beware, there be spoilers: Player Piano

•25 February 2018 • Leave a Comment

OK, so perhaps I’m being a bit overly cautious, warning of the possibility of spoilers for a book first published in 1952.  But I don’t know whether you’re planning on reading it, and it’s quite an enjoyable read.  My reading plan for the year 2018 is to read (among other things, it’s an extensive plan) the complete works of Kurt Vonnegut, and Player Piano is his first novel.  I should say, this is not intended as a book review but rather, I would like to use Player Piano as a bit of a stepping off point.

Interestingly enough, it’s not hard to view Player Piano as smack in the middle of science fiction genre-land.  A brief summary for those who haven’t read it (yet): After a war following World War II, much production in the US has been automated, and the machines and their decisions are beginning to take over in ways that many people find uncomfortable.

People lose their jobs if they are found unworthy by the machines, and are then become part of the great unwashed, provided with the necessities of life except for value.  Their skills are recorded on tape and punch cards, and then the people are cast aside.  And this is the foundation of the rebellion, into which the not entirely intrepid Dr Paul Proteus gets drawn.

What I found most interesting is how this book fits into a growing body of work on the dangers of the machine world.  I would have loved to spend an evening in a bar with Mr Vonnegut, discussing the basic thesis of his book and its relationship to what’s happening now, though now much more quickly and much more extensively.

There is a fundamental difference between what is happening now and what happened in Player Piano.  There, the machines were not aware and they were operating under the rules we gave them, and we still had an understanding of these rules.  At no point did the machines make a decision that was incomprehensible to the characters in the novel, however much they might have disagreed with that decision.

Now, though, expert systems and deep machine learning allow computers to develop their own algorithms, and we sometimes don’t have any idea of what is going on inside these algorithms.  In fact, we will at some point come to a point where the level of complexity and information required for those algorithms will be beyond the capability of the human brain to handle full stop.  And this is beginning to worry some people.

Our stories are becoming full of machines that run amok or otherwise behave in ways we don’t understand, following an internal logic that’s foreign to us their creators.  And this I think is going to make for a very interesting future indeed.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

zen and the art of administration

•28 January 2018 • 2 Comments

I am not a scholar of Buddhism in general or of zen in particular.  I’ve done some reading over the years, dipping in hither and thither, but nothing systematic.  I like Stephen Batchelor‘s interpretation and much of my thinking on zen has also influenced by the connections between zen and martial arts, which isn’t surprising after having studied and practiced aikido for some 20 years.

Legend has it that Ueshiba Morehei O’Sensei, the founder of aikido, had no time for zen.  I will admit that this gives room for the nagging question in the back of my mind, a small quiet but nonetheless persistent question, of whether I’ll be able to do O’Sensei’s aikido without having O’Sensei’s view of the world.

But then the louder, more realistic and somewhat more reasonable, voice comes in and says, you’ll never be able to do O’Sensei’s aikido anyway, given y’all’s different paths through life, and so don’t sweat it; just do the best you can.

And this is a very zen attitude, as I have come rightly or wrongly to understand zen.  It goes back to the old adage, which I read somewhere but for which I didn’t note the source: there’s no point in worrying about the things over which you have no control.  And there’s no point in worrying about the things over which you have some control. As Yoda says, Try not.  Do.  Or do not.  There is no try.

But what does all of this have to do with being an administrator?  One of the basic tenets that I take from Buddhism is that the world is as the world is, whether I pay attention to it or not.  I have the choice of recognizing the world as it is or not, but the world abides and doesn’t care or notice the choice I’ve made.

So part of being an administrator is keeping an eye on and being aware of everything.  This is hard to do and is impossible to do alone, and this realization has played a large part in how I’ve tried to develop and structure my approach to administration.  I have always tried to view myself and to act as one part of a much larger team.  After all, the more eyes we have surveying the horizon, the more of the horizon we can see.

And this brings up another aspect of this line of thought, which is that of contingency.  I’m aware that contingency is a word that has multiple related meanings, but the meaning I’m using here is one thing depending on another.

Large organizations are complex.  One change hither may well cause or require a change thither.  A butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the organization, and sometime later there might arise a small storm elsewhere in the organization.

And so any change, however local, needs to be considered with an eye towards its contingent effects elsewhere.  The conservative view would be, make then no changes, but I don’t see this as a reasonable view to take.  One reason is that the external environment, the rest of the world, is constantly changing and so the contingencies will always reach far far beyonds the bounds of the organization and it’s impossible to ignore these external changes.

But we can’t ignore these external changes or the need for internal changes in response to each other and to the external changes.  And so all we can do is to think through the contingent results of these changes and to shape ourselves as best we can in the face of them.

I’m sure that these ideas have been explored by others, and if you’re reading this and have come across these or similar ideas before, I’d be interested in sources.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

the shining city on the hill and the great white whale

•13 January 2018 • 2 Comments

I suspect that my memory is a bit suspect on this, which given the time that’s passed wouldn’t surprise me, but I have the memory from an AP English class in high school that the shining city on the hill is a reference from Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, an allegory with the subtlety of a 2×4 upside the head. The shining city on the hill was the goal towards which the hero Pilgrim was journeying along the Straight and Narrow Path, through the Slough of Despond and the other stops along his journey.

The shining city on the hill has become a not uncommon reference, one that I’ve used on more than one occasion, as the end point that we might not reach in our efforts. But while we might not reach the shining city, we need to have a goal towards which to work. Towards which to strive. Towards which to direct our efforts, rather than bouncing around in some administrative Brownian motion, bouncing randomly from one thing to another, which can happen in large and complicated organizations.

The great white whale is of course Moby Dick. I remember taking a literature class as a university student from a Professor who felt that Moby Dick was one of the great American novels and indeed one of the great novels in absolute terms. I’ve read Moby Dick a few times now; I try and reread it every few years, and it is one that I enjoy more each time I read it. Ahab’s obsession towards finding and killing Moby Dick still resonates, being quoted by no less an illuminary than Khan Noonien Singh

So why have I brought together the shining city on the hill with the great white whale? I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the objectives towards which large institutions direct their effort and their energy. And I think there’s a central question that we always need to address. Are we moving towards the shining city on the hall, moving towards the heavenly destination in which all things will be better, or are we at sea, bound by our irrational obsession to find and kill the great white whale that in the end we cannot do more than lose our ship to.

Change is a complicated thing, and the decisions we need to make in that process of change are complicated decisions, often and necessarily based on partial information. We rarely have the luxury of making decisions based on perfect or complete information and we do the best we can. But I do think we can and must continue to reflect on the goals of the institution and to keep evaluating that basic decision, is our goal the shining city on the hill or is our goal the great white whale.

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the old reading project and the new

•8 December 2017 • 1 Comment

On 1 January 2017, I set myself a challenge. I would read the Sir Richard Burton translation of the Tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. My original plan was to read one Night per day, and finish in (roughly) 3 years. But I got slightly more ambitious, cranked my pace up to four Nights per day sometime during the spring, and I finished the tale of Ma’aruf and Dayla, the last of the Tales, yesterday during a morning coffee break.

It’s been an interesting journey. I’ve had a physical copy of Sir Richard’s translation on my shelf for 20 years or so, 3 hardback volumes with very small type and very thin pages. And it’s interesting that reading it on the Kindle made it a much easier read. I carry my machine with me all the time, but I would not have been able to easily carry the bricks of the physical volumes. And sometimes, my best reading time was lunchtime or coffee, not the morning when I first woke to greet the day and not the evening, the night, when I was tired and sleep was regretfully more attractive than even reading.

I smiled when I came across Sinbad and the 7 voyages of a man never happy to be sitting at home. I remember Jinn and Ifrit freed from sealed stoppered bottles and rings. I remember caves of treasures but SPOILER ALERT it wasn’t Aladdin or Ala Al’din who found the cave and the Jinn to satisfy all his desires. Rather it was Ma’aruf who found the cave of treasure and the Jinn sealed into the ring while plowing a field.

There were long fascinating stories in the middle, like the many Tales of the battles of Gharib, and all in all, I’m happy I made the effort. The question is, what reading comes next.

I have always viewed the buying of book, the owning of books and the reading of books to be related but separate pleasures, and I have a lot of unread books on the shelves. Next though, perhaps I’ll tackle the source of one of my favourite quotes in these troubled times: Long is the way and hard that leads from darkness into light, which is a paraphrase but I think a reasonable paraphrase for most situations.

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the power of Hofstadter’s principle

•27 November 2017 • 4 Comments

Those who know me, know that I am a fan of Hofstadter’s principle, also know as Hofstadter’s law, which states that the task at hand will always take longer than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s principle.

Part of the power of Hofstadter’s principle is its self referential nature.  Part of its power is the way it feeds on itself, and I want to take a moment to reflect on that.  If we were to phrase the principle as saying, the task at hand will always take twice as long as you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s principle, then twice becomes four times, four times becomes eight times, and very very soon, every task takes infinite time.

Now, I have projects that seem to be taking infinite time to complete, but that is merely a subjective illusion that comes from how I feel the passage of time.  We as humans have a very poor relationship with infinity, but that’s a story for another time.

But every iteration taking a bit longer than the previous iteration, this is something we can hold in our heads.

One reason I like Hofstadter’s principle is that it can be so easily recast for the situation in which we find ourselves.  The task at hand will always be harder than you think, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s principle.  And the task at hand will always be more complicated than you think, even when you take into Hofstadter’s principle.

In this, Hofstadter’s principle is akin to Parkinson’s Law, which (loosely) states that work will expand to fill the available time.  I think the two, Hofstadter’s principle and Parkinson’s law, march hand in hand, and together they have a significant impact on the way in which we work.  The way in which I work.

And so I find myself engaged in constant combat, against the self referential nature of Hofstadter’s principle, and against the expansionist principle of Parkinson’s law.  My daily hope is that awareness of Hofstadter and Parkinson will be part of my toolkit in, if not defeating them, at least moderating their effects.

Posted in bizarre and random things

the truth I find in an old story

•20 November 2017 • 2 Comments

In Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, story 14 of 101 Zen Stories, Paul Rips relates the story of an old monk and a young monk going down a road during a storm. They come across a well dressed young woman unable to cross a muddy intersection. The old monk picks up the young woman and carries her across to the dry road on the other side of the intersection. The monks continue down the road until the young monk, troubled by what had just happened, reminds the old monk that monks in their order do not touch women and how could he break the rules so blithely. The old monk then says, ‘I left the girl there. Are you still carrying her?’

This is one of my favourite (very) short stories and one that I come back to time and again. Because I know that I have a tendency to carry things beyond when they can reasonably be carried. For instance, I am a maker of lists, and some of the items on my lists have acquired tenure, they’ve been on my lists so long. They have acquired almost an untouchability, saying to me, how dare you try and remove me from your list. I have been here so long that I have become an indelible, unremoveable item on your list.

This comes back to the previous entry in these musings of mine, of how to get stuck into the large things. The comment made by Jacey Bedford, friend and colleague, is the old adage that the only way to eat the elephant is one bite at a time. (And apologies to elephants, who have been in the news recently for much less worthy reasons.)

It’s an interesting thing, this comfort we develop sometimes in carrying the same thing for a long time. For such a long time indeed that the act of carrying itself becomes almost a comfort. That the thing we are carrying becomes a comfort blanket, a favourite stuffed bear, and this can make it hard to set it down on the side of the road and walk away.

But this is a common thread in Zen, that we are sometimes, often, the source of our own discomfort, because of our own tendency to carry the source of our discomfort with us. For me, I am beginning to think that one among the many things I carry is this comfort that arises from procrastination. That the fact that something remains on my list is somehow a good thing, a comfortable thing.

And so now, I bid adieu and go back to the list, the new things and the old things, and we will address one of each this evening. And perhaps, if I am strong and able, I will carry on with so attacking my list, the new things and the old things. It is an impossible dream that someday the list is empty, but at this point my sincere wish is that I can look on my list, and all of the things staring back at me are new untenured things.

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time leaks

•18 November 2017 • 3 Comments

In poker terms, a leak is an aspect of one’s play that leads to less than optimal results in the game.  Always playing one’s favorite hand is a classic example of a leak, or playing certain hands in exactly the same way.

This idea of the leak is a much broader idea, somewhere between the poker leak and the more literal definition of leak, and one that I spend a lot of time thinking about.  This is the time leak.

I sometimes get to the end of the day, I look back and I wonder, where did the day go.  Where did my time go today.  During the work week, I spend a lot of time in meetings, and this is just part of the role I currently have.  Some meetings are reasonable or valuable uses of time, though it must be said that this is not true of all meetings.

This I suppose is a variant of Parkinson’s Law where meetings expand to fill the scheduled time.   I am partially responsible for this, as some of the meetings are mine, though not entirely.

But other days, and these other days often includes weekends, I don’t have the excuse of meetings.  I don’t have the time I spend teaching, which is often the high point of my working day.

I wake up in the mornings and I have a clear list of what I want to accomplish over the course of the day.  It is always an ambitious list, and I sometimes make good progress against my list.  But not always.

But there is something I have come to recognize how much I struggle with.  There are some large projects which have been on the list for too long, and I am not good at making day by day progress on these large projects.

And this is now my task, to segment these large projects and to develop the habit of clearing the daily list.

Habits are hard to form. They require cultivation and curation, and it is very easy to begin a project like this tomorrow.  There is an old quote, I’m not sure of the original source, that tomorrow is the greatest labor saving device known to humankind.  It’s not true, but it is always easy to believe it today.

So I need to become something of a plumber, seeking out and sealing the time leaks in my own internal plumbing.  We’ll see how it goes.

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

persuading the world that mathematics can be fun 2: cohomology and local triviality

•5 November 2017 • 1 Comment

I’m feeling particularly brave today, and with this level of bravery comes a degree of foolhardiness that strikes me as reckless.  But I have set myself a quest, and part of that quest is to bring mathematical ideas out into the light.

So let’s do this.   Consider an impossible object.  The particular I want to consider is the Penrose triangle or impossible tribar, thought the same sort of discussion may well hold for some of the other objects on the list.

If we restrict our attention to just one of the corners of the Penrose triangle, we see nothing out of the ordinary.  Just the corner of a triangular object that might have been built out of pieces of wood or steel.  Not much to see here.

But it is when we look at the Penrose triangle as a whole, not one small piece at a time, that things go terribly, horribly wrong.  It is not possible to build a Penrose triangle in normal space, regardless of the materials used.

Lots of people find the Penrose triangle and other similar impossible objects interesting for all sorts of reasons.  For me, there is one particular aspect that I find interesting, one among many, and this is that the Penrose triangle illustrates a phenomenon that mathematicians find fascinating.

This is the phenomenon of getting something interesting globally, about an object as a whole, even when it’s not all that interesting locally, in its small pieces.  The how of getting this something interesting is where the mathemagic happens and so I don’t want to go into detail here.

But I feel that the general idea of taking two objects that are made up of the same looking small pieces, but being able to distinguish one from the other, is I think one of the great ideas in mathematics.

And it’s a remarkable slippery and subtle idea.  To convince you of this, let me end with an example.

Take a line, an ordinary straight line.  If we look at very small pieces, say intervals of length ε (a symbol that mathematicians use to refer to the very very very small), then we can build up the line by overlapping lots (and by lots, here we need to mean infinitely many) of these small intervals.

If on the other hand we look at a circle of radius 1 000 000 000, we can also build the circle by overlapping lots (though by lots, here we mean finitely many even though the number needed will be huge) of these small intervals.

The line and the circle are very different, and yet we can build them out of the same small pieces, by using enough of these small pieces.

The line and the circle are very different; we can keep going around and around and around a circle, something we can’t do for a line.  We keep going the same direction on a circle and we keep passing the same point, which we can’t do on a line.

So, different objects, built from the same small pieces.  Or impossible objects, built from possible small pieces.  Both reflections of the same basic idea, that even when things looks simple on the small scale, they get interesting when viewed on the large scale.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics

exploring Confucius: hearing and forgetting 2

•8 October 2017 • Leave a Comment

I’d like to spend time following up something I wrote some little time ago now.  Teaching has started here and is occupying a lot of my attention.  And a significant part of my attention is on the basic question:  given that I am lecturing, how can I as lecturer best act to ensure my students are getting value for the time they’re spending in lecture.

It’s an interesting question, in part because it’s a strange question to ask.  There is a common view that the question of value is essentially the same as the question of time.  If I as a lecturer am giving you the student my time, then I am providing you the student with something of value.  And yes, I do have to say that I believe this is true of me.  Though of course, it isn’t really my question to answer.

I don’t see that time is the same question as value.  We can extract value from time spent, but it is also possible to spend time but not create anything of value.  What I need to do in the lecture is to capture your attention.  In aikido, this is atemi, which I’ve spent a bit of time exploring in a completely different context.  But it’s not a concept that I’ve explored to any depth from the point of view of teaching.

But it is critical.  We each have busy minds.  When students come into the classroom, I as the lecturer need to do something to bring their attention into the room.  In the aikido dojo, we have a way of doing this, which is the ritual with which we begin every class.  This ritual helps me to leave behind the busyness and business of the day behind, and to focus my attention on the task at hand.  I don’t have such a ritual for my mathematics teaching, and perhaps I should.

And I can see that I’ve drifted a bit off topic, but not too far off.  I hear and I forget, so what I can I do to those who hear me, to help them remember.  This is akin to the stickiness of lectures.

So, what makes a lecture sticky?  And what do we even mean by sticky in this context?  I have an idea of what I mean.  What I want is that you, having heard me talk about something, remember what I’ve talked about.  Not that you can recall the lecture verbatim, but rather that as you go through the notes, you will on occasion read a sentence and hear it in my voice, speaking the words to you as you’re reading.  I want the enthusiasm with which I approach the topic of the day, to become a hum in the background.  And the reason I say this, is that I still have that background hum from some of the lectures I attended, as a graduate student, as an undergraduate, and even a few rare hums from high school.

But how to do this?    I’m sure there are ways.  One I think is to think of a lecture as a story to be told.  And so, I need to become more of a story teller.  This actually runs deep.  Because if I need to become a story teller, then first, I decide what is the story I want to tell.  And this is the rabbit hole into which I find that I have fallen.

 

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

exploring a house of unlit rooms

•1 October 2017 • Leave a Comment
One of the things I find most fascinating about the fiction writing I do is how different it is from my day job.  In my day job, I’m a mathematician.  In my day job, I take a question, a strange little idea, and I spend time, months or years, exploring that idea, wandering through the maze of its subtleties.  Exploring its dark alleys and blind canyons that lead nowhere.  Revelling in its occasional moments of clarity and advancement.
The art of doing mathematics has been described as exploring a house.  We start in one darkened room and we grope our way around, thinking that we are finding where the furniture is located and developing an internal picture of the layout of the room.  And then the light goes on and we realize that our view of the room was largely wrong.  We missed some pieces of furniture, misjudged others, and missed a door entirely just because we never made it to that part of the room.  We then have to spend tome time reconciling the mental picture of the room we created, with the room as we can then see it.
We then go through one of the doors and start all over again in another darkened room.
But for me, writing is different.  I tend not to follow or explore a writing idea to the same depth as I do a mathematical idea.  I am much more butterfly than miner, moving from one thing to another.  And I have started to ask myself, why.
I don’t know whether other writers follow ideas as deep as they go, largely because I think I don’t read entire oeuvres.  I’ll read a novel from X, a collection of stories from Y.  But I don’t start with the first thing X wrote, and then read everything they wrote chronologically from that first thing.  I’m not sure it would help, and I’m not sure it wouldn’t.    Perhaps I’ll make it a project for the Christmas break. And I’m sure that some writers do this deep extensive exploration of the branches and twists of some single idea, and I’m sure that some writers don’t, and now I’m wondering in which group I might want to place myself.
I think that I would much more like to be the sort of writer who needs to dive into an idea, wallow in that idea, explore it like I explore the house of mathematics and find everything I can find.  And that’s what I’m doing.  But there is something more of which I need to be aware.  That is, exploring an idea to its deepest depths takes time, and my mathematician side is used to producing one paper a year, perhaps a bit more, once the exploration reaches a natural end.
But if I’m going to do this exploration as a writer, I’m going to need to change how I view things.  I’m going to need to become willing to let people see the midway points.  I’m going to need to become willing to let people see me camped in the blind alleys.  I’m going to need to become willing to expose my explorations while they are still only half formed.  And for me, this shift is the hardest thing.
And so, I put aside this rumination and turn my attention back to the writing I haven’t yet done today, stories clamouring for attention and a novel that everyone I know is firmly convinced will never be completed.

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