omenti

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.   

 

 

something deeply profound

David Epstein mentioned Hillel Einhorn's epiphany about happiness - something triggered by a fortune cookie.

a celebration of homophones

For those who use the American mm/dd/yyyy,  it suggests 3.14   With an error of about 0.05%, it’s a good enough approximation for many uses.  And those who use the more common dd/mm/yyyy notion can wait for the 22nd of July for 22/7. At  0.04% from the mark, this one's a slightly better approximation. 

 

But just how much Pi do you really need? Eight digits is overkill for most engineering tasks. NASA uses 16 digits .. 15 to the right of the decimal .. to navigate around the solar system going beyond Pluto. The most I can imagine would be to construct a high quality circle the radius of the known universe, about 46 billion light years, to the diameter of a hydrogen atom,. You’d need 38 significant digits for the task.

 

xkcd has a piece on approximations that’s painfully true. For some back of the envelope calculations in astrophysics and cosmology you can get by with crude approximations.

 

 

It’s also Einstein’s birthday. Pie, being a homophone of Pi, seems to the a good bet for the day. I have it on good authority he loved cherry pie and ice cream, so there you go.

 

He’s one of a dozen or so people who have quotes improperly ascribed to them.  He was a joker and much of what he did say is often taken out of context.  But here's a real one I love. Shortly before his death he was asked to offer advice to young people.  His reply was published in Life Magazine.

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day."   A. Einstein 1955

 

revisiting eliza the next generation

a minipost

With all the talk about large language models and applications like ChatGPT,  I recalled a post from about two and a half years ago:  eliza the next generation.  I'd say much the same now - some of the predictions have come about.  Of course it's only been a short while and I played with prototypes, so there's that:-)

 

It was high pandemic and I was spending quite a bit of time talking with friends who were working on interesting things.  Among other things I started to become aware of progress in large language models.  While many who work in AI (a poor label, but you get the idea without me having to talk about a variety of fields and subfields as well as what's unrelated), believed them a diversion, there was progress in LLMs and some interesting applications were emerging.  We chatted about where it could go and what techno-social issues might arise. (disclaimer: I'm not a techno-solutionist)  About the time I posted, Emily Bender at the University of Washington wrote a terrific paper on issues with natural language understanding and if we can believe what comes out of LLMs.  Recently an article on her work appeared in The Intelligencer.  It's a necessary read if only to understand her octopus analogy. 

 

This morning Gregg Vesonder and I exchanged some text messages. He's a serious AI guy with decades of experience and is someone who thinks deeply about social technical issues.  One of his comments:

We’ve seen this scene before, blinded by the hype. My concern this time is that explicit or inadvertent bias in the data can mask some nasty behavior that can subtly or not so subtly mask really tragic manipulations.

Aka speech acts. 

I hadn't thought about speech acts much before.  The definition and examples given in the link are excellent tools for thinking about these things. 

 

I'm not against LLMs and there are some useful applications beyond writing horoscopes in white bro-speak, but the dimensionality of the space for abuse strikes me as large.  As Suw Charman-Anderson notes, we're already seeing it in publishing. 

 

'AI' is a very large and diffuse collection.  Some areas are useful and potentially revolutionary.  Others are potentially dangerous.  We really need to think about these things rather than just trying them out and seeing what breaks.  The things that break may be far too valuable. 

 

 

befrending the imposter syndrome

[A minipost from my reply to Pip Coburn on his recent piece on student-mindedness]

 

The lesson came as I prepared for my thesis defense.  The Stony Brook physics department has three examiners:  two physicists - a theorist and an experimentalist (one is your advisor)  - and someone external to the department who is outside your field.  How I found mine is a long story, but the choice made a huge difference. He was a surgery professor and an accomplished violinist, which seemed reasonably remote from the semileptonic decay mode of charmed particles. The committee members get a draft of the thesis a few months before the defense. Ideally that's when major issues generally uncovered. I thought the surgeon wouldn’t have much to say, but he *really* wanted to understand what it was about.  He was a serious and intensely curious student, with a range far beyond medicine. His particle physics was about on par with my surgical skills, so I had to describe my work to extremely bright student who had a very different background. Spread over two months we spent at least twenty hours together.  His "dumb" (the label he chose) questions gifted me with a deeper insight into what I'd done.  There was so much I hadn’t thought deeply enough about.  

 

Over a good meal one night he said he used to be intimidated by experts outside his field until he discovered they were often intimidated by him. If you feel intimidated it’s a sign there's something to learn and perhaps you can learn something.  Over those two months I learned a bit about surgery and Bach violin sonatas, but the real learning was to to welcome and appreciate the imposter syndrome (I didn’t know to term until much later). Also I learned something about communication.  What I didn’t learn was how to effectively communicate the work to high school students - but that’s another story.

 

Since then I’ve been on a number of defense committees. Only one was physics. The rest have been all over the place and have been fantastic opportunities to learn and get a bit of insight from a developing expert. Hopefully some of my dumb questions help them as much as my surgeon friend's dumb questions helped me. 

 

latin

Ab his via sterniture ad maiora.

 

In about 1820 the local monarch ordered Carl Friedrich Gauss to carry out a survey of the Kingdom of Hanover.   The great mathematician toiled away on the survey for about four years.  While physically difficult and stressful, it's nature gave Gauss something interesting to think about.  

 

Halfway through he realized you could chop a flat map up into small triangles and get an approximation for the topography, but it could never be perfect. The Euclidian geometry we tend to think of where parallel lines never meet and the sum of the angles of a triangle is always 180° just doesn't work.¹  He set his mind to consider the geometry of curved spaces.  It undoubtedly seemed nutty to anyone but a mathematician at the time, but he pushed on and developed the Theorema Egregium - a masterpiece of thought.  At a high level it shows you can determine the curvature of a surface with just local measurements.  You don't need to consider the space the surface is embedded in. Among other things it tells you why we hold pizza the way we do and that the sum of the angles on a sphere is greater than 180° and changes on an egg and the border of Wyoming isn't a rectangle..   Here I link to a great explanation by the wonderful Cliff Stoll.

 

Gauss realized this was fundamental, but only a beginning.  At the beginning of his paper describing the discovery was this phrase:

 Ab his via sterniture ad maiora - 'From here the path to something more important is prepared'

Indeed it was. Thirty or so years later Bernhard Riemann generalized what Gauss had started.  Its beauty was appreciated and enhanced by a few mathematicians until Albert Einstein needed a tool to describe the curvature of spacetime.  And there it was - a beautiful, but fairly obscure, mathematical result from the mid 19^th century revolutionized physics 70 years later. Our Universe is not Euclidian .. that's only an illusion, albeit a very good approximation most of the time,  dictated by where we live and our senses.  Among mathematicians Gauss is a great  GOAT candidate.²

 

We didn't have Latin in high school and I probably wouldn't have taken it anyway.  Since then I've learned a little on my own, but am very rusty. Still, there are phrases that seem more useful than their English equivalents.  Encountering one you pause and think a bit.  This is one I use encouraging people working on long term goals where much of the day to day grind to major accomplishments seem like small steps on the way to the goal. It is a reminder to keep pushing ahead.

__________

¹ Think of lines of lines of latitude on the Earth.  They intersect the equator at right angles added to 180°.  The angle they subtend at the pole is greater than 0°, so the sum of all three is greater than 180°.

² The story of a school master telling the seven year old Gauss to add the integers from 1 to 100 to occupy him for an hour appears in a summation of his life shortly after his death.  Given the problem, he thought for awhile and answered 5050.  He wrote the integers 1 through 100, folded the series and added .. so 1+100, 2+99 and so on. Each pair sums to 101 and there are 50 such pairs so 50*101 = 5050.  He had shown the sum of integers from 1 to n = n(n + 1)/2.  

I don't know if it was apocryphal, but he was doing serious math a few years later.

 

 

beyond abracadabra

More than a few in my line of work, particularly those from the generation before me, are amateur musicians.  The first time it became clear to me was in Gale Dick's living room on Friday evenings. He loved to play the violin and had a nice homemade harpsichord as well as a piano.  Friends would come to play, or in my case just listen to, chamber music.  Regulars included a couple of physicists, a mathematician, a chemist, as well as some real musicians who seemed to enjoy themselves anyway.  It was great fun and the beginning of a life-long addiction to live music, even though I'm just a lurker. 

 

Years later I asked Gale if he understood the connection.  He paused and then replied Bach letting it sink in before elaborating.  Bach ... you see, so much of it has beautiful symmetries...   He recalled when he was coming to grips with group theory in grad school.  The year before he'd come across Noether's Theorem and was blown away.¹  Years later, deep into the thicket of a difficult problem,  he found himself playing a Bach violin sonata in his mind.  

Then magic crackled and the work I was doing connected rather profoundly to those other areas. 

Words came easily to him and new ones, or at least ones I couldn't find in the dictionary, would appear.  As he described the violin sonata sequence, one I hadn't heard before appeared:

You see, Bach's music is this abracadaptor that connects two different kinds of magic giving birth to something that is also magic.

 

That was a long time ago.  Years later I found myself giving a talk at Disney Animation.  After lunch I spent the afternoon chatting with a number of people.  Then it happened.  We were talking about the curious physics that often appears in cartoons.  He said that Walt Disney had a set of rules that defined how things moved in his world building.  The rules are good enough that most survive intact. 

They're the abracadaptor that connects the original story with the artwork.  When it's well done the resulting magic is better than what went into it. 

 

Today I found myself using it in a text message to Sarah.  The beach volleyball season that ultimately determines selection for the Paris Olympics begins in Doha tomorrow.  She and her new partner Sophie have only been playing together for a short time and are still working things out.  

You’re armed with some new knowledge and are likely making great progress putting your abracadaptor into regular operation.°

° abracadaptor. n. - A mechanism or technique that connects two different kinds of magic.

 

There are people who do this: that rare skill that allows them to connect the conversation of those with very different backgrounds creating a deep and wonderful communication.  It's a skill I lack and I'm in awe of the few who can do it.  I like to use some engineering terminology to describe these people - impudence matches.  At its highest level two different magics are connected creating something deeper and an abracadaptor is afoot.

 

__________

¹ Don't worry about either of these if they sound foreign.  Both are important tools in the study of symmetry and deeply connected with physics.

 

2 december 1942 - a half watt

4:00 PM 2-Dec-1942

Compton: The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.

Conant: How were the natives?

Compton: Very friendly

 

Almost exactly 80 years ago the first human-made self sustaining nuclear reaction took place under the stands of a vacant football field at the University of Chicago.  It's a remarkable story and something of a race with Nazi Germany.  Fortunately so many competent physicists had fled Germany that the Nazi bomb project was a failure.  It turns out the wikipedia article on the subject is an accurate and readable summary of the dawn of the pre-manhattan project effort to get a handle on nuclear fission.  The piece  gets a bit technical here and there, but you can skip over those parts if you like.  I'll try and give a high level view of what a sustained reaction is without going into the quantum mechanics of the process.

__________

 

Nuclear fission is the process where the nucleus of an atom breaks apart into smaller pieces releasing energy (often quite a bit) in the process.  The nucleus of an atom is a tight cluster made up of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons.

All of those positive changes packed together - you might ask why don't they fly apart? After all, electromagnetism causes like charges repel.  It turns out a very strong force, cleverly called the strong force, acts on neutrons and protons binding them together.  A difference between the two forces becomes important.  Electromagnetism is a long range force while the strong force only acts over short subatomic distances. To first order you can think of the strong force acting only between immediate neighbors while the electromagnetic force acts on all of the protons.

If the nucleus gets big enough the total repulsive electromagnetic force of all of the protons overcomes the closest-neighbor strong force and breaks the nucleus up in to smaller pieces releasing energy in the process (nuclear fission)

Most of the elements we're used to have nuclei that are too small to break up on their own.  A few are on the borderline. In the case of uranium the addition of a single neutron is enough to undergo fission and in the process it releases energy and, on average somewhat more than two extra neutrons along with a couple of nuclei that are smaller than uranium.¹

In nature uranium usually isn't concentrated and the neutrons from fission are absorbed by other materials.² But if you concentrate uranium you get to a point where each fission has a high probability of striking another uranium nucleus and so on - creating a sustained reaction. Unchecked, with enough purity, and you get an atomic bomb. At lower concentrations and with the ability control the amount of neutron absorption you get a controlled nuclear reactor that liberates a useful amount of energy.

 

A number of interesting characters were involved in these early experiments.  Enrico Fermi was the key player in the first sustained reaction.  Physics was getting specialized and he was probably the last physicist who was both a great theorist and experimentalist. 

__________

¹ I've left out a lot.  I haven't mentioned which isotope of uranium for example.  Also - you may have noticed that adding an extra neutron shouldn't increase the electromagnetic force as the neutron is neutral.  It turns out the uranium nuclei is so close to breaking up that the kinetic energy of the addition neutron adds just enough to break things up.  A nice example is adding a neutron to U-235.  One possible fission chain  n + U-235 → Rb-92 + Cs-140 + 3n + 200 MeV of energy. 

Also details of the strong force weren't known at the time..  A clear hypothesis didn't arrive until about 30 years later and deeper details of the mechanism took almost thirty more..

² A natural formations of uranium t pure enough to initiate sustained nuclear reactions was discovered in Gabon.  It operated for a few hundred thousand years producing less than a megawatt of power.  

 

 

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 in on a clear cold Winter day.  That's something that captures most of us know - the radiant heat of the Sun isn't 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 aprocity 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.