Unique Perspectives

We love people who can think outside of the box.  We love people who can see the world from a unique perspective.  We love people who can spot the trends before anyone else.  Well two of my friends have turned me onto a couple of people that have left me stunned with admiration, so I thought I’d pass them on to you.

The first is from Professor Jesse Schell and his take on where Facebook is leading us.  It’s in three parts:

 

If you watch these videos and don’t have a clue to what he’s talking about, well then I think you need to worry about being out of touch with pop culture, or else accept that the future has rushed past you.  Farmville has over 80 million users worldwide, and if you can’t understand what a weird fraking fact that is, then you might want to study these videos.  I’m not sure rock and roll in its heyday had those kinds of numbers.  Evidently it’s more addictive than meth, crack and heroin combined.  I know from experience since I’m a Farmville widower.

Next up is Christian Lander and his Stuff White People Like, a blog of brilliant social commentary with over 63 million hits.  The way to start reading this site is to visit the Full List of Stuff White People Like and pick a topic dear to your heart and get ready to be undressed.  Even more fun is to get together with a bunch of other white people and read these posts aloud.  Even when Lander isn’t skewering me, I’m learning so much about the people around me that is both hilarious and incredibly insightful.  Damn, I wish I had his people watching skills.

JWH – 3/2/10

What I Want To Be When I Get Old

I’ve picked twelve areas of knowledge to pursue in the last third of life.  It’s a conscious effort to organize my thoughts and actions.  Twelve specialties sounds like too many, but I’ve selected them like building blocks to work together as a whole.  Essentially what I have done is analyze what I’ve been doing for years unconsciously and state them here publicly to make them clear to me.  The pains of aging remind me of my limited time left on Earth and inspire me to change.  What I’m really doing is deciding what I want to be when I get old.  

Areas of knowledge might sound too lofty.  I could say I have twelve self-improvement topics I want to study, or even call them twelve goals for going the distance.  We do not have the language to express ideas of self-programming.  I’ve always loved John Lily’s book title Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, but sadly the book is about a great scientist going off the deep end with hallucinatory drugs and sensory deprivation.  But I digress.  Self-improvement is a vast topic for the publishing industry but has a poor connotation, but that phrase might come closest to my task.

I am a fat, lazy, late middle-aged man who has tumbled through life like big rolling weed acquiring random knowledge and wisdom through undisciplined osmosis.  Since I’m a programmer and work with computers, I think with cyber concepts, so picture an old PC that’s been running Windows XP for years.  This dusty old machine takes forever to boot up, and runs  slower and slower each day.  It’s time for a tune-up!  I want to delete all the clutter and crapware, cleanse the registry, run malware utilities, uninstall all the programs I don’t use, and decide on which programs are the most productive to keep.  I’m realistic.  I don’t expect to suddenly become a new Intel i7 machine running Windows 7, but I can make the old hardware run much more efficiently.

When we are young we have great ambitions about growing up.  We want to be somebody special and find the perfect mate.  During our middle years we expand our ambitions, seeking security, wealth and success.  But for the last third of life our goal is retirement, where we reduce our workloads and seek simple pleasures.  I say bullshit to that.  Maybe it’s because I didn’t find the success I wanted in youth and middle age that I hold out hope for an ambitious last third of life.

I’m not worried about the outward appearance of aging, the wrinkles, baldness, age spots or hobbled gait, what I’ve discovered that’s hard to see as a young person, is getting old is a state of mind that deals with wearing out mentally.  Avoiding pain, illness and injury becomes a relentless occupation.  My daily pains are minor compared to what I’ve seen in others, but the decline in health I’ve experience so far is wonderfully educational.  So for my first study goal is pretty obvious, and probably universal.

1. Maximize Health

I don’t need to become an authority or expert on this subject, but I do require major studying and practice.  Hell, I know the basics, eat right and exercise. Where I need to specialize is in the discipline of of mind over matter, or more precisely, mind over body.  I could greatly improve both the quality and quantity of my sunset years if I could lose weight.  I’ve been slowly gaining weight since my late twenties, and the only time I was actually able to lose poundage was due to illness, not a practical long term solution.  Of course, the secret to weight loss is knowledge many have sought and few have found.  I need to study books about the mind, and maybe even woo-woo subjects like yoga, meditation and will power.  This is one subject I wished I had mastered in childhood and practiced lifelong.

2. Enlightened Citizenship

I wanted to become an expert in green living, but I’ve decided that focus is too narrow.  I am deeply disturbed by partisan politics and our lack of will to make tough decisions about all our problems.  I believe in social democracy; we vote daily on countless issues with our every decision.  I am reading The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong and I’m reminded of her description of how the ancient Chinese practiced their religion.  Instead of being concerned with invisible gods and abstract concepts of the sacred, these people sought perfection by improving the simple acts of everyday life.  In other words, how you clean your house is more spiritual than religious rituals you embrace. 

3. XHTML/CSS/PHP/JavaScript/JQuery/CodeIgniter

After thirteen years of programming in classic ASP  I need to learn a whole new suite of programming languages and tools.  This is putting me way out of my comfort zone, but it’s my chance to prove that an old dog can learn new tricks.

4. Internet Living

I’ve been living on the net since the mid-80s with BBSes, Genie, CompuServe and Prodigy.  I’ve embraced digital life.  I’m fascinated by it’s potential.  I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet, so I want to explore all the emerging possibilities and even write about what will happen in the future.

5.  Clear Writing

I want to be a much better writer.  I love blogging, but I want to go beyond dumping out my thoughts.  I’m a wordy bastard that can’t structure an essay, much less a book.  I need to remove the clutter from my sentences and learn to assemble  paragraphs into larger structures that build coherent ideas.  I’m best at 500-1,000 words, but I want to write larger essays and even a book.

6.  Techniques of Fiction

I’ve been trying to write fiction since a high school creative writing class.  Like my failure at dieting, I can’t break through the writing discipline barrier either.  I’ve taken many writing courses and workshops.  At best, I can crank out words, but except for one time in endless tries, I can’t reach the critical mass of fictional fusion.   I need to master the language of fiction in the same way I write a computer program, so the story works without major bugs.

7.  Robot Novel

I’m struggling to write the great American robot novel.  After space travel, time travel, and alien encounters, robots are about the most over-written topic in science fiction.  Yet, I believe I have a fresh idea if I can crank out 100,000 readable words of fiction.  Notice how specializations 5-10 relate?  I’m not going off in twelve different directions, but hope I’m pursuing twelve skills I can integrated into a synergy of effort.

8.  Evolution of Mind

To say anything fictional about robots will require understanding artificial intelligence, and AI has always depended on studies of the mind.  I find my library is full of books on robots, AI, mind and evolution.  I bought all those books because they were individually interesting, but now I’m going to read them as fuel for my novel.  If we are the pinnacle of intelligent life on Earth now, what will occupy that position in a million years?  Or a billion?

9.  Sense of Wonder

I’ve been a reader and scholar of science fiction my whole life.  People who adore science fiction claim its because it generates sense of wonder.  Sense of wonder has been around far longer than science fiction so it can’t claim exclusive rights, but I do believe that science provides a special kind of sense of wonder.  For too long now science fiction has been living off past glories.  It’s time to find new concepts that push our sense of wonder button.

10.  Cosmological Perspective

Our perceived position in the universe has always been very philosophical.  It is very hard to grasp our location in relationship to the rest of reality.  Even the shape of the universe is impossible to fathom.  If we are God’s supreme creation, why are we so small?  And can any religion or philosophy be valid that doesn’t fully incorporate our knowledge of cosmology?

11.  Learning in Old Age

What are the limits of acquiring new knowledge in an old brain?  Could I learn something in my last third years that I wasn’t able to learn in my first third years?  Could I go back and finish Calculus II, or learn to play the guitar?  There is a discipline barrier that I’ve never been able to crash through.  I find my wisdom grows as my body declines, but will I ever be wise enough to overcome the limitations of my body?

12.  Our Existential Relationship with Fiction

We can’t understand reality so we make up stories.  It is impossible to predict the future yet we constantly create fiction to envision what will come.  And I don’t mean science fiction.  These twelve areas of knowledge I am pursing are a fiction.  The odds are I’ll just get older, fatter, suffer more, watch even more television while waiting to die.  I invent fictions about how I will change myself and fight the inevitable.   But that’s my point about programming and metaprogramming in the human biocomputer.  Is life no more than meta-fiction?

* * *

These twelve topics of specialization are ambitious, but I don’t think impossible to achieve.  It will make me a Renaissance (old) man.  And success can be measured across a range of achievement levels.  No one gets out of here alive, so death can’t be considered a failure of life.  I am reminded of the many books I’ve read about Eastern religions where the last third of life is set aside for spiritual pursuits.  At the end of the rat race, wisdom is the only possession worth pursuing.  But I grew up with a Western world mindset.  Reality is a savage land meant to be conquered, not accepted like our friends, the Eastern gurus teach.

Christians love the concept of the eternal soul.  As an atheist I’m not sure souls exist, at least not in the past.  That doesn’t mean we don’t want to fashion our own souls.  That doesn’t mean we aren’t evolving towards creating souls.  Through discipline we program our identities.  Through metaprogramming we program our programming.

JWH – 2/27/10 

Can You Call Yourself an Expert in Any Subject?

I would think most people could call themselves master in the subject of themselves.  But do you have any topics that you feel you are an expert?  Think small when considering this unless you’re really the leading authority in a bigger subject.  For example, I might be an authority on Lady Dorothy Mills, a forgotten writer from the 1920s. 

I’ve kept a web site about Lady Mills for years trying to find anyone still interested in her work.  About once a year I get an email from someone who has run across her name and wants to know more, or has a tidbit of information for me.  I recently learned that Lady Mills has a sister in her 90s living in New Zealand, so I’m going to consider her the Master of the Topic.

Also, I’ve maintain a web site on the classics of science fiction – but there are many people interested in this topic, so maybe I’m only a scholar.  Topics are relative.  Some topics are too big to rank their specialists, like astronomy, but it might be possible to rank astronomers on a narrower topic, like studying cosmic background radiation.

From reading this essay I hope the next time you meet a person that asks you what you’re in to you can be a bit more specific than “I like music and movies.”  Think about what you like to read.  What topics perk up your ears when the television is on.  What do you like to argue about at parties.  Maybe once you think about this idea of ranking specialists you might like to specialize in a topic.

For the purposes of this essay I created a rough way to rank the levels knowledge on any topic.

Membership Levels in Knowledge of a Topic
Master 1
Authority 2 – 9
Expert 10 – 99
Scholar 100 – 999
Student 1,000 – 9,999
Amateur 10,000 – 100,000
Fan 100,001 – 1,000,000

For big academic subjects a person needs to have a Ph.D. and written widely on a particular subfield to call themselves an authority or expert.  But it’s possible to narrow your focus, say pick a dead person, or work of art, and master the topic.  For example, we might consider David McCullough the master of the topic of John Adams. 

Or I would guess Bill Patterson is the master on the topic of the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, but he might have rivals.  We have to wait and read Patterson’s first volume of Heinlein’s biography when comes out in August.  In the tempest in a teapot world of Heinlein knowledge there’s a contentious society fighting to claim authority turf.  If the going is tough at the top, it’s easier to claim a smaller peak, like Joseph T. Major did by mastering the topic of Heinlein’s juveniles with his book Heinlein’s Children.

At 58 I’m rather old to be thinking about what I want to be when I grow up, but I don’t think I’m too old to become ambitious about studying a specialized topic and trying to master it.  After my last post, Xmind Mapping LibraryThing Tags, I’ve been inspired to discover what subjects I’m the most interested in and start systematically studying them.  Hell, I could become a specialist in online library cataloging programs with not too much work. 

Everyone should have twelve topics they love at the moment.  These topics should be subjects that would thoroughly delight you to discuss at parties and around the water cooler at work.  I’m actively studying all the topics I’m interest in and want to pick twelve to consciously pursue.  The trouble is I need to narrow down my specialties.  I can say I like to read books about artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, but that’s way to big a topic other than just being a general fan. 

The other day I saw a video of a robot that solves a Rubik’s Cube in 12 seconds or less.  I wonder if the guy who built this robot is the absolute master of the topic, or if there are other robots that can do the Rubik’s Cube.  As a fantasy, I’d love to program a computer to read science fiction novels and write scholarly papers about any SF story I fed it, but that’s way too ambitious.  I might could become a scholar of robot characters in science fiction, maybe even an expert.  

Right now I’m just having fun contemplating this idea and what topics I want to pursue.  I hope to come up with a list soon.

JWH – 2/22/10

Xmind Mapping LibraryThing Tags

I’ve finished entering in all my books into LibraryThing and I’m now working on organizing my collection by tags.  Tags are like a simplified Dewey Decimal system, but you can also think of them as virtual bookshelves.  Tagging lets me see how my library reflects lifelong interests.  But tagging, like all book classification systems, is a tricky business.  I currently have 705 books, all with tags, but unfortunately, I’m not sure I like my present tagging system, and that means going through all 705 books and altering the tags once again.  Luckily, I had light bulb switch on in my brain this morning while showering.  Why not mind map the problem with Xmind?  Here’s the way things are now:

Tags1

By creating tags Nonfiction and Fiction I can get quick counts of each, currently 584 to 121 in favor of Nonfiction.  The above mind map uses the largest of my actual Tags:

Tags-photo

I’ve already decided I have too many tags.  Since I’m planning on re-shelving my books in tag groupings to make them easier to find, I would put the one book about telescopes with all the astronomy books.  I’d probably also shelve the six books on robots with the eleven books on AI, and eliminate humor and poetry as tags because I just don’t have enough books on those topics to justify a tag.  I could convert Humor to Memoir and start beefing up that category.  See, there’s lots to think about when playing home librarian.  If all I had was science fiction, I’d just alphabetize my shelves by author.

The fun thing about this work is realizing the reality behind it.  I have 705 physical books on four bookshelves at home and one at work.  Then I have all those books vaguely shelved in my mind.  To be honest, I can only remember a small fraction of my books at any one time.  And when I do remember a book I want, it’s very hard to find the physical copy.  I’m using LibraryThing to aid my brain in understanding my library of 705 books – to help remember all my titles, and hopefully create a system to quickly find the physical volume.

In other words, I have books, a brain and a database.  The LibraryThing is only a list making tool.  By adding Xmind, I’m adding a visual modeling tool into the mix.  Science shows us that our brains can only handle so many objects in our conscious minds at once.  Seven things is where we max out, and even holding seven things in the mind is hard.  Xmind allows me to go beyond the seven limit and visually map out more items on my computer screen, but even mind mapping has limits.  I can’t mind map a 1,000 objects.  I haven’t learned it’s limit, but I’d guess it’s less than 100 items, and maybe less than 50.

Think of it this way:  How many aspects of reality do you specialize in studying?  I have 35 books on space exploration.  I’m no expert, far from it.  But it’s a topic I like.  I have 47 books on programming, most of which are on languages I’m forgetting because I’m switching to new ones.  I am a ASP programmer.  I’m becoming a PHP programmer.  The better I get at PHP the more I will forget ASP.

We can only keep up with a limited number of topics in life, and the books I’ve bought reflect those topics.  I plan to use LibraryThing and Xmind to refine my focus and help me zero in on the topics I want to study the most.  I already spotted topics in my collection that I’m considering abandoning, like Kerouac and Wyatt Earp, and new topics I want to pursue, like cosmology and mapping the universe.

Under the new system I’ll tag topics I want to pursue.  (And it’s logical that I’d shelve books on each of those topics together.)  I created a new mind map based just on topics, and not levels of organization like nonfiction, science, astronomy, cosmology.  I still have too many topics to pursue, but things become clearer.

Tags2

Under my old system I tagged any book, fiction or nonfiction related to science fiction with a tag for SciFi, and since I have a whole lot of books by and about Robert A. Heinlein, I had a tag for Heinlein too.  So one of his novels could get tagged:  Fiction, Novel, SciFi, Heinlein.  With such tagging I could create lists of all my fictional books, all my novels, all fiction and nonfiction books related to science fiction and any book with a Heinlein connection.

Under the simplified system this won’t work anymore.  A tag of Heinlein would mean any book about Heinlein.  If I wanted a list of books by Heinlein I could search by author.   A SciFi tag means books about science fiction.  I’d have no way of listing all my science fiction novels and short story collections separate from general fiction – that is just by using the Tag concept in LibraryThing.  However, LibraryThing also has the Collection object.

I could create Fiction and Nonfiction collections, and then my tags would only apply to those books.  Under the Fiction collection, I could have novels about cosmology and AI.  This offers a lot of flexibility and new insights on how to organize my books both physically and mentally.  But how do I model this in Xmind?  And are the distinctions Fiction and Nonfiction really important?

Take Jack Kerouac.  He wrote novels.  He was a character in many novels.  And whole libraries have been written about his books, his life, and his characterizations, and the people around him and their characterizations.  I could change my topic label from Kerouac to The Beats and be more accurate about my interests.

What about science fiction?  Is it science or fiction?  Actually my interest in science fiction can reflected in more specific tags:  AI & Robots, Space Colonization, Homo Sapiens 2.0, Mars, The Moon and Intelligent Life.  But how do I categorize the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs versus Kim Stanley Robinson versus NASA?  Do I make categories:  Real Mars and Fantasy Mars?  They are two separate topics about reality, what we know about the real planet Mars, and what we know about all the fantasies about the imaginary planet Mars.

This opens up a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way to attack the problem, and more important than that, a whole new way of living.  What are my core topics?  Can I mind map them?  Could you make a list of all the subjects you care about the most?  Ones you could feel like a semi-expert in a discussion.

This project will take me awhile, so I can’t produce my final list for this post.  But I think I’m on to something.  Instead of flitting from one topic to the next and accidently collecting books, I need to decide what topics I want to specialize in studying, and build my library to support those interests.

JWH – 2/21/10

Developing My Book Identity with LibraryThing

I’ve got my books cataloged into LibraryThing and I’m now having big fun playing with my collection.  The collection, 706 books, is starting to take on an identity as I tag the books into subject categories.  And I do mean, an identity, like a personal identity, because my library is public, and I’m getting hung up about its appearance.  For itself, and for how it represents me.

It’s book vanity I know.  I had a few books I was too embarrassed to put in, and I found I didn’t want to list my wife’s books because they weren’t part of my self-image.  And I’m thinking about culling some books because they just aren’t me.  But as I tag books into categories I realize those topics are the ones I’ve been fixated on my whole life.  Just how many people like to collect biographies of Jack Kerouac, Wyatt Earp, Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick? 

Back in the 60s, they had a saying, “You are what you eat.”  Well, I say, “You are what you read.”

The LibraryThing collection represents my physical collection of books, but its also a snapshot of my lifelong personal interests.  Since I own books on subjects I’m no longer interested in, I’m thinking I should cull them from my collection.  There’s two conflicting desires here, (or sins).  The first could be called book gluttony, and the second, book pride.  Do I want to own a lot of books, or do I want to own the books that best paints a clear picture of who I am? 

LibraryThing is a very flexible database, and I could use it’s Collections feature to define more than books I own, like books I hope to read, books I want to buy, or books I’ve read but no longer own.  I could even create a collection “Books That Define Me” and list books I own and don’t own.  I could also create a collection called “It Ain’t Me Books” for my guilty pleasures.

The more I play with LibraryThing the more I realize how many ways I can slice and dice my book collection.  I sit in front of the LibraryThing page, press buttons and links, and make different piles of books to contemplate.  I love using it in cover image mode.  LibraryThing lets you select different size graphics for the covers, and I like the three row size.  It annoys me to see books with bad cover scans, or bummer of bummers, no covers at all. Again, I think this is a vanity thing.  I’ve gotten all hung up on having the same cover as the book I own, but some books I own don’t have dust jackets.  Should I show them with jackets when I don’t own them?  Some books have multiple dust jackets to choose from, would it be unethical to use a cover that I like better than the one I own?  One I’d like to see in cover view better, and one I’d like other people to see. 

Hell, you can judge a book by its cover!!!  And I want you to judge my books by their covers.

Some of my oldest books may never had had dust jackets.  I’ve never even seen photos of their dust jackets.  I’ve thought about creating covers for them with Photoshop.  Isn’t that weird?  I hate seeing the naked books in cover view mode.  LibraryThing offers a variety of generic book covers to use, but I don’t like using them.  I care more about how my books look than how I look.

So far I’ve been pretty honest and listed all but a couple books I own.  I won’t name the lame books I’m too embarrassed to list, but I probably should, just to truly reflect my honest book personality.  And I guess I should just scan my books without dust jackets to show what they really look like.  And I might allow myself to scan the book covers I have when my copies are better than the cover art within LibraryThing.  If LibraryThing was for book collectors, we’d have to catalog exact editions and photograph the specific books I own, but LibraryThing isn’t that exact.

I do wonder if the next time I’m at a bookstore if I’ll buy a book because it’ll make my book personality appear smarter, or because its cover will make it look more beautiful.  Vanity, all is book vanity.

JWH 2/16/10