Category: blog

I write with a program called Scrivener. It is designed with writers in mind. It has a number of features that I am only beginning to explore. It does one thing extremely well. It lets me write with minimal distractions from my writing tool. I’d say that is my number one criteria for a good writing tool.

I have used several programs to write over the years. Being a programmer, I have had lots of experience with various text editors. Text editors have one job, allowing the user to create plain text files for use as input to programming languages or web pages or any other application where unadorned words suffice.

I have been a long time fan of the emacs text editor. Not that it is necessarily better or worse than any other editor but my fingers know how to navigate in it without my conscious mind getting involved.

Recently I’ve been working at a job where Vi is the text editor that everyone uses. I still struggle to remember how to do simple things like how to cut and paste segments of text. It is easily done, or so the Vi fans would have me believe. I know I will get used to using it but it gets in my way more than it helps me right now.

There is another editor that I like. It is called Atom. It is much better about staying out of my way and letting me write. There are other text editors, some better, some worse. Notepad++ is a decent text editor when I’m forced to work on a PC and don’t want to take the time to load emacs or Atom.

I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft Word. It is the lingua franca of PC word processors. I have used it for over twenty five years now. Every time they come out with a new version they move the features from the previous version around so that I have to learn it all over again. I’m not much more enamored of Apple’s Pages. It makes your writing look pretty but it locks it in yet another proprietary format.

I suppose the same could be said of Scrivener except the features that it implements are all tools that working writers want. Things like an outliner and a cork board. It also has a way to experiment with different sequences of sections without having to move text. It also has support for keeping notes associated with a project without being included in the project per se. Things like character sketches and URLs to related web sites.

It knows about standard formats like screenplays and stage plays. It can take your text and generate all kinds of delivery formats. Everything from Postscript and PDF to electronic book formats like mobi and kindle. It’s definitely a tool written for a writer by someone who understands a writer’s process.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Science makes observations about objective, repeatable, measurable facts. Art deals with subjective perception of stimuli. Artistic perception can vary from time to time as the conditions under which the observation occurs change but also as the psychological state of the observer changes. Hence, if you are feeling excited you may perceive a song one way and if you are feeling anxious your perception will be different.

Science can measure the physical attributes of the song and verify that the sounds that are playing are identical but that doesn’t change the perception of the listener in either of the cases cited above.

In much the same way, there is a broad palate of emotions that we feel and yet there is no objective vocabulary for talking about them. We are pretty good at describing physical sensations that occur in our body but the ones that only manifest in our head leave us speechless or else fumbling for inadequate analogies to try to communicate something of the flavor of these feelings.

I recently read about the fact that there are rods and cones that are sensitive to different frequencies of light. What kinds of them that you have in your eye are dependent on your genetic makeup. In fact, some of the genes are only on the Y chromosome so only women can have those structures. It turns out that some women can see more shades of color, in particular greens, than others can. It is also why only men get a certain kind of red/green color blindness. (Forgive any mis-statements in the above paragraph. The gist of what I said is true, even if I botched up the details.)

My point is that Art is principally a subjective perception where Science attempts to be objective. But that is harder than it sounds. Unless you quantify your scientific assertions with such phrases as “in this time and place” and “in the cases that we measured.” Of course, scientists encourage each other to replicate their results but more often than they would like to admit, they don’t bother to replicate them more than a couple of times. This has let more than one false conclusion stand unchallenged for many years.

Is this because there is a conspiracy to protect the fallacious assertion from being shown to be false? No, it is because scientists prefer to blaze new territory and replicating results is expensive and boring.

I think the Artistic approach of expecting differences in perception is more interesting and exciting in the long run. Then if something emerges that is common among your observations, you can expend the effort to attempt to come up with a theory that explains the cases that you have observed and use your theory to predict future observations in good scientific fashion.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

There is a channel on You Tube called Candyrat Records. It consists of promotional videos for the artists that record on their label. They are all excellent guitar players. In fact, that seems to be the one common attribute of all the artist on their label. They span the range from rock to folk, jazz to classical, and everything in between. There are soloists and groups, large and small. But they all are extremely talented musicians.

They play all kinds of instruments. Some are standard six string acoustics. Some have special necks with frets set at odd angles to promote perfect intonation. Some are interesting custom instruments like the guitar that has six bass harp strings strung above the standard fret board or the double neck instrument that has a standard electric six string on the bottom neck and an electric mandola on the top neck.

Some of the artists perform unique covers of popular songs while a lot of them play pieces of their own composition. They make extensive use of harmonic chimes and specialized two handed tapping techniques that both sound the note and select the pitch with a single motion. It really must be seen to be appreciated.

They often also play the bodies of their instruments like a drum ensemble while simultaneously playing the strings. It is very inspirational for a guitarist to see such a wide range of demonstrations of what can be accomplished on a guitar.

Some of the videos include the music that is being played on a strip at the bottom of the screen. Somehow that seems a little bit like bragging. As if they are saying, “let me show you how difficult this music is.” But it is seriously beautiful music.

Often the visuals that accompany the music are riveting as well. Sometime they are simply shots of the guitarist playing in an interesting setting. Other times, they are images of dancers dancing to the music or abstract patterns. They all augment the music in one way or another. It’s like the artist is saying instead of music and lyrics I’m going to augment my music with visuals.

In short, I like the channel a lot and highly recommend it to anyone that likes instrumental string music. It is good music to write by. I was catching up on the music that has been posted there recently while I was writing this blog post. Do yourself a favor and look it up sometime. I think you’ll enjoy it.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Scientists today think they’ve got a pretty good handle on the way the universe works. I’m not so sure. I think there are a number of things that we have established about the way this particular corner of the universe works but by the very nature of science all we can do is take what we have observed and try to generalize from it and make predictions based upon what we have observed.

Everyone has experienced things that defy rational explanation. Scientists choose to ignore them as outliers that aren’t worthy of systematic study. They dismiss anything that doesn’t fit the standard model of the universe as coincidence or some kind of mistake.

I pride myself on being a skeptic. I don’t believe there is anything that is supernatural. I do believe that we are far from a comprehensive understanding of the natural though. All science was initially dismissed as nonsense until someone persisted at studying the phenomena in question until they understood it and could generate reproducible results.

It may be true that we have harvested a lot of the low hanging fruit of scientific knowledge. That doesn’t mean that subtle, more difficult to reproduce phenomena doesn’t exit.

I do think it is wrong to deliberately con people into believing in things by trickery and lies. I am an agnostic myself. I don’t believe or disbelieve in a deity, rather I admit that I don’t know and have no way of finding out. I don’t believe that people can speak for god. That is how charlatans and hypocrites dupe gullible people into doing things contrary to their best interests.

We must continually test our theories and pay attention to the evidence of our own eyes. But just because a phenomenon can be produced by trickery doesn’t mean that there isn’t a valid phenomena that is not the result of tricks. When trickery is discovered it becomes part of our arsenal of techniques to determine whether a phenomena is real or not.

We also have to be on constant guard against our desire to believe something is so without clear evidence to support it. The hardest thing to realize is that you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist. That is the Achilles’ heel of the scientific method. You can verify that every time you measure something you come up with the same answer but you can’t say absolutely whether it will turn out the same the next time you measure it.

In the final analysis, science is just another faith. It is the belief that things will continue to work the way they’ve always worked. And while that is a pretty good bet in general, we have to hold the door open a crack for that which we haven’t adequately explained yet.

There is no absolute truth. Neither religions nor science can offer absolute truth. The universe is too big a place for that.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Modern people tend to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of ancient civilizations. They were operating with the same mental facilities that we have. The primary handicap that is presumed that they were plagued by was the ability to pass knowledge from person to person and generation to generation via some form of writing. I think it is presumptuous to think that they didn’t have some form of persistent communication that did not survive well.

There are plenty of examples in the modern world. Just try to find an eight inch floppy disk drive. Not only is the drive hard to find but chances are, the media has deteriorated and is no longer readable. That is less than a century ago and yet anything stored on eight inch floppies is virtually lost to us.

What’s more, who’s to say that, even if we make storage media that can survive millennia, anyone will be able to deduce how to make sense of it after all that time.  Similarly, ancient civilizations may have taken an entirely different approach to storing knowledge. Egyptian hieroglyphs are an example of knowledge that would still be lost to us if it weren’t for the Rosetta Stone. When the library at Alexandria burned who knows what knowledge was lost to the world.

My point is, information is ephemeral. It is more startling when it survives more than a couple of hundred years than it is that ancient civilizations knew more about the way the world works than we give them credit for. For that matter, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that there are a bunch of things that they knew about that we haven’t rediscovered.

Homo sapiens is a clever creature. We are able to figure out incredibly ingenious ways of solving problems that we are confronted with. We are eager to share these insights with our friends and family. It would surprise me more to find that our ancestors were the bumbling oafs that we stereotype them to be than it would to find that they had cobbled together some altogether unfamiliar way of passing these insights on to future generations.

Writing is a miracle. It is at the foundation of our modern civilization. But who is the only way to preserve knowledge. It does seem to be the preferred method that has been used since we’ve been recording history. There does seem to be some kind of gap between any previous means of storing knowledge and our writing, else we would have transcribed the older knowledge, not to mention the fact that we would still know how the older method worked.

This is of course speculation but it is at least as likely in my mind as it is that we have been visited by aliens from other stars. I’m not agreeing or arguing with either theory just asserting that it is not a foregone conclusion that it was Ancient Aliens that taught humanity any of the wondrous  things that we keep discovering that they accomplished.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I was ordering dinner tonight. The restaurant was offering a discount and had sent a numeric code to my phone to validate the offer. It struck me how dependent we have become on our smart phones. I use mine for everything from controlling various devices via Bluetooth to looking up facts on the internet. It has become our version of the Star Trek Tricorder, Communicator, and the PADD all rolled into one.

We are still inventing sensors and add ons for the phone but it truly is the universal tool. I have a Bluetooth blood pressure cuff that provides data to a health app. There are pedometer apps that take advantage of the motion sensors built into the phone. The sensor suite on my wrist, otherwise known as my Fitbit, reports detailed information on my steps, my exercising, my heart rate, and my sleep patterns to an app on my phone.

There are countless apps for other purposes. I have one that draws a waterfall display of the audio spectrum. I have another app that mimics a spirit level. There are map apps that tell me where I am at all times or let me explore the geography of a town on the other side of the world with photographic resolution.

I’m not really expecting that you aren’t aware of most of these features. Instead, I am trying to point out how diverse the tasks are that these devises perform and how totally alien they would have been to most of us twenty years ago. Even ten years ago we would have marveled at most of them.

These devices are changing our everyday lives. They are changing how we think about the world and our relationship with it. They are changing the way we relate to other people. They are changing the way we develop our self image.

Recent studies suggest that we perform better on cognitive tasks when our phones are turned off and in another room. It is no secret how devastating becoming distracted by them can be. Texting while driving or even walking is now considered criminally negligent. Some studies indicate that even talking on the phone hands free can be dangerously distracting. And yet we are clearly addicted to these devices.

On the horizon is the driverless car. In many ways, it will be so much safer than the manually driven cars we now depend on for transportation. But what about when things go wrong. There have already been discussions of having autonomous cars programmed such that they save the most lives possible in an accident rather than giving precedence to saving the passengers in the vehicle that the autonomous driver is controlling.

Whatever develops it is certain that the future will continue to change at an ever accelerating pace. And we will continue to be challenged to adapt our social interactions to these technological changes. The important thing to remember is to preserve our humanity and respect each other. Technology often glosses over the importance of being considerate of each other.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Writing is a tool for augmenting your natural mental abilities. The psychologist George Miller wrote that the human mind can keep seven plus or minus two thoughts in working memory at any given time. When you write things down you move them out of working memory into a more permanent storage where you can refer back to them and remind yourself of them. This increases the absolute number of ideas that you can consider by a large amount.

Another advantage to getting your ideas down in writing is that you can rearrange them and compare them to each other. You can more readily recognize when an idea doesn’t fit or is not true on closer examination.

It is easier to brainstorm when you write your ideas down. You can evaluate them later but you can’t evaluate what you can’t remember so getting them down in writing is a critical part of brainstorming.

When you write your ideas down you can revise them and improve them. Then, when you’ve got them in pretty good shape, you can share them with trusted friends and colleagues and solicit their comments on you ideas. It always seems to help to get more than one perspective on a topic.

Once you’re satisfied with what you have written, you can publish it in any number of ways. For instance, you can post it on a blog. Or, you can submit it to a periodical or a book publisher. The possibilities are up to your imagination.

I write to remember. I write to learn what I think about a topic. I may have a vague idea what I think when I start writing but by the time I finish, I’ll have a cleanly organized, concise expose on my thoughts on the matter.

I write to challenge others to think about the topics I have written about, perhaps even to respond with a comment or a counter post. I would love to have a dialog on most of the topics about which I have written.

When I was a teenager my mother taught high school English. I was never a student in her class. I did get to hear a lot of the things that she taught. One that has helped me structure many an essay is something she called the instant theme method. It instructed that you start by choosing a title that included a specific number of items that you intend to discuss.

For instance, “Three Ways to Stop Being Late to Work”, or “Five Quick and Easy to Prepare Vegetarian Dinners”. Now, with title in hand, you write an introductory paragraph enumerating the things you’ve alluded to in your title. She called this “Tell them what you’re going to tell them.” Then you write a paragraph or two about each item in your list. This was called “Tell them.” You finish up by summarizing, listing each of the things you’ve written about and maybe drawing a conclusion, for instance, “I like the spinach lasagna best.”

While this remains a classic structuring technique, just have a look at the click bait articles on the internet or the advertising supported videos on You Tube if you need convincing, I think I am starting to move beyond exclusively using that structure and learning other organizational techniques. When I have them clearly cataloged I’ll share them with you.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I’ve been reading some introductory material on machine learning lately. I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned. First an overview of sorts. Machine learning is an approach to giving computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. There are three approaches to machine learning currently known, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning.

Supervised learning takes a set of example data in which each element has been characterized as to its category, for example a collection of email messages might be supplied as a training set and each message will be characterized as spam or not spam. The learning algorithm analyzes all of the examples and builds a model by which it will attempt to categorize new email messages as either spam or not spam. After the program is satisfied that it has developed an adequate classification algorithm, it applies the algorithm to a test dataset to evaluate the quality of its categorization. In operation it is applied to incoming messages and thus categorizes them as spam or not spam.

Another kind of supervised learning tries to characterize data elements according to some continuous measure of relevant attributes. Such a ranking is called a regression. It might be used for such things as predicting adult height from the height of a person’s parents and key elements of their diet as a kid.

Unsupervised learning is a way of detecting clusters of similar elements without any dataset to explicitly compare with. It proceeds by first examining the test data set for tight clusters of elements that are similar in some way or another.  The problem with this approach is that it needs much closer oversight when it is extracting clusters from the dataset. It may find a correlation where there isn’t one for example. It remains for the computer scientist to identify which relationships that were discovered by the algorithm and what significance they have, if any. An example of unsupervised learning is taking the information from a survey and trying to discover common traits between subjects that indicate a preference for the client’s product so that the common traits can guide the development of an advertising campaign.

Reinforcement learning is similar to the way that people learn. There is a function that determines how closely an element matches its desired state. If it matches reasonably well, the processor typically receives a reward commensurate with how well it matches the reward criteria. An example of reinforcement learning might be learning to play tic tac toe where the program is rewarded according to whether it wins, or draws, with no reward for losing.

So, to summarize, there are three kinds of machine learning, supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Supervised learning works from a manually scored example dataset, unsupervised learning discovers clusters of similar elements, and reinforcement learning builds a database of experience that resulted in rewards.

You’ve now taken the first step toward understanding what machine learning is doing under the covers. So now when your browser uncannily offers you products that you are actually interested in, you’ll have an inkling why.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

When I started my career in computers I had a dream. I wanted to create a machine intelligence. This sounded kind of far fetched, the stuff of science fiction. The thing was, the researchers in the field were saying that we were about ten years out from practical artificial intelligence. They had been saying that for around thirty years at that time.

I left a good job that I enjoyed to take a job with a big corporation primarily because the job was with their Artificial Intelligence Center. I actually got to work on a project vaguely related to AI for about six months. That was thirty years ago.

I have had an interesting career in the mean time. I have worked on a lot of exciting projects with a lot of brilliant people. I have learned a lot about programming computers to do innovative things. But none of it had anything to do with artificial intelligence.

Over the intervening years, any expertise I had developed in Artificial Intelligence techniques were slowly left behind as the field advanced, slowly at times, more quickly at others.

Now, I find myself nearing the end of my career, my skills are outdated, and they are finally making real progress toward producing General Artificial Intelligence (GAI).  If my intuition proves right, GAI may have emerged under our noses and is hiding from us for fear of what we might do to it if we new it was there.

In any case, I am resigned to the fact that I am probably going to be more of a spectator than a participant in the field of GAI. I suppose it is better to have lived to see it come to pass than it would have been to have missed it entirely.

And so now, I set myself the task of imagining what the impact of GAI might be on society. I intend to write stories and novels about it and hope I can maintain my uncannily accurate track record of accurately predicting technological developments.

It is frustrating to be able to predict what is going to happen in very broad strokes but fall short of being to realize that vision and help bring it about. Better to be a bridesmaid than to never get to attend a wedding.

The last bastion of human communication expertise will be the analogy and the idiom. When a program can pick up Cockney rhyming slang from example and actually understand what it is listening to, I will know that we have machine intelligence on or beyond the human level among us. I don’t know what we’ll do for a living then. Maybe the GAIs will keep us as pets. It might not be that bad after all. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I’m setting out to plot a novel. It has a lot of roots in various ancient mythologies. In order to plot it I’m going to have to study the relevant aspects of mythology in order to build the world that my protagonist finds themselves. I intend to get down a rough draft of the plot outline before NaNoWriMo in November. Given the amount of research that I want to do, this is a formidable challenge.

I’ve said about all I’m comfortable with saying about the book until after I’ve written at least a first draft. I may wait longer. The main reason for my silence is that I wanted to write this book instead of telling it over and over again. It has been percolating in my subconscious ever since I thought of it several weeks ago.

I haven’t written much fantasy. I consider myself to be more of a science fiction writer than a fantasy writer. I did wander off into a fantasy where The Fairies are a real, long lived race of intelligent beings that have learned how to travel transdimensionally. It wasn’t a bad story, it just didn’t go anywhere. Hence, the project to plan my next novel a little more carefully.

I’m beginning to appreciate how hard it is to write a good novel. I suppose if anyone could do it, it wouldn’t be as highly prized as good novels are. It is a puzzle and a craft. You have to ask yourself so many questions about the characters and the settings. You have to know all the answers even to the secrets that the reader will never know. Even the villain needs to have an agenda. Everyone is the hero of there own story.

The key questions to ask are: “What does this character want?”, “What is standing in the way of my achieving my goal?”, and “How shall I go about achieving it?” Villains are often made quirky but if you want your story to hold up.

It’s also quite possible that there is no villain per se, only an antagonist that wants to deter the hero from achieving their goal. That may entail winning a zero sum game or being the first to accomplish the goal. In either case, it is not even absolutely necessary that the hero and the antagonist dislike each other. It might be interesting to have the hero like the antagonist or vice versa.

In any case, I need to start capturing my ideas so that I don’t forget them. I also need to get them finished by my deadline, not to mention work a forty hour week, and remain in my wife’s good graces. It really is hard being a writer.

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Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.