Some things I did and didn't do

Thursday 1st November

I had some good plans for today, my last day in New York. I thought of going to downtown Manhatten and seeing the financial district and the Statue of Liberty. I thought of getting a ferry to New Jersey and seeing the site of the Burr-Hamilton duel, where the Burr, Vice President of the US, killed his rival. This would have made a fun day out, and shown how far the US has come since those lawless days of trigger-happy Vice Presidents.

In the end I did neither. The subway looks scary, and walking is impossible, with lights fixed to stop you for a minute at every block.

So I went to Central Park again. It's great. You can walk for more than 100 yards in a stretch. There are trees, grass, birds and squirrels. You start to appreciate these things more when stuck in the concrete of Manhattan. I juggled and got the rocking shoulder motion of the four-ball Mills mess just right. I passed some statues: Columbus, Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Shakespeare and King Jagiello of Poland. I guess this shows the shortness of white American history and the importance of immigration to New York.

On the Great Lawn I saw a man playing baseball with his two kids. I offered my services as a second baseman, and we had a good little game with imaginary runners on the bases. It turned out that the guy was from Nottingham, about 30 miles from Sheffield, my home town. So the only baseball game in Central Park was being played by two cricket-trained Englishmen. You can easily spot cricketers playing baseball, as they don't see the need for a glove, and turn inside pitches disdainfully to square leg.

Health Warning

Wednesday 31st October, 8pm

Watching lots of videos showing heart motion, blood flow and clogged arteries hast got me on a health streak. Seeing a video of a carotid artery (that's the one you feel on your throat, and also the one you learn to cut silently during ninja training), all but clogged up, with just a small gap letting the last drops of blood flow to the brain is scary.

I'm now eating ots of apples and went for another jog round Central Park, feeling my heart to check that it was beating nicely. I've been eating oatmeal (that's the American name for porridge) for breakfast. I didn't expect to find it here, but a small diner on the junction of 57th Street and 7th Avenue do a nice oatmeal/banana combination.

Presentation

Wednesday 31st October, 8am

Well the talk about pulse measurements went quite well. I should have known from my years in particle physics that not knowing what you're talking about isn't really a problem. Just turn up on time with the right clothes and some slides that someone else made and talk away.

I never know how talks that I give are going to go. Sometims I freeze, get confused and lost for words. Other times I get into the flow and it goes well. Today I managed to pronounce "Photoplethysmograph" correctly, and slipped in a couple of jokes that got a laugh. They weren't good jokes, but in an engineering conference they don't have to be.

I then went for a jog all the way round Central Park. I keep thinking about manic depression. Yesterday I went from self-hatred and tears to happy and confident within two hours. I can go back in the same time, if not shorter.

Doubt

Tuesday, 30th October.

I'm holding a talk this afternoon about measuring heart pulse (that expansion of the artery you feel when you put your finger on your throat/wrist). I guess that any medical doctor will see that I know fuck all about arterial blood flow. Any electrical engineer will see that I know fuck all about electronics. And any physicist will see that my error bars are way too big.

I can see it, as I'm a physicist. You don't need to know anything about the subject to say that this graph is bullshit. Nature don't work like that.


If you're not a physicist, let me tell you a secret. If those error bars show one standard deviation, then if you fit a line through all the points, about one third of the points shouldn't touch the line with their error bars. A plausible plot looks something like this:



I didn't make the plots, and couldn't be bothered to sort out the error analysis. I'm just the gimp who does the talk. My worst case scenario is to tender my resignation on the spot (with 3 months' notice), go for a juggle in central park, and find a good strip club.

World Series

Sunday, 28th October

I'm quickly getting the hang of baseball terminology, which is almost as confusing as cricket terminology. The New York Times wrote yesterday that during the regular season

[David Ortiz] looked like he was stumbling down a steep hill and then barreling through a revolving door when he corralled one pop-up on a windy day

This means that, in cricketing terms, he shelled a skier, or spilled a dolly.

I used to think that baseball was about hitting home runs, but there is a lot more to it. I watched games 3 and 4 of the World Series, and have seen a bunt (cricket equivalent: forward defensive shot plus a quick single), a double play (cricket equivalent: a run out at both ends, which is imaginable although not possible with the present laws) and a player stealing third (cricket equivalent: running when the bowler isn't looking).

I've also learnt what a designated hitter is: a batter too fat to run, see Ortiz/Inzamam, and that they exist in the American League but not in the National League. This means that there are two sets of rules for the World Series, which is played between the champions of the two leagues. When Boston (AL) played at home, they could use Ortiz, their immobile slogger, to bat in place of their pitcher, but when they played in Colorado (NL) he had to field at first base. In the end he did just fine.

Gala

Monday 29th October, 9pm

I am turning into my dad. He has made a habit of avoiding posh events. Whenever forced to turn up anywhere in a suit, he grumped around for an hour and then went off for a walk. Now people have stopped inviting him, so he's free to go and run up and down hills.

I did the same (except for the hills, of course) at the Gala of the conference in the grand ballroom of the New York Hilton. I started to get unhappy when I realised that I was missing the Torpedo Entenhausen game. Then came the smarminess of some guy thanking the hotel staff "who came from all over the world to watch rich white men pig themselves and slap themselves on the back". What finally flipped me was a professor being given a $2000 prize, and his laudator thanking him for "20 years in the trenches". It's a fucking hard life building ultrasound devices. The mustard gas, shell shock, trench foot, etc.

All this indignation and walking out still leaves me a fucking hypocrite. Would it be better not to thank the staff? I guess not. And of course I pigged out on the food before I left, and I'm not going to volunteer for a war anytime soon. I don't have any answers, but I'm fucking annoyed. Maybe that's a start.

America

I am in a hotel in Long Island. I have been left behind by the wifi revolution and didn't manage to get on the internet for a whole week in New York. The cheapest internet cafe I could find was $0.49/min, so I decided to write postcards instead of emails and start a "paper log", or "plog". Sometime I'll type them up and add the correct dates. Today I am heading for Boston.