Never again
erring on the side!
from now on
I make my mistakes out front
and in the open

And if doubters doubt
and naysayers say nay
well, let them
too
do what comes natural

She who makes life up as she goes
makes no mistake

As the tree that grows in every direction
reaches the sun

1. Dirty Dish Dilemma (for now, linking to a radio interview I gave on this topic)
2. True Mirroring
3. Do-Nothing lucid dreaming and R.E.L.
4. Spontaneous yoga
4. Dynamically Distributed Democracy
5. The practice that liberates

I used to be a computer scientist. I could respectably program in more than ten languages. I pondered the theoretical limits of computation and ways to overcome or exploit them. I tinkered solutions to arcane problems in artificial intelligence. For a short time, I even searched for the Holy Grail.

You see, there’s a kind of Holy Grail in computer science. No one has been able to write an algorithm that can compute this particularly hard set of problems (known as NP-complete) in a reasonable amount of time. A reasonable amount of time means less than a billion years.

One example is the so-called Traveling Salesman problem. What is the most efficient route a traveling salesman can take to visit all the cities in his sales area, (efficient meaning the least amount of driving time)? You can figure out the optimal route for a handful of cities, but as soon as you get above ten or so, the complexity of the problem grows astronomical. Analogous problems show up for routing traffic on the internet, routing airplanes between airports, coloring world maps, or whenever you go on a run of errands and want to be efficient with your driving time.

The Holy Grail algorithm would make this optimization problem tractable. No one knows if it exists. No one has been able to prove that it doesn’t, though they’ve tried. What we do know is that if a solution is found to any of the NP-complete problems, we’ll be able to solve all of them. That would mean instant fame, fortune and a shiny pedestal in computer history.

I once worked for an eccentric and brilliant Computer Science professor (let’s call him Ben) who was determined, in his own way, to find the Holy Grail algorithm. Ben had a hilarious sense of humor, was a great teacher, and could read Yoga sutras in the original Sanskrit. Working in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Ben had developed ingenious methods for getting computers to learn. He made money on the stock market with an automatic trading AI he’d written. He created a chess playing AI that started out with zero knowledge of the game but learned to play respectable chess after losing (and learning from) thousands and thousands of games. Most chess-playing AIs are pre-programmed with sophisticated models of chess strategy.

Yet despite all his practical successes in Artificial Intelligence solving heuristic problems that demanded merely excellent solutions as opposed to optimal ones, Ben had Holy Grail on the brain. He was obsessed with a particular NP-complete problem known as the 8-puzzle or N-puzzle, the old sliding tile game where you have to slide the scrambled tiles back into order. Ben felt that existing algorithms weren’t making optimal use of past experience – they were ignoring valuable lessons learned in the early stages of problem solving that could more quickly lead to a solution later on. He called it a waste of computation. And he was convinced he could discover a new path to solving the 8-puzzle and thereby find the Grail.

Of all my time spent working in Computer Science, it was probably the series of months I spent working with Ben, searching for the Holy Grail algorithm, that led me to realize it wasn’t the field for me. This is not to say it wasn’t time well-spent. I actually loved the work. It was fascinating and fed the part of me that sought beauty in the mathematical and abstract. I just eventually came to the conclusion that I was more interested in human beings than computers. And of course, I continue to be fascinated by the combination of the two. Still, my time with Ben was illuminating, and I think it’s a story worth sharing.

We would meet once a week or so. In order to gain some new foothold in solving the 8-puzzle – which begins in a random state and ends up in exactly one solution state – I must have dreamt up and coded a million ways to map out its strange, mountainous landscape; to find a way to see the end from wherever you happened to be starting from. It’s sort of like being trapped inside a garden maze with someone calling to you from the exit. You follow the sound of the voice and seem to be making headway, but over and over you come to a dead end that stops just short of the exit. So you turn around and try a different route. In other words, the voice calling to you is not enough. You need to be able to look down a path without walking down it and somehow know if it’s promising or not. If you can figure out a way to do that, you’ve solved NP-complete and found the Holy Grail.

Each meeting with Ben went much the same. I would share what I’d tried that week and point out the flaw I’d discovered in our earlier reasoning. Over the course of an hour, we’d inevitably have a leap of insight into a promising new technique to try out. We were back on the brink of Eureka! As the meeting wound down, the conversation would drift… to chess, metaphysics, Sanskrit, stock market prediction, yoga, or the philosophy of J. Krishnamurti.

One afternoon in his office, we sat talking while chainsaws buzzed gratingly outside Ben’s window. Every ten minutes or so, an enormous redwood tree would come crashing down. They were clearcutting to make room for the brand new Engineering building. As it fell, each tree made the most horrific moaning sound, something like a blue whale dying, not a redwood. I made a remark about the beautiful and sad old trees. Ben turned and looked out the window.

“I know, it’s terrible. What a waste of computation.”

Later that week, I’d be up at night coding our latest wizardry, some little algorithmic sleight-of-hand we’d dreamed up. As always, without fail, another flaw in our reasoning would stare back from the terminal screen in the strange half-light of dawn. Another devil in the details. Another promising path that dead-ended just short of the exit.

The weeks slid by. During the drifting, philosophical epilogues to our meetings, I began to wonder if Ben secretly knew our Holy Grail search was futile. Was he playing a sophisticated joke on me? Was the 8-puzzle merely a kind of algorithmic Zen koan intended to reveal the limits of my own mind, in order for me to let go of it? Was our collaboration an allegory for the futility of striving after rational answers to absurd questions? Was he trying to tell me that life was purposeless?

After precisely one too many of those Holy Grail nights, I found myself at a crossroads. I took a good long look down the path I was about to take – without walking down it. And you know what? It didn’t look promising. A waste of computation, really.

Hydrogen Dream
by Daniel Steinbock

My dreams are made of stars
and stars are made of hydrogen.
And though I dream out loud,
I hardly know where to begin,
when dreams are made of hydrogen.

And you carried away the stone.
From my broken back, you lift the heavy load.
And you carried away the stone…

These arms were made to hold you,
your body, the Universe.
And only eyes can show you
what is greater than these many words:
your body is the Universe.

And you danced away the storm.
My broken wings were all at once restored.
And you danced away the storm…

Love was made to disarm.
Love will make you whole again.
And when I cried out loud,
twas Love that led me home again,
where dreams are made of hydrogen.

And you sang up the Sun.
My broken voice could never reach that note.
And we sang up the Sun…

It worked perfectly. I had of course attached funny sound clips from Star Trek, Robo Cop and 2001 to every single system event: windows opening and closing, diskettes inserted and ejected, programs launched, trash filled and emptied. And I found my old writings from sixth through ninth grades, up until we bought our first Windows PC, a 486 DX33. For kicks, I’m going to send my Apple data to RetroFloppy to convert it to a format I read on my MacBook Pro. They’ll even make a entirely virtual version of my old computer (a disk image) that I can boot up in an Apple IIGS emulator!

I haven’t found my oldest writings from pre-sixth grade which must be around here on some 5.25″ floppy disk. That would include my first play, a re-telling of the Greek myth about Paris, Helen and the Golden Apple.

However, I did find a number of early glimpses at my young self. Here’s one that really made me laugh…and wonder in amazement. I’m guessing it’s from the Fall of 1990, near the start of sixth grade. I can’t honestly say I remember what it was like to be that sixth grader. But reading this makes me think I haven’t really changed all that much in essence.

A Proclamation

Be it known by all people that the first week in January is hereby proclaimed to be “Philosophical Awareness Week.”

It is important to recognize Philosophical Awareness this week for the following reasons:

1. Philosophy is important in every person’s life. It is important to explore our innermost feelings and opinions, which we may hide from other people.
2. The study of Philosophy has been neglected for some time and by proclaiming Philosophical Awareness Week, we can rejuvenate this long forgotten mental discipline.
3. The development of a personal philosophy is crucial in the growth process of humans as individuals.

The following activities should be carried out this week in honor of this proclamation (in addition to any special projects, activities, or field trips that might be conducted to make this proclamation even more meaningful):

1. Single or numerous colored ribbons are to be worn on the body, signifying the observance of Philosophical Awareness Week.
2. Philosophical Awareness Week is to be observed starting with the first Sunday of the year. The following Friday is to be a holiday from school and labor.
3. While on holiday, people observing Philosophical Awareness Week for its true meaning should participate in relaxing, enjoyable activities that exercise the skills of the philosopher or of being creative, such as: painting, drawing, arts and crafts; story, play or poetry writing; composing or playing original music; conversing on the subject of philosophy; sharing one’s own philosophical beliefs and expanding on one’s philosophical thoughts.

Signed,
Daniel Steinbock

Youthful disclaimer: Apart from being grandiose, I take creative license with biology, genetics and computer science to serve my own save-the-world agenda.

Late morning sun is warm and bright, here at the June edge of a Santa Cruz summer. A fabulous condition. The 2000+ crowd of moms, dads, grandparents, professors, friends and lovers fills the Porter College quad to overflowing. They churn in happy cacophany. In the middle of it all: the black-robed block of soon-to-be-graduates, sweating in the sun. And up above, the great oak trees sway, their music inaudible above the crowd sound.

I am sitting behind the provost, faculty and fellows on stage, eyes closed in meditation. I listen to the sentimental speeches: a dance professor who urges us to be passionate people; a fellow student who bears to us her honeycomb heart; the provost who commends our achievements and foretells our great works. Meanwhile, the breath goes in and out, and with it goes all fear, anxiety, pride, hesitation. The provost calls my name and I rise, black robes flowing toward the heavy podium and an ocean of faces. With palms laid face-up on the wood I speak:

“This is dedicated to the one I love…..”

An eruption of smiles and laughter as I pause before completing the invocation:

“….You.”

I look into the crowd before me and begin a slow scan of the faces. Trying, to the limit of my ability, to make eye contact with each and every person. As I do, they slowly catch on to the meaning of my words. Now the smiles are ten-fold wider, the laughter ten-fold louder. There are a lot of people in the audience. It takes a long time. I make a complete circle, turning to include the faculty and administrators sitting behind me, until once again I am facing the ocean, now totally silent but vibrating with glee. Up above, I hear the wind blowing through the oak trees like a great, invisible breath. I begin.

I come before you in this moment, not as a bearer of words, but of a Word.

The human genome is a single, glorious Word three billion letters in length. And though spelled from an alphabet of only four characters, this one Word is more profound than all the words uttered by all our poets. For the sound of its articulation is the human being, and, by extension: all the poetry, the cave paintings, and the atom bombs that have sprung from our hands, mouths and minds.

Human creativity is Nature’s creativity, expressing through us.

Now science races to transcribe the text of our genome. When UC Santa Cruz became the first institution to share this text freely on the Internet for all to see, our species took one more step in a great Initiation. For with the deciphering of DNA’s code, the flesh will be made Word. We will step back to contemplate the very bodies in which we are clothed.

Through the vehicle of human cognition, Nature is striving to understand itself. And the arrival of this understanding will serve as The Great Reminder: that we and every species of plant, animal and microbe are branches on a Tree of Life that has been growing on this planet for three and a half billion years. Each branch is a unique expression of Nature’s endless creativity; humanity is but the most recent branchlet, straining up toward the Sun.

Did you know? You share half your genetic code with common yeast. You are 90% genetically identical to the field mouse, and only 1% separates you from the chimpanzee.

I pause as the graduates break out in wild monkey hoots and screeches (a Porter College tradition frowned upon by the administration).

And the difference between you and everyone else in this audience? A mere tenth of a percent.

What makes humankind unique among all the branches in the Tree of Life? It is our Creative Intellect, reflecting in microcosm Nature’s own creative power to fashion novel forms out of our environment. So our own creations, artistic and technological, are themselves yet further branchings in Nature’s Tree.

Thus it’s no wonder that the most advanced developments of our Information Age bear such close resemblance to Nature’s own forms: the World Wide Web, extending our collective memory in a global embrace, bears an ever-increasing resemblance to the brain’s own network organization. Computer scientists design search algorithms based on the foraging patterns of ants. Digital information storage, massively parallel computation, nanotechnology–these are all basic functions of DNA’s double helix. To call these concepts “new” is like the chicken claiming to have invented the egg.

On the Tree of Life, humanity’s Creative Mind is the one and only fruit, nurturing within it the seed — invention! — the vessel by which DNA’s message will be carried to the stars. To plant new gardens before ours is consumed in the fire of our dying Sun.

H.G. Wells wrote, “History is a race between education and disaster.”

Caught up in the dizzying spell that is modern culture, humanity has forgotten its connection to the Tree of Life.

We have forgotten our kinship with every plant and animal.

Forgotten how to live in equilibrium with our environment.

Forgotten the Word, that binds all people as one human family.

Forgotten the true source of our creativity: Nature.

And we have forgotten the stars, though they shine on us every night.

Yet this state of affairs is not tragedy! It is opportunity: for each one of us to apply the creative mind. Whether to design high-technology, adopt ecologically sustainable ways of living, or simply to extend the smile of friendship to strangers you pass in the street. We are all acting out The Great Reminder.

Remember: the stars.

Remember: imagination–the inside of our heads–is the greatest frontier.

Remember: You are the Tree of Life, branches reaching upward for the Sun, ever-seeking new possibilities for being.

And what is, perhaps, closest to being, is beginning.

Edward Tufte at Stanford

Edward Tufte spoke at Stanford this afternoon and I had the pleasure of being in attendance. It was an unconventional talk, as far as academic lectures go, for Tufte was speaking “in the first person” about his own life: his origins in rural Nebraska, his education and formative years, his mentors who influenced his thinking, and the turning points that signaled moments of profound reorientation. As Tufte noted, for a sample size of N=1, the estimated variance is infinite; so other sources should be consulted.

Tufte has had a remarkable career and speaks as someone who appears to have found the courage to follow his bliss, leaving a tenured professorship at Yale to self-publish his famous books on visual information, go on speaking tours, and make large-scale landscape art in his Connecticut backyard.

There were three big lessons I took away from his talk.

Contribute to forever knowledge.

The most important decision a researcher makes is choosing what problem to focus on. One should choose problems that are not only profoundly important, but ones for which good progress is possible. It’s worth nothing to work on grand problems and make no progress. Tufte’s own compass for this decision: contribute to Forever Knowledge. That is, create knowledge that will be universally useful to humankind in any time or place in human history. Tufte ditched his career as a political economy theorist because he found he was working on only temporarily important problems, things he decided were not worth his “time, energy, passion and mind.”

Be self-exemplifying.

In whatever one’s work, be not only a great communicator of ideas and practices, be an exemplar of those same practices and this will communicate the value of what you are saying far better than anything else. Tufte’s books are not only superb treatises on the visual display of information, they are also exemplary demonstrations of clear visual communication.

Strive for personal utopia.

Here again, Tufte is, as he presents it, self-exemplifying. While utopian cultures may be unattainable, you can pretty well approximate an ideal life through clarity of purpose, courage to act on that purpose, and, most importantly, doing what you love.

The poem Tufte opened his talk with was excerpted from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, fitting for a self-reflection.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

The tag cloud displayed on my name tag at Stanford University’s H-STAR faculty retreat.

I created tag clouds for every professor’s name tag to visualize their research interests based on research statements and resumes. It was such a treat to watch these great minds interacting and using the tag clouds as launching points for conversations.

I made the tag clouds at TagCrowd. Check it out and play with creating your own clouds from your papers, resume, poetry, chat logs, or whatever suits your fancy.