Creativity

An array of hammers

Posted on by John

In a comment on the previous post, vonjd brought up the famous quote from Abraham Maslow:

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Sometimes you don’t just have a hammer, you have an array of hammers. You have rock hammers, claw hammers, and sledge hammers, all in numerous sizes. You have a variety of wooden and rubber mallets too. You’ve even got a gavel. Because you have such an impressive collection of specialized hammers, you think you’re broad in your problem solving, but your basic instinct is still only to beat on things.

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John Coltrane versus Kenny G

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My previous post began with a story about a performance by John Coltrane. Douglas Groothuis left a comment saying that he used the same story in his book Truth Decay. Before telling the Coltrane story, Groothuis compares the philosophies of Kenny G and John Coltrane.

Kenny G’s philosophy is as shallow as his music.

I just play for myself, the way I want to play, and it comes out sounding like me.

Coltrane’s philosophy, like his music, is more ambitious.

Overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows and senses in the universe. That’s what music is to me — it’s just another way of saying this is a big, wonderful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life, and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music.

As Groothuis comments, Kenny G only spoke of expressing himself, while Coltrane “expressed a yearning to represent objective realities musically.”

How to neutralize intelligence

Posted on by John

Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron begins “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal.” Beautiful people are required to wear ugly masks, strong people are required to carry weights, etc. Every excellence is handicapped.

But how do you handicap intelligence? With interruptions. In Vonnegut’s story, those deemed too intelligent are required to wear a device in their ear that regularly interrupts their thoughts with a loud noise.

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When rejected thoughts coming back

Posted on by John

I was struck by this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, even though I’m not sure I understand what he meant.

In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Maybe Emerson was referring to that why-didn’t-I-think-of-that feeling when you see that someone else connected one or two more dots than you did. You thought about a challenge, and maybe you were close to resolving it, but you lacked a key insight to pull it all together. You decided your approach wouldn’t work, but someone did make it work.

If that’s what Emerson had in mind, it’s puzzling that he speaks of “every work of genius.” It would be incredibly arrogant to think that you almost came up with every great idea you see. Maybe he means that we recognize genius best when it relates to something we’ve struggled with.

What do you think Emerson meant? When have your rejected ideas come back to you?

Designed from the inside out

Posted on by John

The most recent episode of the Plus Maths podcast describes how the London Velodrome was designed. Being a math podcast, it focuses on the optimization problems involved in the design and the finite element modeling of the structure.

The beautiful shape of the building was not an initial goal but rather a consequence of design decisions that began with the track and worked outward.

It’s perhaps surprising, given the pragmatic design concerns of optimizing the experience of people using the velodrome, maximizing the efficiency of the building, all within the constraints of the construction methods, the design process has led to a stunningly beautiful roof that almost echos the shape of the track.

… it’s a happy by-product of the design. There was nothing intentional in the design [of the roof] that we wanted it to look like the track. … it’s the opposite if the track …

Image by Richard Davies via the Plus Math article How the velodrome found its form.

Related post: Mathematics behind the Olympic water cube

Have you saved a milliwatt today?

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Research In Motion (RIM) is best known for making the BlackBerry. In the early days of the company, RIM focused on reducing the BlackBerry’s power consumption. The engineers put up a sign:

Have you saved a milliwatt today?

This was a specific, reasonable challenge. Instead of some nebulous exhortation to corporate greatness, something worthy of a Dilbert cartoon, they asked engineers to reduce power consumption by a milliwatt.

What’s your equivalent of saving a milliwatt?

Related post: Don’t try to be God, try to be Shakespeare

Theory and practice

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Donald Knuth explains how he combines theory and practice:

This has always been the main credo of my professional life. I have always tried to develop theories that shed light on the practical things I do, and I’ve always tried to do a variety of practical things so that I have a better chance of discovering rich and interesting theories. It seems to me that my chosen field, computer science — information processing — is a field where theory and practice come together more than in any other discipline, because of the nature of computing machines. …

History teaches us that the greatest mathematicians of past centuries combined theory and practice in their own careers. …

The best theory is inspired by practice. The best practice is inspired by theory.

Taken from Selected Papers on Computer Science.

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Third-system effect

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The third-system effect describes a simple system rising like a phoenix out of the ashes of a system that collapsed under its own complexity.

A notorious ‘second-system effect’ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’: sometimes, after the second system has collapsed of its own weight, there is a chance to go back to simplicity and get it right.

From The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond. Available online here.

Raymond says that Unix was such a third system. What are other examples of the third-system effect?

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