and now, for something completely different

•7 April 2024 • Leave a Comment

The world is a complicated place at the moment. Wars, calamities, all sorts of bad going, really everywhere. Some of this arises from decisions made years ago and some of this arises from the actions of individuals. And that’s always been the case.

There are small comforts. Bob the cat comes in from a trip outside, spends some time kneading his blanket (and it is his blanket, for kneading), and then decides that it’s time for attention and HOW DARE I spend time typing when he’s sitting in front of the keyboard. And so yes, he gets his desired amount of attention. Because of course he does.

One lens through which to view this is the local global problem; the global issues are large, as everyone who follows the news knows, but there are the local comforts.

This local versus global problem comes up a lot of places. It comes up for instance in mathematics. The class I’ve been teaching for the past few (ten?) years is Graph Theory. The local structure of graphs is the same for all graphs, if we take a very local view. But the global structure of graphs, well that can be wildly complicated. And so the whole of graph theory can be viewed bridging this gap between the local information that’s easy to see and the global information that can be difficult to determine.

This is not the only place in which this local global issue arises. There is a class of mathematical objects called manifolds; very roughly speaking, manifolds locally look like Euclidean spaces. For a class of manifolds called symplectic manifolds, the localness is even stronger. But the whole field of differential geometry can be thought of as understanding how the Euclidean pieces fit together. (And yes, I’m lying to you in the sense that I’ve hidden a lot of the mathematical detail.)

But the mathematical local versus global issue is different than this Bob versus the world issue that I started with. And this is an interesting gap to bridge. And difficult. Because the local differs so much as we go around the world.

Part of this is that one of my areas of contemplation is, how do some of the mathematical ideas that have infused my day job interact with the real world. The local global idea in the real world seems to be very different than the mathematical local global idea. So, back to the chalkboard.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics

haiku and the ephemeral

•31 March 2024 • Leave a Comment

Six years ago today, I started writing a haiku a day and sending it forth into the world. I wrote about this a few years ago, and if you’re interested, you can find that here. My original intention had been not to keep a record of them but rather to view them as a project of transience and ephemerality.

In the end, when the ownership of Twitter changed hands, I went in and pulled copies from the memory of that platform, and so I have an incomplete record going back to 31 March 2018. I have since broadened out the range of platforms on which I send them out, and once thing that I know I need to do is to bring the information about all of those platforms together in a single place.

One direction of travel from this moment of reminiscence is the observation that this was a strange thing to do, in that I hadn’t planned on keeping a record. But I go back to Yanagi and the Unknown Craftsman, as I mentioned in that earlier post. I still like the idea.

There are other crazy ideas I’ve had but never implemented. One is to draft a story, very slowly, and release it one paragraph at a time, as part of the out of office messages I’ve gotten into the habit of setting when I’m out of the office. Perhaps that’s the next windmill of ephemerality to tilt into.

I suppose that one attraction of this ephemerality is that so much of what I do is written for someone else, recorded by someone else, occasionally published by someone else.

The mind then turns to historians. Many of the words written these days appear in our many social media platforms, or email, and how many of these will just disappear. We won’t have the occasionally voluminous correspondence, but how much of our regular correspondence consists of things we might not have wanted to save.

And so, epheremality, a watchword for our current age. Bane perhaps of the future and the record of our present day, but I’ll continue on my merry haiku path, until at some point I decide to move on to something else.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

working an idea

•17 March 2024 • Leave a Comment

Last week, I pulled out a (mathematical) question I wrote down perhaps a couple of years ago. I keep notebooks for various ideas, mathematical ideas and writing ideas primarily, but I don’t date the entries. Rather, they bump up against one and another, waiting to be brought out of the cold and made use of.

Interestingly, reading through, there are some ideas that periodically recur; these are ideas that I think are worthy of some attention, if only because they’re ideas that my brain can’t quite rid itself of.

This idea mentioned at the beginning is not though one of these recurring ideas. Rather, it’s a much more recent idea, one that resulted from the deliberate smacking together of the body of material in the class I’ve been teaching for the past ten years or so, against the body of material that is the halo around my mathematical research.

I’m not going to be explicit about the idea, if only because I’m not yet sure whether it’s an interesting idea, or whether it’s true, but it is interesting to me at present because of its origin, this cross fertilization of teaching and research.

Sitting with a piece of paper and a pen, staring out the window, over the course of the week I made some notes about possible directions of exploration. But what caused the ice to crack and the log jam to break, was talking it through with someone who’d come to my office to talk about something else entirely.,

This reminded me of a (very recent) post in the sense that there is a difference between sitting in isolation and thinking, and talking through an idea with an audience. And I do find this a fascinating difference.

I’ll let you know if this idea goes anywhere. I remain optimistic at the moment,.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics

speculating on Colossus

•3 March 2024 • Leave a Comment

I would like to spend some time today weaving together some old treads. I’ve written a couple of times before about Colossus, here (in 2018) and here (just last year). I’m not entirely sure why I keep coming back to this old story, written long before we had any strong evidence of just how computers will change our lives.

Perhaps it’s because I find it such a powerful cautionary tale. We build this machine, capable of gathering all available information and being able then to make binding decisions in the world based on its understanding of that information. And then it goes awry. This is an old story, the creation running amok. It is a reflection of that old conundrum, that being able to do something is not in itself a reason for then doing it. Can does not equal should.

So the question came to me recently: who is building Colossus. We are building more and more powerful tools; we see this in the news every day. We encounter them in our daily lives. And we don’t know how they work. This observation is fleshed out in an essay by Stephen Wolfram, and this observation is part of this ecosystem of ideas, these tools we build that we may not understand how to use.

But I’m sure that someone out there, some government perhaps, is building a Colossus. A computer, a programme, through which all information flows. A computer, a programme, that we can then ask, what are others doing. The quality of the answers will depend on the quality of the information, which is why I think it will be a government. Governments are the keepers of secrets; the image that comes to mind is the warehouse at the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

If there were a machine that knew everything that was known, that possessed in its internal structures every fact known, what question would I ask of it? In Jokester, the question is the origin of humor. Others have their questions, but what would mine be, and I’m not sure.

What’s interesting to speculate about gets back to my day job. If this machine knows everything, then it knows all of the math we know, all of the math we’ve discovered (and yes, discovered and not created, and that is a different conversation entirely), and I suspect my first question would be a math question. Do we know enough to answer the questions that I’ve carried for years? Decades? For some, almost certainly not, but there are others, questions that lurk at the outer edges of the math I know well, and perhaps these.

And so, speculation. I’ll continue to ponder this question of which question, and speculate as well on what sort of answer we might expect to get.

Posted in bizarre and random things
Tags: , , , ,

reading and listening

•25 February 2024 • 1 Comment

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently. In part, this is just because I’ve gotten behind in listening to those to which I’ve subscribed. In part, this is because of the old ‘kid in the candy store’ phenomenon, wherein the sweets in every jar on the counter are in and of themselves, fascinating.

Some of my current list are fiction, some are non-fiction; some are very regular, others are to different degrees irregular; are though are still welcome, since if they weren’t, they wouldn’t remain on the list.

All of this listening, sometimes though not always while doing something else that doesn’t require my entire brain, has led me to speculate. And as with many of my speculations, I’m sure, willing to bet money sure, that there are PhD theses on this topic out in the world, answering any question I might craft in these idle speculations.

Listening is easy and reading is hard. This is an anecdotal claim at best, but looking around, I think that we spend a lot of time listening while we’re doing something else. We might have a conversation while talking to someone; we might be taking part in an on-line meeting, taking care of old emails and updating Amazon orders while keeping one ear in the meeting.

This isn’t to say that we’re listening well. We are in such situations just keeping that ear out for the mention of things that we’re most concerned about.

Yes, listening well is hard. Being the attentive partner to someone else’s speculations takes work, as rewarding as it is. But we can pay some attention via listening while doing other things.

For me, reading is different. Reading requires focus which is disturbed by background music, television, but strangely not the white noise chatter of a coffee shop.

Beyond this, I wonder whether we process the information we acquire from reading and from listening differently. I’m sure that we must. I have no formal evidence for this, no proof, but I do have my own experience, for what that’s worth. I can listen to a podcast while walking down the street, while I can’t read a book while walking down the street.

Perhaps this is just one part of a much larger phenomenon, with this at one end and the awkward conversations we sometimes have about the difference between the books we’ve read and the movies made from them. Something to ponder.

Posted in bizarre and random things

a strange non-linearity

•18 February 2024 • Leave a Comment

Let us go back in time. One of the first blog posts I wrote, going back to January 2014, concerned the possibility of the Number Liberation Front. It was a tongue and cheek introduction of an idea that’s persisted in my random contemplations, namely that writing numbers as words can hide their intrinsic magnitude; after all, the words million, billion, trillion are all close to each other as words, but they are very, very far from one another as numbers, at least within the realm of human experience.

How much does this inappropriate similarity impact on our understanding of such things as the budgets of nations. I think, a lot, and I’d be curious whether anyone has done the experiment of asking people, answer as quick as you can, whether 1 billion or 100 million is the larger amount.

But there are other aspects of this general phenomenon as well. One, which I can’t remember whether I’ve written about, is that we do have a strong tendency to want to rank things. And since we want to rank things, one better than the other, we do this by associating numbers to things, so that greater and lesser make sense. And over time, we’ve developed many different ways of associating numbers to things. Statistics is one of our tools for this, in all of its glory and sophistication, but this is also the argument that sports fans have, who has the better team.

What is the psychology of number? The non-linearity of the title is that most of the phenomena that we deal with, do not easily allow for such a linear ordering. The world is a complicated place, and things tend to depend on many other things. Chaos theory, as made famous to many via Jurassic Park, and its cousin complexity theory, tell us that our intuition often misleads us. We do not intuitively see the complexity inherent in worldly situations, and this is a phenomenon has been deeply explored, in Thinking Fast and Slow among other places.

And so, a challenge stands before me, astride the road I wish to walk. What is known about the psychology of mathematics and more specifically, the psychology of how we interpret number, and this is a challenge I’m looking forward to.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics

As the blog says, vote now, time is short

•18 February 2024 • Leave a Comment

Calling as BSFA members – we would appreciate your vote!

BSFA Awards – Vote now, time is short

Posted in writing ephemera

project miscellany

•21 January 2024 • Leave a Comment

After my recent declaration of project bankruptcy, I’ve been working through the old lists and thinking about which projects live and which are encased in carbonite and stacked in the basement. A friend and colleague has offered to be my external conscience, regularly reminding me of what projects are current and asking, so how are they going.

One project that remains on the list is a math project, a paper I should have finished some time ago. I won’t mention how much time, but yes enough time that I’m somewhat embarrassed to even acknowledge that this project remains among current projects. I’ve spent some time recently going back and reminding myself of where I am with it, what remains to be done and where the tricky patches of quicksand are located.

Quicksand. I read something recently, though unfortunately I don’t remember where or by whom (and a quick internet search gets sucked into descriptions of movies by that title, somewhat fittingly). When I was growing up, quicksand was a constant threat on television and in the movies, to the point where I suspect my generation would unflinchingly accept ‘trying to float without struggling’ as a reasonable action to take if one were to find oneself sinking in quicksand. I suspect, though, that this danger from my childhood might have been somewhat over sold as a danger we might come up against.

There is also the project that cannot be named. Those who know of the project about which I write will, I know, roll their eyes and turn away their gaze, so that they can chuckle in disbelief without doing so to my face. And those who don’t know, we’ll see if that particular project survives the Chapter 11 hearing.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had an aikido project over the past couple of years. Last year’s project was both ambitious and ill defined, which is not the best of combinations. So for this year, I’ve decided to be a bit more specific and definite. I wish to improve my ukemi, specifically how I roll and fall out of the techniques as executed by others. At present, I think my ukemi is decent, but particularly as I’ve reached the age when I’m worrying about my age, I think this is a project that will have definite benefits both on and off the tatami.

Enough for the moment. I may spend some time this evening exploring whether I can discover from where this generational fear of quicksand arose, because the more I think about it, the more curious it becomes.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, mathematics

on teaching

•14 January 2024 • Leave a Comment

Looking back, I’ve written a lot about teaching over the years. Some of what I wrote has involved projects, some of which I’ve worked through, some of which I’ve started, and some of which remain nascent. Yet one more project would be to go back through all of the old posts and construct an index of those past posts involving teaching.

Some of what I wrote involves my own relationship to my teaching, and that’s what I would like focus some attention on here. The teaching for the semester ended a few days ago; I gave my last lectures of the semester three days ago, last Thursday, though the marking remains.

I’m always sad when teaching ends. I greatly enjoy teaching, the structuring of the material, working through details, seeing the light of engagement and understanding on the students’ faces.

And now, through the marking, I’ll get a hint about what I need to work on for next year, topics and techniques and theorems that I’ll need to focus more attention on.

And there are the larger questions as well. The ways of education are changing. As a caricature, there was a time, long ago, when facts were rare and precious things, recorded in books difficult to replicate. The reader, the lecturer, had access to these facts and made them available to students.

But now, facts are cheap, available via any web browser. At one point, just a few years ago, we then thought it would be the interpretation of facts that would become the important thing, rather than the memorization of facts. (And yes, this is all still a caricature of a much wider, a much deeper, a much more complicated conversation.)

But now, there are tools that seem – seem – to be able to interpret as well as we expect an undergraduate to interpret, namely the various large language models and their kin. And our current conversation is, what do these mean for us? Like most of my colleagues, this is a question I’m working on locally, in my own head, and as part of broader conversations.

Things are changing. Something that I thought would be a science fiction story might actually be an approaching reality, of personalized AI assistants that take the role of tutor, but that this would be technology that would be available to some rather than to all, exacerbating the divisions already growing in our world.

But that’s a story for another day, as it barrels down towards us like a runaway train. For now, I’ll get to marking and thinking about how to make my class better for next year.

Posted in education and university life

on resolutions

•7 January 2024 • Leave a Comment

Let me start by wishing everyone a belated happy new Gregorian year. The history of years is itself a fascinating thing; perhaps that’s something to add to the ever growing list of things to consider and look into and read about.

There is a beguiling arbitrariness to where we set the beginnings and ends of years. If the orbit of the Earth around the sun were a perfect circle (which it isn’t), then there would be no one point on its orbit that would be distinguishable from any other point and the arbitrariness would be complete. But even with the orbit of the Earth being (essentially) an ellipse, there are distinguishable points on its orbit (from the lore of conic sections), but these aren’t the points we’ve chosen. And so there is something to look into here.

But that’s something for another day. There is a cultural tradition of sorts to set resolutions for the new year, changes of behavior that we wish to implement for ourselves.

We begin the year with the resolutions fresh and bright in our minds, but like a beleaguered prime minister in a race of endurance against a head of lettuce, they fade quickly as the days pass.

As we stand here on the verge of the second week of the new year, it makes some sense to ponder this cultural tradition. I have a few resolutions that are already fading, and I suspect that others might as well.

One thing I’m querying is this habit of making resolutions at a point in the year when we tend to be busy with things, family visits for instance and other calls on our time. Changing habits is difficult. Introducing new habits bring with it one set of challenges, while breaking old habits brings a different set of challenges, and those two sets of challenges are somewhat orthogonal.

And all we can do is to work through them. For me, going back to a recent piece, I’m trying to start over. I’m taking the projects I’ve given myself over recent years and I’m conducting an inventory of what should remain on the list and what should be left off. And so I’m giving myself some time and some space to decide, what are my resolutions for the year and what are then my projects that will arise from these resolutions.

And one of the difficulties with this is that I keep finding things that are interesting, and I keeping being reminded that finding and asking an interesting question (going back to the above) is far easier and far quicker than answering those questions, and so do we begin the new year.

Posted in bizarre and random things

project bankruptcy

•17 December 2023 • 1 Comment

The turn of one (Gregorian) year to another is traditionally a time from resolutions, for taking stock of the previous year and thinking forward to the year to come. I’m typically not much minded towards resolutions, but I have been known to indulge from time to time.

But I’m also aware that I have a tendency, which I’ve had since I was a much younger person, of having eyes bigger than my stomach. That is, I make plans more extensive than the available time allows.

This has a clear result, that my lists of things to do get longer, longer beyond my ability to do them given all of the everything else that life and work require.

Some long time ago, I heard the story of someone whose email inbox had gotten out of control. Too many unread emails. Too many notifications of things requiring their attention. And so they declared email bankruptcy. They deleted the whole of their inbox and sent out a message to everyone, basically saying, if you were waiting on a response then you need to resend, because it’s all gone. Just, gone.

Perhaps it’s a true story, perhaps it’s apocryphal. It doesn’t matter, for the lesson it gives. The thought that occurred is, perhaps I need to do the same with the ever growing list of projects.

What’s interesting is that my list of projects is an internal thing. They are my projects, and so it’s not the same as deleting the expectations of others. Rather, I have to think, which of these things, some of which I’ve carried with me for years, some of which I’ve carried for decades, which do I say, no more. No more attention. No more time.

Like a proper bankruptcy, it’s going to require some time, to sort through them and make the necessary decisions. But I think the time has come. More to follow.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

reading in hindsight: Or All the Seas With Oysters by Avram Davidson

•26 November 2023 • Leave a Comment

Memory is a fickle thing. I’ve been doing some house cleaning recently, of the house in which I grew up, and while doing so I found lots of clothes hangers and paperclips, alligator clips and other office supply ephemera. And all of this brought to mind a story I remembered, by Avram Davidson.

So I dug around and found a copy, and it’s not nearly as strange a story as I remember it being. I have this vague memory of reading collected short stories of Davidson and them being very strange, and perhaps some of the ones I haven’t yet reread are very strange, but perhaps it’s just that my personal threshold is a lot higher than it used to be, from lots of reading.

The basic idea of the story is that there is an animal, whose life cycle goes from safety pins to coat hangers to bicycles, and the ebbs and flow of generations is why we sometimes cannot find a safety pin when we were sure we had many, or why there are so many abandoned bicycles on the side of the road.

The bit I’d misremembered were the safety pins. For some reason I thought it was paperclips, which is why my recent house cleaning experience brought the story to mind.

It’s always a strange experience reading a story from long ago; this particular story was written before I was born, around 1962, The story felt a bit old, in terms of the language, but it also felt a bit archaic, in terms of how the social interactions among the characters are described.

I can see though why the story struck in my memory, albeit imperfectly. Like many others, as gauged by the success of shows such as the X-files and Fringe, contemplate the possibility that there is something beyond the things we standardly see, and for me I can understand why.

We as humans have only been diligent in our exploration of the world around us, far and near, for few thousand years. Our ancient ancestors knew a great many things, and I keep being amazed at the articles in science magazines about what the ancients were capable of, but the world, the universe, is a vast and mysterious place, and we are to some extent bound by what we have witnessed and experienced in our local patch of the universe.

One example of this is the science coming out of the JWST and the observations we’re now able to make about the early history of the universe, and how we keep finding things that seem to test or challenge our current understanding of those early days of the everything that is.

And so why shouldn’t there be things that we have just overlooked, much closer to our own daily experiences. And this gets back to one of the reasons I like reading, particularly short stories, because they are such wonderful exercises of imagination and possibility.

Posted in bizarre and random things

the persistence of old myths

•29 October 2023 • Leave a Comment

I spent a bit of time this weekend just ending undertaking a bit of tidying of my desk at home. It is a Sisyphean task; it’s always a matter of tidy; find something more; tidy some more; find yet more, never ending.

I think I’m just in one of those Sisyphean phases at the moment, feeling that I’m never quite getting the stone to the top of the mountain. But I’m confident as well that it’s just a phase, something that will pass.

But one of the things I found, tucked away in a folder that itself was tucked away in a desk, was an old slightly faded list of possible topics for future blog posts. Some have been crossed out, but more remain.

The one that caught my eye was, ‘training closed, education open.’ It took a few moments but then I remembered what I’d intended by that. I was talking to someone, I can’t remember who, about the difference between training and education. This ties into that larger topic of the purpose of education.

One can take the view that training is a closed process: we are trained for particular tasks; we undertake training to learn or hone or refine a particular skill. But training has an end point that depends on the task under consideration. So I can go on a training course to learn Excel; I can undertake training for a marathon or a triathlon; I can (and have) undertake training to become a better line manager.

On the other hand, one can take the view that education is an open process. There is not a specific goal, in the way there is for training. Yes, it might be that as part of the education process, I become a better mathematician, but this is a much more open, a much broader end goal to the process.

Perhaps it’s just that I want there to be a significant difference between training and education. I do see a difference, but looking back, I’m not sure my thoughts are sufficient clear for me to persuade you of the difference.

I can look at the other big things in my days as well, where I spend my time. Aikido involves a lot of training. Particular techniques. Particularly break falls. But there is education there as well, which technique for instance in which particular circumstance, and how to understand how bodies move.

For writing, there is training in grammar and structure, but the education I think of a writer is a broader, more general process, that comes from reading and putting down words, putting down words, putting down words.

We are almost in November, and so it’s time now to put down some words and continue the education of this writer. I’ll keep working through this list over time, and thinking more about this distinction that I see between training and education.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

more on teaching

•22 October 2023 • Leave a Comment

We are three weeks into our semester and I’m very much enjoying the teaching this year. My class, Graph Theory, seems to be going well and I’ve given a talk in the undergraduate seminar which seemed to attract some interest.

And the aikido teaching is also going well. We have some new members of the club and so I’m starting the process of learning to fall. I always find this process interesting, because falling well is something that can always be improved.

I don’t think there’s a specific reason why. Perhaps it’s that we’re a few years out from the hard years of the pandemic and students (and staff) are more comfortable. Perhaps I’ve just started seeing new things in the material and am enjoying sharing them.

Interestingly, I don’t view myself as a natural teacher; my memory of my days when I started teaching are not especially happy, but I do feel that I’ve made myself into a good teacher over the years.

And this is something I believe, that anyone can make themselves into a good teacher. It takes some practice and reflection, but it is a belief I hold, in part arising from my own personal journey.

The same holds for me as a teacher of aikido. As with math, gather and develop some experience and expertise; reflect on the good lessons and the bad, and I don’t think we pay enough attention to the lessons from the bad sessions; and steal from all the good teachers and all the bad, because there is so much that can be learned from all.

And so we move forward. We learn how to be better at the things we do, whether they are the things we do for ourselves or the things we do for others, walking the halls of the house of kaizen.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, education and university life

Ponderations

•15 October 2023 • Leave a Comment

The weather’s turned cold; just for the weekend, as going to warm of during the week, but winter has sent through its early calling card. The leaves on the trees are turning, some admittedly more resistant than others.

The cats like the colder weather, as they enjoy the fires in the evening, warming their bellies.

For lots of reasons, I’ve been thinking about the passage of time, the eddies and rapids in the river as it flows. Part of this, I’m aware, is my current fascination with my lists and how I’m working through them.

Part of it comes from sitting in the lounge or walking down the hallway upstairs, looking at all the books I’ve not yet read, and oh how do we make the time to do all that reading, particularly since glossy enticing books keep coming into the world.

At the beginning of the year, I set myself a reading project, but I’ve not yet started it and where has the year gone.

Thinking about it, reflecting as the sun sinks low in the sky, a significant piece arises in the accumulation of things. Work begets more work, as I develop expertise at dealing with complicated things, I remain on the list of people who get asked to deal with complicated things., and complicated things take time and attention.

I can remember an appraisal meeting with a senior colleague, many years ago now, where he told me the thing I needed to learn is how to say no. It’s something I’m still working on and is not something I do well.

But it’s all OK. I’ll reset my reading project, perhaps the same and perhaps something different. November is looming and I’ve never successfully NaNoWriMo-ed. The books are patient on their shelves, at least at the moment. And I’ll work on making my lists more reasonable for the days, because some days are by their nature busier than others.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

on teaching

•8 October 2023 • Leave a Comment

We are one week into the new academic year, and I am reminded again of just how much I love teaching. There are several coal faces in academic life: one is this interaction with students; another is facing a research question that remains intimidating and mysterious; a third is taking on a new administrative responsibility and navigating a different aspect of university life.

I find joy in starting a new year and teaching a new group of students. Each group of students has its own personality, and I’ve always enjoyed the conversation involved in getting to know someone new.

Something similar happens in aikido, though not quite so starkly. We welcome beginners all through the year, but with the new students arriving at the beginning of the year, and older students wanting a change to their standard routine, we get a bulge of new people at this time of year.

This means we need to remind ourselves of the basics, falling and stances, basic movements and the foundational techniques, so that the joining beginners develop an understanding of how to move and how to fall.

But with both groups, I get once again to share the insights I’ve developed over the years. This gets back to things I’ve talked about to some extent, for instance the distance between experienced teacher and beginning student. I have to be especially sensitive to this distance in working with the new students, but I always enjoy the reminder.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, education and university life, mathematics

on structures of words

•1 October 2023 • Leave a Comment

I’ve always been a reader, a devourer of words. Recently, I’ve felt a bit out of sorts, and I’ve come to realize that this is because I haven’t been keeping up with my reading. So this weekend, I spent some time with the words and I feel more settled for it.

But I’ve also recently been spending time stringing words together. The Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference 2023 ended last weekend, and that was an awesome week of hanging out with other writers of words.

For roughly five and a half years, I’ve been writing a haiku each day. I can’t remember why I started this particular exercise, but it’s been an interesting journey. Writing within such a tight structure – three lines, of five and seven and five syllables – is a fascinating challenge. Some days, the words come easily and some days, it requires effort to find suitable words to make up the count.

Some days, the haiku makes no sense but other days, I feel like the unknown craftsman of Yanagi Soetsu, fashioning and fashioning and on rare occasion, producing something of great beauty.

Even writing a mathematical paper puts my words (and formulae) into a particular structure, since there is a standardness to many papers. Or at least, to many of my papers.

A blank page, an idea before the words have gone down on paper, can be an intimidating sight, and so having a structure within which to work can be a useful thing, at least for me. But then, as with all of these, I’m just writing out of my own experience.

Even a blog post such as this, to get a bit recursive, is an engaging experience at the best of times. Blog posts tend to be relatively short, focusing on a single topic, raising many possible roads for exploration but alas, not having the time to walk them.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

the efficiency of shelves

•10 September 2023 • 1 Comment

I’ve spent some time recently helping my sisters pack up the house we grew up in. It was an emotional experience, but I’m still unpacking that (no pun intended) (probably) and want to take this particular perambulation in a different direction.

One of our early tasks was to pack up the books, and there were a lot of books, to go off to their new homes. In doing so, I was struck by just how efficient shelves are.

This is not a particularly notable observation, but it did ring with me. Part of that efficiency is that books are heavy and one shelf can handle enough books to make a box heavy to lift. And there was much lifting. But beyond that, shelves are efficient in their tidiness; a few reasonably sized shelves give rise to a small pyramid of boxes.

At this middle stage of my life, I have some reasonably nice shelves around the house, and more books than can fit comfortably upon them. But what to do about this is a different question, and again one I won’t address here.

Earlier in my life, I had crude shelves, boards and cinderblocks, and shelves are something that we are all familiar with and may not give a second thought to. But what’s the history of shelving? What is the archaeological evidence for the persistence of shelving through human permanent settlements?

I’m sure there is a niche of scholarly activity wherein people spend their time packing and unpacking the human history of shelving, and I may have to do some exploration of that scholarly activity, because I’m curious.

After all, we are coming to understand our earlier human selves more and more deeply as time goes on, how they lived and how they furnished their permanent settlements, and I wonder now whether we have some estimate of when shelving first appeared.

But beyond that, I now need to go back and look at how I use my shelves. Books, yes many books, and other things, nicknacks and things collected over many years, some of which have been tucked away behind other things.

And so, shelves. Good things, shelves. Useful. Overpacked. Carrying the weight of memories that we’ve accumulated over the years. Viva the shelf.

Posted in bizarre and random things

the habitual

•20 August 2023 • Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about habits. I’ve done some amount of reading over the years, and I’ve been considering how I work my way though the days and weeks.

I recognize that some people feel that habits are counterproductive, in the sense for instance of being a straightjacket on their passage through their days, but I’m coming to see that a set of regular habits is helpful for me.

Part of this is me reflecting on my aikido practice. Our annual summer school was last week, a good solid week of aikido, and I came away with a few souvenirs, a tweaks shoulder and a sore foot, but I also came away, as I do every year, with an appreciation of what the regular application of effort can accomplish.

In a sense, this is the opposite of a stream slowly eroding away a rock sitting in the water, as I’m building up my level of skill over time. It is the case that my speed of increase has essentially leveled off at this point, and given how long I’ve been practicing that’s only to be expected.

But there are other areas where I haven’t been as diligent about applying effort as regularly as I apply effort to aikido. And I think those areas of activity would benefit from that regular application of effort.

This is not a new realization; I’ve been through this cycle before, I’ve had this realization before, but what might be different this time is that, for all sorts of reasons around all parts of my life, I may finally be ready to listen.

And so I’m writing in praise of the habitual. Of having a structure and a schedule, and even (as in the case of my stretching regime) doing the same activities regularly, and just listening while doing them. Interrogating them through the activities, and listening to what they say.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

further consideration of the Toolmaker Koan

•30 July 2023 • Leave a Comment

I keep coming back to the Toolmaker Koan. I’ve written about this before HERE (and perhaps elsewhere). But the koan is basically the observation that the ability to make tools seems to outpace the capacity, the understanding to use those tools well.

We are developing, and have developed, some incredibly powerful tools, whether we use a limited definition of tool or a broad definition. I’ve been reading a lot about the machine learning tools we’ve been developing, such as the large language models that machinize a strange global average of language.

There is a lot of speculation about what impact these large language models and their successors will have on current human civilization. I work in one of the professions, education, that is sometimes mentioned as one of the professions at risk, with speculation such as individual artificial intelligences for each person, developing and monitoring their own individual educational journey.

We will spend the next few years working through the implications of this particular tool, hoping that we don’t find ourselves in a Skynet or Colossus scenario. But there are other tools.

There is the classic tool that provokes thoughts of survival or destruction: the fission bomb and its bigger, angrier cousin, the fusion bomb. I won’t spend much time here, because we’ve been living with this for decades now.

There are many directions we can go from here. One is to broaden the definition of tool. We are experiencing at the moment interesting consequences of the limited liability corporation, and I think the corporation is a fascinating tool.

One idea here is that the corporation is a form of artificial (perhaps collective) intelligence. We act as individuals, but we also act as part of this larger organization, which as its own goals, which might be goals with longer time lines than individual human lives.

So many tools to consider. And right now, I’m watching Unknown: Cave of Bones on Netflix, thinking about stone tools and the the earliest amongst us who had captured fire. And perhaps even ritual as one of our earliest tools. There is so much we don’t know and we will never know.

But I do think this is one of the fundamental questions for us to consider. How do we use well the tools we develop.

Posted in bizarre and random things

mathematical machinery

•16 July 2023 • Leave a Comment

For reasons I don’t want to go into yet, though I will at some point, I’ve been thinking through aspects of the machinery that mathematicians use to explore the mathematical landscape.

OK, fine, I’m speculating, as others have done, about how mathematics can be used as the underpinning framework for magic in a story I’m pondering, and in particular whether there’s something nifty and interesting I can bring to that conversation.

There are lots of places to start this speculation; one of them is the humble If Then logical implication. As tempting as I might it to be, I won’t dive into the glorious pool that is mathematical logic, but I will say that the basic structure of this statement is If X Then Y, where X and Y are themselves statements.

We then explore the truth or not of the whole statement ‘If X Then Y’ in terms of the truth of X and Y individually, and this is normally expressed as a table of values. (If you want to know more, you can look at the Logical Implication section of Truth Tables.)

But I want to go in a different direction here. There is an enormous power in being able to decide the scale and scope of consideration in the If statement, the X above, and then to create something in the Then statement, the Y above, so that the world created Y falls within the scale and scope of X. That is, we get something along the lines of If World Then Story.

This is one lens through which to consider fictional worlds and the stories set within those stories, whether the statement If World Then Story works as an internally consistent story.

I don’t want to get into the details of the story I’m working my way through; hopefully, in the not too distant future, I’ll be able to point you to where you might read it.

I’ll admit that I’m not yet persuaded that there is anything nifty or weirdly interesting about what I’m thinking through here, but I view it as a first step in a much longer journey. Who knows, maybe I can smuggle enough things in to make mathematicians of people without then even knowing it. One can dream, after all.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

cycles and rhythms

•25 June 2023 • Leave a Comment

We are at the end of our academic year. Teaching has finished, exams have been sat and marked, and we’re at the end of our boards of examiners process, getting ready for marks release to students on Thursday. And here, I find myself thinking about the rhythm of the year.

Highs and lows, busy times and somewhat less busy times, the year does have its own particular rhythm, and so that rhythm will restart, getting ready for the next year. And so one task for the summer is to go through the notes I’ve written for the class, read some papers and make some additions to the notes, polishing and refining what’s there.

The aikido year also has its rhythm. I didn’t make as many of the courses through the year as I’d hoped, but we are getting close to our annual summer school, which I’ve very much looking forward to. I know that at the end of the week I’ll ache, and it will take a few days for that ache to ease, but it’s a bookend of sorts.

There are the quiet rhythms that inhabit individual days, from waking and journaling, reading, working and aikido and writing.

Interlocking rhythms, short and long, and what song to they combine to sing, and that’s the song of the shape of a life. Each of us with our song, the harmony and dissonance of families and friends. Together, all of us on this Earth combine in a grand and glorious opera, but our collective song is not yet finished.

I’ve been thinking about Surak, the (fictional) character who led the Vulcans away from this song of violence to their (in our watching) current path of logic. I’ve commented on Surak before, but what I find interesting today is that there were always a few Vulcans in the various series of Star Trek who didn’t follow the way of logic, or who disagreed about what the path of logic meant.

Surak comes to mind because I wonder whether we’ll find ourselves, collectively and voluntarily, looking for a Surak, a way for us to follow, and one that we can agree on. What makes this complicated is that there are already a number of different ways that various folk have promulgated as ways for humanity going forward, but we haven’t yet collectively agreed on one to follow.

What will be the song of humanity. Science fiction has been writing about possibilities, optimistic and not, of this song for decades. But what will be our song.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, education and university life

reading in hindsight: The Weapon by Fredric Brown

•4 June 2023 • Leave a Comment

On my shelves, I have many books, some read but most unread. Among these are collections of stories that I’m slowly working, or reworking, my way through. (And my but some folk wrote a lot of stories: Sturgeon collected stories run to 12 volumes, and others like Vonnegut are large enough to count as weight lifting.)

One I like picking up is the collected stories of Fredric Brown. Writing in the 1940s to 1960s, Brown had some lovely ideas, albeit wrapped in stories that are problematically of their time, and one idea that I was reminded of today is from his 1951 story The Weapon. If you haven’t yet read it, there will be spoilers.

Dr James Graham is working on an ultimate weapon, a fact evidently publicly known. He is visited by a stranger named Niemand, who asks the question, ‘Is humanity ready for an ultimate weapon?’ Graham doesn’t listen and so Niemand then provides a demonstration of the dangers of giving a weapon to someone not capable of wielding it.

I’m sure that some amount has been written about possible interpretations of the story, but I will note that Ivy Mike, the first fusion bomb, was tested on 1 November 1952, and so this story sits in that complicated time in the early days of what became the nuclear arms race.

But if we take a step back and focus not on weapons but rather ideas, are we in the same situation? Are we, the collective we of humanity, developing ideas that we may not be capable of handling well in the end?

The first possible answer goes back to what might have been Brown’s initial inspiration and the nuclear bomb. If I remember correctly things I read a long time ago, there is an upper limit to the size of a fission bomb but there is no theoretical upper bound to the size of a fusion bomb, except where limited by imagination. And so this had to count.

But there are others. There may be an argument that the idea of a corporation might be an idea that we’re not entirely capable of handling well. One aspect of this I’ve encountered on more than one occasion is the view that corporations are the first instances of an artificial intelligence, something ultimately non-human (though made up of human agents) that has agency and desires.

The version of this filling the news at the moment are the chatbots. Again, I think the argument that we’re not prepared for the consequences of this creation is a strong one, even taking into account that this isn’t an artificial intelligence as such, but rather is a reflection of who we are. After all, the chatbots are trained one what’s been written and so in some strong sense, they’re a distillation of what we collectively have expressed over the years, decades, centuries.

This is a slightly different conversation than doomsday devices, another topic I feel worthy of consideration if only to understand paths not to walk, but still a conversation that we need to have lest we sleepwalk into a world that is significantly less comfortable than our current world with all its faults and complications.

So one very short story with a moral, are we ready for the things we make with our hands, but regardless of the answer, the big question remains. What next. What happens when we have built a weapon, in however general a sense. This ties into other thoughts about the toolmaker koan, that loosely it’s easier to build a tool than to use it well, and perhaps developing our understanding here is the next great quest.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

a time for some reflection

•28 May 2023 • Leave a Comment

The current academic year is coming to its end; I taught my last class a week and a bit ago, and my next proper class (besides the occasional seminar) will be in the autumn. There is a vast amount to be done over the summer, not directly related to teaching but directly related to the job as a whole. One research paper is largely done, needed a bit of tidying and some attention at one point of the argument. Another paper dances before my eyes, a mirage on the horizon, as yet unformed and nascent.

There are other projects as well, problems I would like to spend some time thinking about and working through. This is a part of the job, voyaging beyond the frontiers of extant human knowledge (how grand it sounds).

And both of these aspects of the role are aspects of it that I enjoy. Working with students and expanding their mathematical horizons, and then expanding the horizons of mathematics itself, are engaging and awesome experiences.

But this time, at the end of the teaching year, is a time for reflection. The teaching year went well, I think. I picked up a new class in semester 2, and I learned a lot and I hope the students did as well. This intertwines in some way to topics I’ve covered in previous chapters in this extended scree, such as the distance between teacher and student.

So in this case, though I hadn’t taught the class before, I have a few decades of both the experience of doing math and making sense of math, but also of teaching, of making sense of new things and relating them to other aspects of math. And what’s interesting is that in the process of preparing and teaching, I came across one or two things that I might be able to use in some of my mathematical project work.

There are other sides to this reflection, beyond the day job. There is the old parable of rock and gravel and sand. And it’s again time to undertake the audit, to empty the jar as it were and to examine my current rocks, my current gravel and my current sand. It’s a tricky examination, because all come with their sunk costs. And the fallacy notwithstanding, it’s hard to grind rocks into sand or to press sand to form gravel. It’ll be an interesting summer.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

watching in hindsight (again): Colossus the Forbin Project

•14 May 2023 • 1 Comment

A few years ago, I wrote about a 1970 movie I find myself coming back to from time to time, Colossus the Forbin Project. What struck me today was not the naïveté of the creators of Colossus and Guardin, but rather the prescience of the movie, and the books it’s taken from, in setting forth the emergence of new properties.

In the movie, this emergence comes at the beginning; the extent to which Colossus begins almost immediately to exceed the expectations of its human creators, amazingly without causing panic. This is the theme that drives the movie, that Colossus is more that was was created, and the humans never catch up to how Colossus is growing.

One key moment of this emergence of capabilities is the moment that Colossus makes use of the tools available to it, to enforce its demands. And when Colossus decides not to answer.

The reason this struck home with me today is the almost constant speculation in the news and commentary about the unexpected emergent properties of our current artificial intelligence systems, as well as the speculation about the danger of continued development.

I will admit that I don’t see the development stopping or even slowing down. As has become obvious, we humans can be short sighted in our thinking, chasing the shiny at the expense of running into the road, into oncoming traffic.

But I suspect we’ll continue to experience unexpected emergent properties of the systems we develop, and this should also not surprise us. We are creating systems where we understand the basic shape of the system, but the details of the system are beyond the ability of our human minds to contain. I suspect the systems we build will continue to surprise us, and we should not be surprised by those surprises.

Another interesting aspect of this is that we saw this possibility, decades ago. Runaway robots, Colossus, Hal and all the others, they were Cassandras of sorts, ghosts from the dark corners of our imaginations, perhaps now brought to life by our hands. Interesting, isn’t it, the extent to which we don’t pay attentions to our own stories.

Posted in bizarre and random things

A random collection of moments

•30 April 2023 • Leave a Comment

Some long time ago, measured by where it sits on the list of collected things, I wrote down the sentence, ‘a user guide is an admission of failure.’ I can see what I meant by this. Devices have become much easier to use, going back to the original iPod with its scroll wheel.

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague not so recently, about how students learning to code don’t understand file structures, because they never needed to. They don’t need to organize themselves; they can just search and they will find.

What implications does this observation about user guides have for education? I’m not sure, but education is full of user guides: textbooks, lecture notes, problem sheets, all can be thought of as user guides to particular areas of knowledge. But I don’t think this is the right visualization.

Rather, I think that the textbook or the lecture notes or the problem sheets are the devices rather than the user guides to those devices. So in this interpretation, the lack of a user guide translates to having a well structured textbook.

Bob the cat has developed the habit of walking across my keyboard and sitting on the papers on my desk when he wants a bit of attention. I of course indulge him, scratches under the chin.

It takes time and effort, and a lot of thought, to write a good textbook. I’ve written one, on Hyperbolic Geometry, and like potato chips, it’s hard to write just one 😉 And so part of what is on the list of things to think about is, what might be the next one.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, mathematics

the parable of the oak and the willow

•23 April 2023 • Leave a Comment

There is an old story, which I might be misremembering. An oak tree and a willow tree, who had grown up next to each other, were having a conversation. The oak was glorying in the strength of its trunk and its branches, claiming that it could withstand the strongest of storms. The willow extolled the virtues of flexibility, of rolling with the strength of the storm rather than fighting it directly.

When the storm came, as storms always do, the oak found itself broken, where as the willow, aside from losing some leaves and smaller of its branches, remained standing.

I have a lot of sympathy for this parable. I’m not sure of the strength of its horticultural veracity, but I’ve always found it to make a certain kind of sense. It’s come to mind recently, I suppose, because of the storms, physical and cultural, that are currently swirling around. (I think perhaps I watch too much news.)

Beyond that, my aikido practice is much more willow-like than oak-like. Falling like a tree is not a good way to fall, for instance. And as I get older, the idea of using strength rather than technique and movement and flexibility becomes less attractive over time.

But it applies elsewhere as well. It can be applied for instance to teaching. The oak stands and says, this is my way and this is the way, and requires students to do as they do. The willow is more flexible, more adaptable to the individual student. Or so goes one interpretation.

I contemplate this parable particularly at times when I feel more oak-like than willow-like. Because there is an easiness to being oak-like; I will stand here and I will be, and I will let the winds whistle through my branches and leaves.

I find there to be a theoretical, hypothetical attraction to the way of the willow, but it does require more effort to move and be flexible than it does to stand in glorious ignorance of the world. And some days, it’s just hard to move, and it’s hard to move in response to the world. But still, the parable I think holds a clue to something more. The quest continues.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, education and university life

Eastercon 2023 diary – day three

•9 April 2023 • Leave a Comment

The formal duties for the day are done; the Milford panel has been panelled and we sold more copies of the Eclectic Dreams anthology today, though I will be taking a few home tomorrow.

I will keep coming back to this point, but it’s good to see people. That said, there is one topic that keeps coming up in conversation, which is that engaging and interacting with large groups of people takes a remarkable amount of energy.

This is something I’m used from teaching, and the occasional feeling of dragging the class through the journey from blissful ignorance to understanding, but just interacting takes a lot of energy. Meeting new people, remembering names and context, fitting them into the growing context of the community, takes more energy than I’d remembered.

This is perhaps because in the Before Times, it was just a cost that we didn’t think about; I dealt with people every day, new and old, and I never thought to put a cost on it, because it was just part of what the days involved.

But the calculation is different now, if only because it is more explicit. And the question I’ve been asking myself today is, how to build that cost into future considerations. I like people, at least as much as any extroverted introvert likes people (namely, until we don’t).

In my work life, and my aikido life both, the group of people I deal with is constrained, mainly people I already know and work with (or throw around, respectively), and I don’t do much in the way of Eastercon people. So something to think through.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

Eastercon 2023 diary – day 2

•8 April 2023 • Leave a Comment

I’d intended on writing from Eastercon on each of its days, but alas got distracted by seeing old friends and making new friends, and fell down on day one. We’ll see how the rest of the weekend goes.

But here we are in day two, and it’s going well. The sun is shining, the panels are humming and I’m currently sitting in the Room of Buying and Selling with a small pile of copies of Eclectic Dreams.

This is an anthology of stories (which I was pleased to co-edit, with Pete Sutton and Liz Williams) that have passed through the Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference. We had the formal book event yesterday afternoon, and should you not be at Eastercon, you can order your copy via the links contained HERE (so get your copy today!).

Beyond that, being here reminds me of this sprawling community of science fiction and fantasy that I’m a part of. I’ll admit that sitting here in the Room of Buying and Selling, the temptation to buy yet more books for the already over-burdened shelves at home is exceptionally tempting.

More than that are the people. Going to panels and listening to others talking about things they know and things that excite them, evening conversations in the bar, and catching up with people is good for the soul.

The hosts of the Deadline City podcast often talk about the necessity of filling the well, and that’s part of Eastercon does for me. I experience the same refilling in other parts of my life, with aikido summer school and the occasional math conference, and I do love the energy of being in the midst of so many like minded folk.

Posted in bizarre and random things, Uncategorized, writing ephemera

reading in hindsight: Jokester by Isaac Asimov

•2 April 2023 • 1 Comment

I like dipping back into the (personally) distant past and seeing what stories from those days have to say to us today. I picked up Jokester by Isaac Asimov earlier today; the core idea of it had stuck with me since I read it the first time, because I enjoyed the twist, but it was a smaller aspect of the story that caught my attention.

To add a bit of context, the news over the past few weeks and months have been filled with stories about ChatGPT3 and its cousins, and the impact that they might have on education (where I spend a chunk of my days), among other fields.

The aspect of Jokester that caught my attention was the core fact of the existence of the Grand Masters, such as Grand Master Meyerhof who drives the action in this story. This core fact is that there is a subtlety and a skill required to appropriately frame a question for a computer such as Multivac.

Or for ChatGPT3. I’ve not done a lot of playing around with it directly, but I know folk who have spent more time than perhaps is entirely wise. One thing that’s come out of my conversations with them, and the reading I’ve been able to do, is that, the output can depend a lot on how the question for such Large Language Models is framed.

And this brought me back to Grand Master Meyerhof; not actually the questions he asked, as interesting as they are, but that the skill of the dozen or so Grand Masters was to be able to frame the question.

Thinking of Large Language Models and their impact on education, just to focus attention, it seems that this provides a bit of direction for us to work to work with. These tools are not going away; the main question for us is, how to use them and more even than that, how to use them well.

I’m reminded here of the toolmaker koan, a novel by John McLoughlin, that I haven’t read for a long long time. But it does contain the basic question, is it always the case that a civilization will develop tools before it develops the ability to use them, and this strikes me as where we are at the moment.

We have developed some awesome and mighty tools. Perhaps these tools won’t allow us to answer Grand Master Meyerhof’s question as Multivac was able to, but they do pose this question for us. Will we have or develop the wisdom to use them well? Or won’t we? We will soon find out.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

Moby Dick as a metaphor

•12 March 2023 • Leave a Comment

Every couple of years, I go back and read Moby Dick. I first read as a university student, and I’ll admit that the first time through was something of a slog. But as I’ve gone through and through again, it’s begun to grow on me.

Moby Dick contains many things that we can view as metaphor; we’ve become familiar of the great white whale as the elusive object of obsession. For me, the great white whale is often a research question, one of the questions on the LIST, which recedes every time I make an attempt.

I haven’t thought too deeply about the metaphor, beyond trying to prevent myself from becoming a mathematical Ahab. I don’t know for instance where Queequeg makes an appearance in this metaphor, or Ismael. But I do often have Starbucks whispering in my ear, advising me, persuading me to spend time on the questions on which I can make some progress, despite the howls of protest from Ahab and his old questions.

The metaphor of Moby Dick also works for aikido and writing. The things to do, the voice of obsession, the dissenting voice and Ismael at the end holding on to the coffin so carefully made and carved by Queequeg.

But this leads me down another line of inquiry (enquiry?) entirely. (In the balance, probably a bit more enquiry than inquiry.) Would Melville be surprised at the metaphors we pull out from his story? Would he be surprised at how Moby Dick and Ahab have become part of the imagery we use and the descriptions we give?

I don’t actually know. I hope he would be appreciative. But I do know, as do we all, that we each read things into stories and novels that the author may not have intended. And that’s just part of the way of things.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

fiction

•26 February 2023 • 3 Comments

On the one hand, fiction is an integral part of our lives, and impossible to imagine without. For all of recorded human history and beyond, we have told stories around the fire to keep our worries occupied and our minds warm.

The bookshelves around the house are full of fiction, and I enjoy exploring its pages. Some contain stories I want to explore again and again, Gilgamesh comes to mind and Dune, and some are stories through which once was sufficient. At least so far.

But on the other hand, fiction is a strange thing. I’m wandering far afield here, but is it really the case that human experience is so thin that we require stories beyond that experience?

I wonder some times what might happen when we do encounter an alien race, extraterrestrials, that don’t understand the concept of fiction. I’m sure that people have written variants of this story, and if you have recommendations for what I should read, please let me know.

But from this, we can spiral into speculation, about what that first encounter might be like. Their lack of comprehension, our lack of comprehension at their lack of comprehension. And so, what’s the story.

Can there exist a race that doesn’t tell stories, that doesn’t so exercise their imagination? And more importantly, would we want to be friends with such a race? Trading partners perhaps, but we would have to answer the question, how much do our stories mean to us?

And I think our answer would have to be, quite a lot really. Everything perhaps.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

reading in hindsight: The Man Who Had No Idea and chatbots

•19 February 2023 • Leave a Comment

Barry Riordan is The Man Who Had No Idea, the protagonist of this 1978 short story by Thomas M. Disch. I’d first read the story a long time ago, in a collection of short stories acquired possibly in a second hand book shop of the sort I spent a lot of time and money in when I was significantly younger.

The idea of the story (no pun intended) stuck with me, even if the details and characters (such as Mad Madeline Swain the poet and Cinderella Johnson and her love of single shoes) had slipped through the cracks of memory. The basic idea is of a world in which people need a license to engage in conversation, and the story follows Barry in his almost unsuccessful quest for his.

The story came out mind amidst all of the recent news stories and commentary about the various chatbots and the difficulties they’re having with engaging in conversation. Admittedly, they don’t have Barry’s difficulty, of not knowing how to start a conversation, but rather difficulties of a very different sort.

As much as it’s something that we as humans engage in to a quite significant extent, I think that part of what we’re seeing through these news stories is that conversation is difficult. It requires pulling together, bringing together material from many places and doing real time reflective engagement through the process.

As we go through the short story, we watch Barry get better, to the point of generating a list of ideas for poor mad Madeline, a few of which become some of her better poems. In the same way, I’m sure we’ll witness the various chatbots getting better at chatting, through I do suspect it might take somewhat longer than it took Barry.

Those who know me moderately well will know that I sometimes express some degree of surprise and dismay that we are working ever so hard to equip the machine world with the tools it needs to pull a proper Skynet, or something much deeper and even more effective.

Robot dogs that can run and climb stairs. Facial recognition. Autonomous drones and other weapon systems. Voice recognition. Applying machine learning to develop toxins unlike any seen before. Gait recognition. And how, the conversational, so that even the Turing test won’t save us.

This is an old story and one told many times. This is the story of our capacity for developing tools before or without developing the wisdom needed to use the tools effectively. And so, might the future savior of humanity be the person who can’t be emulated by a smooth talking chatbots, as our last defense against our own creations?

Posted in bizarre and random things

reflections on reflections

•12 February 2023 • Leave a Comment

Scrolling to the bottom of its homepage, I note that the first blog post I wrote is dated 10 February 2013, ten years ago this weekend. I suspect in fact that this is a bit of a artifact, in that I suspect I started drafting it then but didn’t publish it until later, and somehow the date assigned was the date the drafting started until the date the drafting finished. One piece of evidence for this is that the second post didn’t show up until nine months later, in November, and another is the first line of the piece itself.

That first piece was entitled the power of number, and it sets out the basic observation that once we start assigning numbers to things, perhaps for the purpose of ranking, then the meaning drifts into the number, at the expense of that to which the number was assigned. And over the past ten years, I have become more convinced that it’s true.

Another of those early posts was on another aspect of numbers, namely that the words we use to describe number hide the magnitude of the numbers themselves, and this also ties into the difficulty that we humans have in appreciating the scale of the very large and the very small.

There are things that I have the vague memory of putting on the various lists of things to do as part of those early posts, but which have slipped down the list, or off the list entirely, with the continuing accumulation of the ephemera of daily life, the weeds which grow quickly and sometimes hide the paths on which we walk. And so time perhaps to pull some weeds and find these hidden things, and finally work them through.

Beyond that, though, there are larger pieces of work as well. For instance, I’ve written some significant number of words on aspects of teaching, both in math and in aikido, and it’s not clear to me that the current me will agree with all of the words that past mes have written. In part, this is an inevitable consequence of gaining experience through the years, reflecting on my practice through the years, and also the reflection on the experience of the past few years and how that will have changed everything. What to keep, for instance, and what of the old to allow to be gracefully retired or abandoned.

And so I think the time has perhaps come to go back, read old pieces, and have that conversation between current me and the many past mes, though interspersed with the emergent thoughts of the days to come.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, writing ephemera

the relentless march continues

•5 February 2023 • 1 Comment

Last week, I wrote about ChatGPT and the impact that it (and its siblings and cousins and distant descendants) will have on education. I would like to sketch out an optimistic potential future, because I’ve been marking today and so I’m leaning much more towards the optimistic than the pessimistic at the moment

This is a utopian vision, fueled by Federation and Culture and all of the optimistic futures that science fiction authors have projected for us over time.

At some point after we’re born, we are each assigned or gifted an artificial intelligence companion who teaches us, shepherds us, guides us on our path through the world.

Our Companion will suggest reading or watching to fuel our interests but also to stretch the outer bounds of our imagination. Our Companion will test us, working assessment into every one of our days, all of our activities. Our Companion will have as its primary objective to make us, each of us as an individual the best of us we can possibly be.

It’s a seductive future, and a future that I would love to live long enough to see, but there are issues that I can see, that we all can see, and I’m not sure how to get over those hurdles. One is, how do we bridge the gap between rich and poor. It’s easy to imagine such an optimistic and enabling future, but how do we make such a future available to everyone.

And now, a left turn. I have an idea kicking around in my head. Perhaps some day it will become a story (and before you ask, the line of ideas waiting to become stories is long and winding, and so if you have a story from this idea, have at it. I’ll do what I can to catch up). The aliens arrive and in order to join the Federation, the civilized races of our galaxy, we have only to answer a single question.

Tell us the story of humanity. Tell us the story of humanity through its individuals. So tell us the story of everyone who lived today, everyone who died today. Tell us the story of each of you, and you can join us.

I don’t know what to do with this idea, but there is a part of me that wants the aliens to land tomorrow and ask us this question. And there is a part of me that’s afraid that they might. Because we can’t answer this basic question, how do we take care of everyone. All of everyone.

I suspect this idea will lead me down some interesting alleys of consideration. But back to the original question, I would like to see a future in which each of us and all of us are granted this opportunity, to be enabled in such a bespoke way.

I don’t know though how to get from here to there. It’s easy to imagine an optimistic and utopian future, and why not dream a utopian dream. Why not. But plotting the course, ah therein lies the rub.

Posted in bizarre and random things

the relentless march of technology

•30 January 2023 • 2 Comments

When I was taking high school physics, back in the very early 1980s, sigh, my year was the first year to use a calculator rather than a slide rule. I don’t remember the model number, beyond it being Texas Instruments, but I do remember the excitement of CALCULATOR and the relief of many about not having to learn the slide rule. I’ll admit that I was always a bit bummed, though not bummed enough to go back and learn the slide rule on my own.

This memory came to mind during a recent conversation about ChatGPT and the impact it may have on education. Technology always advances, sometimes more quickly than our ability to handle the implications and aftershocks. If memory serves, Socrates all those many years ago was against writing, as it would erode memory and confuse students into thinking they had knowledge when they had only data. And so these thoughts about different technologies are not recent.

What’s interesting about this conversation is that ChatGPT is just the tip of an iceberg. The technology is advancing, and perhaps we will soon find ourselves in a science fictional universe where we are each followed from our early days by a bespoke Artificial Intelligence, teaching us and testing us and either shaping us to serve a malevolent social order or developing us into the best humans we can be, within their own limits.

But that’s the future. What happens tomorrow, and next week, and next month. How do I design an assignment that the students would be doing in their own time. The easy and simultaneously difficult answer is to impose conditions on the time and space in which students take their assessments, but I would like to contemplate a different direction, if only briefly.

For me, the question is, to what extent should we try to reduce the artificiality of assessment. One aspect of this is, why not design and deliver assessments that allow students to use all available tools. After all, out in the world, people will make use of all available tools to do the jobs they’ve agreed to do and are paid to do.

This is a long conversation, as befits a question that speaks to the foundations of what we do and how we do it. One of our basic purposes, after all, in education is to assist students in developing their knowledge and tools for engaging with the world, understanding the world, changing the world (hopefully for the better), and indeed developing a definition of better in this context.

Having put down some words, I have come to the realization that as vast a question I thought this was, it is actually a larger and broader and deeper and more complicated question. I think I need to step away, stare into the dancing fire and contemplate for more time. More to come, and I hope soon.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

and lo, the new year calls

•8 January 2023 • 2 Comments

Let me start with an apology. I don’t keep close and careful track of the topics I work my way through here, and so it may be that I cover ground that’s already been covered. And more interestingly, it may be that I cover old ground along a different path, and I’m certain that I will.

One thing (among admittedly many) that I’ve let slip over the past few years is the annual reading project. The first in 2017 was the Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, the tales of the Arabian nights, the Sir Richard Burton translation. The second, through 2018 and the first half of 2019, was the collected works of Kurt Vonnegut.

I then, in a fit of what can only be described as ambition, set myself the task of reading the literature of humanity in chronological order, from the beginning. That was a task made in ignorance of the volume of what we’ve written and what we’ve translated. I am still reading around ancient Sumer, because I find it an interesting place to visit and spend some time.

For 2021, I picked a list of 100 fantasy books to read, and I’m still working my way through that list; I’ve read a few on that list and I’ll continue to read. But for the purpose of a reading project, I don’t feel that for me, such a list makes a good project.

What I enjoy about a reading project is to immerse myself in the works of a single author, and this is something that the lists don’t offer. And so, I find myself asking, what should be the reading project for 2023. Or rather, who should be the reading project for 2023.

But how to decide? What is my process for making such a decision, since I’m deciding with whom I’ll spend a lot of 2023. (And I’m thinking about the process, because I find myself teaching a module of algorithms in semester 2 and so I’m thinking a lot about decision making processes in general).

One idea was to walk through the house and examine the various book cases and ask, whose books have I bought over the years. From whom do I have a complete or near complete collection. One idea is to ask, who do I want to read.

One idea is to do something a bit different and play two authors off one another. The benefit of this, as I learned while reading Vonnegut, is that sometimes the conversation with a single author can invoke a bit too much familiarity with their voice, depending and depending, and that sort of alternation might then prove helpful.

I’ve not read all of Samuel Delany, and so perhaps this is the year. I’ve not read all of Octavia Butler, and so perhaps this is the year. Roll on 2023.

Posted in bizarre and random things

Being interestingly wrong

•11 December 2022 • 1 Comment

We are coming to the end of our teaching term; we have one week of teaching left, before the University closes for its Christmas break. And for me, this is always a time of reflection; looking back over the past weeks of working with students and thinking about things to work into the teaching for next year.

One thing that I always reflect on is that the students are seeing the material we’re covering for the first time. I’ve taught this particular class for ten years now, and one thing I need always to bear in mind is that while I have an opportunity to continue to develop my understanding of the material, I must always remember that the students won’t have had that opportunity.

And so I need to allow them to be wrong, to miss connections between different things or to not understand why we’re taking a particular approach. And I would like them to have the opportunity to be wrong, because we learn a lot when things don’t work as we expect.

This ties into an old thing from aikido, that we don’t learn as much when things are going well. When the arguments make sense, when the techniques are working, we don’t learn. But when the arguments remain in shadows and we struggle, when the techniques aren’t moving uke and we struggle, we then need to think through the details of what we’re doing and that’s where we learn.

Another aspect of this, when we’re struggling, is to take advantage and to be wrong in interesting ways. And this is a reasonable goal, I think. We will always be learning things, and part of the process of learning is to explore and make mistakes during that exploration, but why not be wrong in new and unusual and interesting ways.

After all, why spend my time and effort, only to be wrong in a way I’ve done before.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, education and university life

the koan as a lens

•20 November 2022 • Leave a Comment

Last week, I wrote about the Art of the Question. As is often the case, the act of writing served to agitate the settled bits in my brain and the ideas have continued to ring in my head.

There is one particular form of question that I’ve always been partial to, and that is the koan: so, what is the sound of one hand clapping, and all of its kin. But what are the koans that run through my days?

Or viewed slightly differently, what of the questions I’m searching for, so that the answer becomes clear from the form and wording of the question, and can I form that question as a koan? I don’t yet have an answer to that, but it’s an interesting lens through which to view this whole process.

I’m not sure of the extent to which this is formally true, but I’ve always viewed a koan as an almost unanswerable question, whose purpose is to generate contemplation. This is how I’ve always viewed the one hand hand clapping question.

What I’m finding very interesting at the moment is that despite the readings I’ve done over time, this idea of using the koan as lens is not something I’d thought of doing before.

What might be the koan of the finitely generated intersection property, for instance. We (the collective we) have a reasonable understanding of this property though there is much we do not yet know. But I don’t know what the underlying koan might be, or if I wander into the forest of recursion, whether this question of what the koan might be, is itself a koan?

And what might be the aikido koan? This one is especially fascinating, since I’m not sure what the question to be koaned might even be. And so all I can say at this point is, the contemplation continues.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, mathematics

the art of the question

•13 November 2022 • 5 Comments

When I was young, I came across the statement, the belief, that if one were to phrase a question just right, then the answer would be obvious. I’ll admit that I’m not sure I ever actually believed this, but it’s something that I’ve always carried with me.

Looking back, I can see that this belief has always lurked in the background of my mathematical life. If we can find the right way of asking the question, then we will be able to see the path to the answer. But it has always been in the background, and this is not a danger free path. It is possible to spend a lot of time looking for that correct formulation of the question but never then get to the question itself.

This is a more interesting line of enquiry (inquiry? I need to remind myself again of the distinction) when I think of aikido. I’ve been studying aikido for a few weeks more than a quarter of a century at this point, and what’s interesting there is that I’m not sure of the question I’m trying to answer.

I didn’t begin aikido with a question. I began aikido because I’d always wanted to do a martial art, and I found myself with time I need to fill and a friend who was in the local aikido club, and once I started it just took. I’ve enjoyed it since and I enjoy it still, and I’ve moved through the ranks at a reasonable pace, but I’ve now (probably long since) reached the point where I am asking the question, why.

Why this among all other things, and going back to the beginning of this rumination, that isn’t the right question. Why in general is a strange question, because it’s so very non-specific a question. How can I move in a way to move someone else, is a better question. It’s still not the right question, but it’s closer. The quest continues.

Writing is more like mathematics, in that there isn’t a single question. In both, I have a number of different directions of wanting to understand. With mathematics, I want to understand structure, how this particular thing came to be, though there are many individual questions to formulate here.

But with writing, my questions are much less coherent. The human condition is complicated and multifaceted, and writing is an exploration of that condition. There are so many questions, from how we get through individual days to larger meaning.

Looking back, I can see that I’m still dancing around the formulated specific questions; I can see the things I want to understand, on distant hilltops, and I’m still working to formulate the questions that set out the paths to be able to find their answers.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

the size of the multiverse

•23 October 2022 • Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking recently about the size of the multiverse, and how we experience the multiverse in movies. It’s showing up a lot at present, particularly in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as older shows such as Sliders.

The reason, or a reason, why I’ve been having these thoughts is that I think the multiverse has to be much more complicated than what we’re seeing in its representations. And this comes from some nineteenth century mathematics due to Georg Cantor.

My understanding of the standard interpretation of the multiverse is that at each moment, reality branches to take into account all possibilities. One issue with this description is that at each moment, there are infinitely many possibilities, and so the structure is remarkably difficult to imagine.

There is a way of approaching this structure, but there is a piece of information we need first. Namely, if we have an infinite branching of possibilities at each moment, then one question we have to ask is, which infinity.

And this is the piece of nineteenth century mathematics. Infinity is not a unitary concept: there are multiple sizes of infinity. Strange, yes? But more than this, we mathematicians have a machine for comparing infinities, and a machine for generating a larger infinity from any given infinity, and other questions such as whether there are infinities between the ones we can construct using our machine.

But in movies and in television, the multiverse is often portrayed as a discrete object, the different universes separated from one another and labelled. And I’m happy to agree that this might be easier.

But one of the thoughts I can’t shake, one of many, is how it might be possible to describe the multiverse in a way that takes all of this on board, for an audience that may not have had exposure to this reality of multiple different infinities.

Challenges, oh all the challenges. Perhaps this story has already been written and I just haven’t come across it, and if this is the case, please do let me know.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics

the inverse TARDIS effect

•16 October 2022 • Leave a Comment

Over the course of my days on this Earth, I’ve seen a few episode of Dr Who but it wasn’t part of my science fiction heritage growing up. That said, I’m familiar with some of the basics and I’ve always been taken with the idea of the TARDIS.

While the TARDIS is a masterpiece of engineering and design, my focus here in on a particular aspect of the TARDIS, namely that it’s much larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. There are structurally similar ideas elsewhere. For instance, there is the bag of holding in Dungeons and Dragons, and the different manifestations of the portable hole.

But the idea of the inverse TARDIS effect first came to my attention some years ago, when I was moving from a smaller office in the Maths Tower to a larger room, and I found it difficult to fit into the larger office, everything that had fit reasonable well in the smaller office.

On a rational level, I have a clear idea of what might have happened. Perhaps I had more shelves in the old office and perhaps I had more cabinets. But regardless, in conversation with colleagues, they also expressed some experience with this effect as well.

But I think the inverse TARDIS effect is much broader than just its application to physical space, whether offices or moving house. It also applies to time.

Again, there is I think a rational explanation. When I was in a major administrative role, the small moments in the day, 15 minutes here or half an hour there, were exceptionally valuable, and I had to make good use of them. But now, out of that role, there isn’t the same external pressure to make best use of those small pieces of time through the day. For me, the external pressure made it easier to focus, and it’s been a relearning process to get myself back to the point of using those small pieces of time well.

Anecdotally, colleagues have mentioned that retirement can be similar. I suspect, fueled by a lack of personal experience, that this might be similar to the previous example; fewer constraints on time allow for the other activities to expand to fill the available time, no matter how much time there is available.

And this then raises the question, which only occurred to me as I was writing this, of the extent to which the inverse TARDIS effect is related to Parkinson’s law, that work expands to fill the available time. But that I think is a question for another day.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

strange questions I don’t have the time to work through

•9 October 2022 • Leave a Comment

The new academic year has started and teaching is going well. But between the teaching, working through the mathematical questions on the list, aikido and the various writing projects, and life, there isn’t the time to ponder and speculate on the random questions that meander through the alleys of mind.

And so I thought I’d put a few of them down here. It may be that these questions have been explored to some greater or lesser extent by others, in which I would appreciate the knowledgeable reader dropping a comment and pointing me to some appropriate references. But even if not, I’d be interested in any thoughts you might have.

1. Chess has an interesting ranking system, in which a player earns (acquires perhaps) a ranking based on the rankings of the players they defeat and the players to whom they lose in combat on the 8×8 arena. From what little I know (I know the rules of chess but I don’t play enough to have a ranking), this ranking is dynamic, and so here’s a question.

There is a significant body of evidence that one of the impacts of covid-19 is shorter or longer term cognitive impairment. Has anyone conducted a study, correlating changes to chess rankings with (perhaps self reported) covid-19 infection. It might be difficult to do something retrospectively, but it seems to me that there might be an interesting project here, even if it were only to get underway now.

2. I have an old question that is set out here

3. In English, ‘we’ is a remarkably nuanced word. There is the ‘we’ of me and you but not them; there is the ‘we’ of the collective of all of us now alive on Earth; there is the ‘we’ of everyone who is or has been; there is even the ‘we’ of me and none of you but unnamed others; and others as well.

So here’s the question: to what extent does the story of human civilization run parallel to the broadening the definition of ‘we’. Naively, I think there’s an argument to be made that ‘we’ would have been an extraordinarily interesting word in early human cities, when we were used to living in much smaller, much closer groups.

What for me is particularly interesting at the present time is how acceptable definitions of ‘we’ seem to be narrowing. Or at least, that’s one way of interpreting some aspects of the news.

4. And then there are doomsday devices, for instance money and agriculture, which I haven’t thought about in far too long.

Posted in bizarre and random things

the beginning of a new academic year

•2 October 2022 • Leave a Comment

Teaching begins tomorrow, the first day of the new academic year. That isn’t entirely accurate; students have been arriving on campus for a week or more, and this week just past was fresher’s week, induction, orientation and lots of students trying to pair square images on a map with the brick and concrete and wood buildings around them.

I’ve been teaching this particular module for several years now, and I’m always amazed at the strange dance between its continuity, in terms of the material covered and its basic structure, and the difference between years in terms of the personality of the students, as a group beyond as individuals. I meet them tomorrow and I’m looking forward to getting to know them.

Beyond this, there are other changes. Administrative responsibilities, committees and working groups and the other connective tissue of university life, pick up again. Seminars restart in earnest, each of them bringing new ideas, new faces, new math, and what could be better than learning new math.

This all ties a bit into my previous reflections. We of necessity bring with us the shadows and echoes of everything we’ve experienced, and it’s hard not to let all of that that’s past color the present and near future too much.

I find this particularly important when teaching, whether teaching math or teaching aikido. This is a point that I’ve worked through a lot and I’ll continue to work through, but beginners are encountering all of these things for the first time, and I can’t let the fact that I’ve been doing them for years, teaching these things for years, get too much in the way of me trying to bring the beginners along.

And so, the work continues.

Posted in aikido, education and university life, mathematics

beginner’s mind

•25 September 2022 • 2 Comments

We are a week here from the beginning of teaching in a new academic year. I’ll have new students but I’ll be teaching a class I’ve taught for many years at this point, and as always I feel that it’s a good idea to reflect.

I’ve reflected on these points before, over the years, because I feel they are important points for reflection. One is the notion of distance: as my understanding of the subject increases, as it necessarily will each time I teach, I need to work to remind myself that the mathematical distance between me as teacher and my students as beginners increases, and the responsibility of bridging that gap lies with me as the teacher.

Part of how I deal with this is to try and put myself in the position of being a student seeing the material for the first time, and this can be a tricky thing to do. But it’s a challenge I enjoy, because that approach can expand and enhance my own understanding of the material.

But for me, and this isn’t anything original to me, beginner’s mind goes much deeper than this. A different arena will be the aikido classes; again we’ll have beginners, and again I’ll need to put myself in the mindset of a beginner.

What’s interesting to me is that aikido is something I took up as an adult. I’ve always approached aikido with a degree of awareness that I didn’t have as a high school student (or before), taking math classes. One result of this is that I’ve approached the two subjects differently, in that I am much more consciously and deliberately aware of the aikido basics than I am some of the mathematical basics.

And perhaps this is part of things, that being aware of basics but not being enchanted by the basics is part of the path to achieving a beginner’s mind. After all, part of what we need to do is to achieve a bit of (a different sort of) distance from what we know, because what we know can be a barrier to the mind of a beginner.

My work on this will continue. There is great value for me in this work, because it makes me a better teacher, and it also makes me a better student.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, education and university life

supervillainry revisited

•4 September 2022 • Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about supervillains. Too much perhaps, but I do find them intriguing. As a side note, it’s clear to me that there are no actual supervillains, as one would surely have made their presence known by this point in time, though perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

Most supervillains, in the Bond universe or one of the comic book universes, Marvel or DC, want to take control, of the planet or something larger. (Interestingly, Thanos from the MCU is an outlier from this point of view, because he had an objective other than total control, achieved that objective, and then retired to a cabin in the woods, for all the good it did him in the end.)

Why. This is the question that’s always intrigued me. Why take control. Why be the boss, for instance, of Earth. I’m reminded of the character from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, living alone, not even clearly understanding the decisions he’s making (if memory serves; it’s time for a reread of the extended trilogy). But one of the aspects of their characters that we don’t often see is why they want to be in charge of all things.

Perhaps it’s just that I’m relying on my own memory at this point and there is investigation that I need to do; a Bond marathon might hit the spot, once I’ve managed to make my way to the top of Task Mountain, as might the chronological rewatch of the MCU, movies and series combined.

But my memory is that absolute power had become its own end, and I have to say that strikes me as remarkably unsatisfying. Being in charge of a country, much less the whole planet, takes a lot of work. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Our superheroes exist in counterpoint to their super foes; they spend their time fighting to prevent their corresponding supervillains from achieving their nefarious (love that word) goals, but we don’t often see superheroes tackling the problems that some people, many people face: thirst, hunger, shelter, making the most of their time on this round rock of ours.

And so I’m pondering, as the clouds gather outside (literally in this case, as we have rain coming in our direction) and as the light of day fades, the liminal space between superheroes and supervillains, where we have combined the desire of supervillains and the morality of superheroes, and things magically become better.

And then I stop myself. Supervillains, like superheroes, are fantasies, creatures of our imaginations that have little to nothing to do with what we’ve done today or what we’ll do tomorrow. (At least for most of us. 😉 ) There is work to be done, and it won’t be done for us by the Son of Krypton. So let’s shift the wording a bit. There’s work for us to do.

Posted in bizarre and random things

reflections on aikido

•21 August 2022 • Leave a Comment

Almost exactly 25 years ago, I began my aikido journey. Just over a week ago, I reached one of the major milestones towards which I’ve been working for all of that time; I successfully made it through my last grading. This isn’t to say that further advancement up the ranks isn’t possible; it just won’t involve me standing in the middle of the tatami, being watched by all as I take bokken and jo away from attackers, for instance. But hitting this milestone got me thinking.

One immediate direction of thinking is that I find it helpful to have goals in mind, milestones to work towards, shining cities on distant hills towards which I’m making my way. And so, I need to develop some new milestones, and I have some ideas for what those might be but that’s not what I’d intended to explore today.

Rather, I wanted to explore some of the connections I’ve found between aikido and other areas of activity in my days. This is something that I’ve touched on from time to time. (I won’t give a complete list here, but if you’re interested, you can find them by clicking on the aikido category in the right hand menu of the multijimbo.com home page.) Many of these have some connection to teaching, as I do spend some significant time in these pages thinking about issues related to teaching and education, but there are others.

One of the basic principles of successful aikido, I think, is maintaining contact with the attacker (or receiver of the action). And what I mean is not physical contact, but a wider, more enveloping sense of contact. I’ll admit that I’m not entirely convinced that contact is the best term, but it’s one that’s commonly used within the wider aikido community.

This is one of these aspects, though, where the language can be a bit tricky, in the sense that the notion of contact I am thinking of here is something that’s partially non-verbal, having been developed over those 25 years of regular practice. This is something I wrote about so long time ago (see here and here), and I’m aware that I need to go back and look through those old posts again. (Indeed, one project on the LIST OF MANY PROJECTS, and one I may have mentioned before, is to go back and read all of those old posts and pick up the threads I’ve left half woven.)

There are different levels of contact at play here, but the basic idea is that I as one part of this particular dance have an understanding of the attacker’s (or attackers’) intentions, but not in such a way that they have that same understanding of my intentions. This notion of contact has relevance elsewhere, such as in teaching (between a teacher and their students, gauging for instance how well the students are grasping the material being covered or even whether they’re paying attention in a session) and in writing (between an author and their audience).

This reuse of standard words to mean something different and something specific to the given activity is something that I’m well familiar with, because we do this all the time in mathematics; we take words (regular, normal, map) and given them a technical mathematical meaning that sometimes has little to do with their standard meaning, though there is often a connection however diffuse it might have become.

Back in the day, as part of preparing for my shodan (first degree black belt) grading, I had to write an essay on Aikido in Daily Life. I remember what I wrote (and no, it’s not a piece of writing I’ll share) but it’s also a question I’ve been thinking about ever since, and for me it ties directly to where I started off this ramble. Some of the lessons from aikido that are applicable to daily life are somewhat straightforward (not least, first get out of the line of attack) but there are others that have become more apparent over time. And that’s what I’ll spend some time exploring over the coming weeks.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, education and university life, mathematics

the individual versus the collective

•31 July 2022 • 1 Comment

One of my favorite non-human races in Star Trek is the Borg, a collective intelligence that assimilates any member of any race that it encounters. Resistance is futile. I still carry the time-tempered memory of the first time I watched an episode containing the Borg, and I was fascinated by this idea of the true collective intelligence (and yes, I will admit that the introduction of the Borg queen did make me sad, but that’s another conversation).

I can recognize that many people view the Borg as a villainous race, breaking down the individual as they do, giving the collective a higher value over the individual. But I’m starting to wonder.

If we consider climate change, it is becoming more and more clear that agreed collective action is needed in order for humanity to survive in anything like its current state, and at present that collective action is still halting. This haltingness is part of the news every evening, and yes I do have the news on in the background as I’m typing this.

A basic theme of Star Trek is that we have learned to act for the good of all, even when the good of all doesn’t agree with the good for the individual, though many of the episodes still involve working through the issues inherent in such a way of being. Star Trek is far more utopian than dystopian, as opposed to some others, but even then the utopia hasn’t yet been firmly established.

So there is a balance point to be found, a shifting dynamic balance point at which there is no rest but only a constant surfing on difficult waves and the constant work of maintaining balance on unstable ground.

What’s interesting is that this then ties into aikido, in the sense of maintaining balance while under stress. But that’s only a side thought, the mechanisms of maintaining balance.

This conversation between the individual and the collective has been going on since the beginning of conversation, and I don’t know what at present I have to offer that conversation. But I can see that I have a lot of homework to do, as do we all I think, And that work continues.

Posted in bizarre and random things

reflecting on a story I once heard

•10 July 2022 • Leave a Comment

There is a story I once heard, for the first time many years ago. Time and again I’ve encountered this story, like commuters with a nodding familiarity with one another but never speaking, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, in the light of current events.

Kurt Goedel was one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century, a logician, an explorer of rules and the consequences of rules. For me, his incompleteness theorem is one of the great mathematical theorems of all time, an unexpected result and one that continues to ring in me, even though logic is not an area I’ve spent any time exploring.

The story I heard is known as Goedel’s loophole. The short version is that one his way to become sworn in as a US citizen in 1947, with Einstein as one of his witnesses, Goedel expressed the view that he had found a legal constitutional way for the US to become a dictatorship. Goedel seems to never have written down his loophole and so we don’t know precisely his proposed loophole was; I suspect, and this is a very personal view based on what little reading I’ve done, is that he may have found a formal route but not one that was necessarily a political feasible route.

But reading the news and watching the events of the day, I’ve been wondering about the security of constitutions written and unwritten. The US has a written constitution, both the original document and an ever expanding body of interpretation around that original document, going back to the Federalist papers. The UK has an unwritten constitution, and for both constitutions (and other constitutions underpinning national governments around the world), there is an inescapable question, just how secure are these constitutions.

For me, and again this is a very personal view, we as humans like to set formal rules for our behavior, back to the Ten Commandments and the Code of Hammurabi, and we then like to spend enormous amounts of effort thinking about the fractal hinterlands of these formal rules, and where precisely the boundaries are between acceptable and unacceptable behavior within that set of formal rules.

I’m not surprised that I find myself pondering these fractal hinterlands, if only because I’ve spent some time thinking about the nature of fractal sets in my day job as a mathematician.

The rules underpinning fractals often appear to be simple rules, but one common property these sets of rules have is that very small changes of inputs can result in widely and wildly differing outputs. So for instance two mathematical cases with similar but not identical sets of inputs might result in very different outcomes; this is why the Mandelbrot set is so delightfully complicated on smaller and smaller scales. Two legal cases might have similar but not identical sets of facts but end up with very different outcomes.

Seemingly simple sets of rules, so for instance John Conway’s game of life, can result, perhaps often result, in complicated behavior. And this same basic observation seems to apply not only to mathematical sets of rules but also to legal sets of rules, and that this includes sets of rules such as national constitutions.

Looking back, I’ll admit that I’m not entirely sure of the point I was trying to make here. Perhaps it’s that we need to acknowledge and respect and understand that any set of rules will result in difficult cases of similar inputs resulting in widely different outputs. Perhaps it’s that a naive faith in seemingly simple sets of rules to provide clear answers will never be satisfied. Perhaps it’s a plea, for sources of reading where legal scholars have taken Goedel’s loophole as a serious subject of inquiry, because I’m curious.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics

a meditation on story

•5 June 2022 • 2 Comments

I’ve been reading a lot of short stories over the past few years, and I’m a fan. I like a novel (or a series) and I’m always up for some non-fiction, but I think my heart will always be with the short story. I can remember going to used book stores when I was in high school and focusing on old beat up science fiction short story collections. And I will always have some minor regrets that I didn’t keep them all, even moving across oceans.

I remember literature class in high school when we talked through the structure of story, with rising action and then the climax of the action, followed by the denouement. And I love a story that nicely subverts this classic structure.

There are some stories that continue to ring with me, like The Lady and the Tiger, with its beguiling ambiguity at the end. I won’t list all the stories in this category, but beyond the stories whose title I remember, there are other stories, their title long forgotten, whose core idea is still one that rings.

One that still rings particularly strongly, perhaps after having been an associate dean for some years, is a story in which the humble bureaucrat saves the day and gives new life to an alien species whose planet we’ve taken, all the while leaving no fingerprints of his own on the critical decisions.

I like how some basic ideas echo through stories over the years and the decades, but this leads me to think what it says about us that these are ideas that continue to echo. One of these, loosely put, is that we as humans aren’t able to organize ourselves to do well by ourselves, and so we require an external threat to bring us all together. And while I’m not meaning to be pessimistic, but recent world events lead me to think that this basic storyline is one that we might need to rework.

But I’ve been thinking through my own stories that I’m working on, and one thing I find interesting there is the extent to which some of these old ideas echo through what I’m trying to write. Can I do justice to some of these ideas that I can only think of as classic ideas? I would like to think I can, but that’s still a road I’m walking.

But interesting things sometimes happen. There is the occasional idea that seems as though it might lead to an uncomfortable ending. And the question becomes, do I want to work through this idea, among all possible ideas, because there are lots of ideas. And to this, I think the only answer can be, does that idea lead to somewhere sufficiently intriguing to make the journey worthwhile.

And so, stories. We have always been story tellers. We entertained each other by telling stories born from the stars overhead, to each other as we sat around fires we’d wrested from nature. Long let the stories continue.

Posted in writing ephemera

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