on lenses

•13 June 2021 • 1 Comment

Since the age of eight, I’ve worn glasses. At the beginning, I was only required to wear them to see the teacher from my preferred seat at the back of the room, but my memory is that I wore them all of my waking hours, except when I was reading, and that habit has persisted all the years since. And so, I have always been used to the fact that the lenses I wear have a significant impact on how I see the world.

Recently, I started reflecting on the other lenses through which I examine the world. Mathematics is one of those lenses; I have an appreciation for the power of clarity in definitions and description, as well as the structure of argument and abstraction. One aspect of this lens is the unexpected joy of discovering sometimes unexpected commonalities in seemingly unrelated situations.

I have always found this mathematical lens to be a useful lens through which to view some aspects of administration and governance. In discussions around policy development, to take one example, having clarity in definitions can be invaluable, to minimize the potential ambiguities that can arise in interpretation, particularly once the history and context around the policy have been lost in the mists of time.

Aikido is another lens, and one that’s come up a number of times through these (virtual) pages. One critical aspect of aikido is contact, and applying the mathematical lens to this, establishing what we actually mean by contact is important here.

Taken somewhat broadly, contact can be interpreted to mean engagement or focus. When applying an aikido technique on uke (the person on whom the technique is applied), there is nothing gained from the movement unless as tori (the person applying the technique), we are moving uke in some essential way.

And this notion of contact is useful elsewhere. In teaching, establishing and maintaining contact with the students is core to teaching. In administrative work, it is important to maintain contact with the core of arguments and not be distracted by the sound and fury of the surrounding discussions.

Somewhat recursively, this notion of lenses is itself a helpful lens through which to reflect on the world. And that’s something for further ponderation.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, mathematics

a lesson from the kitchen arena

•6 June 2021 • Leave a Comment

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.

Posted in bizarre and random things

the glorious interconnectedness of all things 4

•31 May 2021 • Leave a Comment

For a little while now, I’ve been gathering together threads from past contemplations, some explored through these posts, to see what cloth I can weave. This is the fourth in a series; I include here links to the first, the second and the third, for any who might be interested, pulling together observations from one area of my experience and exploring how it advances my understanding of another.

This particular thread involves a connection between aikido and administration. As the English lockdown eases, we have restarted in-person aikido classes; we are still distanced from one another, but we are able to meet in the same room. One big difference that we’ve noticed is that now, as opposed to a class via Zoom, is that we can each other from head to toe.

This sparked a thought. One of the aspects of aikido that I have always enjoyed is that feedback is immediate. Our ability to successfully perform a technique is evidenced by how our uke, the person receiving the technique, moves. Likewise, our inability to unsuccessfully perform a technique is evidence by how our uke doesn’t move. There is the third pillar of the overly compliant uke, where the uke moves because they know they’re supposed to move, but not because they’re compelled to move by tori, the person performing the technique.

There are other aspects of this feedback process as well. If for instance I allow myself, through my movement as tori, to become unbalanced, then I provide my uke with an opportunity to take control of the movement. Thus, I move from being tori to being uke, and I find myself laughing up from the tatami.

The thought that caught me is, to what extent is this same dynamic in play in other parts of my experience. As a teacher, this can happen if I do not prepare myself sufficiently well, for a lecture or a problem class, and I find myself facing a student who has. They ask a question, I fumble the answer, and they continue to press.

In aikido, we have an exercise. Uke will press their hand against tori’s shoulder. Tori needs to move with that pressure, not losing their own balance and in the process, taking over uke’s balance. It’s been more than a year, and I am very much looking forward to being able to do this again.

But this also has a distinct administrative parallel. Sometimes, when circumstances change quickly, decisions need to be made quickly. Events exert their pressure upon us, and we need to react calmly, without losing our balance, in order to have some productive impact on the situation.

An applicable lesson from aikido is that practice helps. Another applicable lesson from aikido is that the test needs to be genuine. In aikido, this is the uke giving tori some of their weight, so that tori has something to work with.

But in an administrative context, it can be difficult to provide genuine practice. Case studies can help, but they often come with incomplete information and they come to us out of context. Here, we come to a lacuna. I’ve never interrogated the training or management literature, to explore how deep this particular pool actually is. And so, another project is born.

And interestingly, we seem to be drifting into the realm of challenge based learning and how the framework around challenge based learning can be adapted to some of these aspects of training. But this is a topic for another day.

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

a reflection during eurovision 2021

•22 May 2021 • 1 Comment

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.

Posted in bizarre and random things

productive procrastination

•14 May 2021 • 1 Comment

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.

Posted in bizarre and random things

yet another phrase about management

•8 May 2021 • Leave a Comment

Looking back over the past years of this (public) notebook, I’ve written a fair bit about issues around management, which reflects my current role in the university. If you’re interested, some of these past posts can be found here and here, here and here, here and here, here and here. Another thing I’ve discussed along these lines is transparent head syndrome, and at the risk of piling things a bit too high, I’d like to add one more.

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, Zaphod Beeblebrox at one point finds himself in the Total Perspective Vortex, which provides him with an accurate representation of his place in the universe as a whole. Fortunately for Zaphod, he happens at that time to be in a small pocket universe that was created for him, and so he has a very different experience than anyone else who’s been through the Vortex.

Interesting and not surprisingly, there has been some formal research into aspects of the Total Perspective Vortex, but what I’d like to include here are some personal reflections.

Like transparent head syndrome, I’ve always found the Total Perspective Vortex to be a helpful image to keep in mind, and for similar reasons. Going through days filled with meetings, it is sometimes easy to forget the larger picture, or to have the wider picture obscured by the small and large details filling the days.

And actually, it’s both parts of the story of the Vortex. It’s both the need to understand the perspective of where we stand in the scheme of things, which is the Vortex, but also that there are times when the Vortex can be misleading. Sometimes, after all, we are involved in something important. Rarely is it so stark as it is for Zaphod, but I do think that the breadth of the view in the Vortex can be misleading.

Perspective requires work, to acquire initially and also to maintain. Each of us has the issues that are important to us, and those issues will differ across the piece. So what’s critically and immediately important to one person may be less important to someone else. Remembering the importance that an issue has for others is part of the overall context that we always need to keep in mind.

Someone once told me that not every job deserves our best. I’d resisted this for a long time, not wanting to seen to be giving something less than my best, but I’ve learned that part of perspective is knowing what effort different tasks require. And it is true. For instance, producing an initial draft, the first part of a longer process of consultation and drafting, consulting again and re-drafting, requires care but doesn’t need to produce as polished a version as results at the end.

And I’ve come to realize just how important maintaining perspective is, particularly when the world is complicated. And right now, the world is complicated.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

stories of Zen: a cup of tea

•3 May 2021 • 1 Comment

Number 1 of the 101 Zen stories that form the first part of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps, can only be described as a classic among classics. Among other appearances, for instance, I remember this story as being part of the opening scenes of the movie 2012.

Nan-in, a Zen master, was (in this version) visited by a university professor, who wanted to talk about Zen. Nan-in served tea, continuing to pour tea into the cup even after the cup is full. The professor could no longer restrain himself, commenting that the cup was full and no more tea would fit. Nan-in said, ‘Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’

I had forgotten until recently rereading that Nan-in’s visitor was a university professor, and being a university professor myself, I recognize that this full-mindedness is something of an occupational hazard.

But this isn’t the core of this particular story. Rather, the core is the question, how do we learn new things? We spend our lives learning, formally and informally, through structured schooling and independent work, and as we learn (naively) we construct a model of the world. That model then can become the lens through which we see the world.

Beginner’s mind is a phrase that that captures this idea, at least for me. What does it take to retain at least some of the perspective of a beginner, a novice, as we increase our own understanding. How can we bridge the inevitable distance that grows between us as beginner and us as experienced practitioner or as expert.

I’m finding this particularly difficult at present, on one of the projects I’m working on. It’s the paper I wrote about recently, which I’ve been working on for too long, and it’s becoming difficult to maintain the perspective that I feel would be most helpful to work through some of the remaining areas for attention.

Unfortunately, or inevitably, I think that the lesson buried in the story is that the only way to get around this issue of full mindedness is to practice, to actively remain aware of the issue and actively keep space in our minds so that we can take a different perspective.

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

beware, there be spoilers: Le Mort d’Arthur volume 1 by Thomas Malory

•22 April 2021 • 1 Comment

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?

Posted in bizarre and random things

the glorious interconnectedness of all things 2

•18 April 2021 • 4 Comments

I am currently working on both a mathematical paper (and to be fair, I’ve been working on it for longer than I want to admit) and a story (built around the same basic idea of my second published story). Both are still in progress, and I thought it would be interesting to (very occasionally) compare and contrast my thoughts as I go through the process of finishing both.

The math paper keeps growing. The original paper was relatively short and focused on one theorem, which is a question that had been kicking around my head for twenty years. It’s a question that I gave to a PhD student, who decided to focus their attention in a different direction and never focused their attention on this question. And so I have an idea, and I went back to it, and I was able to push the idea through.

There is still some work to be done in the details of the proof of that theorem, but I’m confident that I’ll be able to make them work. One of the interesting things about a math theorem, a math paper, at least for me, is that until I actually work through all of the details, in their full detail, there is always the ghost of a nagging doubt that I’ve missed something that will come back and haunt me.

There is an aspect of this ghost in crafting a story, in that there are the continuity errors. If I want something to happen later in the story, the early part of the story can’t then set up something that precludes that which needs to come later. In the math paper, though, the ghost can be something we can’t get around. If only I can do this thing that unfortunately isn’t true, is something that I suspect most mathematicians have said to themselves, and the art and craft then comes in finding the true steps to the true end result.

For me, and for these two projects, the interesting thing is that I can see the ending to the math paper much more clearly than I can see the ending to the story. For the math paper, I know all of the results that I want to be part of the final work, whether I can push them through and make them part of this paper or whether they will require more thought and be part of a future paper. I have a very clear picture in my head of what I believe should be true.

For the story, I have no idea how it ends. Reflecting on the stories I’ve half-written but haven’t yet brought to a final version, I have a problem with the endings. And I can see what I’m doing. I have an idea, I craft a story around that idea, and I lose my energy and end up with something that I don’t find satisfying at the end.

I read a lot of short stories, science fiction and fantasy and neither, and there are some spectacular stories out there. I don’t like to think about how some of those authors would handle my ideas, because they’re (for the time being at least) my ideas, and I want to see what I can do with them. (And it can also be remarkably intimidating.) The same thought also lurks in the back of my mind with the math paper, but both have the common feature that once we send those ideas out into the world, others will be able to read them and start doing their jazz with the ideas.

With both, there is the temptation to keep going. I’ve accepted that fiction needs editing, and editing, and a bit more editing, constantly refining, and removing everything that doesn’t advance the story. With the math paper, there is more of a temptation to include all of the associated and related results, not being as concerned about removing everything that doesn’t advance the story of the paper, and perhaps this is something to reconsider.

I can see that I’ve always adopted the Columbo protocol with math papers – just one more thing, and so an exercise I’ll add to my list of exercises is to read math papers with the same eye I use when reading and critiquing the stories I read. I’m curious to see what happens.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

the glorious interconnectedness of all things 1

•10 April 2021 • 3 Comments

Poker players, to be successful, must not only study the structure of the game itself, but also must become aware of the leaks in their game. A leak for a poker player is a a hole in their game though which they leak chips or money; it’s an area of their game in which they are making suboptimal decisions.

The key here is perspicacity. Poker players need to be aware of their own leaks, as well as the leaks in the games of the folks with whom they’re playing. I’ve given some thought to the leaks I have in my own poker game, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t set them out here. If I were to decide to move from recreational player to a more serious player, I would find a coach, someone who I would ask to watch my game and give me their perspective on my play.

Leaks are a much broader phenomenon than just poker. What are the leaks in my writing practice? What are the leaks in my mathematical work? What are the leaks in my aikido practice? What are the leaks in my administrative work? And it is this wider applicability of these ideas from one area to other areas that reflects this glorious interconnectedness, or at least one aspect of this glorious interconnectedness.

Though not in these terms, I’ve written before about the leaks in my writing practice, particularly the leak of not finishing. I don’t like rewriting and I don’t like editing, and it’s always a more attractive prospect to start a new story than to fix an old story, one that’s almost but not quite completed. And so this is the leak I’m currently working to fix. And I’m aware of other leaks as well, but that’s for another day.

I’m pondering the leaks in my aikido practice, and this is difficult. We haven’t been able to hold a typical aikido session for more than a year, and so it’s been a long time since someone has grabbed me with intent. We’ve been keeping ourselves going with regular zoom classes, of necessity focusing on aspects of solo practice.

And so, not only will any extant leaks that had been in place a year ago still be present, they will be larger, due to the lack of practice, and I’m sure there will be a host of new leaks as well. We will all for instance need to be a bit cautious as we work our way back into regular practice, given our time away and our lack of practice in falling down.

The leaks in my administrative work is a fascinating area of ponderation, and one that I’ll come back to at another time.

But I find pondering this interconnectedness, applying the terminology of one area to another, to be illuminating, and inordinately so at times. As much as anything, I find it useful to have as many ways of interrogating my own practice as possible.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, poker and other games

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