Off-peak holidaying in Bodrum

Finally we made our journey to Yalikavak, a seaside town in Bodrum peninsula. It is the beginning of September. The weather is very pleasant, thirty plus degrees.

Many people have already gone home following ‘bayram’ holiday break as schools are starting. At this time of the year locals, childless couples, and retirees complete the life-scape, and of course those melancholic stray dogs.

If you don’t have young children you should consider holidaying off-peak season. You may have the best holiday of your life in September –or May I am told- in southwest Turkey. It is much less crowded; everybody is more relaxed, the climate is still warm -not boiling hot compared to peak season-. And you have the chance to blend into local population.

There is ‘pazar’ –local markets- in Yalikavak today. We took a ‘dolmus’ –minibus- from Gundogan to Yalikavak. Due to low season, public transportation is less frequent now. Our dolmus is packed with people, 29 in total, twice its capacity.

Semra and Tulin went to stroll in pazar’s endless alleys protected from sunlight by large sails. I am sitting in a local café right now enjoying my cold beer, and typing on my MacBook Air. This is heaven. No not that, I mean seriously what else a middle aged man would want.

Earlier I went to pazar with them and we bought ‘dolma’ from a local seller, a woman whom I may qualify as ‘dolma nazi’. She was proud of her produce and didn’t bother answering our calls for a while as her dolmas were selling fast.

I noticed and Semra too, women in this region are strong in character. Many of them own their own business. Their gestures, the way they talk and behave reflect their pride and strength to a large extent due to perhaps their economic independence. This is in contrast to Anatolian women, who seem trapped inside conservative family structure of Islamic lifestyle.

A toroidal lamp

I woke up in Istanbul around 6am staring at a toroid shaped lamp hung from the ceiling.

Toroid’s surface has peculiar properties compared to a much simpler shape such as a sphere.

On a spherical surface you may start travelling in any direction and end up where you started. This property is valid for any point on the surface.

A spherical surface is a finite two-dimensional surface with no boundaries. It is a finite surface hence you end up reaching the same point. It has no borders or sharp edges that you may fall off.

As a result a spherical surface is a useful model to study a universe with no boundaries but a finite shape like ours.

A spherical surface has also constant curvature. Nowhere on it there is a point that sits on an area that is more or less curved than any other point on the sphere.

On a toroid on the other hand you may find points across its surface sitting on different curvatures. A point on its outer rim is on a surface with positive curvature, where a point on the inner rim is on a surface with negative curvature.

A simplified modelling can explain this “curvature business” that is the essence of Einstein’s general relativity.

You may construct a toroid by bending a cylinder along axis and joining its ends.

Imagine you make a toroid from a rubber cylinder. You will see that the outer surface of the toroid will stretch, and the inner surface will squash forming wrinkles.

Take a rubble rectangular slab, and on its surface paint little circles with identical diameter placed in equal distance from each other. Form a cylinder from the slab by rolling it so that the circles we drew can be viewed from outside. We should observe that despite introducing a positive curvature, the sizes of circles and the distance between them remain the same. There is no stretching or squashing; the curvature is positive but constant.

In contrast when we form a toroid using a rubber cylinder by bending it along its axis and joining both ends, we should observe that the circles on toroid’s outer surface grow in size and the distance between them increases too. The circles on toroid’s inner surface should shrink in size and the distance between them should become shorter. This is because we have introduced variable curvature changing from positive (stretching) to negative (squashing) from outer to inner rim respectively.

Imagine the toroid represents a certain space-time configuration.

It is possible a light beam to travel from circle A to its neighbour B on the inner surface in shorter time than between neighbouring circles on the outer surface. Space-time is clearly stretched on the outer rim, shrunk on the inner one.

A black hole is like a toroid that its inner hole is infinitely small hence the circles you drew on its inner surface collapse onto each other. There is no way to identify or differentiate those circles from one another, the information about them are sucked by black hole’s event horizon.

It is fascinating to think that there may be oddly shaped universes with multitude of curvatures. A universe that its space-time properties are shaped like a toroid is possible. But other weirder shapes too. Some of them may even have collapsed regions where curvature is transformed in odd directions that we may not easily imagine their shape in our Euclidian minds.

The reason we could visualise and construct a toroid is because we may construct it from Euclidian shapes that we are familiar with such as a cylinder. However we should note that we might not do so if we could not stretch and squash the outer and inner surfaces respectively. You cannot construct a non-Euclidian shape without introducing variable curvature.

A toroid is a non-Euclidian shape whereas a cylinder is a Euclidian one. Our education system has given emphasis on shapes with Euclidian geometry perhaps because there are economical benefits of realising them. Euclidian geometry has given us ability to make useful approximations. We can build pipes by modelling them as cylinders for instance.

However studying non-Euclidian geometry such as toroids, can be crucial in modelling and understanding the cosmos.

Songe the moon

I am reading Information by James Gleick. I am learning fascinating things. Such as various forms of African drum-languages were used in communication between tribes long before Europeans invented telegraph.

Drum-communication -why not coin a new term- drumcom was an elaborate form. Most tribal languages were tonal, i.e. subtle tonal variations implied drastic variations in meaning (a bit like Cantonise). Drums exploited tonal variance.

However inevitable loss of consonants (made of high pitch sound) had to be replaced by something for error correction. So drummers introduced phrases. Songe, the moon, is rendered as "songe li range la manga" -"the moon looks down the earth." Redundancy compensated for loss in translation. It is also amazing how beautifully constructed these phrases were.

Theirs was an oral culture. Our African ancestors.

Google+

We all know how Google chose G+ first adopters; we are from geekosphere.

Google let the geekosphere crowd to form/build themselves from scratch via Circles concept and at the same time warm themselves up to the idea (of liking and using social networking). Google wants to make a different social network.

Quite likely Google may be using geekosphere ideas as they make re-factoring decisions about G+ on a daily basis. Perhaps without knowingly we became virtual (and unpaid) employees in Google's ideation process.

Google does not want to open G+ up prematurely as that would instantly cause idiotsia(*) to pour in, eventually causing geeks turning their back and idea factories would have been killed off instantly as a result.

If they want to make a difference they need to be different and this time the difference will come from wisdom of nerds rather than banal "wisdom" of crowds. This makes sense and it is in line with their geek-oriented culture. It works out well for me.

(*)Idiotsia: People who are not Intelligentsia.

The Sofa

It grabbed my attention, there is a market out there for hyper-comfort. People are buying stuff for comfort without paying attention to how much of it they need.

Take sofa designs for instance. Some of our friends decorating a new home bought mega size sofas in recent years. The trend in furniture design has been towards bigger, larger designs with upholstery and cushions getting softer and deeper.

After dinner when people move to living room with drinks in hand and mood to talk, suddenly they find themselves legs elevated bottoms buried deep into a sofa designed to devour you.

In such a hyper-comforted environment, forget talking, within a minute my brain starts to malfunction. After two minutes even making sense of ordinary conversations turns into a torture. Your interest in joining a discussion about climate change or string theory is reduced to a level of woman shoes conversation (no pun intended). After three minutes I have trouble keeping my head straight.

There is essentially no difference between sugar-infested self-indulgence food and a hyper-comfortable sofa. They are bad for you.

I should remind you that we are still animals and what drives us is not too much comfort but primal desires to push our comfort zones.

So do yourself and your friends a favour. If you want to have a decent conversation with your friends, consider buying a semi-firm, normal size, good-old fashioned sofa, designed to sit, as opposed to put you into a coma.