mathbabe

Hello, friends! I’m here to give you an update on my recovery from bariatric surgery.

Swimming and biking

I’ve been cleared to swim and bike and take baths, and I’ve been swimming and biking – mostly biking and taking baths – every day since I got the news, which was on Tuesday. A small bummer: I’m really out of shape compared to where I once was, and it’s hard work. It doesn’t help that the weather, except for Wednesday, has been insanely moist and humid, exaggerating my sweatiness and making my gasping helplessly for breath all the more sad and pathetic.

Fuck it though, I’ll do it anyway! I feel very grateful for having the freedom and energy to do this stuff at all, and it will only get better as long as I keep at it.

Scales

I got deeply depressed yesterday morning. Partly it was the awful horrible weather, partly the political situation of the country, but partly it was something that made me feel awful that I did to myself: I weighed myself.

Now, and I know many of you will relate, I haven’t weighed myself regularly for maybe 23 years, and for good reason: it didn’t matter, it made me crazy, and my mental health was better without it. That’s not to say I didn’t get weighed every now and then; I did, especially when I was pregnant, and it was fine because it was a medical requirement and didn’t seem to bother me, probably because somebody else did it to me.

But, and here’s the naive part of the story, I convinced myself and my husband that I might be able to weigh myself once a week to sort of understand the effects of the bariatric surgery on my body. I had somehow framed it to myself as a scientific lark, ignoring the heaps of evidence that I had accumulated 23 years before that it was a really terrible idea. I thought I was mature enough to handle it now.

Long story short, I weighed myself once a week starting a few weeks ago. At least I was smart enough not to weigh myself every day.

As an aside, my husband loves weighing himself and does so 5 times a day or more. He doesn’t mind when it goes up. He’s endlessly fascinated by how he weighs 4 pounds more at certain times than at others. He’s most assuredly in a different relationship to scales than I am, or probably than any woman I know. Even my friends who are skinny have problems with scales, for various reasons. AmIright?

And it was fine! It really seemed fine. One day last week I decided to nerd out for a bit, so I built a predictive curve of my weight loss based on the information I’d been told by the doctor and my research, plotting out what I could expect to lose each week for a year, and getting to almost exactly the expected overall weight loss I’d been told was appropriate for my height and beginning weight.

And then, yesterday morning, Friday, I weighed myself. And I came in 1 pound more than “expected” based on this totally made up, unscientific graph I had built from nothing. And at some level I was like, 1 pound is the difference between a poop and not a poop, so whatever, I didn’t poop yet today. But at another level I turned immediately into my 14-year-old self, blaming and shaming myself for behaving badly (even though I’d done nothing wrong). It was fucking crazy.

To calm myself down, I made the next fatal error, which was to go onto the chat boards (mostly old) about weight loss after bariatric surgery. For whatever reason – mostly selection bias – these chat boards are populated exclusively by people who are actually insane.

Either someone’s saying they eat 500 calories a day, exercise constantly, but still weigh 300 pounds, and asking if there’s another surgery that will cure them, or it’s someone saying they “jumpstarted” a loss of yet another 10 pounds with the simple trick of drinking only protein shakes for two weeks, or it’s someone asking how to “jumpstart” their weight loss once again, and on and on and on. If you removed the words “bariatric” from these chats, they’d be indistinguishable from those famous websites that exchange tricks on anorexia.

Then, my friends, something shook me out of my stupor, and it was that Steve Bannon was fired. It was the energy I needed. I stood up from my seat, walked over to my scale, and threw it the fuck away.

After all, I didn’t have this surgery to lose weight, I had this surgery to be healthy. And that’s not something you can measure on a scale, or even once a week. It’s a long term thing, and the scale was seriously getting in my way. And shit, I’ll know I’ve lost weight when my pants fall off.

One more thing. I’m an idiot for letting myself get sucked into this weight loss perspective, but it’s really not my fault. In my defense, the people at the surgeon’s office are obsessed with my weight loss, and are constantly trying to get me to name a “goal weight” as if that will help me achieve something. It won’t.

We live in a fucked up world, people. There are lots of things that we have no control over and that suck. Then there are things that we do have control over and that suck. My new motto is, if it’s something in the latter category, throw it the fuck away.

I wrote a piece for Bloomberg View this week, here’s how it starts:

We’re having the wrong conversation about women in tech. We need to decouple two very different issues that have arisen amid the commotion about diversity at Google: biological differences between genders, and bias against females working in tech and more generally in well-paid, prestigious jobs.

For the whole article, go here.

For all of my Bloomberg View posts, go here.

This is a guest post by Michael J. Barany, a postdoc in History at Dartmouth.

One year ago, I wrote a post for the Scientific American Guest Blog arguing against the widespread truism that mathematics is everywhere. The post laid out the history of mathematics as a special and exclusive kind of knowledge wielded by privileged elites. I claimed that the idea that math is everywhere not only gets the history wrong, but also misrepresents how mathematics matters most in most people’s lives, and may be a misguided premise on which to build a more inclusive and responsible discipline. If we start by recognizing the bias and exclusion that affect who gets to use advanced mathematics to intervene in the world, we might get better at responding to those biases while empowering the vast majority in the mathematical non-elite to hold the mathematical elite accountable for the great power they are privileged to wield.

While I received a lot of private responses from people who found the post convincing or clarifying, most of the public reaction represented sharp, sometimes visceral opposition to one or more of my claims. I want to revisit some of those responses here in light of a variety of developments from the past year that I think underscore my argument. The initial responses to my Scientific American post show some of the blindspots and hazards that continue to mark public discourse about mathematics, even from those sincerely committed to rectifying the discipline’s historical inequities. This past year has shown, time and again, that math still isn’t everywhere, and that this matters to everyone.

I wrote my original essay primarily for the mathematics educators, popularizers, and researchers who seem to make the bulk of public claims that “math is everywhere,” as well as for their many different audiences interested in mathematics education and policy. Since I framed my argument historically, however, an important secondary audience came from those who study, share, and read the history of math and science. Their responses bear notice, in part for the contrasts they offer compared to responses from those more vested in the mathematical present.

Specialists on more recent history recognized the essay as a faithful popularization of what recent scholarship on modern science convincingly shows: that math and science are thoroughly political, and that claims to universality are often a misleading means of sidestepping those politics. I received more skeptical responses, however, from some scholars of early periods, especially of the Scientific Revolution. Utrecht University’s Viktor Blasjo got the point of the essay while disagreeing with the interpretation I advanced, calling it a “Po-Mo … party line social constructivist narrative.” (This made Blasjo the second person I know of from 2016 to call my interpretations postmodern as a pejorative. At least my approach is transparent!) If that characterization doesn’t mean much to you, take it simply as an indication of the intensity of interpretive disagreements historians can have while more or less agreeing on the relevant facts.

Other responses showed less careful engagement and less acknowledgement of the grounds for disagreement among historians. A short email with the subject “oh dear” from the University of York’s Anniversary Professor of History, David Wootton, informed me that he suspected I had not read his recent book, which “rather disqualifie[d]” me from opining on the Scientific Revolution. He admitted in a followup email that he had not read my essay, but thought a discussion of it he encountered online seemed “to betray a rather woful [sic] ignorance” that his book would have rectified. The online discussion in question was more substantive than Wootton’s curious irruption of condescension and self-promotion, but reflected a similar dismissive attitude. It began with an extended rebuttal to several points from my essay by math history blogger Thony Christie, who opened by admitting that he was “not really interested in the substantial argument of the article” (a claim Wootton also made to me by email) but rather felt obliged to object to what he saw as historical errors “made worse by the fact that the author is a historian of mathematics.” Since my essay pointed to several places where mathematics was used to claim exclusive authority, and to other places where there were important criticisms of mathematics for precisely that reason, Christie questioned exactly how exclusive mathematics actually was and defended the importance of mathematics in spite of those criticisms. You can decide for yourself from the ensuing back-and-forth what to make of Christie’s objections (I think they only tend to reinforce my argument), but for our purposes here the most significant point was that Christie and Wootton felt comfortable ignoring the stakes and implications of the history of elitism and exclusion in mathematics, as though these were independent of how we understand that history and what we make of it today.

For readers with a stake in today’s mathematics, the response was almost the opposite (and I think a lot more interesting): they tended to grant the historical claims about mathematics and focused almost exclusively on the implications. Two of the more thoughtful and generous responses of this sort came from mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Anna Haensch, on Twitter and the American Mathematical Society Blog on Math Blogs, respectively. Both suggested that we should distinguish the questions of where math is and who is able to use it. This inclination to separate math from its users and creators, I think, gets to the heart of the matter, and was one of my primary reasons for writing the original essay. Haensch argued that “Math is everywhere just as much as anything is everywhere,” that is, that you can find math wherever you look. This view, according to Haensch, “is exactly the antidote” to arguments that dismiss the importance of learning mathematics because of questions like “when will I ever use this?”

Here, Haensch helpfully linked two of the most common kinds of responses to the essay that often appeared less constructively in isolation. The first had to do with what we mean when we say math is everywhere, which in large part is a question about what we mean by math itself. Is math a fundamental latent aspect of the natural world? A basic human capacity for understanding things numerically or logically? An infinitely adaptable tool that modern societies have developed to understand and intervene in the world? A system of training and professionalization that equips certain individuals with specific abstract means of solving problems, and a specific kind of authority that comes with them? How important is it to distinguish basic math from advanced math? Numeracy from algorithms? Dynamical systems from category theory? Is something mathematical if it can in principle be described using mathematics, or just if it is in practice engaged through math?

The second kind of response had to do with the stakes of saying math is everywhere. If math should be more open and inclusive, and more people learning and appreciating math is a good thing, then what do such claims about math accomplish toward that goal? Are there other goals we should have for mathematics that such claims also affect? As many responses put it: does saying math is not everywhere devalue the discipline and make it harder to understand, appreciate, and share? By linking together these two kinds of responses–about what math is, and what is at stake in the answer–Haensch underscored the crucial and fundamental fact that these questions are always implicated in each other: the philosophy of mathematics is political, and the politics of mathematics are philosophical.

Those who claim mathematics is everywhere choose to emphasize what mathematics can be in principle. As Haensch and many others noted, I used Jordan Ellenberg (whose work to share mathematics I greatly respect and admire, for the record) as an example of a mathematician who emphasizes all the places math can reach in order to encourage his audience to appreciate the breadth and power of mathematical thinking. This is not, as many interpreted it, a philosophical claim about the nature of mathematics. Rather (and this is why Haensch’s framing matters), it is primarily a political and pedagogical claim that the best way to understand math (whether or not you’re a mathematician) is as something that is potentially everywhere. And that is what those who expressed either of the two just-considered responses in isolation seemed to miss: that “math is not everywhere” is also at root a political and pedagogical claim, premised on the lessons and legacies of the history of mathematics that most such responses set to the side. Instead of focusing on what math can do in principle, history’s lessons are about what math has been in practice, and this shift in perspective can be as important as the historical episodes themselves.

Which brings us to the most fiery response I received on Twitter, from mathematician Ed Frenkel, whose book Love and Math begins by depicting mathematics as hidden all around us in our daily lives. Frenkel later told me that this was his first real experience of an extended dispute on Twitter, and he would probably have approached it differently in retrospect. Out of respect for this sentiment, I am here focusing on the substance of the exchange rather than the sometimes hyperbolic terms in which it played out. Twitterer @abhinav_shresth distilled one relatively sanitized thread, and a search for both of our Twitter handles shows the parts of the back-and-forth that Frenkel did not delete.

The exchange started after Frenkel shared a link to Haensch’s article, calling it “A good riposte” to my “incoherent ramblings,” and I responded with disappointment that, unlike Haensch, Frenkel seemed to dismiss my essay without taking its claims seriously. It turned out that once Frenkel spelled out his beliefs we had a lot of common ground. We agreed that math is currently and historically elitist and that this is a problem, especially given the huge (and seemingly growing) role mathematics has in contemporary society. Frenkel argued that the solution is for everyone to be empowered by learning more math, to have “equal access” (in his words), and the way to encourage that was to show that math is everywhere. As we have already seen, this claim is both political and pedagogical. Frenkel asserted that the best way to understand the power of mathematics in society is to see it as potentially everywhere, and the best way to give people purchase on that power is to show examples (even mundane ones that are more tractable than the complex mathematics through which that power is often exercised) of mathematics hidden all around us.

By placing the emphasis on how mathematics isn’t everywhere, I claimed that history gave us a different lesson. Politically, I think that it is better to focus on the areas where mathematics does have a profound effect on people’s lives, at the expense of the kinds of tractable examples that are often used to popularize math. This requires sacrificing the expectation that such lessons will always be mathematically tractable, since by their nature these kinds of mathematics are difficult and exclusive, often inaccessible to all but the narrow subset of mathematical professionals who specialize in those specific theories and applications. We should instead seek political, ethical, and other related kinds of understanding about these kinds of mathematics, which would allow more people (however much or little mathematics they know) to hold mathematical elites responsible. Pedagogically, I questioned whether stressing the ubiquity of mathematics was the best motivation. If instead we started by emphasizing that math is and has historically been an alienating and exclusive kind of knowledge (indeed, has often been so by design), then those who have felt alienated or excluded from mathematics need not blame themselves for failing to grasp the mathematics that is supposedly all around them, and mathematics educators (as well as theorists) could prioritize inclusive formulations of their subjects.

A number of developments in the last year have driven home the inadequacy of just trying to convince more people to learn more math as a response to elitism and exclusion in the discipline. News stories abound of malign uses of algorithms and other mathematical technologies for encryption, surveillance, and analysis. During my exchange with Frenkel, one interlocutor called attention to the imminent launch of Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction book. Indeed, among the book’s many strengths is O’Neil’s way of explaining complex mathematical issues in a way that combines mathematical, political, ethical, and other kinds of understanding. O’Neil used these explanations to argue that the public needs to recognize and appreciate the many specific areas where mathematical models and algorithms affected their lives and society, but that this understanding was not enough. Those who wielded difficult mathematical tools also have a responsibility to use them ethically, and to seek the kinds of mathematical and non-mathematical knowledge that will help them do so.

Amidst the martial analogies associated with O’Neil’s title, there was a striking parallel in both Frenkel’s public writing and a number of reviews of O’Neil’s book to debates about a more common kind of weapon. Back in 2013, Frenkel called for “the 21st century version of the Second Amendment” giving everyone the right “to possess mathematical knowledge and tools needed to protect us from arbitrary decisions by the powerful few in the increasingly math-driven world.” Reviewers of Weapons of Math Destruction, meanwhile, seemed to rush to declare the innocence of mathematics while decrying only those who misuse it out of ignorance or malice. That is: math doesn’t kill people, people misusing math do. And, paraphrasing Frenkel: the only way to stop a bad guy with math is a good guy with math. Decades of policy debates have taught us the dangerous fallacy of these claims when applied to guns instead of mathematics. In a provocative Twitter exchange with mathematician Gizem Karaali, I explored whether the same lessons apply to for math, too. We did not come to a clear conclusion, but the discussion emphasized the importance of asking about responsibility, safety-minded training, and contextual understanding for mathematics education and policy. It also underscored that mathematics, like guns and gun control, is an emotional topic with deep-seated cultural valences that policy-makers ignore at their peril.

If this year has made clear the stakes and power of mathematics in our society, for good and bad, the year has also driven home the range of factors beyond just talent and interest that shape who can wield mathematical power. The end of 2016 saw the theatrical release of the film Hidden Figures, based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s book about African-American women computers at NASA. The film and book were the subject of an especially well-attended panel at the 2017 Joint Mathematics Meetings, and drew attention to how racism and sexism have limited access to advanced mathematical education and careers, while also limiting recognition for those who made major contributions despite those barriers.

The problem is not confined to the past. Shortly after the 2017 JMM, a team of mathematicians launched the excellent and timely Inclusion/Exclusion Blog under the auspices of the American Mathematical Society. Since last February, contributors to that blog have chronicled a wide range of barriers to diversity and access for underrepresented groups in mathematics, as well as a wide range of initiatives aimed at rectifying persistent inequities. These initiatives have often been focused on building professional networks, offering recognition and support, and otherwise promoting mathematicians at an individual and institutional level. Few, as far as I can tell, hinged on the premise that math was everywhere (whether in principle or in practice); most started instead with the unequal realities the discipline currently faces. Contributors have asked tough questions about how to respond to the social and structural conditions that keep mathematics unequal. That linked example was by Piper Harron, who has elsewhere (including on this blog) powerfully analyzed the links between social and structural exclusion and our ideas, assumptions, and approaches to mathematics itself.

The August issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society featured a pair of articles on recent political developments in the United States and their affect on the international mathematics community. Another article in the same issue announced a Global Math Project whose aim is to “foster a global conversation about joyous mathematics,” a goal very much in line with the “math is everywhere” approach to access and inclusion: get people excited about math, and inclusion will follow. The juxtaposition with discussions of the U.S. Travel Ban strikingly underscored how access to the mathematical elite is as deeply political as ever, with barriers that require attention to mathematics as a specific and place-delimited discipline rather than a limitless fount of potential joy. While global educational projects can certainly do a lot of good, it is telling that the organizers of this particular project seemed to take for granted that the fundamental problem for mathematics across the globe is “a perception issue,” that it is insufficiently appealing.

There is a potent hope embedded in that kind of thinking. Even if math is and always has been elitist and exclusive, the reasoning goes, it is also (and always has been) available to everyone in principle. The theorems of geometry and the sequence of primes don’t care about where you’re from or the color of your skin. Here, the claim that math can be found everywhere goes hand in glove with the claim that it can be found by everyone. By emphasizing the apparent all-encompassing neutrality of mathematics itself, one might hope, we can see that the only real barriers are the ones we make ourselves and we can resolve to move beyond those barriers individually and collectively. That is, to return to the theme raised by Haensch and Strogatz, by separating math from its users we can aspire to make the user-based practice of math more like math’s universal principles. If we start with “math is everywhere” then we can work toward “math is for everyone” so that any individual has potential ownership of the subject.

I think this gets things backwards. It is precisely because math can’t be separated from its practice and its place in society that, in a meaningful sense, the theorems of geometry do care and have always cared who you are. This is all the more true for math that reaches farther and more powerfully into our lives–the secret mathematics of finance, surveillance, literal weapons and figurative ones–all these kinds of math are guarded and inaccessible by means of an indissociable mix of technical and social barriers. History tells us this isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It is fundamental to math’s place in the world that it is not open to everyone. But, conversely, the mathematical elite is made collectively, and societies do get to shape who has access to math and what we expect of them. If we start with “math isn’t everywhere,” we are better equipped to see math as embedded in larger social structures of our own making, and, I’d suggest, we are better equipped to reshape those structures for the better.

I may have erred by concluding my Scientific American essay with the implication that “there is much work to be done” so that math might “belong to everyone equally.” There is definitely much work to be done, but that work is premised on the unavoidable reality that math cannot belong to everyone equally, that power does not obey utopian principles. Rather, such inequality creates ethical, political, and pedagogical imperatives, and these latter challenges are what demand constant work and attention. The most misleading aspect of the claim that math is everywhere is its timeless formulation, set apart from movement and change, of opportunities for structural reform. “Math isn’t everywhere” risks that same timeless implication. But math and society alike are always changing, always open to new expectations and understandings. Instead of looking to static universal principles, we might find a more productive kind of inspiration from a recognition more rooted in time and place: math still isn’t everywhere.

My latest Bloomberg View column is up:

Trump and Statistics Don’t Mix

For other columns go here.

I’ve started to get emails from concerned friends checking up on me, so it’s high time I give an update on my condition over here:

I’m doing great!!

I’ve been eating really carefully, and enjoying every single (tiny) bite. I dream of bean soup, perfectly seasoned. I am, in fact, well on my way to becoming a health food obsessed foodie. My darling friend Laura has even brought over a selection of fancy salts, because we’re both convinced I’m going to become a “salt douche” lickety-split. I don’t want sweet things at all. My tastes are changing daily, and I live in the best city in the world, with the best friends in the world, to try out new things.

So. Lucky.

I’m also starting to take longer walks, between 1 and 2 miles, and I’m planning to beef it up to 3 miles by the time I see my doctor on the 15th, because my real goal is to get back on my bike. Because, besides becoming a foodie, I’m also planning to get really into exercise. It won’t be the first time, I’ve been there before. It’s fun, as long as you don’t make people listen to your work-out schedule or anything. If I start doing that, please slap me.

The story behind the story of me getting this surgery is that I love biking with my husband. In fact I’d pretty much been able to brush off the fact that I was fat because I could still point out that I was in great shape, biking around Central Park or downtown on the Westside bike trail, and I wasn’t lying.

But last summer, something changed. We rented a house near Poughkeepsie that was great, and pretty close to some nice bike trails, but not very close. As in, about five miles of pretty steep but rolling hills to get to a flat trail. What I realized was, in spite of my best intentions, I couldn’t get myself out there. It was really hot, and the thought of biking up and down all those hills filled me with dread. I couldn’t get myself to do it.

What was worse, I realized it was just the beginning. When you don’t bike regularly, you get out of shape, which makes it even harder to bike when the weather gets better. Once I realized this destructive feedback loop was happening, it really bothered me, and moreover fucked with my long-held notion of myself as a fit fat person.

I’d already heard about the bariatric surgery as a way of getting rid of diabetes, and I’d already decided I’d get it done if and when I was well on my way to diabetes (I ended up being pre-diabetic when I went into surgery, so this wasn’t a minor concern). But last summer was when I started to ask the question, why wait? I started interviewing people who’d had it, none of whom regretted it. Indeed their biggest regret seemed to be that they hadn’t done it earlier. One of them wished they’d gotten a sleeve surgery instead of a gastric bypass surgery (I got a sleeve).

I started thinking long term about my health, and how I wanted to be one of those active old ladies, shouting and carrying on at protests, and how I’d need to be able to stay fit if I was going to go through with it. And although I was carrying my 300 pound body pretty well at 44, it would be much harder to do that at 74.

Long story short, once I’m back on my bike, I’ll definitely feel I’ve achieved something. I was even thinking of joining SoulCycle (after being cleared by my doctor, of course) but it might be too cult-y for me. Then again, it might be just cult-y enough.

Please chime in with suggestions!

Hey people! I’m back to business, with a new Bloomberg View column about healthcare:

Big Data Is Coming to Take Your Health Insurance

I’m happy to report I’m off pain meds, which makes thinking enormously easier. I want to share observations and comments I’ve accumulated while high over the past week before I forget them:

1. Pain

• There are lots of online resources, like this one, which tell you what to expect after bariatric sleeve surgery. When they talk about pain, they get everything wrong.
• In particular, they act like the five little incisions on your tummy that correspond to the laparoscopic tools entry points (and ex-stomach parts exit point) are the main sources of pain.
• WRONG! In the past week, I have experienced no pain from my incisions except one time when I was turning over badly at night.
• The vast majority of my pain, say 99.5% of it, came from the insides. Namely, I had most of my stomach yanked out and the remainder tied together with twine. All of my nerves inside my body are well aware of this fact and stayed busy for at least five days continuously notifying me of this act of brutality.
• So, long story short, the first real observation about my bariatric sleeve surgery is this: it’s a crude and unsparing act.
• I think, when you first hear about it, you know that. But then you get used to thinking about it, and you hear the risks are low, and that it’s laparoscopic, and that you only stay in the hospital one day, and you end up – or I ended up – thinking it was no big deal. And websites telling you your incisions will be slightly sore don’t help. But friends, I know better now. This is for real.
• Also, it’s possible that other people don’t have tons of nerve endings in their insides like I do and actually only feel pain on their tummy incisions. Good for them. They’re the same assholes who talk about how they orgasmed during childbirth.
• But I think the actual situation is that those websites are written by people who haven’t actually experiences the surgery themselves.

2. Regret

• Next observation: I don’t think I’ll regret this.
• I had moments, especially right before I went in to surgery, where I was thinking, why would I put myself at risk like this?
• I also had moments, especially when I got home from the hospital in the taxi that should win the highest award of New York City’s Worst Shocks, where the pain meds – which involved narcotics, mind you – were insufficient to my internal turmoil. That made me wonder what I’d got myself into.
• And there was one other moment, in the middle of that first night home, when I woke up extremely nauseous and the mere thought of throwing up threw me into a panic. At that moment I thought I might even die. But I didn’t. Instead I lay down on the bed and pointed my fan at my sweaty body and my adoring and wonderful husband called the doctor and by the time he called back I was actually fine.
• As I said, I’m off pain meds now. That’s because, since that horrible first night home, I’ve had four more nights home, and each of them has been tons better than the night before.
• Tons. Better.
• It’s amazing, actually, how quickly we can heal.

3. Advice

• I have advice for anyone considering this surgery:
  • Give yourself a full week post-surgery to get absolutely nothing done.
  • Make sure you have helpful people around you for that entire week.
  • Bonus if there are multiple helpful people around you so they can work in shifts.
  • Accept all help and gifts of food (thank you Elizabeth, Laura, and Mel!) so that your family is fed while you’re not up to cooking and so there are loving people around you who can remind you how quickly you’re healing.
  • Also, give yourself the two weeks beforehand to get nothing done while you’re on the pre-op starvation diet.
  • For that matter, give yourself a few more weeks afterwards to get pretty much nothing done.

4. Going Goth

• So, I’ve lost 20 pounds since I started the pre-op diet, and the dress I’m currently wearing is already too big for me.
• All of the clothes in my closet will soon be too big for me.
• I have no idea what my final weight will be.
• I don’t care. The point of this was to avoid diabetes and be able to stay healthy and exercise, even in the summer.
• But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to actually decide what my wardrobe should look like
• I’m going goth. Blue hair stays, clothes are entirely black.
• I already bought myself some amazing platform combat boots. Black, obviously.
• Exceptions to the “all black” will be made for hand-knitted or otherwise handmade garments, which I will allow or indeed insist that they be colorful.
• Comments about how awesome this goth thing will be are welcome. Also, links to stretchy black clothing between the sizes of 12 and 20. Bonus if they would look good baggy and/or with saggy skin.

Made it through surgery and I've already walked around.

I love the pain control button.

Home tomorrow!

I’ve been scheduled for surgery tomorrow. That means I’m super excited and somewhat nervous. We met with the surgeon last week, and he seemed very smart and good at his job by all accounts, which is to say online searches and word of mouth.

In order to prepare for surgery, I’ve been on a liquid diet except for some very low-carb raw veggies since the moment I heard I was cleared, July 13th. The drinks I’m allowed to have are all “meal replacement” high protein, low carb and low fat drinks. They’re very disgusting, being chalky and sickeningly sweet, but I’ve been extremely diligent, learning to drink them quickly and try not to gag.

Since my overall calorie intake has been less than 800 calories per day, I’ve been in ketosis since around the 15th, which means I have been burning body fat (it also means I’m not exactly starving – appetite is subdued in ketosis). This is exactly why I’m on the pre-op diet: to get rid of the extra fat hanging around on my liver and around my stomach. This will make it easier for the surgeon to get to my stomach laparoscopically tomorrow.

One thing that upset me a couple of days ago is that I was feeling very weak, confused and disoriented. I could barely walk around after waking up. I guessed that simply being on such a low calorie diet might explain such symptoms, but I also started desperately craving salt, to the point where I cheated: I ate two small pieces of grilled skinless boneless well-salted chicken. I simply couldn’t resist the saltiness. Then I looked into the salt content of the “meal replacement” drinks: they don’t have enough salt, even though they’re supposed to provide all the vitamins and minerals my body needs. What?!

When you add to that the fact that it’s extremely hot outside, so I sweat profusely every time I take a walk, I realized I was sodium deprived. This could actually be very unhealthy and possibly dangerous. It’s upsetting that I was making myself sick by following directions carefully. I modified my diet to include chicken broth and now I feel perfectly fine, but it made me wonder how the directions could be so badly off. Wouldn’t other people have noticed this defect?

Well, that brought me to a google search, with the result that I found an online bariatric pre-op diet forum which explained to me the following:

1. there are lots of different pre-op diets
2. some of them tell you to have chicken broth or even lean meats or even crackers
3. nobody, or at least very few people, seem to actually follow these diets
4. some people are hilariously bad at following their diet
5. or maybe it’s really sad, but I chose to find it hilarious
6. except for the crazy people who are eating sandwiches right before surgery and planning not to tell their surgeon
7. that could actually kill you
8. yes, I realize that the people on a forum like that are self-selected, but even so

Long story short, I think I’ve been more than sufficiently compliant on my diet, and I will tell the nutritionist at Columbia Presbyterian to add “broth” to the daily schedule.

Today it’s all liquid, I’m not even allowed to have raw veggies. Tomorrow I don’t get to eat or drink at all in preparation for the surgery.

Wish me luck, friends!

A piece I wrote for the Observer over in the UK just dropped, as part of my book’s softcover launch over there. Here it is:

How can we stop algorithms telling lies?

Happy birthday to me, folks! I’m 45 today and my present was that I got the call I’ve been working towards for 6 months, since January: my insurance company has cleared me for the bariatric gastric sleeve surgery I’ve been talking about.

In fact, I’m likely to get the surgery in about two weeks, before the end of the month, or soon after that. In preparation I need to start a strict “pre-op” diet consisting of protein shakes and nothing else except possibly celery. That means no coffee until a couple of weeks after surgery, and no carbonated beverages for pretty much the rest of time.

Wish me luck, friends! I’m super psyched.

I’ll be in London next week for my WMD softcover launch with Penguin UK. They’re having me do a bunch of stuff, and they even gave me this promotion card to show you:

Please come by if you’re in London next week!

I want to explain my reasoning, because it’s probably slightly deeper and more complex than most people imagine, unless they know me pretty well, in which case it might be simply baffling. A run-down:

1. I love my round body. I am dreading losing a lot of weight in terms of what it will do to my body, especially because I will not be left with a perfect skinny person body, but rather a bunch of skin. I have spent months trying to come to terms with that but I haven’t yet.
2. However, the dread I have about losing my round body is more than balanced by my long-term health considerations.
3. I’m pre-diabetic and at extremely high risk for diabetes. My dad is diabetic and I’ve seen what it does to people long-term. People know about problems with feet, which he has, but people sometimes lose sight of the long-term effects it has on the brain. And I like my brain even more than I like my round body.
4. Also, I like staying in shape. Biking is my favorite way to do that.
5. Last summer, I realized that I simply couldn’t go biking in the summer heat. I felt like a prisoner all summer, cooped up inside the house and getting less and less fit. Thank goodness for swimming, but I’d really prefer to bike.
6. Post-bariatric surgery patients complain about being cold, not hot. I’d rather be cold, because then I can wear one of my hand-knit sweaters outside while biking.
7. Even when bariatric surgery patients don’t end up losing very much weight, which is rare, they’re almost always cured of diabetes.
8. I also have arthritis and bad hips and bad knees in my family. Chances are that I’d need more surgeries, sooner, if I stay at my current weight than if I lose 100 pounds. Also, doctors don’t treat overweight people well.
9. Indeed, if I didn’t have bariatric surgery now, I might find myself doing it in 20 years when I’ve had two knee replacements. Why wait?
10. The surgery is laparoscopic, very safe, and I think the lifestyle changes are major but achievable.

Long story short, it’s a quality of life issue for me. I want to be one of those active grandmas that takes their grandchildren (or anyone’s grandchildren who will have me) to the zoo, and then bikes home. I don’t want to be defeated by global warming, nor do I want to be forced to move to Maine.

Now that I’ve explained myself, I’ll quickly mention what I find fascinating about the whole experience. Namely, all the reasons I’ve been given, and all the pushback in general, that this is a bad idea. They come down to three categories, which I plan to tackle in turn:

1. Shaming tactics
2. Financial incentives
3. Bad medical information

I’m back from Ireland. It was as magical as I’d hoped. We had such a blast and I’ll always remember the trip, and also how much more mature Wolfie is than me in the context of long lines at airports, even though he’s only 8 (his words: “Of course I do get impatient, mom, but I just hold it inside and I think about positive things like that we’ll eventually be home and that we’ll be able to see our family”).

Also, after coming home yesterday, I went to a nutrition seminar for bariatric surgery with my husband. I have officially completed all the paperwork (tons of it) so right now I’m in the waiting phase, hoping that my insurance clears the surgery soon so I can get on with it. As usual, I’m impatient. I should probably try to channel Wolfie here.

I’m guessing it will be another 6 weeks before I get the surgery, so around August 9th. That’s four weeks for the insurance to clear, and then once that happens, I need to be on a very strict diet for two weeks heading into the surgery. Theoretically I could get cleared in two weeks, and I could even just start the diet early, but since it’s so intense I’m probably not going to start until I have a date.

The strict diet is essentially a protein-drink only, starvation diet meant to reduce the size of my liver in order for it to be not in the way for the actual laparoscopic surgery. It turns out that many people of my weight have “non-alcoholic fatty liver,” which just means a liver that’s bigger and contains more fat than a normal liver. It can get in the way of the surgeon’s tool, which can be a problem. The good news is that livers respond quickly to dieting, so the two week extreme diet goes pretty far in decreasing the size of the liver to a manageable obstacle.

I’ve been practicing making protein shakes lately, mostly with fruit and milk, in order to get used to them, because generally speaking they’re horrible tasting and sickly artificially sweet. I have found a pretty good one though, by which I mean it’s not too sweet, and I just tried it alone with water, and it was actually fine. The trick is: lots of ice and a really good blender. I got a “Ninja Professional Blender with single serve” and it’s perfect.

Also in last night’s seminar we went over the diet for the various stages of recovery. Here’s a cheat sheet:

1. For the week after the surgery, you’re never hungry and you only drink, but the weird thing is you have to drink tiny 1 ounce cup of water or broth every 20 minutes while you’re awake.
2. For a few weeks after that you eat every three hours, even though you’re probably not hungry, but it has to be the pureed like baby food or applesauce. The reason is that your stomach is still healing and is swollen, and might not be larger than the size of a straw in places, so larger chunks of food could get stuck. You also drink tiny amounts very often but you can’t drink and eat at the same time.
3. After that you start introducing slightly less pureed food into your diet. You eventually eat pretty normal food but your stomach is much smaller than before, so way less of it. They suggest you eat mainly protein, and you eat that first, followed by vegetables and fruit.
4. They also give you the following long-term rules: never eat and drink at the same time. Never drink carbonated beverages. Try to eat on 25% of your diet in fat, and avoid refined carbohydrates forever. Also, take vitamins every day for the rest of your life.

If that all sounds like a major behavior change, you’re right. It’s intimidating. On the other hand, the people I’ve interviewed have all told me the one thing that I think makes it possible: namely, that you’re not hungry all the time, even though you’re eating way less. That small amounts of food fill you up for hours. This sounds like a miracle to me, as a person whose hunger rages at me like someone screaming in my ears on a daily basis. So I’m taking a leap of faith, knowing that I’m pretty good at following plans I’ve set for myself, and also knowing that once you’ve developed a habit, it’s not that hard to follow it.

First of all, forgive me if I’m blathering on, I’ve been hanging out with an 8-year-old for a week so I’m kind of starved for adult conversation. And even if you can’t actually answer me in real time, your comments are very welcome.

Second of all, I would like to comment on traveling in general.

1. What’s with all the mirrors in hotel rooms? They’re everywhere, and, may I say, completely unnecessary. Now, I get that they make the rooms look somewhat bigger, but what’s the deal with sitting down at the toilet and seeing yourself in a mirror, sitting down at the toilet? It’s not a good look for anyone, I’d wager, and I’m not being ultra self-conscious when I say that. For that matter, I’m pretty at ease with my body, but nobody looks good at the toilet. Or rather, people who do look good at the toilet would look good in any position whatsoever. So even for them, I’d suggest fewer mirrors near toilets, are you with me? [the way I deal with the mirror problem is I walk around the room without my glasses on so I can’t see anything. It solves the problem of the mirrors but also produces its own problems]
2. Also, coffee. I’m not complaining, since free coffee is always welcome (although in Las Vegas the coffee pods cost like $20 each, and I couldn’t even find them because I was on my hands and knees looking for free coffee pods without my glasses), but why oh why so little? I’m in a hotel now where they have one of those tiny pod machines, and they give me all of 2 tiny pods for an entire day’s worth of coffee. Is there any serious coffee drinker who could make do on such a small amount of caffeine? I mean, a small Starbucks black coffee would be equivalent to about 8 pods alone, and who buys small coffee anymore? I don’t get it. [the way I deal with the lack of coffee problem is I steal coffee pods off of the maid carts in the hallways whenever I get the chance. This solves the problem of too little coffee but leads to the problem of feeling somewhat guilty all the time]
3. Having made those whiny complaints, let me say how much I love hotel rooms, and especially how utterly anonymous they are. They’re so comfortingly bland! And everything is designed with disgusting behavior in mind, so you don’t have to worry too hard about messing something up. It’s much better than staying in someone’s house where you might break something. In a hotel room there’s basically nothing to break because it’s all bolted onto the wall and/or stain resistant. It’s heaven.

Also, before I leave, I should mention that I did get a wonderful fiddle lesson from Leisha. I don’t have pictures but here’s a recording of her doing a tune called Cooley’s Reel:

In my previous post, I explained how my trip to Dublin with my son Wolfie came to be. Now I want to tell you what we’ve done so far.

Day 1 – complaints

We started with the standard squished-in-the-airplane for 7 hours, then spend forever getting luggage, then find slow shuttle bus to car rental, then get charged an extra $600 for standard transmission (because you cannot imagine driving on the left side of the road in a city you don’t know AND driving manual with your left hand), then driving the wrong way away from the airport, then getting stuck in horrible Dublin morning commuting traffic, then finally making it to the hotel exhausted.

Having gotten that out of the way we proceeded to take a well-deserved nap, then we got up and found lunch and an extremely slow bus tour around the city, which gave us a broad idea of what we had available to us. Then we got back to the hotel, went swimming in the hotel pool, and crashed.

Here we are waiting for lunch. Can you guess who was more patient?

It took a while to get lunch.

Can you guess who was more patient?

Day 2 – laziness

Really no trip would be complete without a full day of doing nothing at all. So we did nothing on this day, stayed the entire day inside the hotel except for the time I went across the alleyway to pick up food that I ordered in advance. Wolfie could see me off the balcony:

By the way, when I say we did nothing, it goes without saying that we went swimming in the hotel pool, because we believe that is a solemn duty of vacationers.

Day 3 – horses and castles

After resting up, we were ready for a day of action! We woke up early, grabbed breakfast, and drove out west to the Clare Equestrian Centre, where a very nice young woman by the name of Shavonne Siobhan gave Wolfie his very first riding lesson:

Wolfie described this experience as “both awesome and mortifying.” In this picture he’s biting his cheek to prevent himself from throwing up.

After the lesson we went to our hotel for the night, which was absolutely the nicest place we ever have or ever will stay, the Dromoland Castle Hotel. One direct consequence of the horseback riding lesson (a steal at 40 Euros) was that, every time from then on when we talk about “how Irish” something we’re doing is, say drinking Guinness and eating beef stew at a pub, we always mention that it could be just a bit more Irish if we were doing it on horseback.

We were too awed by how nice it was at the castle to take many pictures, but here we are at a fancy tea:

Yes, we got steak with our tea. Yum.

And here’s Wolfie doing a victory dance as he beats me at outside chess:

He’s singing too.

We also went swimming in the hotel pool for a record 90 minutes before falling asleep.

Day 4 – the coast and gay pride

We woke up at the castle, had a fancy breakfast, went swimming, and then drove to the Cliffs of Moher:

We loved it.

Can you see Wolfie in the tower?

I am going for messy hair here.

Can’t decide which shot has messier hair.

Lots of movies have used this cave.

We eventually found ourselves in Doolin, where we bought a few things at the shops:

This lad couldn’t be more Irish unless he was on a horse.

After eating beef stew and Guinness at a pub, and wishing there were live music (we’d missed the Doolin Folk Festival by one week!), we went for a walk to make sure I was fit for driving, and we took some pictures:

Looking like an Irish hero

Sentimentality reigns in Ireland

Action shot

Cows with a view

After that we drove back to Dublin, and when we got there, everyone was walking around in Rainbow flags. It was outstanding, and we soon realized we’d missed the Pride Parade in Dublin, which was a huge deal. That made me think maybe we’d be able to find some live music if we just went to the right place. So after parking, we went on a walk to the Temple Bar. Wolfie found himself some flags:

He named pretty much all of them.

Well we did find live music, but the bars were so loud and crowded we didn’t stay long.

And did I mention that there were quite a few drunken horsemen rushing their horses through the streets this way and that and generally causing confusion and mayhem? It made everything extremely Irish. We were mesmerized, especially as the drunk college students kept trying to heave themselves onto the carriages at the slightest provocation.

We ended up sitting outside at an Indian restaurant, when all of a sudden these three musicians popped up right next to us:

And they were fantastic!

Long story short, I’ve asked the fiddler to give me a lesson today, which is Day 5 – did I mention I brought my fiddle? – and she said yes. More soon.

I’m here in Dublin with my son Wolfie for a week. It’s absolutely amazing. To understand why you’ll need to know how we decided to come here in the first place.

It all started on St. Patrick’s Day, which my son happened to have off, and on which I happened to be procrastinating, so we got all dressed up:

We really enjoyed the parade:

And so we talked about how, even though we’re only technically 25% and an eighth Irish, we’re actually, down deep, 100% Irish. We discussed blarney, the need for embellishment for a really good story, and he agreed that drunk people are funny and the musical tradition is friendly and fun. To celebrate we bought a flag:

And then we cemented the deal with a meal at the Brooklyn Diner:

Weeks went by. Wolfie mentioned Irish castles he’d seen on YouTube. Then he started getting really into flags, first getting the U.S., Irish, and Dutch flags on his door:

And then with his amazing “draw a country, color it in with that country’s flag” project:

You might notice he forgot Northern Ireland here. Oh well.

Long story short, Ireland became a small obsession for me and Wolfie. And, soon enough, when I walked him to school in the morning, at some point he’d ask me, ‘Mom, when can we go to Ireland and see the castles?’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah we should do that.’ Until one day, he asked me for maybe the fourth time that week and I said, ‘OK shit, I’ll go home and buy tickets.’ And I did.

So that’s the story of how we got here. Tomorrow I’ll tell you what we’ve done here so far. Spoiler: it’s been amazing.

This is a guest post, converted from a letter to me, by Derek Osborne, a father of four and active participant in his community with a strong belief that real change happens at the local level. Derek is a data scientist at Intel where he works on a team that utilizes machine learning techniques to optimize the workforce at Intel. Prior to working at Intel, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Biophysics.

I moved to Hillsboro, Oregon four years ago with my wife and three kids after finishing my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. Like many parents when choosing a home, I checked on the school scores of the nearby elementary schools and there was a large variance in the Zillow school scores that are taken from greatschools.org. After house hunting for a long time, we finally found a home that was perfect for our family but it was in the school boundaries of Quatama Elementary that was ranked a 5 out of 10 and red. Asking around, other parents told us the reason was because there was low income housing in the area which was driving down the score. We felt that if the only issue with the school was that the school boundaries included low income housing, it shouldn’t stop us from buying the home. We could always transfer to a better school if we didn’t like the experience.

Over the following years we have loved all of our teachers, the principal, and our kid’s classmates and were baffled that it was scoring so low. During this time, we’ve met people that avoided the school when they moved in because of the score they saw on Zillow when they moved to the area. We also have had multiple friends move away because of the school’s ranking. When they would move, we’d ask what in the school do you dislike and they would acknowledge their personal experience was positive but they wanted to move to a “better” school. It was sad to see people trust a single digit score more than a personal experience.

Over this time, I’d check the same single digit ranking every year or so to see if it has gone up but it would remain the same. I felt that our school was a quality school and I was confused why the score never changed. What was even more baffling is that I started to dig into the scores published by the state that go into more detail and Quatama scored nearly the same or higher as its nearby high performing schools. After hearing some other parents say they wouldn’t let their kids go to Quatama, I felt that I needed to figure out why it was “rated low”.

I emailed greatschools.org and explained the situation and I got back a standard cut and paste answer but after a few emails insisting something was wrong they realized there was an error in their publishing system for Quatama. They have now updated the rankings and Quatama is now an 8 out of 10 and “green” which is comparable to its high performing peers. The perception that Quatama is a low performing school was completely erroneous and based off a math system gone wrong.

I’m now working with the principal to see if there is a way for us to measure how this rating has impacted the school. My thought that the same way there are bandwagon fans, there are bandwagon parents. Now that the school is rated higher, will the parents view of the school change? Will the parental support change over the next few years? If it does change, this will open up a large question about the morality of publishing overly simplified data.

My newest Bloomberg View column is out!

What’s Wrong With Letting Tech Run Our Schools

You can see all my Bloomberg columns here.

I’ve got a new Bloomberg View column out:

A Mathematician’s Secret: We’re Not All Geniuses

See all my Bloomberg View columns here.