omenti

creativity in film and beyond

Unburdened by the plastic wrap so common to art books, it was sitting  in the bookstore and was reminded how much I wanted it.  A copy of The Art of WolfWalkers. Ten minutes of delight, but it was too spendy for this trip.  

 

 WolfWalkers is the third in a set devoted to Irish myth from Cartoon Salon - a tiny studio in Kilkenny, Ireland that has won respect from Pixar, Disney Animation and Studio Ghibli.  It's on Apple TV+ if you like amazing animation. 

 

Animation studios and art schools are amazing places.  Years ago they seemed like black boxes that took stories and turned them into animation.  More recently I've been involved with one and am wobbled by the amount of creativity and work play that goes into the most simple moments.  It's always a team effort spread among disciplines and years.  

 

After a few months I finally bought the book. Just wow!   Here's a video of a roundtable the before the film was released.  It was my introduction to the film (although not to the myth or its historical offshoot as Kilkenny is an ancestral home). 

 

It's worth writing about as (a) some of you may enjoy and even love it and, (b) creativity in the era of generative AI  is something I've been spending time on this past year an animation studio and two universities.  Signals have emerged. 

 

The New Yorker published a must-read piece on AI and Art by Ted Chiang.  Given my experience with animation studios, a music conservatory and physics and math, I'm in conditional agreement.  I do see a place as a tool, even in the creative arts, but more as a tool to relieve drudgery rather than become 'thought'.  I use it to organize references in papers as well as to create simple programs that involve freshman level programming for simple but time-consuming tasks.  I stay far away when precision and accuracy are needed and I don't see the creative spark. 

 

Film studios, musicians, and artists worry about wholesale theft of their work in the short term and the potential, if these tools improve, that we'll see more 'art' of lower caliber largely because human-created art is too expensive.  I think the later isn't possible with generative AI - at least not for quality work.  That doesn't mean real art won't be forced out by economic pressures. 

 

As for schools I worry teenagers may take the easy way out in pursuit of easy grades and free time. They'll be cheating themselves.   The world has no need for more high school essays, but that isn't why they're assigned. On the other hand student can learn about tasks these tools can help them with.  That's going to be more important in college.  I've been on two task forces and some schools are developing solid measures as well as the ability to change with time.  The guiding light is "are you teaching them how to think?"  

 

Clearly we're in a fascinating time.  I think we'll see some real carnage in the industry and use cases before signals we probably haven't thought about emerge.  But in the meantime we have beautiful art.   If you haven't seen WolfWalkers, you're in for a treat!

 

 

hard rockers and soft rockers

The Roadside Geology series has been around and growing  for over 50 years.  I have over a dozen and they're wonderful.  Each focuses on the geology you'll see as you travel along roads in regions the US.  They vary a bit in style given the variety authors and the publication dates.  They're very accessible to the beginner and useful for the amateur. They're also small for easy storage when you travel.

 

The trigger for the post was the most recent eruption in Iceland.  Iceland may well be going into a period of great volcanic activity - the sort of thing that comes around every millennia or so.  Yesterday's eruption was the sixth in a few months.  There are usually webcams covering these events, but Shawn Willsey posts videos with expert discussions.  He's a hard rocker (soft rockers study fossils or formations associated with organics like oil and natural gas) and co-author of the Idaho edition of Roadside Geology.    Hard rockers are among the most gonzo scientists - the types who are willing to take what seem like unreasonable risks.¹  Shawn does most of his work in the West, but interviews geologists from around the world.   His videos are unpolished, but often fascinating.  Check out his live section for recent eruptions. 

 

Any vulcanology discussion usually involves rheology - the study of how materials deform under pressure.  It's one of those areas that describes what goes on in the eye under pressure, much of geology, toothpaste, why cake batter goes up the beater in an electric mixer, and non-Newtonian fluids.  Studying it requires differential equations, but if you're curious here's an easy to read discussion that gets into the science most people never see as undergrads.

snip

...

Two of the key concepts in rheology were developed by scientists who also made significant contributions to optics: Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. (Hooke and Newton lived in England in the 17th century. Newton (a Cambridge man) poked things in his eye as he developed theory of optics. Hooke (an Oxford man) discovered cells and published the first book on microscopy. They did not get on.)

...

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¹ A good friend who did his PhD in geophysics at Caltech likes to freeclimb frozen waterfalls for fun.  You don't want to go hiking with him (speaking from experience). A storied geophysics professor at Stony Brook was known for being the first person set foot on Surtsey shortly after it emerged from the North Atlantic. He left in his Zodiac a few hours before it exploded and vanished from view for a month or so. 

Shaun, in an interview of a vulcanologist from North Carolina State University, noted they met a few years ago in Iceland. A large number of Icelanders and tourists had hiked to a safe distance.  He noticed the only other person dressed in protective gear and taking samples of the flow and decided to introduce himself.

Sukie (my wife) would counter that some wildlife field work is as crazy.  She's been stung by hundreds of wasps, has growled down a jaguar and still suffers from something unknown she caught in the Amazon.  Her people, when they get together,  tell stories and show wounds (like missing fingers)

 

beyond david mackay?

a minipost

David MacCay was a remarkable fellow.  Curious and cross-disciplinary, he worked in applied math, physics and engineering research at Cambridge.  Passionate about doing something about global warming, he happened to be a great communicator.  I had a few interactions with him: first about thirty years ago playing with neural networks and later in the mid 2000s as he was putting together Sustainable energy – Without the Hot Air - probably the clearest book written on energy production and demand.  You can still buy the book and  proceeds go to support some good charities.  David updated the book online until his early death in 2016.  It's free online, but the printed version is a better experience.

 

The book is written at two levels - one for folks without a mathematical background and a somewhat deeper version that assumes an understanding of high school physics. David goes into depth building easy to understand models and then plugs in numbers from past and present technologies.  The last step is where the book is flawed.  Enormous advances have been made in solar and wind power technology and prices have fallen dramatically.  A few of David's conclusions relevant ten years ago are now dated.  For example he shows that wind power and solar are insufficient for the UK, even in an ideal world without existing infrastructure and bureaucratic inertias. The last two roadblocks still exist almost everywhere, but the underlying story has changed.

 

Brian O'Callaghan's group at THAT other English university have published an updated look at solar and wind energy in the UK and come to the conclusion that they are practical and nearly sufficient at scale.  Here's the summary of their policy paper.  Their technical papers are solid and thorough.   I suspect Sir David would be proud.

 

In addition to getting an important  update, there's an important lesson here.  When describing current and future technology scenarios it's extremely important to lay down some clear thinking that is largely independent of current and future inputs.  The basis of this type of scenario is really just a solid foundation that's waiting for inputs.   It's rare to see ones that work twenty or  more years in the future.   David's did and does... it just needed updated inputs.

 

 

 

non-neutral technologies and a book recommendation

I’m of the opinion that almost every technology that touches, directly or indirectly, society is not neutral. This may not be apparent at first to users at large even though some of the risks are known early on. A case in point is coal in the industrial revolution. Tyndall and even Fourier recognized the climate changing potential of pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere. A larger number of people recognized the health issues from pollution in the air and water. And there was an enormous economic displacement that took a few generations to iron out (pardon the pun). So what was the major problem from the point of view of governments (especially the military branches) and industry? That coal could run out in as little as 50 years.

 

We’re in an age of running fast and breaking things and well as laws. ‘AI’ has emerged as something seen as an existential threat by some (a diversionary tactic largely for castle wall-building imho) and direct harm that is taking place now by others. I put ‘AI’ in scare quotes as it covers so many very different technologies. Now generative pre-trained transformers - LLMs - like ChatGPT are hot. It has a few lovely uses, but there’s a good deal of misapplication, legal issues and cases of direct harm. Machine learning is another branch (although it’s used in the GPTs) with it’s own shiny wins and pitfalls. And there are embedded bits in the devices, programs and services we use all the time.

 

So how do you navigate these and potentially avoid mistakes? Very few people can hope keep up on with the technical side.

 

Juliette Powell (caveat - a close friend of mine) has a new book out on Tuesday co-written with her business partner, Art Kleiner. The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology is a distillation of s her work at Columbia. The first part is a non-technical look at the systems and how they might be improved to minimize harm. The next part focuses on what uses - businesses, etc - can do to minimize risks to themselves and others.

 

A number of people from the tech and society and tech world have seen it and given enthusiastic thumbs up signals. People ranging from Ester Dyson, who wrote the forward, to deep legal and social thinker Brett Frischmann. I’ve been involved in building a few systems that have some severe constraints - mostly machine learning in astrophysics and cosmology. I’m clearly not a technologist or social scientist, but I actively follow those who are trying to understand these systems more deeply.

 

I followed her work at Columbia and this is a nice summary and extension. Thumbs up!!

 

If you prefer audio books, Juliette took on the narration task. She has an excellent reading voice.

 

teaching kids science outdoors

I've been following Ben Blonder for some time.  He's a young career ecologist at Berkeley. Along the way he's been involved in projects teaching kids science.  He's just published a new book on teaching science to kids outside.  Trust me - Ben knows what he's doing and has involved some of his collaborators in the book.  (I know his dad well ..  Greg describes this as a true labor of love, and it shows)

Place-Based Scientific Inquiry

The online/downloadable version is free.  If you buy a copy, profits will be donated to science education. 

It looks like the focus is grade 3 → 12.   It's probably good for those of you doing a bit of amateur science for fun.

recommended!!!

 

 

 

 

spoken, written, and semi-spoken language

a minipost

My wife thinks it's funny when I'm talking with a native-speaking Montanan. After about fifteen minutes my accent shifts towards my almost hidden native accent.  It's still there,  buried under so many years living out of the state.  The funny thing is neither I nor my Montanan friend notice what's happening.  Similarly I can code-switch and fit into the culture of my parents church - at least over the phone as my beard and dress don't conform with the standards. 

 

In high school I spent a lot of time in Alberta and became fascinated by Canadian English.  I didn't realize Albertan, like the Montanan, was a dialect of its own.  There were the obvious Canadianisms comedians emphasize, but my attempts at using them were unconvincing.  Canadians tend to be unusually polite, but deep down inside they know your attempts are clueless. In college I ran into people from all over the world and quickly got to the point where many of the "rules" of spoken English didn't bother me like they did my k-12 teachers.  

 

A friend happens to be a computational linguist specializing in the rhythm and sound of a language - the prosody of language. Getting this part right - good enough to begin to add the meaning in speech that's often missing in text - is one of those hard problems.  I've read a few  of the papers in her field and find them jargon laden and bewildering.  Still, there's something very important that we just do naturally.  There's another branch of linguistics that's more accessible.  Sociolinguists studies how society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context impacts language.   The good stuff all of us use and misuse. Aalthough nothing like earlier changes in the language, there's constant change. The Gen Z meaning of wholesome comes to mind as a  recent shift in progress.

 

One of my most dramatic experiences with the sociology of language came as I was finishing my graduate work. A Chinese professor who didn't speak English was visiting the physics department. Not really an issue as there were several native-born professors and graduate students.  I was working something out on a blackboard and didn't realize he was watching.  He walked up, took a piece of chalk (yes -- we had lovely chalk back then), and gave me a look that asked permission to annotate what I was doing. It turned out he was interested in the same area.  We went back and forth using drawings and equations that were part of the culture we shared and had a lovely conversation for about fifteen minutes.  It occurred to me afterwards that we were relying on facial expressions and posture along with the chalk marks and never spoke a word.  Afterwards I reproduced what remained on the blackboard in my lab notebook.  Not that it was profound, but rather that it was such a nice chat.  He was only around for a few more days, but there were grins every time we saw each other.

 

Two weeks ago a linguist (not the prosody expert) gave me a beginner's tour of sociolinguistics by Valerie Fridland: Like, Literally, Dude  Arguing for the Good in Bad English.   It's great fun! Learn where change in language comes from (hint - it's not upperclass/educated males), how text messaging is entirely different for teens and their 35 year old parents, why ums and uhs in speech are beneficial and much more.   I'd go for the audiobook as she gives acoustic examples.  I'm not good at communication, but now at least I'm a bit more aware.   

 

 

beyond the equal sign

 

 

 

About ten years ago I devoted a good deal of time to learning a bit of category theory - an area of abstract mathematics that's become important to physics.  It deals with relationships rather than objects, abstractions and analogies, context, sameness, equivalence rather than equality, how you see patterns, and much more.  It can impact thinking in many areas beyond mathematics. It provides a rigorous framework that gives choice in how problems are approached and take you beyond  putting things in boxes that don't always make sense.

 

It's very technical, but Eugenia Cheng has written an excellent non-major freshman level book with the goal of getting art students to think about the world differently.  I suspect it will work for many other people - particularly those who have to deal with complexity and seeing curious patterns that are otherwise missed.  The Joy of Abstraction is one of those rare books that can change how you see the world.  I'd recommend getting a physical version and doing the exercises. (I don't buy books from Amazon and recommend you support local bookstores)

 

Steve Strogatz chatted with her on this episode of his Joy of Wh(y) podcast.  Listen even if the book doesn't strike you as interesting!

 

 

finding what works

 

It’s a clear winter night as I write these last words. I’ve stepped out to look at the sky. With the stars up above and the blackness of space, I can’t avoid feeling awe.

How could we, Homo sapiens, an insignificant species on an insignificant planet adrift in a middleweight galaxy, have managed to predict how space and time would tremble after two black holes collided in the vastness of the universe a billion light-years away? We knew what that wave should sound like before it got here. And, courtesy of calculus, computers, and Einstein, we were right.

That gravitational wave was the faintest whisper ever heard. That soft little wave had been headed our way from before we were primates, before we were mammals, from a time in our microbial past. When it arrived that day in 2015, because we were listening—and because we knew calculus—we understood what the soft whisper meant.

                 Steve Strogatz 

 

Chatting with a friend the subject of gravity came up.  It isn't a conventional force, but we perceive it as one.  Rather it's connected with the curvature of a four-dimensional object called space-time that we happen to live in.  The fundamental concepts aren't intuitive and the math that describes it is beyond what you might get in an engineering degree.  So how to describe it?  There are very high level books and videos that speak in terms of balls on rubber sheets and then jump to oddities like clocks running faster on mountain tops and blackholes.  I usually find them a bit fluffy and disappointing.  They're bound by assumptions about their audience, so it's not a major criticism. It's just that I was talking with one person and something a bit deeper seemed appropriate.  Just how do you find the right level and where do you go from there?

 

A few years ago Wired produced the 5 Levels series.  An expert would try to explain something about a complex subject to five people:  a child, a teenager, an undergrad majoring in the same subject, a grad student and, finally, a colleague.   My favorite is Donna Strickland on lasers - give it a watch, she's excellent:

I went through something like this just before my Ph.D. thesis defense.  I was to explain my thesis work to a group of high school students. At first I thought it would be easy, but that notion quickly evaporated.  It turned out to be one of the most difficult and embarrassing things I've done.  My advisor stepped in near the end of the talk and summed everything up beautifully.  Afterwards he told me if you understand something deeply, you can explain the gist of it to a high school student.  That's high on the list of the most important things I've learned. 

 

My friend has a BA in biochemistry and knows about differential equations so I figured I should aim for something between the vague videos and what a senior level general relativity course offers.  The more I thought about it I realized it would be best to talk about the history and use a bit of calculus and geometry.  I had the advantage of knowing her well and she can stop and ask questions or give a blank look along the way.  And afterwards she was going to talk about something where she has serious expertise. 

 

Steve Strogatz is an applied math professor at Cornell. He's written several books including the one the opening quote is taken from: Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe.   It's an excellent read that makes no assumption on your mathematical background.¹  Thinking about it gave me some hints of how I might proceed.

 

First why do I have to use math?  Why won't words work?  The laws of nature obey logic that we can make predictions from.  Math, calculus in particular, is a logical calculating tool.  In a way it's a prothesis. Math lets us take a bit of logic, write down and perform logical manipulations that far exceed what we can do in our head, and then interpret the results. The logic can be crafted to represent something about the science.   Every once and awhile the results can make predictions that can lead to new discoveries, but more often they're used to to solve an enormous range of problems.   And why calculus?  Much of the  underlying structure of nature has been successfully expressed with the corner of calculus known as differential equations.  "Why?' is a deeper question.  If one encountered an intelligent alien who understood some aspects of how the Universe worked, I suspect they'd use math.  I suspect, but it's only my suspicion, that it's deeper than an artifact of how we think about things. 

 

I spent a couple of hours writing.  How general relativity came about, a bit on the structure of space-time, what goes into the main equation and how a simple prediction could be calculated.  Then about an hour of chatting that left me with two delightful philosophical questions that will probably lead to more discussions as well as her turn to teach me something. 

 

Whatever your expertise, it can be fun to try and explain the gist and maybe even the beauty of it (those can be he same thing) to someone with a very different background.   If you're like me you'll fail at first, but eventually you'll get to a point where you can find the right grounding, the right words and perhaps the right drawings or even music (some of you are artists and musicians).

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¹ By all accounts he's a wonderful teacher and has become a popularizer of math.  Among other things he's created a college course at Cornell for people who think they're afraid of math and have generally put it off until their senior year. 

 

 

 

 

preview season

As many of you know I like to celebrate major accomplishments of friends.  This time I'll offer previews from two good friends as well as another that could have an impact on education.

 

The first is  Juliette Powell's second book.  The A.I. Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology is the working title and it's a further development of her dissertation at Columbia.  I've been fortunate enough to have read the nearly-final draft.  Well balanced and accessible to non-specialists, it's going to be an excellent resource for people trying to sort out promises and pitfalls that can impact much of the future.  One person who had an advance look will be using it as required reading for a college course.  Be on the lookout!

 

The second is from Sarah Pavan.  One of the best beach volleyball players in the world, she's also a clear and deep thinker.  As I've aged I've learned to learn from those outside my area.  She's  been a source of ideas. At the elite level women's beach volleyball is a mental game with communication being one of the defining aspects.  A few months ago her teammate of five years decided to quit the team.  Sarah was faced with finding someone with the necessary complementary skill set as well as the drive, passion, ability to communicate and chemistry.  Canada only has a few candidates, but Sarah found the right one in Sophie Bukovec.  I expect to see them developing as a team over the next year as they focus on the Paris Olympics in 2024.

 

 

And finally potential news from what I consider the most important college course in the country. Sense & Sensibility & Science is a course at Berkeley developed and taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology departments.   Here's an overview:

 

This is a course on the ideas from science that are most widely useful for everyone. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for all kinds of reasoning, from reading the news critically to making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy.

Every day we make decisions that can and should be informed by science. We make decisions as individuals, as voters, and as members of our various communities. We make decisions as students and parents and policy makers. The problem is, we don’t do it so well—a fact sadly apparent in political debates. It’s easy to blame poor decision-making on the greed, irresponsibility, ignorance, or incompetence of other people. But the problem seems to be more basic than that. It seems we face a paradox. Living in a democracy means that everyone’s view counts the same as everyone else’s. But to make decisions informed by science, we often need to defer to those with relevant expertise. Therefore, we shouldn't rely on a democratic system to make the best decisions. Or should we? This basic tension between science and democratic decision-making serves as a unifying theme for Sense & Sensibility & Science (SSS), a course that aims to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers. We will explore key aspects of scientific thinking that everyone should know, especially the many ways that we humans tend to fool ourselves, and how to avoid them—including how to differentiate signal from noise, evaluate causal claims, and avoid reasoning biases. We’ll then look at the best models for using science to guide decisions, since the rational and arational (e.g., values, fears, and goals) then have to be combined. We will explore these themes experientially, often with in-class activities and discussions, and we will culminate in two open-ended projects to design better methods of deliberation and decision making, first as groups, and then as individuals. Co-taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology, S&S&S fosters intellectual advancement for interdisciplinary knowledge seekers.

 

Browse through the topics and resources section.  You'll get something reading the recommended materials and thinking about the topics.  It's one of the few places outside the community where I've seen scientific optimism discussed. A book is being developed aimed at college students, although it should be widely applicable.  There's a serious need to put together something like this at the high school level even though many states would probably label thinking about the process of science as 'woke'..

feel free to comment!

an almost lost word from the dictionary

Reading an obscure paper from the 1880s a word stopped me - apricity.  It seemed like I had come across it before and there were hints from the context, but it was time for the OED.¹  I pulled out the first volume of my old compact edition - the one with the magnifying glass - and found it.  An obscure word dating to 1623 meaning the warmth of the Sun in the Winter.

 

The warmth of a bright Sun on a clear cold Winter day.  That's something that captures most of us know - the radiant heat of the Sun isn't perturbed by the cold air and can be quite comfortable.  Then it hit me I heard the word in a John McPhee lecture in Princeton.² A few decades had passed since he wrote Coming into the Country, but it was about three Alaskas including a look at the Winter.  A perfect word for some of the days.

 

A day of apricity can make snow melt in subzero air temperatures on  Southern-facing roofs only to freeze into beautifully clear long icicles at the edge.  This type of ice formation is often free of bubbles producing beautifully clear ice.  If you have wide enough icicles you might try making an ice lens and starting a fire.

 

Such days are made for outdoor recreation if there isn't any wind.  Perhaps more importantly the basic principle - heat transfer by radiation - can keep heating expenses down.  Heating and moving air to fill rooms is enormously inefficient. If you aren't moving around much you might try a small radiant heater and point it at the area where you are. Heat what you need to heat with infrared light. Direct sunlight is the same...  sit in the Sun.  These measures, plus wearing warm indoor clothing and being somewhat active lets you get away with low thermostat settings.  And be on the lookout for apricity as that can give a big psychological boost!

 

Another Winter word I like is tingilinde. It's a constructed word based on J.R.R. Tolkien's elfin language Quenya meaning the sparkle of the starlight reflecting on the snow on a dark moonless Winter night.  Such sights could be spectacular in Montana away from town when it was really cold and a bit of new snow had fallen as tiny ice crystals. Another great spot is Yellowstone .. super cold air forms the right kind of ice crystal snow near the hot springs and geysers.   Once it was magical - the cold starlight reflecting from millions of tiny diamonds along with the greens and reds of a bright aurora dancing overhead.   On such nights you don't notice that it's really cold.

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¹ The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is the 1928 edition.  Devilishly small print that requires a magnifying glass, but the real OED and only about $80 (still a lot back then!) rather than the fortune the full dictionary went for.  There's a lovely bit of historical fiction on the dictionary and the people who made it happen:  The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.  It's set in the time and place with many of the characters, but focuses on what was left out..  those who weren't white, male and of a certain class.  Recommended!

² McPhee is a great writer - a master of the creative non-fiction genre.