Something about passion and work, and oh yeah I have a plane ticket to Chicago for June 8th.

The end is supposedly three months away. I have a plane ticket and everything - June 8th. There ya go. A deadline. I've recently begun thinking about and looking into what comes next in earnest, assisted by a contemplative mood and plenty of evening/weekend free time (and a small amount of urgency to not be an unemployed masters graduate). This weekend, it led me through a series of articles, reddit threads, and TED talks. One TED talk was by Scott Dinsmore; he founded the organization/website Live Your Legend. I'm generally skeptical of the find passion and turn your life around! concept, but having no idea where to start, I took a peek.

First off, I gotta say - watching a bunch of TED talks in a row of inspired, successful people really does a lot to convince you of the possibility of living the life they tout. How deeply happy they seem makes you almost feel guilty about persisting in your lukewarm, comfortable interests. Dinsmore strongly recommends the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath of Gallop (yes, the polls people), but there's no ebook version so I can't read it immediately. Rath - using some of the massive amounts of data available to Gallop - broke strengths down into 30-some categories, and includes a quiz that gives your highest five. I'm curious if it's better than many of this sort of quiz, which seem to ask, "What do you enjoy doing that people say you're good at?" and then for the answer tell you, "Here's what you enjoy doing and are good at," (I'm looking at you, Myers-Briggs).

Dinsmore also has a list of questions (link should take you to a PDF). They don't tell you what to do with your answers, but some of the questions make you think about interesting perspectives of the passion/interest/vocation spectrum. I went through and answered the questions; it took a couple hours. If you care to read any of it, I've pasted my answers below. It's very long, though, and I didn't write them with the intent of anyone else seeing it so take that as you will. What are your thoughts on the questions? (Which you should be able to see via the "list of questions" link at the top of this paragraph.) Feel free to comment on the answers, but right now I'm really curious about what you think about the value of the different questions, and if you find any of them particularly intriguing. For a little context, Dinsmore is of the school of thought that, instead of working on strengthening your weaknesses, you should focus on your strengths because you will enjoy it more. This means you will work harder at it than you would on your weaknesses, and thus end up having used your time more productively and have really mastered a certain set of skills instead of being discontentedly mediocre at a larger set.

Live Your Legend - 27 Questions to Find Your Passion

1. What makes you happiest in your life? What excites you?
I am happiest when I spend time with people who are important to me and can do things to please them. I get excited by sharing my skills with others to help them attain their goals (or at least I like the taste of that idea) - by being useful, and when people ask me for help (which shows that they consider me useful).

2. What do you do that makes you feel invincible?
I feel invincible when I'm in good physical shape (e.g. can ride a loaded bike up a mountain pass with no rests), or when I solve tough problems (at least, if they don't take so much effort that they wear me down) - when I succeed.

3. What do people thank you for?
For being considerate, for being helpful/being willing to help. I don't do a huge number of things for which to be thanked.

4. What are you ridiculously good at? What are your precious gifts?
In some subjects, I am very good at learning. I'm not world-class, but I am somewhat high-class in mathematical and scientific thinking. This applies to understanding material, to reframing the material in my own terms, and to systematically thinking through implications of ideas. I am also quite good at listening to two parties that are in disagreement and helping them find the root of the conflict (resolving ambiguity, focusing the topic to where the contension lies). So far I have only used this in philosophical/metaphysical discussions, where ideas are at stake more than emotions. I have a strong ability to understand different sides of an issue, and accept and name the complexities surrounding it.

5. Who do you look up to? Who are you mentors? Who inspires you? Why?
Morally, I look up to my parents - dad's integrity, mom's caring/ability to connect with people. I also look up to their work ethic, though to the degree that I want to contribute more than I take at any given job - I don't have too strong of an ambition to be the best at something. Professionally, I look up to Lee. He treats his lab members very well, and seems to balance ambition, kindness, expectations, and understanding - it's the likes of him that humanize the institution of academia.

Personally - many people. Danny and Saee are hopelessly driven and hopelessly kind. Hope and Drew are caring and downright wonderful. The Sprungers are so very familially welcoming. Nate H. is just solid, and has a great sense of purpose. Scott is so excited about life - about your life and his life. Kaleem is brilliant and gentle. Charles is a silly man with strong, real thoughts. Mitch and Amber are so down-to-earth and warm. Celesta is loyal and sensitive. Bontrager cousins are all relentlessly big-hearted and aware of the complexities of the world, and of relationships and family history. All the Hollenbergs want so much to do the right thing. Natalie has beautiful perspective, and a powerful grip on taking responsibility for living her life. And plenty more.

6. When was the last time you massively over-delivered on something? What was it and why did you work so damn hard?
Tough one. Halfway an answer: the INI Christmas apero, though for that I just set some of the vision and got a lot of other people to work. My best "over-deliveries" in Chicago were probably cleaning-related, because that was one area where I felt able to actually do the work properly. Otherwise? One lab write-up in Differential Equations in college. I worked extra on that 1) on accident (numerically solved problems that only asked for analytical solutions), and 2) because I was turning it in late anyways so I wasn't rushed.

7. When was the last time you were in a state of flow, in the zone and totally lost track of time? What were you doing?
I don't think reddit or Netflix count. A few times working on the thesis - either coding some functions to run analyses, or (more often) doing batch, panicked literature review towards the end to find sources for certain facts. That was panic more than flow, though. On reddit, I often lose track of time giving advice (/r/bicycletouring, etc.), or working on AskScience or ELI5 answers.

8. Imagine you won $158 million in the lottery. It's now three months later. How will you spend tomorrow?
I might enjoy working at a bike shop, preferably one with sales and maintenance work for the same position. I'd like to learn to build bamboo (and other) bikes professionally - to help people get the bike they want. I would also work in a pottery studio. I wouldn't build my own studio - I want the community. I would try to get good enough to sell my wares. I might work on baking bread, or learning to cook new (or improving familiar) food styles. I might spend some time learning more programming.

9. What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
I would probably take on an odd-jobs life, kind of a more urban Al Glick, though I think the handyman life is more feasible in a small town where people have fewer places to look for services. Is there a difference here between succeeding and not failing? I might try something political, or something education-related. Hard to say.

10. If you could have or do anything what would it be?
Do? Not sure. Have? Answers to questions like this, and the other tough questions of life. An engaging job, pets, time to travel and be outdoors, resolution. A home.

11. What topics do you find yourself continuously arguing or defending with others? What beliefs does your stance represent?
I think most arguments come down to how we think the world works, so whatever the topic, I argue about how the world works. Many of my arguments come back to context, and how it does or doesn't translate, or that people's worldviews aren't expansive enough. What do I argue about specifically? Hm. We discuss education, how science should be funded, how science should be conducted, what the most promising path of development is most promising for ideas of future technology (e.g. the best approach to develop a true AI), contradicting whatever Gerick said, agreeing with whatever Tom or Danny said (not always but, let's face it, usually), the boundaries of feminism vs. oversensitivity. A lot of my belief can be summarized as, "I don't know yet." Agnosticism at its finest.

12. What makes you most angry about the state of the world? With unlimited resources how could you fix it?
The system, I think, and how difficult it seems to change it. I understand the reason to make it difficult to change; I think that's good. But now it's gone so rotten that it desperately needs a shakedown, a restructuring. The US should rewrite the constitution; I'm sure of it. Much of it can stay, but some practices and concepts are so dated that they need to be removed, while all we do now is to add on. Maybe it goes deeper than that, though. Maybe it's the entire American culture - little sense of responsibility to a larger collective and bullheaded adherence to outdated ideals. Hah, or maybe it's deeper yet and reaches down into human nature. In essence, I want a world where regions can experiment with new ways of doing things - new policies, new practicies, new tax codes, new subsidies, new laws, new lack of laws - and where people are willing to begin these experiments, willing to admit to being wrong if they do not work, willing to try other people's ideas that have worked, and wiling to not blame others whose ideas did not work. A world where it's okay to be wrong.

13. What are you most afraid of for the next generation, whether you have kids or not?
I worry what the political landscape will look like. I fear it will keep polarizing until no sensible people pay it any mind such that the country is run by the corrupt and the crazy. I worry that the political machine will be so bogged down with additional restrictions (see above re: always adding, never removing) that life is one big trail of paperwork and none of it sensible, that there will never be a push to create an efficient system. It ruins government, health care, litigation, social services... any state-regulated/-run activity. Currently everything is so ponderous that I see no hope for change barring revolutionary action.

14. What do you love helping people with? How do you most commonly help others?
I like helping people understand concepts they didn't previously understand, or fixing something that had been bothering them/running suboptimally. For friends, I enjoy giving small tokens of kindness to make their day better.

15. What's your favorite section in the bookstore? What's the first magazine you'd pick up at the grocery store?
Bookstore? Some scifi/fantasy (Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and the like), cookbooks, coffee table photo albums of interesting photographers, real-life adventures (like Shackleton's journey) or adventure-based ponderings (a la Krakauer), books of interesting facts (e.g. Devil in the White City, and how-things-work-type things). Magazines? Popular Science and the like, backpacking, biking/bike touring, fishing, Cook's Illustrated.

16. When was the last time you couldn't sleep because you were so excited about what you had to work on? What was it?
Losing sleep because of excitement about work? I'm not sure I've ever done that. I lost sleep a few nights during my thesis because of hamster brain or realizing/thinking I'd made a huge mistake and couldn't rest until I fixed/verified it. But actual excitement
about the work? Hm. I've had to get up a few times through the several years to write down ideas for small side projects - the bamboo bike, various ponderings I have stored on google docs, how to build certain furniture pieces, and the like. Nothing specific, though.

17. If you trusted that your art (your creativity) would support your life, how would you live?
I wouldn't mind living somewhat off artistic pursuits (pottery, perhaps furniture if I cared to get good at woodworking), but I don't want to leave the technical world behind. One kind of creativity I don't have too well that I would like to is mechanical design - to be able to create elegant, simple solutions to everyday problems. Part of the problem is I have not created opportunities to expand my knowledge in this field or to get significant practice. But I also really enjoy working with bright, scientifically minded people.

18. Out of all your current work roles, what would you gladly do for free?
Out of the work I do as a student? Not much. I learn interesting things, but I'm not content to be a keyboard jockey. In Chicago, what might I have done for free? I liked working with the grad students, post-docs, Becca, and Alan to design solutions to problems. Some amount of machine shop work was also fun. But part of it was the enjoyment of working on disparate, new problems, not having to cover every single aspect of a single large project.

19. If you were able to be a member of the audience at your own funeral, what would you want to hear people say?
I want my life to have made the world, and their lives, better. To give more than to take. Maybe to inspire a few people, but I'd be happy if I just brightened their days a little - if they were glad that they knew me.

20. What do you want to be remembered for - what dent do you want to have put in the world?
The more flamboyant version of the ideal: I want the world, or part of it, to have a clearer understanding of what it means to be alive, or at least have a better idea of how to approach that question for themselves. A more reserved ideal: to have created something that makes people's lives better/easier, even if they don't realize it - a fundamentally deep transformation in the world, so deep that most people don't realize that the world could be any other way.

21. What do your friends always tell you you'd be good at, that you should do for a living? If you don't remember, then go ask five of them.
Teaching, cooking/baking, some kind of mentoring/conflict resolution. I don't hear any of that often (well, somewhat often for cooking), but those are what stick out in my memory. Perhaps they would say the same thing of math/science if I wasn't already trying to make a job out of it.

22. What are you naturally curious about?
I'm curious about expanding my experience of the world - of having a large catalog of first-hand experiences of all things across all walks of life. Often I'm curious about how things fundamentally work, or of the best way to make a difference in areas where society often fails, or how to find the best (or least bad) answer to unsolvable problems.

23. If you had a free hour to surf the internet, what would you explore?
According to recent history, reddit. This weekend, more about finding purpose (and a job). Other times: histories of certain regions of the world, taxonomy of certain weird animals I just ate in Korea and the cultural significance of the dish and if I can try to recreate it at home. Sometimes other food stuff, sometimes information about dog breeds, sometimes overviews of machine learning and neuroscience-related subjects that I haven't taken courses on, sometimes reasons to move to Minneapolis.

24. Think back to when you were 5 or 10 years old. What did you want to be when you grew up? Anything goes. What skills and metaphors do these represent (i.e. a pilot may be a symbol for freedom)?
Veterinarian - to interact with animals, to be a caretake, to help people with something that is important to them.
LEGO designer - I really liked LEGOs. I just wanted to play all the time, creating a world more interesting than our own.
I don't recall thinking much as a child about what job I wanted. Those are the only specific ones I remember. I don't remember wanting to be a fireman or an astronaut or a race car driver.

25. If you could write a book to help the world, that is guaranteed to be a best seller, what would the title be? What's it about?
Am I stuck with the knowledge I have now, or will I be the wiser, more experienced ideal of myself that I imagine writing a book? I'd want to write a book that helps people 1) discover the idea of context - of the limits of personal and regional and national egoism, and 2) breaks down people's need for pettiness and taking ownership of their knowledge - convinces them that what you know is limited by your history, and that it's okay for you and other people to be wrong. That would help so much to make progress in creating a world - have people strive to prioritize what is correct, not who is correct.

26. What careers do you find yourself dreaming of? What jobs do others have that you wish were yours?
Not many. I don't really want a traditional job. Maybe R&D at some engineering startup? If I envy someone for their job, I envy them in the context of their passions and interests - that they found a job so well-suited to them.

27. What 3-5 dream jobs or businesses can you imagine that would firmly embody your core beliefs about the world? Sky's the limit.
These are a couple business ideas that embody or act out core beliefs, though I don't know that I'd want to specifically do the associated work.
    •    Large-scale non-profit in a large city that gets extra leeway from the city to perform experimental social projects, e.g. the group that renovates abandoned houses in the South Side for homeless families to move into, or creating larger scale community gardens that could produce a significant amount of food for the community, particularly for poor neighborhoods, or creates alternative school systems (for poorer neighborhoods?) that aren't restricted to traditional standards/structures
    •    Soup kitchen that gets members of the served community as food prep workers, and gives them professional training in food preparation, or any program that provides a service/necessity to improve the community and simultaneously helps community members work towards economic success. Need to teach vocational skills (being a chef, IT support, teaching, sports coaching? anything, really) and practical skills (budgeting, scheduling, personal/professional responsibility).
Now, how about actual jobs?
    •    Variety. Something with variety. Human interaction and providing assistance, mechanical hands-on creation, technical thinking and problem-solving. And I also like dogs and tasty things.
    •    It could be interesting to work with people in one-on-one (or small groups) scenarios for tutoring-type sessions, or something of the sort.
    •    One specific dream job, though? I still can't define that.

28. What revolution do you want to lead?
Perhaps a revolution of scientific thinking - of getting people to realize that the path forward is not in certainty but in uncertainty, that good, powerful thought processes are about recognizing uncertainty, naming it, and exploring the extent of it, not about claiming a territory and defending it.
Perhaps a revolution of context - of getting people to recognize the world beyond their own, and that their decisions and opinions should take into account how their context interacts with other contexts.
I'm not so driven to lead a revolution, but I wouldn't mind helping someone who was leading one.

Oh so familiar...

I've been in the States for 11 days now. I leave in five more. The first couple days back felt awfully surreal. Riding the L through Chicago, hearing the CTA announcements on the speakers, seeing the city bounce past me on the less-than-perfect red and brown line rails... it almost felt like watching a movie I knew well but hadn't seen in a long time. It didn't quite feel I was actually there. The most instantly obvious difference was the ambiance of being surrounded by native English speakers and the signage and advertising aimed at them (us). It all normalized quickly after meeting with more and more friends and seeing the familiar places of my not-so-distant past.

I got to visit a truly wonderful number of people, and will visit a couple more still.

Last night we went to Goshen to see a performance by Garrison Keillor. It was everything you'd hope it would be. The show started with the audience, well accustomed to his styling of Lake Wobegon, waiting breathlessly for the cue that he had begun being funny. The first few laughs were hopeful more than earnest. Normally the performer needs to warm up and relax for the show to be enjoyable. This time, it wasn't until the audience relaxed a few minutes in that we found a more natural cadence at which to laugh. You could almost hear the expectation in the pre-laugh silence - "The next line will be a good one, I'm sure of it!" His mammoth reputation preceded him, and it took a short time for the audience to get over their giddiness to truly enjoy the show. Keillor closed by saying that what our country/the world needs now is gratitude. "Gratitude is the cure." And to choose to be cheerful. Not happy (because who really knows what that means), but cheerful.

I don't know what to try to process next. So many different strains of thought have positively flown through my head during the intermittent quiet moments of this trip - thoughts of the future, the past, Midwestern sensibility and humor, motivation, biking, sickness and death... everything really. I can only hope that some portion of the ideas I'd like to mull around come back so I can spend some proper time with them and get them down on paper.

Riding bikes of carbon fiber and horses of math...

Small victories are important. They can make a difference in how I feel day-to-day. To use training language, everyone needs periodic reinforcement. Since the beginning of the spring semester, my reinforcement to work ratio was very low, particularly with several very time-consuming assignments that I never finished. The past couple months, my running and biking also fell off. I’m not training for anything in particular. (If people ask, I “joke” that I’m training for middle age. Not entirely a joke, right? It may seem far off, but it’ll come soon enough.) I’ve set no specific goals. I even figured out eating habits that maintain weight without much exercise. At this stage, my exercise has dropped enough that simply getting out is a victory. I realized this today while I spent a quick hour on the bike ride to burn off some extra energy and make it easier to mount up back onto the study horse this evening. As my Goshen physics professor Carl Helrich has been known to say, "Math is the trusty steed we ride." But now I'm back off the bike so it's time to get back on the study horse. Or maybe it's a study train, I never was sure.

These days I need to use exercise to give myself these small victories, in the absence of feedback from the academic side of things (those pots all have to simmer longer term). In several weeks I’ll get course grades from spring semester (hopefully passing), and hopefully along the way make measurable progress on my thesis. Right now I’m simply figuring out the mechanics of the data processing I do in MATLAB - what order to do things in, how to pre-process data, how to measure changes. So for every step of progress I make toward the explicit goals of the thesis, it usually means figuring out several behind-the-scenes issues. It’s not always the most fun I could imagine having ever, but I enjoy getting into the process of actually doing science, and learning what exactly that means.

Well, back to more studying so I can actually earn some positive reinforcement for all the time I’ve spent on this course in the past few months.

Edit: bikes of aluminum. I guess only the fork is carbon.

Quick as a cricket!

That's how I have to write this post. It's Tuesday, and my last exam is Thursday. It won't be a thing of beauty, but with luck (and successful studying through today and tomorrow) I should (might?) pass. Probably. Linear regression, PCA, reinforcement learning, inverse models, and Bayesian estimation theory. Fun stuff. But after that it will be the thesis full-time.

Summer's in full swing in Zurich. For a city that's supposed to average only 3 days a year above 85 degrees, we've been there (or close) for almost 3 weeks, with a few days above 90. Also, Switzerland doesn't believe in air conditioning. It does cool down at night though - often down to 70 or so. Aren't you glad you're caught up on Swiss weather now?

Beyond a couple hikes and a couple bike rides, I haven't been outside too much this summer, though the heat has driven us (and much of the city) to spend weekend days at the river and the lake, enjoying sun or shade or water however you see fit.

Rachel and Darin get here tomorrow morning, which is exciting, but for today, well, that studying isn't going to do itself! Happy August, folks.

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.