The Jazz of Physics By Stephon Alexander

This was a book that I was looking forward to reading. Two words caught my fancy: Physics and Jazz.

Alexander is an accomplished physicist and a working musician. He was fascinated by both parts of his life when he was a child and managed to be able to do quite well in both spheres as an adult. He was able to convey his own natural attraction and obsession to both physics and jazz in a very natural and passionate way. He does an excellent job in eliciting in me a corresponding response in me that was as natural and passionate as his.

His intent is to present the advanced physics that he is working on as an academic as being analogous to the jazz improvisations that he is working on as a gigging jazz musician. Unfortunately, he was much less successful.

My own expertise in both physics and jazz are skin deep at best. Physics being more naturally aligned with my engineering training, while jazz is limited by scant my musical background. So it would seem to be natural that his explanations of the physics would be easier for me to comprehend, it wasn’t. In fact the musical analogies that he explained made much more sense that his explanations of physics.  As I slogged through the explanations, I wondered about the more general audience, whether they were having as difficult of a time as I was.

The center motif that he presented at the beginning of the book involved John Coltrane’s mandala in which Coltrane was trying to create a connection with his own very original musical expressions with the evolution of modern physics during that time. Coltrane worshiped Einstein and his ideas, for example.  According to Alexander, Coltrane’s last three albums were his own experimentation with the mathematical ideas that Einstein had speculated upon.

Taking inspiration from arguably the most prominent minds of their era, in completely disparate areas of achievement, Alexander decided to work on both simultaneously. Of course, this was not a conscious choice, he had been foundering in his physics career since physics had become a calculators domain with the mathematics heavy emphasis on the superstring theory.

Indeed, Alexander employed the method of no method, or the idea of wu-wei to use jazz as a means of training his mind in a way that perhaps the jazz could elicit some original ideas in his physics. By the accounts in the book, he was indeed successful in doing good physics while also playing some good jazz. What he failed to do in the book however, was cogently leading us through his maze of twin spheres of influence and the complexity contained therein with each one. While he did a very admirable job trying to explain himself, I suspect that the culprit is more the complexity of the subjects rather than his familiarity with both subjects. Indeed, the book would be 100 times longer if he had indeed taken care to explain the minutiae of the two subjects. His hope of using analogy rather than detailed explanations to convey his message was somewhat successful but also somewhat a failure. But no matter, because the book did a great job of creating an ethos of what he was trying to convey, and there was a denouement of sorts toward the end. I will never listen to Coltrane again, and I will now understand a little bit better what all the fuss about modern physics  is in regard, so I can say that I learned something new.

The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments by Peter Catapano, Simon Critchley (Editor)

This is a fantastic compilation of The Stone Reader column that is published in the New York Times for the last few years.

I read the columns on occasion and the level of discourse is uneven but when the article is good, it is fantastic. 

This compilation is a worthy collection of the varied and disarmingly charming topics that the column had elicited over the years. 

It is a book that does not call for being read in one sitting, it is however,a tome to be savored, dissected, and analyzed repeatedly in order to entertain one's mind. A most welcomed series for those time that we need to let our minds reach into the nether reaches of our thoughts and replenish our mental energies while getting away from the daily grind.

It is, a most welcomed respite.

Before The Fall by Noah Hawley

I knew nothing of Noah Hawley until I started reading the book. I did not know of his renown as a television producer nor as an author. I had read that this was a good read so I jumped in.

I must say that I am pleasantly surprised at this book. The story flowed and the suspense, although not overbearingly mysterious, was perfect in tone and in keeping me on the edge of my seat. 

The structure that Hawley used to set up the story wasn't something too terrifically new, but he wielded it effectively and he wrote within the structure he set up extremely adroitly. 

The hardest part I thought was the part where the main character swam with the boy in the ocean, that would have been easily mishandled but he did a great drop in keeping my interest while also moving the story along.

As you may be able to tell, I am trying very hard to avoid letting the plot out in the review, but please trust me when I say that the book kept me tautly interested the entire time I was reading. In fact, I sensed the familiar twinge of regret when the denouement came because I knew I wanted the story to continue. I wanted to see the comeuppance for the those anti-heros in the book. as well as a tidying up of various loose ends. But this ending worked quite well.

Mr. Hawley has gained a follower with this book. I may even go out to search for his other books as well. He has a great and deft touch with timing, drama, and tension which served him quite well. he was able to create believable mental dialogues for his characters without making those dialogues seem trite or self conscious while also maintaining a depth of thought that served to advance some key ideas.

Before The Fall by Noah Hawley

I knew nothing of Noah Hawley until I started reading the book. I did not know of his renown as a television producer nor as an author. I had read that this was a good read so I jumped in.

I must say that I am pleasantly surprised at this book. The story flowed and the suspense, although not overbearingly mysterious, was perfect in tone and in keeping me on the edge of my seat. 

The structure that Hawley used to set up the story wasn't something too terrifically new, but he wielded it effectively and he wrote within the structure he set up extremely adroitly. 

The hardest part I thought was the part where the main character swam with the boy in the ocean, that would have been easily mishandled but he did a great drop in keeping my interest while also moving the story along.

As you may be able to tell, I am trying very hard to avoid letting the plot out in the review, but please trust me when I say that the book kept me tautly interested the entire time I was reading. In fact, I sensed the familiar twinge of regret when the denouement came because I knew I wanted the story to continue. I wanted to see the comeuppance for the those anti-heros in the book. as well as a tidying up of various loose ends. But this ending worked quite well.

Mr. Hawley has gained a follower with this book. I may even go out to search for his other books as well. He has a great and deft touch with timing, drama, and tension which served him quite well. he was able to create believable mental dialogues for his characters without making those dialogues seem trite or self conscious while also maintaining a depth of thought that served to advance some key ideas.

Zen and the Art of Archery.

I read this book a long time ago and I have returned to it.

Zen and the Art of Archery is still, for its time, an excellent description of an occidental immersing himself into the cultural and philosophical depths of Asia. When Herrigel visited Japan, he was unique, for there were not too many occidentals who ventured to Japan,nor were there too many who had the open mind or courage to enter into Asian art forms with guileless curiosity. 

As a result, his account of his lessons with the master and his experience is about as pure as possible. But, he did still carry the Occidental ideas on learning, and training in an martial art. He was a skilled pistol shooter by his account so some of what his personal accounts were colored by that part of his makeup. His account though is relatively free of overt western arrogance and preconceived notions.

In the time that has elapsed between my first reading of this book and now, I have been changed by my own readings and prejudices. What Herrigel was trying to convey in this book, the modern writers call "flow", a term coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. A state of being that conforms somewhat to what people used to call being in the zone, or the unconscious state of being completely comfortable with ones surroundings and being at such a heightened state of enhanced performance that performance is simple and unencumbered by the burden of thought. Indeed, the mind is completely unmoored from one's being, some have compared this to be a state of unconscious consciousness.

Ed Slingerland wrote about this in his book Trying Not To Try, a personal favorite. His concept of "flow" comes from Chinese philosophy, and it is called "wu-wei". There is indeed some differences between Slingerland's Chinese philosophy of Confucianism and Daoism versus Herrigel's Zen Buddhism. The Chinese school is much more formalized and more structured, while the Japanese is more mystical and less structured. Regardless of the formalism in their philosophy, the ideas are almost identical, different sides of the same coin. 

The drawback for me is that Herrigel's account is showing its age, the accounts are somewhat naive and full of wonder at the vastly different turns of the mind that the master and other practitioners of archery practice versus his own Occidental mind. 

I suppose I may be termed jaded after my own readings but Herrigel's account still carries a certain level of wonder as I read through it for the second time. It is indeed an excellent account of an Occidental's foray into the, for its time, mystery and mythical state of the Asian mind. It is still very worthwhile to read this short book and it is still very worthy of its place in the references on learning.

Leaving Space For the Divine

I was listening to Radio 360 this past Saturday when I heard an exchange between Tavi Gevinson and Ben Wishaw. The discussion about acting and trying too hard in acting; Whishaw was making a point about trying too hard, being too disciplined and leaving little to chance. He quoted Jane Campion, quoting her as saying: “making space for the divine”. Gevinson also talked about reading the phrase: “Leaving room for the divine” from The Argonaut.

In the context of their conversation, they were talking about not being too regimented, that the idea of acting is an exercise in creation, reacting to and allowing the other performers to act and in being spontanepus; as Gevinson remarked: “You don’t want to end up acting like robots.” In other words, “leaving room for the divine means to leave room for the spontaneous, the moment of dealing with the unknown, whether the spontaneity is due to something mundane, i.e. the situation, or whether the spontaneity is due to impulse.

This got me thinking about the meaning of the particular phrase in other contexts and in a more general way.

“Leaving room for the divine” means two things: one involves how we act or react and the second is how we view our reality. In the former meaning, the sole word that comes to mind in spontaneity; while the second meaning, the world is random.

The first context, making space for the divine, means to allow the spontaneous to happen, by itself and in its own time, without undue pressure and rigorousness. This means to be in a state of wu-wei, a concept that the Chinese Daoists and Buddhists have cultivated: living in the moment and and Trying Not To Try as Ed Slingerland so eloquently describes in his book of the same name. http://eslingerland.arts.ubc.ca/tryingnottotry/.

It is a real conundrum, trying to not try, cultivating the spontaneous while not trying because trying to be spontaneous is not spontaneous.

In the second context, “leaving room for the divine” leads me to think in terms of the random, the unmodeled, the unpredictable and the unknown.

We, living in modern society as worker bees toiling in the technology and science infused ethos have been inculcated in the idea that humans are so knowledgeable of our world that our sphere influence are so vast that  our world is deterministic, that leaving nothing to chance is an attainable if not an already organic state of reality. We believe that there are so much already known that the possibility of the unknown and the random entering into our reality is not only undesirable but impossible.

Dr. W. Edward Deming, the total quality and Statistical Process Control (SPC) expert recognized our hubris and pointed this out in his book Out of the Crisis: “the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable” in response to the American management’s hue and cry for management by results, pointing out that the most powerful numbers are those that we cannot possibly measure.

Yet, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb so forcefully pointed out in his Incerto series of books that not only is randomness a reality, it is inevitable. Moreover, the more we disregard randomness, the more we will inevitably suffer from our intentions to ignore the random. http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/INO/incerto

I find the link between spontaneity and the random very hopeful, inspirational, and invigorating.

Birthdays

Birthdays are a special milestone in our society. It is a time for us to celebrate our own life as well as for our friends and family to show, at least verbally, their love for us.

I remember a time in my life when I looked forward to the day with great anticipation.  We look at the calendar with great worry, fearing that we are caught in a space-time continuum problem that you can’t solve because you haven’t learned calculus yet and you are convinced that the universe has slowed downed indefinitely, just to mess with you as you look expectantly on the coming of your day of birth.  That day that you are absolutely positive will change your life forever because of the promises that the world has offered you; that day where you are forever beloved, at least for 24 hours; that day that your parents and family are all looking upon you adoringly, as if the planets revolved around you; that day where you can do no wrong, in anyone’s eyes.

You dream longingly about the traditional celebration made up of a family gathering of friends, food, sweets, games, and never-ending happiness and celebration and the best payoff of all: the collection of loot, the gifts from everyone. These gifts will keep you interested probably for weeks, maybe even months, but they will be relegated to the garage sale pile sometime within a few years.

Oh, there is the cake aspect as well; we rarely get sick of cake, which is always a good thing.

We then become more social, we look forward to the birthday because it is a time to get together with friends, to hang out, to approximate living life as a person of your age would imagine living life; living those halcyon days of youth, when the complexities of the world rarely intruded upon your hothouse like world. But then we become aware of the illicit pleasures of life. The stuff that the adults would not share with us.

We discover libations, the effects of said libations and of course the effects of libations on libido. So for a few years the excitement was to get libations before you are legally allowed to drink libations. That is what birthdays become, a marker for the day when you can drink legally. 

That day comes and the euphoria you were expecting really doesn’t happen. The infinite flow of Long Island Iced Teas really doesn’t mean infinite happiness.  Far from it, it means infinite trips to the toilet to infinitely empty your stomach of the copious amounts which you had assiduously consumed in the immediate hours prior to the reversal of flow.

But then you get wiser and more mature, relatively; and birthdays become less important than when you were young. You are responsible now. You are educated and you put away the childish things for more important things.  There may even be times that you don’t even celebrate your birthday. Too busy, too important for frivolous things, you may go grab dinner and drinks with your buddies or a meal with the family but the days of the all-day bashes are gone. The caches of loot have all disappeared as well. Other than maybe weird Aunt Helen with the goofy sweaters that are two sizes too small. She always got your age mixed up anyways.

Until now. Today. When the ubiquity of social media and technology leashes are everywhere.

Holidays and birthdays are the days when people who aren’t usually on your feed will reach out and send you a note: “Yo, HBD.” Or some kind of a variation on the theme.

Texts come incessantly, your Facebook timeline is blowing up with simple single sentences, yet with each glance of the message a history unfolds in your mind.  The good times and bad that you had with this person, you ponder your relationship. How close you once were or were not. How you came to know this person. Occasionally, there is the: “Who the F--- IS this person?” response, and then you think back, hard. The glimmer of a memory comes to you and you begin to recreate the time, the place, the situation, the smell, the light, the colors, and the memory once again becomes vivid.

The massive amount of messages stops you dead on your track for the day, your memories are filled with mini-reminiscences and tangents from that specific person and that specific time to sometime closer to it but not quite the same instance. You go on that long nostalgic ride into the past, into the deep recesses of your mind, the parts that have not been impaired by that long ago experiment with alcohol or other substances of recreation, that part of your memory that you hope and wish will never go away but you know will inevitably be robbed from you just because that’s life.

But you have the now, the flood of your memories and they are alive with images of the past that seem as fresh as daisies, as immediate as now, and as sharp as a ginsu knife.

This was a day that you live through as if in an extended but much better version of Groundhogs Day, because you want to relive the memories, and you know you have a much better ending in mind, an ending that is better than having Bill Murray nd Andie McDowell in it. You want this day to never end because you are actually replaying your life with all these people all over again; in slowmotion, in technicolor, is The Matrix slow motion, and it is epic, and it is better than it actually was, and you memories begin to play tricks on you because you are blanketed by the warm thought that all these people cared enough to reach out to you on this one day just to make you feel special. That little kid living inside of you,  that insecure one, is asking: do I actually deserve all of this attention?

And you end up saying: abso-fucking-lutely.

Yeah, that was my day. I want to do it again. Tomorrow, and the next day.

Exploring gambles reveals foundational difficulty behind economic theory (and a solution)

http://phys.org/news/2016-02-exploring-gambles-reveals-foundational-difficulty.html

This is a very interesting article on economic theory and the problems inherent in the assumptions that economists make.

Interestingly enough, I forwarded this to Nassim Nicholas Taleb and he followed up with a short blurb on Facebook. 

Just found out I was not alone in finding something weird in economists not understanding dynamic vs static ruin problems. 
It is a strange feeling to realize the answer to the question "Is it me or are they blind to something obvious?" is "no, it is not me". 
Murray Gell-Mann and colleague found the SAME point (though expressed in a more physical setting).

Here is a link to his ideas on the subject. 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/rational.pdf

Heroes - Postmodern Jukebox ft. Nicole Atkins - David Bowie Cover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foDOGeRFsCY

Terrific version of Heroes by the Post Modern Jukebox guys.

Proceeds will be going to cancer research.