The day after sheer dumb luck

Today was both really productive and really enjoyable. I am sure that a lot of that was due to waking up this morning and thinking about the disaster that didn’t happen yesterday.

It feels as though a giant hand from above has pointed at me and said “I’m going to give you a chance here — make the most of it.” Respecting those wishes (you do not want to cross a giant hand from above), I have indeed done just that.

If I could just bottle this feeling of “things almost went really really badly, but they didn’t”, and use it to power each day, I might become both the happiest and most productive person I know. Unfortunately, I realize that after a while such states of mind begin to fade back into the ordinary.

Oh well. I am going to enjoy this feeling as long as it lasts.

Shifts in reality

If you were to go back in time, even a little bit, everything would seem weird. That’s because we don’t notice when things change.

By definition, our current day-to-day life is labeled as normal. So we don’t really notice the ways that our life is different from how it used to be.

Case in point: If you were to go back to before March 2020, you would find a world in which pretty much all meetings were in person. To attend a meeting, you needed to show up with your physical body.

Now that we routinely meet over Zoom, we forget how much of a change this is from the very recent past. I now have colleagues around the world with whom I meet to collaborate all the time, and I don’t really think much about it.

Similar radical shifts in reality happened when SmartPhones came out, and before that when libraries started to be replaced, for many purposes, by Wikipedia. To me the most fascinating thing about all this is not the radical shifts themselves, but how quickly we collectively absorb them and then forget that they ever happened.

The quantum nature of intelligence

As far as we know, all intelligence is contained within brains. Some of those brains belong to humans, others belong to dogs or other species. The important point is that we have no evidence that there is any actual intelligence in our Universe outside of the brains of living beings.

I think of this when I see a crowd of people walking around, and I also see around them the manifestation of human intelligence in the form of human made things, be they cars, buildings, clothing, books or smart phones. All of these objects are the result of collective human thought, yet none of those objects possesses any actual intelligence — only brains possess intelligence.

This in turn makes me think of quantum theory. For most of human history, the Universe was thought to be continuous. Solids and fluids were believed to be undifferentiated masses of homogeneous stuff.

Then we learned that matter actually consists of little components called molecules, which are built from still smaller components called atoms. Still later we learned that those atoms are themselves comprised of still smaller particles called electrons, protons and neutrons.

Eventually we learned that even the behavior these elementary particles is discrete in nature, since an elementary particle can exist in only a finite number of quantum states.

All of this reiterates the way intelligence works in the world. We see its manifestation all around us, which creates the illusion that it permeates our world as a sort of continuous property. But in reality, it is entirely contained in relatively tiny things called brains — which collectively hold, as far as we know, all the intelligence in the Universe.

Teaching computer graphics

I find that the trick to effectively teach computer graphics is to create a clear narrative progression from simple to complex. This is not easy, but it can be done.

First I lead the students to creating something very simple. It needs to be something that is easy to implement but also gives them a sense of satisfaction and ownership.

Then we gradually add more capabilities. The important thing is that the student sees the clear effect of everything that they add. Nothing should be left to blind faith.

Gradually the student builds up their system, learning skills and gaining confidence as they go along. At each step it is important to suggest ways they can customize their system, so they get feel true pride of ownership.

Eventually the student has put together a fairly sophisticated system. Each step along the way was manageable, so the student is never overwhelmed by the process.

By the end of the class, students should have the confidence to strike out on their own. Ideally they will go on to create their own unique computer graphics.

I suspect that this approach might also work well for other topics.

Helicopter

Apparently the FAA rules are about to change soon. After that, you will be able to buy your very own personal fly-by-wire helicopter, without needing a full pilot’s license. At least in theory.

“Fly-by-wire” simply means that a computer sits between the controls that you manipulate and the controls that actually fly the vehicle. So if you screw up, you are less likely to crash the helicopter.

Still, you’ll need at least 30 hours of training to be allowed to fly your little civilian helicopter, at $300 of training time per hour. Then again, if you can afford the $188,000 you’ll need to buy one of these things, you won’t miss the $9000 it will cost you to not kill yourself.

When I was a little kid, I really wanted my own little personal helicopter. Now that I am a grownup, I am less sure that I want one.

Still, it’s nice to know that I will soon have the option. At least in theory.