#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!

Friendly Triangles and Spectator Ions

Nostalgia, Science!, Teaching, Thoughts on Thoughts

There are many different ways that you learn things. You can learn things from school, from books, from videos, from sticking a fork in a light socket.

But we’re talking about the things you learn in passing, or by osmosis, as you’re growing up. Sometimes these are things learned so early on in your education, so basic, and built upon by thousands of other concepts. Sometimes they are the ways of speaking of your parents, their ways of thinking.

For me, this was Spectator Ions. Growing up, my dad would always talk about (aqueous) chemical reactions, for example, from Wikipedia:

2Na+(aq) + CO3 2−(aq) + Cu 2+(aq) + SO4 2−(aq) → 2Na+(aq) + SO4 2−(aq) + CuCO3 (s)

In this reaction, the carbonate anion is reacting/bonding with the copper cation. The two sodium cations and the sulfate anion have no part in this reaction. They are merely ‘spectators’.

So this is all reasonable, this makes sense. But I was trying to explain this to someone recently, and I realized that I didn’t know the phrase ‘spectator ions’, I just knew intuitively that sodium cations are basically never involved in reactions. The best way I can describe is knowing them as ‘small and bouncy’. (Perhaps ‘small, bouncy, and indivisible’, unlike N2(g), which is ‘small to medium-sized, bouncy, and divisible with significant effort.)

So, how do you explain something like this, when you approach it in such an intuitive way? I feel like it approaches or becomes an issue of privilege, like being the only person who can access the underpinnings of the system.

Sometimes, I feel the same way about ‘friendly triangles’. Probably the most famous of these is the ‘3,4,5’ triangle, which has been known (and presumably used in construction) since antiquity.

The other triangles commonly called ‘friendly’ are:
– 1,1,sqrt(2), or the ‘45,45,90’ triangle, used with unit vectors everywhere, also interestingly the right-angle triangle which has the largest percentage of its perimeter in its hypotenseuse.
– 1,2,sqrt(3), or the ‘30,60,90’ triangle, used most often probably with equilateral triangles and subsections thereof

Once these concepts are automatic, you start to see them everywhere. If you want a better explanation of ‘friendly triangles’, try here:

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/trig.htm

But back to our original question, which was all about how you deal with having a very intuitive sense of something, which underpins your world view in a subtle but fundamental way that is difficult to describe. I don’t know. All I can do is to try to notice when it happens, and try to learn how to best describe it, which is really all you can do to try to communicate something unconscious to you and which may be outside the other person’s experience. I think a later post will talk about some of my other interactions with math of this type, and how I learned to describe while showing and sharing.

Better Conference Calls

Agile, Software Development, Thoughts on Thoughts

So, I was talking with A earlier this week about meetings, and she mentioned the issues that many people have with conference calls.

But what are those issues? I can only talk about issues that I’ve had with conference calls.

For those who are not familiar, we’ll start with audio conference calls.

A humorous video by Tripp & Tyler may help illustrate.

To me, these problems can be broken down into the following categories:

Human factors:
– Absence of body language
– Outside distractions

Technical factors:
– Lag
– Other audio artifacts of VOIP
– Technical issues with audio conferencing software

We’ll start with the Technical factors.

Lag:

Lag feels like it’s only gotten more prevalent with greater use of mobile phones and VOIP. Of the two components of lag (encoding/decoding time and routing/travel time), you can probably improve routing/travel time the most by spending more money on better dedicated VOIP connections. You may also get some mileage from having your conferences during off-peak hours and being on a wired (rather than wireless) connection. The anti-jitter algorithms described in this ‘how VOIP works’ article inherently have a tradeoff* between jitter/dropout and lag. If you make things easier for them, they should be able to improve both for you.

Other audio artifacts of VOIP:

These other audio artifacts are also products of the packet data nature of VOIP. ‘Toilet bowl audio’ is caused by VOIP losing packets and the sound being recreated artificially by the algorithms. (Before they figured this out, you would hear pops or crackles or even more annoying sounds, like in early mp3 encodings.) Sound cutting out is the result of too many consecutive packets being lost.

Feedback is an interesting one. I’ll use the iPhone as an example. When you have the speaker on a device very close to the microphone, you’re liable to get feedback. The device gets around this by analyzing the sounds coming in through the microphone, and ‘subtracting’ them from the output stream. The echoes you may hear sometimes is what happens when this fails. These algorithms were required to make satellite communications viable.

(A better history of echo cancellation is here, for those who are interested: ECHO_history_of_echo_cancellation )

Other audio artifacts of VOIP have similar origins and solutions.

Technical issues with audio conferencing software:

This one still puzzles me. Like microwaves, they seem to be all different, and none of them intuitive. I can’t tell if this is because the industry has not converged on a solution, or the problem is actually that unsolveable. My current favourite is Google hangouts, but that could be because I generally use them for one-on-one conversations. Perhaps this problem is because of the always problematic nature of security, when controlling access of people to be able to phone into a conversation. But even when there is no conference call security, there are still always issues, with people trying to call into the conference, calling the wrong way. I feel like the solution is to have an intuitive interface, where you can see all the calls coming in to your phone and then drag them together to make a conference.

We could even make a game of this. We could call it ’21st century switchboard operator**’.

Now, on to human factors.

Absence of body language:

This is a tough one. Interestingly, humans figured out a method for showing body language in text at most 11 years after the first email*** was sent, while 140 years after the invention of long-range audio communication****, we still do not have an effective method of conveying body language over audio transmissions. I would say that video conferencing will supplant all audio within our lifetime, but there is still space communication, satellite communication, dark rooms, non-working cameras, etc… Perhaps some sort of interstitial click language would work.

In the meantime, the best solution is to have people meet each other, in person if possible, over video or at least a one-on-one audio before they engage in a conference together.

The other elephant in the room is people who are normally bad at in-person body language cues for when it is time for them to finish talking. In person, this can be difficult, even with a strong moderator. In an audio conference, this can be well nigh impossible. A moderator with the ability to selectively mute participants might work. The social hierarchies in many organizations may not permit this, but improving the flexibility of those hierarchies and teaching people to *listen* is one of the key components of Agile.

Outside Distractions:

This one feels like a tossup between having a strong moderator and having an engaged workforce. Sometimes life does indeed intrude into work, but if this is occurring on a regular basis, perhaps it’s an indication that the meeting is at the wrong time, or too long, too low a priority, or the participants are not as engaged as they could be, for whatever reason. Addressing those issues is probably the best next step here.

So, that was a lot of words. Apparently I have a lot of thoughts about this. If you want more, comment below!

Some other useful links:

An explanation of packet loss and discards.

*Because you’re sending voice data in packets, these packets have to be reassembled at the other end. Because the packets are going over the internet, they can be delayed. A delayed packet either has to be left out or waited for. This causes jitter and lag, respectively. If you have a better connection, the algorithms can make better decisions for you.

**This just makes me appreciate the people who did this job even more, and I always thought it was difficult.

***The article also goes in depth about the specific strengths of email, and how it may be a more natural method of communication for humans than some other types…

****I did not know before reading this article that Alexander Graham Bell was “Professor of Vocal Physiology at Boston University [and] engaged in training teachers in the art of instructing deaf mutes how to speak”

Multidimensional Word and Sentence Rotation

Analysis, Internet Culture, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I was talking to G during a life coaching session, and the topic of ‘Opposites’ came up. Specifically, the use of ‘Opposites’ to swap out parts of a sentence to gain more understanding of the sentence, the topic, or perhaps something else.

There are a number of different ways one can swap out parts of a sentence. I’ll go in approximately the order I use them, but the fun ones are at the bottom. 😀

We will use a famous* sentence to illustrate:

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.”

First, we can start by swapping parts of the sentence:
– Spoonerisms swap the first characters or syllables of words, such as ‘linc and zead’ for ‘zinc and lead’, or ‘The quick frown box jumped over the dazy logs’, which is nonsensical, but highly creative, especially if you drew it.
– One can swap words, swapping the subject and object: (‘The quick brown dogs jumped over the lazy fox.’), or descriptive words with nouns: (‘The quick brown dogs jumped over the foxy laze.’) This second one could be nonsensical, but could also refer to lasers, which could trigger other thoughts or creativity in the listener.
– We can completely swap the object half of the sentence: (‘The lazy dogs jumped over the quick brown fox’)
– We can move words around and change their parts of speech: (‘The brown fox quickly jumped over the lazy dogs’), in this case changing the meaning from descriptive/innate (quick fox) to intent (fox quickly).

There are more ways to do this, but they are generally more complex combinations of the above.

Second, we can remove parts of the sentence:
– ‘The brown fox.’
– ‘The fox jumped over the dog.’
– ‘The quickly.’

Third, we can change the cultural referent of the sentence or parts of the sentence:
– ‘The swift vulpine soared over the meddlesome cur.’
– If I knew enough Japanese, I could give examples of different levels of formality here.

Fourthly, we can do what I can only describe as ‘Word Rotation’, where you chose a word in the sentence, and rotate about one of the axes that the word is on, similar to a gimbal or leather punch.
– You can rotate animal species, such as ‘the quick brown bear jumped over the lazy cat’
– You can rotate action words
– You can rotate tightly or loosely:
– Tight: Dog, cat, mouse, hamster
– Loose: Dog, horse, panda, bear**
– Absurd: Dog, mushroom, amphioxus, pool table
– You can rotate senses*** (my favourite, although ‘propriocept’ is not a very good verb.)
– You can take a sub-word and rotate it. This one is clbuttic.
– You can rotate more than once (although this is only very subtly different from rotating once more loosely).
– You can exchange words or word parts for the ‘more formal’ version: ‘Mark my words!’ becomes ‘Marcus my words!’
– Rotation also works with antonyms.

Basically, any way you could #hashtag a word in a sentence, and then replace that word with a different word that also qualified for that #hashtag.

Join us next time, when we explore the mysteries of %tags, and try to figure out whether a single open bracket or closed bracket is more annoying. As always, let me know what you think in the comments below!

*This sentence was commonly used to test typewriters, as it uses each of the letters in the alphabet and is reasonably short and easy to remember.

**Banda, pear.

***Space Quest IV had an icon which alternately allowed you to look, touch, or taste objects. It’s possible this is where my analogy of rotation comes from.

Predictive Punning

Analysis, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I tell many, many, many bad puns, as anyone who has hung out with me knows. What many may not know is how much preparation and mental remapping has gone into this process.

The two key factors in the success of a pun are Timing and Obscurity*.

By Timing, I mean that the pun has to be said close enough to the sentence it is riffing on so that the short term memory of the listeners is willing to go back and look and compare, to find the humour/reference. If you wait too long, you risk your listener timing out** and ignoring you, as they have already forgotten the specifics of the original sentence. Too soon, and the listener has not finished understanding the meaning of the original sentence, and the pun sentence will pass them by.

By Obscurity, I mean that puns which are too obscure will cause the listener to think about the pun for a brief while, then time out and move on. Puns which are too obvious will cause a groan as the pun wave collapses, and the listener will move on. Only a pun somewhere between these, where the listener is subtly forced to engage their brain will get the reaction you desire***.

Complicating matters is that Obscurity is defined differently for each listener****, as each listener will have different amounts of knowledge in each area. So, you’re constantly juggling what you know of the knowledge levels of each of your listeners, and trying to find puns that will fit inside enough of the Timing and Obscurity windows of your audience.

What can help is Sentence Prediction. Just like Amazon can tell that you will need toothpaste before you do, you can predict what words someone will say in a sentence before they know themselves. Once a person has started a sentence and is about halfway through, it is remarkably simple to predict how they will finish the sentence*****. More importantly, it is easy/possible to predict the exact words****** they will use, as you will need the exact words they will use in order to generate your pun.

So, you’re listening to someone speak. Partway through their sentence, you fill in their sentence with what they’re going to say. You then spend the next couple/few seconds planning your pun, you wait until they’re done speaking, and then you strike! Mental chaos ensues! Coyote is happy.

Want to hear more about this? Let me know in the comments below!

*I use ‘Obscurity’ instead of ‘Difficulty’ here because a specific pun will have different ‘Obscurity’ levels for each listener, depending on the specific shape of their knowledge/experiences.

**I’m using ‘Timing Out’ in the sense of the computer term ‘Timeout‘, where after a certain defined period of time, the computer will simply go and do something else. If you want a great example, watch two cats interact. You will see one or both of them timing out on a regular basis.

***If they start hitting you, you’re probably doing this right. Or wrong. It’s all the same. Dada is the anti dada.

****Timing is probably different for each listener as well, but I haven’t studied that in as much depth.

*****I’m sure someone has studied this, but I can’t find a link.

******Incidentally, I quite enjoy the feeling of ‘cache miss‘/’branch misprediction‘ that I get when someone uses a word I don’t expect. It jumbles my neural net and makes me think.

What is the Difference Between a Duck?: Mu Jokes and Mental Push Hands

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Nostalgia, Puns, Words!

UPDATE: While I was writing this, this blog passed 1000 page views since I started counting on Dec 29th! You people are awesome!

******************************************************

Yesterday, I briefly touched on the concept of ‘the space between meaning’.

One way to demonstrate this concept is with a Mu-joke (not really an anti-joke*):

Q: What is the difference between a duck**?

A: One of its legs are both the same!

The goal here is to say some words which sound not too much like nonsense, such that the listener really tries to understand.

Like a good pun, you want to draw the listener in by making things the correct level of ‘difficult to understand’. Too easy, the listener groans and moves on. Too difficult, the listener times out and moves on. (Note that this changes with each individual audience member. If ever there was an argument for (education) streaming, this is it. 😀 )

By analogy, you want your Mu-joke to make the listener feel like they would understand it if they ‘just tried a little harder’.

Also, a good Mu-joke will play with language and parts of speech, the goal being to make the listener more aware of the structure and inner meaning of what they are saying and what is being said around them. Normally, the word ‘between’ refers to two things, but we are using it to refer to one object, a duck. This gives the listener a mental ‘cache miss‘ or ‘branch misprediction‘ error, and it can throw them off balance as they try to reassemble their mental model of the conversation.

This trick can be used in a ‘Mental Push Hands***’ competition. I have fond memories of doing this with MC as we reshelved books at the library in high school. I suspect many of the best debaters use variants of this, and the best politicians have well-developed defenses against these kinds of tactics.

But back to ‘the space between meaning’. It is the space in your head where you are comfortable with ‘between’ referring to any number of things, where you are comfortable with ‘both’ referring to one thing.

It is a space I enjoy, and I hope you can help put me there. 😀

*Anti-jokes are not quite what I mean. They seem to be defined online as jokes with a standard leadup and an opposite-ish punchline. Many of the punchlines seem to take a ‘standard’ punching-down joke and subvert it. Funny, interesting, useful, but not what I’m taking about.

**I first saw this joke in one of those ‘choose-your-own-adventure-rpg’ books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grailquest. Probably my favourite series in the genre.

***I learned ‘Push Hands’ as a martial arts balance exercise. You plant your feet and touch palms with your opponent. The object is to make your opponent move one of their feet without moving yours. For me, it was all about being as flexible as possible while trying to find my opponent’s inflexibilities.

Three

Nostalgia, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

Warning: 25-year-old TNG spoilers below! Imbibe at your own risk! If you wanted to see Dr. Crusher at her finest, read further!

It’s always interesting how certain things lodge themselves in your brain, to be retrieved only at certain personally defined times…

There’s a scene from ‘A Matter of Perspective*’ where Riker says “Riker to Enterprise, I’m ready to leave. Now.” I often replay these words to myself when it is clearly (in my head) time for me to leave. 8 words from a TV show I saw once 25 years ago, and yet it has stayed with me and the memory has perhaps only gotten stronger with time.

This brings us to the title of the post, ‘Three’. This is from a different TNG episode: ‘Cause and Effect****’, where the Enterprise is caught in a time loop, and Data** sends himself a message so that they can break free. This message is ‘Three’, which represents the number of pips on Riker’s collar that Data glances at just before the Enterprise is destroyed. Data surmises that he was trying to tell himself that Riker was correct and he was not***, and vents the shuttle bay doors, saving the ship. Earlier, he and Geordie had described the effect as a ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’. Interestingly, this may have been more powerful than they realized. Often, when I am asked a question, I will randomly answer with ‘Three’. Sometimes I do this because I enjoy putting people into ‘Mu*****’ space, but sometimes it’s probably just because of my memories or subconscious effects from this episode.

Incidentally, this was probably my most favourite episode for Beverly Crusher. I feel like she was the only one who could play the part she played, bringing together the early detection of Deja Vu, with the scientific and analytical mind to analyze what was going on and to gather the data that no one else would think to do. Data may have sent and received the message, but Beverly told him and Geordie that something was going on, and gathered and analyzed data to prove it. If you like this character (or want to), watch this episode.

Also incidentally, it felt almost like the scenario may have been designed by Q (or some being like him), as there are just enough clues for the crew to figure it out, without that legendary crew, they would have been trapped for 90 years, just like the Bozeman, but also because it hints at helping humans understand space and time just a little bit better, like Q was talking about in ‘All Good Things…’

*A really interesting look at perception and consent, as well as other things.

**And Geordie. They have an excellent bromance, from before such a thing was named.

***Riker wanted to decompress the main shuttle bay to move the Enterprise away from the collision, Data wanted to use the tractor beam to push the other ship away. Why they didn’t simply use both from the start, or have established emergency procedures for moving the ship when engines and thrusters are down is anyone’s guess.

****Incidentally, one has to google ‘data three tng’ to retrieve this episode. ‘data three’ is a data center, and ‘tng three’ is the third season of TNG. Interesting to think how Google and its pseudo-venn-diagram method of searching has changed the way we think******.

*****I like to refer to this as ‘the space between meaning’, similar to the effect of asking the question ‘What is the difference between a duck?’. (This will be the subject of a later post.)

******I used this when I was playing a party game many years ago. (I thought it was Cranium, but it looks like it was more likely Taboo.) I would get a word like ‘Superman’, then name two words which, if you googled for them, would return ‘Superman’.