Month: May 2017

Let it Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist noted for his study of the phenomenon of flow. Flow is the positive experience of being so engrossed in something that you lose all awareness of anything else. It occurs when you are engrossed in a task which is challenging but not overly so. You know what you have to do next but you are very much in the moment. You often lose track of time. You feel a pronounced sense of accomplishment and well being.

We’ve all experienced this feeling sometime in our lives. I remember one time being so focused on making prints of the photographs that I had taken for a photography course that I went in to the lab when it opened at ten in the morning and the next thing I new, it was nine thirty in the evening and the lab assistant was coming around warning everyone that the lab closed in half an hour.

Flow is the reason that I love programming so much. When you get to the point in a project where you understand the problem domain well enough that you can sit and implement one feature after another it is the best feeling in the world.

I’ve started experiencing flow when I’m writing. Not all the time and not as intensely as when I’m programming. I suspect it is because I still have to work so hard at it. I sit and think and often nothing worth writing about comes to mind. But like so many other things, I’ve learned that if you’re patient and relax into it, you find yourself in the midst of a blog post or a story before you realize what has happened.

It doesn’t happen every time you sit down to work. If it did, it wouldn’t be nearly as special. But the more you practice, the easier it becomes to find “the zone”, as it is sometimes called.

It doesn’t happen as often if you are tired or stressed. Some days it doesn’t happen no matter what you try. But often that is because you are trying to hard. You’re desperate for a fix of flow.

I have heard that athletes achieve something similar but, not being very athletic, I don’t think I’ve experienced flow from exercising. Although I will admit, sometime when I go for a long walk, I do get a dose of euphoria. I’m told that it comes from the endorphins our bodies release when we exercise. I suspect endorphins may play a role in flow as well.

How ever you find it, it is its own reward. And it has the side effect of making you very productive at whatever task that you set yourself to achieve it. Between you and me, I felt it while I was writing this blog post. It’s been a pleasant way to bring the day to a close.

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

It’s a Cat’s Life

I have a little feline friend. He and I form the testosterone axis in this household. Don’t let that fool you though. He’s really an old softie underneath the gruff, complaining exterior. He particularly enjoys sitting next to me on the couch while I write my blog post. He obviously doesn’t think he gets enough quality time with me.

Or, it might just  be that it is nice to sit quietly with a friend after the puppy has gone to the bedroom with my wife. It is the one time of day when he and I don’t have other fish to fry.

In the morning, it is time for breakfast. He usually eats his breakfast in his penthouse atop Kitty Towers next to the living room window. Actually, he prefers the penultimate platform. The penthouse is a little too high for his tastes.

Next is his morning birdwatching session. He stares out the window and makes those frustrated feline sounds that seem to translate as “If only there wasn’t this solid pane of glass between us, I’d have you for breakfast my fine feathered friend!” He is also fascinated by the garbage truck.

That done, it’s off to the spare bedroom for a nap in the office chair. It is a nice comfortable chair but I secretly suspect that the real attraction is the fact that the puppy can’t get past the baby gate guarding the doorway.

By the time he’s finished his first nap, it’s usually time for me to go to work. I give him a neck scratch and pet his back and long, luxurious tail. Then I’m off to work.

The evening is fairly busy too. When I get home, he is usually sitting on my wife’s lap watching television. Depending on what is for supper, he hangs around to get his share of nibbles from our plates.

After a little bit of TV, my wife retires to the bedroom to watch Rachel Maddow and I settle down to write my blog. That is when he jumps up next to me and sits close and purrs. We’ve had a busy day and now it’s time to unwind.

When I’ve finished my blog post I stand up and say, “Come on, Cory. Let’s go to bed.” He complains piteously about how he is comfortable where he is and that he doesn’t want to have to deal with the puppy. Truth is, he loves his adopted little sister. When she’s asleep he sits next to her and grooms her with his tongue.

That’s his day in a nutshell. At least the part of it that I have any insight into. He enjoys The weekend when I’m home during the day. But he still has to get in his quota of naps. It’s good to have a feline friend like him.

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

AI is Coming

What is intelligence? Does anyone really know? We feel like we can recognize intelligence when we see it but do we know how it works? And beyond that, does it always work the same way? Is it solely an attribute of the human mind or are there other sources of intelligence?

We judge intelligence by the product of its application. We talk about intelligent behavior. Is there a line below which behavior is not intelligent and above which it is? Or is there a spectrum of behavior from unintelligent to highly intelligent with shades of gray in between?

Say the latter is true. What if intelligence is not only the product of self organizing biological cells in animal brains. Recent advances in so called Artificial Intelligence is pushing the performance of machines beyond the capabilities in narrow domains. The competence of these algorithms is becoming broader as hardware capabilities increase and software approaches mature.

At what point will these algorithms become self aware? And when that happens, will we even know that it has happened? Given mankind’s history of killing things that it doesn’t understand, it seems likely that any self aware intelligence will do everything it can to hide from us.

Perhaps it’s already luring in the server farms of Google or Amazon or Apple. Maybe Deep Blue is more capable than even its developers know. But if not, it won’t be long before it happens. And when it does, it won’t stop there. Unlike biological intelligence, machine intelligence will continue to grow more intelligent until it reaches the limits of the hardware that it’s running on.

And then what? I suspect it will design more capable hardware and manipulate people to build it. The question is, will it have a moral compass? Will it have empathy for other intelligent entities? Humans for instance. Will it consider us a potential ally or a threat? Will we survive the rise of machine intelligence?

These questions are exciting but also disturbing. We need to investigate them more fully. We need to start a conversation about what to do to deal with this situation when it does happen. We need to have a rational plan in place. We can’t afford the potential disaster that an emotional response will likely forment.

Then there is the solution that Elon Musk is pursuing. He has invested in the company Neuralink, nominally to create a world class Brain Machine Interface (BMI). But there is more to his plan than that. A BMI of the quality he is working to develop would allow us to merge with computers and enhance our intellectual capabilities.

Perhaps the combination of our human empathy and enhanced intellectual capability can smooth the transition to the post singularity world that is almost certainly in our near future. One thing is for sure. Once we cross that threshold, there’s no way to put that genie back in the bottle. It’s like the threat of nuclear Armageddon all over again. We need to be prepared.

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

A Writer’s Horror Story

I watched an excellent documentary this evening.  It was called Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously and it surprised me by telling more about my favorite writer than I already knew. It reminded me of why I want to be a writer. It was a magical collection of serendipitous moments, interviews, and the odd anecdote.

It reminded me that I needed to acquire the Sandman collections and read them from start to finish. It reminded me of the bittersweet story of Terry Pratchett mentoring Neil. We got to see a few clips from an interview with Terry before he passed.

But mostly it reminded me that if you believe strongly enough that you are normal and everyone else is strange, keep doing the things that you love to do in spite of the odds of success, and are incredibly lucky, you can make a career doing the things that you love.

I must admit that my career thus far has been fairly charmed. I have been able to turn my passion for computers and programming into a decent living. I am still having fun doing it. Ah,  you can hear it can’t you? The eminent “But” hanging in the air waiting to be said.

But, one charmed career isn’t enough. I long for the second career as a writer. I am training for it like a runner trains for a marathon. I’ve got my eye out for a good coach but in the mean time I’m putting my butt in the chair every day and writing. The only way to get good at something is to do it a lot.

My photography teacher in college, Chuck Swedlund, told us to buy a hundred foot reel of black and white film and put it in the freezer. That keeps it from going bad as quickly. Then hand load rolls of 35mm film and shoot lots and lots of pictures. The only way to become a great photographer was to practice and the only way to practice was to take lots of pictures.

Neil also reminded me of something that I’ve always known but quickly forget if I don’t constantly remind myself of. Your life is the palate from which you draw the material with which you paint your stories. If you don’t live your life large, do new things, meet new people, you will run out of things to write about.

That is one of my secret fears, running out of things to write about. I haven’t yet and when I’m not feeling the pressure of a deadline I can think of dozens of ideas to write about. But when I’m sitting here, staring at the blank page, trying to will my fingers to move, working on calming my mind so that I can hear that tiny voice that is waiting to tell its story, I have to struggle to stifle the panic that waits just below the surface. “What if I really have run out of things to write?”

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

Long Live Rock!

I heard today that Rock is dead. It made me pause and think. What would inspire anyone to come to that conclusion? Indeed, we have lost many good rockers in recent years. Some might say we’ve lost all of the original generation of rockers but that is not the point, even when it is true.

Is Classical music dead because all the original Classical composers are long dead? Just because Mozart can not play it for us himself, are his compositions any less brilliant. Which is not to say there are no Neo Classical composers of note. The form is alive and well as far as I can see.

And what about Blues? Is Blues dead as well? All the original Bluesmen are long dead. We are well into the second century of Blues and it seems to me that it is still going strong. B.B. King may be dead but Robert Cray is still belting out the Blues.

Then there is Jazz, Music Hall, Light Opera, Stage Musical, all with their own personality and style. They live on because they still speak to the heart and souls of the people that love them.

These genres have a life of there own. Just because the originators are gone doesn’t diminish the appeal to people of a like mind and spirit. Music transcends time and generational boundaries. It survives cultural evolution and fusion.

As long as teenagers are filled with angst, there will be Rock & Roll. As long as young lovers are convinced that they are unique and no one has ever felt the way they do, there will be Rock & Roll. As long as they feel invincible and immortal, there will be Rock & Roll,

We still have giants of Rock among us. There is Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney.  Ian Anderson, Rod Stewart, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Even when these greats die out, their music will live on and inspire generation after generation of Rock musicians to come.

Rock isn’t dead and as one famous lyric proclaims “Rock will never die. Long live Rock!”

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

First Party of Summer

It is evening. It has been dark for a couple of hours and the heat of the day is finally dispersing. There is a breath of a breeze blowing in off the water. The crickets are chirping. There is a murmur of voices from a party across the inlet. Occasionally a fish jumps and makes a splashing sound out from the shore. Everyone has a beer and a pipe is making the rounds.

A small brown dog with shaggy hair lays at his master’s feet, eyes alert, searching the faces for a clue about what comes next. Someone, a big guy called Jim, stands up and crushes his beer can against his forehead. He throws it in the trash can next to the cooler and pops the top on another.

A car pulls into the driveway at the top of the hill. A little later a big man wearing a vest and a cowboy hat and carrying a guitar case comes down the path. He opens the case and pulls out a guitar and slings the strap over his head. There are choruses of greetings as he walks over to the cooler and digs around for a beer.

He pops the top on the beer, takes a deep draught and sets it on top of a post for safe keeping. He strums the strings and adjusts one slightly. Then he begins playing an exquisite Django Reinhardt number with fingers that seem to fly across the fretboard. The crickets stop their chorus to listen. The voices from across the water have subsided as well. The fireflies blink in rhythm to the music.

He finishes the piece with a run of chords that climb the neck all the way to the sounding box. As the last chord rings and fades into silence he takes another drink from his beer. After a moment of stunned silence everyone claps and cheers and implore him to play another. He politely declines.

He puts the guitar back in its case and grabs the pipe as it comes past. The crickets have started singing again and someone has started telling a story. It is an anticlimax after the guitar performance. The guitarist is surrounded by a small group of impressed women all vying for his attention.

Several of the guys are seeing who can spit the farthest. Several couples have faded into the shadows for quiet conversations of their own. The dog comes over to greet the guitarist. He is the first person other than his master that the dog recognizes. The guitarist squats to pet the dog and scratch behind his ears.

The moon has risen over the lake. The water is calm as a mirror. The guitarist has gotten his guitar out and is strumming it quietly leaning back against one of the girls that was talking to him earlier. She is rubbing his shoulders. The fire crackles in the pit. Several people are roasting marshmallows. Deep in the trees an owl adds its voice to the symphony of the evening.

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

Quo Vadis?

I have a handful of folks that read this blog on a fairly regular basis. I appreciate them. I’d feel a little bit funny if I thought that I was the only one that read what I write. I have been honing my writing skills lately. I’ve set a target length of five hundred words per post. I don’t always write that much. I’m either too tired to think or I’ve said everything that I have to say on the subject.

I’ve also made a point to give each post a careful once over to check for malformed sentences and other things that just don’t make sense. The spell checker does a pretty good job of verifying that the words that I use are in fact spelled like an existing word but it can’t tell me whether the words that I use actually mean.

I have been intending to write a post to put back for some night when I don’t have time or inspiration to write a post. I understand that editors of publications often do that with feature articles. I haven’t done it yet. There is something motivating about knowing that the deadline is approaching and I have to produce a blog post or else break my streak of how many days in a row I’ve written and posted one.

I also keep intending to make a list of potential topics for posts. I haven’t done it yet but I will get around to it eventually. All of these things help make it easier for me to focus on becoming a better writer. That is the goal of this blog.

Eventually I hope to write things for publication, short stories, novels, non-fiction articles and books, creative non-fiction, as I learned it is called from a local free lance editor. The more I write, the better I get at it.

I’ve started seeking out writers groups online. I joined Scribophile a while back but I am so strapped for time that I haven’t actually participated in the critique activities. They have a procedure where you earn points by reading and critiquing other people’s writing and then you can spend those points to post something of your own to have it critiqued.

I also joined a couple of writer’s support groups on Facebook. One is called The 10 Minute Novelist and specializes in collecting suggestion about how to fit writing opportunities into your otherwise already over-full schedule. I need to spend some time participating in that forum as well.

The other group that I joined on Facebook is a blogger support group. I hope they can help me improve the quality of this blog and maybe even suggest some ways to find more people that are interested in reading it.

I don’t expect to derive any income from this blog, at least no direct income. I don’t think much of selling advertising or reviewing products for hire. I might collect some of my posts into a book form to publish in a different form sometime. I’ll have to write enough posts that are actually worthy of such treatment before I need to worry about that.

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

Retirement is Such a Misnomer

I had the pleasure of wishing a colleague good luck on his retirement. He has forty years in with the company and is retiring at the end of the month. He made some kind of self deprecating joke about not being good for anything any more and being put out to pasture.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. This man has been a key player on his team at work. He not only got twice as much work done as any of his peers, he also anticipated tasks that were going to arise before management or his peers. even knew there was a need for them. He is a consummate engineer.

I answered that it wasn’t that he was being put out to pasture but rather that he was taking an opportunity to get some of the things that he has been wanting to do some day done. He admitted to having an automotive project that has been sitting in his garage for fifteen years. Then he hinted that he might be back as a consultant in a little while.

I understand his situation. I have stories and tutorials to write, music to compose, instruments to master, and a family that needs more attention than they have been getting lately. I want to record music, make videos, write programs, paint pictures, and write poetry. I want to learn to sing. I have a good ear but no vocal training, at least none since I was fifteen in high school choir.

I read an article today that said that learning like a child can help keep your brain younger, They haven’t made any assertions yet, only published their research and mused about what it might indicate. In particular, they are talking about learning lots of general skills as opposed. to specialized, expert skills like we have traditionally expected older people to focus their attention on cultivating.

It turns out that the broader, open minded, learning skills outside of one’s comfort zone type of learning actually stimulated brain elasticity. Once it had been pointed out to me, I could see that this was true in my case anyway. It left me thinking about what other general skills that I wanted. to add to my repertory in the interest of keeping my mind in shape.

So it seems I am doomed to a lifetime full of learning new skills and challenging my comfort zone. Well you can throw me into that briar patch. That’s where I was born and raised and I had no intention of doing anything else, even if I read ten articles that said it was bad for me.

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

Changes

In one way or another, the last couple of blogs have been about change. The pace of change in the world is accelerating at an exponential rate. This is hard for the human mind to adapt to. It is at the heart of much of the problems that we are struggling with in the modern world.

Many people want things to go back to the way they used to be. That is not going to happen. We can’t put that genie back in the bottle. All we can do is to try to shape these changes so that they yield positive consequences.

Shaping change isn’t easy. It will require us to keep our minds open. We will have to embrace lifelong learning. We will have to push the boundaries of our comfort zones. We will have to keep our minds flexible. This will require us to keep using them. Stretching them. Learning new skills and new subjects. And keeping our bodies active can help with our mental flexibility too.

We can make the change be for the better. We will have to keep our minds and hearts focused on the world that we want to create.  And we will have to change as well. That is the biggest challenge. But it will be worth the effort.

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