Category: blog

Comparing Baking with Writing

Following instructions is not my strongest suit. Watching the comic relief bake off by comedians. Apparently comedians have trouble following instructions too. It was fun watching them attempt something so obviously outside their area of expertise. It was also touching to see their reaction when their entries were well received.

I know how that feels. I have been writing short stories and getting them critiqued by my fellow writers at the Downtown Writers Group. It is good to hear their suggestions for how I might improve my stories but it is also magical when someone really likes something that you’ve written. It means even more coming from another writer that has experienced the struggles of pulling a story together and making it hold together.

The key to learning to write is to write a lot. The more you write, the more you understand how to write. I have started attempting to write micro stories that are complete in around five hundred words. I’ve discovered that this is a big challenge as there is not many words with which to establish setting and character. It does give me the opportunity to write more stories and explore many different techniques.

I look forward to sharing the best of my micro stories with my critique group. I feel like I am much more of a beginner than the rest of the members of the group. I have written for a respectable length of time but I have less literary background than they seem to have. I hope to improve in that area by reading more criticism and maybe taking a class or two.

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

Library Time

The library is no longer the bastion of quiet that it once was. That is not all bad. It is good that people are interested in reading books and talking to people about them. It is good that parents are bringing their children to the library. It is good that librarians are losing their reputations as strict disciplinarians.

I suspect that there are still some places that are quiet in the library. I am sitting across from the main circulation desk on the floor with the Youth Services Desk and the children’s collection. It is typically quieter upstairs. In a way, I’m surprised at how much space they have and how many interesting activities they sponsor. I definitely need to come here more than just the two times a month that my writers group meets.

As much as I love the internet, it is encouraging to me that the internet hasn’t had the predicted effect of killing libraries. If anything, many libraries have embraced the network and integrated it into their services. There are plenty of other services they have to offer besides looking up facts, an activity that Google is admittedly far more adept at.

I am going to work on varying my topics more. I plan to find a time for working on my fiction other than the time that I have reserved for blogging. I also plan to spend time on topics other than artificial intelligence and programming languages. That will take some extra reading on my part but I never was one to complain about reading.

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

The Absolutely Shortest Blog Post, Ever

If I’m going to get a blog post written and posted today, I’m going to have to do it now. I have twenty minutes left in the day. I have been thinking about what to write about and nothing is coming to mind. I’ve written about the panic of this situation. I’ve written about the value of learning to write under a deadline. But this is the first time that I’ve ever written about the topic when I was feeling the pressure so directly as I was writing about it.

I don’t have to write a lot to fulfill my commitment. In fact, I could post what I’ve written so far and technically I would meet that commitment. But I would feel like I was cheating somehow. I wouldn’t have an Aristotelian complete composition. I would only have written a beginning, and a middle. Or, if you prefer, a beginning and an end. Without this paragraph to serve as the middle, the composition wouldn’t be structurally complete.

But now, I’ve done it. I’ve written a beginning, a middle and an end. I have addressed a topic, coherently. I’ve done so typing just about as fast as my fingers will fly. And, I’ve learned my lesson. Don’t put off writing your blog post until eleven forty or you run a very real risk of not getting it written in time to qualify as a blog post for today instead of one for tomorrow. Goodnight.

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

Courting the Muse

Artistic expression is a spiritual activity. First their is the quiet waiting for inspiration from your muse. Then the careful nurturing of the thread of truth that emerges from your silent anticipation. The reverently teasing the truth from the light that illuminates the vision. The vision, in turn, elevating the spirit to a fevered pitch of ecstasy.

It sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? I’ve never experienced artistic expression in quite that organized a fashion. In my experience it is passionate chaos. There is the endorphin rush when things are coming together but that is offset by the struggle to manifest the product of your inspiration, whether that is a story, a song, a painting, or some other artifact of being touched by the divine.

That is what the ancients thought happened to artists. They were touched by divinity and gifted with an alternative perspective on the world. The spirits that motivated them were called their genius. It was the genius that provided the insight and talent to produce their art. This made it easier on the artist when they woke up on some days and couldn’t do  what had been so effortless the day before. By attributing the creativity to the genius, the artist was allowed his human foibles. Without the constant pressure to produce, the artist was able to maintain the relaxed atmosphere that encourages creativity and avoid the depression of creative block.

Alas, I don’t believe in independent spirits that motivate my art. I do have a process aimed at reproducing that of the ancients and their genii. It starts with sitting quietly and relaxing. At some point I put my hands on the keyboard and start to type. If I have engaged my inspiration, what comes forth is coherent and expressive. If not, I keep typing. Writing is a craft as well as an art and by virtue of writing coherent sentence, I become a better writer.

Often, after a couple of sentences I hit upon the essence of what I am writing about. Sometimes after I’ve written a couple of pages I decide that what I’ve written is not what I intend to say. At that point, I save it as a draft so that I can come back to it later to see if there is anything to be salvaged from a previous draft.

More frequently, the second time around I am in a better frame of mind and manage to produce an acceptable work. I won’t say that every one is a sterling creation but they do help me understand myself and my options. They give me inspiration to avoid the pitfalls of the past. And sometimes, I do write something that I am proud of. Those incidents are happening more and more frequently as time goes past and I have more experience writing.

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

Pay Attention. There Will Be A Test.

There is a technique in engineering known as biomimetics. It is a practice where a designer patterns the behavior of an artificial system after biological processes. An example of biomimicry was the early attempts at designing a flying machine by studying the way that birds fly. The successful application of this approach has bloomed in recent years and yielded many phenomenal devices and processes. One of particular interest to me is the genetic algorithm.

A genetic algorithm mimics the operation of DNA to encode behavior as small snippets of code that can be randomly combined to produce individuals that run that code in a specific environment. The performance of each individual is evaluated against some fitness criteria and then a new generation of individuals is constructed by randomly recombining the components of individuals from the previous generation favoring the contributions from the more successful individuals over the less successful ones. The cycle then repeats some arbitrary number of times or until an individual is “bread” that meets some target fitness level according to the fitness criteria.

Surprisingly good performance is often obtained with relatively few iterations. The behavior produced in this way is not necessarily intelligent. Intelligence implies sophisticated mechanisms for problem solving that involves dynamic adaptation of generic cognitive capabilities to an unanticipated spectrum of problems. Genetic algorithms do produce impressive behaviors though.

I saw a video on the internet today that talked about how some plants used clever tricks to co-opt more intelligent species assistance to accomplish their objectives. The example was given of a plant that had a broad leafy substance that looked like a female insect’s genitals. The male insect attempted to copulate with the plant thus pollinating it without the plant having to expend any energy producing nectar to attract it.

There is a site on the internet called IFTTT (IF This Then That). It allows you to set up conditions that the site monitors for a given value and a set of consequences that the site will execute if the trigger condition is observed. It seems to me that this is the sort of mechanism that is ripe for establishing behaviors that are very clever, perhaps even profitable, without having to resort to actual full blown general artificial intelligence.

And the next step might be, a site that treats IFTTT recipes that are themselves used as snippets in a genetic algorithm. The key thing that would need to be developed would be a fitness function that would judge the generations of individuals until some success criteria was achieved.

I may have to do some hacking myself. I understand that various online stock tickers have IFTTT interfaces. I could build an interface to various news sources and run a genetic algorithm that attempts to pick stocks based on the news sources. I wouldn’t be the first to try it and probably not the first to make money that way if I got it to work.

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

Aesthetics and the Age of BMIs

I’ve written about Artificial Intelligence a lot in this venue. I have presented the potential danger that unconstrained amoral emergent artificial intelligence may pose. I have mentioned the alternative of building Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) that allow us to merge with machines, hopefully before they achieve emergent AI on their own.

Another concern has crossed my mind of late. It is the question of what it means to be human. Is it really as great as we imagine it to be? Is it something that will be compromised by merging our brain function with computer prosthesis? Will empathy survive the transition from biochemical thought processes to electronic ones?

And what about sensory perception? Will enhanced perception change our perspective on the universe and out place in it? Will we be overwhelmed by the volume of stimulus and become incapable of exercising our human judgement regarding the virtually unlimited possibilities that become apparent as a result of it?

I begin to appreciate the concerns of the Luddites when the industrial revolution threatened the way of life that they enjoyed with no clear promise of what it would be replaced with. I’m not taking a Luddite stance here, just saying that it is understandable what they were feeling given the context of the current looming AI revolution.

This concern began when I started thinking about the contrast between rational writing processes as opposed to intuitive ones. Intuition is a result of poorly understood electrochemical activity in the brain. I believe it is an inherently perceptual phenomena and is predominantly emotional instead of rational, at least in its human embodiment.

When you hear music or see a painting the emotions that well up in you are far from rational. You can think about the reactions and try to analyze them. Analysis doesn’t go very far toward allowing an artist to create a new work that has similar profound effects though. At least it hasn’t up until now.

Perhaps the availability of direct brain communication will make artistic endeavors seem archaic, something practiced by folk archivists for the sake of remembering what narrow bandwidth our communication channels had prior to high fidelity BMIs were available. I think there will always be something special in the process of translation from a personal thought or feeling into a physical manifestation of that experience.

Will artistic expression be given a broader canvas upon which to manifest itself with the advent of high fidelity BMI interfaces or will it fade into obscurity due to lack of interest? Only time will tell. I think it’s important for us to start thinking about such matters before they become fate accompli.

Perhaps a new generation that has never known a time before BMIs will not see a need for artistic expression. I think those of us that have grown up before BMIs become a reality will always value artistic expression as an external abstraction of our feelings that exists outside of ourselves, available for interpretation and re-interpretation by each person that perceives them.

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

Ramble on the Processes of Writing

I can think of two ways to approach writing a blog post, or anything for that matter. The first is to approach it rationally. Make a list of potential topics, choose one or two, make an outline, do some research, then sit down and write according to the plan. This is probably the safest way to ensure that you write something that is at least of some minimal quality.

The other way is to approach it entirely from a place of intuition. You sit until a topic occurs to you or until you get impatient and just start without one. You write whatever comes to mind. You look something up if it matters to you. You stand ready to pull the plug on a piece that is going nowhere and start again. I usually save the stillborn attempt in case it catches my fancy some other time.

This second approach is often labelled “seat-of-the-pants” in the circles where writers discuss their processes. I get the analogy to piloting but I think the term is unnecessarily dismissive. In the case of piloting you are navigating your way through a landscape that has an objective existence. You probably have some idea where you want to go. In any case, you can look at where you are going and decide based on objective observation whether it is where you want to be.

Writing is qualitatively different to that. There is no objective pre-existing landscape to navigate. Whether you take the rational first approach or the intuitive second approach, you are making it all up as you go.

If you are trying to write about something that is predominantly factual, you would probably be best served to do at least some minimal amount of research and planning. If you are making everything up as you go, its not as important to plan.

The one point where this is not the case is when it comes to plot. It may happen that you will wander around and tell an interesting tale but if you don’t have any idea what the ultimate point of the journey is you are going to end up, as I have on multiple occasions, with a disappointed and perhaps even pissed off audience.

So the point here is that you have to court your muse at least to the extent that she gives you an end to your story. I’ve talked to other authors and they have told me that they often set way points that they use to steer their story toward a given outcome without dictating the entire journey beforehand.

Creativity is a strange phenomenon. It balks at excessive planning but thrives when given constraints within which to operate. A pre-imagined ending is probably a good constraint within which to work. Goodnight all.

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

Beatle Mania, 50 Years Later

One of my guilty little pleasures is my SiriusXM subscription in my car. The model of car that I bought had the deluxe stereo package and it came with a 3 month trial subscription. At the time I was commuting an hour and a half to work every day. I was sold on a subscription before a week had gone by.

That was almost five years ago and every year I try to talk myself out of renewing but of the subscriptions that I have I probably use this one more than most of the others. I don’t have a long commute any more but I listen to Sirius every time I go anywhere in my car.

This week Sirius started a new channel that has made me an even bigger fan of the service. You may have seen the ads for it on television. It is called the Beatles channel and it plays songs from the entire Beatles catalog including those recorded by the individual members after the breakup. It also plays music by musicians that influenced the Beatles like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry for instance. It plays covers of Beatle tunes by various artists, many of which I was unaware. It plays short documentary clips about various details of the Fab Four. I also caught a little bit of a show where Little Stephen of the E-Street Band was playing his favorite song of each Beatle. I suspect we’ll have more different content as time goes by.

I was about to go through the process of deciding whether to keep my subscription for another year. This channel has just tipped the decision for this year at least.

So, why am I so excited about a Beatles channel anyway. Several reasons come to mind. Foremost among them is the fact that I grew up listening to the Beatles. The first LP that I ever owned was bought with Green stamps and was Beatles 65. The first song that my garage band learned was Eleanor Rigby. You begin to see a pattern developing here.

The Beatles weren’t the only band I listened to but as the years went by and my musical taste broadened, the Beatles remained in the core of my musical pantheon. I listened to the Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, Ten Years After, and Jefferson Airplane/Starship. As my musical taste matured I found myself listening to Santana, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, and Ricky Lee Jones.

Beatles song have a particular quality to them. They infused our culture so completely and for so long that they have become markers that bring to mind events in your life when a particular song was playing. For example, I associate Rocky Raccoon with the Saloon at Guntown Mountain the first night that I worked there. The rest of the cast was feeling me out and the fact that I knew Rocky Raccoon seemed to cinch their opinion of me as a competent guitarist.

I remember how upset I was that they were breaking up. It was a slow motion affair. The decision had been made and put in motion before the sales of Let it Be and The White album had even begun to peak. We didn’t have any idea of how prolific the individual members of the band would be after the break up.

I said there were a lot of reasons. I’ve really only given two are three. There are more but I’ll give it some thought and write about them another time. By the way, I wrote this blog post listening to… The Beatles, of course.

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

Fairy Tale Debrief

So much for a first attempt at a fairy tale. Here’s a first cut at a debrief. As one of my loyal readers was quick to point out, I left several mysteries unexplained. I never explained the significance of the flowers or the bag. I never explained the growling creature with glowing eyes. There was no payoff, no pun, no moral, no explanations.

What do I, as a writer take away from this exercise? One tip that I’ve been given on several occasions that was driven home in this case was that you should write your story backwards. That is to say, you should figure out how it ends and then write the beginning to support the conclusion. That helps to avoid all the loose ends.

I think the story has potential if I rewrote it with that in mind. Another lesson learned: it’s very difficult to write a story from start to finish in five hundred word increments with a daily deadline. I may get the hang of serial fiction on a deadline eventually but I don’t intend to try it again until I get some less ambitious projects under my belt.

The reason I have tried it so many times is that I have a schedule crunch. There are only so many hours in a day and I still work a full time day job. Writing takes time. Time is a precious commodity. I am going to keep trying different ideas to find time to write. Eventually, I will retire and have more time to spend writing. I am hoping to get in enough practice between now and then that I can actually find a market for my writing.

Whether I sell my work or just continue to develop my skills as a story teller, it is a win – win situation. Developing new skills has been demonstrated to help keep the brain young. Besides that benefit, writing is one of only a few ways that I have ever managed to sustain flow. Flow is addictive.

If you don’t know what flow is you can read my post, Let it Flow, from last week or the Wikipedia post about it. You can also watch Mihály Csíkszentmihályi‘s TED talk on the topic. I also wrote a post about How I Find Flow.

I hope you experience flow. I hope you find your bliss. Remember, happiness is a choice, not a consequence of wealth or possessions. Life is a journey not a destination. Pay attention to the scenery along the way.

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

How I Find Flow

At the suggestion of a friend, I watched a TED talk called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness | TED Talk …. I have read his book, Flow, and so the ideas presented in the talk weren’t new to me. What I was reminded of was the necessity of a high degree of challenge combined with a high degree of skill. As I pondered that it occurred to me that in so many of the cases of flow that I have read about or experienced myself, one of the key factors was a level of familiarity with ones tools that was so intuitive that you don’t consciously think about them.

Take writing for instance. I have developed my typing skills to the point where I don’t think about spelling words anymore. I just think the sentences that I intend to write and they appear on the page. It feels almost like magic.

Similarly, when I write a program, I build it a piece at a time. I prefer interpreted languages, like Lisp or Python, because I can experiment with them as I think about the problem. The IPython environment is especially good for that kind of development as it records every expression you enter and every response that it returns and labels it with an index number (see the screenshot below).

You can also step through the history by using the up-arrow and down-arrow keys. You can edit the expression and then execute it again. Typos are not nearly as frustrating when you don’t have to type in the entire expression again. Notice I refer to the previous output with the _ character. The line that starts with the prompt: In [2]:  computes the square of 42 ( _**2) .

There are many other useful features of IPython. I am still exploring them. The nice thing about them is that they are optional. You can learn about them a little bit at a time and they don’t get in your way if you don’t know about them. This helps you stay in flow by not distracting you.

There are other nifty tools to help you write Python code. I have been using one called Spyder that is a multi-pane Integrated Development Environment similar to Xcode, Eclipse, or Visual Studio, depending on your preference as a programmer. Each of these other IDEs have add on software that helps you develop Python.

I’ve wandered a bit away from the topic but the point that I am making is that before you can experience flow while doing a task, you have to be comfortable doing it. Pick a tool, learn it until it disappears. When you are creating, the tool should become invisible to you. Your focus should be on the code that you’re writing, not the tool that you are writing it with. Furthermore, you should be thinking about solving the problem, not how you get the language to do what you want. That takes a good bit of practice to achieve as well.

To round out my examples by noting another activity where I experience flow. When I’m playing guitar, I experience flow. Especially when I am trying to play a piece that I’ve never tried before. Or when I try to learn a new song on the mandolin. It challenges me and demands skills that I often have to learn to get into the zone. It’s worth it though.

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