science

Criticize By Creating.

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Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
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If we truly look at we humans have achieved over the centuries, what we have created, it has been a reflection of how we wish to improve things.

A sculptor looks at stone and wishes to make it in a different image, an artist finds a way to decorate a blank canvas, a writer empowers imagination through words on blank pages – and we all decorate time. In fact, we regularly graffiti the tyrannical walls of time with our creativity.

We criticize by creating, our every invention a way an attempt to improve upon what already exists – or we would not create it at all.

Too often we get into a spiral of criticizing things without actually making things better, like over-exuberant sculptors working on sandstone with a sledgehammer, when maybe what we should be doing is simply building something different.

Sadly, it is not as easy these days to build great things- large companies seem to have sucked all the air out of the room in many contexts – but it doesn’t stop us from creating the small things, the little things that make the big things, the words that make the sentences that make the paragraphs.

I often have to remind myself of Michelangelo’s words: Criticize by creating.

Bouncy Daydreams.

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I was thinking about my present writing project and somehow I ended up thinking about the universe doing something different this morning.

At this point, it seems like the results of the Big Bang are accelerating outward. This is mind-boggling to people because we are creatures of finite thoughts, so an idea of never-ending space where the entire universe is accelerating from a single focal point, the Big Bang, seems like a lot.

So I started wondering, “What if the initial Big Bang was just one force out there, and as things go further from the center of the Big Bang, other forces pull back toward that center?” The idea is sort of like a car in that if you hit the gas, it accelerates, and if you hit the brakes, it decelerates. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know, and I was just having fun with an idea for the book.

The whole idea of the universe reverting every few billion years to create a new Big Bang is interesting.

As it happens, the idea of the Big Bounce is not new, and I will not be accepting a Nobel Prize for Physics this year. There’s no need to get a confirmation from Neil de Grasse Tyson, it’s a known theory.

It’s all just as well. I never planned for a Nobel Prize. I have nowhere to put it, so not getting one would just create a new problem for me. But it is fun to think that just by having some coffee and tuning the world out I could come up with an idea way outside of my experience based on only what I have read and gestated on for half a century.

There is still space to dream in the world. You just find yourself in someone else’s campsite fairly often.

Leave snacks out!

Feynman’s Flower

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A recurring conundrum I have had in life is the way the world demands I be technological/scientific or creative. It does not allow for both, neatly filing people into categories that can define them for life.

At least in my lifetime, it has seemed that way. At least, in my life, it has seemed that way.

If you’re creative, you’re considered irrational, emotional, and that you lack objective to those in the scientific/technological camp.

If you’re scientific/technological, you’re considered rational, distant, cold and inhumane to creative people.

The people I’ve enjoyed the most in my life have been both.

It’s not a surprise, then, that I found that someone had taken Richard Feynman’s conversation about flowers and made a video of it that suited it perfectly – one that to me was something that I always explained to my mother, the creative, but couldn’t quite get through to my father, the more engineering minded.

Enjoy it below.

Earth Bound Misfits.

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_earth_alone_networked

I may offend some folks with this, but it’s hard to write anything these days to do so. My intent is not to offend but to present my perspective.

I had to explain to someone that there is a difference between anti-theism and atheism itself. It’s tiresome.

Anti-theism is the akin to the political far right of atheism, finding all sorts of things to blame theism for, and with convincing and rational arguments that just don’t work on the religious.

Conversely, the religious arguments against atheism tend to be of a religious nature and only cherry pick logic.

As an atheist, I don’t care enough about religion to debate it, and I understand that for at least some people it’s a source of enjoyment. Can it be misused? Certainly, but so can just about everything else humans do. Take a look around. Once the religious stuff doesn’t adversely impact my life, I don’t care too much. A public holiday is a public holiday.

People talking about being nice to each other is something we could use more of, and if some people require religion for that, that’s fine, but withholding aid to people in a disaster zone unless they join your specific religion is just shitty salesmanship. Bad things happen with anything people are involved in and religion is no different. The same with science and technology.

The arguments on both sides tend to center around everyone wanting people to be nice to each other and fighting over how it should be done.

Now, atheism is more complicated because everyone has their own personal version. In fact, atheism is a complete lack of belief and the only reason there is a name for people who don’t believe in a deity is because the people who need deities needed something to call the others who didn’t. Personally, I prefer being called a heretic. It conjures in my mind some guy living in a cave somewhere with a rabbit bone in his beard, dancing around a fire just for the joy of it.

My version of atheism is just being awed by the world around me without the need to blame anyone or anything for it. When you drill down into the finest details of everything we know about everything around us on the planet, from plants to fungi to the thinking meatbags we thing we are, it’s simply astounding that it all exists. This is the platform from which many people’s faith springs, and I applaud them on that. I, however, understand – even believe – that we’re just an accident in a universe of accidents.

We would like to know why we’re here, but it’s peculiar that’s not the first question a baby asks. We’re sensory creatures, social creatures, and our first questions are not about the universe but on what’s practical for us. No child says, “I’d like to know about all this God business”, instead, they are sort of put on a path based mainly on geography for better and worse. I was thrown into various religions as a child and came away fairly unscathed, with no ill feelings toward the religions – but a little scared by the bad things people who are religious will do in the name of their deity of choice.

__Earth Distance

Me? I have come to an understanding with the universe which is as lopsided as everyone else’s. When I view the world, I view it as a tourist because, in the end, that’s what I am.

All the beauty, all the ugly, everything combined showing just how complicated a single world is, with we earth bound misfits constantly stretching the bounds of our knowledge through science and technology. To date, no one I know has prayed and received a better algorithm for anything, but it might happen. Who knows?

But please, don’t try to tell me that science is evil while using an app on a cellphone whose signal is bouncing off the earth through satellites, powered by harnessed electrons finding their way to ground through our mazes, as you type on a device containing very rare elements on Earth.

Connecting Coherence

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flickr svklimkin publicdomain aug 8 2017There are two main ways that I know of to connect things: science, and art. Science tends towards linear connections, where one question leads to another and connects them. Art is not so constrained, allowing the mixing of things that aren’t necessarily the same but have some coherence. The image on the left that is titled ‘Neurons’ but is actually a picture of dandelion seeds, disconnected unlike neurons.

Scientifically, the two are not connected, but the representation allows us to ‘fill a gap’, to intuit something that is not there. While it’s wrong here – an important thing to note, since the dandelion seeds are not connected in the same way that neurons are – there is some coherence in how we perceive a flat image.  It also does something else. It opens our minds to the possibilities.

This is sort of like being comfortable or uncomfortable around people of the same skin color, culture, religion, gender and geography, regardless of how differently they view the world. Movements, even now, clash over these ‘meta’ commonalities allows us to settle into a false sense of coherence with people. The desire to fit in clashes with the desire to be an individual, and people sometimes prefer to simply ‘go with the flow’ rather than find others who are actually more coherent to who they are.

Consider this article on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “Inside the Battle On The Eastern Front“, by David Patrikarakos (contributing editor to Unherd). A very great article that he ties together at the very end – I won’t quote it because to get the full effect you need to read the article – is a matter of coherence, of what connects humanity in a way that makes the entire invasion of Ukraine by Russia look incoherent in a new way. Humanity disconnected where it shouldn’t be.

Yet the article itself is based in fact, in linearity, scientific to a great degree in reporting the subjective while being objective. It’s a story in that regard, from the guy toting around an image of Jesus Christ (go on, read the article) to… well, Kit Kats? Little touches of the world, however surreal, that connect in ways that we may not have seen all because the right person with the right observation skills and the right ability to describe them coherently was there. 

This is the way we connect islands of coherence in this world of chaos. These connections are important in understanding and connecting our worlds and making them less worlds, closer to one world of perception. That’s the challenge of our time.

Making sense of babel.

Innovation vs. Specialization

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Solutions KeyPeople look at things through their perception and what their experience have taught them.

We live in an era of specialization, where people are expected to continuously refine their skills in a smaller and smaller area of expertise. We sacrifice width for depth, thinking that more specialized knowledge will somehow allow us to innovate ourselves out of dilemmas.

Innovation typically doesn’t come from people who specialize in only one thing. For instance, the Theory of Evolution is known to have been introduced by Charles Darwin – but very few people know that without the help of James Gould, Darwin would not have found out the 13 species of bird obtained in the Galapagos Islands were related. Gould was an expert, Darwin not so much.

Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity upturned physics and the world not because he had studied Physics, but because he went beyond what was taught and came up with his own theory.

When you look at any true innovation, you’ll likely find that someone with enough knowledge of different fields came up with ideas that solved problems, be they world views in science to implementations of technology.

Unfortunately, there is no direct reward for that.

Hail The Drunk Alchemist.

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A rocket lifting off is an amazing sight not just because of the light and smoke, or the piercing of our atmosphere. Underneath that, there’s this Newtonian law. The Third Law.
ICESat-2 Launch (NHQ201809150015)

For every action force there is an equal and opposite reaction force.

Granted, there are so many other factors involved in a rocket launch, but the basis for almost all of it is that third law a drunk alchemist, who got hit with an apple, came up with through observation.

The photograph quality of this particular rocket is pretty stunning too.

I Was Going Somewhere With That.

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Little Green Man says THAT WAYOne of the more ‘fun’ things that happens with writing is the distraction – when you end up off on a tangent because of other things.

Like earthquakes. Introspection because of how you see other people react about earthquakes. And then, because you’re already distracted, you end up writing about an attachment to vehicles.

And that actually fits in with all of what I was getting at. Granted, some people are distracted by the antics of people who they implicitly give authority to with their attention, or have that societal attention deficit disorder as frameworks do what they were designed to.

When the earth rumbles and people realize just how powerless they really are – when they can’t run away from something and there’s nothing to fight – a morbid reality sets in that can’t be so easily dismissed… for a short while, anyway. It’s not as if understanding plate tectonics is going to save you from an earthquake. Breaks in frameworks begin to show, and the ambiguity of how safe one really is seeps into the society.

Time moves along, the ambiguity pumps are manned as people find explanations from either science or religion or that-person-down-the-street-who-knows-everything… they find some comfort, getting rid of that ambiguity.

And suddenly, they’re acting as if nothing happened at all. As if they are safe, as if the few hours of their lives they spent with seismologists was enough – because to them the world is dangerous to know about, it’s dangerous to understand what happens outside of those frameworks.

People don’t want answers. They want comfort.

And, oddly enough, that’s an important point on the way to where I was going.

Perspective

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spaceWe used to look up.

I don’t know exactly who I mean by ‘we’. Maybe it was my generation, when we had seen man actually make it to the moon. Maybe it was people of my mindset.  I’d like to think it was my generation, with parents who had watched the original series of ‘Star Trek’ – and our generation who saw the original ‘Star Wars’. Or,  ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, or even, ‘E.T.’.

We used to look up. We used to stare at the stars, some of us, while laying in the grass.

I’ve spent most of the day watching this live stream, in the background, as I read and did other things. It’s beautiful. It’s amazing. And we take it for granted, we sit there staring at phones, communicating about little of worth.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzMQza8xZCc]

The things of worth we do talk about are about how we can’t keep things from flooding, or people from doing dumb things, or arguing over which idiot is better than which – we who could put a man on the moon, who could build an international space station, who could go peeking at other planets like a nosy neighbor.

We have the capacity to know where we are on our own planet with accuracy that would make ancient mariners ecstatic, and we have that on devices that Tesla told us we would eventually have. It wasn’t so long ago that these things didn’t exist. We dreamed big.

Then the Internet happened – a complex system of communication, too complex for our communication as we began to talk to people around the world. Kittens and pornography propagated it across the world.

Some were so intent on selling their products, services and thoughts that they got really good at marketing. In fact, they got so good at marketing that their marketing became better than their products, services and thoughts.

Somewhere along the way, I think we stopped looking up with a sense of awe. We stopped seeing what our combined efforts could do if we chose to work together.

We should look up.

Arts And Technology

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Sisyphean TechnologyI found myself at my alma mater, discussing with the present Dean the divorce between Sciences and Literature a few weeks ago. It’s part of the concrete issue that I faced as a young man – in Trinidad and Tobago, then, probably around 1986, we were put into focused classes for Ordinary Level examinations.

There were paths for Modern Studies, Technical for the more hands on, and two Science classes. I made it into one of the two Science classes where we were driven down the science path – which most of us wanted. We were also required a language, which was Spanish. I was very happy with this at the time, only of the Computer Science aspect.

I was convinced Computer Science was my future, and to a large extent this was a self-fulfilling prophecy – as most prophecies seem to be.

In retrospect, as I spoke to the Dean of the school, a man younger than me, I looked back on how I wish I had the option to continue studying English Literature. I lost that when I got into the Science silo.

For 3 years prior, at the beginning of every summer vacation, I read all the books required for the next year. A voracious reader, I had read everything in the house already – all my father’s novels. Louis L’amour, James Clavell, Robert Ludlum, Stephen King, Zane Grey and Clive Cussler come immediately to mind. We also had an Encyclopedia from the early 1980s that I had read from end to end.

As I look back, I had two main passions but at the time I only understood the passion for one: Computer Science. The second, which I didn’t understand as a subject, was literature in it’s many forms – except plays. I thought reading plays was silly, and to a large extent I still do – you lose the forest for the trees, in my mind, and to write a forest one does not study trees but the forest. An opinion.

Now, what would have happened if I had been able to trade Spanish or Geography for English Literature? We could speculate a lifetime. I could say that the system failed me, but it’s not the system’s job to create individuals. In fact, when it comes to Education, what the system’s job is probably one of the most debated topics on the planet.

I can’t fix the Education system. That’s not the intent here. Nothing works for everyone, and it’s a fool’s errand to try to – but we set humanity’s most horrendous weapon to task, bureaucracy, and it grinds at young minds enough so that Pink Floyd wrote, “Another Brick In The Wall” as I began my very journey through the grind, beneath that wheel.

This isn’t about Education, though. This is about Learning, and the need to be balanced to at least be competent to some degree in sciences and art.

Just because you like being an individual who writes poetry doesn’t mean you won’t gain from understanding how a tree lives. Just because you like to know how things work doesn’t mean that you have to be spartan in your reading.

It was later on in life where I was rescued and given challenging things to read that tested my mind, poked and prodded it and teased out the importance of other things. It was an openness to knowledge that allowed me to do that, and while I was in a secondary school silo I did not feel that I had the time for such… luxury… such freedom to allow my mind to explore.

Yet I worked for decades with people who were generally horrid to communicate with, who weren’t aware of some of the lessons available in the Arts – about why society maybe should do some things and maybe shouldn’t do others. Ethics, and the roles as builders technologists play on the world stage. Philosophy. Being human. And in doing so, we forget what our role is, shrugging off the responsibility and putting it on others because we like our paychecks.

We should be better than that.