Category: Article

Posted on
by

Note: It’s been almost two years since my last post. We had a baby, and life has been more full with two little boys. It’s been lots of fun! But I kept coming back to this post, so eventually I was able to finish it. No guarantee on when the next post will be...

Recently, I have been really excited about the Free Will Theorem by John Conway and Simon Kochen. It states that if we have free will then elementary particles have some degree of free will too1. If you believe we can make free decisions, then this theorem has profound implications. In particular, it challenges that dichotomy between inanimate matter and us humans with our minds, emotions, and free will. Perhaps electrons and galaxies also have some degree of internal life?

But first do we have free will? I believe we do have a limited ability to choose between different options and that our decisions have the potential to change the course of the unfolding universe. But this feels like a religious belief, because I can’t prove it. When I look at the laws of physics, things look to be deterministic or to be driven by randomness. Fundamentally, I’m a bunch of electrons, protons, and neutrons that obey the laws of physics, so how does my free will fit into this picture if it exists at all?

These questions about free will are core to the mind-body problem. One way to state the problem is, since we are matter where does our subjective inner life come from? I want to write about some of my grappling with the mind-body problem, and about how the Free Will Theorem helps.

Wondering about the mind body problem

I’ve struggled with what you could call the mind-body problem since I was a young. I remember feeling uncomfortable when people described the human brain as “just a bag of chemicals”. It didn’t make sense to me. How could a bag of chemicals learn, make decisions, and love? But we are are made from matter, so I was left with an unsettled feeling, that maybe I was wrong. In college, I considered the idea that maybe inner life doesn’t exist at all. I didn’t know it at the time but this is called eliminative materialism2. To me that is an incredibly dark idea. Fascinating that you could have a whole universe without any awareness, but also deeply lonely and disturbing. But I could not accept this idea because it would mean denying my own inner life.

I also considered the idea that perhaps I am the only one that experiences inner life. What if the people I’m talking to are just responding according to the electrical signals in their brain that have been trained by their experiences and by evolution? What if they have no subjective experience? Perhaps them talking about it is just a quirk of evolution like peacock tails. I also didn’t know this at the time but this describes solipsism3. It didn’t make sense to me because I’m probably not that special, so most likely other people have an inner life as well.

After graduate school, I entered a period of questioning the foundations of my Catholic faith, and in the process learned about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He writes in “The Phenomenon of Man” about his theory that all things have a inner subjective experience4. I found this idea to be profound. I had already believed that animals have some type of consciousness, but now I was invited to consider even electrons to have some small amount of inner life. Teilhard’s view of the world and the mind is a form of panpsychism, specifically panexperientialism5. This idea suggests that all matter has some degree of mentality from humans down to electrons.

But say we and everything else in the universe has this inner experience, does it matter? Do our thoughts change anything or are they fully determined by our evolving physical configuration? Is free will an illusion? I am definitely biased is this area. I can’t shake the idea that our choices matter, that we are not entirely determined by our past. I do admit that I am heavily influenced by my environment, but still I believe that at least in a small way I can choose between different paths.

With these types of questions there are no easy answers, but the Free Will Theorem gives a useful perspective. It describes free will as the ability to take an action that can not be predicted by any previous information in the universe. If this type of free will exists then it can change the course of the universe; the story is still being written.

The Free Will Theorem

John Conway and Simon Kochen are both mathematicians but their Free Will Theorem has implications in physics and philosopy. Conway gave a series of lectures about this theorem, and acknowledged that you have to be a little crazy to make a big statement outside your field6. But they had something important to say.

The setup

To make their proof, they imagined a situation where two spin-1 particles (for example certain atoms) are first “twinned” or entangled (in a singleton state) and then one of them is moved to Mars while the other remains on Earth. There is an experimenter A on Earth and an experimenter B on Mars and each experimenter can measure the spin of their respective particle. If they measure the squared component of the spin along a certain direction, then they will get a 1 or a 0. It turns out that for spin 1 particles, if one experimenter measures the spin in three orthogonal directions then result will be two 1’s and one 0 in some order. This is derivable from quantum mechanics (I don’t know how!), but they take it as an axiom which they call the SPIN axiom.

The second key piece of the experiment is that the particles are entangled. Even though one particle is on Earth and the other is on Mars, when each experimenter measures the spin in the same direction they will measure the same value for the spin. This a strange effect. We don’t see this type of behavior in daily life, but it is what we observe experimentally for entangled electrons and other very small particles in entangled states. Conway and Kochen call this effect the TWIN axiom.

The final setup for the theorem is the limit on the speed that information can travel between the two experimenters. From relativity theory, we know that no signals carrying information can travel faster than the speed of light. Since the experimenters are so far apart this means that each has time to perform an experiment before the other can influence it by sending a signal. They call this the FIN axiom. With these three axioms they derive the following theorem.

The theorem

This paper has set up a situation that relates the experimenter’s choice of measurement direction to the response of the particles. The theorem shows that if the experimenters can freely choose the direction to measure a particle then the particle’s response is free in the same way. This is a strange, but intriguing idea. Here is how they state the theorem:

The Free Will Theorem (assuming SPIN, TWIN, and FIN)].

If the choice of directions in which to perform spin 1 experiments is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then the responses of the particles are equally not functions of the information accessible to them.

John Conway and Simon Kochen

The measured spin does not exist before the measurement

We are used to properties existing before you measure them. For instance, we don’t expect that measuring a box will change its dimensions. But small particles in the quantum regime are different. They can be in a state where the measurement outcome is random. It turns out for this specific example of spin 1 particles, you can prove that the measured spin does not exist before the measurement. If it did then there would be a deterministic function that gives the spin based on the direction of measurement. Such a function, called a 101-function, does not exist. The proof is call the Kochen-Specker paradox and depends on a geometric puzzle with no solution7. That’s good, because if the measured value already existed then the particles would definitely not have any choice in how they responded to the measurement.

Breaking down the proof

Not only does the measured spin not exist until the experiment, the Free Will Theorem proves that it can’t be predicted. The proof works by contradiction. First it assumes the opposite, that it is possible to predict the measured spin of the particle from information available to the particle. After a series of deductions John Conway and Simon Kochen find a contradiction. If the opposite of the Free Will Theorem is false, then the Free Will Theorem is true.

So how do they find the contradiction? Here are the steps they follow:

  1. First they assume that there actually are functions that could predict the responses of the particles given any information available to the particle before the direction of measurement was chosen by the experimenter.
  2. Then they use the TWIN axiom, that the particles are entangled, to show that the function for particle a is equal to the function for particle b if the measurement directions match.
  3. Next they note that the information available to particle a before the measurement does not include the direction of the measurement of particle b, because according to relativity there are some frames of reference where particle b is measured before particle a. This allows them to define a function that returns the measured spin values using only the measurement directions as input.
  4. Finally they observe that this new function is a 101-function, but such a function does not exist. So by contradiction they prove the Free Will Theorem

I keep having to re-read the theorem to follow through the logic, but each time it makes sense. If you’re interested, I definitely recommend you read it yourself. As far as mathematical papers, it is relatively accessible.

Implications of the Free Will Theorem

At the low level, the Free Will Theorem is just talking about whether it is possible to predict the outcome of a particular experiment, but the conclusion has deep implications. If the experimenters could pick the directions for the experiment then the particles could pick their response. How can particles pick a response? Do they have some degree of consciousness? It strange to think about everything in the universe having some small amount of inner life, but if it is true then it points to where our own free will comes from. Perhaps the free choices of the particles that make us up don’t completely cancel out, which would leave us with some ability to make free choices ourselves. In their philisophical remarks, John Conway and Simon Cochen write:

The authors strongly believe, however, that there is a way our brains prevent some of this cancellation, so allowing us to integrate what remains and producing our own free will

John Conway and Simon Cochen

It is not clear at all how that emergence of our free will comes from the free wills of our constituent particles. But it makes a lot of sense to me. From this perspective, there is no need for a magical life force that animates the body. Matter itself is animated and has some limited ability to determine its own destiny.

Of course, there is no requirement to believe in free will for people or for sub-atomic particles. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a deterministic interpretation that is gaining popularity8. The idea is that the wavefunction of the universe is what is ultimately real. It evolves deterministically, but contains projections that correspond to different versions of reality. Each projection is a parallel world. Every time there is what appears to be a free choice of a particle or a person, the world divides with one world for each possible outcome. There is a certain beauty to this theory because everything can be explained mathematically, in principle.

I find this Many Worlds interpretation to be unsatisfying, because I have such difficulty letting go of the idea that I can make choices and that they could make a difference. But I want my beliefs to match reality as much as possible. The Free Will theorem provides a coherent picture of how free will works if it exists. I find it to be an expansive and exciting view of the world. I like how John Conway and Simon Cochen end their paper:

Einstein could not bring himself to believe that “God plays dice with the world,” but perhaps we could reconcile him to the idea that “God lets the world run free.”

John Conway and Simon Cochen

A world where all the protons and electrons are running free sounds great to me. I hope it’s true. Until I find evidence that disproves it, I’ll take it as an article of faith,

  1. Conway, John and Kochen, Simon. “The Free Will Theorem”. URL=Arxiv.orghttps://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079v1
  2. Ramsey, William, “Eliminative Materialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/materialism-eliminative/
  3. Stephen P. Thornton. “Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL=https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/#H1 accessed 12/30/2022.
  4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, p56-57
  5. Kind, Amy. “Panexperientialism, Cognition, and the Nature of Experience”, Psyche 2006: VOLUME 12 ISSUE 5. URL=http://journalpsyche.org/files/0xab06.pdf2021-05-27 09:05 Panpsychism
  6. Conway, John. “Free Will and Determinism in Science and Philosophy”, lecture series, URL=https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/Free+Will+and+Determinism+in+Science+and+Philosophy/1_h7r12hbc
  7. Kochen, S., Specker, E., J. of Math. and Mech. 17 (1967), 59–87. URL=http://www.iumj.indiana.edu/IUMJ/fulltext.php?artid=17004&year=1968&volume=17
  8. Sean Carroll. “Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space”, 2021. URL=https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.09780

Posted on
by

I’m interested in building up a personal store of knowledge – good ideas, data, memories, and notes – and saving it in a way that I can quickly and easily make use of this information. Without some external way of saving things, I tend to forget them. The dream is that these ideas and pieces of information don’t have to be re-thought up or re-found each time but can be explored to rapidly generate more ideas. Ideally this would help me solve problems and help generate new knowledge for the wider society.

In reality this has turned out to be much harder than I expected. In my experience, it is easy to save information but hard to find it and make use of it later. The vast majority of my files have never been used after I saved them. When I do happen to remember a piece of information that I want to look up, I tend to have trouble finding it. This unfortunate situation surprised me. I had bought into the idea that there is essentially no cost to saving things digitally so I should save everything, and second that digital tools should make it easy to find things. I was wrong on both counts.

The difficulty of storing information became a real problem for me in grad school when I was doing research for my PhD in physics. I had to deal with countless journal articles, presentations, calculations, brainstorming sketches, experimental data, notes from talks/classes, and different versions of code (I wasn’t using version control, aaahhh!). At first, I thought my problems were just caused by the wrong organizational system. So I tried different systems, but despite having advantages and disadvantages they didn’t solve the underlying problem for me.

Thanks to my misadventures, I’m learning that forgetting is a feature not a bug. When I try to remember all my ideas and information, the default organizational systems struggle and while specialized tools can help they also tend to silo information. It turns out, there is a need to limit the inflow of information and the amount of work in progress. I need the information and ideas that are relevant to me, and everything else is unlikely to be needed, and should be let go. In a way my organization system for saving ideas and information is an extension of my brain. My brain is quite good at forgetting things (sometimes too good!). So while it is important to have good tools and organization, shouldn’t my system also forget things?

The default ways of organizing tend to be digital analogues to the way we store papers: papers on the desk, in notebooks, and in folders. These systems fail in similar ways to paper based systems. The simplest approach is to just put everything you need on the desktop, but this quickly fails if you have more than around ten files. The next simplest is to create notebooks; essentially storing the files in chronological order (for example by starting the filename with the date). This helps because you can quickly find a file if you remember when you worked on it, which tends to happen for things you recently worked on. However this approach makes it hard to see connections between ideas from different times1. You can’t re-arrange the ideas as you learn more; they are fixed in chronological order.

The next strategy that I’ve tried is putting files in a folder structure according to topic. This seems like a reasonable idea, but quickly becomes quicksand for ideas. Inevitably, I need to change the folder structure as I learn to better reflect the association between my files. The changes make it hard to remember where things are and breaks any references to file paths. As I create more folders, I find it difficult to remember the context underlying the relationships between folders. This can lead to folders with mashed up collections of files and sub-folders that don’t make sense.

Based on these struggles, I have turned to more specialized tools as a way to solve my organizational challenges. They can make a huge difference, but can create silos of information. For example, I started using Zotero in grad school, to keep track of all my research articles. This was a huge improvement over putting papers in topic based folders and trying to cram paper keywords into the filenames. Zotero has useful tools that allowed me to generate bibliographies automatically and to save papers directly from the browser. But now I had a separate store of papers that wasn’t tightly integrated with my research data and information; it was in a separate silo. This turned into a problem when I needed to reinstall my operating system. All my other files were restored but I had trouble recovering my Zotero papers. Eventually I was able to recover them, but it highlights that separate silos increase the complexity of securing my data.

Ultimately tools won’t help if the information is not useful. Marie Kondo says throw away all papers (except what you really need)2, and I think the same could be said for digital information too. She says this because according to her core principle, your things should “spark joy” and she finds papers rarely spark joy. Do my digital files and information spark joy? The majority probably don’t. I’m not totally sure because most are in these old folders that I never look at.

Information tends to bring me more joy when it is connected to something bigger, and this is where tools can help. For example, the “Untitled” file in an old folder called “New” is probably not useful. The context is lost; it is just a fragment. In contrast, a note in an Evernote notebook is part of something bigger. Evernote allows the notes to be displayed in different ways which can help the context to be recovered, and it is easy to search. It’s also easier to make connections between different notes with tags or with links.

Based on these experiences, I have begun to seriously fight the accumulation of unnecessary fragments and now try to only keep things that are part of a “whole”. One practice that has helped a lot is to channel the inflow of information. By default, there many different places that new files are saved, which is bad because it’s hard to evaluate what should be kept. To make things more manageable, I create a single “Inbox” folder where any new file is saved temporarily until it can be saved in an appropriate place (I got the idea from this blog post3). This little change gave visibility to the problem, because I could easily see files building up. Now that the files were in one place, it was more straightforward to decide what to keep and what to delete (although I still put it off sometimes!). This is a small step toward protecting my digital space and being intentional about what I allow in.

Limiting the amount of work in progress is also critical. Work in progress can be many things: unfinished projects, ideas that need to be pursued, or emails that need to be responded to. Too much work in progress is bad for multiple reasons (Agile frameworks like Kanban4 and Scrum5 are dedicated to limiting work in progress), but in regard to storing information, the unfinished work means that there are lots of associated files and information that don’t bring joy. Instead of being sources of useful information, these incomplete files require additional work and are difficult to understand because of missing context. One tactic that helps limit the work in progress is to create a single “Current Projects” folder for things that are being actively worked on (this is another good idea from this blog post3). With all the active work in one place it is easier to see when things are getting overwhelming. When that happens, I need to let go of things that I am never going to do and work to finish the projects that are important.

Organization requires deep change in behavior. I am part of the knowledge organization system, so if the system is going to succeed then I need to be working too. This means being more intentional with what I keep and with how I keep the things that are important. The hard part is letting go. Sometimes that means deleting now and sometimes it means letting something be buried in the bottom of a list of notes. Either way this reserves the prime spots for the most useful information. As part of my system, I also need to focus on what is most important. This is a huge challenge because it requires saying “No” to some demands, and risking the disapproval of others. When those demands come from bosses, significant others, or children it’s difficult to say no. But by setting limits, I will be able to make the most of my limited resources and give the most back to those in my life.

The effort is worth it for me. As I have been implementing these changes, I have found that I spend less time searching for files, notes or projects from a few months ago. It still happens sometimes, but usually when I didn’t follow my own rules! My store of information is not some magically useful thing that I will use in the future, but a limited resource that I rely on and enjoy now. It has room to grow, with plenty of unneeded information that can be pruned and lots more that can be added in an integrated way. This practice is helping me to think more clearly. Letting go of information, forgetting, is helping me to make connections between the important ideas that are left.

  1. David B. Clear, “Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive”, https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125.
  2. Kondo, Marie. the life-changing magic of tidying up. 2014 p 96.
  3. Mark Virtue, “Zen and the Art of File and Folder Organization”, https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15677/zen-and-the-art-of-file-and-folder-organization/.
  4. David J. Anderson, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business.
  5. Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process.

Posted on
by
Image of restored specimen of a squat quadruped with knobby back
An ankylosaurus: by Emily Willoughby (e.deinonychus@gmail.com, http://emilywilloughby.com) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30925563

Like many kids, I was into dinosaurs. I had fun reading about the different types of dinosaurs, and trying to figure out which was the biggest, strongest, or most powerful. Over the years, I got interested in other things so dinosaurs have not been in the front of my mind. Recently my son has helped me to reconnect with the amazing world of dinosaurs. My son (two and half years old) loves dinosaurs and has been starting to learn some of their names (like ankylosaurus) so I have naturally been learning with him. To my surprise I’ve found that dinosaur research, and paleontology as a whole, has made tremendous progress since I was a kid.

Here are some specific examples:

  • Spinosaurus is the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever and had a crazy looking spine on its back. The finding of new Spinosaurus fossils as spurred a lot of research trying to understand whether it was aquatic, what the spine was for, and what it ate. The evidence is suggesting that it may have been one of the only swimming dinosaurs!
  • Tyranosaurus Rex was huge, but how fast was it? There has been a lot of back and forth but according to this 2017 paper, they probably weren’t that fast and mostly walked. Very disappointing! I still am hopeful that they could run as fast as a Jeep, but it did get me interested in the general relationship between animal size and speed (see this interesting blog post going into the details about animal speed)
  • Dinosaurs had efficient respiration with air sacs like birds (living dinosaurs!). In addition their bones were often pneumatic meaning that the air passages went through the bone. This made the bones light and strong which may have been one of the traits that allowed dinosaurs to get so big.
  • There is a wealth of evidence and theories about how different dinosaurs and other animals evolved. I really enjoyed this Eons show exploring how pterosaurs evolved the ability to fly.

Dinosaurs remind me that the world has not always been like it is now; it has changed and most likely will continue to change. The dinosaurs showed that huge land animals are possible. Could they evolve again? Could genetic engineering help? Jurassic park made it seem like a bad idea, but I would be for it. On a darker note, the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs (except the birds!) in particular is a reminder that millions of years worth of effort can be erased in a day. But perhaps the survival of our ancestors and the ancestors of other current species is an inspiration that life could survive the next big catastrophe. I like to remember we are part of the same story that includes the dinosaurs, and it is not over yet!

Posted on
by

When developing software, I want to build applications quickly. In my sometimes painful experience, low quality work gets in the way of this goal. There are a lot of problems with poor code quality, but I want to focus today on how code quality is directly tied to the amount of work in progress. Low quality code leads to large work in progress which in turn causes slow and uncertain delivery time of new features.

I tend to think of low quality code as any code that leads to defects that require rework, i.e. bugs. There is an inherent challenge in this definition because it’s hard to know what will cause a bug until the bug shows up. But from experience, I know there tend to be more bugs when I write the code quickly, working alone, and without writing or running tests. There are a lot of different ways to write bad code, but those are some of the common ways I do it : ).

The low quality code really starts to be a problem when I “finish” some features and move on to developing new features. The poorly written code is not really done. Most likely it still needs some rework to really function the way it is intended. So in reality, I have more work on my plate than I can handle efficiently. Major bugs crop up more frequently interrupting me and causing the time to finish any feature to increase.

It turns out that there is no way to get around the fact that more work in progress leads to longer delivery time; it’s Little’s Law. If you have a system with items coming in that have to wait in a queue before they can exit the system, then the number of items in the queue is directly proportional to how long, on average, that it takes to process a single item. This makes sense. Long lines mean long wait times. But when it comes to planning work, it is easy to think that I can get everything done at once.

To achieve a quicker cycle time, I need to insist on high quality work to avoid the pile of work in progress from unexpected bugs. A faster feedback cycle is super beneficial. With complex products each bit of work that we complete gives us new insight into the system, and ideally we would like to incorporate those learnings into deciding what to do next. The only way we can do that effectively is to have short delivery time of features.

This is my understanding of the connection between work in progress and delivery time related to my experience, but I learned about this connection first in Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business by David J Anderson and more recently in Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process by Kenneth S. Rubin.

I hope to write upcoming posts about specific things that I have found helpful in my efforts to improve the quality of my code.

Posted on
by

I was super excited to go skiing for the first time as an 11 year old. My older brother and I had signed up for a ski trip run by our town, and we were on a bus with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Going skiing was something I had dreamed of doing ever since watching Olympic alpine skiing as a very small child. Every winter I would sled fanatically any time it snowed, but I longed to go skiing. This was my chance!

I ended up learning how to ski quickly and loving it. My first day, my brother and I stayed on the beginner hill, but by the end we were flying down that little hill. Since then I have gone on to ski black-diamond slopes.

Why did I learn skiing quickly, while other people struggle greatly? Since then I have failed multiple times trying to “teach” friends how to ski. But then I have another friend, Keith, who learned how to ski even faster than me and was on black diamond slopes on his very first day!

How people learn is a whole field of study that fascinates me. Today, let me share a few of my thoughts about how learning works based on my own experience and from what I have picked up from reading about learning.

I think that there are many, many mini skills that are needed to accomplish any physical skill like skiing, swimming, or even walking. Having a toddler in the house makes that very clear. My son will try all sorts of variations on manipulating objects and repeat again and again. I believe that these games help him to build up a suite of mini skills that can eventually be drawn upon to learn skills like shooting a basket or doing stand up paddle boarding.

Perhaps getting stuck when attempting to learn a new skill is just a sign that one needs to learn some more of those mini skills. I had that experience with snowboarding which I tried for the first time with my friend Keith who was trying skiing. I had hoped that my experience with skiing would help me to pick up snowboarding. No luck! I kept on falling, and just felt very unstable on the board. I couldn’t turn or stop, so I had to fall. Sometimes the falls were awkward half-falls, and other times I would do a face plant into the icy snow. In the end, I gave up and switched my snowboard rental for a ski rental. Then Keith and I had a blast for the rest of the day racing down the advanced hills.

I didn’t try snowboarding again for over a decade, but when I did try snowboarding I picked it up right away and I loved it! I’m not sure how this happened, but I attribute it to learning how to do the RipStik (see the image below). A RipStick is like a skateboard but has only a single wheel at each end attached with swivel casters. To move you have to swivel you legs back and forth which somehow generates motion. It was definitely a challenge to learn but I learned it during a summer living with a group of my friends while going to Rutgers.

RipStik_Classic_BL_Product
The Razor RipStik

Somehow when I returned to snowboarding I felt like I was able to transfer some of the skills I had picked up from the RipStik. I felt much more comfortable balancing on the board. I could swing my legs and hips to enter in to turns and I could control how the edge slid through the snow.

When I tried snowboarding as a teenager, I wasn’t good at it, but when I tried it again over a decade later I was a ‘natural’. This experience and others like it, make me question the idea that some people are inherently good or bad at certain skills or sports. Yes, some people will learn skills much faster than others. But do not write off the slow learners! Once they master the necessary mini-skills they can catch up pretty quickly and perhaps they can experience the joy of flying down a mountain on a snowboard!

Do you have the experience of failing to learn something the first time and then picking it up years later? I’d be curious to hear about it. I’m also interested in learning more about what the scientific research says about how people learn.

Posted on
by

The first weekend of December, I took part in the 2019 Omega Center conference titled Love at the Heart of the Cosmos. The Omega Center is an organization dedicated to building a new understanding of religion and science. The conference explored the idea that God’s love permeates the physical world and that the physical world matters to God. I attend online, but despite the distance, was still able to feel the excitement of the speakers and the attendees. I felt a sense of finding my “home”, other people like me who care deeply about religion, but are searching to find an understanding of religion they can wholeheartedly believe in.

To give a sense of the conference, here are a few examples:

  • Matthew Fox talked about the importance of holding on to a sense of wonder. He argued that God is not static, so we should be open to updating our beliefs and doctrines. I found it particularly encouraging how he has worked on new forms of liturgy.
  • Kathleen Duffy , a Catholic sister and physicist, described the struggle of Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as he navigated writing about evolution and how it impacts his Catholic faith while facing censure from the Church. It is helpful to learn from Teilhard’s struggle, because we still face obstacles today. There is real resistance towards fully embracing evolution which necessarily causes dramatic changes to our understanding of God.
  • Ilia Delio, Catholic sister and theologian leading the Omega Center, spoke about the need for inner work, including contemplation, to contribute toward the future that God is calling us to. She described how technology is changing our very definition of what it means to be human, and the role of religion in this time of change.

Throughout the talks, the questions, and other events, there was a sense that we are on the edge of a big change in religion and society. In some way the current world religions will need to change to make sense of our changing world. There is a hope that a new religion or religions could emerge and help humanity face existential challenges.

I am just one person, and can not do much on my own, but I am part of something bigger. Maybe I can and we can, in some small way, contribute toward this epic story.

Posted on
by

Parallel parking is hard. Many of us avoid parallel parking if we can help it, and yet there are a select few that seem to be able to parallel park with ease. How do they do it? Over the past three years, I’ve been forced to parallel park a lot since our apartment doesn’t have enough parking in the lot. All the practice has helped me get a lot more comfortable about parallel parking, but it has also got me thinking. Parallel parking is an iterative process; somehow by going backwards and forwards and turning the steering wheel back and forth you can shift your car into a spot. I realized there must be an algorithm, a simple set of rules, that will always move the car smoothly into the spot. So I figured out a way to do it, and want to share it with you today. Maybe knowing the rules will help our parallel parking!

Shift car into spot by shifting back and forth according to an algorithm.

The basic problem with parallel parking is to shift your car into the spot, as shown in the sketch above. It would be easy if the front and back wheels could rotate 90 degrees, but with a normal car you have to deal with only the front wheels able to turn. Here is an algorithm I found for parallel parking:

  1. Start with car lined up with front of spot (not optimal but easier to understand the algorithm).
  2. Turn wheel right and reverse about half the length of the spot.
  3. Turn wheel left and reverse to the end of the spot. The car should be straightened out.
  4. Turn wheel right and go forward about half the length of the spot.
  5. Turn wheel left and go forward to end.
  6. Repeat until car is close enough to curb.
The car tires draw out concentric circles as the car turns.

As I was figuring out how to sketch the process of a car parallel parking, I actually learned something about car steering. It turns out that the front wheels do not point exactly in the same direction during a turn. Instead they follow the Ackermann condition so that every wheel draws out a circle with the same center point, as shown in the sketch above. With this insight, I was able to trace out the motion of the car as it parallel parks. The images below break down the process:

  • Car about to park in spot
    Line up car with open spot.

So if you trust my drawings, following these steps solves the parallel parking problem. Give it a shot! It is a little unnatural at first following a series of steps, but is nice once you get the hang of it. I like knowing that I can always shift the car where I want it just by going forwards and backwards.

To really learn something, I think it’s important to mess around and try things. I played around with making the turns uneven and found that this can cause the car to be crooked or straighten it out after I make a mistake. The slides below explore how this works.

  • The tracks of the back tires make nice symmetric curves if you follow this parallel parking algorithm.

Thanks for reading my thoughts into how parallel parking works. I hope it was helpful and interesting. Part of my inspiration was a nice article I read about visualizing algorithms. Please let me know if you have and questions or comments!

Posted on
by

 

I didn’t know how RSS worked for a long time. It’s too bad because RSS is a great way to follow websites that you like. It stands for Real Simple Syndication (see wiki article for more info) and is a way for websites to create feeds of their content that users can subscribe to. This is one of those cases where a little barrier can be enough to block adoption. I wanted to share with you how RSS works in case you also are wondering how those little broadcast symbols work.

Following a website or blog on social media is pretty straightforward; you just click on the button for Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/etc. You can achieve the same thing with RSS, but you need to know a couple things first. If you just click on the button you might be asked to open a text file with a bunch of code in it.

rssText

That’s what I did, which is wrong. That code is actually a computer readable version of the latest posts from the website. Instead, you copy the link (right click and press “Copy link location”), and then you subscribe to that link in your RSS reader. But wait, I also had no idea what an RSS reader was. It turns out an RSS reader is just an app that automatically reads a website’s RSS feed and pulls the latest posts and updates from the websites that you follow. I’m using Inoreader right now which allows me to follow several blogs all in one place. Here’s a screenshot from my phone:

Screenshot_20190811-162619_Inoreader

If you want to start following websites outside of social media (and without spamming your email inbox) then sign up for a RSS reader. There are a bunch of options with readers, Feedly is a popular one. Many are free and you always can switch later if you realize that another has features that you like.

I’ll end by noting that you may already be using RSS without knowing it. iTunes or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) are essentially readers for podcasts that are broadcasted using RSS! So if you want to create a podcast you just need to create an RSS feed and connect it to iTunes (see this tutorial for example).

I’m planning on looking into how I can use RSS more on this site. I hope you enjoy RSS too. May it help you break free of the social media silos and find the content you like.