Month: September 2016

The Silver Lining

What if you got to the end of your life and you realized that all you had accomplished was surviving? You had managed to feed, clothe, and shelter yourself and your family. You had gone to work and done the job that was assigned you. You had done everything that society expected of you.

But you had lost yourself. Your personality had faded until you hardly recognized yourself when you looked in the mirror in the morning. Your passions had evaporated like the afternoon rain. Your world had turned a uniform gray. Would you say that you had actually lived your life?

Our society has failed so many of its members. It has taught many of them how to survive but few of them how to live. How to think about what they are passionate about and how to live a life that they will be pleased with when it is over.

The good news is, even if you feel that way today, your life isn’t over yet. There is always time to think about these things. To make these decisions. To live a life that you will be pleased with when it is over.

Sweet Dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important off all, be kind.

Happy Fiftieth Star Trek!

Science fiction at it’s best shows us who we are in the reflection of a time and place removed from our current circumstances. It allows us to reframe the important issues of the day in metaphors that illuminate the essence of what it means to be human. I am, of course, talking about the legend that is the Star Trek franchise. Gene Rodenberry took his vision of a future that was better than things are now and reinvented the medium of television into a canvas that would accommodate that vision.

It is a rare franchise that fifty years on is still inspiring spin offs and fan fiction and conventions like Star Trek. It has dealt with space travel of course but that hasn’t stopped it from also exploring time travel, telepathy, telekinesis, parallel universes, artificial intelligence, matter transmission, a unique spin on virtual reality not to mention hundreds of alien societies. I can think of no other show that has dared to explore such a wide range of topics and premises.

So, on the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek I proudly proclaim that I am a Trekker forever and I thank Gene and all the marvelous actors and writers and directors and crew members that have given us such a rich and wonderful world full of some of the best dramatic literature ever written. May they all live long and prosper.

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

Recipe for Success

Here is the recipe that I have learned to get things done.

  1. Define your goal, i.e. what you want to accomplish, in terms that can be measured.
  2. Make a plan. A plan is a series of specific steps such that you can tell when you have completed each one.
  3. Execute several of the steps. If it takes more than an hour or so, you probably need to think about breaking the steps down into smaller steps.
  4. Measure your accomplishments against your goal.
    • If you are making progress toward your goal but haven’t achieved it yet, go to 3.
    • If you are not making any progress toward your goal, go back to 2 and rethink your plan.

That’s it. Simple, eh? It took me 61 years to figure it out. I got stuff to do. I’ll write more tomorrow.

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

Only the End

Aristotle taught us that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And so, for thousands of years our stories have had a beginning, a middle, and an end. But how many real stories have all three elements in equal measure? All stories start and end. They have something that happens inbetween. But these are arbitrary divisions.

Perhaps there is a story that is all beginning. It is meant to inspire you to fill in your own middle and end. Or perhaps there is a story that is focused on tying up loose ends from an elided beginning and middle. Or perhaps you have a story that more closely mirrors real life. It is all about the middle, the now. There are things that went on before and there are things that will go on later but the story is focused on the moment.

Isn’t that how we experience our lives? Shouldn’t our stories reflect our own experiences, at least some of the time. It’s nice when a story comes all neatly packaged with its Aristotelian components but isn’t it more realistic when you only get whatever pieces that were at hand?

It certainly makes a nice theory. Now it only remains for me to see if I can actually write a story based on these principles. The proof is, as they say, in the pudding.

The noise outside got quieter and quieter. She knew that something was happening but she was scared. There was a clanging noise from the middle of the courtyard right outside the barn where she had been awaiting the return of the clerk who had started this whole search for the hidden realm.

A crow cawed and the young man sat on the bench. He had come a long way since he had left his apartment with his walking cane and his little canine companion. They had found the journey long and arduous but rewarding as well.

It only remained to deliver the trophies and they would be on their way home, at least until new competitors vied  for the title. Then they would have to accelerate their program to discover new artifacts from the Golden Age and keep their civilization intact.

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

Impromptu

I started out writing this post with some navel gazing crap about introspection and self worth. I deleted that and started over. Everyone is tired of my navel gazing, even me. I suspect my character sketches are beginning to wear a little thin as well.

I’d like to write something entertaining but that is turning out to take a lot more time than I realized. It also is something that is very hard to do on a schedule. You can work on it on a schedule but it takes as long as it takes to produce something that is complete enough to be worth sharing.

I have written a couple of essays that weren’t half bad. Most of them were first drafts and could use a bit of rework to flesh them out a bit. I particularly like the ones where I write about the history of technology. That takes a bit of research on my part. I enjoy doing it but I often find myself with the end of the day fast approaching and I’m still struggling to write a meaningful post.

I am not complaining. I am thankful for the opportunity to write for you, my readers. I feel a responsibility to you to write something that is worth your time to read. I will redouble my efforts and make it so.

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

This Old Dog is Learning New Tricks

Not only can you teach an old dog new tricks, but it is vital for dogs, and everyone else for that matter, to constantly learn new skills. It keeps the brain agile and working at top efficiency. It isn’t always comfortable to constantly challenge yourself to try new things, go new places, and learn new skills, but the benefits are well worth it.

That is one of the motivations behind my daily blog posts. It allows me to practice the art of writing and pushes me beyond my comfort zone. I sometimes find myself scratching my head trying to think of something new to write about. That is when I sit down and start typing. Writing something is more likely to lead to a topic than sitting and staring at a blank page. Besides, if what I write turns out to be unfit for a blog post, I can either edit it until it is fit or throw it away and start over.

The biggest enemy of achievement is doing nothing. Doing nothing is rarely the result of laziness though. More often it is the result of fear. Fear of failure. The paradoxical truth is that in order to succeed at something we must try and when we try we often fail. If we then learn from our failure and try again, we will often succeed. The surest sign of a successful person is the perpetual attitude that they haven’t failed, they just haven’t succeeded yet.

I have been working on learning to write succinctly for my entire life. I have been actually writing on a daily basis for a little over five years. I am only beginning to actually succeed at writing an interesting piece every now and then. I intend to continue to practice.

I appreciate my long suffering readers and would appreciate any comments or suggestions that you might have. You can comment here on my blog site, on the cross posts to Facebook or Twitter, or you can email me at jkelliemiller at gmail.com.

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

Wiki Madness

Almost everybody knows what a wiki is thanks to Huntsvillian Jimmy Wales and the site that he founded, Wikipedia. What is not so widely known is the story behind the invention of the wiki.

Ward Cunningham invented the wiki in 1994. It was an experimental site designed to see whether a community of people could collaborate to build a collection of hyperlinked pages in an organic fashion. It was wildly successful beyond any expectations that he had. Here’s how it works.

There is a button on every page that allows the contents of that page to be edited. There is some convention for encoding links to other pages, often the use of what is referred to as camel case where the first letter of each word is capitalized. For example, AnotherWikiPage might be a link to a page titled AnotherWikiPage. If the page doesn’t exist already, it will have some visual indication of that fact, often a question mark that is a hyperlink that will create a new page of that name when clicked. It is actually much simpler in practice than it sounds when you explain it.

Ward’s original Wiki was created primarily for the discussion of design patterns in programming. The idea of the wiki caught on quickly and soon there were many other people implementing there own spins on it.

One of the most interesting spin offs is a project called TiddlyWiki that implements a personal wiki. It is written in Javascript and runs in a web page. Each “page” is called a tiddler and they are displayed on a single “river” of tiddlers that unfolds on the web page as you click on links or search for content.

You can create as many of these TiddlyWikis as you’d like kind of like notebooks. Each one lives in its own file on your computer. You can share a TiddlyWiki with someone else by including the file as an attachment to an email or you can put it on a memory stick and carry it with you between computers.

What kinds of things can you use it for? I use it to for a work journal. At the beginning of the day I create a new journal entry tiddler. I keep a running narrative of what I’m doing on my project in it. If I need to look up what I did or when I did it, I just search my wiki for my notes.

The applications for it are as numerous as your imagination can come up with. You could use it to take notes for a class. You could use it to collect recipes and search for them based on their ingredients. You could create tiddlers instead of writing everything down on sticky notes. You can’t search sticky notes automatically with a computer.

It is a wonderful tool. I don’t know what I’d do without it. It’s as revolutionary as the spreadsheet or word processor.  You should definitely try it. Check out the getting started videos on the web site.

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

Memories of a Time Before

The life we lead today is like science fiction when compared to how we lived when I was a boy. We had TV but we only got three of four channels. Some of them were intermittent at best. All television was broadcast over the air so you had to have an antenna to receive stations that were any distance away. Most televisions were black and white. There was a time when color televisions were becoming the norm.

All phones were connected into the phone system using wires. There were no cell phones. There were pay phones all over the place. Phone calls cost a quarter for three minutes. It was a luxury if you had more than one phone in the house. We would often be told to get off the phone because someone was expecting an important phone call.

Computers were large affairs that only the government, universities, and large businesses could afford. At their smallest, they were the size of a refrigerator and at their largest they could occupy an entire floor of a moderate sized building. Programmers worked with pencil and paper. They were often referred to as System’s Analysts. There weren’t many colleges with degrees in Computer Science. Most programmers had degrees in Electrical Engineering or Mathematics. IBM discovered that English and Music major were particularly good at writing complex programs and started hiring them as programmers as well.

The transistor was the newest innovation. Every kid wanted their own transistor radio. We listened to rock and roll music on AM radio stations. We formed garage bands and learned to play the songs that we heard on the radio and dreamed of signing a recording contract and becoming stars.

When your friends moved away, you wrote them letters and mailed them with an envelope and a stamp. You wrote the letters with pen or pencil on paper. There was no such thing as email or text messaging. Even when your friend moved across town you might still write letters to keep in touch.

When you took a picture, you had to either develop it yourself which required a dark room, lots of smelly chemicals, and a good bit of skill, or you would send your exposed film to a laboratory to be processed and it would be a couple of days before you got your pictures back. And there was no way to know if they were going to turn out any good until after they had been processed.

Tape recorders were relatively expensive. There were cassette tape recorders that you could record music off the radio on and then there were reel to reel tape recorders that were more expensive and were high enough quality to record demo tapes of music. I never owned a reel to reel tape recorder but my friend’s father did. We used it to record the music we composed for our garage band. I wish I  had a copy of those tapes now.

What do you remember about the time before we woke up in this science fiction story?

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

The Future Explained, Part 2

As we became proficient in mathematics we noticed that some of the operators had inverse effects on numbers. For instance, subtraction was the inverse of addition thus you could take 10+4 = 14 and reverse the effect with subtraction; 14 -4 = 10. Next, they looked for an inverse to multiplication and came up with division. When it came to exponentiation however they had to search for a while for its inverse.

Finally, in 1614 John Napier published a book entitled Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (Description of the Wonderful Rule of Logarithms). The logarithm is the inverse of the exponent, where 10 to the 3rd power is 1000, the logarithm base 10 of 1000 is 3. Logarithms had several interesting properties.

If you added two logarithms together you obtained the logarithm of the number that was the product of the two original numbers. For example, the logarithm base 10 of 100 is 2 and the logarithm base 10 of 1000 is 3. If we add the two logarithms, 2 + 3 = 5, we find that 10 to the 5th power is 100,000 as is 100 * 1000. Similarly, when you subtract two logarithms you get the logarithm of the number that you get when you divide the two original numbers; 5-2 = 3 thus 100,000 / 100 = 1000. This fact allowed for the invention of the slide rule, which was what all the geeky engineering types used before they had computers.

I’m going to generate some figures to illustrate this next feature of logarithms but in the mean time, bear with me as I describe it. A plot of an exponential function on a standard Cartesian grid starts with a very shallow slope which increases rapidly until it has a very steep slope that approaches infinity. When you plot the same function on a grid where the x axis is graduated in logarithmic intervals, the exponential curve becomes a straight line. This makes it easy to identify exponential functions when you don’t know their formula. You plot the raw data on a logarithmic grid and if you see a straight line, the function is exponential.

Like I said, I’ll add some figures to illustrate what I’m talking about tomorrow and we will continue on our adventure.

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

The Future Explained, Step By Step

At this stage in the evolution of humanity there is only so much that our brains can perceive. For instance, we can easily visualize quantities of up to several hundred. We have had experiences that make the quantity of several thousand imaginable. We have an impression of how big a million is but we really have to strain to visualize it.

This aspect of human cognition falls under the broad umbrella of numeracy. Primitive humans don’t have it to such a degree as we do. Many primitive tribes have words for one, two, and many. Modern man has mastered counting things, has developed the idea of zero as a significant quantity, and has gotten the hang of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

We have struggled with concepts like repeatedly multiplying a number by itself a given number of times, an operation called exponentiation. It is hardly intuitive to many people and yet it is key to the future of mankind. An interesting example is often used to illustrate exponentiation.

Take a chess board. It has sixty four squares on it. That is, eight rows of eight squares.  If you place a single grain of rice on the first square, and then double that number and place two grains of rice on the second square. If you continue on in that manner, by the end of the first row of squares you will have placed 1+2+4+8+16+32+64+128 or 255 grains of rice on the board. That is equal to two to the eighth power minus one.

By the end of the second row, you will have placed 65,535 grains of rice on the board. Or at least you will have attempted to. They probably won’t fit. Assuming a large enough chess board, by the time you finished doubling the number of grains of rice on each successive square you will have place two to the sixty fourth power minus one grains of rice on the board. This is approximately equal to 1.844674407 times 10 to the 19th power.

This number is well beyond the ability of any mere human to imagine. And we got there in sixty four simple steps. Similarly, there are many natural phenomena that grow in an exponential fashion. They all exhibit the same characteristic of starting to grow slowly at first and then very rapidly growing out of the realm of the human imagination.

This is the first step in our adventure to discover how exponentiation holds the key to the future of mankind. We will continue with that adventure in the next installment of this series.