Author Archives: Kamal Maher

No Time for Sleep and Too Tired to Meditate

Posted on by
1

While the advice we heard during last week’s cafe was interesting and informative, a lot of it seemed hardly practical to implement in the daily life of a Cornell student.

Sleeping for under 9 hours a night (and usually far under at that) is much less of a choice as it is a result of rigorous academic standards on top of involvement in sports, the arts, or clubs. So when it is suggested that we get more sleep, it seems like an impossible suggestion. It just pulls me in another direction while I’m simultaneously being pulled toward my classes, my clubs, my job, my lab, classical guitar, my personal life, and all sorts of other directions. There is a limit to how many responsibilities a person can uphold, and sleep begins to dwindle in priority when compared to other activities.

But what is that pulling force exactly? For me it is my honest interest in each of the responsibilities I mentioned. Not to mention the expectations of grad schools on top of that. But sometimes I worry that people participate in certain activities only because of those expectations, and I think that is prevalent based on something very important that was mentioned during the talk. You can often walk through any crowded area on campus and hear students almost bragging about how little sleep they have gotten. You could also argue that this is the culture surrounding Cornell as a result of these high standards. So in my view, it seems meaningless to suggest students get more sleep when it is effectively out of our control.

Meditation, on the other hand, is a relatively small commitment with potentially large benefits such as allowing one to relax and increasing focus. However, some can’t even fit an hour in their schedules to walk to the session, participate for 30 minutes, and walk to their next destination. And even if they had the time, could they stay awake?

I think it is important to be aware of the sleepless culture surrounding Cornell, but to make a change would require much more than a simple statistic and suggestion.

The Carbon Cycle in Real Life

Posted on by
Reply

Dr. Solomon gave a good presentation of the details behind carbon sequestration. It was a nice focus on the importance of carbon from the perspective of the soil, as opposed to the perspective of greenhouse gasses and climate change that one usually hears. To me, it seemed like this provided the second half to the story of carbon in the environment.

Throughout the talk, I thought a lot about the law of conservation of mass. That sounds really lame when I’m reading this over, but I swear it makes sense. It became clear that one could think of the distribution of carbon in the environment as a sort of “law of conservation of carbon,” as carbon is not being created nor destroyed. Rather the carbon is being redistributed between the atmosphere and the soil. Dr. Solomon seemed to stress the importance of balance between these two states of carbon, as both the atmosphere and soil suffer from any imbalances. The examples we see today are soil infertility due to lack of carbon and climate change partially due to excess atmospheric carbon. Using the conservation analogy made this challenge really easy to identify.

Anthropological investigation revealed that indigenous tribes had methods for sequestering carbon in the soil. This was an interesting twist, as all the science and technology he had shown us in terms of analyzing mineral content of soil samples down to the nanometer scale seemed obsolete when compared to the results that the tribes were able to achieve.

The coolest part was definitely that Dr. Solomon and Prof. Blalock were able to take these observations and actually act on them by producing an affordable, recycled product built off of the anthropological findings. It was really nice seeing this relatively completed project, as it showed that this issue could really be tackled. I feel that too often environmental issues are portrayed as bleak with no solutions being presented. Overall it was a refreshing and inspiring perspective on our current environmental challenges.

Adversity as a Best Friend

Posted on by
Reply

I have some friends and fellow bio majors on varsity teams here at Cornell. Some of them are also pre-med. How they do it all, I had never understood. For me, this talk help clarify how they do it.

It was really nice to see how passionate coach Tanasoiu was about his players, his sport, and school. I enjoyed hearing him go on about his upbringing and how he got to Cornell. It helped me understand the passion he has for tennis. It led him to Cornell. Here, he cultivated a strong connection to the student athletes and to academia. Seeing how much he cared about his job and his sport made it really clear that his coaching both pushes and supports the students in athletics and study. He also mentioned the adversity that the students face, and that they learn to “make adversity their best friend.” The challenges they face because of these two demanding roles pushes them to overcome hurdle after hurdle and become better and better.

So when I wonder how they do it, my perspective of “it” is likely monstrous in comparison to the perspective of a student athlete juggling sports AND school. Especially when you have someone like coach Tanasoiu as well as others helping you along the way. What is incredible to me is that the average GPA of the team is apparently a 3.60. That really struck me, and I think that it is telling of the value of what the coach had to say.

In the end, I both regretted my slow decline in sports and came to understand and really appreciate what my athlete peers face and accomplish.

Another Example of Timescales and the Environment

Posted on by
2

For years, House Professor Garrick Blalock has battled the environmentally unfriendly three-stone stove in East Africa. But something has prevented a seemingly provocative shift toward the efficiency and health that alternative stoves offer. While the lack of infrastructure behind the alternative stoves is likely an important factor, I believe it really has to do with the timescale of the benefits offered by the stoves.

Environmentally friendly products are expensive, but we have several ways to manage their cost. We can offer financing. We can offer insurance to subsidize the cost of accidents. We even have warranties that can fix or replace the product at no expense. All of this forms an infrastructure which supports expensive investments in environmentally friendly products. This type of infrastructure is largely absent in East Africa. For that reason, it is very difficult to introduce relatively expensive, environmentally friendly cook stove products into these regions.

However, even when the cost of a healthy stove is practically reduced to zero, families almost always revert back to their original three-stone stove. This issue seems beyond financing. Even when the health benefits are many and the cost is none, the families in this region choose their traditional option over seemingly pure benefits.

So then my question is, is it really that simple? Clearly the benefits of using the environmentally friendly stove do not outweigh the costs. So what are the costs that we aren’t seeing?

Perhaps the issue is in terms of timescale. Similar to the talk given by Prof. Sachs, the environment operates on a much larger timescale, and that can differentiate between imminent, tangible, humorous events and long-term, intangible, intrinsically non-humorous events. Maybe the timescale of health is related. Maybe the benefits of using the alternative stoves are on a timescale that is too drawn out to be noticed by these families. When the benefits were presented in the talk, time was not a factor. However, when each is made a function of time, the cost of adopting a new twist to an essential activity becomes concentrated and could far outweigh the diluted benefits that would slowly be introduced over the course of YEARS!

When time is introduced, it seems to me much more understandable that the environmentally friendly stoves have not been adopted.

Rocky Start to a Revival

Posted on by
1

I haven’t seen any of the Rocky films. There. I said it. So that may have influenced my relatively negative take on the movie. I am, however, familiar enough with the story line to understand the references that were packed into this newest addition to the series. In the end, I think that Adonis was hard for me to see as a protagonist for one reason in particular.

The movie started off really well,  I thought. I liked the idea of Adonis becoming a fighting prodigy not only because of his father but because of his upbringing in juvenile detention facilities as well. I thought it showed the struggle involved in his decision to become a fighter. He left his mother and a comfortable lifestyle in pursuit of something dangerous yet necessary. I liked that. But then he met Bianca. After that, my opinion of Donnie went downhill. I think it’s because of the amount of times he had to go back to her apologizing for a number of things he did. Then their resulting interactions made it even worse. It kind of made him seem immature to me, which created a huge disconnect with his upbringing that would’ve lent itself to a much more hardened character. I think that for that reason I also saw the romantic side of the movie as kind of a detour. I was much much more interested and invested in the training and nuanced relationship to Rocky.

After typing this all out, I feel like I sound somewhat heartless or inconsiderate… But I really do think that the acting on Stallone’s part (which I absolutely loved) as well as Adonis’ background made the immature romantic relationship seem out of place to me. In the end, maybe I would have preferred to see this movie as a drama. But then that wouldn’t exactly fit in with the Rocky series.

So ultimately I guess I should sit down and dedicate a solid 24 hours to watching the entire Rocky series with occasional breaks and then write another post afterward. Stay tuned.

Imminence and Humor

Posted on by
Reply

House Fellow and Associate Professor of history Aaron Sachs introduced a number of viewpoints on environmentalism, humor, and the major disconnect between the two. He used popular internet video clips to illustrate the public’s perception of environmentalism, and the divide became very clear. The reason why hardcore environmentalists are often the butt of jokes stems from their seriousness about the subject and inability to take jokes, let alone make them. The solution that Prof. Sachs proposed was centered around the possibility that humor could be an essential medium for reaching a broader audience, and environmentalism has yet to successfully tap into it. He showed an example of a trailer for a documentary about a family attempting to live for a year with zero environmental impact. It seemed to pull off some humorous and relatable moments while ultimately delivering a positive message about the possibilities of living with zero impact. Overall, Prof. Sachs made a compelling argument that humor could be the key to successfully increasing awareness and active participation.

However, Prof. Sachs conveyed the problematic disconnect through examples from the history of environmentalism, seemingly criticizing the way that it developed over the years without humor. I think that this is somewhat of an unfair critique due to the nature of environmentalism itself. First of all, Prof. Sachs continually referred to “Jewish humor” as a similar example to potential environmental humor and called it a sort of “doom humor”. In the face of imminent death or disparity, this humor arose. While I agree that this would apply to Jewish humor among other types, I think that environmental humor is unique in that the “doom” it refers to is not relatively imminent. It afflicts children or grandchildren, but not the self. I think that this intangible nature of environmental doom greatly dulls the potential humor behind it. Secondly, it follows that a natural comedic incompatibility with the subject would cause environmentalists to rely on seriousness alone, which results in the dynamic we see and learned about from Prof. Sachs. So it seems to me that any consideration of an alternative route of developing environmentalism is like wrestling with the inevitable. Nevertheless, I believe that humor has a place in the future of environmentalism, and it was very insightful to have Prof. Sachs give us a preview of what that may look like.

Quartet Dialogue

Posted on by
Reply

It’s not uncommon for classical music to convey a portrait. In fact, impressionist composers such as Debussy and Ravel create scenes out of flooding melodies that all come together to form one landscape interpreted by the listener. Personally, that is my favorite style of classical music, and to listen to Momenta Quartet’s performance of Janacek was reminiscent of impressionism yet totally novel to me. The group prefaced the piece by explaining the composer’s intent of conveying a dialogue. Whether it was due to foreshadowing or the clarity and power of the composition itself, the intense interactions between each of the four parts was very clear. Rather than melting all together to form one piece, it seemed like each part was a sharply distinct melody that wove — sometimes sweetly and sometimes chaotically — into the other bold voices. While the separation of voices is a common theme in musical performance, the focus on this separation in the composition itself created a beautiful and sometimes even painful piece. Among many other aspects of the stunning performance, the contrast between communicating parts stood out to me the most. Also, the hosts gave us cookies. That was cool too.