dooms day devices 2: agriculture

•7 June 2014 • 2 Comments

I’d like to go back to an idea that I wrote about some long time ago, the idea of a doomsday device. One of the questions I find it interesting to ponder is, what are the doomsday devices in the modern world, that we have set in motion for ourselves. Perhaps there aren’t any but I tend to think there are.

Back then, I was thinking about the attack us and die doomsday device (as in Dr Strangelove) and the keep me happy and fed or die doomsday device, and I made the observation that money might well be a doomsday device of the latter kind.  At some point, perhaps I’ll try and get a colleague in Economics to suggest this as a dissertation topic to one of their students.

I think that agriculture is another one, though I don’t think it fits into either of these two categories.  I wasn’t thinking at the time that this would be a complete characterization of types of doomsday devices, since there are clearly others, such as the musical chairs, as long as the music plays doomsday device, which I think agriculture might be.

And I have to say at this point, this is not a new idea to me. It is one that’s been explored by a number of authors. These are the stories of civilizations collapsing and dying because of environmental collapse, whether brought on by climate change or the environmental effects of large scale agriculture, the repercussions of war, or something else entirely.

But what I am offering here is a slightly different interpretation of these stories of agriculture and the consequences of agriculture leading to the environmental collapse that then led to the collapse of these old civilizations.

Because what are some of the consequences of agriculture. Agriculture, the structured cultivation of crops and animals (if we want to use a wide definition), led to the establishment of cities, of governments, writing and reading for the purposes of administering and governing. But one of the main consequences of agriculture is that it led to the increase in population size.

I remember the population bomb as a topic of conversation in the 1970s and it is not my intention to revisit that debate, because I think the world is capable of sustaining quite a large population, with appropriate shepherding and conservation efforts, and some amount of restraint on our part.

But I think that agriculture has become a musical chairs, as long as the music plays doomsday device, because I don’t see how it would be possible to undo the growth in population that agriculture has allowed.  And it is this impossibility of undoing that I think is a defining feature of doomsday devices.

We, the whole of humanity we, will find ourselves under pressure over the coming century, as population increases, as the climate changes and patterns of cultivation change in response, and as people around the world quite reasonably aspire to live well.  How we, the whole of humanity, cope with this pressure will define us.

There has been a vast amount of science fiction written on this general topic, how we will cope with some of these pressures going forward into our future, and it will be interesting, in all senses of the word, to see how those speculations stand up going forward, and what we are able to learn from them in terms of seeing ourselves through.

Posted in bizarre and random things

a first meditation on being a teacher

•8 February 2014 • 1 Comment

I have been a teacher for many years now; in fact, we’re now rapidly approaching the point at which I’m thrice the age of my students, rather than merely twice. I teach 2 very different things. On the one hand (which I can write without violating the basic tenets of the Number Liberation Front, as I’m using ‘one’ not as a number but as an adjective, I suppose), I teach mathematics to undergraduate university students, and on the other hand, I am 1 of the instructors in the University aikido club. I’ve been thinking recently about the commonalities and differences between the 2 types of teaching.

There is an obvious difference between the 2. To practice aikido requires physical contact. Someone grabs me, or attempts a strike, and I need to do something rather quickly. (Or is it quite quickly? Having lived in 2 countries where the use of ‘quite’ and ‘rather’ is different, I am now very confused and can’t remember which is the current local usage.) The end of a good, active aikido session can be sweaty.   This physicality leads to a directness in teaching.  When I’m being thrown by a student, I have the opportunity to feel exactly what they’re doing, right and wrong, which I can then feed back to them immediately.

Mathematics, on the other hand, can be done in isolation. (And to follow a random train of memories, this brings to mind Ms Shearer, my 6th grade teacher, with whom we spent a session listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s I am a rock, I am an island, and discussing how people cannot exist in isolation, as they remain part of the cultural in which they grew up.)   Also, mathematics rarely involves physical combat.   Not never, mind you, just rarely.  In terms of teaching, though, mathematics teaching is a bit more at a distance than aikido teaching.  Part of this is that mathematics classes tend to significantly larger than the aikido classes I teach.   Also, a good, active mathematics class rarely ends in sweat.

Even so, there are for me some deep and significant similarities.   These are things that no doubt are similar to the teaching of many things, but hey, this is my meditation.  The similarity I would like to focus on here is the lead-a-horse-to-water phenomenon that is regularly, and sometimes almost brutally, brought home to me in both teaching fora.

In both aikido and mathematics, there are some basic, fundamental ideas that underlie everything that we do, and that I try to bring out and illustrate as much as I can through my teaching.  This is after all, in my mind at least, what a teacher should do.  I have spent  time studying how to do particular things, learning from my contemporaries and those who have gone before, and I can use the miracle of language to take what I’ve learned and provide my students with some short cuts, so that they can get farther along the path a bit faster than me.

In aikido, 1 of these basic, fundamental ideas is that at any moment in a technique, I should understand where my balance is and what is happening within both my own centre and my partner’s centre.  The way I like to try and embed this idea into my students’ brains is to have them go slowly through a technique, paying attention throughout.  But this requires that the student is willing to do the technique slowly, and alas not all of them are.  So I talk, I demonstrate, I cajole, but in the end, I cannot force.  Ultimately, I cannot teach anything.  All I can do is to provide guidance for my students on how they might learn and provide them with an environment within which they can learn.

In mathematics, the basic, fundamental idea on which I like to focus is that each statement, each assertion, needs to come from somewhere.  With each question, we have to start with things we know to be true and work out from there.  Part of an undergraduate mathematics education, and indeed mathematics education before university, is to provide students with a collection of facts, procedures and processes that we know to be true.  Mathematics does not come from nothing.  Mathematical facts do not spring full-grown from the head of Zeus.  Rather, mathematical facts are the product of accretion and accumulation (and this is where the sweat comes from).  We have just come to the end of the semester, and as in all previous years, I have the evidence that some of my students listened, and some didn’t.

So, what to do?  There is nothing to do besides persist.  Some students listen and some students don’t, but I have come to believe that it is these larger things, these fundamental ideas, that are by far the more important things that I teach, far beyond the individual techniques of aikido or the definitions, theorems and examples in mathematics.  And so we persist.  As Samuel Beckett once wrote, ‘Try again.  Fail again.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again. Fail better.’

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, mathematics

The birth of the Number Liberation Front

•20 January 2014 • 4 Comments

Friends, colleagues, members of the Academy, fellow numerati – I come before you, humbly and with open hands, to tell you of a great ill that is being done to those who depend on us, our friends, our servants and our masters, the humble numbers.  For too long, the obfuscators and the confusers and the pedantic grammarians have been shielding the true meaning of the numbers from us in a cloak of words.  These words, each similar to the next, the million and the billion, the trillion and quadrillion, serve only to cloak the true meaning of 1 000 000 and of 1000 000 000, of 1 000 000 000 000 and 1 000 000 000 000 000, from our eyes and our minds.

I say million and I say billion, and even though I know deep within the core of me that this is not the case, my mind says and my mind believes, these words are almost the same, differing from one another only by a single digit, and so the things they represent, they must be close to each other as well. Lies, lies and scandalous lies, and these lies are eating away at the foundations of our understanding.   We can no longer tolerate such lies.  They must be faced and they must be refuted.  Yea, they must be exposed to the harsh cleansing light of truth.

So, on this day, on this 20 January 2014, I declare the birth of the Number Liberation Front.   I espouse peace and harmony and the use of numbers in their true, unblemished, unshielded numerical form.  I declare that I will strike those words which claim to stand for numbers from my vocabulary and decry their use, today and forever more.  I want T-shirts saying Free the Numbers.  I want demonstrations in the streets, demanding that the truth be set free in its numerical form, without the meaninglessness imposed by the banality of this numbing blanket of letters.

Join me and let us stand together to free the number and to let the truth shine forth.

Posted in bizarre and random things

Giants, Neanderthals and old stories

•15 December 2013 • Comments Off on Giants, Neanderthals and old stories

So here’s a strange idea that’s been kicking around inside my head for a long time now, that I’ve never done anything with. I’m also not sure of just what would be the best way of testing it, but here it is for what it’s worth.

At least in Europe, and I suppose in other parts of the world, we have legends of giants and ogres, trolls and goblins, hobgoblins and other unpleasant lurkers in the dark, stealing our children and grinding their bones to make our bread, et cetera. We also are beginning to discover the extent to which modern humans such as our ancestors geographically cohabited with other branches of our recent family tree, such as Neanderthal man.  So could it be that these legends and stories are the warped cultural memory of the time when we so cohabited?  It wasn’t all that long ago, perhaps 10 000 years or so, and so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that we have some lurking distant memory of those times.

This is the sort of idea I like, I have to admit, digging into the past and trying to discover the origin of our old stories.  Could Enkidu, the wild man companion of Gilgamesh, have been a Neanderthal?  Part of the intrigue for me is the likelihood that we’ll never know, that this is a piece of knowledge that has been completely lost, because we have no good way of capturing or reconstructing a history that is primarily oral.

So what are some ways that we could test this idea.  One way would be, if we were to have a good record of where the stories of giants, ogres, trolls, et cetera, were common in folklore, to see what the correlations were with the geographical regions in which we cohabited.  But I’m not sure that such a record still exists or whether it’s even possible to reconstruct one, given the extent to the cultural communication that results from television, movies, books, and other ways of transporting stories from one place to another.

Another possibility is to find a region where humans had lived for a long time, tens of thousands of years, and where there exists no evidence of such geographical cohabitation.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure that such places exist.  Even the Americas wouldn’t be possible, because we may have cohabited with Neanderthal and other early humans before coming across the bridge into the new world.  I also have to admit to being lazy and never digging to see what stories of giants, et cetera, are contained in the mythologies of the Americas.

So, to close on this grey and overcast Sunday morning, I have a request.  If you have any ideas of how this might be tested, or you happen to know of any serious work that’s been done on this question, please do let me know.  Because I’m curious.

Posted in bizarre and random things

a first meditation on supervillainry

•10 November 2013 • 1 Comment

When I get dissatisfied with my job, I ponder the nature and attractiveness of a new job.  Supervillain.  And I don’t mean to create the wrong impression among those reading by saying that.  I like my job, quite a bit.  For the large majority of the time I spend at my job, I find it an interesting and fulfilling experience, all the things that anyone might want from or hope for in a job.  And we even have decent coffee on campus now, with the Starbucks franchises opening up in various places.

But no matter how good the job, there will always be those days when things don’t go well.  When we don’t have time for breakfast and traffic is just awful.  We get to the front of the line at the cafe but they’ve just sold the last coffee and are going to have to make more.  There is one parking spot left but the people on either side have parked too close to the lines and there’s no way to fit even my small car into the remaining space.  The students just won’t settle down and we don’t have the voice or the energy to talk over them.  We remember just as we’re walking into the office that there was one thing we absolutely had to do over the weekend but it’s still in our bag and the person to whom we promised it is standing at our office door.

These are the days that I think, perhaps there is something to recommend supervillainry.  Don’t get me wrong.  I know that supervillainry comes with many associated problems .  There are the thorns in the side:  Bond, Solo and Kuryakin, Reuter, all those who have nothing better to do than to get in the way and cause angst and delay.  There are the problems of insufficiently competent subordinates.  However, these problems have been considered by others, for instance the wise words at http://www.eviloverlord.com

But then, as they always do, the practical difficulties involved in the transition from my current profession, mild-mannered teacher of mathematics to the interested young adult, to supervillain, and it will not be easy.  When I last sat down and made the list, during a meeting in which I should have been paying more attention, I came up with: financing (I sincerely doubt that my savings and salary would provide sufficient seed money to do, well, much of anything along this line), recruitment (where does one advertize for henchmen, lackeys and minions), lair location (I don’t’ think I can successfully become a supervillain working from my desk in the corner of the bedroom), and objective.

Yes, admittedly all of the others are practical impediments that each cause their own special difficulties, but it is that last one, objective, that stops me dead in my tracks.  It’s all fine and good to say, I want to be a supervillain, until I take the next step and say, because.  Because of the money?  If money had been an objective of mine, I would have chosen a different career in the first place, in which the possibility of financial reward was significantly greater than what I do now.  The same applies to status and fame.  Alas.   And I don’t have a great desire to tell others what to do.  Not that anyone would listen anyway.  I do occasionally joke about ruling by fear, but there’s always too much laughter, half of it coming from me.

It’s a lot of effort and sacrifice becoming a supervillain.  If there’s one thing we’ve learned from literature and the movies, the likelihood of some possibly deforming physical injury is quite high, and it seems to be quite a busy job.  And so I’ll continue to ponder that basic question of objective, of a sufficiently compelling reason, of a goal that consumes me that can only be reached by taking the path of supervillainry.  If nothing else, it will continue to give me something to do during meetings.

Posted in bizarre and random things
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the power of number

•10 February 2013 • 1 Comment

I wrote the first version of this post a long time ago, back in February.  I’m not sure of the etiquette of revising a post, rather than replacing or supplementing, but what the hey.  Math is a strange subject, one that many people find hard to come to terms with, and I find that easy to forget.   So I’ll do what I can to avoid getting technical, but I think it’s inevitable that I do from time to time.

I’m curious about the psychology of numbers and of rankings.   And in a (strong) sense, this post is the beginning of my exploration of what is a very large topic, because I have not yet done any significant reading (though an excellent book on the subject, Who’s #1 by Langville and Meyer, is sitting on my shelf, trying to make its plead to be read heard above the pleas of all the other books that have been there longer, and so make a more compelling case).  And so, as I read and as my understanding of the topic expands, I’ll come back from time to time, to revise the thoughts I am putting down now.

We as humans like to put things in order.  We like to know which things are better than which other things, from schools to doctors, deodorants to diet plans, songs to books, even when the criteria and data we are using are highly problematic.   Part of this problematic-ness comes from the questions we ask and the methods we use to gather the data, while another part comes from the means we use to combine and weight all of this data in order to obtain a final ranking.  After all, when we get down to ranking things, we have first to decide which are the criteria that are important and which are not, and which ones we want to weight more highly than the others.

But the point I want to make here, at this early place in the discussion, is not to get into the details of how we create the rankings.  Rather, it is just the observation that even when we know that the ranking is problematic, even when we know that the questions are leading (as all questions have to be), even when we’re aware of how dirty and unreliable the data is, even when we’re aware of how unevenly the different aspects of whatever are weighted in order to compile a final, single number, we then forget everything and take the number as gospel.  We give numbers an enormous power.

I’ve had conversations with people who know better but confess to doing this, and I have done it myself.  We see a number associated to something and we accept the number.  We ignore the possibility that our own priorities may be very different from the person or group who constructed the ranking and hence that the final ranking will not accurately reflect our personal preferences.

Posted in mathematics

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