Basque, Life

Inherited History

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On the way back home from Idaho, Lisa and I began listening to the audio version of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.  We aren’t done yet, so I’ll wait until giving my thoughts of his story, but there was one thing that jumped out at me.

Obama’s father was from Kenya.  So, while he is African-American, his ancestors didn’t experience slavery.  Even so, it is very evident from his story that Obama has inherited that history, the history of the majority of African-Americans, shaped by the fact of slavery and the ramifications of that history on their lives today.

In Obama’s case, this is a direct result of his skin color. And, at first glance, it might seem he is somewhat unique in this regard.  But, thinking about it more, it seems to me that this happens to everyone who is born to immigrants.  It is the difference between cultural history and what might be called familiar history, or the history associated with one’s ancestors.  In Obama’s case, he inherited the cultural history of African-Americans, not the familiar history of his Kenyan father.

I’m the son of a Basque immigrant, but the history I know, that I identify with, is most certainly that of the United States.  I really know relatively little about the history of the Basque people or of Spain and France.  However, it is precisely because of this that I’ve taken such an interest in the Basque people and their history.  And, I think, this happens to many children of immigrants.  It is why there are people who call themselves Basque-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, or what have you.  I think it is because they lose the history of their parents or grandparents by the simple fact that they were born and raised in a different country.  They inherit the history of the culture in which they grow up, not that of their immigrant ancestors.  And it is the desire to connect with that history, to connect with their ancestors in some way, that lead people such as myself to call ourselves Basque-American.

I’ve often been asked why I consider myself as something other than just “American”.  Why do I add “Basque” in front?  And, beyond vaguaries about it being the culture of my dad and my grandpa, I never had a really good answer.  I think that this is the answer.  It is to connect to their history, to their experience, to not be completely disconnected from the cultural reality in which they grew up.  It is to honor their culture, but it is more than that.  I call myself Basque-American because the history that shaped some of my ancestors was not the American experience, it was something else, and I want to better know what that was so as to better understand who they are and who I am.

Sports

Vikes, losers again

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Another season, another disappointing ending.

Driving home from Idaho, we made it to Cortez, CO last night.  We had something like 300 miles to home which, as I drive, would take about 4.5 hours.  Leaving at 10AM, that put us at home roughly at 2:30PM, just in time for the kickoff of the Vikings-Eagles game.  Another playoff game, another hope for glory at the end of the season.

We got out a bit earlier than 10, just about 9AM.  The roads, however, were not so cooperative.  We hit probably the worst stretch of road between Boise and Santa Fe, with some areas covered in snow, forcing us to slow to 35 miles per hour.  Even so, we made it just in time.  We rushed into the house, turned on the TV, and saw the kickoff.

The first half gave hope.  Sure, the Vikes were behind, 16-14, at the end of the first half, but that was due to a Viking interception returned for a touchdown.  The Vikes held the Eagles to 3 field goals and scored two TDs of their own after impressive drives.  If the Vikes could continue that kind of play in the second half, they had a real shot.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t, they didn’t, and the season is over.  There are bright spots on the team, though quarterback is still a weakness.  Jackson showed some good abilities in the first half, but the second half, he seemed to fall apart.  He couldn’t complete any passes and the last few plays, he just was making horrible decisions.  I wonder what the Vikes could accomplish if they had a true quality quarterback.  Maybe we’ll find out next year.  One can hope.

Travel

Eastern Travels, Part I

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It’s been a bit quiet around here lately, primarily due to life and work getting in the way.  Work has included a couple of trips in the last few months which have made posting on the blog a bit difficult, trips to China, Australia, and Boston.  I meant to post my thoughts on my Eastern travels months ago, in October when I went, but I just haven’t gotten to it until now.  Hopefully, I remember enough to have something to say here.  🙂

I went to Beijing for a week for a conference (on Computer Simulations of Radiation Effects in Solids — COSIRES) and then to Australia for a week as well to visit a colleague there.  I’ll write a second post on Australia; first, Beijing.

So, I went to Beijing for a scientific conference, so most of the week was spent working (listening to talks and giving a few myself) so I didn’t see as much of China as I would have liked.  I left the US on a Friday and arrived in Beijing on Saturday.  I went with a postdoc that is working with me who is from China, and his father — along with a few of his friends — picked us up.  They drove us around Tiananmen Square and then took us to dinner, where I had the first of several Peking Ducks for the week.  Part of the meal also included duck heart (which I neglected to try) and what was Mao’s favorite dish, pork braised in brown sauce.  In reality, it seemed like pork fat, so I only tried a small piece.  This was probably the oddest thing I tried while in China, including the frog we ate the next day.

I wanted to buy a couple of souvenirs for friends and family and so the next day we went to a shopping mall, a bit far from our hotel (well, we had to take a taxi to get there, so it wasn’t within walking distance is all I really know).  It was pretty push, very upscale.  I was looking for a small piece of jade for my daughter, nothing very fancy.  So, we looked at the various displays from seemingly different companies.  We settled on one eventually, looking at the various pieces.  Immediately, the prices jumped out at me.  I was looking for a simple piece, a piece shaped like a donut and not much bigger than a quarter.  The cheapest piece like this was maybe $500, though most were at least $1000 and some as high as $10,000 or more.  The price of a car!  With the help of my postdoc’s dad, the lady behind the counter searched in a bin she had underneath and found, eventually, after a bit of searching, a piece that was about $100.  The whole store was like this, filled with luxury goods such as watches and perfumes that I couldn’t imagine buying.  I quickly realized that China is actually a very capitalistic society, regardless of the form of government it has.  It was also clear that there must be a huge disparity between those who have and those who do not, as the average farmer from the country-side likely couldn’t afford the $100 piece I’d just purchased, much less the other pieces that were clearly out of my reach.

After that, the rest of our week was spent attending the conference, which was, overall, quite good.  These conferences are primarily an opportunity to meet with colleagues and collaborators from around the world on a semi-regular basis, to get an update on what they are working on, and to potentially establish new collaborations.  As I go to more and more of these, and I see the same people each time, I enjoy them more and more.  Each night was spent in the hotel bar, which had a pool table.  We stayed until the wee hours of the night, drinking beers and challenging each other to games of pool, usually broken up by country (the Yanks vs the Brits, the Finns vs the Yanks, and so on).  We then had to get up between 6 and 7 the next morning to make the next round of talks.  This got harder and harder as the week went on.  🙂

The conference was held at Beihang University, which was a pretty big campus.  It was odd in that there were lots of younger kids also on campus, playing ball and such on the fields.  The most memorable part to me was the bicycle parking lot, as this epitomized everything you hear about China.  While there are a lot of cars on the road (and it is amazing to me that there aren’t accidents every block), there are still a lot of bikes on the road.  They dodge and weave amongst the cars, seemingly taking their lives in their hands with every turn.

As with most of these conferences, there was an outing.  And, in China, there is no bigger draw than the Great Wall.  We spent a couple of hours there (once you catch a bus at noon to get there, spend nearly 2 hours on the road to the Great Wall, and then have to be back for dinner, it doesn’t leave a lot of time).  We all scattered our separate ways, exploring the Wall in our own ways.  I went off with my postdoc, just hiking as far as we could in our 2 hours.  We hiked up about 45 minutes, pushing ourselves a bit (which, in my case, isn’t saying a whole lot since I’m not in the best of shape).  It was a spectacular view.  But, it was also amazing how crowded the whole thing was.  Some places, the pathway was only one person wide, but two rows of people were trying to push past one another.  And they weren’t polite about it.  It was still amazing, however, to think about the effort that went into building the Wall, and how many people died during its construction.  Supposedly, when someone died, they just tossed the body over the side and kept working.

The last day of the week, Friday, the conference ended after half a day and some of us decided to go to the Forbidden City.  Now, this was impressive.  The City is immense and no photo can do it justice.  We spent the afternoon just traversing from one end to the other, checking out the various side buildings and gardens and such.  But, there were so many buildings, so many parts to the City.  My understanding is that the City was built to house the Emperor and his 1000 concubines.  The only other men allowed were eunics, to ensure that the concubines were not sullied by any man besides the Emperor.  Anyways, the buildings were being refinished, prettied-up, so to speak.  It made it feel a bit more like a tourist trap, like it was being Disneyfied just a bit.  Even so, it was still such an amazing place.  Amazing that such a place could be built for one man.

The next day, I flew to Australia.  But, I will write about that another day.

Science

Interview for the website Sustatu.com

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A friend of mine, Luis Fernadez, interviewed me for the website Sustatu, a Basque site on technology, economy, and culture.  The interview, in Basque, can be found on their site.  Here, I’m posting an English version of that interview.  The subject is primarily nuclear energy.  Thanks for this opportunity, Luistxo!  (Unfortunately, my Basque is no where near good enough to answer Luistxo directly.  I answered in English, as below, and he translated to Euskara for me.)

Blas, tell us about your work and position at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

First, let me say that the views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

I am a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). I work in a group that is studying materials for nuclear energy applications. In particular, we are interested in materials that would make for better nuclear fuels and would allow for better treatment of the nuclear waste from a nuclear reactor. We study materials at a fundamental level, trying to understand what makes some materials better than other for various applications. In particular, I perform computer simulations of materials at the atomic scale in order to determine what atomic-scale properties govern materials’ performance in various nuclear environments.

Read the rest of the interview

Books

The Wisdom of Crowds

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Finally, after a year of carrying it around in my bag and half starting it, I just finished reading James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.  I have to say, I found this one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a long time.

Basically, this is an introduction to the concepts of collective decision making — colloquially knowns as “the wisdom of crowds” —  the idea that groups of people can make better decisions than the individuals within the group.  Surowiecki gives a number of examples of this phenomenon, some that are truly amazing.  The canonical example is at a fair in England.  A hog was being raffled to the person that could most accurately guess the weight of the hog.  Some of the people guessing were, of course, farmers that raised hogs, but many of the people were just regular fair-goers who had no real clue (I mean, seriously, how many of us could guess?).  It turns out that the average guess was much better than nearly any individual guess.   The errors of guesses by less expert people go on both sides of the right answer, giving a good overall estimate.  This is just one example of this phenomenon.

These ideas have become more formalized in recent years – for example by Scott Page and others — with a solid mathematical foundation.  Surowiecki doesn’t go into this foundation, rather introducing the importance of the concepts.  But, he does discuss the implications of collective decision making in companies and corporations, small working groups, government, and several other aspects of life.  These ideas have led to the creation of decision markets, in which people effectively trade “stocks” on the answers to questions such as who will win a given election or which drug should a drug company persue for development.  The best known example of such a market is the stock market, though it isn’t a perfect market, for reasons discussed in the book.

To me, the most interesting part was when he was discussing management of corporations.  He discusses how corporations are more successful when everyone within the corporation has some stake in decision making, when decisions aren’t top-down from upper management.  He also points out that bonuses for executives tied to certain deliverables lead to deception on the part of the executives, as they either overplay how hard the deliverables are to meet or just out-right deceive, cooking books or what not to meet expectations.  It seems that, in many places, management is actually moving the opposite direction.  I think all managers should be required to read this book.

I am really intrigued by these ideas and really trying to figure out a way to include them in my work.  Not just in how I interact with people, but just more generally.  We’ll see if I can come up with anything useful.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone that deals with groups of people.  The insights into how people work as part of a group are invaluable and, in many cases, counterintuitive.  Not only would it help people understand better how to interact in part of such groups, but it would also help to best create those groups in the first place.   The key, if I got the point correctly, is effectively cognitive diversity — diversity in how people think.  Even people who aren’t expert in the relevant area, as long as they have some knowledge, even if they are not the smartest people in the group, add significantly to the group and make the group smarter overall.

The lessons in this book are wide ranging and would impact many aspects of life.  I can’t emphasize enough how much I think anyone involved in management or decision making should be familiar with the ideas presented here.  I highly recommend this book.

For a summary of some of the ideas presented, take a look at this Wikipedia page.

Blah, blah, blah… I've got the blahs.