Author: admin

Sometimes I look around at the world and the people in it. And I think, these people are also looking around at the same world and we share a certain sense of reality.

When we are not thinking about it, we all tend to think of that as objective reality. But of course it is human reality, in so many ways. Not only can we only see what human eyes ser and hear what human ears can hear, but we can only think the way human brains can think.

I wonder how different the same world would appear through alien eyes. It would be interesting, even just for a moment, to get a glimpse of that alternate reality. That is, if it didn’t just end up driving us crazy.

This weekend I am preparing to move my office at NYU. The new office has a layout identical to that of my current office, so ideally I would exactly replicate the setup I currently have.

Unfortunately, the real world does not work that way. I have to take things off of shelves, put them in boxes, label everything, and get ready to reassemble it all after the move.

This really is a case where the digital has certain advantages over the physical. Semantically what I am doing is precisely a cut / paste operation. It would be so much easier to do that with bits rather than with atoms!

Suppose you instantly make half the people in a universe disappear, seemingly selected at random. That makes you, essentially, Thanos.

This is true even if you are a billionaire who owns a company that makes electric cars. Am I the only person who has noticed this?

Most textbooks ultimately come down to didactic presentation. The student is told: “If you study these facts and processes, then you will do well on the test.”

Therefore much of the motivation is extrinsic — the desire to succeed. For some fortunate students, who happen to already have an interest in a given subject, there is also the intrinsic motivation to learn more about what they love.

But if a student does not already have that connection to a topic, then assigning them chores will not forge that connection. In fact, it might inspire dread and resentment.

So why not instead present educational material in the form of fictional narratives? That will tap into a motivation that the student already has, on an instinctive biological level — the desire to hear a good story.

Why do we love stories so much? Objectively speaking, it seems counterintuitive. We listen with rapt attention once we know that we are hearing about something that doesn’t exist, and in fact has no literal correspondence with the real world.

I suspect that it has a lot to do with our development as a social species. Our survival as a species is linked with our development of natural language. For early humans, tribal cohesion was greatly enhanced by the ability to sit around together and tell stories, whether of myth or of tribal lore.

It is now likely baked deep into our brain that we feel pleasure when somebody starts telling us a story. If it is a good and well formed story, then we integrate the telling, fictional as the content may be, as a life experience.

This has implications for education. More tomorrow.

I’m thinking about designing a story to write — and then writing it. And so I find myself thinking in terms of the classic hero’s journey.

Fundamentally, you need a hero, a problem and a solution. The rest is all details.

Of course those details matter. For example, it’s not that interesting if the hero doesn’t learn anything. Ultimately it’s not really about what happens, but rather about the character arc.

And of course you need to know who exactly is going on that journey. I remember the first time I saw Ratatouille, and realized that the big character advancement moment was not about Remi.

It was, of all things, about the food critic. That was a character I hadn’t even thought I could like. And yet it was the moment that brought tears to my eyes.

So maybe I shouldn’t assume, going in, that I even know who our hero is. That knowledge might just end up bubbling up from somewhere in my subconscious.

And I am happy to not yet know the answer. Like Yogi Berra said near the end of his life, when his wife asked whether he would prefer to be buried or cremated: “Surprise me.”

I am thinking of spending the month of December writing a complete story on this blog. It’s something I’ve done before, but not recently.

The idea is to start on the first day of the month, and post every day until the story ends on the last day of the month. Given that I will be writing in December, my story will have 31 chapters.

In order to make that work, I’m planning to take some time behind the scenes throughout the month of November to plot out the story structure. I figure that a month for structure followed by a month for actual writing should be about right.

If you count this post, I guess I started the process today. That is, if meta-structure counts as structure.

It is very good news that Brazil now has an incoming president who is not downright scary. We can agree to disagree on policy, but democracies should not have administrations that aim to dismantle democracy itself.

Also, this election result is good for the world in general. For example, the wholesale destruction of the Amazon rainforest as official government policy is now on hold.

We can all breathe easier knowing that. Literally.

I saw the news of Lula’s election as the lead news story in the New York Times. Curiously, the on-line link to the article was followed by an option to read the same article in Spanish.

I’ve been scratching my head trying to figure out why they did that. When there is an election in Germany, the NY Times generally doesn’t provide an option to read the article in French.

What am I missing?

Somebody told me I should watch “Andor”, the TV series that is a prequel to the Star Wars movie “Rogue One”. I loved “Rogue One”, so I am sure I will like this show.

But part of me — the part that loves computer science — is transfixed by the title. It just seems so, um, logical.

Could there be another prequel in the works, I wonder. Something that continues the obvious metaphor.

It would be called, of course, “Ifthen”.

Today in 1969 the first ever link was established between one computer and another. It could be argued that, from an historical perspective, this was the single most important event in the development of the internet.

It was, in a sense, the moment when that first human footprint appeared on the Moon. The moment when that first ape lifted up a bone to use in warfare.

On this day in history a computer first began talking to another computer. It’s anyone’s guess, more than half a century later, where the conversation will go next.