A learning about math catch-22

Catch-22: Schools kill imagination and creativity, yet learning about mathematics depends on imagination and creativity.

Imagination: “process of having in your consciousness conceptions of things that aren’t present.”

Creativity: “applied imagination.”

“The moving power of mathematics is not reasoning but imagination.”–Augustus De Morgan

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”–Albert Einstein

“There’s very little emphasis on the right brain thinking
– the intuitive, the creative, the imaginative — and in
particular, the thinking out of the box.”–Peter Neumann

From the “Coping With Math Anxiety” essay from MathAcademy.com: “Myth #3: Math Requires Logic, Not Creativity.”

Sir Ken Robinson has a popular TED video in which he states that “schools kill creativity.” Plus, Robinson claims “creativity is nourished by keeping your imagination alive (stimulated).”

If Robinson, De Morgan, Einstein, Neumann are correct, then we have a catch-22 when it comes to learning about math.

MathAcademy.com::Coping With Math Anxiety

TED.com::Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity (filmed Feb 02006)

From 140 to 1,759,000,000,000,000

This semester I have been hammering away at two themes: Twitter and High-Performance Computing.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service that limits postings (i.e. tweets) to a maximum of 140 characters.

During November 02009, TOP500 issued its list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers and Jaguar was number at 1.759 petaflops (i.e. 1759 trillion floating-point operations per second).

The lecture notes for weeks 13 (02009.11.16) and 15 (02009.12.01) contained the following tweets.

The Global Language Monitor names “Twitter” the top word of 2009.

I’ve been telling students that I am in the process of learning about Twitter. For me, as of 02009.12.01, the power of Twitter is in who I follow.

President Obama visited China and he had Twitter on his mind.

“First of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter.”~Obama to Chinese

I don’t know why Obama had to let the Chinese in on the fact that had never tweeted.

“I’m a big supporter of not restricting Internet use, Internet access, other information technologies like Twitter.”~Obama to Chinese

Obama referred to Twitter as a form of “information technology” and these days I call this 21st century Informatics. In a nutshell, 21st century Informatics is supercomputer-based data processing.

Al Gore was the keynote speaker at the 21st annual SC conference. SC is an “international conference on High Performance Computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis.”

At SC09, Al Gore says supercomputing can be killer app in climate change.

Gore believes high-performance computing systems, which include high-performance visualization systems, will help convince the world that climate change is a real problem. Gore might be wise to expect the unexpected.

“Supercomputing has given us the most powerful tool in the history of civilization.”~Al Gore at SC09

A bold statement by Gore and only time will tell if he is correct.

By the way, Steve Wozniak once said, “Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”

About ‘ideas’ via Knuth and Keller

A few days ago I read the following Keller quote on my iGoogle.com homepage.

College isn’t the place to go for ideas. — Helen Keller (01880-01968)

A day later I received a tweet that contained a hyperlink to a Knuth related webpage that included the following quote.

I have always liked the concept of universities as they were
in Ancient Greece, where folks who had something cool to say
would just come and say it. It wasn’t about recognition; the
impetus was the thought that you were resonating with ideas.
– Donald Knuth (01938-)

Does Knuth’s quote lend credence to Keller’s quote?

If modern day universities are places to go for ideas, then why would Knuth reminisce about Acient Greece?

A catch-22 when it comes to trusting code

The following quote is from Ken Thompson’s ACM Turing Award Lecture: Reflections on Trusting Trust (1984).

You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)

On 15 October 2009, Basil Vandegriend [1] posted an item in which he asked the following.

Would you trust your life to your code?

I pondered Basil’s query and concluded that my answer was “no.” Upon reflection, I’ve never unconditionally trusted the code that I’ve written. Many of my fellow programmers would immediately blame software glitches on hardware (or “stupid” users), but software was always my initial suspect.

A catch-22: Thompson is correct and you don’t trust your own code.

[1] Basil Vandegriend is a “senior software developer and architect specializing in Java and enterprise business software located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.”

Bell-Labs.com::Reflections on Trusting Trust

Killer robots, yuck

I really don’t want to ponder killer robots, but RealityPod.com reporting on the Samsung Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot it tough to ignore.

The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot is a
stationary unit armed with a 5.5-millimeter K3 machine
gun and a second gun that fires rubber bullets. It can
use its twin optical and infrared sensors to track and
identify targets from up to 2.5 miles away in the daytime
and about half that distance at night.

Stationary today, mobile to tomorrow?

It also has a microphone and speaker system to exchange
passwords with human soldiers. If the password is incorrect,
the robot can either sound an alarm or open fire on the target.

I’d want more than one chance to say the correct password because
I’d probably pull a Ralph Kramden… homina homina homina.

RealityPod.com::Samsung Unveils Fully Automated Sentry Robot
that can Track, Kill Humans

Snoop Dogg, Aristotle, Donald Knuth

On back-to-back days I mined quotes by Calvin Broadus (Snoop Dogg)
and Aristotle. Dogg’s quote was about math and Aristotle’s quote was about teaching. The combination of math and teaching caused me to recall a quote by Donald Knuth about the importance of computing.

If you stop at general math, you’re only going to make general math money. — Snoop Dogg

I’m curious as to how Dogg defines “general math money.” Minimum wage? Less than six-figure salaries? Less than $1 million per year? I suspect Dogg makes abstract algebra money.

Teaching is the highest form of understanding. — Aristotle

The quotes by Dogg and Aristotle reminded me of the following quote by Donald Knuth.

It has often been said that a person does not really understand something until he teaches it to someone else. Actually a person does not really understand something until he can teach it to a computer, i. e., express it as an algorithm. The attempt to formalize things as algorithms leads to a much deeper understanding than if we simply try to comprehend things in the traditional way. — Donald Knuth [1]

Programming is how a person “teaches” a computer, yet students don’t have to learn about programming in K-12. And, many (majority of?) students get college degrees without ever learning a programming language. We are living in the CSTEM era and 21st century STEM depends on Computing, yet our educational systems seem to ignore this reality.

Aristotle might have been a dude in his day, but he didn’t have supercomputers at his finger tips. Knuth is a grossly unknown modern day polymath who would be quickly whatevered by most young people. But what about Snoop?

Snoop Dogg tells his fans to learn beyond general math. Kudos to Dogg. It would be nice if Mr. Dogg would rap about the importance of learning about the base-2 number system (i.e. the code).

[1] Donald Knuth is a “computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.” [Wikipedia]

Augmenting human intelligence

This was my Facebook posting on 02009.11.20.

It’s all about augmenting human intelligence. What happens if somebody cracks (“hacks into”) a person’s brain implant?

Direct Link Between the Brain and Computers Coming in 2020 [02009.11.20]

“It’s possible now, more than ever, to augment human intellect.” — Bill Joy (from an article about Doug Engelbart titled “The Dream of a Lifetime”)

I tweeted the following two days ago [02009.11.18]…

Covered peta-scale computing in class yesterday. Student asked: Why supercomputers? Tomorrow they’ll see http://ow.ly/DkwZ

Nutshell: “IBM has simulated a brain with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses–about the equivalent of a cat’s cortex, or 4.5% of a human brain.”

The computing roadmap at the end of 02009: 20 petaflops by 02012 and 1,000 petaflops (one exaflops) by 02018-02020.

[extra] While writing this blog entry, the following tweet from @hrheingold was received.

Engelbart’s 1962 “Augmenting Human Intellect” is well worth rereading every year or two.

I retweeted Howard Rheingold’s tweet and added the following bookmark to my Delicious.com account.

AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework

Promoting long-term thinking

I posted the following comment in response to an AzCentral.com posting by editorial writer Joanna Allhands titled “The impact of long-term forecasts.

“30-year economic forecast”… Hee-haw.

“Recovery from this recession could take decades”… I don’t know how you define “recovery,” but I keep “seeing” 02013 as being a major breakout year. In other words, the “recovery” will take decades if we assume one-year decades (and one-decade centuries). Note: I use 5-digit years for a reason. [visit LongNow.org and subscribe to the SingularityU YouTube channel]

Want to get majorily depressed? Investigate “lump of labor.” We’re not yet in the Robotics Age; consequently, this recession’s “recovery” is giving us insight into the “lump of labor” problem that is awaiting us. The next recession has the potential to make this recession look like good times. In a nutshell: We need to start electing 21st century leaders rather than 20th century political dinosaurs.

Petaflops processing yottabytes

I tweeted the following two tweets on 02009.11.16…

• Jaguar supercomputer hits 1.759 petaflops http://bit.ly/3eInDv

  A supercomputer known as Jaguar has finally bested IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer in the biannual TOP500 list, but researchers have already begun looking into exascale supercomputers that consist of 100 million cores and run 1,000 times faster than Jaguar.

• Yottabytes of data via PopSci.com “National Security Agency’s
  Surveillance Data Could Fill Two States by 2015″ http://ow.ly/CRGE

  The NSA estimates it will have enough data by 2015 to fill a million datacenters spread across the equivalent combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island. The NSA wants to store yottabytes of data, and one yottabyte comes to 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.

Diamandis and O’Reilly On Innovation

Entrepreneur.com had an article in which Peter Diamandis and Tim O’Reilly talked about innovation.

I agree with Peter Diamandis when he said, “I fear that we have become very risk-averse in our society.” My take: It’s tough to innovate when failure is a kiss of death.

Tim O’Reilly believes too many people erroneously consider themselves innovators. O’Reilly used a lyric from a Buffalo Springfield song: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” I like to use the following Bob Dylan lyric: “And you know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is… Do you Mr. Jones?” My take: Too many self proclaimed innovators are Mr. Jones.

Something to ponder… Innovation as an increasing function of fun?

Tim O’Reilly says, “We find innovation where people are having fun.“