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conulyMany Hands Make Fractals Tactile
http://nyti.ms/XWkCac
LOS ANGELES — Human beings are born with an innate capacity to learn languages. Yet while mathematics is the language of pattern and form, many people struggle to acquire even its basic grammar.
But what if we could experience math directly — just as we experience language by speaking it? Some years ago I founded an organization, the Institute for Figuring, dedicated to the proposition that many ideas in math and science could be approached not just through equations and formulas but through concrete, physical activities.
Take fractals, mathematical structures or sets with intermediate dimensionality. Coined by the mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, the term comes from the Latin “fractus,” meaning broken. Instead of having one, two or three dimensions, a fractal will have, say, 1.89 or 2.73 dimensions.
This sounds absurd; indeed, in the late 19th century, when mathematicians began to explore such forms, they were flabbergasted, using terms like pathological to describe them.
Fractals possess the strange property of “self-similarity.” Zoom in on any part of a fractal, and each small section will have the same richly complicated structure as the whole.
Clouds and coastlines, with what Dr. Mandelbrot called their highly “wiggled” geometries, exhibit this self-similar scaling (at least to the degree possible in nature, for true fractals with infinite levels of patterning are mathematical ideals).
Together we folded business cards into cubes and linked thousands of cubes in intricate configurations that reveal the fractal’s self-similar anatomy. Visual symphonies of rings and crosses — then rings of rings, rings of crosses, and crosses of crosses — became apparent to the eye, a physical manifestation of the concept of recursion.
Construction took more than 3,000 hours, and the form we made, held together by nothing more than the folded cards — no glue or Scotch tape — stands as a sculptural monument to a once heretical abstraction.
The idea of making models of fractals out of business cards was dreamed up by Dr. Mosely, a leading practitioner of mathematical origami and a specialist in curved origami, which requires a serious knowledge of differential geometry.
From 1996 to 2005, Dr. Mosely spent her leisure time supervising the building of a 66,048-card model of a fractal known as the Menger Sponge, named for its discoverer, Karl Menger, the Austrian mathematician, and for its resemblance to a sea sponge. Imagine a cube riddled with hundreds of square-shaped holes — it is the three-dimensional analog of an important mathematical object known as the Cantor Set.
After she had made the Menger Sponge, Dr. Mosely realized that it was one of a whole family of fractals. Some are trivial, others cannot be made, but one was especially interesting. She named it the Snowflake Sponge for its enigmatic sixfold symmetry.
Although it involved fewer cards — roughly 49,000 — it would be a greater problem to assemble. A suite of carefully designed submodules would have to be pieced together in a precise sequence so that the project would play out algorithmically in both space and time. In 2011, when the U.S.C. Libraries asked me to curate a project to engage students creatively with math and engineering, we decided to take on the challenge.
Most images of fractals are generated by computers, whose lightning-fast processing chips never tire of repeating simple routines thousands upon thousands of times. Making fractals materially is a lot harder because, as Dr. Mosely notes, “you have to think about such things as the size of a human hand in relation to three-dimensional holes.”
Building this fractal — and seeing participants who never thought of themselves as mathematically inclined become adept at understanding the complex spatial relationships — got me thinking about the experimental side of mathematics. What else might be possible?
At the Institute for Figuring project space in Los Angeles, we are now using Dr. Mosely’s techniques in a free-form exercise. This time, with 60,000 electrically colored business cards, our goal is open-ended.
Visitors are encouraged to explore and play. Already,Tracy Tynan, a former Hollywood costume designer, has made a model of a Peano “space-filling” curve, a line that wiggles around in a way that can fill a plane completely.
David Orozco, an artist and stay-at-home father of six, has developed a new construction method that creates an elegant, boxy three-dimensional lattice. An artist, Jacob Dotson, has created a new way of linking cubes into crystalline networks of octahedrons, regular eight-sided figures. Despite these explorations, none of these people will be able to pass a university geometry exam, and there will always be vast areas of math inaccessible to nonprofessionals. Nonetheless, many important mathematical concepts can be expressed without formal symbols. After all, nature does it without an alphabet.
Everyone knows about think tanks; at the Institute for Figuring, we have set ourselves up as a “play tank.” By inviting people to play with ideas, we encourage them to experience not just the beauty inherent in mathematics, but its awesome structural power.
How High Could the Tide Go?
http://nyti.ms/10zYreh
January 21, 2013
How High Could the Tide Go?
By JUSTIN GILLIS
BREDASDORP, South Africa — A scruffy crew of scientists barreled down a dirt road, their two-car caravan kicking up dust. After searching all day for ancient beaches miles inland from the modern shoreline, they were about to give up.
Suddenly, the lead car screeched to a halt. Paul J. Hearty, a geologist from North Carolina, leapt out and seized a white object on the side of the road: a fossilized seashell. He beamed. In minutes, the team had collected dozens more.
Using satellite gear, they determined they were seven miles inland and 64 feet above South Africa’s modern coastline.
For the leader of the team, Maureen E. Raymo of Columbia University, the find was an important clue as she tries to determine just how high the oceans might rise in a warmer world.
The question has taken on new urgency in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which caused coastal flooding that scientists say was almost certainly worsened by the modest rise of sea level over the past century. That kind of storm tide, the experts say, could become routine along American coastlines by late in this century if the ocean rises as fast as they expect.
In previous research, scientists have determined that when the earth warms by only a couple of degrees Fahrenheit, enough polar ice melts, over time, to raise the global sea level by about 25 to 30 feet. But in the coming century, the earth is expected to warm more than that, perhaps four or five degrees, because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.
Experts say the emissions that may make a huge increase of sea level inevitable are expected to occur in just the next few decades. They fear that because the world’s coasts are so densely settled, the rising oceans will lead to a humanitarian crisis lasting many hundreds of years.
Scientists say it has been difficult to get people to understand or focus on the importance, for future generations, of today’s decisions about greenhouse gases. Their evidence that the gases represent a problem is based not just on computerized forecasts of the future, as is commonly believed, but on what they describe as a growing body of evidence about what occurred in the past.
To add to that body of knowledge, Dr. Raymo is studying geologic history going back several million years. The earth has warmed up many times, for purely natural reasons, and those episodes often featured huge shifts of climate, partial collapse of the polar ice sheets and substantial increases in sea level.
“I wish I could take people that question the significance of sea level rise out in the field with me,” Dr. Raymo said. “Because you just walk them up 30 or 40 feet in elevation above today’s sea level and show them a fossil beach, with shells the size of a fist eroding out, and they can look at it with their own eyes and say, ‘Wow, you didn’t just make that up.’ ”
Skeptics who play down the importance of global warming like to note that these past changes occurred with no human intervention. They argue that the climate is ever-changing, yet humans or their predecessors managed to prosper.
The geologic record does offer startling examples of the instability of the planet. Whale bones can be dug up in the Sahara. The summit of Mount Everest is a chunk of ancient seafloor.
But most climate scientists reject the idea that this history means human-induced climate change will be benign. They add that the fossil record indicates nothing quite like today’s rapid release of greenhouse gases and its parallel effect of raising the planet’s temperature, changes that are occurring in a geologic instant.
“Absolutely, unequivocally, nature has changed before,” said Richard B. Alley, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “But it looks like we’re going to do something bigger and faster than nature ever has.”
Clues From Fossils
In any given era, the earth’s climate responds to whatever factors are pushing it to change.
Scientists who study climate history, known as paleoclimatologists, focus much of their research on episodes when wobbles in the earth’s orbit caused it to cool down or warm up, causing sea level to rise or fall by hundreds of feet.
Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, appears to have played a crucial role. When changes in the orbit caused the earth to cool, scientists say, a large amount of carbon dioxide entered the ocean, reducing the heat-trapping properties of the atmosphere and thus amplifying the cooling. Conversely, when the shifts in sunlight led to initial warming, carbon dioxide emerged from the ocean and helped speed the end of the previous ice age.
Based on this record, scientists like Dr. Alley describe carbon dioxide as the master control knob of the earth’s climate. A large body of scientific evidence shows that the current increase in the gas is being caused by human activity, meaning that people are essentially twisting the earth’s thermostat hard to the right.
In most of the previous warm periods, some ice remained near the poles, in Greenland and Antarctica. Today, enough water is stored as ice in those regions to raise the level of the ocean roughly 220 feet, should all of it melt.
The fossil record suggests that temperatures slightly warmer than today would not be enough to melt the ice caps entirely. But an increase of even a few degrees Fahrenheit in the average global temperature does appear to cause severe damage. From the last time that happened, about 120,000 years ago, scientists have found more than a thousand elevated fossil beaches around the world.
Many scientists believe that, as a result of human-induced warming, temperatures are already entering the danger zone. They are seeing rapid changes in Greenland and western Antarctica.
“I can merely tell you that every time in recent earth history where we’ve had these kinds of temperatures for any protracted period of time, two polar ice sheets have catastrophically collapsed,” said Jerry X. Mitrovica, an earth physicist at Harvard who collaborates with Dr. Raymo.
Dr. Raymo works at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University just outside New York City. Like many of her colleagues, she is trying to run the movie of the earth’s history in reverse, finding an era with temperatures that mirror those expected before 2100.
She has zeroed in on the Pliocene epoch, roughly three million years ago. The level of carbon dioxide in the air then appears to have been about 400 parts per million — a level that will be reached again within the next few years, after two centuries of fossil fuel burning.
Previous efforts to estimate the maximum rise of the sea in the Pliocene did not take full account of some factors now known to be important.
In Search of Prehistoric Beaches
Two years ago, in hopes of pinning down a better answer, Dr. Raymo pitched an ambitious plan to the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that pays for much of the country’s scientific research. She proposed to pull together a worldwide network of expert collaborators: to find, date and measure Pliocene beaches on nearly every continent and then to work with experts in computer modeling to take careful account of all the factors known to alter sea level.
The N.S.F. awarded the group $4.2 million, with one anonymous scientific reviewer declaring that the plan would permit a “far more precise and quantitative prediction of future climate change.”
This summer, Dr. Raymo and her team drove hundreds of miles along South Africa’s southern and western coasts, scouting for prehistoric beaches.
To collect ancient seashells for laboratory testing, they hiked treacherous paths and descended into old quarries and diamond mines. At one point an Australian researcher, Michael J. O’Leary, and an Italian colleague, Alessio Rovere, climbed a steep cliff face to take measurements, clinging to shrubs as their feet kept slipping.
The team located suspected Pliocene beaches as low as 38 feet and as high as 111 feet above modern sea level. In similar work in Australia and on the East Coast of the United States, the researchers have found Pliocene beaches as low as 33 feet and as high as 295 feet above sea level.
Part of the explanation for such varying elevations, Dr. Raymo said, is that the land itself has almost certainly moved over the last three million years, unevenly — thus raising or lowering beach deposits after they had been laid down.
Scientists have come to realize this can happen anywhere in the world, even far from geological hot spots, a major factor complicating their interpretation of past sea level. “A lot of the big task we have is teasing apart this dance that the crust of the earth is doing with the level of the sea,” Dr. Raymo said.
Over the next few years, her team plans to gather new measurements from most continents, including North America, where the Pliocene ocean encroached as far as 90 miles inland. After several years of work, they hope to arrive at the magic number Dr. Raymo calls Pliomax, or the maximum global sea level rise during the Pliocene.
That figure may help to solve a vexing scientific problem.
A large body of evidence suggests that the ice sheets atop Greenland and the low-lying, western part of Antarctica are vulnerable to global warming. But together, they can supply no more than about 40 feet of sea level rise.
The previous estimates of Pliocene sea level, based on spotty evidence, range from 15 feet to 130 feet above today’s ocean, with 80 feet being a commonly cited figure. If Dr. Raymo’s work were to confirm such a high estimate, it would suggest that the ice sheet in eastern Antarctica — by far the biggest chunk of ice in the world, containing enough water to raise sea level by 180 feet — is also vulnerable to melting. And if it is, scientists do not fully understand why, because their computer forecasts — acknowledged to be imperfect — suggest most of it should remain stable even in a warmer world.
“Just the mere fact that we know the number will tell us right off the bat, is East Antarctica stable?” Dr. Raymo said. “Or is it a huge risk?”
Thus, if the project is successful, it may put an upper limit on how much the ocean is ultimately capable of rising if temperatures go up as much as expected this century.
But the Pliomax project will not be able to answer what might be an even bigger question: In a worst-case scenario, how fast could the rise happen?
Dr. Raymo and her team share an emerging scientific consensus that the increase in this century will probably be on the order of three feet, perhaps as much as six feet. That would almost certainly require millions of people to evacuate coastal regions.
Calculations by Climate Central, a research group, suggest that once the ocean has risen five feet, storm tides comparable to those of Hurricane Sandy could occur about every 15 years in New York City.
Scientists say that in the 22nd century, the problem would probably become far worse, and the rise would then continue for many centuries, perhaps thousands of years. Recent research suggests the likely rise could be 12 feet by the year 2300, inundating coastal regions around the world.
If the rise is slower than expected, society may have time to adjust, or to develop new technology to solve the problem of greenhouse emissions. But many scientists are plagued by a nagging fear that the opposite will occur — that their calculations will turn out to have been too conservative, and social stability will eventually be threatened by a rapid rise of the sea.
“At every point, as our knowledge increases,” Dr. Raymo said, “we’ve always discovered that the climate system is more sensitive than we thought it could be, not less.”
Generation LGBTQIA
http://nyti.ms/RGv4TA
STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares “positive perspectives” on being transgender.
In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue — hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room — Stephen exuberantly declared himself “a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut,” and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and “any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters”) to his toy zebra.
Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.
Armed with the millennial generation’s defining traits — Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off — Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.
If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn’t whom they love, but who they are — that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.
But what to call this movement? Whereas “gay and lesbian” was once used to lump together various sexual minorities — and more recently “L.G.B.T.” to include bisexual and transgender — the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. “Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.,” said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.
Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is “L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.,” which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.
“Q” can mean “questioning” or “queer,” an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. “I” is for “intersex,” someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And “A” stands for “ally” (a friend of the cause) or “asexual,” characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.
It may be a mouthful, but it’s catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.
The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate “gender-neutral” restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.
The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with “lgbtqia” suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled “lgbt.”
“There’s a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality,” said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of “Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal.”
“When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.,” Professor Halberstam added, “it’s because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being.”
And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like “genderqueer” and “androgyne” to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.
BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.
Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university’s “Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community.” But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).
Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn’s L.G.B.T. Center. “I left thoroughly disappointed,” said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, “This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it’s all gay guys.”
Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for “non-cisgender.” For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, “cis” means “on the same side as” and “cisgender” denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. “This is a freshman uprising,” Richard said.
On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group’s inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: “Free condoms! Free ChapStick!”
“There’s a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene,” Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.’s, began. “However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we’re aiming to change that.”
Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert — a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt — took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of “bi-gender.”
“Does anyone want to share what they think it is?”
Silence.
She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a “detachable penis.” “Some days I wake up and think, ‘Why am I in this body?’ ” she said. “Most days I wake up and think, ‘What was I thinking yesterday?’ ”
Britt’s grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term “bi-gender” from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as “agender” and used the singular pronoun “they”; she now sees her gender as an “amorphous blob.”
By contrast, Britt’s evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.
In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase — until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn’t settled.
“While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn’t know that I was one,” Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn’t “trapped in the wrong body,” as the cliché has it — she just didn’t know which body she wanted.
When Kate told her about the term “bi-gender,” it clicked instantly. “I knew what it was, before I knew what it was,” Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than “transgender” but less vague than “genderqueer” — a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.
At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, “It took you this long to figure it out?” For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, “since people know what that is.” But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.
Among them was Richard Parsons, the group’s most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. “She’s like, ‘Well, if you say that he’s a guy, then I don’t want you rooming with a guy,’ ” he recalled. “We were in a car and I basically blurted out, ‘I think I might be a guy, too!’ ”
After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose “Richard” on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means “gift of God.”
By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women’s changing room.
Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college’s medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, “has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year.”
PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.
More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one’s name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a “transgender” checkbox to its college application.
“I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to,” said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. “And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues — Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.”
But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the ’80s and ’90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.
Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called “Beyond ‘Will & Grace,’ ” which examined gay characters on shows like “Ellen,” “Glee” and “Modern Family.” The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using “L.G.B.T.Q.” in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using “queer” instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as “unaccepting of things that she doesn’t understand.”
Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. “I am all about economy of expression,” she said. “L.G.B.T.Q. doesn’t exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, ‘Don’t put in an acronym with five or six letters.’ ”
One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer’s first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. “Frankly, I’m both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they’re free to love who they want,” she said.
If history is any guide, the age gap won’t be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.
Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. “In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian,” Professor Halberstam said.
Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.
At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls “L.G.B.T.Q. plus.”
“Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?” he asked.
Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. “We have our lesbians, our gays,” he said, before adding, “bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual.” He took a breath and continued. “Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous.”
By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: “Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human.”
The room burst into applause.
For Space Station, a Pod That Folds Like a Shirt and Inflates Like a Balloon
http://nyti.ms/UusiiZ
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — An inflatable space pod to be attached to the International Space Station in a couple of years will be like no other piece of the station.
Instead of metal, its walls will be made of floppy cloth, making it easier to launch (and then inflate).
NASA said Wednesday that it had signed a $17.8 million contract with Bigelow Aerospace to build the module, which could reach the space station as soon as 2015. That is a bargain-basement price compared with most equipment the United States and other countries send into space, and the Bigelow agreement could serve as a model for how NASA puts together missions at lower costs by using a Kmart strategy: buying off-the-shelf pieces instead of developing its own designs.
“This program starts a relationship that we think, and we hope, is going to be meaningful between NASA and ourselves,” Robert T. Bigelow, the chief executive of Bigelow Aerospace, said at a news conference here at the company’s headquarters.
Low-Earth orbit, he said, is the “first target,” but larger modules could be used for stations in deep space or for habitats on the Moon. “We have ambitions to get to the Moon someday, to have a base there,” Mr. Bigelow said.
The fold-up, blow-up approach solves the conundrum of how to build something voluminous that can be packed into the narrow payload confines of a rocket. The soft sides of the module, called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or Beam, will allow it to be scrunched like a T-shirt in a suitcase.
At the space station, it will be attached to an air lock and then inflated like a balloon and expanded by a factor of 10 to its full size — about 13 feet long and 10 feet in diameter, with about 560 cubic feet of space inside. At least initially, it will remain empty as NASA gathers data about its characteristics, including temperature and protection against micrometeorites.
The balloonlike structure is carefully designed not to pop. The fabric walls will consist of several layers including Vectran, a bullet-resistant material. Even if punctured by a high-speed meteorite, the fabric does not tear. A hole in a metal structure in space, by comparison, can cause explosive decompression as air rushes out.
When the Beam module reaches the space station, astronauts might go to it to seek solitude: engineers expect it will be the quietest spot there. The fabric walls absorb sound vibrations instead of transmitting them.
Beam revives a concept that NASA developed more than a decade ago for an inflatable four-story crew quarters on the space station. Congress halted the work as the station’s construction costs grew sharply.
Mr. Bigelow, who made a fortune in construction and hotels, licensed the technology from NASA and set up his factory here in North Las Vegas, investing more than $250 million of his own money. The company has already launched two unmanned prototypes into orbit, showing that they can remain inflated for years.
If Beam is successful, NASA will probably incorporate the technology into any manned mission to an asteroid or elsewhere in the solar system, or to build a base on the Moon or Mars. Inflatables could also overturn notions of what a spacecraft ought to look like: Instead of the sleek, shiny machines imagined in science fiction, the practical ones of the future may be blobby, soft-sided contraptions.
Mr. Bigelow holds space ambitions of his own. His company is building two much larger inflatable modules, each with 11,600 cubic feet of space, to launch as the world’s first private space station, docked together as station Alpha. The plan is to lease space on Alpha to countries that want to set up low-cost space programs and companies that want to conduct zero-gravity research. Tourists might be invited, too.
At the news conference, Mr. Bigelow announced prices for travelers to his space station: $26.25 million for a 60-day stay, including the ride to orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket built by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. If the traveler wished to book the rocket ride in a more expensive capsule under development by Boeing, the cost would be about $10 million more.
Mr. Bigelow said the pieces of his private space station would be ready for business as soon as other companies were able to provide the rocket transportation for the people going up and down. The Beam module is a variation of earlier designs, allowing Bigelow to set a fixed price for NASA. With most of its development programs, NASA pays the contractor for time and effort — and overruns. With the fixed-price contract, if Bigelow runs into obstacles, the company, not NASA, will absorb the additional costs.
“For pennies on the dollar, NASA will be able to test a technology that could have implications for future exploration,” said Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator. “It represents a new way of doing business.”
If Bigelow succeeds not only at building inflatable structures, but also at juggling the logistics of operating and supplying a space station, its private stations could soon overshadow the International Space Station.
The first Bigelow station, which could be in orbit by late 2016, would be large enough to house a dozen people, twice as many as the International Space Station.
The company intends to build additional ones to meet demand, and it has already begun designing an enormous module with 74,000 cubic feet of space.
http://nyti.ms/XWkCac
LOS ANGELES — Human beings are born with an innate capacity to learn languages. Yet while mathematics is the language of pattern and form, many people struggle to acquire even its basic grammar.
But what if we could experience math directly — just as we experience language by speaking it? Some years ago I founded an organization, the Institute for Figuring, dedicated to the proposition that many ideas in math and science could be approached not just through equations and formulas but through concrete, physical activities.
Take fractals, mathematical structures or sets with intermediate dimensionality. Coined by the mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot, the term comes from the Latin “fractus,” meaning broken. Instead of having one, two or three dimensions, a fractal will have, say, 1.89 or 2.73 dimensions.
This sounds absurd; indeed, in the late 19th century, when mathematicians began to explore such forms, they were flabbergasted, using terms like pathological to describe them.
Fractals possess the strange property of “self-similarity.” Zoom in on any part of a fractal, and each small section will have the same richly complicated structure as the whole.
Clouds and coastlines, with what Dr. Mandelbrot called their highly “wiggled” geometries, exhibit this self-similar scaling (at least to the degree possible in nature, for true fractals with infinite levels of patterning are mathematical ideals).
Together we folded business cards into cubes and linked thousands of cubes in intricate configurations that reveal the fractal’s self-similar anatomy. Visual symphonies of rings and crosses — then rings of rings, rings of crosses, and crosses of crosses — became apparent to the eye, a physical manifestation of the concept of recursion.
Construction took more than 3,000 hours, and the form we made, held together by nothing more than the folded cards — no glue or Scotch tape — stands as a sculptural monument to a once heretical abstraction.
The idea of making models of fractals out of business cards was dreamed up by Dr. Mosely, a leading practitioner of mathematical origami and a specialist in curved origami, which requires a serious knowledge of differential geometry.
From 1996 to 2005, Dr. Mosely spent her leisure time supervising the building of a 66,048-card model of a fractal known as the Menger Sponge, named for its discoverer, Karl Menger, the Austrian mathematician, and for its resemblance to a sea sponge. Imagine a cube riddled with hundreds of square-shaped holes — it is the three-dimensional analog of an important mathematical object known as the Cantor Set.
After she had made the Menger Sponge, Dr. Mosely realized that it was one of a whole family of fractals. Some are trivial, others cannot be made, but one was especially interesting. She named it the Snowflake Sponge for its enigmatic sixfold symmetry.
Although it involved fewer cards — roughly 49,000 — it would be a greater problem to assemble. A suite of carefully designed submodules would have to be pieced together in a precise sequence so that the project would play out algorithmically in both space and time. In 2011, when the U.S.C. Libraries asked me to curate a project to engage students creatively with math and engineering, we decided to take on the challenge.
Most images of fractals are generated by computers, whose lightning-fast processing chips never tire of repeating simple routines thousands upon thousands of times. Making fractals materially is a lot harder because, as Dr. Mosely notes, “you have to think about such things as the size of a human hand in relation to three-dimensional holes.”
Building this fractal — and seeing participants who never thought of themselves as mathematically inclined become adept at understanding the complex spatial relationships — got me thinking about the experimental side of mathematics. What else might be possible?
At the Institute for Figuring project space in Los Angeles, we are now using Dr. Mosely’s techniques in a free-form exercise. This time, with 60,000 electrically colored business cards, our goal is open-ended.
Visitors are encouraged to explore and play. Already,Tracy Tynan, a former Hollywood costume designer, has made a model of a Peano “space-filling” curve, a line that wiggles around in a way that can fill a plane completely.
David Orozco, an artist and stay-at-home father of six, has developed a new construction method that creates an elegant, boxy three-dimensional lattice. An artist, Jacob Dotson, has created a new way of linking cubes into crystalline networks of octahedrons, regular eight-sided figures. Despite these explorations, none of these people will be able to pass a university geometry exam, and there will always be vast areas of math inaccessible to nonprofessionals. Nonetheless, many important mathematical concepts can be expressed without formal symbols. After all, nature does it without an alphabet.
Everyone knows about think tanks; at the Institute for Figuring, we have set ourselves up as a “play tank.” By inviting people to play with ideas, we encourage them to experience not just the beauty inherent in mathematics, but its awesome structural power.
How High Could the Tide Go?
http://nyti.ms/10zYreh
January 21, 2013
How High Could the Tide Go?
By JUSTIN GILLIS
BREDASDORP, South Africa — A scruffy crew of scientists barreled down a dirt road, their two-car caravan kicking up dust. After searching all day for ancient beaches miles inland from the modern shoreline, they were about to give up.
Suddenly, the lead car screeched to a halt. Paul J. Hearty, a geologist from North Carolina, leapt out and seized a white object on the side of the road: a fossilized seashell. He beamed. In minutes, the team had collected dozens more.
Using satellite gear, they determined they were seven miles inland and 64 feet above South Africa’s modern coastline.
For the leader of the team, Maureen E. Raymo of Columbia University, the find was an important clue as she tries to determine just how high the oceans might rise in a warmer world.
The question has taken on new urgency in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which caused coastal flooding that scientists say was almost certainly worsened by the modest rise of sea level over the past century. That kind of storm tide, the experts say, could become routine along American coastlines by late in this century if the ocean rises as fast as they expect.
In previous research, scientists have determined that when the earth warms by only a couple of degrees Fahrenheit, enough polar ice melts, over time, to raise the global sea level by about 25 to 30 feet. But in the coming century, the earth is expected to warm more than that, perhaps four or five degrees, because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.
Experts say the emissions that may make a huge increase of sea level inevitable are expected to occur in just the next few decades. They fear that because the world’s coasts are so densely settled, the rising oceans will lead to a humanitarian crisis lasting many hundreds of years.
Scientists say it has been difficult to get people to understand or focus on the importance, for future generations, of today’s decisions about greenhouse gases. Their evidence that the gases represent a problem is based not just on computerized forecasts of the future, as is commonly believed, but on what they describe as a growing body of evidence about what occurred in the past.
To add to that body of knowledge, Dr. Raymo is studying geologic history going back several million years. The earth has warmed up many times, for purely natural reasons, and those episodes often featured huge shifts of climate, partial collapse of the polar ice sheets and substantial increases in sea level.
“I wish I could take people that question the significance of sea level rise out in the field with me,” Dr. Raymo said. “Because you just walk them up 30 or 40 feet in elevation above today’s sea level and show them a fossil beach, with shells the size of a fist eroding out, and they can look at it with their own eyes and say, ‘Wow, you didn’t just make that up.’ ”
Skeptics who play down the importance of global warming like to note that these past changes occurred with no human intervention. They argue that the climate is ever-changing, yet humans or their predecessors managed to prosper.
The geologic record does offer startling examples of the instability of the planet. Whale bones can be dug up in the Sahara. The summit of Mount Everest is a chunk of ancient seafloor.
But most climate scientists reject the idea that this history means human-induced climate change will be benign. They add that the fossil record indicates nothing quite like today’s rapid release of greenhouse gases and its parallel effect of raising the planet’s temperature, changes that are occurring in a geologic instant.
“Absolutely, unequivocally, nature has changed before,” said Richard B. Alley, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “But it looks like we’re going to do something bigger and faster than nature ever has.”
Clues From Fossils
In any given era, the earth’s climate responds to whatever factors are pushing it to change.
Scientists who study climate history, known as paleoclimatologists, focus much of their research on episodes when wobbles in the earth’s orbit caused it to cool down or warm up, causing sea level to rise or fall by hundreds of feet.
Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, appears to have played a crucial role. When changes in the orbit caused the earth to cool, scientists say, a large amount of carbon dioxide entered the ocean, reducing the heat-trapping properties of the atmosphere and thus amplifying the cooling. Conversely, when the shifts in sunlight led to initial warming, carbon dioxide emerged from the ocean and helped speed the end of the previous ice age.
Based on this record, scientists like Dr. Alley describe carbon dioxide as the master control knob of the earth’s climate. A large body of scientific evidence shows that the current increase in the gas is being caused by human activity, meaning that people are essentially twisting the earth’s thermostat hard to the right.
In most of the previous warm periods, some ice remained near the poles, in Greenland and Antarctica. Today, enough water is stored as ice in those regions to raise the level of the ocean roughly 220 feet, should all of it melt.
The fossil record suggests that temperatures slightly warmer than today would not be enough to melt the ice caps entirely. But an increase of even a few degrees Fahrenheit in the average global temperature does appear to cause severe damage. From the last time that happened, about 120,000 years ago, scientists have found more than a thousand elevated fossil beaches around the world.
Many scientists believe that, as a result of human-induced warming, temperatures are already entering the danger zone. They are seeing rapid changes in Greenland and western Antarctica.
“I can merely tell you that every time in recent earth history where we’ve had these kinds of temperatures for any protracted period of time, two polar ice sheets have catastrophically collapsed,” said Jerry X. Mitrovica, an earth physicist at Harvard who collaborates with Dr. Raymo.
Dr. Raymo works at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University just outside New York City. Like many of her colleagues, she is trying to run the movie of the earth’s history in reverse, finding an era with temperatures that mirror those expected before 2100.
She has zeroed in on the Pliocene epoch, roughly three million years ago. The level of carbon dioxide in the air then appears to have been about 400 parts per million — a level that will be reached again within the next few years, after two centuries of fossil fuel burning.
Previous efforts to estimate the maximum rise of the sea in the Pliocene did not take full account of some factors now known to be important.
In Search of Prehistoric Beaches
Two years ago, in hopes of pinning down a better answer, Dr. Raymo pitched an ambitious plan to the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that pays for much of the country’s scientific research. She proposed to pull together a worldwide network of expert collaborators: to find, date and measure Pliocene beaches on nearly every continent and then to work with experts in computer modeling to take careful account of all the factors known to alter sea level.
The N.S.F. awarded the group $4.2 million, with one anonymous scientific reviewer declaring that the plan would permit a “far more precise and quantitative prediction of future climate change.”
This summer, Dr. Raymo and her team drove hundreds of miles along South Africa’s southern and western coasts, scouting for prehistoric beaches.
To collect ancient seashells for laboratory testing, they hiked treacherous paths and descended into old quarries and diamond mines. At one point an Australian researcher, Michael J. O’Leary, and an Italian colleague, Alessio Rovere, climbed a steep cliff face to take measurements, clinging to shrubs as their feet kept slipping.
The team located suspected Pliocene beaches as low as 38 feet and as high as 111 feet above modern sea level. In similar work in Australia and on the East Coast of the United States, the researchers have found Pliocene beaches as low as 33 feet and as high as 295 feet above sea level.
Part of the explanation for such varying elevations, Dr. Raymo said, is that the land itself has almost certainly moved over the last three million years, unevenly — thus raising or lowering beach deposits after they had been laid down.
Scientists have come to realize this can happen anywhere in the world, even far from geological hot spots, a major factor complicating their interpretation of past sea level. “A lot of the big task we have is teasing apart this dance that the crust of the earth is doing with the level of the sea,” Dr. Raymo said.
Over the next few years, her team plans to gather new measurements from most continents, including North America, where the Pliocene ocean encroached as far as 90 miles inland. After several years of work, they hope to arrive at the magic number Dr. Raymo calls Pliomax, or the maximum global sea level rise during the Pliocene.
That figure may help to solve a vexing scientific problem.
A large body of evidence suggests that the ice sheets atop Greenland and the low-lying, western part of Antarctica are vulnerable to global warming. But together, they can supply no more than about 40 feet of sea level rise.
The previous estimates of Pliocene sea level, based on spotty evidence, range from 15 feet to 130 feet above today’s ocean, with 80 feet being a commonly cited figure. If Dr. Raymo’s work were to confirm such a high estimate, it would suggest that the ice sheet in eastern Antarctica — by far the biggest chunk of ice in the world, containing enough water to raise sea level by 180 feet — is also vulnerable to melting. And if it is, scientists do not fully understand why, because their computer forecasts — acknowledged to be imperfect — suggest most of it should remain stable even in a warmer world.
“Just the mere fact that we know the number will tell us right off the bat, is East Antarctica stable?” Dr. Raymo said. “Or is it a huge risk?”
Thus, if the project is successful, it may put an upper limit on how much the ocean is ultimately capable of rising if temperatures go up as much as expected this century.
But the Pliomax project will not be able to answer what might be an even bigger question: In a worst-case scenario, how fast could the rise happen?
Dr. Raymo and her team share an emerging scientific consensus that the increase in this century will probably be on the order of three feet, perhaps as much as six feet. That would almost certainly require millions of people to evacuate coastal regions.
Calculations by Climate Central, a research group, suggest that once the ocean has risen five feet, storm tides comparable to those of Hurricane Sandy could occur about every 15 years in New York City.
Scientists say that in the 22nd century, the problem would probably become far worse, and the rise would then continue for many centuries, perhaps thousands of years. Recent research suggests the likely rise could be 12 feet by the year 2300, inundating coastal regions around the world.
If the rise is slower than expected, society may have time to adjust, or to develop new technology to solve the problem of greenhouse emissions. But many scientists are plagued by a nagging fear that the opposite will occur — that their calculations will turn out to have been too conservative, and social stability will eventually be threatened by a rapid rise of the sea.
“At every point, as our knowledge increases,” Dr. Raymo said, “we’ve always discovered that the climate system is more sensitive than we thought it could be, not less.”
Generation LGBTQIA
http://nyti.ms/RGv4TA
STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares “positive perspectives” on being transgender.
In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue — hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room — Stephen exuberantly declared himself “a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut,” and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and “any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters”) to his toy zebra.
Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.
Armed with the millennial generation’s defining traits — Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off — Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.
If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn’t whom they love, but who they are — that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.
But what to call this movement? Whereas “gay and lesbian” was once used to lump together various sexual minorities — and more recently “L.G.B.T.” to include bisexual and transgender — the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. “Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.,” said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.
Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is “L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.,” which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.
“Q” can mean “questioning” or “queer,” an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. “I” is for “intersex,” someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And “A” stands for “ally” (a friend of the cause) or “asexual,” characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.
It may be a mouthful, but it’s catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.
The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate “gender-neutral” restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.
The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with “lgbtqia” suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled “lgbt.”
“There’s a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality,” said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of “Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal.”
“When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.,” Professor Halberstam added, “it’s because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being.”
And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like “genderqueer” and “androgyne” to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.
BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.
Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university’s “Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community.” But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).
Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn’s L.G.B.T. Center. “I left thoroughly disappointed,” said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, “This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it’s all gay guys.”
Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for “non-cisgender.” For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, “cis” means “on the same side as” and “cisgender” denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. “This is a freshman uprising,” Richard said.
On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group’s inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: “Free condoms! Free ChapStick!”
“There’s a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene,” Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.’s, began. “However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we’re aiming to change that.”
Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert — a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt — took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of “bi-gender.”
“Does anyone want to share what they think it is?”
Silence.
She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a “detachable penis.” “Some days I wake up and think, ‘Why am I in this body?’ ” she said. “Most days I wake up and think, ‘What was I thinking yesterday?’ ”
Britt’s grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term “bi-gender” from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as “agender” and used the singular pronoun “they”; she now sees her gender as an “amorphous blob.”
By contrast, Britt’s evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.
In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase — until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn’t settled.
“While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn’t know that I was one,” Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn’t “trapped in the wrong body,” as the cliché has it — she just didn’t know which body she wanted.
When Kate told her about the term “bi-gender,” it clicked instantly. “I knew what it was, before I knew what it was,” Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than “transgender” but less vague than “genderqueer” — a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.
At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, “It took you this long to figure it out?” For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, “since people know what that is.” But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.
Among them was Richard Parsons, the group’s most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. “She’s like, ‘Well, if you say that he’s a guy, then I don’t want you rooming with a guy,’ ” he recalled. “We were in a car and I basically blurted out, ‘I think I might be a guy, too!’ ”
After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose “Richard” on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means “gift of God.”
By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women’s changing room.
Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college’s medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, “has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year.”
PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.
More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one’s name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a “transgender” checkbox to its college application.
“I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to,” said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. “And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues — Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.”
But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the ’80s and ’90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.
Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called “Beyond ‘Will & Grace,’ ” which examined gay characters on shows like “Ellen,” “Glee” and “Modern Family.” The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using “L.G.B.T.Q.” in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using “queer” instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as “unaccepting of things that she doesn’t understand.”
Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. “I am all about economy of expression,” she said. “L.G.B.T.Q. doesn’t exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, ‘Don’t put in an acronym with five or six letters.’ ”
One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer’s first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. “Frankly, I’m both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they’re free to love who they want,” she said.
If history is any guide, the age gap won’t be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.
Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. “In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian,” Professor Halberstam said.
Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.
At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls “L.G.B.T.Q. plus.”
“Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?” he asked.
Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. “We have our lesbians, our gays,” he said, before adding, “bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual.” He took a breath and continued. “Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous.”
By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: “Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human.”
The room burst into applause.
For Space Station, a Pod That Folds Like a Shirt and Inflates Like a Balloon
http://nyti.ms/UusiiZ
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — An inflatable space pod to be attached to the International Space Station in a couple of years will be like no other piece of the station.
Instead of metal, its walls will be made of floppy cloth, making it easier to launch (and then inflate).
NASA said Wednesday that it had signed a $17.8 million contract with Bigelow Aerospace to build the module, which could reach the space station as soon as 2015. That is a bargain-basement price compared with most equipment the United States and other countries send into space, and the Bigelow agreement could serve as a model for how NASA puts together missions at lower costs by using a Kmart strategy: buying off-the-shelf pieces instead of developing its own designs.
“This program starts a relationship that we think, and we hope, is going to be meaningful between NASA and ourselves,” Robert T. Bigelow, the chief executive of Bigelow Aerospace, said at a news conference here at the company’s headquarters.
Low-Earth orbit, he said, is the “first target,” but larger modules could be used for stations in deep space or for habitats on the Moon. “We have ambitions to get to the Moon someday, to have a base there,” Mr. Bigelow said.
The fold-up, blow-up approach solves the conundrum of how to build something voluminous that can be packed into the narrow payload confines of a rocket. The soft sides of the module, called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or Beam, will allow it to be scrunched like a T-shirt in a suitcase.
At the space station, it will be attached to an air lock and then inflated like a balloon and expanded by a factor of 10 to its full size — about 13 feet long and 10 feet in diameter, with about 560 cubic feet of space inside. At least initially, it will remain empty as NASA gathers data about its characteristics, including temperature and protection against micrometeorites.
The balloonlike structure is carefully designed not to pop. The fabric walls will consist of several layers including Vectran, a bullet-resistant material. Even if punctured by a high-speed meteorite, the fabric does not tear. A hole in a metal structure in space, by comparison, can cause explosive decompression as air rushes out.
When the Beam module reaches the space station, astronauts might go to it to seek solitude: engineers expect it will be the quietest spot there. The fabric walls absorb sound vibrations instead of transmitting them.
Beam revives a concept that NASA developed more than a decade ago for an inflatable four-story crew quarters on the space station. Congress halted the work as the station’s construction costs grew sharply.
Mr. Bigelow, who made a fortune in construction and hotels, licensed the technology from NASA and set up his factory here in North Las Vegas, investing more than $250 million of his own money. The company has already launched two unmanned prototypes into orbit, showing that they can remain inflated for years.
If Beam is successful, NASA will probably incorporate the technology into any manned mission to an asteroid or elsewhere in the solar system, or to build a base on the Moon or Mars. Inflatables could also overturn notions of what a spacecraft ought to look like: Instead of the sleek, shiny machines imagined in science fiction, the practical ones of the future may be blobby, soft-sided contraptions.
Mr. Bigelow holds space ambitions of his own. His company is building two much larger inflatable modules, each with 11,600 cubic feet of space, to launch as the world’s first private space station, docked together as station Alpha. The plan is to lease space on Alpha to countries that want to set up low-cost space programs and companies that want to conduct zero-gravity research. Tourists might be invited, too.
At the news conference, Mr. Bigelow announced prices for travelers to his space station: $26.25 million for a 60-day stay, including the ride to orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket built by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. If the traveler wished to book the rocket ride in a more expensive capsule under development by Boeing, the cost would be about $10 million more.
Mr. Bigelow said the pieces of his private space station would be ready for business as soon as other companies were able to provide the rocket transportation for the people going up and down. The Beam module is a variation of earlier designs, allowing Bigelow to set a fixed price for NASA. With most of its development programs, NASA pays the contractor for time and effort — and overruns. With the fixed-price contract, if Bigelow runs into obstacles, the company, not NASA, will absorb the additional costs.
“For pennies on the dollar, NASA will be able to test a technology that could have implications for future exploration,” said Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator. “It represents a new way of doing business.”
If Bigelow succeeds not only at building inflatable structures, but also at juggling the logistics of operating and supplying a space station, its private stations could soon overshadow the International Space Station.
The first Bigelow station, which could be in orbit by late 2016, would be large enough to house a dozen people, twice as many as the International Space Station.
The company intends to build additional ones to meet demand, and it has already begun designing an enormous module with 74,000 cubic feet of space.
