, and we’ll confront the barriers that stand between you and your own well-being… With science.” The paragraph cited at the top is an antithesis to science. There is a fundamental difference between atoms composing the human body and the living organism itself. Atoms of the same element (stable isotope) are interchangeable and don’t change over time. Humans are way more complex.

Burnout, according to Psychology Today, is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. The term was coined in 1970s by Herbert Freudenberger to describe emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a deep sense of futility experienced by caregiving professionals. It was later recognized that burnout is not limited by career type, and is not a byproduct of being overworked. Atoms’ interactions are fully described by equations. People, on the other hand, often react differently in the same conditions. Some thrive under continuous pressure and achieve greatness. Others under-perform and become mentally and physically sick. Some professions are statistically more prone to burnout, but until I’ve read Burnout: the secret to unlocking the stress cycle, I never suspected that being born and raised as a female was a professional hazard.

“Womanhood as a ‘chronic, low-level stress’ is even messier than it sounds, for two reasons: First, it’s very possible that female and male biologies respond differently to that stress. When male rats are exposed to these chronic, mild stressors, their swim time in the forced swim drops in half pretty much right away. After six weeks, it drops in half again. Female rats, by contrast, take three weeks to drop their swim time in half…and it does not change after six weeks. Female rats exposed to chronic, mild stressors persist more than males do. They work harder in the face of difficulty; it takes twice as long for their brains to shift into helplessness. Even female rats, it seems, #persist.
And second, one of the stressors we experience is being told that we’re not experiencing any more or different stress than men. One aspect of the patriarchy (ugh) in the modern West is that it says it doesn’t exist anymore.”

The analogy between humans and rats is not so far-fetched as that between us and atoms, yet a question immediately arises: how does this experiment prove women’s susceptibility to burnout under continuous stress? I really wanted to find out whether sex is a significant factor in burnout, and waited for data-based evidence for the claim that being a female increases one’s odds of developing burnout. I did not see the hypothesis supported with rigorous research and statistically meaningful data. The anecdotal evidence and fictional stories in the book might have value as entertainment, but in terms of validity, they reminded me of the joke about dads fainting in the delivery room and being treated by the medical staff while the women give birth.

Facetious comments aside, there are two reasons why I’m writing this blog post. First, it annoyed me that affirmation was conflated with empowerment. Most women do not succumb to stress even when they face problems much more serious than the threats posed by “The Real Enemy.” If the book were written by misogynists set out to prove that women cannot “man up”, I would stop reading right away. I persevered to the end of the book because the authors were not guys who try to disguise their testosterone-infused superiority complex with science-y terminology. On the contrary, they were caring women set out to “inspire and empower.” Still, I cannot fathom why arguing that women are set to fail is either inspiring or empowering, nor why the authors choose to further degrade their female readers, by suggesting that women cannot see that they are screwed. There is nothing new about men claiming that women are whiny idiots, but when other women profess that their sex cannot cope with fast-paced, demanding modern lives, they add insult to injury.

The second reason why I write this post is the authors’ advice to thwart burnout with rest, physical activity, and positive connection with friends and family. There is nothing wrong with these common-sense suggestions, but again analogies based on a common denominator (like sex) can be misleading. According to NIH, “The symptoms that are said to be a result of burnout can generally also have other causes, including mental or psychosomatic illnesses like depression or anxiety disorders. But physical illnesses or certain medications can cause symptoms such as exhaustion and tiredness too. So it’s important to consider other possible causes first together with a doctor.”

A self-help book should not give the illusion of providing a reliable diagnosis. One can be annoyed or amused by the tirade about “The Real Enemy”, but when one is advised by complete strangers that everything will be OK once you sleep and exercise instead of smiling and dieting, this crosses a line. Burnout can have serious consequences, so one should be wary of anything and anyone that presumes to prescribe general one-size-fits-all solutions. Seriously, humans are too complex for simplistic guidance.

To see why it’s important to get a professional perspective for the specific case, I recommend reading a physician’s experience with burnout and what it took to treat it: After Burnout: Reigniting the Flame.

To sum up, I think that it’s good to remember that the fair-sex—that is about half of humanity—is not as fragile and easily put-down as the Burnout book claims, but if you, or someone you care about shows signs of burnout and cannot cope with everyday life, it might be a good idea to get professional help.


Image: Worn Out: At Eternity’s Gate, by Vincent Van Gogh, 1890.
The painting was completed two months before Van Gogh’s death, when he was convalescing from a severe relapse in his health. He was 37 years old. Source: Wikipedia

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WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL: a memoir of writing life

Posted on April 11, 2026 by tkflor

“I wanted to throw my whole self into writing, believing I could make a go of it, while simultaneously doubting it was possible. I’d reached one of those edges, when you can’t fathom remaining where you are, but neither can you imagine going forward.”
From WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL, a book by Sue Monk Kidd.

WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL is partly a memoir of Sue Monk Kidd’s long and rewarding writer’s journey, and partly an introspection about the inner forces that compelled her to write and about the external forces that shaped her writing.
“Geography is fate,” Sue Monk Kidd (SMK) cites Heraclitus, adding “This was true of me.” Her writing odyssey began with a clash between her “impulse of the heart” to write and the societal expectations of “the pre-feminist, pre-civil rights, religion-possessed South,” where a girl from her background went to a charm school to polish her manners and studied in an all-girl home economics class how to cook, sew, entertain, please her husband and raise their children. At fifteen, Sue was certain that she meant to be a writer; after high school, she studied nursing in college, married and began a family.

Finding the light, then losing the light—it happens to writers all the time. Circumstances intervene that extinguish it, or the radiance flickers out from lack of attention or a belief that we aren’t capable enough. John Gardener suggested that the true search in a writer’s life is for “the necessary fire.” I believe he meant that the writer must search for a conviction in herself, for the place of combustion inside that enables her to say with certitude, This is my path.

SMK believed in herself, yet as a mother of two young children who juggled writing with night shifts at hospital, she realized that while keeping all the balls in the air, she basically gave up on her dream. Longing to reclaim the creativity she had felt in her youth, and having a supportive husband who was willing to make financial adjustments, she left nursing to write full-time. In stories, taking the leap starts an alchemical chain of events that transforms a heroine into a much better version of herself. In real life, it took more than dedication and having time to write to alleviate the self-doubts of a woman discouraged to believe in her abilities. The memoir discusses other ingredients that made a difference. For me, the most interesting one is creativity.

The book starts with a premise that creativity is an instinct that seeks conscious expression in the world, and proceeds to Jung’s distinction between writing that originates from the unconscious (“the deep inner world of the author”) and writing that draws from the “conscious mind and rational intellect.” Creativity has an unconscious part where stories are conceived, and a focused, goal-oriented one that brings order to and shapes the disconnected figments of imagination. Both are necessary for writing.

The unconscious “mystery beneath the words” that writers sometime call the Muse generates images, conjures dreams, and creates epiphanies when one is stuck in their work. Although it’s impossible to summon inspiration, the Muse’s appearance is not completely unpredictable. Good work habits, motivation, and routine are oft-quoted suggestions to train her to show up. To these, SMK adds taking time from actively looking for a solution, and cites Einstein who made breakthroughs while not being actively engaged in productive work. Apparently, an indolent mind frees our imagination to browse around, to find new connections and discover meaning that eludes us when we are focused on coming up with results. Subconscious creativity, however, cannot create tangible work. Ideas are like seeds, or possibilities; merely combining figments of imagination generates chaos rather than art.

“In literature,” she cites a writing teacher, “madness uncontrolled is madness, madness controlled is genius.” Achieving such control while crafting stories that resonate with readers is both art and craft.

The book’s largest section is on the craft of writing. Those who have read other books on the subject would be familiar with most of the content, but any novice who believes that having a story to tell is the most important part of the process is bound to be disillusioned. I especially liked SMK’s description of the bored reader in the chapter “Hurry Slowly.” A passenger on a cross-country flight does not care how action is paced with explorations of the characters and with world-building, or whether the story is imbued with meaning. All she notes is that “This thing is so-o-o slow.”

The last section of WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL is about meaning. In this part, I discovered the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who studied creativity and a phenomenon he called “flow.” I have encountered the term in craft books and in podcasts about writing, but SMK’s introduction caused me to want to know more about this blissful “state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” (from https://news.uchicago.edu/story/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-pioneering-psychologist-and-father-flow-1934-2021)

I recommend WRITING CREATIVITY AND SOUL to readers interested in an introspective view on the “heart and soul” and the craft of writing, and to writers tempted to substitute chunks of lengthy and often unpredictable process with AI-generated text based on their ideas. As Sue Monk Kidd shows, writing is more than ideas and craft. It offers and requires creativity and self-discovery.

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Euclid’s Window: a smorgasbord of geometry, history and anecdotes about famous scientists

Posted on February 28, 2026 by tkflor

“The discovery that mathematics is more than algorithms for calculating volumes of dirt or the magnitude of taxes is credited to a lone Greek merchant-turned-philosopher named Thales a bit more than 2,500 years ago.”
From Euclid’s Window, a book by Leonard Mlodinow.

Euclid’s Window is a brief and non too-serious history of the development of geometry, that highlights conceptual breakthroughs from Thales (5th century BC) to the emergence of M-theory at the end of the 20th century. The book is divided into five stories — Euclid’s, Descartes’s, Gauss’s, Einstein’s and Witten’s — but also emphasizes that none of those trailblazers lived in a vacuum.

The author begins with a claim that “Euclid was a man who possibly did not discover even one significant law of geometry. Yet he is the most famous geometer ever known and for good reason.” Then he goes on to describe how ancient Greeks transformed the practical knowledge of earlier Egyptian and Babylonian mathematicians into a much broader understanding of “earth measurement”, or in Greek, geometry. The former worked to find solutions to specific problems. Thales and his successors saw beyond particularities. They introduced abstract concepts that apply to many unrelated circumstances. Euclid’s story begins with Thales and Pythagoras, and continues after the introduction of Euclid’s famed postulates. For example, in 212 B.C., Erasosthenes, the chief librarian of Alexandria, calculated the circumference of the earth by employing geometry. Surprisingly, his calculation was so accurate that his error was within 4% of the correct value!

The second story is that of René Descartes, a French philosopher from the seventeenth century. Descartes’s greatest contribution to geometry is connecting it to algebra. His discovery replaced descriptions of curves like circles and ellipses with equations, and his coordinate system revolutionized how distances between points in space are recorded. Historians of science can probably explain why it took so long for mathematicians to start using algebraic equations to describe curves given that scientists, well versed both in Geometry and in Algebra, flourished during the middle ages. Euclid’s Window does not go into such speculations, but it mentions some of the challenges Descartes faced, before, during and after he developed his new method to describe positions in space in terms of algebra.

Mlodinow calls his next choice, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, “the greatest revolution in Geometry since the Greeks.” Non-Euclidean geometry is much harder to visualize than Euclidean geometry, as it’s not a concept readers encounter in everyday life, or are familiar with from high school math. For over 2000 years many mathematicians deemed that Euclid’s parallel postulate (for any given line, only one parallel line can be drawn through any given external point) was not as intuitive as his other assumptions. However, all attempts to prove it failed. It took the genius and the self-confidence of Gauss to make the leap to a different geometry. Gauss did not show that Euclidean geometry is wrong. Instead, he made a different assumption and discovered a new geometry that describes a curved space where the sum of the three angles of a triangle is less than 180º. In curved space, for any given line, there are not just one, but many parallel lines through any given external point.

Gauss’s idea that the curvature of a space could be studied solely on the surface itself is even less intuitive, but Mlodinow uses his sons (repeated characters in the book) to illustrate what this means. Gauss’s final stroke of genius was to compel Riemann to work “On the Hypotheses Which Lie at the Foundation of Geometry.” Riemann’s consequent work expanded Gauss’s curved spaces, and set the stage for Einstein’s general theory of relativity which entwines physical concepts like energy, mass, and momentum with space itself.Image from Feymann Lectures

Einstein’s story is the best known one, so I won’t repeat any of it here.

The last story, that of the string theorists, stands out in many ways. First, unlike the previous stories, here the author personally knows the protagonists and had a front seat view of the evolution of their work. Second, I know nothing about M-theory, but the author claims that its predictions are relevant for physics. It seems to me that if there was observational evidence for any incarnation of string theory, the news would have spread beyond the small community of mathematicians and theoretical physicists. A quarter of century has passed since Euclid’s Window was published, yet I did not hear about any such observation.

In all, I enjoyed reading Euclid’s Window. I found the book easy to read, despite its topic (geometry was my least favorite math subject in school). And what is rarer, it made me want to continue to read to the end. I recommend this book to those who want a glimpse at the evolution of geometry’s fundamental ideas, who are curious about scientists’ understanding of what space is. The book does not assume that readers have a mathematical background, and does not offer scientific rigor. I think that it makes the book not only comprehensible, but interesting. In that, I completely disagree with the distinguished mathematician who opened his review of the book with: “This is a shallow book on deep matters, about which the author knows next to nothing.” Mlodinow’s scientific career shows that he does understand something about geometry. He could have sprinkled his book with expressions like “conformal invariance of Euclidean geometry” and “a Riemannian manifold is Euclidean if and only if it is flat.” Such additions were unlikely to increase readers’ understanding of these “deep matters”. But maybe then the reviewer would have omitted some of the accusations that “the author shrinks from nothing in his desperation to be ‘readable and entertaining’”.

I do have one last nitpick: Whoever edited the book shouldn’t have missed the incorrect attribution of “To see a world in a grain of sand” to Keats. Obviously, it’s not a blasphemy to confuse between two romantic English poets, but only Blake could begin the Augeries of Innocence with

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

To me, writing that the “poetry fits the mathematics,” adds insult to injury. I appreciate Mlodinow’s explanations of Euclid’s, Descartes’s, Gauss’s, Einstein’s and Witten’s groundbreaking discoveries. Trailblazers, however, are not the sole prerogative of mathematics and sciences. William Blake was a visionary poet who elevated imagination and abhorred logic. As his song attests, he perceived curved space and time that ticked differently. As Blake’s poem preceded Gauss’s discovery of curved spaces and that much later work that connected space with time, I don’t think that Blake would have appreciated the arrogance of scientists who fit his song into mathematics. Maybe Blake would not have objected if the conclusion was that math fits poetry.


A fragment of the second book of the Elements of Euclid. Source: Wikipedia

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Thank you to an anonymous person

Posted on November 26, 2025 by tkflor

This post is directed to someone I do not know who yesterday found a wallet at ShopRite.
It was the last store we went to before returning home, and I didn’t notice that my wallet was missing until I was back in the house. A hectic couple of hours followed as we searched the car and the driveway hoping that the wallet fell there. It barely drizzled for the entire month, but yesterday, it rained. Finally, I had to accept that the wallet was lost, and call to cancel my credit cards. Later, we went back to the shops and asked if anyone returned a wallet. By the time we reached our last stop, this felt rather pointless, yet we asked, and instead of the shake of a head, the guy at customer service went into another room and returned with my wallet. I cried, thanked him, and cried more when I found that EVERYTHING, including cash, was inside. So, a very big Thank You to the kind Anonymous Person.

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Three Tomorrows: Be careful what you wish for

Posted on October 25, 2025 by tkflor

“She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”
From Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,
a novel by Gabrielle Zevin

I am pretty sure that I can identify what draws me to read a work of fiction. And Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was full of promise: two protagonists, one is an undergrad majoring in math at Harvard and another studies computer science at MIT. Both are exceptional (is any other kind accepted to these venerable universities?) and yet neither fits where they are. At first, the encounter of two gifted misfits with baggage to overcome suggested to me a love story, but the novel is certainly not a romance.

It turns out that the protagonists, Sadie and Sam, have known each other since childhood, but haven’t been in touch, until a chance meeting in their early twenties. Although they have not spoken for years, it quickly becomes clear that Sam and Sadie deeply care about each other. Nevertheless, a childhood grudge weighs on their friendship. Still, both are avid gamers, and ambition pushes them to collaborate on creating a game that would raise them above hordes of game developers and propel their careers.

The first part of the book is a story of how Sam and Sadie follow this goal, and it’s an engaging read. Zevin alternates between “present” and “past”, so I could appreciate Sam’s willpower and be amazed that he managed to be in Harvard despite what life had thrown at him. Sadie was harder to like, yet I sympathized with her because in the competitive, male dominated environment of MIT’s computer science department in 1990s, she faced choices that none of the male students had to deal with. The plot thickened and was broadened by the presence of Marx, Sam’s benevolent roommate who bankrolled the enterprise, and Dov, a professor at MIT with whom Sadie has a very unhealthy, yet professionally rewarding, relationship.

As noted above, to create a great game, Sam and Sadie had to hone their abilities. Time, however, is a major issue for undergrads in very demanding academic programs. A choice had to be made: a degree from Harvard/MIT or following a risky dream.
ʻIf I were youʼ Dov said, ʻI would take the next semester off.ʼ
Sadie was listening, nodding.
ʻYou and your crew. You’ve got something here,ʼ Dov said, ʻI really believe that.ʼ
ʻBut school…ʼ Sadie’s voice was barely audible. ʻMy parents…ʼ
Taking that break and not graduating with their class was the first, but not the only, tough decision Sam and Sadie made for the small chance to make a splash with their game. Closed in a room for months, “…Sadie and Sam had programmed Ichigo, nonstop, until their fingers bled. Literally, in Sam’s case…Sadie had stared at her computer screen so long she burst a blood vessel in her right eye. She didn’t even go to the doctor; she just sent Marx to the drugstore for eyedrops and Advil, and soldiered on.” There were other sacrifices, and Sam’s and Sadie’s determination to complete and sell (the game) Ichigo took a heavy toll on their physical and mental health.

If Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow ended fulfilling the ancient promise “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy,” it would have been only a third as long as the actual novel and the message would be clear: the tremendous effort and the sacrifices were worth it. But reading on, I became confused about what the author was trying to convey. My disenchantment with the characters was gradual, but as Sam and Sadie became more and more miserable, I lost interest in the twists and turns of their misunderstandings and dissatisfaction. After a major tragedy toward the end of the story, I could not stand either of the protagonists and left the last sixty pages of the novel unread.

After closing the book and putting it aside, I tried to figure out why it didn’t deliver on its promise. The increasingly depressing tone contributed, yet I neither expect nor ask novels to lead to happy endings. The disengagement seems to be a consequence of the straining of the tenuous balance between the story’s events and the protagonists’ response to them. The deal breaker was the death of the character who kept the others in check; I saw no hope for the remaining cast. To say it more plainly, it was interesting to read about unusual people who worked hard to reach a position where they could reap the fruits of their talent and labor. When these people, having the advantages of still being young, well connected, and without financial worries, cannot find joy in their life, it becomes quite boring to read on and on about their petty grudges, endless squabbles and other ways they make themselves and each other unhappy. Then I reached Marx’s favorite speech from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Those lines explained the aptly chosen title. They also seemed to say that there is no point in reading further, that the rest of the story would give me nothing.

A scene from Macbeth, Banquo’s Ghost by Théodore Chassériau 1855,
image from Wikimedia.

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Arboretum and Yogurt

Posted on June 7, 2025 by tkflor

After a rainy May, suburban central New Jersey is lush with greenery. The landscape is pretty, albeit quite monotonous: lawns, seasonal flowers, common shrubs and trees. An arboretum, on the other hand, aims for more than a pleasant impression. Its collection of plants requires knowledge of horticulture, acreage beyond small suburban plots, and many years of development. The Barnes Arboretum at Saint Joseph’s University is located near Philadelphia. The oasis of 12 acres had started when the site’s previous owner, Joseph Lapsley Wilson, began to assemble a collection of trees in the 1880s. He sold the arboretum in 1922, yet remained its director until his death in 1928. Laura Barnes, the new owner’s wife, continued and expanded the arboretum’s collections.

A century later, it is a beautiful and peaceful place, where visitors can stroll on woodchip paths that meander between a variety of trees, ranging from California redwoods to pines from China, and visit a “formal garden” that looks as if it belongs in a British period drama. In late spring, the lilacs are past bloom, but the peonies and roses were magnificent. The native mountain laurel was also in bloom, reaching the size of a tree. The vast majority of trees and plants had name tags. I enjoyed what I saw without trying to memorize the plants’ names and countries of origin. We took hundreds of photos. Here are some:







Another matter I wanted to write about is plain, whole milk yogurt that recently has become hard to find on the shelves of local stores. I did find several organic, non-GMO, and occasionally grass-fed types of yogurt with hard to believe prices, and even these were not always available. Gradually, the idea of home-made yogurt seemed more appealing. Yogurt is a two-ingredients product, I reasoned, and if the preparation process was complicated, people in Eastern Europe and the Middle East would not have made it for millennia. Previous experience with stuff bought and used once or twice, then left to clutter the kitchen for years, taught me not to buy new equipment before I make sure that my family will eat the new food. That left out yogurt machines, special ceramic bowls, thermometers and whatnot.

Next step was to search the internet for an easy recipe. A video clip How to Make Homemade Yogurt – No Machine Required showed that this is doable and not time consuming. I decided to start with a small batch, so if it would turn out inedible, I could use the soured milk to make pancakes.

It worked!

To make five jars of yogurt I use four and half jars of warm milk (regular whole milk from local dairies that verify that the milk does not contain antibiotics) and half a jar of starter (initially I used a store brand of organic whole milk plain yogurt and later the yogurt I made).

Preparation method: It is common to scald the milk, then wait for it to cool, and only then mix in the starter. The very serious seriouseats.com provides a scientific explanation why scalding the milk for several minutes yields a better yogurt. I tried this way and also to warm it just until I could hold a finger inside the milk, and did not notice any difference in taste or texture. One time, I absentmindedly mixed the starter into cold milk. Although I was skeptical that this batch could turn into yogurt, I poured the mix into jars, closed their lids and let them reach a comfortable temperature in a bath of warm water (again the finger test, i.e. holding it in the water for a few seconds). The culture did not care that something was amiss and at the end of the day (about 10-12 hours later), each jar contained yogurt!

My conclusion is that what matters most to make a mild, creamy yogurt is a) to use milk that does not contain things that would inhibit the culture and b) to give the milk and starter mixture enough time to mature in a warm environment.

yogurt in jars yogurt on a spoon
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A Plague of Giants- high fantasy and an unexpected treat

Posted on March 20, 2025 by tkflor

“It is my life’s work to tell stories,” the bard continued, his smile gone now and replaced with an earnest tone. “And no one else can tell you what I have seen. This great war of our time has indeed been terrible, and I am still struck with its horrors, waking up in the night sweating and—well, I am sure I don’t have to tell you.”
From A Plague of Giants, a novel by Kevin Hearne.

When a book opens with a bard addressing refugees gathered at a place called Survival Field, I can either assume that the book is rife with death and gore and return it unread to the library, or assume that in this horrible situation the bard has something comforting to say to people already devastated by loss of their families and homes. Curious about the direction A Plague of Giants would take, I decided to give it a try. A Plague of Giants is a high-fantasy about 600 pages long, with eleven main characters. In my mind, long sagas with bards and mythical elements belong to ancient Greece and medieval Europe, whereas modern fiction is usually shorter and with fewer protagonists.* In novels I’ve read, main characters, even if they are scattered in different places and belong to different cultures, ARE UNITED by a main goal or event.

The beginning was not promising. I struggled to remember who is who and where different places are (there is a Dramatis Personae and a map, but flipping pages to check this or that was not conducive for immersing in the story). Even worse, the skeleton-like Bone Giants, whose deadly invasion on the eastern shores of the continent started the war, were a faceless, merciless evil without a glimmer of humanity. I did not want to know more about them. I continued to read because Hearne’s storytelling is engaging, the world-building is rich without being overly descriptive, and the magic is nuanced and intriguing. As the bard’s tale progressed, the Bone Giants’ thread turned out to be one of three. The other threads drew me to continue reading the story.

The Hathrim are fire-wielding giants (unrelated to Bone Giants) who settled without permission on a piece of land on the west coast of the continent. Strictly speaking, they’re trespassers, yet they are actual people with names, families, and human emotions. Most importantly, they did not sail to another country with the purpose to kill and conquer. They fled a volcanic eruption that made their island uninhabitable. Their ferocious and cunning Hearthfire (I think that’s their word for chieftain) made the most of the bad situation, and led the surviving Hathrim to a new place. Through a combination of physical strength, magic and deceit they occupied an uninhabited stretch of land and began to make it their home. Naturally, the local peoples took notice. Some wanted the newcomers to leave out of sheer nastiness. Others, mainly the plant-magic users of Forn, perceived a large settlement of giants armed with the destructive power of fire as a threat they could not accept.

The third thread is a tale of coming of age that seemed totally unrelated to any giants. In a country believed to be devoid of magic, a teenager decided to go against his family’s tradition and do everything differently. There was nothing world-shattering about the lad’s choice to inform his domineering father about his decision at the worst possible timing. However, the ramifications of a commonplace confrontation were unpredictable when untapped magic was involved.

Gradually, the disconnected tidbits about the war, various forms of magic and personal growth came together, and I could not put the book down. I enjoyed how the threads in A Plague of Giants were interwoven, how events followed “naturally” from previous ones, how magic was not an inborn trait of a few “chosen ones”. In this world, magic is a potential individuals choose to seek at a risk of their life. My only complaint is that this book ends abruptly on day nineteen of the bard’s tale, with one liner, “Continued in volume two, A Blight of Blackwings.”

* Obviously, I do not read much high fantasy, but I plowed through Lord of the Rings.

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The Death of the Artist – why artists deserve to get paid, amateurs suck, and the Big Tech kills Art

Posted on March 2, 2024 by tkflor

… when the sons of song descend to trade,
Their bays are sear, their former laurels fade.
Let such forego the poet’s sacred name,
Who rack their brains for lucre, not for fame:
Still for stern Mammon may they toil in vain!
And sadly gaze on gold they cannot gain!
Such be their meed, such still the just reward
Of prostituted muse and hireling bard!

From English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: A Satire by Lord Byron

Unlike the young Lord Byron (the satire was published when Byron was 21, recently graduated from Cambridge and about to embark on a Grand Tour), Deresiewicz, the author of The Death of the Artist argues that artists should be paid for their art. As far as I understand, the thrust of his reasoning goes like this:

  • Artists should be paid, because art is work and it deserves remuneration, like any other work.
  • Artists should be paid, because art is hard and it takes many years of focused dedication to reach an artistic level beyond amateurish. Although most artists are not in it to get rich, they still need food in their belly and a roof over their head.
  • Art has value, and therefore it ought to have financial value. While artists do not deserve compensation for doing what they love, “they do deserve to get paid for doing something you love, something other people love. That’s how markets work, by putting a price on other forms of value.”

But what happens when supply surpasses demand? The “starving artist” is not a new phenomenon. In the past, most artists did not eke a living off their art, but there was a considerable group of people who published books, exhibited in galleries or succeeded in other artistic pursuits while holding part-time (or full time) jobs. In the twenty-first century economy of “winner take all”, a tiny percent of artists grow very rich, and the rest are either forced to leave the field, risk starvation or turn into sellouts. The author blames Tech Giants for “the demonetization of content” by enabling the flow of cheap and often free art. This has devalued artistic work. Consequently, artists are either not compensated at all or barely compensated for the fruits of their talent and labor. Moreover, companies like Apple encouraged lay people to become “artists,” then Amazon and other Tech Giants let them flood the digital platforms with amateurish content. The glut of “art” obscured the much smaller offering of professional artists. To stay visible, they are coerced into working for exposure, to forgo pay for their work.

The Death of the Artist includes many interviews with artists and shows the human cost behind the statistics. The author clearly knows what he writes about, even though he calls himself a “snobbish old asshole”. Regardless of how he calls himself, I agree with him that people should be paid by those who consume their work and not be exploited by corporations. My qualm with the book is that it reads like an expanded essay on the evil tech companies and their useful idiots, the hobbyists, rather than a concise study of the field.

For example, The Death of the Artist claims that the traditional “culture industry” – publishers, music labels, art galleries, movie studios and so on – has successfully supported artists until a large chunk of their revenue was snatched by Amazon and other Tech Giants. The current plight of the artists, the author argues, is caused by the multi-billion culture industry’s inability to afford to nurture artistic talent. Obviously, the artists cannot depend on the new bosses, whose revenue is driven by algorithms. Tech behemoths monetize clicks and do not care about artistic merit.

This dire picture makes me wonder whether artists were better off before the balance of power had shifted from the culture industry to tech corporations. The author explains that capitalism enabled the emergence of the concept of “fine arts” in the Romantic age (end of eighteenth and early nineteen century), but says nothing about earlier cost-reducing technological advancements that erased entire disciplines. Movies are a cornerstone of the bastion of culture. A century ago, cheap cinema tickets had killed vaudeville shows. It is worth remembering that new technology was not the only source of artists’ growing woes. Consolidation through mergers and acquisitions in the “culture industry” in the second half of the twentieth century diminished the number of artistic venues even before Amazon entered the field. In publishing, the market was increasingly controlled by large corporations, until only six big publishers were left. The corporate practice to limit supply to below-demand, hurt the chances of new writers to get published and led to smaller advances (the payments for a work already done, but not published yet) for mid-list writers (i.e. professional writers who achieved recognition and had considerable readership in their genre, but who were not best-sellers).

Last but not least, the book repeatedly points to the harm caused by deluded hobbyists whose drivel cheapens art and diminishes the income of professional artists. These wannabes may not appeal to the highly-educated, elitist critics, but I am skeptical that legions of aspiring writers endanger literary careers. Professional artists do not merely vie for attention in an ocean of crap created by amateurs. They compete with the best in their field, dead and alive, from all over the world. For example, a work of literary fiction by an American author contends for readers with the ephemeral bestsellers, as well as with novels by Toni Morrison, Agatha Christie, J.R.R. Tolkien and many other classics (all available to be read with a single click). Talent and credentials like an MFA are insufficient to carve a career in the fine arts. Like Byron who had introduced the jaded, moody Byronic hero to readers weary of the endless Napoleonic wars, a modern artist may have a better chance to succeed if they have something new and relevant to say, something that will show off their genius and be both fresh and timeless.

PS. If the author of The Death of the Artist wants to explore a really scary scenario, he can update the book after AI gains the abilities to perform better than 99% of the artists.


Self-portraits by Picasso and Rembrandt
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Excavations – Americans at a summer dig in Greece

Posted on August 18, 2023 by tkflor

“There was no evidence though. Archaeology alone was where the facts lived; this is why she respected it. No smoke, all fire. Speculations about that far back was just theoretical, and the only real truth – the only realness you could get your arms around to properly believe in – came from the ground.”
From Excavations, a novel by Kate Myers.

I borrowed Excavations from our library because an unimposing book about a group of archaeologists working in a remote mountainous area sounded like the right mix of chitchat, intrigue, natural obstacles and summer romances to read in the heat of early August. I was both right and wrong. Like the oft-mentioned baklava, Excavations is layered, with more substance than I expected and can be enjoyed all year round.

The novel starts in NYC, with the protagonist Z relaying how she was just dumped by her latest boyfriend, how her parents wanted her to settle down and how her life sucked both job-wise and men-wise. Now, in her late twenties, Z’s one great memory is a summer when she was an archaeology undergraduate working at an excavation with her first serious boyfriend. Miraculously, the same guy – but at the end of his graduate studies and apparently still single – emails Z about an opening for summer staff at an excavation site. Is it a wonder that Z immediately takes off to the Greek mountains?

It is hot in Greece during the summer, but a steamy romance has to wait. Charles, an American university professor who heads the excavation, is nearing retirement. Resolute to promote his lifework, he is pushing the staff to make discoveries that support his agenda. His methods to reach this goal include pitting archaeologists against each other, bullying the most vulnerable undergrads into snitching on others and clandestine activities that range between disgusting and unlawful. Charles’s right hand is Kara, a meticulous (both about her skincare and her lab work) and self-righteous grad-student who picks her allegiances – and her love-interests – in accordance to their suitability for her ambitions.

This academic alliance is confronted by Elise, a forty-something Brit who heads the field-work. Unlike Charles and Kara, Elise does not have degrees in archaeology. She is a no-nonsense, asocial woman. Undergrads fear her. Charles and Kara mistrust and despise her, yet the success of the excavation depends on Elise’s expertise to unearth noteworthy artifacts unscathed.

Once Z joins the dig, she finds that things are not as straightforward as she remembered from her student days. Her former boyfriend is engaged to Kara, but Kara professes that she does not intend to marry him. Elise blames Charles for “dickwashing history” by eradicating women’s achievements or attributing them to men. Determined to prove that The Heraean Games, in which girls competed in sports, had taken place at that remote site, she stealthily does her most important excavations at night. Eventually, rivalries and suspicions become as unbearable as the heat and Z must choose her side: will she join Elise’s dogged search for archaeological evidence, or will she take a leaf out of Kara’s book and fend for herself and for the guy she apparently still loves?

The further I read the novel, the more I liked Z. She is not a model career woman like Kara, nor a tough and headstrong heroine like Elise. Z tries and fails, then she tries again because she is quite optimistic but she is not Pollyanna. In her own words, “This always happened to her; multiple things were always wrong at once, and she always picked the wrong one to fix first.”

I also liked the humor woven throughout the book and the jibes about academic hierarchy. Undergrads from a prestigious university are called Ugs and are treated as nameless, cheep labor. The professor who leads the excavation is often depicted as over the top, petty chauvinist. Other men play minor roles, yet the novel is far from being a feminist manifesto. Z’s ex-boyfriend is very likable. Kara is quite heartless, even if “her heart was set on being a preservationist at one of the top houses, Christie’s or Sotheby’s, and yet neither had taken the bait on her impeccable resume.”

I recommend Excavations for being a fun and unconventional story. It took me to an interesting location and showed the sweat, the excitement and the temptations accompanying archaeological excavations.

Spartan running girl
Image from Wikipedia

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Where does mass come from? *

Posted on July 30, 2023 by tkflor

Atoms are made from electrons and atomic nuclei. Since the nucleus accounts for more than 99.9% of the atom’s mass, we can focus on the nucleus, or on the protons and neutrons it is made of. Protons and neutrons are made from quarks (each particle contains three quarks) and gluons. Therefore, most of the mass of ordinary matter comes from quarks and gluons. But how can that be possible when gluons are massless and the up and down quarks which compose neutrons and protons are nearly massless?

The answer emerged 50 years ago (1973) and resulted in a Nobel Prize in Physics 2004 to Gross, Politzer and Wilczek “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.” In his Nobel prize lecture, Wilczek recounts that Einstein in his 1905 paper stated his most famous equation as m = E/c2. Another indication that Einstein considered the possibility that energy is the source of mass is that the title of the paper was a question, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon its Energy Content?”

In the early 1970s, a new quantum field theory called QCD (Quantum Chromodynamics) was developed to describe the “strong force” between quarks and gluons (each up and down quark has a unit color charge. Color gluons interact with color charges or change one into another). In Wilczek’s own words:

“Modern QCD answers Einstein’s question with a resounding ‘Yes!’ Indeed, the mass of ordinary matter derives almost entirely from energy – the energy of massless gluons and nearly massless quarks, which are the ingredients from which protons, neutrons, and atomic nuclei are made.”

Although on its face this statement brings to mind creation of matter out of nothing, that is not the case.  Empty space is not really empty!!!   It is permeated with constantly changing quantum fields and their evanescent excitations, also called virtual particles. The color charge of a single quark or gluon is small, but even in “empty” space, a cloud of virtual particles builds up around the actual quark. The explanation of how the cloud enhances the strength of the color charge is very technical. Here it suffices to say that this process also requires a growing amount of energy. Since energy cannot be created from nothing, free quarks are not found in nature.

For a particle like a proton, energetically the most favorable scenario would be that the color charge of its three quarks would cancel out. For the color charges to cancel out completely, the quarks must exactly overlay each other. However, the uncertainty principle imposes limitations on how well the quarks could be localized: precise localization would require huge momentum, i.e. enormous investment of energy. Optimally, a particle will have the lowest possible energy.

“Thus, in seeking to minimize the energy, there are two conflicting considerations: to minimize the field energy, you want to cancel the sources accurately; but to minimize the wave-function localization energy, you want to keep the sources fuzzy. The stable configurations will be based on different ways of compromising between those two considerations. In each such configuration, there will be both field energy and localization energy. This gives rise to mass, according to m = E/c2, even if the gluons and quarks started out without any non-zero mass of their own. So the different stable compromises will be associated with particles that we can observe, with different masses…”

The citations are taken from Wilczek’s Nobel lecture. I recommend both to watch the video (it’s about half an hour) and to read the transcript. In 2009, Wilczek published a popular-science book, titled The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, which elaborates about the origin of mass. The book also addresses the feebleness of the gravitational force compared to the three other fundamental forces in nature (the strong, electromagnetic and the weak forces), and concludes with mathematically inspired speculations about a possible unification of the forces at ultrashort distances (i.e. huge energies inaccessible to any man-made machine). It also briefly discusses possible implications for understanding the cosmological puzzle of the dark matter. For me, the first part of the book that described in non-mathematical terms the “playground” where the creation of mass takes place was the most interesting (it is longer than the two other parts combined).

In the beginning of the chapter The Grid (Persistence of Ether), Wilczek states:

For natural philosophy, the most important lesson we learn with QCD is that what we perceive as empty space is in reality a powerful medium whose activity molds the world. Other developments in modern physics reinforce and enrich that lesson.

Another very interesting, and somewhat sobering part to read was the epilogue. Whereas the relation m = E/c2 explains how 95% of ordinary matter emerges from massless building blocks, modern physics cannot account for the mass of the electron. I conclude with Wilczek’s words:

“The mass of the electron, although it contributes much less than 1% of the total mass of normal matter, is indispensable. The value of that mass determines the size of atoms… And yet we have no good idea (yet) about why electrons weigh what they do.
…It’s a similar story for the masses of our friends the up and down quarks, u and d. They make a quantitatively small but qualitatively crucial contribution to the masses of protons and neutrons, and hence of normal matter. If their values were significantly different, life might become difficult or impossible. Yet we can’t explain why they have the value they do.”

————

The question does not refer to the “dark matter” found in galaxies nor to exotic particles that flicker into brief existence (for a very tiny fraction of a second) in high-energy experiments, but to ordinary matter made of atoms.

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