Ken’s Blog

I know many people who like to write — essays, stories, reminiscences, polemics. Using the language to express oneself is, to many people, just plain fun. And it can a powerful way to reach other people, to share ideas, to preserve and celebrate culture, to maintain an extended conversation.

Yet I know relatively few people who focus on the language itself as a technical study. Psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical / evolutionary / developmental / computational linguistics, computational phylogenetics, these are all fascinating but relatively rare career choices.

Most people are more interested in using written language rather than looking inward to study the workings of the language itself. And that makes sense, just as it makes sense that there are a lot more drivers of cars than there are automobile mechanics.

Yet while we have a recognized field called “computer science”, we do not have a recognized field consisting of the best use of computer programming. All of our academic study focuses on looking inward — of being the equivalent of the linguist or the auto mechanic. Academically, we seem to conflate the act of programming with the study of the underlying mechanisms of computation.

Maybe this false equivalence is holding our society back from achieving true universal programming literacy. Perhaps the field of programming needs to focus less on producing good linguists, and more on producing good writers.

Yesterday I bemoaned the large separation between the teaching of high school math and the teaching of high school physics. Let’s go beyond that, and ask the question “What would it mean for these two topics to be taught in a coordinated way?”

Could our high schools integrate such topics together in a more seamless manner? I wonder whether the impediment is not so much an inherent issue, but rather something structural.

Perhaps there is something fundamental in the process of high school level education that requires keeping subjects separate. It might be that practical organizational issues, from the choice of a textbook to the training of teachers, actually rely on there being a clear intellectual firewall between different topics.

An alternative explanation, of course, is that there is no reason for the lack of coordination between courses, other than “That’s how we’ve always done it.”

If that is the case, then perhaps it is time to work out a more integrated curriculum. And then to do systematic user testing to validate whether such an approach would, in fact, create a better general appreciation for, and mastery of, math, physics, and the interactions between those topics.

When I was in high school I took math courses. I also took a course in physics.

The math courses were all taught by the math teachers. To attend those classes, you needed to go to the math wing of the school. You also needed to have a textbook devoted to that year’s math topic.

Meanwhile, the physics course was taught by the physics teacher, who hung out with the other science teachers, in the science wing of the building — which happened to not be very close to the math wing.

There was a textbook for physics, with lots of cool pictures, examples, and some very cool mathematical equations. This textbook did not in any way refer to the math textbook. In fact, reading just the physics textbook you wouldn’t have had a clue that there was even such a thing as a math textbook.

The math textbooks took the same attitude toward physics — in fact about all other non-math subjects. Those courses simply did not exist, as far as math textbooks were concerned.

Different textbooks, different teachers, even different rooms.

Does it strike you that there is something wrong with this picture?

I was having dinner this evening in Stockholm with a very high ranking minister in the Swedish government. To my delight, he was very intelligent, extremely thoughtful, and impressively well-informed about matters relating to how government might improve education.

Our long and wide-ranging conversation touched on many topics. At some point the conversation came around to the topic of elections. He mentioned, rather tongue in cheek, that Saddam Hussein had once won reelection in Iraq with 99.5% of the votes.

“I have always wondered about that,” I said. “I mean, all things considered, why didn’t Saddam win with one hundred percent of the votes?”

“Ah,” the minister replied, “that was for plausibility.”

I went to a lecture today by Slavoj Žižek. He said many fascinating and thought provoking things, about economics, culture, politics and philosophy. But one thing in particular really stayed with me.

He pointed out that the things we value from our past, the things that we have lost, are often valuable precisely because we have lost them. It is the loss itself that creates much of the sense of value in our memory.

I think we can all agree, when we reflect back on our own remembrance of things past, that this is quite true.

There seems to be something tragic about this quality of human nature. Joni Mitchell said it in a somewhat different way: “We don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have a crystal ball that tells us “This experience — this day walking with a friend, this sunlit morning waking up with a lover, this moment in time that you so blithely take for granted — one day this simple moment will be remembered in your mind as a paradise lost.”

And knowing this, perhaps we will know not to take it for granted.

Today we took the rowboat out, and rowed across the lake. Nobody lives on the other side. Beyond the trees is a meadow, where the cows from a nearby farm often come to graze.

For quite awhile we were alone, enjoying the view of trees and sky, the silence of the day, the ripples that crisscrossed in ever-changing patterns across the surface of the lake.

Then the cows found us.

And they were completely fascinated. I don’t know whether it was because the farmer gives them treats (and so they expect the same from any humans) or just because they were hungry for bipedal company, but they couldn’t get enough of us.

More and more cows showed up, and soon we were nearly surrounded. They were all gazing up at us with big brown eyes, sniffing at us, and generally acting as though we were the headliner act in whatever is the bovine equivalent of a rock concert.

As we walked back to our rowboat, they followed en masse, keeping pace with us at every step. At last we got in the boat, and the cows looked on sadly as our little craft drifted slowly away from shore.

Or at least I’d like to think they were looking on sadly. I’m not really certain. The picture above shows the cows watching us depart. Maybe you can figure it out.

Today I am visiting friends in the Swedish countryside about 100 Km north of Stockholm. They have a summer cottage by a lake, surrounded by trees all around. It is eery how similar this region is to the place in upstate New York where my parents used to take us in summer, the source of so many happy childhood memories.

The view of the lake brings me back to those times, from the geese who sail serenely along, to the delicate layer of white mist floating just above the water. Even the birch and oak trees look the same.

And of course there is a peaceful sense of quiet for miles around, so far away from the noise and bustle of the city.

But one thing is very different — the light. The sun here does not set until after 10pm, far later than in New York. At sunset, the angle of the sun makes for a beautiful but (to my eyes) eery light, with deep streaks of red arcing through the clouds and reflecting off the rippling surface of the lake.

It’s like seeing my childhood summer memories brought back to life under a new sky.

So why is it, continuing from yesterday, that Disney animations often subject their young viewers to the violent and traumatic death of the parents of beloved animated characters, and yet a trip to Disneyland comes to be seen by kids (and their parents) as the most wonderful and safe of vacation options?

I would argue that there is a deliberate and brilliant strategy at work here on the part of the Walt Disney Company. And it is clearly a strategy that goes all the way back to Walt himself, when you think back on such classic Disney films as “Pinocchio” and “Bambi”, both of which contained some truly terrifying moments.

When you go through a traumatic experience with somebody — say a war, or the loss of a loved one — and have seen it through together, such an experience can draw you closer. I think Disney is deliberately tapping into this principle, by carefully constructing stories that will subject little kids to the most horrific emotional trauma, and then guiding them through that trauma to the conclusion: “Everything turns out ok in the end.”

Question: After you have experienced such terror as seeing your mother being shot to death, or your father betrayed and murdered by his own brother, or your entire family wiped out by vicious killers, who can you trust? Answer: Whoever it was that guided you through this horror and saw you safely through to the other side.

In other words, inducing terror in small children is Disney’s very stock and trade. Kids love visiting Disneyland precisely because they have learned by watching Disney films that the world can be a horrible, cruel and unfair place, where bad things happen to good people. But also that there is one little corner of the world where you can escape this ever-present existential terror.

Disneyland!

Yesterday I talked about my lunch conversation with a friend in which we mused over the plethora of killing in Disney animations — specifically the frequency with which family members of the protagonist (usually the mother or father or both) are killed, often while our young hero is helplessly looking on.

One thing I didn’t mention is that my friend’s daughter now really loves Disneyland. To her, a trip to southern California means yet another chance to visit the Magic Kingdom. It was this key factoid that put me onto my current train of thought.

This is an animation company that regularly subjects little kids to the most frightening thing imaginable to a small child: The death of a parent — generally right in front of the eyes of the character the child most identifies with.

Now couple this with the fact that Disney’s commercial empire is built upon cross marketing: You see the movie, then you visit the theme park, buy the princess dress and take home the character-themed plush toy. It’s all part and parcel of the same highly interconnected business.

And what is the fundamental appeal of that theme park? I would argue that the allure of Disneyland is deeply connected to the idea that it is the safest place on earth. Little kids love that feeling, and parents like the reassurance that everything is under control.

But wait. On the one hand we have movies that regularly kill off the parents of beloved little animated characters, often in a highly brutal and traumatic way. On the other hand, around these movies are built highly successful theme parks which are all about safety and reassurance. What is going on here?

More tomorrow.

Yesterday at lunch a friend was telling me that she had a nagging feeling before her young daughter sat down for the first time to watch a Disney film that she herself had not seen for many years. The movie is rated fine for kids, but something in the back of her mind was bothering her.

When they finally sat down to watch the movie, she told me she remembered all at once what it was.

“It was ‘Finding Nemo’, right?” I asked.

Sure enough, that was the movie. You know, that cute adorable animation for kids which begins with a scene of our young hero’s entire family being brutally slaughtered — parents and siblings all.

I then told her that when my nephew first saw “The Lion King” as a young boy, he was traumatized by the scene where King Mufasa is killed by his brother Scar. My nephew also has a brother, the same difference in age as my brother and I. It seems it wasn’t the death of the king that disturbed my nephew so deeply. Rather, it was the idea of one brother betraying another. For the next year he would, from time to time, ask my sister in law for reassurance, saying “It was only a movie, right?”

And of course there’s Bambi. In fact a similar dark thread runs through many Disney stories. Why is there so much killing of the parents and family members of the protagonist in Disney animations?

I have a theory, which I will talk more about tomorrow.