Ken's Blog

When I heard that Max Matthews had just passed away, my first thought was deep sorrow, and my second thought was how fundamentally he changed our culture.

It’s been well over half a century since Matthews started experimenting with the use of digital computers to create musical compositions. Now, of course, we all live in a world of digitally created art. We take for granted that our music, our movies, our games, our TV ads and just about everything else around us uses digital computers as a tool for aesthetic creation.

But back in 1957, when Matthews created the first real digital computer composition, these giant electronic beasts were generally seen as military tools for fighting the cold war, when they weren’t being portrayed as cold-hearted destroyers of humanity in the work place. The idea that the cybernetic behemoths of the day could be used as tools to create something as lovely and aesthetically focused as a musical composition was simply off the cultural radar.

Now, with the hindsight of fifty four years, after the rise of computer music (a field very much nurtured and mentored by Matthews), and then its younger sibling computer graphics, it’s astonishing to realize how truly radical and ahead of its time was that vision.

Sadly, the man himself is now gone, but he has left behind a powerful legacy, as generations of artists have now walked in his footsteps. In many ways the world of today, our art, our music, our games, the breathtaking computer visions and soundscapes in our movie theatres, are all his children.

William Butler Yeats once said that “Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire”, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. But what does it take to light a fire?

People who study the science of fire and combustion have an image for what it takes to light a fire, called the “fire triangle”:

For a fire to start — and to continue burning — all three of these components are necessary. But what is the “fire triangle” of learning?

I would argue that the fuel is intellectual curiosity, the oxygen is the sense one has that what is being learned is relevant or meaningful, and the heat or spark is the excitement that comes with true learning. When you look at learning this way, you can see much of what is wrong with our current approach to education, as well as what we might do to make things better.

If a student is told to sit in a classroom and learn something just because “it will be on the test”, then the student is being asked to learn in a vacuum. Without the important questions of “Why am I learning this?” or “What will I be able to do or think about or feel or express after I have learned it?”, then learning cannot really happen.

Yes, a student can be made to memorize, to learn tables of names and numbers and repeat back concepts by rote, but that is not true learning. The flame that Yeats spoke of is a flame of excitement, and that excitement is kindled only when a learner’s inherent curiosity and desire to explore encounters some sort of meaningful context, some interesting space to explore.

But what about the spark? Some students, but only a few, carry with them their very own tinderbox, and those students are very lucky. They have the ability to look at something they do not yet know, and see how their own curiosity will be set ablaze by the promise and implications of this new topic. There was probably little one could have done to prevent Mozart from composing, or Austen from writing, or Ramanujan from creating cathedrals of mathematical beauty.

But most people need a little help to find that spark, and that is where a good teacher is essential. A teacher’s love and passion for a subject is most often the single most important factor in kindling a student’s excitement for that subject. Good teachers know this, and realize, on some level, that they are indeed the keepers of the flame.

So if you’re a teacher (and everyone of us is, sooner or later), go out there and help light some fires!

I’ve been talking about way too many dark things here, so today I decided I would just make a random happy thing.

Click on the image below to see it:

I just really like that phrase “probability athiests”. It refers, more or less, to people who refuse to be religious about things probabilistic. No placing wagers on favorite numbers, no buying lotteries based on mom’s birthday, no world view that sees our number line in quasi-religious terms.

It’s hard, given the quirks of human nature, to consider questions numerical in terms that are not beholden to some faith-based reasoning or other. But it’s possible, and useful, and I think it’s important that we take the extra effort to try.

I wonder sometimes whether the bond between adults and children is based more on illusion than reality. When you are three years of age, or five, or seven, you have a way of looking at the world that is in many fundamental ways entirely different from the viewpoint of an adult. We grownups can see that worldview only vicariously, and as we spend time with children it is tempting to believe that being with them, playing with them, laughing with them, in some way takes us back to our own childhood.

But it is equally likely that this sense of transport is merely an illusion. We grownups may feel we know the mind of a child because we have our own childhood memories to draw on. Yet there is no reason to believe that those memories are in any way a portal back to our true experience at that age.

Have you ever stumbled upon something you wrote when you were quite young? I have, and the experience is very disconcerting. The writings of my preadolescent self feel like the writings of a stranger. There isn’t the sense of immediate connection and recognition that I feel, say, when I read something that I wrote at age sixteen (an age when we have indeed, for the most part, become our adult selves).

Or course the illusion of shared mind view between adult and child is necessary to the very survival of the species. And we wouldn’t want to give it up, any more that we would want to relinquish the pleasant and nurturing illusion that there is true mutual comprehension between us and our beloved canine companions.

In the deepest recesses of a long forgotten library, where mortals rarely dare to tread, there is a book, very wise and very old. Even the librarians in that forsaken place speak of this tome only in hushed and reverent voice, for its power is great, and its reach is infinite.

It is the list of terms once vibrant and alive, that now live on only in gaunt and ghostly shadow. Phantoms of language, creatures spawned by voices now stilled, the words that live between its ancient covers writhe upon the page in their struggle to be heard. Each entry in this vast and ancient text once blazed with great power, as souls countless in number fell under its sway. Yet these words remain trapped within these cryptic pages, for they are no longer welcome to walk among the living.

If you listen closely, on moonless nights you can hear the whispers of these ancient symbols within the library corridors, a faint echo falling like silent snow upon the uncaring walls. The music of these words is strange, its meaning elusive, like an ancient incantation only half remembered by a dark sorceror long gone mad. Words like hep, and knapped and ague, like groovy, barkers and fream, ginchy and fab and STTNG, bludger and dollymop, flimp and LSMFT.

Each of these words, once mighty in its reach, waits like a spectre for its moment to rise once more and reenter an unsuspecting world. And perhaps one day they will return, these strange lexical apparitions, refugees from a forgotten time. For who among us can foretell the future, and who can say what dark truths it may yet hold?

Open, if you dare, the Lexiconicom.

The dead they are not gone, we listen
Carefully to hear, we think, to what
They try to say, to tell us,

From wherever they have gone
Although we’ve lost, somehow, their
Voice, their touch, a thousand
Memories we still remember, yet

We listen, how we listen, like
Children lost in waiting
For someone to take our hand
And lead us home again, until
We realize, all in a moment,

We are so very far from home.

I am slightly nearsighted. Without glasses I have wonderful vision at about two feet away (the distance of a computer screen, more or less). I can see ok at a distance, but when I drive or go to a movie, I wear glasses to get that extra little bit of sharpness.

But here’s something odd: Whenever I look out from an airplane window without my glasses, everything below seems perfectly sharp and clear. Of course when I put on my glasses, all sorts of new details pop into view. Yet without the glasses, I never feel like I’m missing those details — it’s as though they never existed.

Yesterday I was at a dinner party where somebody who grew up with cellphones and the Web was asking what it was like before those technologies existed. “How did you find things and reach people?” he asked.

Those of us who had been around back in the days before cell phones and the Web explained that there had never been any sense of something missing. You could reach somebody by phone because you knew when they would be at home or at their desk. As for finding information, in the library you could learn all about any topic under the sun. When you wanted to arrange a meeting at work, you sent around a memo.

I suspect it has always been like this. People who lived before the age of the telephone, the airplane and the automobile didn’t miss them. Life, work and relationships had a way of adapting seamlessly to whatever technology happened to exist at the time.

I wonder, twenty years from now, when technology has advanced yet again, and the SmartPhones and Web browsers of today seem hopelessly clunky and inconvenient, whether young people will ask how we all managed to get along with only the paleolithic technologies of 2011.

At a dinner party this evening overheard someone talking with a man who researches ways to cure cancer. The cancer researcher was asked what causes cancer. He explained that the very same wild capacity for growth that enables children and embryos to grow by leaps and bounds can also end up going wrong. Random mutations sometimes trigger cells to act as though they are in a growth spurt, but in inappropriate ways that veer wildly out of control. The result is unpredictable and often fatal run-away tissue growth.

He went on to explain that this is largely a disease that strikes older people, because there is little genetic selection in our species for preventing such mistakes in people who are beyond child-bearing age. Mostly, our DNA just selects for individuals to survive long enough to propagate. After that — in evolutionary terms — you are living on borrowed time.

Deciding to crash the conversation, I suggested that maybe the long-term solution to solving cancer lies in a different direction. Rather than focusing only on curing cancer in individuals, I proposed that research also be done to extend the age at which we can make babies. That way whatever happens to older people will go into the gene pool. The tendency toward cancers in such older people will gradually be weeded out.

He agreed that in principle this should work. Of course we also realized that this won’t be of any use to anyone alive today, or even anyone alive in a hundred years. But over time, it will do the job.

Maybe, in some far off distant future, our descendants will thank us.

I just read that the government of the People’s Republic of China has essentially banned TV shows that feature time travel. I’m not making this up — here is the story.

I guess this is conclusive proof that time travel does not exist. Because if it did, some intrepid TV producers would certainly have traveled back through time and given themselves advice about how to avoid annoying the Chinese government.

On the other hand, maybe some rival TV producers who actually have time travel have managed to use it to go back through time and plant those seeds of suspicion about time-travel themed TV shows in the minds of government officials.

But then what happens when the people who make the time-travel TV shows get hold of that time machine, and figure out how to get the Chinese government to think that time-travel themed TV shows are the most patriotic thing imaginable.

Would we all end up getting caught in an endless time loop?

And more importantly, if we do, can we make a great Chinese TV show about it?