There remains a lot to be learned… 😉
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This Is What Climbing With A Disability Looks Like
There remains a lot to be learned… 😉
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Olympic paraclimbing
Besides physics and philosophy I invest quite a lot of time and energy in sports. Several years ago a friend of mine asked me to join him to go climbing in a gym. When he saw me wavering he spoke the magic words “perhaps it’s not such a good idea. Your disability will make it very difficult for you to get up there”. That’s when I was sure that I was going to go climbing. And so it started. Now, almost four and a half years later, I go climbing every week and I have made some nice rock climbing trips abroad.
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What Is A Dimension?
In sci-fi movies there is often talk of “going to another dimension” as if there is some kind of barrier in between dimensions that can be crossed only if the circumstances are very special – usually the filmmakers are wise enough not to specify what these very special circumstances are. I will show in this blogpost that “Travelling to another dimension” is not only physically impossible; the phrase makes no sense from a logical point of view either. (more…)
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Disability As A Networking Skill
When abroad I use a wheelchair because it’s quite a hassle to take a tricycle with you on an airplane. When I visit conferences on my own I cannot use a wheelchair because my left hand doesn’t work (and I don’t want to go in circles all the time). Being on foot at a conference can be a challenge for me because often you have to cover distances of over 100 or 200 meters in between speaker sessions for which you only have five minutes. It is also challenging when the conference-organised lunch consists in a DIY buffet, because I can’t even walk with a cup of coffee in my hands; let alone with a tray filled with food! I often have to ask total strangers for help. This can be a bit of a nuisance because I like being independent. But on the other hand it is also a great advantage because it allows me to come into contact with other conference-goers (without being annoying) whom I wouldn’t have met otherwise. In short: it allows me to extend my academic network.
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Conference Vienna, part II – customs, Kant and quantum mechanics
When I had exchanged email addresses with the Japanese girl and we had said goodbye to each other, our wheelchairs were pushed off by one of the airport’s employees. With great dexterity he steered both wheelchairs at the same time to our next stop: customs. The customs check is one of the most unpredictable parts of a journey in a wheelchair. Sometimes the check is very thorough: the douaniers check every inch of the wheelchair; frisk me while I remain seated and even swab the wheelchair’s tires for explosive residue. At other times merely seeing the wheelchair is enough to just let me pass and wishing me a pleasant journey. The only constancy that I can detect is that never once have they checked the tubes in the frame of my wheelchair – I wonder what could fit in there.
When we had passed customs the wheelchair pusher dropped me off before the gate from which my plane was to leave. I was lucky, I thought, because the gate was straightly opposite from a coffee bar, so I wouldn’t have to walk very far for my ‘daily worship of the black gold’. Neither were the toilets very far from my gate. I sat down and made myself comfortable. Out of my bag I took a sandwich and the book I wanted to read. To get into the spirit of the conference I had chosen a German book on Kantianism. At the conference I was going to give a talk on something I’ve been working on the past few years. I’ve been working on the role of Kant’s philosophy in modern philosophy of physics. Many physicists see little value in philosophical systems, no matter how well thought-out, of over two centuries old. At the other extreme there are those who believe that modern physics, and particularly quantum mechanics, present philosophers and physicists alike with problems that can only be resolved within a Kantian approach.
Looking up from my book, rather sleepily, I noticed on the view screen that the regular boarding was to be preceded by what they call ‘priority boarding’. People with babies or other disabilities or people who are willing to pay for priority boarding are allowed to board the airplane before the horde of regular passengers. Since I fall in the category of people with disabilities I’m allowed to make use of priority boarding.
By the time the actual boarding of the airplane begins I’m not in a wheelchair anymore, and as long as I’m not walking I don’t really look disabled so I always try to make sure that the people behind the boarding-counter see me walk up to them so that they’ll allow me to ‘board with priority’.
When I walked up to the counter to tell the lady behind it that I wanted to make use of priority boarding she had been very busy with a conversation up until that moment and hence had not seen me walking up to her desk. So when I asked her whether it be possible to make use of priority boarding I could hear her starting a sentence “but why do you need…” As I was quickly trying to think of a way to convince her of my disability (should I show her the scar on the back of my head, which was due to the latest brain surgery I’d had?) I almost fell over backwards. When I had regained my balance the lady behind the counter was a lot more willing to accept that I belong in the disability priority class.
The stewardess behind the counter, made anxious by her experience, now wanted me to board the plane with extra priority – even over the other priority passengers (she was probably afraid that I would fall). Once in the plane I could relax: “if anything goes wrong now it’s not my fault” I thought. I always like flying because on a flight you can read or work without being disturbed. But not only that. Not only without being disturbed but also without the possibility of distracting yourself with Google or Facebook or what-have-you: you can sort of force yourself to do the work that you have taken with you. For most people this strategy will not work because it will only make them stare out of the window of the airplane. For me the situation is somewhat different because I have so much double vision (because of the spasticity of the muscles moving my left eye) that staring out the window while actually seeing things requires a lot more effort than reading. For me the strategy works perfectly: often I look forward to a flight for weeks because I have already decided upon what to read.
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Probability “1” Is Not Certainty
They sometimes say that if you try something very often then you will succeed. Say you play a game of dice and in every round there is a non-zero probability that you’ll win. As the number of rounds you play becomes larger and larger then you must, eventually, win – right?
Wrong. What you can say with certainty is that the probability that you will keep losing as you play many rounds becomes very small. That means that the probability that you will win at least once becomes very large. In the limit of the number of rounds going to infinity the probability of winning actually equals one. But that does not mean that winning is a certainty. It is possible, even after many rounds, that you’ll never win. It may be infinitely improbable, but it is not impossible.
Saying that something has a zero-probability of occurring is not the same as saying that it is impossible. Just think of throwing a dart at a dartboard. The probability of the dart hitting any specific point is zero (as there are infinitely many points on the board), and yet if you throw a dart at the dartboard you’ll always hit some point. Hitting a specific point at a dartboard is highly improbable, but not impossible.
What happens if you repeat a process that can have different outcomes (such as throwing a die) very often is described by Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers (LLN). There are actually two different laws that bear the name LNN: the strong and the weak LLN. In a future post I will explain the difference between the strong and weak versions of the LLN and also show how these laws are often misinterpreted in modern physics.
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Conference Vienna, part I – ethical asymmetry at the airport
At international conferences the university or institute hosting the conference often provides a list of hotels which are a relatively small distance from the conference site. The hotels on this list are usually neither the cheapest nor the cosiest, but rather well-suited for grave and grey professors. Since I am neither grave nor grey I often search for a (youth-)hostel myself. I can’t always find hostels that are close to the conference, but the nice thing about hostels is that they force you to have some social interaction. When I had found a suitable hostel near to the University of Vienna (which was the place the conference was held) it was time to book a flight.
In daily life, as I told you earlier, I make use of a tricycle. I even enter supermarkets riding on it. The obvious alternative, a wheelchair, is impractical for me because due to my spasticity I can’t use my left arm to spin the wheels of a wheelchair. Travelling by plane pretty much rules out the tricycle as possible mode of transport when I’m abroad, because it costs a small fortune to take the trike with me. A wheelchair it is then. Because I have ‘special needs’ – such as the wheelchair – I often opt for one of the larger airlines to fly with, because their service towards disabled travellers is better than the service provided by smaller airlines (matters are even worse with the so-called low-cost airlines). For my trip to Vienna I chose to fly with KLM, the Royal Dutch Airline. To travellers in a wheelchair KLM provides ‘wheelchair assistance’, which you can simply ask for during the check-in at the counter (officially you need to book this in advance, but I never do that).
The lady who checked my passport and printed my boarding pass told me to report to the special ‘disability counter’ and there await being picked up for a wheelchair-push to the gate from which my flight was to depart. At the disability counter they told me to take a seat in their waiting room and wait for one of their colleagues. I looked around and I saw four rows of chairs most of which were empty, save for a somberly gazing elder couple and a Japanese girl with a rather blank stare. I sat down in, or rather stumbled into, one of the chairs in the row closest to me. The Japanese girl sat in the same row, with several empty chairs in between. I was about to start reading the book I had brought with me, when I noticed that the girl’s blank stare hadn’t changed direction since I first saw her. She was blind. While I was busy trying to imagine what it must be like to be blind I suddenly realized that I was staring at her. People often stare at me too. Especially when I ride my tricycle. I can understand why people stare. At my tricycle in the supermarket, naturally, but also at my tricycle in general, out on the street. I think people stare for the simple reason that they do not often see tricycles – let alone tricycles with adults on it. This curiosity for the outlandish, as I see it, has a significant advantage. When I meet people I don’t know they are often favourably inclined to having a conversation; they want to find out why I’m on a tricycle.
Blindness probably also induces the curiosity of strangers, but for blind people it is more difficult than for me to exploit this curiosity (if they even want to) because they can’t see the people with whom they could potentially have a nice conversation – life is not fair. I decided then and there that I would not let this particular girl be the victim of such ethical asymmetry. I decided to start a conversation with her. It turned out that she wasn’t as helpless as she seemed: she had been in the Netherlands to represent the Japanese Society for Blind Athletes. After learning about each other’s jobs and impairments and exchanging other pleasantries we decided to go for a coffee, as we had to wait another 30 minutes before one of the airport’s crewmembers would come to pick us up. I was a bit alarmed because I didn’t know how far we needed to walk to the nearest coffee bar. I had told Tomoe (I don’t know whether that was her first or last name; the other name was Takada) I could only walk very short distances, but perhaps she had misunderstood? Her English was not perfect, to put it mildly, so perhaps she didn’t even know I was disabled? I became even more alarmed when she asked me whether it was ok to hold my arm because she didn’t know the route to the bar. I told her that I would do my best and started lumbering out of the waiting room with the Japanese girl clasping my arm. I must admit that I felt a little proud at the situation; I didn’t feel like the handicapped one for a change. So we had coffee and our ways parted; hers back to Tokyo, and mine to Vienna. For a very brief period of time the half-spastic man was king in the land of the blind.
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