A fond goodbye to most of fiction

I've recently noticed a strange and surprising shift in myself: I appear to be losing much of my interest in fiction.

This is an odd and somewhat disquieting phenomenon for me to notice in myself, since I have been a committed fan of the stuff, and especially science fiction and fantasy, for such a long, long period of my life.  Like many a nerdy child before me, I got into Tolkien and Asimov at an early age, and most of my fiction reading growing up was science fiction.  Then I went away to college and discovered the MIT Science Fiction Society, and my cementation in the genre was complete.  For more than fifteen years, my need to buy fiction was almost entirely abrogated, and I gave back as a volunteer librarian, holding hours, processing part of the bookflow, and eventually writing reviews as well.

Processing books at MITSFS: here we were comparing donated books to current copies in order to decide which was in better condition and should be kept.

The first big shift in my fiction consumption was shifting from a walking/public-transit commute to bicycling or driving.  When I walked, I would read as I walked, and I had gotten quite good at it in several years of commuting while reading.  When I added a subway ride to my commute it stayed the same.  Towards the end of grad school, I started bicycling, however, and that meant that I could no longer even vaguely sanely desire to read while commuting.  When I moved from MIT to BBN, public transit become a much worse option for commuting, and it shifted to bicycling and car, and my commuting reading shifted entirely to podcasts and audiobooks.  There went at least six hours a week of reading, right there.

The next big shift in my fiction consumption was having a child.  When Harriet was born, my already scarce time dwindled even further, and I started needing to multi-task at home as well.  No longer were there good long times to read just curled up on a couch or in bed. Instead, I was generally doing something else, whether it be laundry or cooking or errands or something else, and more reading time converted from visual to auditory.

In the most recent shift, however, I've simply stopped consuming fiction at all for the most part.  Of the last 10 audiobooks that I have purchased, five have been non-fiction, while the others have been science fiction / fantasy.  That might not seem like a lot, but five years ago there might have been a single non-fiction in the lot.  Even more tellingly, of those ten books, I have finished all of the non-fiction and even listened to three of them twice.  Of the fiction, however, I have only even bothered to finish listening to two.  For me, this shift is frankly shocking.

I think that this most recent shift has something to do with the accompanying transitions in how I process fiction when it's auditory and not visual.  When reading a physical book, I read quickly, and move quite quickly through a story, more quickly when I'm not enjoying parts of it.  With an auditory book, on the other hand, the physical fact of the narration speed being so much slower than my usual reading speed means that I am given time to think about and process every sentence as it comes to me.  In turn, this leads to me thinking more deeply about the story I am listening to.  This ends up meaning several things: first, I need a much better quality of author to even keep me interested, since I am forced to consider quality of the prose more closely.  Second, it means that I am thinking in general more about the narrative and story structure, which means that I am generally learning more about not just this particular book that I am reading, but about storytelling as a craft and art.  That, in turn, has ended up bleeding over into other sorts of genres as well, and I am now having a much harder time enjoying anything in fiction (or fictionalized) in television and movies also.  I end up spending more time critiquing the story and looking at its structure than I do enjoying it (again, unless it is very well done indeed), and so a man who once would spend a whole day on the couch watching Cartoon Network is generally now bored by the second episode of something new, when I can see the signposts marking out the path for all the next ten episodes.

I think that I am finding non-fiction more interesting for exactly the same reasons that I am finding fiction less interesting.  Instead of giving me places to ponder the gaps in the world-building of the author and the hollowness behind the scenes, a good non-fiction leaves me wondering about the interconnections and larger implications of the things I'm thinking about.  For example, one of the non-fiction books that I have recently "read" multiple times is a lecture series called "The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes." This piece of history, despite its often degrading into a list of names of peoples who had fights at places, has really filled in a gap in the way that I have been educated about the world.  In my Euro-centric education, the world was anchored in the Mediterranean, with the rise of Islam off on one side and India and China as far away islands to talk about in very separate ways (mostly having to do with when Europeans turned up bent on conquest there).  In fact, however, the great land mass of Asia has always tied these lands together, as well as the worlds in the middle, such as Transoxiana, that were never even mentioned in my education.  This lecture series has shifted the way that I can understand our history of Eurasian civilization, and of many of the ways that I can understand the drivers backing current events, even as I have critiqued the scholarship and prejudices of the author in my head while listening.

In fiction, also, the things I still enjoy are works by authors such as C.J. Cherryh, who many find challenging because of the way that she submerges you so tightly in her characters' viewpoints and refuses to give much introduction to the worlds or technologies that they deal with.  A story by her is thus so densely packed with things to think about that I can read or listen to it many times and still be thinking about the implications and dynamics of the worlds that she has introduced, as well as just the general structure of the story.  A few words here and there can give a glimpse of an iceberg of relationships within a whole society, just as in our own world a single painful news story may become a touchstone for a much, much broader movement.  It's just that authors such as her are rare, and I treasure them on those occasions when I find them.

I suppose that in a way I might consider all of this just natural progress of maturity, but I don't know.  We don't necessarily get bored of all the things we love, not when those things can symbolize comfort and familiarity and home.  But when it comes to fiction, I think I'm moving on to wanting much more depth than once had been able to make me very satisfied.

The Scientific Richter Scale

Perhaps it's unhealthy statistical fixation, but I tend to mull over scientific citations, those being one of the important factors in the multi-currency economics of science.  From my thoughts, observations, and wanderings on Google Scholar, has gelled the following rough interpretation of scientific impact in terms of the rough order of magnitude of citations:

• Order 10⁰ citations: This paper is languishing in darkness and obscurity.  That doesn't mean it's a bad paper, just that nobody particularly cares about it.
• Order 10¹ citations: Either some people have noticed this paper, or else it's part of a strong ongoing line of research and is picking up a lot of self-citations.
• Order 10² citations: This paper is having a significant intellectual impact.  People have noticed it and, whether or not they are actually using the ideas within it, those ideas are having a noticeable effect on the scientific discourse.
• Order 10³ citations: This paper contains something that lots of people are actually finding that they need and are putting to use.  It is no coincidence that many of the "Top 100" papers identified by Nature are methodology papers (though the fact that the list omits Claude Shannon's exceedingly highly cited paper on information theory is another great example of just how shoddy citation databases are in their coverage of computing fields).

Of course, there's no sharp boundaries between levels, nothing to say that a paper with 300 citations (closer to magnitude 2) is really all that different than one with 350 citations (closer to magnitude 3). Perhaps it will be best to think of this as a scientific Richter scale, measuring the intellectual impact of individual scientific events [papers].  Right now, I don't think it makes much sense to look beyond three orders of magnitude because there are so few papers out there, but then, there aren't many magnitude 8.0 earthquakes either.

Thinking about this in terms of the Richter scale immediately sends the complexity theorist in my brain to think about scale-free distributions and log/log plots, and so I made a plot of my own current personal citational spectrum, according to Google Scholar.  It looks like this:

Yes, that certainly looks relatively linear on a log/log scale.  But then, so do so many things.  The the linear fit points out that there is definitely a big kink in the line, so it's not a straight scale-free distribution.  That means... I have no idea.  But this was certainly a fun way to fritter away half an hour while starting my vacation and watching my daughter sleep.

What do we mean when we say a circuit "works"?

Today, I have a new paper out in Frontiers about biological circuits, addressing a fundamental question about the field.  This question is rather simple at its root, but surprisingly has not previously been answered (to the best of my knowledge and ability to literature search).  It is this:

What does it mean for a biological circuit to "work"?

In research on information-processing and control in synthetic biology, we often take this notion for granted, saying things like "we built a toggle switch, and it works great!" or "it took a long time to get this detector working, but now we've got it," or "these repressors work really well."  But how good is good enough?  And surely "good enough" will differ from application to application, won't it?

An influential way of thinking about this problem can be found in papers like Sussman and Knight's paper, "Cellular Gate Technology" or the Weiss, Homsy, and Knight paper "Toward in vivo Digital Circuits". These consider how biological systems might be used to implement digital logic, considering standard ideas from the electronic world like the availability of strong non-linear amplification and identification of "high" and "low" signal regions set to reject noise.  

From our MatchMaker paper: digital logic "transfer curves" identifying "high" and "low" signal regions, based on the location of regions of strong non-linear amplification.  Do they reject noise?  Who knows?

What is easy to forget, however, even for folks like myself who have been trained in electrical engineering and computing, is where these concepts come from.  Ultimately, all computation, digital or analog, "program" or "controller," is about processing information.  And every time that we use a device to process a piece of information, the signals that come out of the device may be more or less hard to interpret than the signals that go in.

All of this stuff about strong non-linear amplification and high and low signal regions set to reject noise is a particular recipe that, in the world of digital electronics, is quite effective at producing devices that have outputs easier to interpret than inputs, and this is what lets us build very complicated digital computing systems, like you are using right now to read these words.

So how do we actually know how if we're actually getting signals out that are easier to understand than the signals that come in?  Information theory developed tools for doing this the better part of a century ago: one can directly determine how intelligible a signal is by computing its signal-to-noise ratio, which quantifies how clear your signal is in units of decibels---the same numbers that describe how loudly your music is playing.  That's a good way to think about it: high decibels = coming through loud and clear; low decibels = really hard to understand.

So if we want to measure how well a biological circuit is working, we can simply compute how many decibels its output signal is.  Some applications need only low signal-to-noise ratio: control of a simple chemical fermentation process might need only a couple of decibels if it just needs to nudge collective behavior a little bit.  Other applications need really, really high signal-to-noise ratio: treating cancer with modified immune cells, for example, probably wants at least 30 decibels (or more), because even a few cells making a bad decision can cause serious harm to the patient.

Using the same principles, we can ask how good a biological device is at processing information by comparing the signal-to-noise ratio of its input to the signal-to-noise ratio of its output.  This depends in part on how it's used and what it's connected up to, but the relationship is relatively straightforward, well-understood, and easy to analyze without the need for lots of additional laboratory experimentation.  Interestingly, this even lets you categorize any biological computing technology into one of three qualitative categories:

1. "Difficult circuit" technologies, where it's really hard to get anything to work
2. "Shallow circuit" technologies, where devices generally degrade information as they process it, so it's easy to get simple circuits to work, but hard to get complex circuits to work.
3. "Deep circuit" technologies, where clarity of information is not the limiting factor and there is the potential to build very complicated systems.

So far, so good: we've got a well-grounded measuring stick for biological computation and control that can actually be applied to any information processing system.  Electronic computing is so powerful because most devices fall into the "deep circuit" category.  That's also where "strong non-linear amplification" and "high and low regions of noise rejection" make sense to talk about.

How about biological computing?

That's the bad news.

• For much of the published work on biological computation, we simply can't compute signal to noise ratio or its change across a computing device.  
• Often, papers report only the variation in the mean output values, but not the mean of the cell-to-cell variation (so we know the signal, but not the noise).
• Papers about computing devices often do not quantify device inputs and instead report the induction used to stimulate the input, which means we cannot compute whether the device improves or degrades a signal.
• Device inputs and outputs are often not measured at intermediate values, or are not measured in comparable and reproducible units, which means we cannot predict the signal-to-noise behavior when two devices are connected together.
• The best performing and best quantified biological device technologies currently out there only provide "shallow circuit" performance, which means that at present it is simply impossible to build biological computation or control systems with more than a certain limited complexity.

I don't think this represents a real barrier, however.  A good measuring stick does more than tell you where you fall short: it also tells you what needs to improve and by how much in order to get what you want.  Signal-to-noise ratio analysis certainly does that for biological devices: in many cases, the information currently missing from publications can be readily acquired, and will hopefully shed more light on the true current information-processing capabilities of synthetic biology.  Likewise, signal-to-noise analysis shows that the various current technologies differ from one another in the issues that limit their signal-to-noise ratio. This analysis can hopefully be a useful guiding light directing improvement of those technologies---and some of them are pretty close to hitting the "deep circuits" level and making it much easier to engineer complex biological computation and control.

My vision is of a world where biological information processing becomes not a challenge, but a useful and reliable tool, supporting all sort of useful applications.  Just like in the electronic world, I expect that reliable computation will play a foundational enabling role, letting people stretch for goals not currently considered possible, for better medicine and a more sustainable environment, for cleaner energy and a safer world, for art and beauty, and for all the things we haven't even thought of yet.

Read the paper free online: Signal-to-noise ratio measures efficacy of biological computing devices and circuits

Are publication delays aimed at manipulating impact factor?

Today while dealing with citation queries from a journal's editing staff on a pre-publication proof, I was confronted once again with the recurrent annoyance of delay "formal" publication. Back in November, we published a nice paper on high-precision prediction of genetic circuits.  Well, I say we published it in November, but technically it was only just published today, seven months later

This is due to the curious phenomenon where many journals will publish "online early" shortly after a paper is accepted (an excellent idea!), yet still wait, sometimes for many months, to bundle papers together into an "issue," as if the journal were still all about printing on dead trees and shipping to libraries, rather than having most people simply access it directly online.  This phenomenon has always struck me as odd, and it's a pain in the butt, because it means citations have to change over time and different citations to the same document end up with different years in them.

Confronted again with this today, I had an insight.  I wonder if this phenomenon is no mistake, but perhaps in fact intentional on the part of some journals, in order to manipulate their Impact Factors. The "Impact Factor" of a journal is a horrible, broken statistic that is used to make or break people's careers, particularly in the biomedical fields.  It is calculated as the average number of citations that papers in a journal receive during the two years following their publication.  For example, if Journal X published three papers in 2015, and two of them are never cited, but one gets cited 5 times in 2016 and 7 times in 2017, then Journal X would get a nice high Impact Factor of 4.0 (i.e., (5+7)/3).  Yes, it's kind of a dumb statistic, but it's heavily used and thus frequently gamed.

Here's the thing, though: because it was "online early," my paper has collected several citations before it was ever officially published.  So when it gets included in the computation of the journal's impact factor, it's effectively going to get 24+7 = 31 months of citations, rather than the usual 24 months of citations.  That's going to increase its expected number of citations, and thus the all-important Impact Factor of the journal.  This is further compounded by the fact that getting noticed takes time and publishing a citing paper takes time, so the later we get from a significant paper, the higher its citation rate is likely to be.

So from a journal's perspective, it seems like it would make sense to drag out the time between online publication (when a paper starts being noticed and collecting citations) and official publication for as long as possible.  It's also possible that some enterprising editors or publication houses have noticed this and may thus set their publication delays intentionally to manipulate this impact factor.  Even if the reasons are benign, however (e.g., smoothing out the publication pipeline), the distortion in statistics is still there.

Maybe the citation indices that compute the magic Impact Factor numbers have noticed this and accounted for it... and maybe they haven't.  I would not be surprised in either case, but I'd be very interested to know the answer.  The real answer, though, is not to be more precise about Impact Factor computations, but to discard the damned thing and obtain a more sane and reasonable metric for discussing the significance of papers and journals.

A spectre is haunting me in Huntsville

Having recently had great fun watching a satellite launch in Cape Canaveral, we decided to spend this spring break visiting the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.  Unlike Cape Canaveral, Huntsville is a plausible driving distance from Iowa City, at about 10 hours on the road, which made it a much better option than competing for airline seats at spring break fare levels.  Huntsville isn't quite so beautifully warm and spring-like as we'd thought it would be---apparently Northern Alabama has a lot more climatically in common with the Midwest than the Gulf Coast.

From our hotel, you could see the giant Saturn V moon rocket (mockup) looming up over the trees, and overall, the museum did not disappoint.  Harriet did space-walk dances beneath the shuttle, and delighted in the "blast-off ride" for little kids that shot them up in the air and then bounced them up and down and up and down on their way back to the ground.  She also loved the recordings of the Saturn V engine tests, which shook the whole area around where they played.

Harriet on her highly-favored "blast-off ride"

The Space and Rocket Center is also where Space Camp is, and so all the time that we were there, we were surrounded by floods of school-kids of various ages, going from place to place, learning the history of space and rocketry, doing experiments with balloon-and-cardboard landers or hand-launched rockets, learning about reorientation training by being spun around in giant hoops, and generally being highly enthusiastic at the top of their lungs.

Learning about space beneath the Saturn 1B

Reorientation training in a three-axis tumbling machine

I found, to my surprise, that my feelings were much more mixed than they had been in Cape Canaveral.  The thing is, the Space and Rocket Center is quite conscious of its history of being just as much about rockets as space.  This is where von Braun and the rest of the Nazi scientists from Operation Paperclip were brought to continue their work, and the collection also includes V-1 and V-2 terror weapons, quite a number of US military missile systems, and even an attack helicopter from the Vietnam era.  Walking through the museum entry, after you pass the case of model space shuttles and the "Mars Climbing Wall," you confront a bunch of Army future combat system prototypes and publicity models: a humvee with some sort of laser targeting pod, air and ground combat drones, air-to-air missiles, storm-trooper mannequins in badass green camouflage.

Learning in the shadow of  a V1 "Buzz-bomb"

Army surface-to-surface missile systems

I shouldn't be uncomfortable with this, I think.  I'm basically OK with the idea of military systems, used responsibly, and my research is mostly funded by the military.  So why did it bug me to have such a fusion of space and military, to find that overhead there seemed to be practically always a military helicopter passing by in some direction on an errand in the sky?  Clearly, the people of Huntsville did not have any such qualms.

One of the ubiquitous overhead military helicopters

So why was it this way for me?

I think that I want to feel that our venture into space is part of the best part of humanity, the reach after better dreams and visions.  It is in space where we first truly learned to look back on the Earth and to learn how fragile and unified it is, a gut-level grasp of the meaninglessness of national division.  Seeing the Earth from space helped to kick-start environmentalism, and to get us past the Cold War.  So I want space to be tied into that well-spring of good things, feelings I can rightfully feel warm and fuzzy about.

Military technology, on the other hand, while I feel it is reasonable and necessary, I also feel reflects the worst aspects of human nature.  We need these types of technology because we haven't figured out any way to have a society (or system of societies) in which there is not also conflict and strife.  So we need safety and defense, and defense can so easily become offense and oppression and war.  Even now, living in the safest period of human history, we are killing one another, and our high technology does nothing ultimately to change that fact, and indeed can enable us to become more callous and distanced from the effects of the choices we make as a society.

At Kennedy Space Center, the military side of space is not particularly visible, and neither is the nationalistic side.  It has all been brushed under in favor of the international and positive side, the aspirations that drive one major side of the drive to orbit and beyond.  The crowd is international, and the tone is of a united humanity.  But the satellite launch we watched while we were there was a US military communications satellite, and its existence actually directly impacts the scenarios that I am working with in my research now.

In Huntsville, you know that the two are intertwined, and you know that they are proud that it was the United States that went and did these things.  They aren't shy about von Braun's Nazi past.  They don't hide the fact that we performed animal testing before we ever sent humans up: in fact, there is a very uncomfortable-looking mannequin of a monkey restrained in a complex steel contraption, to show just how Able and Baker were sent up on their historic flight.  I also eat meat.

I know that I'm not comfortable with this intertwining of dreams of a better civilization with the realities of military use, but that doesn't mean it is or was the wrong thing to do.  In fact, I know that in fact it may be best to have a person like me who is uncomfortable involved, because I am not going to take the morality of the research that I am involved with for granted.  Or at least I hope that can remain the case.  I sometimes wish I didn't have to see the truth, but not to see it would be worse, I think.

Our visit to Huntsville haunts me, and I am comfortable with that.

Saturn V: the dream at dusk

The secret to avoiding jet-lag on red-eye flights

OK, folks, here it is: the secret to avoiding jet-lag on red-eye flights.  I learned this from Patrick Winston, who claimed to have learned it from his time serving as a research advisor for the US Navy. The US military, of course, has a deep interest in all things related to sleep, including jet lag, and has invested quite a bit into learning how to best manage it over the years.  The bit that I remember, and have successfully deployed on many occasions, is this:

First, you must understand the principle: your body keeps its circadian rhythm entrained with the cycle of day and night by having a natural rhythm that is slightly longer than a day, and resetting it on encountering bright light in the morning.  Artificial bright light, however, is all around us, including in the LCD screens that dominate our modern environment.  So when you stay up late in artificial light, that makes your body think the day is longer, and drag you "Westward" in your rhythm.  Red-eye flights, however, are generally East-bound, and so if you follow the natural course and try to stay up, your body thinks it is a super-long day, runs out of patience and tries to put you to sleep in the middle of the day, gets very confused, and you end up completely screwed up with jet-lag.

Instead, you want to convince your body that it is a super-short day.  For this, you need to shut out all light, so you need one of those sleep blinders.  It doesn't need to be fancy, just to shut out the light and be sufficiently comfortable that you can keep it on all night without ever removing it: you can generally get a decent one for less than $10.

As soon as you get on the plane, get comfortable, buckle up, and put on the blinder.  Do it before takeoff.  Skip dinner, skip the movies, and don't take the blinder off until you smell breakfast.  Just relax and rest---sleep if you can, but resting will do OK even if you can't sleep, and you'll probably drift in and out.  Your body, deprived of light, will think it's a short day and move your rhythm "Eastward"---not all the way, but enough that you won't have to fight sleep in the middle of the day, can be quite functional immediately, and will be fully adjusted within another day or so.

I find this works quite well, and have added one more filigree of my own: I go stir-crazy if I'm sitting in the dark but not asleep, so I need something to occupy my mind.  For that, I listen to audio books, and in particular, on a red-eye flight, I always listen to an audio book that I have already listened to, preferably multiple times.  This does two important things for me: 1) it's not new for me, so it's not exciting enough to stay awake for, and 2) I can have a vague sense of how long is left in the flight without looking by the progress of the story.

With audio books and a blinder combined, I find that I can manage pretty much any red-eye comfortably and effectively, with minimal jet-lag, and I strongly recommend them to you as well.

Good luck, and happy traveling!

Chicago O'Hare airport at dawn

Cutting it Close

"If you've never missed a plane, then you are spending too much time in airports."  This was a saying about travel that I have come to appreciate, which I heard from Patrick Winston, one of my graduate advisors. He is also the one who taught me the secret of avoiding jet-lag on overnight flights, so I take his advice quite seriously.

So far, I am still apparently spending too much time on airplanes, but today was closer than I've ever been before, leaving MIT at 4:50pm to catch a 5:55pm flight at Boston Logan.  Fortunately, traffic wasn't too bad, and I even had 5 minutes at the gate before I boarded, but it reminded me why I do still spend more time in airports than Patrick would suggest: the cost of missing a flight and getting home too late is just too much for my preference.  These days, I err instead on the side of shaving things close in my presence at meetings, and omit the time I might have allocated for touring or getting to know my environment, because I don't want to spend the time away from home and those I love.

How young is too young to fly with me to a conference?  I don't yet know, and I'm not sure I'd want to put Harriet through the absolute boredom that my packed traveling days would generally entail on her behalf (I never even get full nights of sleep when I'm traveling professionally), but I keep thinking about it, and trying to figure out when and how I can make it sane for her to join me and get to see the world as her father does.

Sunset takeoff at Boston Logan

Peripatetic Science

Some things you don't really fully realize until they are all put together in front of your face. Filling out some (exceedingly tedious) forms today, I had to write down all of the foreign countries that I have visited recently, and apparently, over the past five years I have gone abroad 27 times, to 14 different countries.  The vast majority of that travel has been for scientific meetings of one sort or another, and mostly to various locations in Western Europe.

I know that I travel a good bit for science, and part of me looks at that number and says, eh, that's only about once every quarter.  The other part of me, the part that remembers a quiet childhood growing up in Maine, almost never traveling more than a few hours drive from home, looks at those numbers in astonishment.  It means that I have grown up to become one of those strange frequent fliers, for whom an airport is just a normal part of life, and I suppose that is how it will continue to be for as long as I am a practicing scientist.

I like this life, but sometimes it helps to remember how foreign it is to many others, and even my own younger self, who not only didn't know I would end up living such a life, but never even thought about the possibility.

Discovering Luxembourg

I think that I am falling in love with the architecture of Luxembourg.  This morning I have spent mostly walking around the streets of the city, with its curious mixture of old and new, and I am being continually taken in by the drama and beauty of the place.  My hotel was right in the center of the city, and the city itself is quite compact: a hill surrounded by deep and defensible valleys, now bridged with great stone and concrete viaducts that carry highways and rail lines.

The streets in many places are nearly as narrow as Venice, but with high 18th century-style buildings more reminiscent of Paris.  Even the newer construction often seems to have chosen either to fit in or to coherently and deliberately depart (and there is quite a bit of new architecture, Luxembourg having apparently been rather damaged in the tail end of World War II).  Moreover, since the center is much more compact than either Paris or Venice, all these things combine to create a city where even a short walk turns around many corners of surprises, dramatic angles formed of the corners and confluences of little wriggling streets.  At the edge of the hill, the city drops off sharply, with steep stairs and roads plunging down into the parkland of the river valley.  Along the side of the valley are old castles, pastel-colored stone houses marching down the side of the slope, and even homes driven into the rock itself.  On the far side rise cranes and the glass towers of the country's industry, though I'm not sure whether those particular towers hold banking or software or European government.

It is a rather international city as well, as befits a small country that attempted neutrality for a long time, then after its experience in World War II turned about and fiercely embraced the new order that it helped to create, as one of the founders and agitators for both the European Union and NATO.  I walked along a major road named Franklin D. Roosevelt Boulevard, and not far away is another street named for John F Kennedy. I hear many languages in the streets, and see at least at least a smattering of cross-cultural couples.  Nearly every advertisement that I have seen has something to do with the way the country sees itself as a crossroads, a place not on its own, but defined through its connections with the rest of the world.  Luxembourg intrigues me, and I need to come here again with more time to spend.

Now, I am sitting on the steps of a public building on the edge of one of the city squares, listening to blacksmiths pounding out ornaments in the bustling Christmas market in front of me, and amazed to find myself automatically online (perhaps it is the university) so I can even upload this post while it is fresh on my mind.  Good job, Luxembourg: yet another way I like you.

International Showers

Somewhere, inside pretty much every international airport, there is a place where you can get a shower.  Sometimes they are public and anybody can get at them; other times you have to get access to one of the airline lounges, either by being a frequent flyer or paying for a day pass.  If you can get at that shower, though, it can make a world of difference.  Last night, before getting on my overnight flight from Miami to London, I got a shower in the American Airlines lounge, making up for not really being able to clean my hair properly for the last week.  Then, while waiting to connect in Heathrow, I got another shower in the British Airways lounge, and washed away all of that red-eye flight nastiness that builds up when you've spent a night neither really sleeping nor not sleeping.  In both showers, the water temperature was kind of unstable (each in its own special way), but who cares: it was a few minutes of perfect quiet solitude and self-care, and by the time I stepped out, I was clean from my toes to my teeth and with a much more settled and stable mind, ready to face the next step of my voyage.