Ken’s Blog

It has now been about half a year since the transition from one presidential administration to another, perhaps time to get a little perspective on things.

Seen from here in June 2009, the reign of W seems a bit like something from another world. The whole tone of things is different in the Obama presidency. That much is obvious, but I’ve been trying to figure out the precise nature of this tonal difference, the underlying fundamental principle that distinguishes then and now.

I don’t think it’s just about political left versus right, liberal versus conservative, although clearly that is a big part of it. I wasn’t really sure what it was until the recent revelations about the two Republican presidential hopefuls who were caught out having extramarital affairs, pretty much back to back.

And that’s when I realized that what W’s presidency offered the country, first and foremost, was a kind of Puritan certainty, a reassurance that Sin had left the building – not only in his policies but in his tone. The “decider” clearly believed he was getting his marching orders from a higher authority.

This might be connected to to our former president’s history with alcoholism. There was a strictness to his views, and this strictness suffused through everything – all of his decisions and policies.

The engagement with sin and redemption was not new, of course. Bill Clinton was clearly playing out a grand narrative of sin and redemption throughout his presidency.

That entire dialectic has now receded. Obama brings a far more secular tone to the White House. No longer is the Devil standing over the shoulder of our highest ranking government official, ready to pounce. Obama is neither the unyielding patriarch of the Bush years nor the failed penitant that Clinton projected. The whole gothic focus on sin, on a personal struggle against Evil, is gone.

For example, it would have been nearly unimaginable to see W taking a drink. So much of his public persona was predicated on his absolute renunciation of the habit that had once brought him low. And this certainty, this refusal to engage with the Devil, crept into all of his policies.

Obama, on the other hand, is able to effectively push legislation that prevents tobacco companies from marketing to children, while openly admitting to smoking the occasional cigarette – his personal struggle with an unwanted addiction.

It all has a far more secular tone. I think it is this sounding of a secular note, despite the fact that Obama is a religious man, that has been appealing so strongly to young people. Rather than seeing the world as an eternal struggle between a stern and wrathful God and the evil forces of fire and brimstone, the citizenry is being asked to see a struggle simply to make the world a better place, without all the trappings of old time religious sturm und drang.

Seen from this new perspective, one driven not so much by stern moralizing as by can-do optimism, the receding world of W begins to seem far away indeed.

“When you see a fork in the road, take it.”
-Yogi Berra

The letter ‘V’ looks great on a page, doesn’t it? Majestic yet simple – two slanted lines rising up simultaneously from a common source, reaching toward different places in the sky. Some letters just have a way about them, a natural panache that other letters lack.

Contemplating the letter ‘V’ I realize that I’ve actually been sensing, without quite realizing it, that each letter captures some essential quality of human thought and desire. Together they can be used as a lexicon of much that matters to us, but that we hardly ever articulate. For example, our discussion the other day around the letter ‘S’ captured some of this – the way its form visually suggests both transitions and relationships between opposites, and how the two poles of any such dialectic loom far larger in our perception than all that lies between.

Just as the letter ‘U’ may represent turning back, ‘Y’ can be a choice glimpsed in the distance, whereas ‘V’ is the choice that is now upon you, the one that can no longer be put off. ‘T’ suggests a stopping point, the place at which you may need to abandon your current path entirely and make a hard choice. But by the same token, it also suggests a new adventure about to begin.

‘L’ is the sudden change of direction that reorients your thinking, and ‘Z’ the crooked path that will leave you continuing on your original journey, but perhaps with some unexpected life experience gained along the way. ‘O’ is finding you’ve been going in circles (a pattern I find all too familiar in my own experience, sad to say).

‘X’ is perhaps the best form of all – a sign of those rare and wonderful moments in life when you encounter someone and realize that, in some important way, your paths have crossed.

“Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on.”

– Robert Plant

There is something in our minds, some quality inculcated deep into us from the time we’re little, that works to prevent us from simply changing paths when things start to go wrong. I suspect it has something to do with the sheer complexity of the decisions we are called upon to make in our lives – from the really big things like job and home and love and spiritual purpose, down to the little things like what brand of bread to buy.

There is so much we need to do that we set up these self-actuating mechanisms, little automatic pilots guiding the various choices in our lives, so that we can feel free of the weight of continual decision making.

It all works, except when it doesn’t. From the global financial meltdown to that brand of salsa you bought three weeks ago that is slowly going bad in your fridge, we are victims of our own efficiency at multitasking and auto-delegation.

I sometimes wonder whether the world would be a better place if we all had a little psychological restart button that we could press from time to time – something to tell our fearful habit-driven selves that it’s ok to change things up, to try a new path, to drive off the main road at the next exit and just explore a little.

I guess this is a form of spiritual enlightenment, the ability to see situations as they really are, and not through the misleadingly comfortable glasses of how things should be but aren’t, or the dangerously comfortable glasses of the way things used to be, but are no longer.

Maybe it’s something we should teach our kids in school, when they are still young and the lesson is more liable to stick: That yes, it’s wonderful to set a bold and daring course, plan for your future, charge forth with gusto and all steam ahead. But it’s also useful to know when you might be heading the wrong way, and to have the presence of mind – just every once in a while – to make a U turn.

Why do children have such a fondness for the Tyrannosaurus Rex, possibly the most brutal and deadliest land predator that ever lived? I distinctly remember, as a small boy, thinking that the T Rex was incredibly cool and wonderful. Even after I was a teenager, when I finally got around to seeing Walt Disney’s “Fantasia”, it was the T Rex I enjoyed the most, out of all of the wondrous creatures of old brought to majestic life while Leopold Stokowski conducted the “Rite of Spring”.

In reality of course, if through some quirk of time we were to coexist with one of these monstrous behemoths – in the flesh, so to speak – the mighty and relentless reptilian predator would almost certainly gobble us up in an instant, bones and all, and then have some of our friends for a snack. There was nothing even remotely sentimental about this creature – the T Rex was, from all evidence, one of nature’s more impressive and relentlessly efficient killing machines.

Yes, I knew all that when I was seven – all little kids know that – and yet we love them, with a kind of completely irrational exuberant love. And when, as small children, we are not musing fondly about our friend, the savage and deadly king of the dinosaurs, our innocent young thoughts often turn appreciatively to Orca the killer whale.

Why do we do this? Perhaps there is some deep instinct at work here.

People often talk about the “Bell curve” – a statistical distribution among a population of any property, such as athleticism, natural longevity or various kinds of intellectual ability. For most such properties, the great majority of people are located fairly near the mean. As you go further away from this mean value for any given property, the percentage of people represented tends to drop off precipitously.

That is one reason we are so astonished when one person is far from average in two properties at once – because it is quite rare. For example, there just aren’t that many astonishingly beautiful people who have also made groundbreaking and fundamental innovations in technology, such as Hedy Lamarr, or extraordinarily talented actors who have also had a nearly off-the-chart high IQ, such as Judy Holliday.

I don’t particularly like the image of the Bell curve (or as the Little Prince would say, a snake swallowing an elephant), because I think it tells the wrong story. A Bell curve visually suggests that in the center are the “normal” people, thereby implying that all the people who are far from the center are somehow deviant. I think this way of thinking misses the point, because it focuses on the middle – the boring part – rather the two ends, which is where things are most interesting.

I think it is better to embrace the two ends – rather than marginalizing them. For example, if I were extraordinarily nearsighted I would want society to help me to find ways to see better without subtely placing me in some marginal category because I am not like everyone else. The same would be true if I knew a child with a learning disability. I would want society to honor that child as an individual, by coming together to help her reach her maximum potential.

Similarly, a high intellectual ability in some area should be seen as a call to service. A talented artist or musician is fortunate, not because they are “better” but because they have a unique opportunity to enrich the lives of those around them. Similarly, those of us who either have or acquire an ability to teach or to do research have a responsibility to others, because we are in a good position to lend a helping hand to those around us in a particular way: Every ability you possess provides an opportunity to serve others, not an opportunity to imagine yourself superior to others.

For this reason, I prefer to replace the Bell curve by a set of S curves, to visualize the ways that each of us may need a helping hand in some way, as well as the ways that we may be in a greater position to lend a hand to others. Each of us, every individual, finds ourselves on not one but many S curves, and we are most interesting for the ways that we are either to the left or the right on any given one.

Every once in a while I see an interesting (and fun) sign that somebody is at the extreme of some S curve. For example, today my sister Joan told me about a conversation she’d had just this morning, during a car ride with my eleven year old nephews Jack and David. They were all discussing the fact that today, June 21, is the longest day of the year (at least here in the northern hemisphere). The boys pointed out that there must therefore be a shortest day of the year. When Joan quizzed them on when that day might be, they quickly realized that it must be a hundred eighty two and a half days away – exactly half of three hundred and sixty five days.

As Joan was telling me this story, something started nagging at the back of my mind. It wasn’t the fractional day – that was ok. Rather it was the assumption that a year has 365 days. That is not quite right, since it doesn’t take into account leap days. I told myself that I was probably being hopelessly nerdy, and that I should just be pleased that my two wonderful nephews where discussing science and fractions with such ease and facility – not to mention avid interest.

But then Joan got to the end of her story. She told me that toward the end of the ride Jack became rather quiet, and she could tell that something was bothering him. She only realized what it was when they got out of the car, and Jack turned to her and declared, correcting his earlier statement, “A hundred eighty two days and five eights”.

It’s curious how often the letter “R” seems to come up in science fiction, with its ray guns, robots, rocket ships, relativity drives, red dwarf stars and radiation shields. Consider the case of “R.U.R.”, whose title is an acronym for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”. The very name of Karel Capek’s foundational story suggests that R is for Robot – quite literally. I suspect that Isaac Asimov gave his famous robot detective the name R Daneel in homage to Mr. Capek.

But for me the letter R will always be associated with “R is for Rocket”, an anthology of Ray Bradbury stories which finally convinced my childhood self that science fiction was about far more than ray guns and space ships. The collection’s title was no doubt chosen to draw in the unwary thrill-seeking kid looking only for cheap space opera adventures. But when you actually read the thing, you find that most of the stories are about – gasp – human relationships. Of course any reader of Bradbury knows that the study of people, in all their fascinating fragility and complexity, is his not so secret agenda.

Not that this collection lacked for impact in the traditional SciFi sense. After all, it contains “A Sound of Thunder” – arguably the single most influential work ever written about the potentially pernicious effects of time travel. I love the fact that Mr. Bradbury is still around – eighty nine years old and still going strong.

Looking back on his work, I think my favorite (although it’s hard to choose) is a relatively unknown Bradbury novel that completely reversed the tenets of science fiction – “Dandelion Wine”. It’s about one ordinary summer in a small town in the life of a 12 year old boy (based largely on the author’s own childhood, I am told). Except that everything that happens seems completely magical. There are no objects of fantasy – no robots, aliens, laser weapons or spaceships. But all of the “ordinary” events the boy experiences possess essentially the same transcendent quality we associate with those fantastical things. To give one example among many, the boy refers to his grandfather as a time machine, because the old man can transport his grandson by telling adventures of his own youth, of a time long gone by.

Perhaps R is really for reading, reminiscence, relationships and Ray Bradbury.

A number of years ago I was visiting my friend Mauricio in Rio de Janeiro. Mauricio had a beautiful house in the neighborhood of Lagoa, looking out over the water.

It happened that Mauricio’s guest room was also his library, and what a library! During my stay I spent happy hours exploring his huge and eclectic assortment of published works.

One book in particular, a small book I had somehow never heard of, was Richard Feynmann’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter.

I found out later that this book was based on four lectures he gave in 1985 at the University of Auckland, which are now available on-line in streaming video.

It’s actually a perfect example of the kind of P-code I was talking about yesterday, in this case a P-code for discussing quantum field theory in clear and easy to understand lay terms. In this book Feynmann set out to explain, in an intuitive and non-technical way, the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics – the theory (often abbreviated to “QED”) that describes how light interacts with electrons through space and time. Feynmann shared a Nobel prize in Physics in 1965 for helping to make this theory a lot more elegant and powerful.

The title of the book is also a really clever play on words, since Q.E.D. is also shorthand for Quad erat domenstrum, or “that which was to be proved” – the thing mathematicians write at the end of a successful proof of a theorm.

Not being a quantum physicist, or really having any particular knowledge of quantum physics, I picked up this slender volume that night in Mauricio’s guestroom/library with no confidence at all that I would be able to make heads or tails of it. To my surprise, Feynmann’s beautifully clear and simple prose began to take me through a wonderful world I hadn’t known about.

Feynmann also had a meta-message – that science, even very advanced science, does not need to be incomprehensible. With care and thought, even very sophisticated concepts can be explained clearly to a general audience.

And this delightful little book amply proved the point. For example, one thing I understood after reading it, a conundrum that had puzzled me since childhood, is the question of why light always travels along the shortest path between any two points. I had always wondered how light manages to know which is the shortest path.

I mean, what would happen if some light were to guess incorrectly and take the wrong path, not realizing its mistake until it got almost all the way to its destination? Would it then need to excuse itself, go back and try again? And if not, does that mean that light is psychic, able to predict the future?

Feynmann explained that light actually goes in every direction and takes all possible paths, radiating out from any point into all headings at once, somewhat like the ripples that form when you drop a pebble into a pond. But because light has a phase, it turns out that all of these possible paths arrive at any point in space in such a way that their energies cancel out and add up to zero.

All the paths that is, except the one path that happens to be the shortest path. Along just that one path, the phases all add up constructively, rather than destructively. To an observer who doesn’t know what’s really going on, it looks as though the light has only traveled along this one shortest path.

Note that as strange as this description of reality may seem, it actually provides a cause and effect reason for why light travels the way it does, with no need to resort to the phrase “because it just does”.

Things actually get lovelier and more interesting than the way I’m describing them, but why spoil the fun? You should read it for yourself. The important thing is that Feynmann doesn’t just claim these things – he leads you, step by clear and careful step, through the why and how of everything.

And along the way he amply proves his point: That it is indeed possible to make even the most advanced science fun and accessible to a non-expert.

Q.E.D.

Continuing yesterday’s theme of the connection between concepts used in programming and concepts in the larger culture, there is a concept in computer science of a “P code”, which is short for pseudo-code. It comes up because when you’re trying to make a computer language. You could build the language directly from the underlying machine instructions, but that’s often really hard to do, and it kind of wires you in to that particular set of machine instructions.

So what people sometimes do is create a made-up machine, one that doesn’t really exist, but that happens to be really easy to work with, if you’re trying to implement a computer language. Instead of spending months trying to figure out how to turn a very high level description into a very low level set of computer instructions, you find some nice middle ground between high level and low level, and you do the translation in two steps:

If you design the P-code carefully, it turns out that this is much easier than trying to translate in a single step. Of course a lot hinges on how good your P-code is.

There are many other situations in society where the gap between “high level description” and “low level description” is very large, to the point where there is a real problem. For example, most casual political conversations in our country tend to be vastly oversimplified, with all issues painted in black and white and every argument reduced to a kind of pointless jingoism that merely reaffirms one’s pre-formed opinion. I have noticed that in the U.S., it is extremely difficult for a Democrat and a Republican to sustain a political conversation for more than about a minute. After that, each ends up expending most of their effort simply trying to hide the fact that they believe the other to be completely insane.

Similarly, it is very hard for the average U.S. citizen to accurately follow a legal brief or ruling from the bench. Legal language, which sounds superficially like English, is actually a form of technical description – the words and phrases don’t really mean what you might think they mean, if you didn’t know their technical interpretation. And there are similar language problems with medicine, engineering, physics, architecture, psychology, anthropology, biology, literary analysis, and many other fields.

It’s not that people in these fields are trying to be obscure. It’s more that in order to get serious work done in a field, you need to develop a kind of shorthand, so that when you get together with other people who are equally serious and focused, you can get right to work on the problems at hand, without continually needing to start from scratch.

When faced with something like a legal document or a scientific paper, people who are not in a given field generally throw up their hands and give up trying to understand what is going on. The distance between expert knowledge and common knowledge is simply too great. The net result is that most people get shut out of real discussion about a lot of important issues.

But suppose we were to introduce, in every field, a field-appropriate pseudo-code? Not something thrown together dismissively as a sop to the masses, but rather a serious yet accessible way of expressing important concepts in that field, one that was carefully and thoughtfully constructed, with serious intent. To do this properly in any given field it would be necessary to get mindshare from both experts and laypeople, and it would probably be necessary to iterate a few times before the right balance is reached.

It might be productive to make this a general paradigm, to assume that citizens are capable of thoughtful, intelligent discourse, but that the proper scaffolding – an accurate yet accessible language – is needed to bridge the gap between expert knowledge and truly conversant non-expert knowledge.

I think the most important insight to draw from computer science P-code is that the best solution is not likely to be a watered down version of expert knowledge, not merely a “[fill in the blank] For Dummies”. Rather, it is likely to be something uniquely crafted to its purpose, a language of discourse for a particular field which is optimized for a rapid learning curve and a lack of specialized jargon, a common ground that makes sense to both expert and non-expert.

Perhaps if we work seriously at constructing enough field-specific P-codes, we might end up with a general approach to making them, and to knowing whether they are going to be up to the job. And we all might just end up with fewer pointless arguments around the water cooler.

People who program computers have a notion of things being “Object Oriented”, or “O O” in the parlance. This is considered to be a good thing, and yet software systems that use this principle are generally described as “objected oriented programming systems” or OOPS – an acronym which may be tempting fate, to say the least.

The basic notion is borrowed from the physical world – that everything is thought of as an object, whether it be a number, a tree structure, a list of email addresses, or a computer program. You can “talk” to an object by sending it a message, then proceeding to “listen” to what the object has to say for itself. This is admittedly a strangely anthropomorphic way to treat things in a computer.

The real power of this approach comes from the fact that an object can belong to classes of objects that talk or listen in a particular way, and that these classes can be nested one inside the other, which allows you to refer to objects in progressively more specific ways.

We actually do this all the time in the real world. For example, a fruit is a kind of thing to eat, an apple is a particular kind of fruit, and a crabapple is a particular kind of apple. Depending upon what you’re trying to communicate, you might be more or less specific: “I had fruit for desert,” or “I had an apple”, or “I ate a yummy crabapple”.

Similarly, in a computer program, a component is something that you can see in a user interface, a button is a kind of component (one you can click on), and a pop-up button is a kind of button (one that goes away after you click on it). The whole object oriented thing is really a convenient a way of organizing things to make it easier to program, by using concepts that we already understand from real life.

I sometimes wonder whether there are other programming ideas we could borrow from the real world, and how far we could go with those analogies. For example, could we start to think of software objects as being mutual friends? As political rivals? As lovers? In other words, why can’t software objects see each other as objects of affection, or emnity? Or desire?

It might be useful to have a programming object be jealous of another, wishing to wreak revenge. Or for two objects vying to be best friends with the same third object. Presumably this object of their affection would need to decide which of the other two it liked the best – the one with the fancy attributes it just connected with yesterday, or the old reliable object it has been hanging out with since Windows 2000.

We might be able to get ideas about how to organize our programs by looking at the classics – Joyce, Austen, Nobokov, Shakespeare – to understand new and expressive forms of relationships between the things that go on inside a computer program.

For example, a powerful supervisory programming object may have spawned three daughter objects, each of which now claims to be carrying out its commands, but only one of which is truly loyal. Of course the spawning object might not correctly guess which of its daughter objects is the loyal one, and this could have tragic consequences.

Similarly, we could use the evolving relationship between Beatrice and Benedict as a model for error correction, or the path finding techniques of Leopold Bloom to design random walk algorithms, or model message passing protocols after the protocols used by Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy for, well, message passing.

With a little out of the box thinking, object oriented programming might never again be the same.

The other day over dinner my dining companion, a fairly regular reader of this blog, accused me of being an optimist. Well, perhaps “accused” is not the best word. But in the moment I did feel that the characterization was, in a way, limiting. I certainly have my dark side, which I draw upon quite often. For example, my post of five days ago was a recollection of what was certainly a dark and daunting time for me. But I suppose she meant that the general tone of my writing is one of perpetually bouncing back, looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. Or as Winston Churchill once said: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

I have a theory about this. Namely, I suspect that people who play with mathematics, in particular those of us who have grown up doing that from childhood, tend to be optimists. After all the central premise of math is that the Universe is a never-ending curiosity shop, with something new and exciting waiting just around the corner, or maybe on that next shelf over there.

There are many different philosophies in this world, religions, sects, ways of trying to metaphysically frame our existence. After all, existence itself is an ultimate mystery. A mystery that includes not just the astonishing fact of the glorious human mind we each possess, but also the human tendency towards playfulness in using that mind. How fortunate we are that playfulness, the sheer joy of exercising our minds and bodies, provides such a supreme source of pleasure. Of course it’s not all that surprising that our species would derive pleasure from a quality which so improves its odds of survival. That’s just common sense.

But mathematical playfulness in particular has a uniquely charming quality. Even as simple an expression as N + 1 suggests a world of possibilities. I think this quality is linked to that fact that it doesn’t matter what N is – it could be five or 33 or 1048577. When I say “N + 1”, or “N × N” or N^N, I’m not thinking about the number itself. Rather I’m thinking about a property of the Universe, a simple way to discover things about all numbers everywhere.

It’s like being in a house where every door can lead to a new room you’ve never visited. And each of those rooms contains other doors, so you can wander and explore as long as you want, without ever running out of new adventures. As a framing device for existence, the mindset that goes along with this process has certain advantages. The joy that comes from mathematical exploration leads to a very real experience of each new day as a fresh possibility for adventure. And yes, I think the general sense of this joy, of having options to explore, does indeed have a way of seeping into everything else.

Which, I guess, makes me an optimist. Opto ergo optimum