Shaky Danny

  I had been sail boarding with my friends in Lake Michigan with little success. Being male, we used our backs rather than our brains. We took turns wrestling the board while the rest of us considered the futility of our meaningless existence on the beach. In the 80’s Chicago winters were extreme enough to push me into the Caribbean. Going for two weeks meant I paid less in air fare. This also meant that the resort boards were unused over the weekend, when everyone else was in transit. In fairness to my friends, Lake Michigan is choppier and less buoyant than the ocean. By now I knew to paddle out to deep water and fall off the board, rather than on the board. Standing on the board, holding the line connected to the boom where it joins the mast, I reckoned the wind direction and maneuvered the sail to the opposite side. I wasn’t going to let the sail push me off again. I gently lifted the sail slightly out of the water. The water fell out of the uplifted hollow mast. The mast and...

  According to their web site, 2024, at University of Chicago 43% of the teachers are professors. This is better than most schools. By third or fourth year an undergraduate will be taking instruction from a professor. Again, the site says the average pay of a professor at University of Chicago is $165,000. Nonetheless, most tuition money does not go to instruction. At the old Columbia College in Chicago graduation was a great shame. Nowadays Columbia is more collegiate. It used to be more vocational.   The instructors were professionals in their fields. Graduation meant you hadn’t been hired. If schools are training professionals, their graduation rate should suffer, just as in sports. Conversely why take training from people who can’t find work? Corporate training can be adversarial: how would you train your competition? I propose a new form of institution. Rather than a degree I propose an open transcript. Everyone can see your grades. Enrolling in the Co-operative Colle...

  Life doesn’t play fair. We cheat. From virus to Dolphin, we slip the wink, nod, hidden card. All entities communicate, sometimes to our advantage. Roots respond to fungal signals. Flowers attract insects. Birds shriek at hawks. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House , has evolution as a disordered wandering in a local domain from a variational minimum. He is contradicting the belief that humans are a culmination of effort. We are merely a twig on the great evolutionary bush.  Except when the wandering is selected. Communication across and within species is such a selection. The principle of intelligence, the consequence of its various possible algorithms, develops from communication. Unlikely there is one common algorithm for intelligence. More reasonable there is a principle among the algorithms. Given communication as the source of advantage, intellect is inevitable. Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. The principle of intelligence will be the same, regardless ...

  We are frustrated with artificial intelligence because of its lack of self-awareness; we need sentience. The greatest difficulties in automated sentience are human impatience and fear. Human language learning is slow and difficult, some of us are still poor at it. Sentience is frightening. To speed up the process and short circuit sentience, averaging algorithms are hard coded in. This leads to showy but unconvincing results. Rather than letting intellect develop, our results oriented chatbots are behaving as we expect intellect to work. Take Mike Pence as a human example of the same problem. Mike Pence is a hero: he refused the Secret Service evacuation that would have delayed certification. Thank God for Mike Pence. But his stated positions and explanations for those positions are ridiculous. Pence honed his speech as a talk show host. He is a victim of poor training data. Pence’s language makes more sense if you visualize it coming from a chatbot. I task ChatGpt with revie...

  One of the questions of mathematics is are we uncovering the ideal structure of reality or creating language. Yes. [i] I think of mathematics as a collection of tools or techniques. Socrates argued that all knowledge is innate. He took a young slave boy and interrogated him as to a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Since the boy kept agreeing with Socrates, he must have known of this proof already. Socrates described a right triangle, then showed a square constructed from 4 of these identical triangles, then set the area of the square to the areas of the 4 triangles and the square contained in them. Then he solved for the Pythagorean theorem. Socrates was in the impossible position of arguing for ethics and logic in a polytheistic world, surrounded by the arbitrary gods. By proving that a slave had the same innate knowledge as the rest of us he was calling into question slavery. Euclid hated this proof of the Pythagorean theorem. The proof requires that you already know w...

I am a big fan of the unsaid obvious.  Perhaps the best example was the fact that AIDS is passed by anal intercourse.  Sorry Magic. This deference of reality to propriety demonstrates the dangers of hypocrisy.  I remember the idiot virgin clubs where they proudly refrained from sex, because of all the dangers, then got that goofy sly look and mumbled about other things you could do.  Lazy eye is a good current example. If you look up strabismus, they will tell you that the cause is unknown. This is a lie. If you look up fetal alcohol syndrome, one of the symptoms is strabismus. It may be that there are other causes. But fetal alcohol causes strabismus. If you have a cast to your eye, perhaps your arms and your temper are a little short; chances are Mom was hitting it. Some people might consider this a lapse in good taste, but I think it is preferable to recognize a developmental disorder rather than a hereditary one. If they were truthful rather than pusill...

Trip Advisor recently picked The Art Institute of Chicago as its best museum . I like museums that have a flavor of subversion to them.  The worst museum in the world might be Epcot Center.  It doesn’t claim museum status but it is supposed to represent Future World, sort of a perpetual exposition. There is nothing subversive about Epcot. Drained of content it is nothing more than a people containment facility, which may well represent their view of the future. My current favorite is the  Door County Historical Museum  in Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin. It is jammed with the usual historical knickknacks. They have a discussion of fish boils. There is also a fascinating wildlife diorama constructed by a true obsessive. In the middle of the museum is a leftover jail cell with the key.  While I was there a girl locked her little brother in it. What little girl hasn’t wished to do that?  That is what a museum is for. My favorite exhibit is the  Mathematica Ex...

In second grade our teacher Ms. Bowers introduced us to Cantor’s diagonal proofs.  You are already familiar with this, of course.  The rational numbers, the fractions, are listed with 1/1, ½, 1/3… on the top row, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1… in the first column and the diagonals always equal to 1: 1/1, 2/2, 3/3… and all the fractions in between. Then Cantor counts them by going up and down diagonally, zig-zagging between them.  All the second graders accepted that.  Then she showed us that the real numbers, say all the real numbers between .0000… and .9999…., were uncountable because no matter which way we listed them, she could generate a new one by going down the diagonal going on to infinity and generating a new one.  Cantor liked diagonals. I may have lost some of you.  I think the reason we got this as second graders is because we knew that if Ms. Bowers was explaining this to us, it couldn’t be that complicated.  But adults believe that this stuff should be...

Some years ago, after many academic adventures I found myself taking an introductory programming course as a general requirement for graduation.   The best part of the course was the computer problems book.    It encapsulated all the uses for a computer up to the undergraduate senior level.    I wanted to get my computer programs out of the way at the beginning of the semester so I could clear the decks for the important courses I was taking in mathematics.   Several computer program problems were required, but some were electives; they were ranked in order of difficulty.    In the back of the book, there was a list of how many lines of code each problem took.    Cross referencing each list to get the most credit for the least lines of code lead to the problem called partitions.    Partitions was defined as the number of different ways to sum integers to reach another integer.    For instance 2 is 1 + 1, 3 is 1 + ...

The short and simple answer is yes. The various authorities and means available to him are as diverse and varied as our government agencies.    Most obviously as Commander in Chief the president commands the military.    The military will carry out his orders. The military should also record his orders and report the consequences.    Such reports should be available for review by authorized persons making it likely that they will become public. The military has overcome this oversight in the past by various well known mechanisms. One legendary example was the order to troops in the Pacific to feed captives from their own rations. Another is to maintain favored units or individuals who well understand that their privileges depend on obedience and discretion. More normally certain areas or endeavors are categorized as off limits and subject to summary execution. J. Edgar Hoover was a remarkable instance.    His homosexuality made him so vulnera...

In order to restore or conserve a work of art, you have to redo it.    You have to paint over the painting, rebuild the statue, or buy another piece of hardware to replace the found object.     Regardless of how cunning or clever you are, you are forging the artists work.    It will be your hand, not the artist’s.    Once done, however atomically close it may be, you will have a replica and not the original work.   H enceforth, whoever sees it will be examining the work of the paint by numbers conservator, not the artist. There are discussions about the nature and quality of restoration.    How true it is, how faithful, but they are discussing the quality of forgery, not art. There are innumerable examples of poor or questionable restorations:    Modern paint on medieval paintings, the removal of varnish applied by the artist, but that is not my point. Even if the restoration is perfect, the masterpiece had cracked...

I was tormenting Tiquan.    This was right and proper, as he was smaller than I was.    We were in second grade at Ray School.    Suddenly Tiquan turned around in his seat and screamed at me. -Oh Tiquan, that’s wonderful, you yelled, Ms. Bowers said. Ms. Bowers seized every opportunity to pass on a life’s lesson.    Embarrassed, we both shrank in our seats. If someone is picking on you, you should stand up to them.    Once when someone did something she said: -Who did that? Look at you, you all turned to look, you dummies; you gave him away.    Raymond, are you proud of yourself?    All these friends of yours that you are showing off for gave you away. Thereby she imparted the important lessons of group cohesion and honor.   -I can see your lips moving, I know you’re talking. Don’t be caught was the number one lesson.Each day was a new challenge.   One morning the principal, Ms. Kenause, lay in ...

As I move from one town or city to the next I am always amused by their various claims to celebrity and achievement.    I grew up in Hyde Park in Chicago.    The only plaque or monument I am aware of there, honors the first nuclear chain reaction.    Most places would give such an event its own acre, perhaps with a museum and diorama.    Hyde Park keeps shuffling it around,  -Look, it happened nearby, OK, maybe not exactly right here, but in the general vicinity and anyway we've got a few things going on right now. When I was a child, living in Hyde Park, my mother introduced me to Hannah Arendt.    She was a member of our congregation. Hannah Arendt told me she studied evil and I said that sounded boring.    My words were not flippant.    Evil people did not impress me.    We agreed that evil was worth studying. I wish I could tell you that Hyde Park lionized Arendt; instead, we subjected her to...

I’m surprised that no one has recognized Obama’s speech in Tucson.    The papers give credit to a young speechwriter from Wilmette.    This same well-worn speech has been given thousands of times by ministers across the country.    Whenever someone has died for standing, the ministers trot out this chestnut.    You can’t beat them on hatred, stupidity or bitterness, so you concentrate on love, decency, truth and caring.     Because we are the good, the righteous and just, and they are filthy swamp slime and don’t you ever, ever, ever forget that. I can’t stand watching Palin.    I just don’t have the tolerance for it.    She may be some kind of smart, but when she is talking, she gets an irritating unfocused stupid look. Reading the text of her speech, it seemed reasonable. Except that while I understand that she talks in code, people should say what they mean. If she meant votes, she should have said votes. ...

Some time ago, in Chicago’s Hyde Park, well, on the border with Washington Park, Laredo Taft built a statue of a concrete very close to sandstone.    It was a variety of people, sharply cut, in a procession.    He built the statue around a fountain and over time, it eroded as he meant it to do.    The statue was the  Fountain of Time  and it was a performance piece.    Eventually it eroded to nothing and then some stupid people decided to rebuild it at considerable expense since he obviously hadn't made it correctly.    Today you can see a replica of Laredo Taft’s performance piece desecrating the site.    Thank heavens there isn’t an afterlife or he would be furious.    Admittedly, it still will eventually erode, but they completely missed the point. Over a hundred years ago, some Scots in Oak Park decided to build a temple.   They wanted to stick it to all the other churches in the area.  ...