Tien Chiu

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Smashing the 1,000-weasel barrier – and still climbing

My trainer had me test my 1-rep max for squats the first time today – the maximum weight I could lift, just once, for that exercise.

Unfortunately we didn’t get quite all the way to my max – when we finished, I still felt like I could have done more weight. But we smashed through the 1000-weasel mark like it never existed. I squatted 1,060 weasels and felt like I could have done at least another 40-80 weasels!

By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout...) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By Keven Law (originally posted to Flickr as On the lookout…) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(For those of you not familiar with the weasel unit of measurement, there are 4 standard English weasels to the pound, so I was squatting 265 pounds and felt like I could have done 10-20 pounds more at least. And if you’re wondering why I’m measuring progress in weasels, check out this blog post about why weasels are way better than self-discipline!)

To put this in perspective, at the USA Powerlifting California competition a month ago, I would have placed fourth in women’s squats despite being 17 years older than the next oldest competitor (she was 31). Okay, the field was small (9 women). In the NorCal Powerlifting California state competition in July 2018 (the biggest competition that year), I would have placed third among all the women of any age or weight class in squats.

And I wasn’t even at my true maximum. And I’m 48. And I’ve been training for exactly 6.5 months as of today. Before that, I was a couch potato.

Dang. I got into this to lower my blood sugar, but you know, I think I might actually be a contender?

That said, I have a long way to go before I start winning powerlifting competitions. Powerlifting consists of three lifts: squat, deadlift, and bench press. My deadlift and bench press are quite weak, so I need to work on those areas before I’m ready to enter competitions (if I decide to do that).

But…I’m a LOT stronger than I ever thought I’d be.

Wow.

Onwards!

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A huge “THANK YOU!!” to the weaving community!!

The first launch of my online courses is over. And it went really well.

Here’s a copy of the email I sent out to my Warp & Weave subscriber list yesterday morning. It pretty much says it all.

Dear ____,

Absolutely no sales stuff today. Instead, I want to say a huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to you and the rest of the weaving community.

When I quit my job at Google three years ago to pursue my dream of making a living as a weaver and a weaving teacher, I wasn’t sure I could do it. As we all know, it’s really, really hard to make a living in the fiber arts. I didn’t want to live my life on a plane, so I decided to focus on teaching online. It was a leap of faith.

I wasn’t sure I could do it. Neither was anyone else.

Some friends were supportive. Others, less so. One weaving “friend,” when I told her my plans, said, “Good luck. I hope you like being poor.”

The last few years have had ups and downs, but I kept going because so many people told me my blog posts about color in weaving were useful and enlightening. Both of my parents are scientific researchers. I believe that one of the greatest gifts one person can give another is the gift of understanding, and one of the highest callings a person can have is figuring out how things work and then teaching that to others. Knowing my posts were teaching and helping others gave me the courage to keep going.

The response to my course launch has been phenomenal, and has given me confidence that my “friend” was wrong, and that I can – in time – make a full living as a weaving teacher.

When I was an undergraduate at Caltech, renowned science fiction writer David Brin came to speak at SPECTRE, our science fiction book club. At the end of his talk, he told us about a nightmare he’d had.

“I was at work in the astrophysics department, as usual, and my boss came up behind me. He said, ‘We’ve figured it out! You’d do this for free! In fact, you’d pay US to do this!’”

“I woke up in a cold sweat,” said Brin. “And now, I lay the David Brin Curse on all of you….that someday, you too will wake up from the same nightmare.”

Thank you, all of you, for making my David Brin Curse come true.

Tien

Color Courage for Weavers
Color Courage for Weavers

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Remove before launch

I’ve been pretty silent here for the last few weeks because I’ve been working like crazy on prepping my online course Color Courage for Weavers for its launch. (Coming up fast. Really fast.)

And I’m not going to say much right now because I’m still working like crazy trying to get the launch ready. You have no idea how many moving parts are involved!

But I did want to share one thing with you.

You may recall that, long ago and far away, I worked for a company called Skybox Imaging….which made, launched, and operated state-of-the-art, seriously bleeding-edge imaging satellites.

Well, when satellites are constructed, there are typically protective parts that are kept in the satellite while it’s being stored on Earth, but are removed just before it leaves the planet and goes into orbit.

So people don’t forget to remove those parts, they are typically tagged with big red labels that look like this:

So shortly after I joined Skybox, I got a “Remove before launch” keychain fob to commemorate the launch of our second satellite. The one that convinced Google to buy us.

After I left Google, I thought, “Remove before launch. Hey, that’s cool. I’ll just leave it on until I’m ready to launch my new business. That’ll be another six months or so.”

Then Life Happened. It’s now been on my keychain for over three years post-Google.

But…it’s coming off.

Within the next week.

Stay tuned….

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Book review: Figuring Fibers

Figuring Fibers
Figuring Fibers

I have long wondered whether it was possible to create Art that expressed the beauty of science at a deep level. Most of the Art I’ve seen celebrating science has lain strictly at the surface – mostly, images of scientific concepts that happen to have aesthetically attractive representations. Fractals, various spirals based on the Golden Mean, microscopic images of cells, and so on. These are OK, I guess; they help make science more approachable, and they definitely demonstrate that science-y things can also be pretty things. But they don’t get at the true beauty of science, which for me is conceptual beauty, the sheer elegance of the rules underpinning the way the world is put together. I have never, for example, seen a work of Art that really expressed how elegant Maxwell’s equations, or the Pythagorean theorem, really are. Not their truth, or their usefulness, but their elegance: The simplicity and power with which they express their underlying truth.

It may sound odd to non-mathematicians or non-scientists to talk about beauty in a profession that is supposedly dedicated to truth, but the beauty of the truth, of the rules underpinning how the world works, is what gets most of us into the game. Particularly, it’s what gets mathematicians into the game. Because mathematicians work with abstractions rather than messy data, and because much of mathematics has no obvious application to the real world, mathematicians are in some sense the poets of the scientific world, seeking truth and elegance for their own sake rather than for any specific application. (This is, like most sweeping statements, an overgeneralization, but one with a reasonable degree of truth to it.)

The great mathematician G.H. Hardy, in his book A Mathematician’s Apology (one of my favorite books about the philosophy of mathematics), said this about mathematics, Art, and beauty:

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words…The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics….

It would be quite difficult now to find an educated man quite insensitive to the aesthetic appeal of mathematics. It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind—we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.

I’m not going to try to give a rigorous definition of mathematical beauty – it would be an interesting exercise, and Wikipedia takes a stab at it, but it would be kind of like trying to explain being in love to someone who’s never experienced it. Louis Armstrong once said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” Mathematical beauty is somewhat similar.

Nonetheless, it exists, but it’s a conceptual beauty, and trying to render it in physical form is hard. Really hard. In fact, I wasn’t even sure it was possible. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but couldn’t figure out how because I’d never seen it done.

Until someone told me about Figuring Fibers. Figuring Fibers is a compilation of articles that demonstrate mathematical principles using fiber arts in a deep, thoughtful manner. It’s unique in that it’s written with mathematical rigor, yet is readable by the sufficiently bold layperson, and each article covers a deep, interesting mathematical idea and then demonstrates it/extends the idea using a fiber art technique. Crochet, knitting, quilting, sewing, and beading/embroidery are all used in the book. (No weaving, alas, but perhaps a future volume?). This is no mere crocheting of a Moebius strip or knitting a 3D rendition of a Klein bottle; this is creating fractals, extending the Chinese Remainder Theorem to knitting contexts, and proving hyperbolic geometrical theorems through quilting. I mean, this stuff is cool. Way cool. As in, I had continuous nerdgasms for three days cool. (Okay, okay, TMI, but you know what I mean. 🙂 )

Figuring Fibers is definitely not your “Quilt in a Weekend” type fiber book, and it is not for those easily intimidated by mathematical notation. In fact, I opened it, looked inside, saw subscripts and superscripts and phrases like “Triply periodic polyhedra in Euclidean Three-Dimensional Space” and nearly shut it again. But I didn’t, and I’m very glad I didn’t. If you are mathematically educated enough to read Scientific American, and if you are willing to put some time and effort into understanding the concepts, you can skip over the more technical bits and still get 90% of what the authors are saying. There are definitely places where you’re going to get lost – at least, for awhile. And there are places where you’re going to have to go back and forth until you get it. But it is possible to skim over those parts and still appreciate how devastatingly cool (did I mention devastatingly cool?) the concepts and the art are. Yes, I was a math major, but I haven’t cracked a math text in 25 years, and I still think this was an amazingly enlightening read, both for the mathematical beauty and the knowledge that it is possible to combine Art and mathematics in a deep, beautiful way. (Plus, I now have a new favorite phrase: “The Borromean Rings are Hyperbolic: Proof by Quilt”! OMG, I’m in love.)

Figuring Fibers is edited by Carolyn Yackel and Sarah-Marie Belcastro and published by the American Mathematical Society; it is available through Amazon but is (at least for now) available much more cheaply on the American Mathematical Society website. It is the third book in a series; I haven’t yet read Making Mathematics with Needlework or Crafting by Concepts, but you can bet they’re on my reading list now!

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The “art” thing

Some of the responses to my last blog post made me realize I was careless about what I said. There’s a perpetual confusion about what the word “artist” means, because (in my opinion, anyway) there are two meanings to the words “art” and “artist”. The first, which is what I usually mean, is an inclusive one: it refers to someone who is doing something creative, regardless of skill level or degree of external recognition. If you’re making something creative, you’re making art, and you’re an artist.

And then there’s Art with a capital “A,” which is the stuff you see in museums and galleries, possibly accompanied by the Artist, typically someone with a list of exhibits, museum collections, etc. next to their name. What I would describe as “a career artist”.

I would certainly describe myself as an artist, and I have very little doubt that, given time and effort, I could succeed as an Artist. But that’s not where my interests lie. I don’t feel disillusioned about Art, exactly, but after two years as Board President of an Art museum, I feel I have a better idea of what it is and isn’t. Let me explain.

As someone newly interested in things artistic, I wasn’t entirely sure what Art was, or how it differed from the art I saw in day to day life. As a result, I shared the fairly common belief that Art was the best quality art, selected by curators for preservation in museums. And thus, that being an Artist represented achieving the pinnacle of artistic quality, and was something that, as an artist interested in producing good quality work, becoming an Artist was something I should aspire to.

This isn’t an uncommon belief, and there’s a nugget of truth in it: one rarely sees crappy art in museums, because museums exhibit things that people want to see, and people rarely want to see crappy art. But museums don’t necessarily display the best art, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s impossible to determine what art is “best,” because everyone uses different criteria. Second, museums aren’t out to display the best art. They want to display the art that most advances their mission, and which brings in enough visitors to keep them in business. The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, for example, focuses on art in textile media, because that’s our mission. We aren’t going to exhibit paintings, even a Renoir or a Picasso, because that’s not what we’re about. You could create the world’s greatest bronze sculpture, and we would still reject it, because it’s not what we collect or exhibit.

Similarly, art galleries are interested in exhibiting things that will eventually sell enough to keep them in business. Again, they won’t sell crappy art, but they aren’t out to sell the best art, either. So yes, being exhibited in a museum or a gallery is a sign that your work isn’t terrible, but it isn’t a sign that your work is the best, either.

Another trend in modern Art over the last century or so has been the “de-skilling” of Art. Ever since Marcel Duchamp produced his piece “Fountain” in 1917 – a commercially made urinal signed with a fake signature – the trend has been to emphasize concept over technical skill. As a result, a lot of modern Art is about message, not technical skill, and there’s even a certain undercurrent that suggests that a piece that pays too much attention to technical skill isn’t “really” Art. I’ve seen many exhibits by highly skilled Artists, but I’ve also seen a lot of exhibits that, while powerful Art, are technically primitive – as in, I could probably have executed some of the pieces, even though they aren’t in my medium.

Given that I care very much about technical skill in my work, enjoy pushing the edge of what can be done with a technique, and don’t particularly care to put an explicit message into my work, it seems that my work is unlikely to make it significantly into the Art arena any time soon. I might be pleasantly surprised, but I’m also not planning to pound on the door of the Art world demanding recognition. They’re going in one direction and celebrating a particular thing, which is not my thing. Three or four years ago, that would probably have bothered me. Today, it doesn’t. I think two years as Board President at an Art museum has really helped me gain perspective on this. I’m pleased about that, though I’m not sure it’s an insight I’d have sacrificed two years of my creative life for.

(Not that I regret becoming Board President for one moment – but I’m also very happy to have stepped down to Board Vice-President as of a few months ago. Now maybe I can do some weaving again!)

The last week and a half has been spent finishing up the filming for my upcoming class, Color Courage for Weavers. I’m a little nervous that I may be including too much material for one class, but since I plan to offer a online workshop version as well as a content-only version, hopefully those who would like more guidance will be able to get it in the workshop version. It’s now looking like the release date may be early December.