What I Learned Today

It wasn’t all about the big nose and fighting duels. Cyrano de Bergerac also ventured into the realm of science fiction, although his two novels weren’t published until after his death. (He died young, at age 36!) The books are “L’Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune (The Other World: The States and Empires of the Moon)” and “Les États et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun)”. I haven’t been able to read the books myself, but from reading about them online I gather that Cyrano was less concerned with scientific realism and more interested in using the fantastic realm as a platform for social commentary (and criticism). As such, his work is very much in line with a major current running through later science fiction; the displacement of people and personalities into a new environment uniquely enables us to gain perspective on our own strengths and weaknesses.

Would his prose hold up today? Would it be amusingly or irritatingly naive in terms of science? Would Jules Verne have approved (200 years later)? I may never know! I dug up a copy of the original text online, but it is not only in French, it’s in ancient 17th-century French, and it would take me approximately a century to muddle through it. Someday, in my copious spare time…

Library Science has a fundamental philosophy, first articulated by Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan. He was a mathematician and a librarian, so naturally he’d be led to identifying Laws. The Laws are simple:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

I admire these few, short rules for their concreteness, their simplicity, and their import. They hint at a deeper underlying philosophy (here I use philosophy in its “how to live your life” sense, not its “abstract argument” sense).

Rule 1 seems obvious, but on closer inspection it is not; instead, it helps combat natural protective (to keep the books clean and untorn and unmutilated — that is, unused) or collector (books are not (just) wall decor) impulses.

Rule 2 recognizes fundmental human diversity. If that isn’t a big concept in a small sentence, I don’t know what is.

Rule 3 actually seems a bit questionable to me, but I guess implies that every book may appeal to someone, even if it doesn’t appeal to you (or offends you — censorship beware!).

Rule 4 urges efficiency in the organization of books, the process of finding them (search), and the process of checking them out. Yes!

Rule 5 is the biggie — an open acceptance of change. How rare to see an institution acknowledge and embrace the fact that change is inevitable? Patrons change, demographics change, materials change, and the process by which those materials are disseminated definitely changes (the very wording of these Laws is now outdated, since we must replace “book” with “media” to reflect today).

Now I’m wondering what primary Laws one could identify in Machine Learning, or even Computer Science. Do we have fundamental principles? Can they be similarly tied to ethics? What would they be?

(Yes, yes, the Three Laws of Robotics. Next?)

Reading is something we typically do alone—holding a book, gazing at a computer screen, thumbing through a newspaper. Yet now people are talking about “social reading” as a shared activity, enabled by the proliferation of devices and software that combine reading with community.

I recently came across a proposed taxonomy of social reading, from book groups to online discussions to collaborative authoring. Authoring? Well, with dynamic texts and increasing interaction between authors and readers, the distinction between reading and writing starts to fade away.

One way to enable social reading is to integrate the text with user-contributed comments. CommentPress and Digress.it are WordPress plugins that allow comments on a per-paragraph basis, placing them in a sidebar so you can view them alongside the relevant content (instead of scrolling to the bottom). In browsing examples of such content, such as the taxonomy mentioned above or an online version of Candide, I find myself intrigued but also a bit mentally fragmented. Jumping back and forth between the main text and the comments mashes them together, which perhaps is the point, or maybe reading nonlinear content like this just takes some practice. It certainly does give the feeling of being in a group, discussing the text, rather than being a solo reader. I’d probably find this most useful for non-fiction, when a critical analysis or discussion of the topics is a higher priority. For fiction reading, I’m happy to dive in and be immersed all on my own, at least for the first pass.

Yet although these plugins (and the taxonomy) have been around since at least 2010, this was the first time I’d encountered them. An even older article, from 2009 (The Future of Reading by Tom Peters), discusses the evolving nature of reading, including a term that was new to me: “skimmy-dipping” (the process of browsing a list of links or citations and dipping into the interesting ones at different depths). While the term was new, the concept was not—this describes the way I process just about every Google search I do, especially those at scholar.google.com.

Peters’s article includes this great quote: “Reading is one human activity that is at once both intensely cerebral and lusciously sensory.” He also touches on the social reading idea with “In the good old days, first you read the book, then you discussed it with fellow readers. Now it is becoming a single, combined process.”

His article was published by the Library Journal, and his primary audience was librarians. This paragraph struck me as the most salient and interesting part:

“The impact of these new forms of reading on libraries and librarianship could be profound. For example, they may force us to confront the archival impulse and mission to preserve and protect. Books may cease to be fixed utterances that, once published (whatever that may come to mean), begin a long trip to eternity during which any changes in the text or the text-bearing-device are perceived as crimes against nature and against the inviolable text. Books may become more like fleeting communal experiences, with little or no promise of sustained integrity. Whatever their makeup, they will be books, and they will be read.”

I was inspired to look up these articles after a colloquium talk Tom Peters presented as part of the freely available SJSU SLIS Colloquium series. I highly recommend the iTunes subscription, which provides audio (good for commutes) or video (good when you want to see the slides) versions of these talks. From this and other talks in the series, my emerging view of librarians is that rather than clinging to physical books and bemoaning the advent of new technology, they are excited about the possibility of new ways of engaging with content and readers, and they’re industrious about staying on top of the latest developments. This makes my upcoming MLIS adventure all the more exciting!

This captures the way I feel about my own personal future of reading:

“Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” asks the title of a book I am currently reading. This book delves into the whats, whys, and hows of translation. Along the way, it raises fundamental questions about what we want, need, or can expect from a translation. I’m only in chapter 5 and already have encountered several thought-provoking ideas.

One such idea is that of “Word Magic.” This is the phenomenon that we tend to ascribe some sort of reality to something just because we have a word for it. Examples given in the book include “levitation,” “real existing socialism,” and “safe investment.” The dangerous aspect of word magic is that it can make us forget or ignore hidden assumptions and fail to notice when the world of words departs from the world of reality. This isn’t (just) about oxymorons, for dubbing a word as an oxymoron indicates an acknowledgment of its unreal nature (usually through self-contradiction). Word magic happens when we talk about something that need not be self-contradictory, but does not exist, while we don’t notice or don’t care about its unreality. What a powerful concept! (Which concept, by the way, originates from C. K. Ogden in his book The Meaning of Meaning, which I now would also like to investigate.)

I don’t think that having words to describe things that are not “real” is itself a problem. Much of science fiction (or speculative fiction) is founded upon describing worlds and things that do not exist in our current reality. Our power of imagination makes this kind of creativity both inevitable and something to admire and appreciate. It is only when word magic is employed to manipulate minds that it creates a problem. Now I’m trying to think of other word magic examples and having a hard time with it—perhaps exactly because it’s a phenomenon below usual conscious notice.

I am reminded of this quote by Dale Spender:

“Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas.”

But of course, I’m the one who’s avoided using my serrated bread knife to slice tomatoes for years, simply because it is a “bread knife.” Somehow I had it in my head that a paring knife was supposed to be the right tool. Wrong! It’s good to be alerted to these quirks, caused by the necessary reduction of an entire thing’s essence, purpose, and potential down to a mere word or two.

From the Fish book’s table of contents, I see that future chapters will also discuss machine translation, and perhaps the limits of what can be automated. I can’t wait to read more.

OSU offers a course called ME 412: Design of Mechanisms. Sadly, it is only offered during the winter term, and I am here for the fall term. So I contacted the professor to find out more about what sort of books and other materials the course uses, for my own investigation. Imagine my delight when he gave me a copy of the latest edition of the textbook and sent me on my way!

This textbook, Design of Machinery, may well be the best textbook I’ve ever read. Really. Unlike some books that pay lip service to being clear and accessible, this text really is clear and accessible. It is also annotated with lots of amusing cartoons and very clearly illustrated examples — the latter being crucial since we’re talking about physical devices and how they move. The book comes with a DVD with animations that I haven’t been able to play with, since it is Windows-only. But, of course, there are linkage animations galore online. And even better is building them yourself, physically.

Chapter 1, “Kinematics of Mechanisms,” is charmingly written and touches on the broader subject of what it means to be an engineer, and how one of the biggest challenges is learning how to “structure the unstructured problem” to go from a concept to a problem definition to a solution. One tip the book offers is to use “functional visualization” (meaning, focus on the desired behavior of the solution, but no one kind of “embodiment”) so as not to limit your creativity and be restricted by a specific kind of solution early on. It also encourages you to make cardboard models of linkages that you design (as above) — a philosophy I think makes a lot of sense.

The chapter also includes the text from a paper given by George A. Wood Jr. titled “Educating for Creativity in Engineering.” Two of my favorite quotes from the paper are, “To me, the creative moment is the greatest reward that the profession of engineering gives,” and “If a person decides to be a designer, his training should instill in him a continuing curiosity to know how each machine he sees works.” Yes! Yes!

On a more concrete level, I learned that kinematics is “the study of motion without regard to forces,” while kinetics is “the study of forces on systems in motion.” The first half of this book focuses on kinematics, reserving forces for the second half. I can already tell that kinematics alone provides ample material to keep me busy!

“Once you become familiar with the terms and principles of kinematics, you will no longer be able to look at any machine or product without seeing its kinematic aspects.”

It’s already happened. At a conference last week, after ironing a shirt in my hotel room, I sat down and drew my first kinematics diagram — of the ironing board.

I’ve already started working through Chapter 2, “Kinematics Fundamentals,” which is fascinating but slower going, as it’s dense with new information, terms, and concepts for me. But I’m already impatient to get to the end of this chapter, where there are 15 pages of problems to do! Starting with… drawing kinematics diagrams of familiar objects like ironing boards. Ooops, jumped the gun on that one!