Month: June 2017

A wise woman named Anne Lamott said, “Every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.” At this point in life, I have plenty to tell. A lot of what I have to tell is about people at their most vulnerable. I have often been the quiet observer on the edge of dramatic situations. Having said that, I would expect that I would understand people better. But that is far from the case.

I grew up around actors. Stage actors are good at figuring out why people do the things they do and feel the way they feel. Film or TV actors are good at remembering their lines, keeping a neutral expression on their face, and hitting their mark. In both case they are presenting the characters as written by the playwright.

I started life in a bassinet back stage every night. My mother was the lighting operator for a summer theater production. My father was away in the Army at the time. I don’t have any conscious memories of that summer but I expect it had some effect on my early development.

When I was seven, my mother and father and I were members of the cast and crew of another semi-professional theatrical company. The production was a play called Stars in My Crown and it told the story of the taming of the Tennessee river by the TVA. It was actually much more entertaining than it sounds. There were songs and dancing and an interesting story line.

I was much too young to understand the backstage intrigue that went on nightly among the adult members of the company. Actors are often vain, emotional, and self centered. It was fairly confusing for me. But I soaked it up like a sponge.

By the time I moved into my teenage years, I had internalized all of the archetypical artistic behavior. I participated in orchestra, choir, plays, debate, and speech competitions. I knew how to act like a tortured artistic soul. So much so that I sometimes wonder if there was any relationship between the way I acted and who I really was.

After I graduated from high school I worked in the summers at a western theme park, with gunfights, saloon shows, magic shows, and Kentucky long rifle demonstrations. The cast and crew were mostly college students working there during the summer. The typical actor behavior was the norm there as well.

I was consequently at somewhat of a disadvantage when it came to knowing what normal human relationships were like. My parents were both school teachers and lead rather Bohemian lifestyles, or so I thought. It turns out they were actually fairly normal.

I haven’t associated much with theater people the last half of my life. I find that sad. I enjoyed their company. I have often thought about getting involved with local theater productions but I have the disadvantage of knowing what hard work that is and can’t bring myself to commit to that level of effort on top of a full time day job.

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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 always been a fan of simple text editors when it comes to writing. Word processors have too many knobs. It is too tempting to get distracted by how something looks and spend your writing time messing around with how something looks instead of doing what you set out to do, write.

But as I get better and better at maintaining my focus on writing I find that there are other tools available to writers than just traditional word processors. These tools are designed to help writers manage the mass of words that they create and easily view them in different ways.

One such tool is a program called Scrivener. It is the Cadillac of such tools in many writers’ opinions. Among its features are support for outlining, a cork board view of the elements of a piece, a version management facility, and tools to help collect references and organize them outside of the main flow of the work in progress. There are many more features, so many that learning to use them effectively is overwhelming in its own right.

I got a copy of Scrivener for Christmas last year. I’ve used it off and on since then but as with many power tools it isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I have a fast approaching deadline. I usually don’t want to spend a lot of time rediscovering how to do simple things with it. Until tonight.

Tonight I was reading my email and various articles that caught my attention in some of the newsletters to which I subscribe. One of the articles described a process for writing a novel by the seat of your pants using Scrivener.

The idea was to write lots of scenes of approximately five hundred words apiece. Each scene is stored in a scene element that has an associated synopsis card. As you collect more and more completed scenes you assemble them into a story using the cork board. When you have ideas for scenes, you create a synopsis card for it. When you sit down to write, you scan the cork board for unwritten scenes and choose one to work on next.

I can see how this would make writing something like a novel easier. Then as I thought about it some more I realized that it would be a good way to collect ideas for blog posts. It would help me tackle ideas that I wanted to spend time researching and polishing for maximum effect.

So here is the first attempt at teaching this old dog a new trick or two. I have high hopes for using it to take this blog to the next level. I may even achieve my long time goal of having several finished posts in the wings ready to publish on days when I am otherwise pressed for time.

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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 are different ways of arriving at the same solution to a problem. You can be good at recognizing patterns and matching aspects of the problem at hand with problems that you have seen in the past. You can exhaustively enumerate the potential solutions to the problem, judging each one to decide if it solves the problem and how well. You can imagine the problem solved and work backwards toward the conditions from which you are starting. You can conduct experiments to determine what methods might be useful in solving the problem and which would not.

The list of ways to solve a problem goes on and on. The way to choose one of them depends upon how your mind works. For instance, you might be better at remembering things than you are at thinking of all the possible solutions. You may instinctively recognize patterns. Probably your style is some combination of methods. It may even vary from problem to problem.

I suspect that we will discover the same characteristics are evident in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). We will find that as we automate all of the various approaches to solving problems we will be producing a catalog of techniques that will serve the AGI as well as it does us. We are already building such catalogs. They are called library packages.

Every computer language has them. Most recent language have centralized repositories that make these packages available and sophisticated dependency management software that assist the programmer in ensuring that the versions of the libraries that are loaded to support any given application are compatible with each other.

Some cutting edge languages are building the package management facilities right in to the syntax of the language. This acknowledges the importance of dependency management while simplifying the task for the programmer. Instead of having to look for an external dependency management package and perhaps choosing between several competing solutions, the programmer just uses the built in facility.

Another feature of the modern computing environment is the facility with which languages are interoperating with each other. Whether it is through the facilities of a Foreign Function Interface (FFI) or an Application Programming Interface (API) or some other mechanism for interoperating with different software facilities, the modern programmer is more often faced with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to ways to implement commonly used library facilities.

When combined with the exponential increase in raw computing power, todays programmer is able to spend more time coming up with abstract solutions to the problem at hand and less time trying to conform their solutions to digital representations.

My major hope is that we don’t forget how all the underlying infrastructure works. It would be a shame if we got so sophisticated that no one knew how to fix the basic system software that interacts directly with the hardware. Of course, as time goes by, that will become abstracted into the design of the hardware as well.

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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.

One of my favorite mathematical theorems is Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem. There have been several books written on it. My favorite one is Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Just recently one of my favorite channels on You Tube, Numberphile, posted several videos on the topic: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (extra footage 1), and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (extra footage 2) all interviews with professor Marcus du Sautoy.  They do a better job than I can at describing what the Theorem is but I’ll give it a shot. If I confuse you, I refer you to the videos or Hofstadter’s book.

First, I draw your attention to the paradox represented by the following sentences:

The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false.

If you think about it for a minute you will see that neither sentence can be either true or false. If the first sentence is true then it tells us the second sentence is true. But the second sentence tells us that the first sentence is false. If, as the first sentence asserts, the second sentence is true then the first sentence must be false in which case the second sentence must be false. As you can see, we can’t come to a consistent conclusion about the truth or falsity of theses sentences.

What Kurt Gödel did was encode mathematical statements such that each one had a unique number that was derivable from the axioms used to prove it. Then he encoded the statement that asserted that: “there is no proof of this statement”. If there is a proof of the statement, the statement is false. If there isn’t a proof of the statement, the statement is true but isn’t provable thus there is a true statement that is not provable within the constraints of the mathematical system.

This has profound philosophical implications. It implies that there are things that are true but unprovable. This other disturbing conclusion is that there may be no such thing as objective reality. Reality may be a product of our interpretation of our sensory input and yet everyone may be perceiving the world differently.

So then we think about some of the more practical aspects of this idea. Take for example programming languages. Programming languages are formal mathematical systems for expressing procedural statements. They are subject to the same analysis as other formal mathematical systems such that given any particular language, there are truths that cannot be expressed in it.

Taken to the extreme, all sufficiently sophisticated languages can be shown to be ultimately equivalent. This is called being Turing complete. Since this class of languages can be shown to be equivalent, it can be deduced that there are some truths that cannot be programmed.

Further, it can be extrapolated that since our minds are finite electro-chemical systems that there are some truths that cannot be understood by the human mind. Perhaps that is as close to a proof of the existence of a superior being as we’ll ever be able to understand.

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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 going to write this post using the language favored by the writers of the Ancient Aliens series. I find it always entertaining and occasionally thought provoking. Their choice of language does more to destroy any confidence that I have in anything they say. Some of it may actually be true but I will be surprised if and when we discover that it is.

What if we’ve got the source of the ancient aliens all wrong? What if, instead of the stars, they come from alternate universes? The whole concept of alternate universes alleviates the question of how they overcome the immense distances between Earth and the stars.

Is it possible that the ancient aliens and the fairies are one and the same race? As Arthur C. Clark observed, sufficiently advanced technology will appear as magic to sufficiently primitive peoples. Are we sufficiently primitive compared to the ancient aliens?

Did these entities reveal themselves to the administration of Dwight Eisenhower only to be surpassed by J. Edgar Hoover and the head of the CIA? How did the fiasco at Roswell even happen? Why did the US government spend seventy years denying the existence of aliens? Could it be that there were no aliens, only highly evolved humans from the future?

The key to the genre is to ask intriguing questions and propose fantastic answers to them while claiming that they are the only possible answers to the questions. The aren’t. They aren’t even the most likely answers but you gloss over that fact.

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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.