multijimbo

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

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.

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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.

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This is going to be a bit of a ramble.

Some long time ago, I read something about the word WE, namely that there are human languages that contain different variations of we, and once we start to think about it we can see there are many different variations of we. What follows will be a bit self-referential, but often I’ll be using the variant of we that includes everybody, which admittedly is somewhat presumptuous of me.

Let’s suppose that you and I are talking in a room (and isn’t it strange that writing ‘I and you are talking in a room’ sounds so strange to our ear). There is the we consisting of me and you but not the people outside the room; if there are many people in the room, one we is me and some of the people in the room but not the others, and if we wish to count this consists of many possibilities. And there is the case of me and some of the others in the room and some of the people outside the room. If I am talking to you, then there is the we of me and someone else but not you. And we bring all of these different possibilities into a single word.

This requires of us some skilful navigation in conversation, the work in understanding which variant of we is being intended every time the word is used. This is an unavoidable piece of work, because it’s not possible for a language to include all possible variants of we, since if we were doing to be complete, we would require a different variant for each subset of humanity, at least each subset of humanity containing me, and that is just a vast number of possibilities. It’s a number we can calculate, and it’s a number that’s so large as to be virtually infinite.

But what does this mean? One possible meaning, one possible lens, is that each of us lives in the center of an expanding and overlapping circle of variants of we. And so what if the meaning of civilization is that we need to view the world with the larger circles of we, rather than the smaller circles. Biology persuades us that we need to take small circles of we, because in the rough and tumble of natural selection, smaller circles of we allow us to better ensure our survival. And so we need to fight our biology, train ourselves to see past the darker voices of our biology.

And now I want to make a strange connection, to the fictional Vulcan Surak. I’ve mentioned Surak in a couple of other recent posts, in reading with hindsight: Superiority and beware the shiny and in how distant others might see us – the tragedy of the commons. In our stories, Surak sees a path for Vulcan to survive its biology, and so should we be seeking a surakian path of our own. Is this perhaps why we, here the non-specific global we, have the story of Surak as part of our collection.

I don’t know quite what to do with this connection. It’s a connection I’ll keep pondering. I’ll continue my reading what I can find, to work towards the understanding of how our brains work and all the tricks our brains play on us. Long is the road, and hard, that leads from darkness into light.

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I’d like to pick up a thread that I’ve let sit fallow for too long, longer than I’d intended. This is a thread I’d previously written about here and here.

Number 35 of the 101 stories that make up the first part of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones compiled by Paul Rips is called Every Minute Zen.

The summary: Tenno had passed his apprenticeship and was visiting the Zen master Nan-in. It was raining and so Tenno had an umbrella. Nan-in asked whether Tenno had set his umbrella to the left or to the right of his wooden clogs, and Tenno couldn’t remember. This raised doubt in Tenno’s mind, as he wasn’t able to keep his Zen with him every minute, and so he became Nan-in’s student.

So why do I like this one? We’ve each experienced those moments when we’ve done something, and we know we’ve done it because we have the evidence of having done it, but we don’t have a clear memory of the process of doing. I’ve had aikido moments like this, particularly in tradings, and in retrospect it’s a strange experience.

But the world is a busy and complicated world, and it is difficult sometimes to maintain awareness, to maintain mindfulness, amidst the chaos of the world.

At this particular moment, I’m aware of how I’m sitting. I’m aware of Buttercup using her scratching post, and the fading light outside as the day winds down to evening. I’m aware of the unceasing weight of the persisting pandemic and the other events that fill the news.

I find local mindfulness to be somewhat easier than global mindfulness. It’s hard to keep the whole of the world in mind. It’s hard to properly consider the world. But I can do more work on my local mindfulness.

For instance, I had a stretch earlier this evening. During my stretch, I try to pay attention to what’s going on inside my skin, because I have always felt that a stretch is a conversation that I have with my muscles, my tendons and ligaments, my bones, and it’s a conversation that I always want to remain calm and measured, with no yelling.

This evening I’ll pay attention to my dinner, bite by bite, and in the morning I’ll pay attention to my coffee, sip by sip. And I’ll pay attention to the individual moments as they step by, and some days that’s all we can do.

And this is what this particular story has stirred up in my brain. There’s always something more to work on. Something more to do. And this provides some direction to our days.

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Let me start by noting that unlike many of the other reading project posts, there is a genuine spoiler alert here. Beware. If you haven’t yet read Jade City (and Jade War and Jade Legacy), they are awesome and I recommend them very highly. So go forth and read.

And I am behind on my 2022 reading project. I’d set reading through this particular list of the best 100 fantasy novels back at the beginning of 2021, but needless to say, the world got strange, through 2021 and so far through 2022. And taking heed of a piece of advice I’ve taken to heart when working with others, I’m giving myself a bit of a break and seeing what I can do on this through the rest of 2022.

Admittedly it is only Jade City that is on this particular list, but the entire trilogy, often called the Green Bone Saga, is on the 2022 Hugo award shortlist for best series and so I decided to read the whole trilogy (and I’m glad I did).

This isn’t a book review blog, but there was one thing that caught my attention in this Saga that also caught my attention in the Star Wars universe. The Green Bones were trained from childhood in the use of bioenergetic jade, focusing on six basic disciplines (channeling, deflection, lightness, strength, perception and steel). While there were some shortcuts that non-Green Bones could take, mastery required training and dedication from childhood.

The same type of training and dedication were required in the Star Wars universe for mastery of the Force. And this brought to my mind a question: if the focus were not on the use of jade for fighting, what other sorts of aspects of jade might be possible to develop. This is hinted at in the use of jade and channeling for medical purposes. I can’t help but be curious about what other things there might be, for instance through the penitents.

With the Force, my question is slightly different. Again, we get a hint of this through Yoda, and this might well be something explored somewhere in the extended Star Wars universe, but what might a very long lived being (with a life span measured in millenia, rather than decades or centuries) be able to discover about the Force.

There is for me a lesson here. though perhaps lesson is too strong a word. There is an observation here. Each story spawns a collection of other stories. Each idea calls forth other ideas, and it’s not possible for an author to explore the whole of this landscape. And each reader will have a few things that will catch their attention and that will pique their imagination.

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I recently went deep back into the archives and read an old post on the number liberation front. The attempt at humor aside, there was a serious idea tucked away therein. Namely, that how we view a concept (in this case, a number) depends on how that concept is presented to us. In this case, the difference in presentation of a number as a word or as in digits, and the view that presenting large numbers as words (million, billion, trillion) acts as a shield to their true size and scale, given the similarity of the words used.

I can’t claim this is an idea that’s original to me and I suspect (though my reading here is still wildly incomplete) that this is something commonly known in psychology circles. Perhaps it’s related to issues of cognitive load and what our brains can properly handle, and I’m sure there’s a good idea for a story about first contact with an alien species, where we as humans don’t have the cognitive capacity to understand the aliens and what we then have to do to mitigate this.

But this is one facet of the larger issue of how we handle discussions and contemplation of scale, particularly when the scale gets very large. We develop tools to help us handle these, and one example of this that I find very interesting is how mathematicians handle the infinite. To some extent, the infinite is the ultimate scale problem, particularly when we touch on issues like the different sizes of infinity, the infinitude of infinities.

For this, we have developed a structure of notation and conceptual tools that allow us to manipulate and explore infinity, but there is a small part of me that wonders what we’re missing. Are there aspects of the infinite that we haven’t yet encountered, perhaps that are shielded from us by the very conceptual framework we’re using to explore the infinite. And this contemplation I find exciting and interesting, because there is always something more to do.

But this is only one small example. When we consider the world in all its glorious expanse, I find it hard to wrap my head around the whole of it, and to understand what direction to take moving forward, out of all the many possible directions. The scale issue here is that the space of all possible futures is a wildly massively high dimensional space, and we are navigating a path through this space.

There are lots of difficulties with this process of navigation, only a few of which I’m sure I have sight of at present. Do we for instance want our path to be a geodesic path, one that best reflects the changing geometry of this space of possible futures. But this requires that we’re able to get a handle on this changing geometry, and that then runs back into this issue of scale and being able to capture and reasonably manipulate the amount of quantity of information needed to understand this space.

And this is one of the things I most love about being a mathematician. We have the opportunity to explore such spaces and to develop the tools to understand such spaces, and there’s always another horizon over which to journey.

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So, let’s get this out of the way here at the beginning: King Arthur does indeed die at the end. But I’m not sure that actually counts as a potential spoiler.

What I hadn’t expected, though, is that Sir Gawaine would be the bad guy, the unforgiving wedge between Arthur and Lancelot, the final nail in the coffin for the whole saga.

Another thing I hadn’t expected was how relatively small a part the quest for the Sangreal, the Holy Grail, plays. It happens in volume 2, but it is an inconclusive quest, though it does contain the end of Galahad. And though I didn’t take notes, I seem to remember it was Galahad who pulled the sword from the stone, but this wasn’t the act that created the King.

There are small things that happen in passing, that saddened me with their lack of future appearance. Glatisant, the questing beast tracked by Sir Palomides, and we never get to know Glatisant. Perhaps this is just the version of Le Mort that I chose.

But one of the deepest lasting impressions that this left on me, weirdly, is the economics of knighthood. Being a knight is expensive: there is the retinue, the weaponry (and all of the very many jousting lances), the armour, the horse, the castle back home.

We come across battles involving thousands, tens of thousands of knights, and one hundred thousand die in the climactic battle between Arthur and Mordred that ends the saga. The sheer cost of knights and knighthood (and yes, I am taking into account the possibility of hyperbolic inflation on the part of the author) must have seemed a doomsday device of sorts, this giant machine that consumes everything it encounters so that it can perpetuate itself.

It’s tempting to speculate on the current incarnations of this doomsday device of knighthood, but that’s something perhaps for another time. I’m beginning to wonder, though, whether part of the reason we, the collective we, sometimes find ourselves caught in these cycles of consumption for no clear purpose, is that the collective we has no clear purpose. But that’s not a rabbit hole for today.

But I will need to speed up my reading; I did make my through the Tales of 1001 Arabian nights a couple of years ago, and it’s now taken me half a year for Malory. And this is only the first 2 on this list of 100. To work!

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For reasons I’ll admit I can’t completely track, I have a soft spot in my heart for gladiatorial cooking shows. Hell’s Kitchen, in all its subtle polite glory. Top Chef, with the spectacular weird extravagance of some of its competitions. Cutthroat Kitchen and Iron Chef Gauntlet and the sometime surreal febrile imagination of Alton Brown. And there are many others. I have never had the desire to be a chef, and each of these shows reinforces that non-desire.

I have enormous respect for chefs, in the same way that I have enormous respect for all people who dedicate themselves entirely to their craft. And I also have respect for the chefs who put themselves forward to participate in such shows, particularly when the shows get into their latter series and none of the participants can claim to be unaware of the gauntlets that each of the shows offers.

Food is a necessity and so it’s a bit strange that food has become such a big part of our entertainment landscape. Alton Brown, during his Hot Ones interview, made the point that food is comfort. When times are complicated and difficult, as they have been for some time, people turn to food.

Interestingly, I can see that the applicability of this argument to the calmer, gentler cooking shows, with their recipes and conversation. But these more gladiatorial shows, they are more entertainment than comfort. And entertaining they are.

But they also offer their lessons. For instance, the structure of Hell’s Kitchen is such that it prioritises communication within a team, and it is only towards the end of each season that the participants engage in properly individual challenges. Far beyond the horizons of the kitchen, communication is clearly critical, and my mind turns in strange directions. How possible might it be to take some of the Hell’s Kitchen challenges and adapt them as training exercises in academia.

Top Chef on the other hand, with its quick fire challenges, encourages creativity in pressured situations. One way of viewing this is that we need to be comfortable in understanding what we know, so that we can take that understanding and adapt it in somewhat unusual situations.

Cutthroat Kitchen for me is the most difficult to adapt to a collegial working environment.

Looking back, one of the themes that runs through a lot of these blogs is a continual investigation of the ways in which we can take lessons from one part of our lives and apply it to others. And even the gladiatorial cooking shows offer us something, if we approach them with a beginner’s mind and an open heart.

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Here on a Saturday evening in May, when the weather in southern England is more reminiscent of winter than late spring, I’m watching the finals of the 2021 Eurovision song contest. And as often happens, my thoughts get lost in the labyrinth of my imagination.

How long have we been singing? Not tonight, because that an easy question to answer, but overall, how long have we and our hominid cousins been singing? It may well be an impossible question to answer, since singing is ephemeral. A note, a song is sung; it goes out into the world and fades into the distance. Unless we have an artefact of the song, we don’t know the song has been sung.

I suspect that sheet music with lyrics would have to be considered evidence of singing – otherwise, why write it all down – but writing is a very recent invention. We have musical notation going back a few thousand years, but from the (admittedly limited) reading I’ve done, the few thousand years of musical notation is roughly the same as the few thousand years of writing.

Musical instruments, so perhaps bone flutes, indicate music but I’m not sure that the existence of musical instruments is sufficient to conclude the existence of singing.

Graham Norton is good, but I miss Terry Wogan. And Wilma the cat isn’t particularly interested.

Singing is clearly embedded deep as part of being human. Music permeates our lives and singing permeates our lives. And for me, there is a stark difference between a song and a spoken poem. Both are powerful, but for me, there is something about a song that can catch me in a way that a spoken poem doesn’t, though this might be that I’ve just heard more songs than poems over time.

I think I read something, not too long ago though I don’t remember the specifics, that work has been done that demonstrates that our Neanderthal cousins were capable of speech and perhaps also capable of song, though we will almost certainly never know if they did sing around their fires.

This touches on one of those points that periodically recurs, namely that for most of our history, we haven’t been able to capture stories or songs. We could tell them and sing them, remember them, pass them to the next generation, but there was always the possibility of their loss, in a way that I think we have difficult comprehending.

And if we were able to travel back in the past, this might be the question I would want to answer. I wouldn’t want to see dinosaurs. I would want to hear the first stories and songs being shared around fires.

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Procrastination is a topic I’ve written about before and think about a fair bit, though often when I should perhaps be doing something else. I think the title is an oxymoron, but I hope by the end of the next few hundred words, I’ll have persuaded you that it’s not as much of an oxymoron as it might seem now. And if you’re interested, some earlier reflections on aspects of procrastination can be found here and here, and here and here, and here and here.

I am a list maker. I make lists of the things that need to be done, and rarely a list of lists, and from time to time I review and refine my lists, and then have a clean new list containing the contents of previous lists. But I’ve come to realize that while having lists is fine, lists are a remarkably fertile environment in which procrastination can grow. A long list, with many things to do, allows for the possibility of necessary reprioritizing.

But reprioritizing allows for the possibility that some things will keep slipping down the list. I’ve recently gone through one of those exercises of reviewing and refining my lists, and I was struck by how many things are still on my list. They have, in a strange sense, become familiar friends. Part of the issue, entertainingly explored in a TED talk by Tim Urban, is that some of these tasks don’t have explicit deadlines. To paraphrase Mr Urban, the Panic Monster never has its excuse to get out of bed.

In the spirit of perspicacity, I have to admit that I am inconsistent in how rigorously I’m able to apply internal deadlines. And the more times I push something into the welcoming arms of tomorrow, the more ethereal weight that task acquires. Push forward enough times, and the weight of the task can start to become problematic; the task becomes harder to pick up, because of the weight and also sometimes perhaps because the task is itself unwieldy.

What’s interesting is that these ideas all have a familiar feel to them. Many are old friends, but this realization of grappling with this issue of prioritization is the newly made friend at the table. In retrospect, this is an obvious realization, perhaps one that I should have had some long time ago, but I cannot change my past. I can acknowledge it, I can learn from it, and that learning will now be at the top of the list.

But where does productive come from. Part of this issue of reprioritizing is that I can move things to the top of the list, and get them done, with the concomitant feeling of accomplishment, even with the heavy and awkward tasks remaining on the list, wanting attention. The challenge is to keep in mind the medium to long term, and to complete those tasks without explicit deadlines in good time, and not allowing the shiny of the easily doable tasks to overly distract.

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We are getting rather deep into 2021 and I am still working through the first book of the 2021 reading project. I’ll admit that Malory is (a bit) longer than I’d thought, but it’s an interesting journey so far (and there is still volume 2 ahead of me).

We have encountered some of the main characters of the Arthurian mythos. This includes the many knights of the Round Table, though I’ll admit that I hadn’t realized (or remembered) that Sir Tristram was such a major character; but then, one of the reasons for this reading is to back, read and fill in those gaps in my knowledge. We have encountered, though only very briefly, the Questing Beast, and Merlin has been imprisoned in his cave.

There is a lot of jousting. Every time two knights meet, it seems that there is an obligatory joust, followed by a sword fight on foot, since of course the knight who remains on their horse after the joust must then meet his dehorsed opponent on foot, in the spirit of knightly fairness.

There is so far remarkably little magic. Arthur has Excalibur, but another aspect of Excalibur that I think is less known, is that whoever holds the scabbard of Excalibur does not bleed. Given the jousting and sword fighting, this is a remarkably handy property for a scabbard to have.

One of the things that struck me early, and continued to strike me (like a jousting spear into my carried shield) throughout volume 1 is the economic madness of a society which seems to exist only to support knight who seem only to wish to joust and fight, fight and joust, and occasionally rescue the fair damsel imprisoned by the evil knight.

I know that this isn’t the point of Le Mort. We see here the exploration of knights and perhaps the creation of the culture of chivalry. But for me, this reflects a sensibility that is so embedded in modern fiction, including much science fiction, that has become part of what I enjoy in my reading.

I like the worlds of stories to make sense in themselves, and I like the stories to make sense in their worlds. With Le Mort, it makes sense in its world, but its world doesn’t make sense, however much we might like a joust.

So I’ll keep reading. I’m curious to see whether this relatively early (I haven’t done the research to know if this for instance is whether the Arthurian mythos begins) telling of Arthur contains in volume 2 the quest for the Holy Grail, which has become the canonical Arthurian story.

And in the back of my mind, I’m wondering; am I misremembering or did Monty Python neglect poor Sir Tristram?

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