Author: admin

Today I gave a talk at a conference, and decided that the talk would consist of demonstrating fifty of my Java applets, with nary a PowerPoint slide in sight. This ended up being an interesting choice, because each applet, as it turned out, connected to several others, and themes began emerging of which even I had not been fully aware.

The entire experience was fun, in the way that live performances are always fun. You never entirely know what will happen in a live performance — what might go right and what might go wrong — and this sense of heady danger creates a kind of bond between everyone in the room. As Bill Murray said so memorably about theatre in Tootsie, “These are people who are alive on the planet.”

I may just give up entirely on prepared slides!

We take so much for granted as humans in our perception of the world, from bilateral symmetry to the privileging of human faces and voices in our observation of the world around us.

It makes perfect sense that we are this way, since our higher brain functioning evolved largely to facilitate complex and subtle interactions with other humans (as well as the occasional co-evolved species, such as dogs).

It would be interesting to be able to temporarily impose an “Alien filter” on our perception, to remove our human-centric bias from the way we perceive the world around us. You would certainly want such a filter to be temporary, since using it would, from a certain perspective, make you functionally insane.

But the insights to be gained from such a visit to an alien’s point of view might be quite beneficial. We might discover how to see familiar objects and concepts in new and potentially useful ways.

The first time I ever visited Oslo (which I believe is the nearest I’ve been to the North Pole while on the ground) it happened to be June 20 — the longest day of the year. I had a magical and slightly surreal experience wandering around the town in the excellent company of the friends I was visiting, in a city without night. As midnight came and went, and darkness never quite arrived, I felt not tired at all, but rather exhilarated.

The first time I ever visited Albuquerque it happened to be the weekend of the annual hot air balloon festival — one of the zaniest and most fun sights to be seen in these United States, with giant balloons in all sorts of surreal and eccentric shapes floating over the landscape. I didn’t realize at first that this was a once-a-year spectacular, so my initial thought was that I was witnessing a very civilized, if unusual, way for a town to be organizing its daily transportation needs.

The oddest such experience was the first time I visited Nice, after having attended a conference in nearby Monte Carlo. I was delighted to discover that the streets of Nice were filled with jugglers, magicians, stilt-walkers and clowns, street fairs and puppet shows. Wherever I went, people wearing giant papier-mâché heads were walking around in broad daylight, to the general delight of children. I found myself wondering at how tourist friendly Nice was, while pondering how on earth such a city could maintain a sustainable economic model. “Wouldn’t this be a great place to live all year round!” I thought.

It took a while before I realized that I had just happened to wander into town during Carnival.

Yesterday I attended the impressive doctoral defense of a brilliant Ph.D. student in our department. Nektarios has been blind since birth, yet he is able to quickly understand and reason about many advanced spatial concepts with which other students struggle.

A bit later in the day I showed him a research prototype, and it was fascinating to see him assimilate the idea, ask a few questions, and then rapidly build a model in his head, which then led to a wonderfully interesting and free ranging discussion.

It could be that many concepts we generally categorize as “visual” are actually more properly called “spatial”. Nektarios clearly does not have a visual model of anything, yet his reasoning process involves a highly sophisticated and flexible form of spatial reasoning.

Perhaps we should be doing more to bring in other senses such as touch, hearing and proprioception when we teach spatial reasoning to our students, much as Montessori schools now do for some younger children.

Having taken a Greyhound Express eight hours from New York to Pittsburgh on Friday and then another eight hours back on Sunday, I am happy to report, with unalloyed enthusiasm, that the experiment was a success.

I managed to get a vast amount of work done in those sixteen-odd hours. Before my trip I had made a long wish list of all the things I had hoped to create en route, and what I actually ended up accomplishing exceeded even my most optimistic estimates

Although, all things considered, I would rather take a train. Alas, there is no direct train route between New York and Pittsburgh, so the bus will have to do.

I noticed that not everybody on the bus seemed as happy as I did to be taking such a long ride. I wonder whether they would like it more if they learned how to program. 🙂

When my sister was very young, my parents took her to see “Mary Poppins”. The film had first come out many years earlier, but the Walt Disney Company had recently rereleased it, and my parents jumped at the opportunity to introduce her to this classic children’s movie the way it should be seen — on the big screen.

Unfortunately the screening was a little late in the evening for my sister, and within a few minutes she had fallen fast asleep.

Not wanting to wake her, my parents watched the film by themselves, all the way up to the scene where our heroes have jumped through a painting into a cartoon world, where they proceed to happily cavort with assorted animated characters.

At this point my sister suddenly awoke. For a few moments she stared at the sight of Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews dancing up a storm with a gaggle of animated penguins. Then she solemnly (and rather loudly) pronounced “Penguins have no elbows!”, whereupon she promptly fell back asleep, a state in which she blissfully remained for the duration of the film.

My sister says she has no recollection of having issued this solemn declaration. Yet down through the intervening years the story of this moment has continued to be told and retold, achieving a kind of immortality within our little extended family.

Even today, if you mention Mary Poppins to any of my little nieces and nephews, they are as likely as not to exclaim, with cheerful enthusiasm, “Penguins have no elbows!”

Clearly there is enormous power in using commercial grade software tools. For the most part they tend to be solid, robust and interoperable with all sorts of data and other programs. Which makes sense, since these products represent the fruits of many years of collective labor, often by extremely talented and dedicated people.

Yet I find that after a day or two using any new software tool, my first instinct is to try to build my own version of it, and then use that for a while.

I know full well that on some level this is a fools errand. One could say I am playing the part of John Henry against the railroad, or Don Quixote tilting against the collective windmills of industry.

Yet I often find that what I build ends up addressing some issue I had with the far more polished commercial tool. At the start of my Do-It-Yourself experiment, I’m not even sure what that criticism is. Yet after a day or two of hacking, I find that I have built something that addresses some essence of what I was hoping the original software would do for me — some hoped for feature or set of features that I found lacking.

This is a kind of constructive criticism. I mean “constructive” in a very literal sense, and it’s really the only practical way to practice this sort of criticism. I generally don’t have access to the source code of the commercial product in question. Even if I did, it would take far more time than I am willing to commit just to learn my way around well enough to be useful.

But taking a day or two to make my own little demo version satisfies my need to say “look folks, wouldn’t it be so much cooler if you could just do it like this?”

From time my little experiments even make their way back into that big commercial space of industrial strength software products.

When that happens, I often end up being uncredited. But that’s ok. It still gives me a thrill when I use a feature in some product that actually began as one of my little DIY constructive criticisms.

And I know there are fellow travelers reading this who have contributed in pretty much the same way.

A mathematician friend of mine, when chatting on-line, types the emoticon “<3" to indicate "love". This two-character sequence looks quite a bit like a heart lying on its side. In fact, many chat clients automatically convert this character sequence into a heart icon. At some point it occurred to me that there is a certain poetry to this particular representation. Not only does it visually suggest the shape of a heart, but its mathematical meaning is, precisely, "less than three" -- an interesting assertion when applied to love. The next time you type this emoticon, you might want to consider that on some level you are asserting that love is just for two.^†

A corollary theorem, as my mathematician friend might put it, is that you should never get involved with somebody who is already dating someone else.

<3 † “Less than three” can also refer to “one”. I am sure you will agree, mathematically speaking, that falling in love with oneself is merely reducing to the trivial case.

Tomorrow morning I will be taking a Greyhound Express bus to a family function. Travel time from here to there will be something over eight hours. Over the last few days I have been mentally preparing for this long bus ride — planning my food menu, arranging files on my computer, making a list of all the things I plan to accomplish during this alone time — with something like a spirit of celebration.

The trip is certainly far enough that flying would seem to be in order. Yet one of the hardest things about airplane travel is the difficulty of going into your own psychological space. Just the process of getting to the plane, particularly the weird vibe around security, can dominate the experience.

But on a bus I can be invisible, unobserved, vanished into my own space, on a little zen vacation from day-to-day reality, a bubble of time to think, to create, or to simply let my mind wander.

And if eight hours is not enough time to accomplish all the things I am hoping to get done, on the bus ride back I will get another shot at it. 🙂

I’m currently reading fiction by two authors, taking turns between them. One is “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, and the other is the “People” stories by Zenna Henderson.

I am enjoying both immensely, yet it has occurred to me that this is an odd pairing. Both are a series of science fiction stories about young people trying to deal with a strange and often frightening world. Yet in many ways they send exactly the opposite message.

Collins paints the world her characters must face as a brutish and nasty place, one in which growing up is a constant and uncertain struggle for survival. Henderson acknowledges that reality can be treacherous, but effectively says that once we go through our internal struggles to define ourselves — to figure out who we truly are — the world is a beautiful place that is waiting to welcome the full flowering of our being.

The former says that to survive we must learn how to cloak our true self, and the latter says we must learn how to accept and reveal our true self.

I wonder whether the difference is partly due to a cultural shift over the decades. Henderson was writing mainly in the early fifties to the mid sixties. Collins is, of course, writing her stories now.