Monthly Archives: February 2016

Puns and Other Forms of Verbal Warfare

Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

Recently, a person I respect very much, and who I consider to be quite good at the rough-and-tumble of verbal sparring, told me something that was either one of the best compliments I’d ever received, or…something else.

What he said was even though he engaged in gentle mockery of others, he would never do it to me, because of the fact that or the way that I would fight back.

I had mentioned ‘mental push hands‘ before, and I mentioned the idea of pushing (or throwing) the listener off-balance. There are a number of ways of doing this[1], of varying levels of pleasantness and effectiveness. Here are a few:

– Insults

In my opinion, it’s generally better to keep the conversation de-escalated and cerebral, as not only do I function best there, if you have any negotiation goals, and are interested in actually getting to yes[2], insults are generally not the way to go.

– Puns

A well constructed pun will make the listener think just enough, by making them return to what they just said, and cross-reference it with what you have just said. For someone who is not prepared for a pun duel, you can make an impression[3], especially if you can have a counter-riposte ready, with appropriate timing, to counter whatever riposte they may perform. You are helped in this that most people pun in areas close to the subject at hand[4].

– Be Boring

Sometimes this exactly what you need. Sometimes you need to take your presentation (usually a presentation), and for every single word in it, find a more ‘professional’ or ‘enterprise’ word. This may be your best option when you’re dealing with a very controversial topic, where no matter which example you use, you’re going to anger someone. Sometimes the only way to slide a concept through is to make it like lukewarm porridge.

So, how do you deal with these?

For insults, my recommendation is de-escalation. There are many other, better writings on the topic, so I will stick to the simple ‘speak calmly and make it about the issue, not the person’.

For Puns, practice! You will be the envy of your friends! Take a random sentence from a book and practice sentence rotation on it! Find a way to refer to a word in a previous sentence without using that word. Read this comic again, and come up with different ripostes.

For boring presentations, I would recommend a deeper knowledge of a topic. In grad. school, I could tell that I progressed between 1st and 2nd year because I started to get something from the Sunday morning talks. (This was at a retreat, where you would arrive Friday night, have talks all day Saturday, then stay up most of the night.) Test yourself on the topic when you are half-asleep. If you can still understand and poke holes in arguments, you’re in good shape.

And that’s it! If you have more types of verbal sparring, I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

[1]This assumes that you’re familiar with the standard ‘remember something about the person you’re talking to’, the ‘remember their name’, and the ‘be nice’.

[2]I hear it is an excellent book. I have not read it all the way through, but it is considered the fundamental book on ‘principled negotiation’, as in when you want both/all parties to come to an agreement which is truly best for all involved.

[3]I’ll leave it to you to decide what type of impression it is…

[4]I often say that know just enough about many words to be able to pun with them. This involves spelling, pronunciation, and just enough of a definition/genre/associated words.

Rotation and Other Metaphors

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

Today, I noticed that I seem to write a lot about rotation. It seems to come to be ‘naturally’, or at least from something far back in my past[1].

It feels like it might have originally come from discussions of Chirality, somewhere back in high school. Like the concept of Gm1m2/r^2 migrating to Cq1q2/r^2[2], or basing the Bohr model of the atom on the model of the solar system.

A lot of what I write has to do with how I ‘rotate in’ possible solutions to try to fit them with the problem I’m working on. As far as I know, the brain doesn’t actually work like this. I could see a generalized model of computing developing two sections of nerves, one which displayed a problem, one which displayed possible solutions, each in their firing patterns. I wonder if this happens.

While we’re trying to fit possible solutions to this problem, let’s consider other possible metaphors from the ‘ball and stick’ molecular model[3].

– Hinge rotations, like a pendulum, or the dangling COOH on a long-chain carboxylic acid
– Spring action, like atoms in an N2(g) molecule moving towards and away from each other.
– Triangle and higher order into and out of plane rotations/vibrations/translations

Note that all of these can change based on the conditions:
– Temperature
– Water or non-water nearby
– Salts or other charged ions near or far away
– How hydrophilic or hydrophobic parts of the adjoining environment are
– Van der Waals forces

The blog posts which inspired this one:

BOF VI: The Chemist in me:
Multidimensional Word and Sentence Rotation
Solution Rotation

[1] Perhaps this explains why I was so excited about Dinosaur Rotation!

[2]I was lucky enough to see Douglas Hofstadter speak about ‘Analogies in Physics‘. His best work is probably ‘Godel, Escher, Bach‘, which talks about natural and artificial intelligence, the incompleteness theorem, music, and art.

[3]I owe much or all of my intuition here to my time spent rotating[4] through the Ponder Lab at WashU. They work on one of the few world class molecular modeling software programs, Tinker. When I was there, Tinker worked by modeling molecules as balls & sticks, with various rotational and vibrational modes.

[4]Ha!

Brain Normalization, Bicycles, and Privilege

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

The brain is good at many things. Previously I’ve talked about how the brain is good at being lazy.

One corollary of this is that the brain is very good at normalizing your experiences of whatever difficulties you are experiencing.

This can be a very good thing, if for example you are trying to accomplish a task while subject to indescribable pain. But it can be a bad thing when you assume that everyone else’s problems are just as difficult as yours.

For illustration, I’m going to use my favourite analogy, which while imperfect, I think showcases the relevant concepts.

Bicycles, headwinds, and tailwinds:

Most of you reading this have ridden a bicycle at some point. If you have ever commuted by bicycle, you will know that headwinds are the bane of your existence[1].

But you might never notice a tailwind, if you have one. Headwinds are very noticeable, because you have to actively fight through them. Tailwinds are much more subtle, you might notice that you’re less tired after a trip, or that it was faster. It’s very easy to ascribe that to you feeling more energetic that day, or just feeling more fit.

Now imagine that on your route each morning, you have a tailwind. You don’t notice it, you just end up at work each day slightly happier than you would otherwise. Now imagine another person who travels in a different direction each morning, which gives them a headwind. Having never experienced a headwind, you might say “oh, you just need to increase your pedal cadence until you become more fit”.

This is your privilege speaking. This person is just as fit or perhaps more fit than you. Your brain has normalized your experience. You just think you understand because you also have problems which feel just as difficult to you.

[1]This is especially fun if ‘downtown’ is by a large body of water, and dwellings are ‘uptown’. You will get an onshore breeze in the morning (blowing inland) as you’re commuting downtown, and then an offshore breeze (blowing towards the body of water) in the evening, as you’re commuting home. Headwinds for everyone!

Space Junk Miner Wilco

Fiction, Games!, Nostalgia, Space!

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/video-watch-60-years-space-junk-accumulate-1-minute

They called her ‘Wilco’. They’d been calling her that since she was selected to be part of ‘Satellite Control’. “‘Space Junk Control’ more like” she had said under her breath during the induction ceremony, but not out loud, as this was the only way most people could get to space.

You see, all non-essential spaceflight had been cancelled since a number of high profile fatal collisions with space debris in the 2020s. There were the few essential robot missions to Moon Base Alpha, to provide them the equipment they couldn’t manufacture themselves yet, the constant replacement of GPS sats (now dual-purposed to carry data), and the occasional deep space probe that made its way through the space priority committee, but no more pleasure craft, only ‘Satellite Control’.

‘Satellite Control.’ Even the name was pompous. The mission was equally so, to think that they could actually clear LEO, MEO, and GEO of space debris, when they hadn’t even been able to clear LEO after years of trying. Of course, the constant rain of new debris from GPS-debris collisions, and the rain of debris from MEO didn’t help.

‘Wilco’ walked over to her ship, that she would call home for the next two weeks. The next two lonely weeks. The ship was basically a giant shielded cone, with a tiny cockpit living module at the point. From the ground, even with the best of adaptive optics, ground sensors could still only reliably detect debris of about half a centimeter or larger. The billions of smaller pieces of debris would skeletonize an unshielded ship like piranhas.

Strapping in, flight checklist. Fuel check. Computer check. Sensors check. Engines check.

“Wilco reporting. Ready for launch sequence.”
“Roger that, Wilco.”

(She hated that, even though she had always enjoyed the exploits of the space ‘sanitation engineer’ Roger Wilco from the Space Quest games, her nicknamesake.)

“Thrusters online.”
“Docking clamps disengaged.”
“Disengaging at 0.5 meters per second.”
“Okay, you are now clear of the station. Nose to the wind.”
“Nose to the wind.”

‘Nose to the wind’ was now the traditional call sign and benediction for the ‘Wilcos’. It had to do with how they flew their ‘collection’ ships. The massive cone was pointed in the direction of travel, collecting the space debris and not incidentally protecting the pilot. There was also a magnetic cone which extended the size of the cone, allowing the ‘nose ships’ to collect more of the ‘heavy dust’, the dark tiny shards of metal which did the most undetected damage. The ‘wind’ was similar to that of riding a bicycle down a hill on Earth. You would be going so fast that it seemed that everything was streaming towards you, on Earth a benign pushing force, up here a deadly rain of metal shards.

She settled in and started navigating towards her first target. A cloud of debris from a commsat which had been on its way to its graveyard orbit when it was hit by unexpected booster debris.

It was going to be a long day, but for now she was free, and IN SPACE! It was beautiful and quiet. All the many stars that humans would go to one day, as soon as they cleaned up the orbits around their own world. Thinking about it, maybe Earth wouldn’t be considered a planet until it (they) had cleaned the orbit again. The cloud was approaching. Arguments about Pluto and Eris for later. Time for work.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest#Roger_Wilco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet (3rd part of definition)

The article that inspired me:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/video-watch-60-years-space-junk-accumulate-1-minute

“Humans are messy, and not just here on Earth. Now, you can see all the junk we’ve launched into space for yourself with a data-driven animation created for the United Kingdom’s Royal Institution by Stuart Grey, an astronomer at University College London. It all begins in 1957 when the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, a 58.5-centimeter-wide ball emitting radio pulses. A piece of the rocket that took it into orbit was the very first piece of space junk. The United States launched its own satellite, Explorer 1, the next year. Almost every mission into space has created new debris, either from the launch vehicles, objects falling off satellites, or unintended collisions. By the time the USSR launched the first human into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, there were 200 objects floating around up there. By 1980 we had landed a man on the moon and left nearly 5000 objects in orbit. And because of deep space exploration, not all of them are tiny. Entire rocket engines are lurking around up there. The number of objects remained stable at about 9000 until suddenly, in 2007, a Chinese ballistic missile test exploded and added 2000 chunks of metal to the mix. In 2009, a couple of big satellites collided and added yet another 2000. You get the picture. We now stand at about 20,000 known pieces of space debris bigger than an apple—that is, an apple capable of ripping through a steel wall at 17,000 miles per hour—and there’s bound to be more. Space is becoming a very cluttered place, making it all the more dangerous to send humans up there to our orbit and beyond. (Video credit: Stuart Grey)”

How do you Want to Remap Your Brain Today?

Idle Speculation, Thoughts on Thoughts

Every time you do something, you are making a choice about how you want to map your brain. A few times might not make much of a difference, but eventually you will start seeing the world differently. During the 1890s, psychologist George M. Stratton found that after about 5 days of wearing reversing glasses, his brain started to see the world upside down.

Every time you make a choice about what you do today, you bring your brain a little closer to remapping itself, or reinforcing the remapping that it is still there. This is a lot of why habits can be so difficult to break.

Confounding many of your efforts is the fact that your brain tries to be as lazy as possible, all the time.

You may experience this as the article above, as changing your walking gait under different conditions, or as many do, as your brain sliding away from a difficult problem and distracting you with something else.

If you want to get better at these things, you have to train yourself to marshal and to guard what I call ‘proactive energy[1]’. My personal theory is that this is why hobbies and doing something you love are so powerful. When I was singing with TNL, we would talk about ‘The Inner Game‘, and tactics for interacting with yourself, to getting out of your own way and letting yourself succeed.

But we never would have gotten there if we hadn’t so desperately wanted so sing well. Because we loved the singing so much, and wanted to succeed so badly, we overcame a number of internal obstacles. We could then use these tactics we learned to help us do so many other, more mundane things.

Somewhat similar to how engineering school is often great training for pushing yourself to your limits, and learning how to deal with sleep deprivation[2].

But back to our original question: “How do you want to remap your brain today?” Every choice you make is a brain remapping choice, where you will get better at the things you do.

The corollary is that if you do things you love to do, you will get better at them, and then want to get better at them, perhaps enough to learn more about yourself and remap your brain even a little bit more consciously.

[1] Christine Miserandino has an excellent essay: ‘The Spoon Theory‘, which talks about the difficulties of living with a chronic illness or disability, and how difficult it can be to have limited resources of this type. She uses ‘spoons’ as a proxy for the amount of mental energy someone has at the beginning of the day. Wikipedia link.

#hashtags and @tags

Internet Culture, Puns

Recently[1], the word ‘hashtag’ was added to the Oxford dictionary. For those who are unaware, #hashtags are used to ‘tag’ a post so that it can be more easily searched, or to perform a ‘promotion by crowd’, as the ‘top hashtags’ are shown in various prominent places, such as:

#pants
#pants

This brings the question: If #hashtags are meant to connect a post to a concept, and so that it can be connected to other posts connected to that concept, what are @tags?

In the Slack world (and other IM), @tags are used to notify or summon a person, or to broadcast a message to a group.

So, if #hashtags connect a post to a concept, and @tags are used to notify a person of something, what would $tags[2] be? Or %tags, ^tags, or *tags?

!tags would ideally be used for expressing extra strong feelings about something. I imagine they would start out as the ultimate downvote[3], but then they would be culturally re-appropriated by the new generation to mean the ultimate in positiveness, or coolness, or whatever else they will call it.

~tags will evolve from their original meaning as home directories or webpages on unix servers to mean homepages in general. ‘~nayrb’ would point to this site, for example.

$tags[4] would be appropriated by Amazon for their new ‘one tap purchasing’, where you could purchase any goods mentioned in a post, but even the post itself, perhaps as part of a multilevel marketing scheme. You would end up with post squatters, the scourge of the internet of tomorrow.

%tags are an interesting beast. Like the ‘%’ symbol, they are a link to a concept, but only for a brief period of *time*[5]. So, you could link your post to other posts posted nearby, but only for a while. Like a #hashtag crossed with Snapchat.

^tags go back to the beginning, to the root of things. ^tags are used to end an argument, where you would end a many posts long conversation by posting a final #hashtag on that topic, along with ‘^regulatorycapture’.[6] Can be used in situations similar to those immediately preceding a mic drop.

&tags (not to be confused with &amptags) are multipliers, or ‘amplifiers’. Often connected with ‘micdrop’ tags (-.), they ‘amplify the signal’ of any nearby tags, using an inverse square law to determine nearness and level of effect.

*tags can be substituted for any other tag, and they change depending on context. Under RFC 7168, the implementation of *tags is browser-dependent.

Stay tuned next time, for the riveting differences between (tags, }tags, and ][tags.

[1]2014.

[2]Not $cashtags, that would just be silly.

[3]in the boolean ‘not’ sense of ‘!’

[4]Still not cashtags!

[5]*time* as the Orz would measure it.

[6]Similar to Mornington Crescent, it is critical that the ^tag not be used too soon, or else it will not work as intended.

Why Would Alduin Save the Dragonborn?

Analysis, Games!

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

So, some of you may have heard of a little computer game called ‘Skyrim‘.

In the game, you play the part of a ‘Dragonborn’ character, whose special ability is being able to learn ‘shouts*’ by consuming dragon souls.

The game starts (although the player doesn’t know if yet) with the ancient dragon king ‘Alduin**’ arrives after being thrown forward in time by thousands of years. Alduin then*** flies to where the player is about to be executed, and attacks the town, freeing the player.

You learn later that Alduin’s goal is to resurrect dragons (who were all or mostly all killed before recorded history), and conquer the world**** again.

So, why, as Alduin’s first act would he save the life of the one person who can thwart his dragon resurrection**** plans? There are two main theories:

1) Alduin reappears after being thrown forward in time, perhaps confused, and attacks the nearest human target, perhaps the nearest human military target.

The nearby towns:
– Ivarstead (small town) is 5+4 (6.4 units as the dragon flies) away SE
– Helgen (fortified town) is 8+9 units (12 units as the dragon flies) away SW
– Riverwood (medium town) is 8 units away W
– Whiterun (major city) is 7+9 units (11.4 units as the dragon flies) away NW, but is where a dragon was trapped before, and is heavily fortified.

From this it’s a stretch to see Helgen as the obvious target, as it’s the furthest of the nearby settlements. Perhaps Alduin enjoyed flying over mountains, or was flying in the opposite direction from High Hrothgar (where humans taught each other shouts, also heavily fortified). Perhaps the people who threw Alduin forward in time were from Helgen, many thousands of years ago, and he was following them back.

2) The other person saved by Alduin’s attack is ‘Ulfric Stormcloak’ (another human who can ‘shout’), whose capture was about to end a civil war. His escape after being saved by Alduin reignites the civil war, distracting humans, and not coincidentally providing Alduin with many more souls to eat in Sovngard. Sovngard being the afterlife for honoured warriors, where Alduin resides so as to be impossible to kill on the mortal plane.

This theory feels like it makes a lot more sense. Alduin having been defeated by humans once, and needing time for his dragon resurrection campaign needs something to distract the humans. How he would have figured out that freeing Ulfric would help this is unknown. He could also feel that Ulfric could ‘shout’, and seek him out as a source of power, to defeat him, or to release him to cause chaos. I feel Alduin’s arrogance would only let him respect (and only barely) a human who could ‘shout’.

Other ideas:

3) Alduin senses the dragonborn (the player) (either because they feel like a dragon, or like a powerful human), and attacks to try to kill them*****. Ironically, this ends up saving them. Why Alduin didn’t finish the job is beyond me. Perhaps the player escaping into the keep and going underground caused Alduin to lose them, and he went off in search for other prey or dragons to resurrect. Perhaps because the player had not yet come into their power, or did not shout back at Alduin, they were nothing but prey, or beneath his notice.

4) The Elder Scroll****** or whomever empowered it to be used to throw Alduin forward in time brought him forward to the exact time and made sure he was in such a mental state that he would through his own actions save the very person (the player) who would cause his downfall. It was suggested that the time/dragon-god Akatosh was displeased with Alduin’s arrogance, so they could have been responsible.

5) Other ideas? Let me know what you think in the comments!

*’Shouts’ are an innate ability of dragons, for whom ‘shouting is as natural as talking’. ‘Shouts’ are special words of power which do the standard type of dragon things you would expect, like breathing fire or ice, or various other spell-like abilities. It is also mentioned in-game that a dragon argument involves them ‘shouting’ at each other, leading to very blurred lines between dragon arguments and combats.

**Alduin was the first dragon, created by the dragon-god of time Akatosh. Alduin’s original purpose was to be the ‘World-Eater’, to devour the world at the end of time, but Alduin decided to try to conquer the world and become a god. The humans rebelled (with some dragon help), and eventually used an ‘elder scroll’ to throw Alduin forward in time.

***It is unclear if anything else happens between these events.

****Dragons were originally the creation of the dragon god Akatosh. They are normally immortal, and can be resurrected by Alduin (and perhaps others). Consuming their souls prevents this resurrection.

*****Dragons ‘shout’ to argue with each other, so Alduin could have sensed someone like a dragon (dragonborn), and ‘shouted’ at them just to try to speak with them. This is not canon at all, but could make for a much more poignant story, if the whole story was all over an inability to communicate.

******’Elder Scrolls’ are fate-linked artifacts which have amazing and special powers, but these powers seem to be linked to the threads of some larger story woven by the gods or perhaps something even more powerful and ancient.

Surplus and Corruption

Economics, Idle Speculation

Today, I was reading about declarations and non-declarations of war in the United States, and changes in law surrounding them.

Many people have bemoaned that as the American Empire has progressed, more and more war powers have been invested in the executive branch, with congress doing little to nothing to try to stop it. In a way, this is a form of corruption, corruption being where someone does not appropriately discharge their fiduciary duty because they will personally gain.

To me, it seems that corruption inevitably arises from surplus. They are two sides of the same coin, like encryption and compression*.

The theory goes that when a eventually-to-be-powerful** country is in its infancy, people like Cincinnatus*** and Washington are more willing to give up power and sacrifice self for the good of the tribe.

As the empire becomes more wealthy, things start to change. There is more surplus, so there is not as much a need for leaders to go back to tend to the farm. The people who are more prone to self sacrifice for the greater good seem to not acquire power for one or more of many reasons.

Perhaps self sacrifice is not encouraged as they are growing up, as the society is too affluent to require it. Perhaps they have it worn away by many years of anti-socialization, the lure of personal wealth is too great, or perhaps it is just not necessary for the empire to do so. The power brokers just don’t see the point in giving up useful power to someone to fix the problem unless the situation is dire.

For the Romans, one of the main counterbalances for this was supposed to be the Tribune of the Plebs. What is the counterbalance supposed to be now? The press? Popular opinion? The conscience of politicians****?

I see the fundamental problem is that all of these require active intervention to solve the problem. There is no concept of ‘fail safe’. The closest I’ve seen is from ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘, where the theory is that the civil service tries to damp out wild swings in popular and political opinion, and tries to run the country stably and competently. This is perhaps combined with the theory that whichever organization is more stable lasts longer, and therefore wins. If you’re a stable democracy or republic, you just need to wait until other countries go through disruptive changes to go in and get what you want*****.

I’m not saying it’s good. I’m just saying it’s what happens. And the survivors tend to write the history books.

*A lot of the math is the same, they use entropy in very similar ways. Look it up! 😀

**There are all sorts of theories of why countries become powerful. I don’t think there’s any consensus about this, and in general they do terrible things on their way up, but this is outside the scope.

***I didn’t know this is where Cincinnati, Ohio got its name!

****Vetinari would remind you that ‘politician’ comes from ‘polis’, implying that they have as much a stake in the city as anyone else.

*****There are many recent colonial examples, if you want them.

How do you math?

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

In an earlier post, I was talking about ‘friendly triangles’ as an example of unconscious things that inform my interactions with problems and math. Today, I wanted to talk about some other aspects of solving math problems that I didn’t notice I did until I had to teach mental math*, a number of years a.

I was trying to describe mental math, when I noticed all of the little assumptions I made, all the little tricks that I used to make math and mental math easier and more likely to end up correct**.

Some of these tricks were:
– The curve on the bottom of the lower case ‘t’, so it didn’t look like a ‘+’ sign
– Curved ‘x’, I’m guessing so it doesn’t look like a multiplication symbol (this one is lost to the mists of history for me
– Lining up equals signs
– Being very conscious of only having one equality per line
– Friendly triangles (1,1,sqrt(2), 1,2,sqrt(3), 3,4,5)
– Looking for radii of circles in geometry problems
– Various methods for making sure that I always itemized all of the permutations or combinations***

Once I noticed that I was doing these tricks, it was a matter of figuring out which were useful enough to spend my students’ time on. Many of them would probably be most usefully conveyed by demonstration in passing, like the way a painting instructor would demonstrate brush stroke by example.

Knowing then what I know now, I might have tried to help them come up with rules for each type of situation, but in hindsight, it’s probably best I didn’t****. What I do remember is teaching geometry problems with the advice ‘draw a big picture*****’, and ‘label everything you know or can figure out’, which feels like sound advice for solving all sorts of problems.

To this day, it’s probably why all my notebooks are slightly-larger-than-larger blank sketch pads.

*To adults, as part of standardized testing preparation.

**I remember being one of those school math students who did really well overall, but was constantly doing ‘stupid mistakes’, where I would drop a sign, or reverse something/etc… I think I compensated for this be extra checking and all the little tricks I’ll be talking about above. Or have already talked about above, it you’re reading the footnotes after all of the post.

***I actually learned this

****I don’t actually remember what I told them. I seem to recall it was just a bunch of working through problems.

*****Thanks prof. Collins!