I am … unhindered by talent

Several people have asked about “culture shock” upon returning home, and for me at least there really hasn’t been much (I’ll let WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil speak for themselves). One thing that has been really amazing, though, is the peace and quiet here.

The photo above is from a few years ago, but it’s representative of what it’s been like being back. The roads (and sky) are wide and quiet, and peddling my bike down a big empty street seems kind of otherworldly after a year in a much more crowded part of the world:

The other huge difference is the damn mosquitoes. Didn’t really miss them while we were gone, and wasn’t too thrilled to see them again (in vast quantities) upon our return.

Oh, and burritos are much better in Minnesota than in the UK (and much better in Texas than Minnesota). Really. Much better.

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Today we spent a wonderful, exhausting day at the Alhambra in Granada, and it’s every bit as cool as the books, etc., made out. Which is good, since that’s a key reason for this entire trip to Spain! I frankly don’t have any idea where to begin. I took over 800 photographs, plus there’s all those from WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy).

It’s like several really cool forts and castles, some spectacular gardens, archeological digs, museums, (Christian) churches, and a complete course in Muslim architecture and culture (complete with some of the finest examples on the planet), all in one (big) place. I’m both physically and mentally exhausted (and exhilarated!).

This shot is from the justly famous "Patio of the Lions" (Patio de los Leones). The lions themselves (part of a fountain in the middle of the space) were missing as they’re undergoing extensive restoration at the moment. Still, the space, the columns, the carving, and the light were enough to take my breath away. And that was after already seeing room after space after room of exquisite work.

I’m going to go sleep now.

Later.

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Just did a pile o’ dishes and listened to a SciAm podcast featuring the remarks of Robert Rosner (head of Argonne National Laboratory). The short version is that science (and, I would argue, education in general) is a matter of necessity plus vision. First, science is not a luxury, but instead a necessity:

Without the science base, you cannot build an industrial base.

Second, science requires long term vision and public and private support in in basic research. It typically takes decades for culture changing technologies to move from the basic idea to ubiquity; Rosen gives as examples railroads, airplanes, transistors, computers, the internet, and lasers. The question then is

How do you convince the politics and the public that that lag in fact is real and that if you don’t make the investments … today … we’ll be lagging things that other folks that are making the investments

Rosen is (quite reasonably) focussed specifically on the question of support for science, but points out that this is part of a larger trend of irrationality in the U.S.:

But we all know that in the United States there are long traditions of anti-intellectualism, of what the Times today also refer to as anti-rationalism, the idea that there really are no facts, it’s all opinion, the idea that scientists [are] just playing their sand box and don’t connect with anybody.

What it really comes down to is a distressingly common failure for Americans to see any form of education (science or humanities, K12 or university) as a necessary investment in the strength and future of our society and country. For me this has become a useful litmus test to separate sensible conservatives (who understand the economic necessity of investment in key areas) from the wingnuts that have come to dominate the Republican party (who spout anti-intellectual nonsense while shredding schools and lining the pockets of themselves and their friends).

Eisenhower understood the practical necessity of an interstate road system, and encouraged and supported that investment. All Shrub can seem to invest in is Halliburton and their ilk.

Things to think (and ask) about in this happy election season.

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In “Is language extinction a good thing?” Thomas Hawks reviews some recent writing on language extinction, focusing on differing attitudes to the question of how “bad” it really is when a language goes extinct.

Languages are clearly fluid, dynamic things, and statistically we’re going to lose some along the way. In this age of massive globalization and urbanization, however, we’re losing lots, and quickly. (This and the work of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages was a feature topic in cool podcast from last fall.)

Hawks quotes several folks who argue that language loss is a key part of the “assimilation” process that converted my starving Swiss ancestors into successful dairy farmers in Wisconsin, and thence to high-level investment analysts, and therefore we shouldn’t moan about it so much. While I’ll certainly acknowledge that there is an inevitability to certain amounts of language loss, I’m definitely not as comfortable with it as some of the people Hawks quotes for two key reasons: (a) So much of it was (and is) done against people’s will, and (b) as with biological extinction, there is potentially valuable information and history that is lost.

On the first point, I think that the “why” of the thing is crucial, and doesn’t come up anywhere in Hawks’ piece. (In fairness, Hawks is really just quoting a bunch of people here, so he’s arguably the messenger.) If the kids just aren’t interested in learning grandma’s weird old language, then at some level that’s their choice and we can’t force them to change their minds. My Swiss-German-speaking grandfather married a woman of primarily British descent, (American) English was their shared language, and neither my mother or aunt heard or learned any significant Swiss-German at home. My grandparents had the luxury of choice, and those are the choices they made.

All too often, however, minority groups have been forced to set aside their cultural traditions, language included. Native Americans, for example, were frequently punished severely (including beatings) if they used their native languages while in the boarding schools (which they were often forced to attend). Similarly Cajuns were often whipped for speaking their French in schools in Louisiana. Sadly, I’m sure we could pull together an embarrassingly long list of such cases worldwide, and it seems to be that we should mourn and decry every such loss in the strongest possible terms. To the degree that any given language extinction was aided by such behavior, we dare not be flippant about it’s disappearance, for it speaks ill of us all.

As to the second point, I am continually amazed and frustrated by certain people’s willfully obstinant refusal to recognize the very real value of diversity. This isn’t just some liberal whining about “Can’t we all just get along?”; I’m not arguing that the world is somehow “just a better place” when we have diversity. Diversity is vital in generating innovation and adapting to change (issues of at least a little importance in the world we have made for ourselves). Diversity manifestly enriches our lives (consider, for example, the wonderful diversities in world cuisine and world music, and how much more cooler our days are because of them).

And every language that goes extinct is a great chunk of experience, calved off the glacier of human history to melt away forever. Languages embed both knowledge and world view, and the loss of a language is the potential loss of much of that knowledge. The fact that a group in South America has over 70 words for “wasp” shouldn’t be seen as an oddity, it should be seen as a demonstration of the enormous importance of that insect to those people, and a collective encoding of a great deal of information about wasps. If that language goes extinct, that knowledge of those wasps goes with it.

This doesn’t mean that we should “freeze” languages, or force people to preserve their languages whether they want to or not. But we should be sad when one vanishes, and we should support people who wish to maintain their language in the face of all the pressures to the contrary.

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And the day after I get around to posting this, he announces that he’s not running after all. Sigh. The reasons he gives in his new video are clear and convincing, however, and there’s always the possibility that he might run in the future when the notice is not so short.

It’s probably old news for some of you that Lawrence Lessig is considering running for Congress, but I only just had time to watch Lessig’s video, and I definitely want to put in a plug for it, and for him, and for his possible campaign. Lessig has written some excellent books (Arne Kildegaard and I have used both Free culture and The future of ideas in our interdisciplinary network economics course), and is a wonderfully clear thinker with a powerful grasp of what’s necessary to effect change (rather than just make noise). (He’s been a key player in the Creative Commons movement, for example.)

I couldn’t claim to have done the sort of homework needed to make any concrete statements on his policies or particulars, but I can say that he’s a smart, effective guy who’s trying to address real and important problems. And that seems to be a pretty good pedigree for someone running for Congress. I quite like the message of the video as well, and think it would be quite fascinating to see him take on an extremely experienced and successful (his words) politician.

I’m also impressed by his willingness to actually stick his neck out, because I know that I find that hard. I’ve thought, for example, about running for school board in Morris, but I’ve never quite screwed up the courage to try it. It’s obviously very important, and I care a lot about (and frequently disagree with) the Board’s actions. I also know, however, that it would take a lot of time to do well, and probably be pretty frustrating (you’ll never make everyone happy, and there’s likely to be a shortage of easy answers). Thus nothing has actually happened (at least so far).

So well done to Lessig, and best wishes.

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One of my constant struggles as an educator in computer science has been helping students see a bigger picture, look past the mundanities of yesterday’s “help wanted” page, and see what the world could be rather than what it has been.

One way this has often played out has been in debates over programming languages and development tools. Students are (quite legitimately) concerned with their near term employment prospects, and so they tend to focus what they’ve heard of, and what they see in the job web sites. Unfortunately that is almost always an exercise in looking backwards in time. When I started in 1991, the problem was getting students out of Pascal and C and start thinking about objects. Now we’re working to add things like Ruby and Python to our Java-heavy toolkit. Constant throughout has been the difficult task of getting them to take (semi-) functional languages (Scheme, Haskell) seriously or, in fact, any language doesn’t have a “For dummies” book at their local mega-bookshop.

I need to be fair, though, and make it clear that we’ve always had students who could see the bigger picture, and have often pushed us faculty to open some important new doors. I suspect that we’ve actually been luckier in that respect at UMM than many other programs. That said, you still get groaners (often very vocal) who never seem to be happy unless you’re emphasizing whatever tool or language they’re firmly convinced is their only road to employment.

This is one of the reasons that it makes me so happy to see the list of programming languages used in the One Laptop Per Child project:

We will support five programming environments on the laptop: (1) Python, from which we have built our user interface and our activity model; (2) Javascript for browser-based scripting; (3) Csound, a programmable music and audio environment; (4) Squeak, a version of Smalltalk embedded into a media-rich authoring environment; and (5) Logo. We will also provide some support for Java and Flash.

OK, we can debate the details (and I’m sure people have and will), but let’s skip all that shall we? Let’s instead note that none of these was a “heavy hitter” 5 or 10 years ago, and there are plenty of people who would (wrongly in my opinion) argue that none are terribly important today. How many data structures classes in the U.S., for example, (a key “bread and butter” course in most computing curriculums) use any of these languages? I’m sure there are a few (especially Python), but proportionally I bet it’s pretty tiny. (Try searching either Amazon or the web for textbooks for such a course, for example.)

It’s also worth considering impact here. Sure, I doubt that anyone’s likely to start building inventory control systems in Logo, but should that be the issue? What’s the real opportunity for impact here? How do I change the world? By building accounting systems? Or by contributing to a project that plans to put computers and software in the hands to millions of kids all around the world?

You want to make the world a better place? You want to really fight terrorism? Then give people hope, a chance to grow and make their world better. Give them something to protect. Contribute to a project like this.

And, if you’re contributing to this project, you apparently program in Python, JavaScript, CSound, Squeak and Logo.

So let’s put an end to the whining about these not being “real” programming languages and nobody building “real” programs with them. I’ve written a crapload of Java code in my day that only a handful of people will ever use. Some bright bulbs used Squeak to build Scratch, which I suspect will be used by millions. Hmmm … which do I find more impressive?

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I was pottering in the kitchen (probably making tea or some such) while WeatherGirl was listening to a comedy program on the radio in the sitting room. I’m half hearing the words as they gently waft my direction, when a woman on the program says “shit” quite clearly and plainly. Matter of fact, no big deal, middle of the sentence.

“Shit”

But it popped out at me like a glowing ember and smacked that neural structure from 1974 that said “Hey - people aren’t supposed to say things like that on radio!” Which was a little odd, since I’m typically not very good at noticing such things (which is sometimes a problem when reviewing CDs for the radio station). Yet there it was, and it certainly caught my attention this time.

I suspect that in 1974 the BBC never would have never aired such language, except perhaps in the wee hours, or with bleeping. Times change, however, as the recent UK re-rating of Christopher Lee’s 1958 Dracula from X to 12A (!) makes clear.

In a larger sense, however, it seems like we’ve turned a huge collective corner and, short of some catastrophic change, aren’t likely to come back. It’s clear that people swear, are quite fascinated by sex, and enjoy the occasional fart joke. Various folks like the Victorians and the FCC might have attempted to deny these basic facts, but it didn’t make them any less true, it just drove them underground.

The web, however, is rapidly washing away any such pretense. Without any sort of centralized control over content (and none on the horizon), we end up with the great unwashed, and almost entirely unedited, rambling burps of the world. And we can no longer pretend that it’s not out there, that people don’t say these things. All these past forms of mass censorship have been based on the flimsy notion that we were protecting someone from something. Now, short of an off-grid survivalist camp in Montana (where I’m sure no one swears, talks about sex, or tells fart jokes), you just can’t pretend it’s not out there. Mulder would be proud.

As a result, we’ll just have to grow up and take some responsibility, for ourselves and our children, and not assume that someone else will handle it for us. We’ll no doubt run across some things that aren’t to our liking (American Idol anyone?). Assuming they’re not illegal or harming others, we’ll need to just look away and hit the back button. Kids are gonna run into things that lead to awkward questions. But heaven knows they talked some crazy shit in the playground when I was in elementary school, so I suspect all that’s really changed is our ability to pretend it wasn’t happening.

This is one of those moments where something huge has changed, incrementally but fairly quickly, and will not likely change back in many-a-lifetime. And that little “shit” was just one of the hinge creaks as the door opened on this new world.

Credit to Neil101 for the great image.

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A total hoot!

Yeah, I remember those glacial dot matrix printers and the screech of 18.8 modems. They were the bomb in their day, though, and I’m sure that most of what we’re all trendy about today will look equally dated in 10 or 15 years.

Heaven help us all if national security were to depend on finding a payphone these days!

Thanks to TechCrunch for the pointer.

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