End-of-May Day

I sit at my desk this Friday morning as it continues to rain steadily. I looked up Zurich's climate and compared it to Chicago's before moving here. On paper they're very similar, except for Zurich's less extreme temperatures. So far, though, it seems to rain or threaten to rain most days between October and June. You don't notice it now that the trees' leaves are out, but when the trees are bare, at some point you realize that they're all covered in moss. Sure sign of a wet climate. Rain's not the worst thing in the world - we can handle rain. We had a great soccer game last night in fact, playing in the mud and the rain. However, all this rain is a good deal less pleasant when, apart from a few beautiful 70-degrees-and-sunny days, it stays around 45-50 degrees. I look forward to summer, whenever it comes.

Today is the last lecture of the semester, and the last lecture my degree requirements say I need to take. That means that I now start working on the thesis, which will be with the Sensory Motor Systems lab at the ETH. Briefly, my job will be to take neural recordings ("functional near infrared spectroscopy" - fNIRS), and work on algorithms to filter noise produced by various biosignals (heart rate, blood pressure, etc.) out of the data. The filtered signal can then be used to decode whether or not a patient (presumably spinal cord injury or stroke victim) wants to move their hand or arm. It's too slow of a signal to control an artificial arm, but in these nascent stages it can at least control binary tasks.

I'm looking forward to spending next weekend in Madrid with my Leese cousins, and the weekend of the 21st in southern Germany for the Southside music festival, camping and watching bands with Gerick and Tom from my program. In August, Rachel and Darin visit, in September I join parents and aunts and uncles for biking in Italy, in October a visit the States for Celesta's wedding, and then in November there's a decent chance I'll go to South Korea for a 3 month research project.

That's a lot of exciting things to look forward to, but for now I return to studying. (Even though lectures are over, I'm still working through a number of homework assignments and probably will be for most of the summer).

What to do?

This was kind of depressing to write, so you might want to have a puppy or something close at hand while you read it. Spoiler alert: a lot of people die.

Everybody has something to say about the Newtown, Connecticut shooting. A lot of it is renewed calls for gun control, defense of gun rights, bemoaning the state of our mental health care system... all so heavily politicized that it's difficult to have a constructive conversation and make headway while each side waves the party flag. I won’t spend much time on mass shootings because, while they’re devastatingly tragic, they represent such a small percentage of the whole that their biggest relevance is to bring broad attention to the violence going on all the time.

You hear a lot of things from either side of the argument, so I looked into it for myself. Yes, all of my information is from Wikipedia. There are some conflicting numbers on there, but overall trends are consistent across articles and reporting groups. I do have a few questions about how some of them are collected, though it's mostly straightforward.

I read up on a few statistics for different countries - mostly gun ownership, firearm death rate, and standard of living. I did not do an exhaustive quantitative analysis. I hope Randall Munroe or some such person puts something together, since he is so good at presenting large amounts of high-dimension information.

This post talks mostly in terms of number of deaths per number of people - so it's all normalized to population, like percentages. I’ll try to hit important points without tiresomely laying out all the nuances and stipulations.

If you can think of a good graphic to illuminate a point, let me know and I’ll see what I can come up with. This could be better organized/summarized, but I wanted to get a few numbers out that give an intuitive comparison between different countries and different phenomena. This is a long post, just to warn you.

A couple preliminary notes

I primarily looked at numbers on gun deaths, not all homicides/suicides. In the US, guns account for about two thirds of all homicides, and 50% of all suicides. Men commit 90% of US homicides, so later in the post I deal specifically with the male demographic because of the majority we represent in this issue. There is also a distinction to pay attention to between overall murder rates (intentional homicide with any kind of weapon), gun murder rates (intentional homicide with a gun), and gun death rates (any death from a gun – homicide or suicide).

Here's what I found.

Gun ownership

The US by far leads the world in personal gun ownership - almost 90 guns in the US for every 100 people (270 million firearms nationwide). About 85% of countries have fewer than 20 guns per 100 people.

The US places at #12 in firearm death rates per year among the countries. Few countries with more firearm deaths are noticeably wealthy, and none nearly so much as us. Some countries with higher rates than us are El Salvador, Colombia, South Africa, and Mexico... countries we don’t normally think of as the safest places to visit (Mexico and South Africa have almost the same rate that we do, though their rates are dominated by murder more strongly than ours is dominated by suicide). These tend to be poor countries with gun ownership rates dwarfed by ours, usually less than 10 weapons per 100 people. Remember, these are only gun-related deaths.

Quick aside: this is one number I'm curious about. It's easy to imagine how they count/estimate gun ownership in the US. But how is it estimated in countries where death rates are dominated by drug cartels, or places with no functional gun control? Also – the reporting agency was explicit that some estimates have a very high margin of error.

Murder rates

Overall (weapon-inspecific) murder rates tend to be worst in countries that are very poor (parts of Africa) and have large drug operations (parts of South America). Most of Asia and Europe are extremely low - the Americas have a greater number of murders per year than all of Asia, though Asia represents well over half of the world's population (high murder rates in a small population – about 1 billion people live in the Americas - versus low murder rates in a large population – over 4 billion people in Asia).

In the States there are about 8.5 firearm deaths per year for every 100,000 people. With a population of 315 million, that means almost 27,000 people are shot to death every year. But that is all gun deaths. About 35% of those are homicides - the rest are suicides. (Accidental gun deaths represent a number that, while small relative to our murders and suicides, is comparable to murder rates in Western Europe.) Don’t forget the additional 5,000 murders and 16,000 suicides per year in the US that don’t use guns. These numbers really add up.

Let’s take a moment to process that. More than 30 people are shot to death every day in the US, and almost 50 overall are murdered daily. Daily. That means we also get nearly 100 daily suicides in the US, half by gun. Every. Day.

It’s important to note that our gun death rate is only comparable to the other trigger-happy countries because of our high suicide rate. Suicides appear to be a wealthy country thing. Colombia has three times the gun death rate compared to the US, but less than one fourth our gun suicide rate (only 3% of their gun deaths are suicides). Presumably our country should start to put all these suicides in the spotlight.

Homicides. No, let's call them murders. Homicide is such a sterile word, like herbicide. More than 10,000 people per year are shot to death in the US - murdered with guns. That's a lot. Individual countries in Western Europe never break 100 per year. Switzerland has a relatively high gun ownership rate due to their mandatory military service (45 guns per 100 people – half of our rate), but only averages 40 gun murders per year.

You may have heard this kind of comparison before, but the absolute numbers are misleading. We have 40 times the population of Switzerland (their 8 million would barely populate New York City), so their per capita murder rate is better characterized as being 17% of ours. Still not great – a population of 8 million Americans murders 240 people each year. That sounds like a small number to us, but Switzerland would flip their shit if they experienced this kind of rate. Interestingly, the Swiss gun suicide rate, relatively speaking, is closer to ours – about 3.15 per year for every 100,000 people compared to our 5.5.

Murder rates relative to gun ownership

Worldwide there is not a strong correlation between gun ownership rate in a country and murder rates. Murder rates appear to correlate with bad economic situations (probably true looking at regional murder rates within the US as well). However, if we look only at wealthy countries, gun murder rates do seem higher in countries with more gun ownership. We actually look pretty good when you consider number of murders per gun in our country, at least compared to war-torn countries overrun by drug cartels.

El Salvador has more than 8 homicides per gun each year for every 100,000 people, while we have only 0.034. This is calculated as [gun murders per year per 100,000 people] divided by [guns per 100 people], so it’s not an exact normalization, but it’s a reasonable way to report a relative rate. On this scale, Switzerland weighs in at 0.011, the UK at 0.007, and Germany at 0.002. Oh. So (and these are countries with similar economies to us), each American gun kills 3 times more people than each Swiss gun, 5 times more people than each British gun, and 17 times more people than each German gun. Britain has very restrictive ownership laws (only 6 guns per 100 people), but Germany is not quite so strict with more than 30 guns per 100 people.

Murder in the USA

A quick look at Wikipedia is all it takes to notice a few striking things about murders in the States (this is all murder, not only those by gun). Most obviously: they are overwhelmingly perpetrated by younger men. 18-24 year old men are by far the largest age group among murder perpetrators. That age group only represents 5% of the US population, yet accounts for more than 45% of the murders. If you include 17 year olds, the numbers are even worse (men 16 and under account for only a very small number of murders compared to other age groups). 17-24 year olds (11.4% of the population) commit a full one third of gun murders (gun murders, not all murders).

Broadening the scope by only another ten years, men under 35 account for nearly 90% of all murders in America. 90%. This is a well-delineated, small (15%) subset of our population committing 90% of the murders. Why don’t we hear more about this? Maybe because of the demographics involved. 75% of all murder victims have served jail time. In the mid-90’s, Philadelphia actually reported that 93% of their murder victims had served prison sentences. Chicago reported 88% of perpetrators as having previous arrest records.

I don’t have numbers on the kind of crimes for which they had formerly been indicted, though that might be interesting to see. It could be an interesting result if it went definitively either way – that they are primarily associated with violent crime, or that it makes no difference what kind of crime landed them in prison.

Centralized crime

It’s no surprise that murder is more prevalent in urban areas. Cities larger than 250,000 people represent the vast majority of murders (12 per 100,000 people, versus about 3 per 100,000 people in non-metropolitan areas). In 2009, New York City had 471 murders (6.4 per 100,000 people), compared to Chicago’s 459 in that same year (a whopping 17 per 100,000 people). Over the past 40 years, Chicago has consistently suffered the most murders (total, not relative to population) of any US city, peaking at 943 in 1999 (34 per 100,000). (However, even New York, with a murder rate at one third of that of Chicago, found a murder-free day newsworthy back in November)

What makes this more remarkable is how lopsided the violence is – among Chicago’s black population, there are 34 murders for every 100,000 people, while the “per 100,000” rate is 11 for Hispanics and 3 for whites. In fact, victim/offender percentages among the three primary ethnicities tend to follow each other quite well: about 76% of victims and convicted offenders were black, about 18% were Hispanic, and about 6% were white. Chicago is apparently such a segregated city that even crime is split along ethnic lines.

But what does it mean?

For all of this, a proper quantitative analysis would let us state things more categorically. I’d like to see numbers on correlations between murder rates (with and without guns) and factors like quality of life indicators, drug production/consumption, mental disease occurrence rates, unemployment rates, drug use, and any other interesting dimensions people can think of. So this is where I really start to ramble.

Suicide rate is clearly another topic the media should bring to the nation’s attention. Across the world, suicide rates don’t clearly correlate with any factors I poked into. Obviously the root of both of these problems is not in the existence or ownership of guns, but that doesn’t mean we should toss off gun control as a leftist move towards tyranny.

I’m okay with people owning guns. Nowadays, hunting in the US provides necessary wildlife population control, especially for deer in the Midwest. I’m not as sure about the necessity of handguns, though you have to wonder how many robberies, etc. are averted because the would-be perpetrator knows their target has or might have a gun. A lot of (most?) gun crimes are committed with non-registered or stolen weapons, so the people who use guns in ways they oughtn’t are already circumventing the system. The strongest argument for trying to get rid of all handguns is that 75% of gun murders use handguns (small, easy to carry out of sight, cheap).

Maybe they would have a harder time stealing a gun if there were fewer guns to steal? It’s hard to say. Unfortunately, any time you bring a weapon into a confrontation, the stakes immediately go up. As soon as the gun comes out, everybody starts thinking about death, or at least how much he’d rather it didn’t happen to him.

Regardless, I see no justification for assault weapon legality. Those are for wars, and We The People don’t need to fight wars because we spend $700 billion a year for people to do it for us. (“To fight potential tyranny!” you say? Well remember, that tyrant will be wielding the $700 billion war machine you so patriotically bought. And no, that doesn’t mean you should be allowed to buy even more guns). I have heard that true assault weapons are prohibitively expensive to buy, so I don’t know how many of those are in circulation that a ban would actually change much.

I don’t have personal experience with the US mental health care system. Of course a huge range of pathologies requires a huge range of treatments. Of course a lot of things get shoved under the rug when nobody can figure out how to deal with them. Of course not every pathology can in fact be dealt with. This is a difficult problem, and I’ve already written way too much to try to get into that, too.

I have no strong conclusions, except that a lot of people are killed every day, all over the world. America’s disproportionate number of guns may not have given us a disproportionately high murder rate among first world countries. But maybe it did! The data I looked at doesn’t clearly say.

It is pretty clear, however, that gun restriction alone is not enough, and perhaps not as big of a problem as many of us on the liberal end of things would like to think. So let’s start looking for solutions that are more creative and effective than simply further legislation. Some US cities have had significant success in combating murder rates in the past 15-20 years; hopefully with a little work the rest of the country can, too. To end on a brighter note, apparently violent crimes have been globally decreasing over the past few decades, and nobody is entirely sure why. I can’t find a source for this, but I do remember reading it somewhere in the past few months. So there is hope.

Dear people...

As the days grow shorter, my schedule's regularity passes the weeks quickly. A few full evenings a week I study for Neuromorphic Engineering (lots of transistor physics), and occasionally crack a book for one of the five other classes, so it's hard to keep track of where the time goes. It's not all work, admittedly - I joined some friends to see the new James Bond movie (Skyfall) on Tuesday and a Mika concert last Thursday, among other, lesser outings. It's probably a good balance.

In adjusting to the new culture, I'm not dealing with the Swiss culture so much as the culture among the other students. The enculturation is not a task as such, but there are differences. When I work with people who are accustomed to more formal education environments, it can mean adjustments for both of us - they think I take assignments too lightly and unprofessionally (I do), and I have a hard time wanting to turn in polished assignments as long as we demonstrate understanding. It's probably good for me. I like to think it's also good for them. Either way, I get to work with some talented people and feel like we balance the work well.

There's not much to report beyond the daily grind. Hiking season is [mostly?] over, so weekends again turn to winter activities - baking bread, running errands, studying, and relaxing. Occasionally my mind thinks about something, anything that happens to cross it. One thing I've thought about off and on is the idea of identity. Not my specific identity (well that, too), but also what we mean by identity. What do we mean?

Here's a letter a friend recently came across. When Kurt Vonnegut was 22, the Germans captured him as a prisoner of war during WWII. He survived the firebombing of Dresden and lived many of the experiences that befall the main character of his Slaughterhouse Five (a quick read that's much worth it, if you never have). This is the letter he wrote to his family after the war ended, telling them he was alive and would be home in some weeks. Even at 22, you hear his distinctive voice that we know so well from his books, though it would be another eight years until he published his first book.

By simply reading the letter's salutation - "Dear people," - you can imagine no one but Vonnegut writing this. "Dear people." The first sure word he sends home after months as a POW - writing to his family and whomever they may share it with - and he opens with, "Dear people." Maybe that's the only thing he could open with. But to the topic at hand: you read this letter and you know that this is Vonnegut. This is quintessential Vonnegut - pragmatically artistic, matter-of-fact, full of the human element without basking in emotion, and whatever else reads as Vonnegut. All of his writing really gives a strong sense of who he was.

But what do we mean by that? Who do we say that he was? For that matter, who am I? Am I defined by what I do, what I think or believe, the groups in which I claim membership (or the groups that claim me as a member)? By how I process the world? Perhaps I am defined by the way in which I define myself.

A less asked question than, "Who am I?" is probably, "Who are you?" How does one go about answering that question when it's about someone else? In saying, "This letter represents who Vonnegut was," are we saying more than, "I recognize this as being like Vonnegut's other writing and reflects the worldview he presents in his other work"?

What do we mean by "who"? Is there something that you are beyond describing basic characteristics, interests, and personality traits - something that we can actually articulate? Or is that all we mean when we ask that - simply to put together some kind of description? Is there no difference between "who you are" and "what you are like"?

I don't want to get too meta, and don't yet have any sort of formulated answer. I really am interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Identity and self-hood fascinate me. I hope to be able to spend more time learning and talking about this with people, in addition to a few other areas related to the psyche, language, and philosophy of mind. If I'm good about it, I'll spend some time on here looking at this stuff. If I'm lucky, I'll figure out a way to turn some of this stuff into a plausible research project with tangible goals. But that's a ways down the road. I may be on a road that will take me in the right direction, but I need to find a more specific way to that path before putting my best laid plans along with those of other, smarter mice and men.

Share a vine, and perhaps a wine

After the fourth week of classes, a rhythm has started developing that makes it easier to get the feel of doing homework and studying appropriately. Of course, this doesn't rule out one or two 2am nights a week staying up to finish lab reports. It simply means I feel acclimated to being a student again. It feels good. Though perhaps ironically, I'm writing this while I would normally be in my Signal and Information Processing class. After short sleep Wednesday night and a couple long days, I decided to not get up this morning for a three hour lecture when the professor puts together very good lecture notes that I can study at leisure.

Now that we're almost halfway through October, fall is finally making inroads to Switzerland. After a few weeks of 65 and sunny, the weather now tends to 50 and raining. Not the most pleasant, but let's be honest here: after northern Indiana and Chicago, it's nothing new.

Tuesday night this week was finally moving night. One short ride on the train and a couple 5 minute walks and that's all it took. Bam. New apartment. Across the street from my 3rd floor (really: 4th, but they start counting at zero here) bedroom window, there's another apartment building with old-style roof tiles. The rounded corner of the building is directly in front of me, with a large rounded balcony wrapping the end of each floor. This particular building's tenants seem to have specifically gotten apartments with balconies in order to grow impressive bundles of potted plants. A number of plants drape over the edge of the balcony, some sending vines nearly two floors down - a kind of shared garden world that must brighten the scene for many other tenants in my building as well.

Our building is not as new or well-maintained as the place I lived through September. This whole neighborhood looks older - steep, tiled roofs with the occasional attic window poking through, some kind of stucco finish on the outside of buildings, and sidewalk edges filled with bushes and shrubs up against each building that are not maintained so heavily as to look picture-perfect and sterile. It feels much more organic, more of a home than a street lined with new, spotless shops, with all greenery nicely contained in limited and sharply delineated areas, not allowed out of its prescribed bounds.

The buildings here vary in color from a pale green that's nicely set off by the rust-orange roof tiles and dark green shutters, to various shades of gray, beige, and very pale yellow. Though each building is different - color, roof line, absence or presence of balconies and bay windows - they are all very much in the same style. From my window you can see a series of adjacent roofs where each one is successively higher by a few feet than the previous as the buildings sit higher and higher up the hill towards Roeschibachplatz and the Wipkingen train station. Down the hill in the other direction is Wipkingerplatz, a Zurich Kantonal Bank, the Coop grocery store (pronounced "cope"), and Limmat River as it winds it's way north out of Zurichsee ("Zurich zay" - Lake Zurich)

And here's my view. It's not the mountains, but it's not bad.

Getting. It. Done.

A lot has crystallized out of the past five weeks. Until a few hours before flying out of Chicago, I did not have a place to spend my first night in Zurich. After a few jet-lagged nights in a youth hostel, a second-year student offered some space to crash on his living room floor, where I've been for the entire month of September.

Until a couple weeks ago, I didn't know how long I'd be staying in this living situation. This week I move to a more permanent solution, "more" being the operative word. It will last through February - sharing a place with a few second year students I've gotten to know and enjoy.

Until one and a half weeks ago, I had no idea what my class schedule would look like. After sitting in a couple extra lectures and spending a lot of time poring over the course catalogue, I have a reasonably interesting schedule lined up with classes ranging from Neuromorphic Engineering to Robust Statistics to Basics of Instrumentation.

Until a few days ago, I didn't know German. Oh wait, that's still true. But it does feel good to have gotten past all these events that, like the distant Alps, loom as hurdles in the future as you approach them. And perhaps also like the Alps it can take some work to get over them, but it all gets much more accessible with a halbtax card in your pocket and bread and chocolate in your backpack. (A halbtax card is a travel pass you buy on an annual basis that makes almost all train travel within Switzerland half price. Pays for itself pretty quickly.)

So life is settling down to some sort of normal (yeah, Mom, I know, "what IS normal??"). I've applied for a residence permit and a bank account, am finding running routes around the city, will get a bike soon, and am slowly figuring out what my schedule and rhythm will be for the next little while.

Just in case you were curious, here are what some of the local Alps look like ("local" might mean a two hour train ride away, but hey, I have more Alps than you do so quick nitpicking).

Faith Restored (it's not what you think)

The start of classes is quickly closing in: next Monday we kick things off with the program's orientation meeting. Four years after finishing at Goshen, it'll be interesting to see what it's like back in the academic rhythm. Maybe I'll even get some proper study habits, in contrast with my previous schooling. It should be a good atmosphere, though - the other students that I've met so far seem like a really bright, motivated, energetic group of people. Studying appropriately will be much easier when everyone else is heading in the same direction and running into the same walls. The previous couple years of students have clearly formed a very cohesive group, and it's exciting to see how that energy can build off itself and keep everyone going.

After a couple years as a research tech, I never saw the classes side of the experience, only the lab side. I heard a little about classes, but they were simply one of those things that happened to other people. The Miller lab was great to work in because people interacted so well on both social and professional levels. I really enjoyed seeing the dynamics that come out of those situations - where people are comfortable enough to relax around each other, but still focused on the problems at hand that the lab is tackling. That's one of my favorite aspects of the academic/research world in general.

Not to overblow the situation, but it's almost on the level of "restoring one's faith in humanity" to see a group of people who respect each others' abilities consult with each other and work together to figure out not who is right so much as what is right. That step from competitive to collaborative is one of the biggest ways I can think of to ensure a positive work culture.  Going beyond concepts of "synergy," teamwork, divide-and-conquer, and all of those ("synergy" gets quotes because I refuse to give it status as a legitimate word. I maintain that it's the bastard child of business school and buzzwords), the collaborative atmosphere shows respect for and legitimizes all contributions and ideas (and contributors!) rather than only rewarding the most successful. So to make a long story short, that's why I appreciate the work atmosphere I've experienced in academia.

In other news, I'm still functionally homeless. Well, functionally sheltered but technically homeless (sleeping on someone's floor... thanks, Gerick!). I've seen about 7 apartments so far and have just as many more visits planned within the next few days, so eventually one of these people will give me a piece of paper to sign and I'll be on my way!

The Foundational Chocolate

I came to this place, where the hills flow with cheese and chocolate (easy milk and honey allusion, right?), and managed not to immediately gorge on either. The cheese fast was broken a couple days ago when I made some homemade mac'n'cheese, which ended up being shell pasta with cheese melted over it. Without the patience to make a proper sauce, it was simply a nice stringy mix of emmentaler, gouda, and gran padano cheeses, tossed into the pasta with sliced leeks and mushrooms sautéed in more butter than you want me to mention.

Out of this, I was trying to figure out how to turn the cheese into a proper sauce. After thinking of a few extra ingredients that would help, I realized that I basically intended to make a cheese fondue and pour it over pasta. And then eat it along with a glass of whichever white wine or vermouth had gone into the fondue. So mac'n'cheese fondue is now on my list of foods to make for a tasty, cholesterol-heavy meal (and now you want some, too).

But what about chocolate? I managed to last a full week without indulging. My only chocolate while still in the youth hostel was a Cadbury's Caramel bar, courtesy of Heathrow airport and about $2 more than should have been spent on it. Late last week, one of my friends from Chicago asked how much chocolate I'd eaten, spurring an interest and a craving. So on Friday I bought one. Something milk chocolate filled with something even milkier chocolate. Saturday I bought another. Sunday, a third. Honey-chocolate with nougat, and dark chocolate with orange filling, respectively.

The back of my mind knew what was in those chocolate bars besides mouthfuls of rich, Swiss culture and the fatty milk of cows raised on three languages and banking in alpine meadows full of edelweiss. The back of my mind knew what the future held if I kept eating those bars like that. Either a lot more running and biking (not as likely) or a whole lot less (much more likely).

After finishing each of the first three bars came the, "Why did I buy only one??" feeling. This is good. It reminds me how lucky I am to be here, and is a good indicator that I didn't eat myself sick.

I did buy bar number four today. It may even last until the afternoon. I will try to keep track of all the different kinds eaten, to move through the world offered by the Swiss chocolatier. My first inclination was to try to explore every nook and cranny of the local chocolate world, but dietary sense, fiscal sense, and the sheer magnitude of it makes that quite an undertaking. So I will start by trying to cover the basics - to run the range of bars that are readily available, covering the center of the local spectrum. The foundational chocolate.