I haven’t blogged in almost a month, and I can totally feel it. My brain is so overflowing with ideas that I forgot to pay the electric bill this month, in between work, school, trips to DC and SF, and trying to come up with the ultimate Scrabble player ranking system.

I’m sure many of you have come across the spinning ballerina right brain/left brain test. I’m also sure many of you went through a 30 minute period of obsessively trying to make the ballerina spin the “other” way. (After several such 30 minute periods, I managed to make the ballerina switch at will, which led me to exclaim “I am master of my own mind!”) If you see the ballerina spinning counter-clockwise, you’re left brian dominant (logical, analytical, etc.) whereas if you see the ballerina spinning clockwise, you’re right brain dominant (creative, do things by feel).

For me, the ballerina spins clockwise by default, and it takes some effort to get her to switch and go counter-clockwise. I am (to my surprise, and maybe yours as well) utterly dominated by my right brain.

Well, maybe it’s not that surprising. If you look back at my post on not going to work at Facebook, there is very little evidence of any sort of rational thought. (As Facebook continues to hire amazing people and heads for a 15 billion dollar valuation, the decision seems less rational than ever.) That said, when I look back on major decisions I’ve made in my life, the only ones I regret are ones where I went with the pragmatic decision over what ‘felt’ best. I’ve been trying to learn from that, and figure out some way to get my left brain to shut the fuck up and let the right brain run the show.

Then there’s the whole math thing. For this, I’m going to reference my very first blog post ever. Looking back on it now, it reads like a plea from a right-brained student to all of those left-brained math teachers to teach math in a way that lets people like me connect with it. If I had never read The Man Who Knew Infinity, I might have become a lawyer or something (shudder.)

Labels: math, cognition

[ 1 comments ]

Dave Winer is one of my pet peeves; his only redeeming quality is that he may be the most aptly named human being on the planet.  He’s whining about the use of the term ’social graph’ as opposed to ’social network’, and claims that the people who use the term ‘graph’ to describe our web of social connections are idiots.

There really is nothing more annoying than being called an idiot by one of your pet peeves, so forgive me if the rest of this blog post comes off as a bit harsh.

Here are a few things you might not want to do if your primary goal is to not sound like an idiot:

• Spell ‘theorems’ as ‘theorums’.
• Claim that all graphs are four colourable. The non-idiotic version of this statement is ‘all planar graphs are four colourable‘. (Don’t like my British spelling? Bite me. My graph theory textbook was written by a dude who spoke the King’s English.)
• Say that combinatorics is related to statistics. This statement is arguably more misleading than the ’social graph’ terminology Dave is railing against– combinatorics is related to the statistics of coin flips, but not to things like bell curves or regression or anything else that a normal person would associate with ’statistics’.

Looking over this list, I wonder if Dave’s idiocy wasn’t a strategic attempt to prove his point– if a nominal “math major” like Dave Winer doesn’t know anything about graph theory, how can we expect a mere mortal to understand it? This sort of thing drives me crazy– it plays off of math phobia to trick people into thinking this stuff is really hard and that they’re not capable of understanding it.

Bad form, Dave. You’re on my list. Well, you were on my list before. But now you’re like, even higher on the list.

Labels: math, social networks, rants

[ 1 comments ]

i had an especially good teacher for intro to philosophy– tom polger, who was a graduate student at the time. i’m tempted to pick up his book, natural minds– even though i’m not sympathetic to identity theory, i’d like to give tom yet another chance to change my mind.

at the time, i was starting to wrap my head around ideas like non-euclidean geometry and the axiom of choice, and i was curious about how far people had gone in terms of exploring the limits of logic and language. figuring that no one takes things father than philosophers, i asked tom if anyone had ever tried to ‘axiomatize the world’, and he took me to his office and showed me his copy of wittgenstein’s tractatus logicio-philosophicus. the title is as long as the book is short– there are seven primary propositions, most of which have numbered subpropositions that are commentary on the primary propositions (this map shows the tree structure of the book).

i was thinking about the tractatus the other day– not so much as philosophy, but as a piece of literature. google searches for various combinations of “deconstruction”, “tractatus”, and “wittgenstein” didn’t turn up anything, which may just indicate that i don’t really get what deconstruction is all about. the brevity of the tractatus makes reading it feel like going through an advanced math proof, where enormous amounts of complex context and background information is referenced in passing. and yet, one of the primary arguments of the book is that philosophy is not like science or math, but rather that philosophical problems and questions are simple misuses of language, such that after you finish the book and understand it, you should throw it away because everything it says is nonsense. it seems like such an odd way to write a philosophy text that argues that philosophy is just a silly misunderstanding– i suppose the idea is that if you’re going to spew nonsense, it’s best to spew as little as possible.

i’ve been toying with the idea of doing a cover of some piece of writing using the literary style of the tractatus. sean suggested “there’s a monster at the end of this book”. right now, i’m thinking “animal farm” would make a good candidate. i’d also like to write up a qad rails app that would facilitate the reading and writing of tractatus-esque pieces of literature. right now, this is all brain crack. it would help if the next time we talk, you ask me about how this little project is going, and then berate me when i say that i haven’t really started it yet. and don’t let me off the hook when i try to claim that i’m busy with finals, that’s total bs.

Labels: math, literature, philosophy

[ 0 comments ]

i went to the heather gold show last night with sean and sean’s friend gordon from the internet archive. the show last night was on continuous partial attention, which is a term that seems to intuitively makes sense to anyone who has experienced it. heather had a variety of guests on to talk about CPA (although oddly, that abbreviation wasn’t used at any point in the evening), either about how this was a bad thing that should be stopped because it’s destroying our brains, or how it was an okay-to-good thing that was just part of our natural evolution as human beings. this is somewhat glib, but i’m going to go ahead and lump the invited guests into one group or the other here:

• CPA as bad thing: micki krimmel, doug pray
• CPA as good thing: derek powazek, lane becker
• CPA as other thing: justin hall, liz belile

i put myself in the ‘CPA as good thing’ camp, and I had the opportunity to go up on stage and sit with everyone and discuss my own experience with CPA for a few minutes. alot of the conversation focused on how our technology and our online lives takes time away from opportunities for self-reflection or just being with yourself. personally, i do most of my reflection in the shower, since the threat of electrocution generally provides me with a great opportunity to put down the laptop and just spend a few minutes with myself. the shower is where i think over whatever great puzzle is challenging me at the time, be it at school or work or in my personal life, and try to integrate the puzzle into the background of my daily thought pattern. and then, for the rest of the day, i subject myself to the noise of existence– random conversations, blog posts, chats, whatever, in a fierce attempt to find whatever idea or image changes my perspective from the problem into a solution. sometimes problems spend a few hours in the background, sometimes they become these persistent themes that last for weeks and weeks and get woven in with other problems.

my point in all of this is that doing CPA is a great thing for me– it’s not just that i have this need to constantly be aware of what is going on in the world (although i do), it’s that being exposed to all of these different ideas has become critical to my thinking process. it seems like every year my intellectual and professional life becomes more about insight and intuition and less about logical deduction and sequential processing, since so many of those tasks have been outsourced to the computers all around us. it’s like my ability to tie disparate ideas together has become how i differentiate myself from my tools.

(aside: i wrote this post over the course of several IM conversations, two phone calls, a face-to-my-face-looking-at-the-computer conversation, and three panel sessions, including about 75% of bruce sterling’s closing rant, which has been delightfully angry.)

books related to this post: of human bondage, the rise of the creative class

Labels: math, sxsw

[ 2 comments ]

most people don’t like math. it’s just one of those things. it seems like doing math requires a certain isolation that most people find unnatural. it’s not just isolation from other people, it’s isolation from the world of ideas. euclid laid down the five axioms of geometry more than 2000 years ago, and those five axioms have served as the laws of the universe in high school geometry ever since. it all feels very restrictive.

this restriction and isolation extends to how we teach the individual subject areas of math in school- geometry for a year, algebra for a couple of years, maybe some trigonometry and calculus. the different areas build on each other to some extent, but since you’ve generally forgotten most of what you learned the previous year, it’s hard to see the ties that bind the different subjects together. and this is the great tragedy of math education, because there’s a secret behind all of this seemingly different math stuff that most people never find out about: it’s all the same thing. it all ties together.

i’m sure that sounds strange, but it’s true, and it’s true in a way that we don’t really fully understand yet. we still only have these glimpses of the connections between the different areas. let me give you my favorite example of this, using three of the weirdest numbers that most people ever encounter.

first, let’s take pi, that number that is kinda sorta approximately 3.14159… most people come across pi when they are learning how to calculate the circumference or the area of a circle, but pi actually shows up everywhere in mathematics, often in really unexpected places. introducing people to pi as the way we calculate the area of a circle is like introducing someone to the adventures of huckleberry finn by showing them how effectively it can be used as a beverage coaster.

next, let’s take i, which is a number that is defined as the square root of negative one. it always feels to me like i is the red headed stepchild of algebra. i have this image of some mathematician going along a couple of hundred years ago, working out the quadratic equation or whatever, and then he comes across an equation like x^2 + 1 = 0, and has one of those oh shit moments. believe it or not, these moments are somewhat common in math. the greeks had this religious cult called the pythagoreans who actually executed this guy who figured out that the square root of 2 was an irrational number. i have to wonder if there was some other guy around that time who wondered about the square root of negative one, but thought of the poor square root of 2 guy and kept it to himself.

the last number in this triumvirate is e, which most people don’t come across until calculus. it’s a magical number, not unlike pi, that shows up all over the place in math. the various ways it’s defined can be found at mathworld, but the way in which it’s usually used is pretty familiar- we usually come across e as a base for an exponent. In the same way that 2 raised to the fifth power is 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 32, we usually end up raising e to some power in order to do…something. sometimes we do it to get a job at google. sometimes we do it to find something like this:

e raised to the (i*pi) = -1.

it’s perfectly understandable if your reaction is sort of like this, that was my reaction the first time I ever saw it.

three of the weirdest numbers in mathematics, each of which arises from a separate subject area (trigonometry, algebra, calculus) combined together in such a way that you end up with one of the simplest numbers around. it’s extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinary obscure, and that’s a shame. it seems like we teach math in such a way that students much suffer for years of seemingly pointless formula manipulation in order to get just a glimpse of the really good stuff behind it all. and we wonder why we have a hard time getting kids interested in math or finding people who want to teach it.

books related to this post: pi in the sky

Labels: math

[ 0 comments ]