Monomorphic

The first time I found myself onboard an airplane was when I was 9-10 years old or so. At the time, travelling by myself to visit my aunt who lived on a remote island was a big experience. In particular, I think, the sensation that the environment was managed in the extreme made a big impression on me. The temperatures and winds outside my seat window were a hostile element, but human technological achievement successfully shielded me from these dangers. I could take part in the collective human pride in this affirmation of technological ability.

Much later, when I was a student in London, I was subject to budget constraints and went for the cheapest flight whenever possible. Accordingly I found myself flying with an Irish airline, Ryanair, quite a lot. This enterprise is marked by its grisly yellow and dark blue colour scheme and continuous experimentation in lowered flight standards, comfort and safety, all for the sake of lower prices. For a 1-2 hour flight between England and Sweden it was fully acceptable.

Recently I have been flying between Japan and Sweden quite a bit. The intercontinental flight can last more than ten hours, and takes on quite a different character from short flights. Some of the essential absurdities of any flight journey become increasingly difficult to ignore during this time period.

Firstly, there is the fact that the airplane that more than a hundred passengers ride in is a sealed off, highly fragile, mobile cross-section of society and a habitat for human beings. Airplanes need continuous replacement, draining and replenishment of food, waste, excrement, water, fuel and electricity. The air pressure and temperature inside the cabin are artificially maintained. The similarities with an imagined future biodome on the moon are not a few. What happens if an airplane has to land on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean and doesn’t have enough fuel to fly back, or there is some kind of technical problem? All of these buffered flows which the airplane must always replenish would be interrupted, and our very lives are hooked up to those flows.

In addition, hundreds of people are placed very close to each other for an extended period of time with minimal lateral separation (although there is some longitudinal separation in the form of seat rows). A certain neuroticism is provoked. We become hyper-aware of our neighbours and what they do, what they talk about, how they dress and what habits they have. We try our best not to notice. And this lattice, this packing of people, is surveyed from above by the panoptic eyes of the flight stewards and hostesses. Observation not only from above but also from peers becomes essential in maintaining order in a closed-off society where governmental violence cannot reach and the usual norms might easily be violated. Security breaches are to the greatest possible extent preempted by the pre-flight security theatre, and what remains of risk is contained by observation and observability effects.

This pressurised air and pressurised micro-society is spiced up, or muddled, slightly by the increasingly confused roles of the stewards and hostesses. In the jet set era, the air hostess was an object of attraction, an apple of the eyes of businessmen, an icon of liberty who had authority but no doubt also a certain intoxicating effect which helped to pacify. Today she is more clearly authoritarian, but the old role has not quite been erased from people’s minds. Something oedipal threatens to take place. Is this person who serves me food a nurse, a security guard, a mother as well as a possible lover? The neuroticism of the family extended into international airspace. All authority figures merged into one. Male stewards only slightly less confusing.

Fortunately airlines are very happy to serve up small doses of wine and beer to take the edge off the situation. Flying is absurd, but for the moment we have no other way of getting around.

A characteristic of a naive approach to the digital world is the tendency to record and store everything. JustBecauseWeCan. Every photo, every e-mail, every song, every web site ever visited, every acquaintance who ever added you as a friend on some social network, every message you ever received. Somebody, probably an author, termed this the “database complex”, I think. A projection of a certain greedy tendency to gather and collect things. This does have certain benefits when coupled with a good search function. Every now and then I find myself having to use some information that only exists in an e-mail that I received 6 months ago or so.

A more advanced approach is selective forgetfulness. Humans cannot go on with their lives if they do not forget memories and experiences that are irrelevant and useless. They become unable to set and act on new targets. I think  that a slightly less naive digital life would contain a measure of deletion. Deletion of files, old e-mails that have probably become useless, “friends” on social networks who are mere acquaintances or even less, and so on. Taking away the old makes space for the new. It can be especially powerful to see the number of files in your home directory reduced from 50 to 5. A lot of confusion and ambivalence is immediately removed.

Part of taking the next step step deeper into the digital age should be deciding, each for themselves, what one’s personal thresholds and principles of deletion are. What should be deleted, when and why? In our brains it has been managed by evolution for us. Now we must manage it by ourselves.

Here’s a general method for synthesising solutions to complex problems, intended for use by people.

1. Enumerate the constraints

2. Find an initial solution that feels right but doesn’t quite work, based on previous knowledge of the domain

3. Use the information contained in the constraints to adjust the solution, so that it works

4. Either you have succeeded, or new constraints came out of the process => go to step 1 and repeat

I thought I’d write a more personal note for a change.

It’s been just over a year since I started studying for my Ph.D. — formally, I entered the program in April 2009. With at least two years to go, how do things look with some hindsight? What do I think it means to obtain the Ph.D. degree, or, more specifically and usefully, to be a researcher in computer science?

Much of what I’m noticing are things that sound obvious and natural, like everyday truisms, when expressed with words, but the idea I have of it goes a little bit deeper than that. For instance, we all get told over and over throughout our lives, starting in high school, that we have to become good communicators. So it’s not going to be a surprise to anyone when I say that I think the process entails becoming a much better communicator than I’ve ever been before. Maybe what’s different is that I am trying to communicate things that haven’t been communicated before, things that I invented — or things that have hitherto been communicated only by a very small number of people. (Most of the communication I did prior to becoming a Ph.D. student may not have been terribly original.) Basically, reading and understanding a large amount of scientific papers, and understanding them with a particular use in mind, either having or getting a sense of how they fit into your own work. Then, writing your own papers, and communicating, somehow, what you thought, and what you were the first person to think, so that somebody else might read it like you read the works of others, and use it similarly. Then, presenting research, discussing it, and understanding what is being presented and discussed by others — similar challenges in speech instead of in writing.

I can’t speak for other fields, but in computer science ( I work with programming languages and software engineering), I find that a lot of this, for me, has been about building up a certain mental dexterity with formalisms. Understanding the implications of formalisms as you read about them and seek to apply them. Communicating formalisms to others. Some of this is still difficult, in particular the “communicating to others” part, but I think I am achieving things in this regard.

Communication, then, where does it take us? One of my mental images of academic knowledge is a big directed acyclic graph (a tree) where papers reference other papers. A surprisingly big part of writing a paper is ensuring that your work can get assimilated into this graph easily — placing it well, referencing the right things, making sure that you can be referenced easily. Also: defining the boundaries of your work extremely well — here’s where it begins, here’s where it ends. We assume precisely this and arrive at precisely that. It really seems that these things can never be made clear enough.

Which leads to another mental image of research: the paper/unit of work as a building block. The more solid it is, and the harder and sharper its surfaces and edges are, the better structures can be built from it (though I think there are other kinds of valuable works too). That’s one direction I think I need to be aiming for as an aspiring researcher.

I just got a new laptop, courtesy of the lab. Naturally, it’s of the fruity kind. One of the first steps: install essential software.

I thought I’d make a list of software I consider absolutely essential on any new computer, and it became longer than I thought.

General use:

NetNewsWire for news reading

DropBox for file syncing

OmniFocus as a task organizer (the GTD methodology actually works — it has liberated me from reciting a long list of things to do in my head all day long)

CircusPonies Notebook for note taking

iStat Pro for system monitoring

If I want to develop software:

Eclipse

Fink and MacPorts so I can get various unix tools (I can’t settle for one or the other, since some tools are in one of them only, but normally Fink is nicer since the packages are precompiled)

Apple’s developer tools

If I want to read and write papers:

TeXShop

Mendeley Desktop

So these are the “absolute essentials”. Of course web apps like gmail count too, but they require no installation. Anything I’ve missed?

One thing I do not install, but perhaps should, is Apple’s MobileMe. Considering how fruity my environment is, there ought to be some benefit. But between Dropbox, my own DAV server for calendars, and built-in syncing of apps like OmniFocus, I can make things stay in sync anyway, so MobileMe is probably not worth the cost… I think.

A cold, bright morning in Tokyo’s somewhat fashionable Azabu-Juuban district. I’m looking for a clinic, but I can’t find it. I’ve only visited it once before, more than a year earlier. I look for landmarks that I might remember, bring out the map on my phone, pay attention to every detail in the hope that I will recognize something.

The morning has turned into a game. It’s me against the city layout, me against my memory, me against entropy and the temporal degradation of my cognitive faculties. The ludic dimension has entered my life again. And soon enough, I find the place I was looking for.

When we have a sense of competition, that a victory against something or someone is possible, our awareness of life is heightened in every way. We pay more attention, we notice more, we become more here and now. The endless simmering chatter in our heads, nearly meaningless thoughts that usually refuse to yield anything meaningful, gives way to absolute focus.

It occurs to me that a society where everyday tasks can be carried out like they are games, victories to be won, might be a more moral society, with greater happiness and life awareness for everyone. In such a society, even if you lose a particular game, you win something else.