multijimbo

lenses and the shape of the world

•17 October 2021 • Leave a Comment

Earlier this year, I wrote about lenses and how they affect our observational windows. This relates as well to the Rashamon moment, that I touched on briefly some long time ago. I’m thinking about lenses again, and there is one train of thought I’d like to chase for a bit, that starts in a weird place.

I thought about this a long time ago; you can find them here and here, and I’ve come back to that old speculation, but from a different viewpoint. Through, perhaps, a different lens.

Supervillains are rife in the literature. They populate Bond movies, Dr No and Blofeld from the Bond movies, and others, independents and those who’ve worked for SPECTRE. More recently, there is Thanos from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and perhaps even Lex Luther and the Joker from the DC Universe. And there are many many more beyond these few.

There is something to work through here, namely what is the fractal nature of the boundary between mere villain and supervillain. but that’s a practical application of a mathematical idea to be explored another day.

Often, though not always, supervillains wish to take control, to be in charge of the world or the universe, and I find myself wondering, why? Being in charge is complicated. There are difficult decisions to be made, often in situations where there is no clear right decision. There is paperwork. There are unhappy but ambitious minions.

I will say, Thanos had a clear goal. He had a plan. While I very much disagree with both his basic goal (there were so many other things he could have done once he had the Infinity Stones and even before), I have to take him out of this discussion because there is a clear argument for why it doesn’t apply to him.

This question for supervillains then leaks into my thinking about, well, everything else. What is the shape of the world we are working towards, and I know that if I were to ask a dozen people, I would get at least a dozen answers.

And so, over the next few weeks, I would like to explore a particular lens through which to view this question of the shape of the world of the future, and how we might view purpose as the guiding spirit on our journey to this world of the future.

This choice of lens is inspired in part by the world of Star Trek and the dream of the Federation. The lens I choose is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and I’ll come back to this next week.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

a reflection on teaching 2

•10 October 2021 • 1 Comment

And the week went very well. The students were keen and engaged, they were (essentially all) undertaking our institutionally expected precautions, and we are all working our way back into a Before Times rhythm of classroom interaction. I’m sure that the nervousness will persist for some weeks, until we can all see how things will settle down.

Aikido has also been going well; my reactions are less rusty than I’d feared they would be under the pressure of an actual grab, but yes there is still some rust and it will take time and practice, but positivity reigns at the moment.

I’m starting now to work through old things, ideas that have been circulating around in my brain for some long time now. One of these, which I may have touched on in some post in the past, is the notion of contact.

In aikido, contact is critical to the success of anything. This may be physical contact, uke with a firm grasp of my wrist, or mental contact, where I as tori, the person doing the technique, manifest my attention in both my movement and my uke’s movement. This ability to be able to invade my uke’s intention and influence my uke’s intention is what I have been working towards and continue to work towards.

The same notion of contact applies to teaching. I can walk into a room and start talking, but if I don’t have the attention of the audience, if I’m not influencing the intention of my audience, then all I’m doing is contributing to noise to the room.

This gets back to some of the points I touched on last week. I was nervous about my ability to make this contact with my students, but that nervousness seems to be misplaced, as we have made contact. People coming up with questions after a lecture, a session, is a key indicator for me, because if someone has been paying enough attention to be curious about something or confused by something, then at least they’re been paying some attention.

So I will continue to think through ways of making contact with my students, my mathematics students and my aikido students. Part of this will be thinking through my presentation of the material, both in the classroom and through the virtual channels such as the module Blackboard site. And part of it will be moments of structured spontaneity.

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

a reflection on teaching 1

•3 October 2021 • 1 Comment

Tomorrow, I am back in the classroom for the first time in almost two years, and as much as I’m looking forward to it, I’ll admit that I’m a bit nervous. Yes, I did teach last year, with some live on-line sessions as well as some significant recorded material. But it wasn’t the same.

I miss the performative aspect of teaching; I miss working with my students, my audience. I miss gauging how well they’re following the current argument. I miss backtracking and tangents and doing what I can to provide an entertaining and informative overview of the subject. I miss working with the students as they engage with the material and work through the details of the assessment.

I wrote about one aspect of this getting back to teaching recently, when I wrote about the physical space. I walked through the rooms I’ve been assigned last week, stood at the front of the room looking out over the seats. I’ve taught in both of my rooms before, and so they’re comfortable spaces for me, as comfortable as any room can be in our current circumstances.

But it’s much more than this. I am an inveterate list maker, and I’ve spent some time (as I do from time to time) going through old lists, finding ideas that I’d written and forgotten and thinking, how might this work in the classroom.

Beyond some now-standard things, perhaps having a single question on-line quiz at the beginning or middle of each teaching session, picking up on some point I think an important point to stress, making use of the reflection on the changes we’ve all thought through after the past year.

But there are other things, that I’d written down and then forgotten. Watching old documentaries about stand up comedy, there’s a lesson for teaching from improvisational comedy: never say no. No matter how strange or ridiculous the thing being thrown at you, by the audience or by one’s partner, respond instead with a ‘Yes, and…’ Build on it, perhaps turn it around.

And this turning becomes then a form of instructional jiu-jitsu. Taking the energy of the comment or the question, and changing its path into a path that allows for illumination and learning. And this I think is the core of my nervousness.

In person aikido has only recently started, and I can feel the rust in my bones and my reactions. And I worry that this same rust might affect my ability to handle the stadium, the arena of the lecture theatre. I’ve been teaching the same module for a number of years now, and I’ll admit that my scripting of each session has become more skeletal over time.

But for this year, I will go back to a full scripting, reminding myself of what might be some pressure points, some particular topics that have in the past generated interesting and tricky mathematical questions. We’ll have fun and in the end it will all be fine.

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

the power of place

•26 September 2021 • 3 Comments

After a long time, we have restarted in-person aikido classes, with all appropriate mitigation measures in place due to current circumstance, and it’s great after so long to be able to practice more-or-less properly. But walking back into the dojo for the first time in more than a year and a half (we had been using other rooms), I was reminded of the power of that a place can have.

We bow when we enter the room, we take off our shoes before getting on the tatami, and this short ritual carries an enormous amount of internal weight. I feel the liminal shift, leaving my day job behind for some little while, and the ritual is part of how I focus my attention on aikido and to let other things slip away.

This same liminal shift happens elsewhere as well. The annual Milford Science Fiction Writers Convention ended a week ago. We gather, we critique each others’ pieces, and walking into the critique room (always the same room), taking off my outdoor shoes and putting on my slippers, I get the same feeling as I get entering the dojo.

And the critique room is a dojo of sorts; we have a task of focus, we all throw ourselves into that task. As in the dojo, we are there to be the whetstones to allow each other to sharpen our craft.

Universities are reopening and I start teaching in a week’s time, and the classroom has the same feel as the dojo and the critique room. The students and I are all there for the same purpose – to explore (in this case) graph theory – and we have that same focus.

It may be that I have a slightly different view of the classroom than my students, and if so, then that different view comes from these other spaces, each dedicated to the study of a particular craft.

There are many spaces that don’t have that same feeling associated to them; the lounge and the kitchen are rooms that serve many different though functions. My office at the university also serves different functions: it is not a space purely for research, and it is not a space purely for teaching and education, and it is not space for administrivia and email, but rather is a space for all of these.

I find this sensitivity to space and the functions of space interesting; as is often the case, I’m sure there’s more to dig out of this idea, and that’s something that I’ve now added to the (near infinite) list of things deserving some time for contemplation.

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

education and training

•5 September 2021 • 5 Comments

There’s an idea that’s been kicking around in my brain for a little while now, and so I thought I should start exploring it. As with many things, I’m sure that exploration will come in stages. So, consider this the first step in a thousand mile journey.

The genesis moment for this was the question, what is the purpose of education. We live in a complicated and fast changing world, and knowledge and the application of knowledge are what are going to get us through. This is a common trope in science fiction, the scientist as savior. It should be noted that this is also the starting point for many a classic disaster movie, but that’s a topic for another day.

But there’s a recurring discussion regarding the difference between education and training. Underlying this discussion is a common view that one of the core functions of our educational system, particularly pre-university but also impacting on undergraduate level at university, is to prepare students for the world of work, developing transferable and key skills.

And so I thought it might be interesting to try to slide a thin sheet of paper between training on the one hand and education on the other. When I think of training, I think – perhaps a bit unfairly – of preparation for a known task. This might run from something straightforward like touch typing through to leadership training.

But the basic structure is that there is a body of knowledge or information, and the task is to transfer that knowledge from the trainer to the student. We could at a small stretch include such things as some first year university modules, like calculus, because much of an introductory calculus class is to make sure that students have a basic understanding of how to address relatively standard questions.

Education on the other hand we can take to be preparation to answer questions for which we don’t yet have the answers, and this is where the key distinction lies. In training, there is no surprise at the end point; with education, there should be some surprises at the end.

Following on from the comment above, an undergraduate degree can then be viewed as a transition from training to education; from modules that cover standard material, necessary vocabulary and the foundation on which the education will be built, through for instance project work and dissertations that allow students to take a question and properly explore it, not necessarily knowing where that exploration will lead.

Perhaps this is an artificial distinction, and it needs to be set against the wide body of research in education, but it’s an idea I’ve found useful in my own thinking. There is much reading for me to do, I’m sure, and much more thinking. The second step and the third, and the rest of the journey.

Posted in education and university life

aspects of balance

•19 August 2021 • 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking recently about different aspects of balance. One aspect is the basic physical aspect, so not falling over while standing or walking, and being able to maintain our sense of physical perspective while being thrown or throwing someone else, which is critical for proper aikido.

It’s been a year and a half since we’ve been able to engage in standard aikido practice; we’ve been practicing, via Zoom or doing solo weapons practice together in a large, well ventilated room. While that practice has been helpful and interesting, and has given me the opportunity to focus on the weapons work in a way I hadn’t done before, I do miss what had been our standard practice.

Our aikido club is currently on its usual August break and we don’t have a summer school this year. But come September and October, we’ll begin the process of working back to standard practice, and it will be fascinating to throw someone else, and to be thrown by someone else.

One thing that I do remember is that physical balance is a fragile thing. I feel this going down the stairs first thing every morning, on my way to the first coffee of the day. But I also remember is that it is much easier for us to take our own balance (or give it away) than to take someone else’s.

This is a lesson that I’ve tried to export out to other parts of my daily activities, namely that maintaining balance can be tricky, and this is certainly true in our current circumstance.

Some days are like having a head full of bees, and balance can be tricky on these days; it’s easy to focus on one bee at a time, try to follow and catch one bee at a time, and the bees act of their own accord and don’t make themselves easy to follow or easy to catch.

I don’t know how to tame the bees; I don’t whether the bees can even be tamed, and so our maintenance of balance amidst the bees can’t rely on taming them. This can at times be tricky, but it is something that improves with practice.

The core lesson from all of this, I think, is that maintenance of balance is a relentlessly dynamic process. There are occasional moments when our balance persists without constant attention, without the small tweaks that corrects for the constant bumping by the bees, but these moments are few and far between, and always far shorter than we hope they might be.

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

bits and pieces of time – with highlighted minor spoilers

•31 July 2021 • Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking recently about time and it’s passing, and I know some of the reasons. We’ve come to the end of our academic year, and like with the calendar year, the end of the academic year is a time for reflection of what’s in the past and what lies in the future.

Recent birthdays, mine and others, provoke a similar speculation, and one interesting aspect of this is the number of different annual cycles that we have in our lives: one birthday to the next, a calendar year and an academic year, one anniversary to the next; so perhaps there some thinking to be done on the intersectionality of cycles.

I’ve also recently watched Loki, and here lie some minor spoilers. Loki is a time travel story, with its branching timelines, and I realized something while watching. A lot of our representations of timelines, in Loki and in Avengers: Infinity War as well, we have a very discrete view of how timelines branch.

What I mean here by a discrete view of branching is that the points at which the branching happens don’t pile on top of one another and there are only finitely many different timelines at each branch. While I can understand, from a narrative point of view, that this discrete branching of timelines makes for a more straightforward story, but the universe doesn’t have any need to adhere to what we find narratively convenient.

I’ve done a small bit of reading about the many worlds interpretation of the multiverse, where (loosely) each action at each moment creates a branching across all possibilities, and there are many many possibilities. Here, the different timelines are different forward evolutions of the universe, sitting alongside one another, somehow.

But I’ve become fascinated by this branching, because it brings together two mathematical ideas that I’ve spent some time thinking about. One is that there are many – infinitely many in fact – sizes of infinity, with the necessary recursive issues that come into this contemplation. The other is the notion of a real tree; this is nothing to do with forests, but is a mathematical concept that extrapolates and abstracts a normal backyard tree.

But digging into those two ideas is for another time. The more interesting question is, how to bring those two ideas into the narrative structure of a story, in a way that carries some mathematical fidelity but doesn’t put off the reader and doesn’t wash out the plot and characters from the story itself.

And this is part of a larger challenge. There are some great stories that have a mathematical idea at their core, and creating such a story is something that I’ve always been interesting in working through.

And this cycles back to the start of this post, the cycles of time. I was hit recently by the image of our remaining days as a jar of coins; different coins might have different values, as different days carry their own impact and their own value, and we don’t know how many coins are remaining. And so let’s spend today well.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

experiences of note and further reflection

•17 July 2021 • Leave a Comment

I’ve had an interesting experience recently, one that continues to ring like a bell that’s been struck. I’m confident that over the coming weeks and months, I’ll continue to listen to and interrogate that ring. But part of what this experience caused me to do is to investigate the foundation of my beliefs.

It’s easy to get caught up in the busyness of daily life, of the demands of work and and the personal projects (about which I’ve written enough over the course of days and previous posts), and not to take the time to think about the source of things. And I like to think about the source of things; perhaps this goes back to how I approach my mathematical life, returning to first principles where I can.

So one of those foundation stones comes from a reflection on Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor, where he takes a secular approach to Buddha’s teaching and frames the Buddhist principles as calls to action. The first is a call to understand, namely to understand that a cause, perhaps the cause, of anguish is the disjuncture between the world as it is and the world as we might want it to be.

So consider the world. I watch news on television and I read news, from multiple sources, and themes arise from that consideration. One aspect of this consideration carries echoes of Star Trek.

The Vulcans were at one point in their history were like us, subject to their emotions. Perhaps ruled by their emotions. That brought them to the precipice of disaster, and it was a turn to logic that saved them. So considering the world, I wonder whether we are approaching a similar point in our history. If we take a step back and examine ourselves calmly, perhaps the time has come for us to honestly explore how we think, how our brains work, and then start down the path of working through how we can best train ourselves.

And this leads to an idea. Assume, as I’m willing to do, that we make contact with one or more extraterrestrial species and they are similar enough to us that we can establish meaningful communication. Would we allow them to study human psychology? Would we allow them to understand humans as well as marketing executives and advertisers understand humans? Because I think the answer would have to be no; we wouldn’t be able to take that chance.

Or perhaps, we might think, what could possibly go wrong.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

beware, there be spoilers: Le Mort d’Arthur volume 2 by Thomas Malory

•30 June 2021 • Leave a Comment

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!

Posted in bizarre and random things

labyrinths and minotaurs

•27 June 2021 • Leave a Comment

Looking back, a recurring theme in these pages (and other places) is labyrinths and the minotaurs that inhabit them. I’m not sure exactly why, but I have always found it a captivating image. A piece of homework not yet done is to go back and reread (in translation) the original tale of Theseus and the Minotaur, since it’s been a while and I’m sure there are details that I’ve missed.

A labyrinth (according to the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary) is a place constructed or full of intricate passageways and blind alleys. In the original, Theseus laid out a thread as he searched the original labyrinth for the Minotaur, so that he would be able to find his way back.

But intricate passageways and blind alleys are a reasonable characterization of many of the aspects of the lives we lead. A research question is a labyrinth, and one we don’t know how to navigate. What seem to be exits turn out to be the blind alleys of an argument we can’t successfully articulate or perhaps even the beautiful idea slain by the facts of the world.

I’m currently exploring a question that arose only recently, while I was thinking about something significantly different, and while I’m enjoying my time in this particular labyrinth, I can’t help but wonder what the minotaur in this labyrinth will be. Will it be that, as might happen, the question is much easier than I expect it to be, more of a hallway than a labyrinth proper, or will it be that the question is much harder than I expect it to be, from what I’ve done so far, requiring everything I know and perhaps a bit more. I don’t know yet, as I haven’t yet faced that labyrinth’s minotaur.

And it is the minotaur that I find more interesting than the labyrinth itself. The minotaur is the beast trapped in the labyrinth, not able to leave, attacking those who dare enter. This is why I need to go back and read the original. What agency was granted to the Minotaur, for instance, and to what extent did they inhabit the labyrinth by choice.

Though this may well drift very far from the original myth, to what extent is the minotaur the soul of the labyrinth? If we view the labyrinth as the question we’re trying to answer, or the situation we’re trying to work our way through, be it large (climate change) or small (my math question from above), then perhaps the minotaur is that which keeps us focused on the question or situation, and provides some incentive for us to keep moving, to keep developing our understanding, to keep working towards a solution.

I suspect I have drifted too far from the original, but then again, perhaps the time has come to revisit the labyrinth and the minotaur, and how in particular I use that image. Perhaps some labyrinths will have the one minotaur, angry and wielding its ax to terrible effect. Perhaps some labyrinths will be inhabited by groups of smaller minotaurs, each of which we can handle on its own but potentially overwhelming when they swarm.

And there are the other aspects of the myth that I haven’t considered here. What of Theseus and his role, and what of the golden thread. And what of Daedalus, he who constructed the labyrinth as well as the wings for young Icarus. There is perhaps even some historical context and with so much to explore, I’m sure this is a topic I’ll come back to, and more than once.