multijimbo

spending time with an old friend

•7 November 2021 • Leave a Comment

I find myself spending time with an old friend today, a friend named procrastination. Over the years, I’ve written about time spend with this old friend, here and here if you’re interested. What I find interesting about today’s visit is that they mentioned something I hadn’t realized before.

I often feel bad about procrastinating; I think of it as spending time not doing something needs to be done. But as they mentioned, dropping a line into a conversation about something else, sometimes what we think of as procrastination is actually just the making of a judgement of the order of importance of things.

We all have many things we want to do, and at any particular moment in time, we can do only one of them. This is one of the lessons I’ve worked my way through, which is that there is no such thing as proper multitasking. There is serial focus on individual tasks, with quick switching between the tasks, but I’ve come to realize that at least for me, I can do one thing at a time.

At this moment, writing these words, I feel as through I’m sitting at a table full of projects old and new; each of them is making their case for my time and attention of the moment, and all I can do is to listen to their points made, some more persuasive than others, and act accordingly.

We could push this analogy a bit further. We have all had the experience of that conversation being interrupted by someone coming into the room, letting me know that there is a call. Sometimes, I can say that I’ll call back but sometimes, I have to take the call, however interesting the conversation.

And so we settle into the evening, the conversation continuing and the various projects continuing to make their cases. I enjoy their company, even knowing that as I bring each to its natural end it will leave our table. But so is the way of the world.

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

the richness of old lists

•31 October 2021 • Leave a Comment

I am a maker and keeper of lists. I have lists of mathematical projects, writing ideas, blog ideas, tasks that need to be done soon, tasks to be completed at some indeterminate point in the near to medium term future. Lists, lists, lists.

Some lists I write on random scraps of paper, items to be crossed off when completed or transcribed into more permanent lists. Some lists I keep in my daily journal, pages in which are full of items crossed out and occasionally circled, for particular attention. My list of writing ideas I keep on my computer, scraps and fragments, to be printed out and explored from time to time.

I have a drawer in my desk of blank journal volumes, each waiting patiently for its turn to come. I went through that drawer recently, finding one journal that I’d inexplicably put back in the drawer only half completed, and other volumes with nascent lists on their first few pages.

One reason I like finding an old list is that it provides a window in a moment of a before time. A reminder of things that had been occupying my attention, of things catching my eye. Very occasionally, of something that remains to be completed.

The writing list is a collection of beads, some bright and shiny, some dull because I don’t remember the thought that gave rise to the idea, to be strung onto the string of a plot or a character, to give rise to a story.

The mathematical list is as much as anything the list of things to understand, distant acquaintances that intrigued me when we first met, with whom I’d like to spend significantly more time. And I’ll get to spend some time with them soon, come the new year.

One reason that lists are on my mind, despite the several different themes that are inhabiting my recent posts here, is that I’m coming to the end of my current journal volume and I’m looking forward to the new volume, and the items that will be part of its initial list.

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

a reflection on teaching 3

•24 October 2021 • 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the idea of contact and connection with students in teaching, and I know with this idea that I am standing on the edge of a deep lake, wet up to the ankles, and I will keep coming back here to drink. This is particularly true now that we are again practicing full contact aikido, that other laboratory of contact.

But this contemplation of contact leads naturally to contemplation of other aspects of teaching. Two of these are design and delivery: how I structure my interactions with students, face to face and on-line, scheduled and spontaneous, and how I take this developing map of (in this case) graph theory and get it out of my mind and into my students’ minds.

Because to a great extent, this is what I’m working to do. One aspect of this, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before at some point, is the basic fact of distance. As I teach a subject year after year (graph theory, calculus, aikido), my understanding continues to develop. I see deeper into the subject, and my distance from those just beginning their journey increases.

And so part of what I have to work through, in terms of design and delivery, is how to manage and mitigate this increasing distance in understanding. The issue I find with design is that I want to show my students the nifty things I’ve found, but I have to be careful in doing this.

What I like about graph theory is that there are some (relatively) easy to state questions relevant to the material we’re covering, where I can give my students their statements and then point to (sometimes very) recent papers and preprints where mathematicians are still working through those questions.

But there is a deeper question kicking around here. The past year and a half has changed how we think about delivery. The lessons we’ve learned will change what we’re doing, how we design and how we deliver, and the landscape here is constantly shifting as we digest these lessons.

What will this landscape look like in 10 years? 15 years? I can make guesses, but they can be only guesses, as my Magic 8-Ball doesn’t provide sufficiently nuanced answers to my questions. And I’m very curious to journey through this landscape.

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

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