Here are five things you may not know:
On language: We sometimes choose our words carefully, because two words describing the same general concept may have slightly different shades of meaning. Are there any words in English that mean exactly the same thing? There's just one pair of exact synonyms in English: gorse and furze.
On thinking: Some aspects of psychological and neurogical functioning can be evaluated with the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure test. You're given a copy of the diagram below, and you copy it. Later (either immediately or within half an hour) you're asked to redraw the diagram from memory--and you haven't been told that you'd have to do this. An expert evaluator judges the proportions, detail, and so forth of your drawing and uses the scoring as a diagnostic tool.
On animal intelligence: Although we sometimes think of tool use as one of the hallmarks of human intelligence, some very simple animals use tools. Some wasps (Ammophila urnari and A. Yarrowi) pick up pebbles and use them to pound down earth into a nest. The great apes and some species of birds (most notably New Caledonian crows) are the most capable tool users among non-human animals.
On architecture: The tallest brick building in the world is St. Martin's church in the town of Landshut, north of Munich, in southern Germany.
On computers: The Undo function in most of the applications I use has sometimes been a life saver. (Not literally.) As useful as Undo is, it has built-in limitations. It can be mathematically proved that a completely general Undo function, for any non-trivial application, is impossible to write.
My head is full of this kind of stuff. Here's the thing--I suspect yours is too. I have a hypothesis, formed on relatively little evidence, that while we all tend to have a circle of friends and acquaintances who share our interests, each of us has little areas of specialized knowledge that make us unique within that circle.
Me, I'm interested in the information that's relevant to the work I do, but there are lots of other things, too. And I'm often surprised by what my friends tell me, even those I've known for years--one was a radio DJ in college, another has read almost everything written by John Steinbeck, yet another is an expert on anime. It makes conversation interesting.
Hidden depths--I wonder if everyone has them?
Credits: The gorse and furze bit is from Fowler's Modern English Usage; here's the image source for the ROCF diagram; W. H. Oswalt's Habitat and Technology: The Evolution of Hunting is the source for the information about wasps; I took the picture of St. Martin's standing on a balcony down the hall from a cafe in a nearby castle; mathematician Alan Dix did the work on Undo.
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It's probably also why getting my bachelor's degree later in life took so much time - there was nothing interesting about the traditional students, besides the fact that they seemed to be afraid of me. I should have made a t-shirt : "Age is not contagious."
In the five college area, where several large hospitals and institutions were deinstitutionalized in the '70's and where a master's degree qualifies you for a job at Whole Foods, I like to say: "The great thing about this area is that the person who is bagging your groceries might have a PhD. or a severe mental illness. Or both."
I love brains, yours especially.
Continuing Ed. is the profit maker for a huge percentage of colleges and universities. We're kind of low risk, I guess!
I still visit Profs - just pop in to say hello when I'm on campus (my job is campus based).
I'm thinking about the tallest brick building and how they managed that! Assuming it is from a past century? I tend to want to know the story of the person who placed the last brick, y'know?
It is: checking Wikipedia, I discover that St. Martin's was finished in 1500. Five hundred years ago! I have that same feeling about some pieces of architecture. For example, I was lucky enough to visit the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona several years ago, one of Gaudi's masterpieces. It's still under construction (and some of the most famous parts of the cathedral were designed and built by architects who came after Gaudi). I sometimes think about the generations of people working on a building, whether they can keep in mind the grand vision; that would be cool.
Hey, Sonya, thanks. I first learned about the ROCF test sitting in a dissertation that described an attempt to automate the acquisition and (partly) the evaluation of the figure, with people using a tablet computer rather than pen and paper. I had that same thought--my spatial memory and reasoning capabilities are pretty limited. I imagine that expert evaluators can take that into account, though. The diagrams I saw done by people with neurological damage really looked obviously strange, so I'd guess it's not a huge issue.
Nikki, I think all that counts, too. I even want to say that everyone's an expert in one way or another, even if it's only expertise about what's going on inside their own heads.
Yes, love arcana of all kinds.
Imagine spending your entire life building something but not seeing its completion. That takes some guts and faith that I lack, but appreciate.
It's lovely to talk with you - thanks for the conversation.
I have no interesting tidbits in my head to share.
Tho I do wonder how we come to understand the slightly different meanings of words and how we can do complex, abstract thinking with them... I wonder about that particularly on those occasions when I try picking up a little French or Spanish, because I know I will never get beyond a crude useage and always get hung up on the weird idiomatic things that I don't even notice with respect to English equivalents.
And the mention of cats - I've had lots of them over the years, and have a number at the moment, and it's amazing how, with a very limited range of activities and beingness, each and every last one of them is a unique individual. (Which presumably holds true for every living creature, at least of the multi-celled persuasion...) However cranky computers can be, I wonder if machine intelligence will ever be able to do THAT.
Me, I've been thinking of caterpillars. Some brains are very odd.
language : entranced & spellbound ?
thinking, intelligence, bricks, undo, friends : hmm ...
surely all of us have hidden depths; I think those depths are what attracts us to each other in the first place, balances us, holds us together.
language : mystery & enigma ?
aim, if I ever get back to the Five Colleges area, we'll have to get together. We can search out unfinished building projects. I didn't know that about the cathedral. It's pretty cool that such long term projects exist today. (The Big Dig aside. :-)
Stim, your intuition is exactly right. The proof is much simpler than Goedel's, though. Interactive applications can be modeled as state machines, and state machines have no memory. Any transition from state e to state e' can be undone by a special Undo transition, but for two Undo transitions in a row to work as expected, the state machine can have no more than two states, which can't represent any non-trivial application. There are other model representations, of course, but Dix's argument is a reasonable one.
Thanks, Sheila. I'm actually not all that interesting in person. Well, I try. :-)
Myriad, I have the same thoughts about the other languages I know a little bit about--the idioms are all different. I was recently chatting with my wife about German, about the word Handschuhschachtel, or what I call the "glove compartment" in a car (some call it a "glove box"). In German, gloves are "hand shoes", and we were thinking about how that probably indicates that wearing shoes was an earlier development than wearing gloves. Pretty obscure.
Caterpillars, vanessa? Interesting. I've probably told this story on OS before, but when I was a kid in San Francisco, playing outside my house with friends, I came across a tiny caterpillar inching across the sidewalk. We studied it for a while and eventually, with some excitement, concluded that it was a porcupine. City kids. My wife still ribs me about this.
Entranced and spellbound sound good as exact synonyms to me, Kim. But I'm just going from Fowler's. I agree that the little differences make us all more interesting to each other.
Great post Rob...gives me a few ideas; Thank you!
Kelly, I was going to follow up on my list with a short description of how some cognitive scientists model the human thinking process, but I didn't want to go into too much detail. I'll bet you do have some arcana in the recesses of your memory, though they may be inaccessible. That's the way it is with me, at least.