Month: July 2017

What makes a good product? The most important aspect of any product is that it does at least one thing well. If it is a cleanser, it gets things clean. If it’s a knife, it cuts things cleanly and stays sharp. You get the idea.

Some products try to do many things well, for example a Swiss Army knife. It is the epitome of the one product does everything category to the extent that it has become an adjective to that effect in the marketing field. I used to carry a Swiss Army knife and I found it extremely useful. Perhaps the reason was that the makers of it had clearly identified their key feature, to do a number of things adequately in a compact package. Suffice it to say, it still does one thing really well. It cuts things, just like a knife is supposed to.

When it comes to software, the same philosophy was behind the popular Unix (and later Linux) operating system. The idea was to have a number of small programs that did one thing really well, weren’t finicky about where their input came from, and produced clean, simple streams of text as output, streams that were easily routed to other utilities to be further processed as input.

While many programs follow the philosophy of simplicity, many succumb to creeping featuritis. Many of the office suites are good examples of what I’m talking about. They try to be everything to everyone and end up being frustrating to use to everyone instead.

There is a third category of program, analogous to the Swiss Army knife. It knows it’s audience and has a clear focus on its primary purpose but it also caters to other things that its core audience might want from a program.

A good example of this is the program Scrivener. It is a program that is targeted at writers. It allows them to keep all the components of their creation in one place. It has a place for keeping clippings from research and notes on characters and locations. It also allows you to view your words as individual sections, chapters, or entire books. It has the equivalent of a cork board so you can rearrange your ideas without drowning in the details of what you’ve written so far.

But the most important feature is, it’s easy to sit down and write with it. You don’t have to learn how to use all the bells and whistles, just the ones that are relevant to you and your project. And when you do find you need a feature that you haven’t used before, there is a very well written manual complete with illustrations, You Tube videos showing exactly how various features work, and online forums where you can ask for help directly from another human being.

I am biased, being both a writer and a satisfied customer, but I honestly think they have grasped the wisdom of doing one thing well. Their reputation in the writing community certainly lends credence to that assertion. If you’re an aspiring writer you might want to give it a try. They give you a one month trial period and it’s not a calendar month either. It’s a month of actual use so you could, for example, use it today and then not touch it for three weeks and you would have only used up one day of your free trial. Recommended.

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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 treat blogging like musicians treat improvisation. There is always a structure upon which a musician bases his improvisation. The blues is a popular structure use for that purpose. It has a basic chord sequence that everyone knows. Once you’ve agreed upon the key, your set. This blew my dad away when an older male relative and I were able to say let’s play blues in E and that was all that needed to be said. He was totally unaware that there was an agreed upon structure underlying the blues.

It is the structure that provides the context in which the musicians can improvise. Otherwise, how would they coordinate their performance? Some people think that having a fixed structure like that would be constraining and perhaps even boring. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When I write a blog post, I look for an idea that has enough substance that I can write five hundred words or so about it. I try to start off with a hook, some surprising statement that will pique the reader’s interest. It has to be relevant to the topic although it might not become clear until the reader has read most of the post.

Next, I start expounding upon the various aspects of the topic. If there is a logical progression that needs to be followed to explain what I’m talking about, that dictates the way the exposition unfolds. But some topics lend themselves to a treatment that I think of as a ramble.

I start writing about one aspect of the topic and follow where ever it leads me. Sometimes I discover things about the topic that I had never known before. Sometimes it becomes a vehicle for a story about how I discovered what I know about the topic. Sometimes, not often, it falls apart and I throw it into the folder with unfinished drafts to return to at some later date.

Such a ramble fits the definition that Paul Graham gives for an essay. As he explains it, an essay is written to discover things about a topic as much as it is about expressing it to someone else. He does spend more time than I do editing his essays. I really need to follow his example and edit my essays more carefully.

In my defense, Paul has several books under his belt not to mention a Ph.D. Writing a dissertation teaches one rigor in writing. I am not making excuses. I need to learn my craft. I’m just a good bit down the learning curve. I am just now learning the fine art of editing a draft.

The part of writing a blog post that I’ve been learning to do recently is to bring it to a close with some appropriate summary of what it has been about. It is like the musician that restates the main theme of a piece after improvising on it for a while. It helps set the hook firmly in the mind of the audience.

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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.

If we knew what would happen later in our lives would we live them differently? The things that we would gain would be balanced by the things we would lose. If I never married my first wife I would have never had my two daughters. I also would have not joined the Army, ended up in Huntsville, met my second wife, the list goes on and on.

Perhaps the arrow of time only points in one direction because we could not deal with the complexity that would ensue if we could run time backwards and forwards until we came up with a timeline that pleased us. If we could change the past, should we?

If Buddy Holly hadn’t died in that plane crash, would the Beatles have been the hit that they became? Perhaps there would have been an American invasion of Britain and there would have been a whole different pantheon of musical super groups in the sixties and seventies.

Or what if Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t cobbled together HTML to appease the need of the scientists at CERN to share hyperlinked, multimedia papers. Would someone else have come up with something better? Or would there have been something worse.?Perhaps we would be stuck with a commercial system that took a lot longer to reach critical mass. Would that necessarily be a bad thing?

Maybe if the web were a commercial entity instead of a freely interoperating conglomeration of different content providers Facebook wouldn’t have risen to be such a dominant force. Maybe people wouldn’t have gotten lost in the bubble of just the news they wanted to hear. Or would things have played out substantially the same? Are the way things are a fluke or are they the inevitable consequences of human nature?

We can never know for sure. If there is such a thing as time travel, we can’t know what effect it would have on the future. Perhaps like quantum theory suggests, we can either know where we are or how fast we are going. We can be the observer or the observed.

If I seem particularly obsessed with the idea of time travel right now it can be partially ascribed to reading “The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O”, the latest book by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. It bears many of the hallmarks of Stephenson’s best novels with a nice fresh flavor that can probably be attributed to the contributions of his co-author. I’ve barely started the novel, a tome at 768 pages, and I’ve already had my thinking challenged several times over by both the technical ideas presented and the memorable characters that we have been given by these two master story tellers.

I for one am going to savor this one. I hope these two gift us with another story as good as this one has been so far.

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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 a journal has become easy. I write about whatever I’m thinking about. Sometimes that is just, how am I going to keep writing complete sentences until I’ve reached my word count goal for the day. It has gotten so easy that I can usually write a thousand words in my journal in less than forty minutes. That’s an average of twenty five words a minute if you didn’t do the math. I can actually type faster than that but I find that there are usually a few pauses while I shift gears. I don’t usually write my entire journal entry on one topic.

When I sit down to write my blog post I still suffer from writer’s block though. It is partially because I’ve put some constraints on my blog posts. First of all, I try to make the topic something that someone other than me would be interested in. That is probably an unnecessary restriction. Anything I write probably has someone out there on the internet that will be interested in it. The important thing is to write something that is interesting to me. Some of my best blog posts have been memoirs of my childhood or my early experiences in the computer business.

Another restriction that I place on my blog is one that I find more difficult to follow. It is the ban I’ve placed on political essays. Politics in the last ten years or more has gotten very divisive and hurtful. I almost lost my best friend over a misunderstanding stemming from a difference in political opinions.

It disturbs me that our country has become so mean. People have forgotten how to have civil discussions about issues instead of letting the conversation descend into personal attacks that have nothing to do with them. Lately people stick their head in a bubble of news that is spun from the perspective they want to hear and ignore everything else. This is bad for both sides of any issue.

Another thing that disturbs me is the disregard for facts. There is an objective, observable truth and no amount of insisting things are contrary to these facts will change anything. In a similar vein is the rejection of the scientific method. We have built this country on our excellence in science, math, and engineering. As a result, our country leads the world in technical capabilities. If we all of a sudden change direction and reject these core disciplines, the country will quickly decline until we are a third world country.

These are just my observations about what I understand to be shared American values. I heartily support a multi-party system. It is only through discussion of all points of view that we can come to an understanding of the issues that face us and begin to craft solutions that will serve the interests of all parties.

Perhaps by expressing my ground rules for this blog, I can discover a way to make my observations in a kinder, more civil way.

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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.

A had a bit of an epiphany today. I was sitting thinking about music, trying to come up with some clever thing that could be said about it. Something that would either be profound or amusing, perhaps even both. What came to me was so simple that I almost dismissed it out of hand. Music is all about the concurrent motion of a mass at vastly different scales of time and distance.

Let’s break that statement down a little bit. First, let’s talk about time. Time, as Ray Cummings said in his 1922 science fiction novel “The Girl in the Golden Atom”, is what keeps everything from happening at once. At first, the statement seems trite, even funny. But as you think about it, you realize that it does summarize the fundamental nature of time rather well. Time can be divided into arbitrarily small units called instants that occur one after another. Instants have no duration but serve only to mark a given point in time.

The next fundamental concept is position. At any given time, everything has a position. There are at least three dimensions that we use to specify that position. They are at 90 degree angles to each other and are sometimes referred to as height, width, and breadth. Some initial reference point is given and the position of things can be specified as being a particular height, width, and depth from the reference point, also referred to as the origin. As instants mark a particular place in time, points mark a particular place in space.

Having established instants and points, we can now describe motion. If, from one instant to the next, a thing is located at the same point, it can be said to be stationary. If, however, the thing is at a different point in the next instant, it is said to be moving. Music, indeed all sound, is the result of a mass, moving back and forth at a given rate. The rate at which it is moving is called its frequency. Frequency is usually expressed in Hertz or vibrations per second.

In order to hear the sound, the movement must be transferred, often by air, from the moving mass to our ears. There, sophisticated biological apparatus in our ears transform the movement into electrical impulses that are transmitted to our brains so that we can interpret it as sound.

Now back to my mini-epiphany. When something, say a string, vibrates at a frequency, we hear a pitch. Furthermore, the string vibrates at a number of frequencies all relative to the length of the string. For instance, if the predominant, or fundamental frequency of a string is 440 Hz., the first harmonic is twice that frequency or 880 Hz. The second harmonic is three times the fundamental or 1320 Hz. This continues on to form the harmonic series. A string will produce all of the pitches in the harmonic series, each successive harmonic having a lower volume in the overall sound produced.

This brings us to the point that all of these harmonics are the concurrent motion of the string at different scales of time and distance. When you break it down like that, it doesn’t seem nearly as profound.

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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.

Music is part of our identity as human beings. We have built in apparatus in our heads that allow us to discriminate between pitches of different frequencies. There must have been some evolutionary advantage bestowed by this capability but I’m not sure what it is.  The topic is a hot topic for study but there are some interesting theories. Let’s have a look at some of them.

One theory is that people make music to attract a mate. It certainly is an important part in modern mating rituals. People often plan their courting activities around musical events. They go to festivals and concerts to meet people of similar musical taste. Many an adolescent boy has learned to play the guitar solely to attract female attention. And what adolescent girl can resist the emotional rush of having a song written exclusively for her.

Another theory sites the need to synchronize activities among participants, for example rowing, or marching. This seems to me to be a side effect noticed by people exercising their musical impulses for other reasons. It isn’t that music isn’t a good technique for synchronizing activity, it’s just not a survival trait.

Another theory asserts that music arose as a way of establishing a tribal identity. That seems like more of a survival trait than synchronization but it doesn’t have the feeling of truth that the mating song theory does.

A theory that I relate to strongly is that music helps people induce trance like ecstatic states in themselves and others. Having experienced these feelings first hand I am willing to give the idea some credence. It doesn’t seem like an actual survival trait but it does represent a large enhancement to our life style.

Music is particularly effective at arousing emotional responses. While that also wouldn’t account for why our musical acuity evolved it seems like it might potentially have more direct effect on inspiring people to take action for emotional instead of rational reasons. This is probably tightly related to some of the other ideas of why we developed our musical abilities.

The strangest theory that I came across while researching the topic is that music was used to intimidate large predators. I’m not sure how such a practice might have first been advanced. “No, really George. We get out there with our lutes and our timbales and the tigers will freak out and run away from us.” It seems like the early experimenters might just as well have been eaten.

What ever the reason, it is undoubtably true that music is an inherent part of our psychology and our culture. It is as necessary to our existence as fresh air and sunlight. We can survive without either of those but it would be a drab existence. Perhaps it is an expression of our mental predilection for exploring complex patterns of any type, be they visual, auditory, olfactory, or gastronomic, or some combination of the above. It is part of what makes us uniquely human.

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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 British magician named Derren Brown who specializes in mentalism. He is incredibly convincing although he adamantly maintains that what he does is all trickery. Since he does not reveal how he does his tricks, it is sometimes hard to believe that he isn’t really psychic and just telling people that he’s not.

I personally know a magician who performed mentalist illusions. I worked with him every day for an entire summer. I picked up some of his techniques through repeated observation of his performance. I won’t expose these techniques. I consider myself a member of the brotherhood of magicians and we have a policy of never publicly revealing how a trick is done.

Derren Brown admits to using cold reading, misdirection, and hypnotism among the many varied techniques in his arsenal. He has been criticized by some of the people whose scams he has debunked. He has been cleared of all wrong doing in all cases. I think it is a good thing to expose people who attempt to manipulate people by lying to them.

You can watch Derren Brown’s videos online. Some of them are even available on You Tube. It is sad to learn that some of the phenomena that you thought were real are actually just confidence games. It is hard not to make excuses and say that just because there are confidence men taking advantage of people’s gullibility doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t real examples of the phenomena. But in the final analysis, there is no evidence that the phenomena is real. Not repeatable evidence anyway. Any evidence that can’t be duplicated must be written off as coincidence.

In the final analysis though, I classify such phenomena in the same category that I do conventional religions. I plain don’t know. I don’t have enough information to totally dismiss either religion or any other paranormal phenomena. Just so, I can’t confirm or deny anything without definitive evidence.

I can enjoy suspending disbelief in the interest of entertainment though. I just don’t intend to make important life decisions based on anything unconfirmed. It is becoming harder and harder to detect frauds. In this era of establishing truth by loudly and persistently repeating outrageous assertions, you have to remember that appeals to authority are not valid proof.

It is more than a little disturbing that this means we now have valid logical reasons to distrust our government. I guess we always did have. It’s just more blatantly true lately.

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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 thought, since I haven’t been able to think of anything else to write about, that I would catalog some of the things that I enjoy doing. I’ve been lucky enough to spend most of my career doing something that I enjoy doing a lot. I program computers, I design software, I test software,  I teach computer science, I repair computers, and I build computers from scratch. Since I have been doing it for over forty years, I have achieved a fairly high level of competency at these tasks.

Another thing that I have been working on mastering for the past seven years is writing fiction. There is a lot of aspects to master to become a good writer. I have participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) on four different occasions. I completed the challenge to write fifty thousand words in a month twice.

For the past seven years, I have written at least seven hundred and fifty words a day in an online journal. It has helped me to overcome my fear of the blank page and develop the ability to capture my thoughts on the page without having to think about typing each letter.

About a year ago, I increased my daily word count goal from seven hundred fifty words a day to a thousand words a day. On top of that, I renewed my commitment to blog by deciding to write a blog post of approximately five hundred words a day, bringing my daily word count to over fifteen hundred words.

In February of this year I started attending meetings of a club called the Downtown Writer’s Group sponsored by the Huntsville / Madison County Public Library. This has resulted in my writing short pieces of fiction to be critiqued by my fellow members. This has been educational and inspirational.

In addition to the critique sessions, the Group has sponsored programs aimed at helping a fledgling writer to prepare their work for publication. We have had presentations from an editor, a publicist, a self-published author, and a writer who shared her experience being published by a conventional publisher. We also had a presentation about cover design.

Another passion of mine that has been being ignored too much lately is playing music. I am primarily a guitarist but I also own two violins, a mandolin, and a Celtic harp. That is in addition to two acoustic guitars and two electric guitars. I also have an acoustic electric bass on order that should be delivered some time this month.

I want to learn how to record music on my computer. I have a copy of Garage Band on my computer but I’m thinking about purchasing a copy of Pro Tools when I can afford it.

The last thing that I’ll talk about here is I love to teach whether it is computer programming, writing, or music. It is perhaps akin to my love of performing whether it is acting or playing music.

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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 lot of buzz lately about Artificial General Intelligence. The distinction that is drawn between AI as it is currently defined and AGI is one of scope. Most current AI programs are limited in scope to a narrow domain of expertise. The vision of AGI is a program that can identify the context in which it finds itself and apply its expertise to problems from a wide variety of domains. One approach to achieving AGI is to create a network of AIs that each are experts in their narrow domains that are supervised by an AI that is trained to recognize problem domains and dispatch those problems to the AI most adept at solving that particular problem.

When you think about it, that is how we solve problems. We first categorize the problem so that we can focus on what we know about the relevant domain. We also are able to see similarities between experiences that we have had in other areas that may suggest alternative approaches to the problem at hand.

When it comes right down to it, our superior intelligence is based on a hard wired ability to match complicated patterns. A good example of this is our ability to see faces in random shapes. We have developed a particular affinity to the basic features of a human face. It has long been a survival trait to quickly recognize that we see a face and who that face is so that we can either embrace them if they are a friend or defend ourselves against them if they are a foe.

Another important tool that we use to amplify our intelligence is language. We have used the ability to communicate our experience through stories to teach others our hard won lessons. As time goes on, and more and more people have shared their lessons, our collective intelligence rises. It takes a huge leap when we learn how to write our stories down. Now we can save our best stories, unaltered for generation after generation.

After a while, a certain clever man named Gutenberg created a printing press that made it practical to mass produce books. This meant that now everyone had the ability to read the collected wisdom of the ages.

The next step is yet to come. There are scientists hard at work on building a brain computer interface (BCI) that will allow us to communicate our thoughts and feelings directly to a computer and inevitably to each other.

When this occurs, we will have the mechanism in place to form a global collective on a scale to rival any AGI that may either emerge or be created directly by human programmers. In any case, the Singularity will have arrived at that point.

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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.