Author: admin

There is a saying in evolutionary biology that “Every genotype requires a viable phenotype.” In other words, each genetic mutation needs to result in creatures that can survive — otherwise the mutation dies out.

Even if, say, four particular steps of evolution would have led to a super-being, that path of evolution will never happen should any of the first three steps produce a fatal vulnerability.

It occurred to me today that this concept has something to teach us about education. Very often an educator will introduce a lesson in the following general way: “Later this semester we’re going to get to the fun stuff, but first you need to learn these basics.”

What often follows is a grueling and demoralizing exercise — equations are written, theorems proved, complex formulas worked through. Students become bored, disenchanted, distracted. They surreptitiously check their iPhones for incoming texts. Nobody wins.

Even if the stuff that comes later in the semester turns out to be fun, the damage has been done. Students who lost the narrative during the earlier lesson are almost certainly not going to be able to pick it up later. They will be unprepared for what comes next.

I would argue that every lesson needs to be fun and exciting on its own terms. I know that in practice this can be difficult.

But it is necessary.

There is a wonderful scene in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” where the two main characters, who have just met, are provided with subtitles. They are both attracted, but have no idea how to talk to each other. As they natter on awkwardly, trying and mostly failing to hold a meaningful conversation, the subtitles say what each is really thinking, to hilarious effect.

One day, perhaps far in the future, the technology may exist to make those subtitles. Your wearable device will analyze your partner’s body language, facial expression, eye saccades, tone of voice, slight pauses, and any other available clues.

This data will be correlated in real time with a vast database in the Cloud, then run through various machine learning algorithms, together with techniques for rapid language parsing and synthesis.

The net effect will be an interpretive stream of words that appears to float in space between you and your friend, telling you what the other person is really thinking and feeling.

And here’s the weirdest part: The people who grow up with this technology won’t have the faintest idea why anybody would have a problem with it.

In any real-time performative medium, you walk in with something already prepared. If you are a pianist, the piano has already been built — the audience generally does not wish to see you construct a piano there and then on-stage.

In theatre there are sets, costumes, lights, stage directions, usually a script, all of which have been carefully prepared before the live event itself.

Even improvisational performances require much preparation. Nobody goes into a jazz improv session without lots of practice and grounding in the rules of the genre. The same goes for improv comedy or dance. In fact, the more “improvised” genres tend to have very well understood boundaries — that’s what lets them work without dissolving into chaos.

Everything you come in with, every asset available to you to use in your live performance, can be thought of as an instrument. Your trained voice and body, your guitar, the spot light from stage left, these are all instruments.

It might be interesting to study genres of live performance entirely from the perspective of nature of the instruments they require. There are many overlapping taxonomies of instruments, and the more one thinks about it, the more complex and intricate the questions get.

I wonder whether anybody has ever looked at understanding varieties live performance entirely from this formal perspective — through an epistemology of instruments.

I suppose the more standard and traditional route, upon getting a new musical instrument, would be to learn the repertoire — standard chord progressions, popular songs, whatever is out there.

But I find that when I pick up my blue Ukelele I don’t want to do any of that. Instead, my fingers want to explore, to try random things, to figure out sounds and chord progressions from scratch.

I’ll figure out an F chord, then an A7, then maybe a D followed by an E minor, and go from there, working out picking patterns as I go. It really doesn’t matter, as long as the next chord feels right.

It seems that what I really want is to explore the ukelele as a kind of hack space — a place to work things out on my own, and see where it all will lead.

Which is turning out to be, I am happy to report, a lot of fun. 🙂

Ideas are brilliant
Alas, the world really needs
Deliverables

Walking along Commercial Street this morning in East Vancouver, on my rounds to shop for various necessaries, I found myself drawn to a little guitar shop. Walking in, I got a sudden urge to buy a ukelele.

Since I don’t play the ukelele, it didn’t seem like a good idea to get a fancy one. It turns out that there is a little beginner model for around $40 that comes in all sorts of vibrant colors. The store owner told me that his girlfriend, who is a professional musician, uses the pink one in her stage performances.

Somehow the phrase “blue hawaii” rang in my head, and I realized I just had to get the blue one. Which I did.

You can see my shiny new toy in the photo below, in the arms of its proud owner. My blue ukelele has a delightful sound, and I’m having tremendous fun learning all the chords I can make with just those four G,C,E and A strings.

And unlike my computer, it will never need batteries!

I started to get very wary
Somewhere back in January.

It really made my eyebrows arch,
When February turned to March.

Then time piled up from day to day
And April somehow led to May,

When suddenly, and all too soon
It seemed to be the month of June!

Now here we are, don’t ask me why,
How quickly does the time go by!

After watching a world cup game today with some Latin American friends, I mentioned a theory I had formed years ago, on the day I first attended a soccer game at Rio de Janeiro’s famed Maracanã Stadium.

Seeing more than a hundred thousand testosterone fueled young men venting their energy at once, I had theorized that spectator sports may have developed as a way to channel the rage of young men — an emotion which can be so useful when a tribe is at war, but which can, if not redirected, become so destructive at other times.

One of my Latin American friends said that she thought my theory made a lot of sense. “It’s too bad,” she continued, “that the U.S. does not embrace soccer. If it did, your country might be less inclined to go to war.”

If my friend’s theory is correct, imagine how much money our government could save by investing a few million dollars each year in promoting soccer proficiency among children and young people. If we could one day assemble a team that would be truly competitive in the World Cup, our interest in waging war might decrease.

And if our government were less inclined to declare wars based on questionable evidence and logic, we might be able to reduce our national defense spending by billions of dollars per year.

That sounds like a pretty good return on investment.

Gavrilo Princip
Starts nine million deaths using
Only two bullets