Communication – Serenity Through Sweat

Filling in the Blanks

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. I’ve been slowly exposing Speedy and El Duderino to my rather eclectic taste in music (metered in at age appropriate levels, of course). I wanted to share and discuss one of those recent experiences.

“It’s stupid, contagious
To be broke and famous
Can someone please save us from punk rock 101
My Dickies your sweatbands
My spiked hair, your new vans
Let’s throw up our ‘organs’ for punk rock 101″

“Wait a minute, that’s not right. I’m pretty sure it’s “rock hands” dude. No, it’s organs. Buddy, throw up our organs doesn’t make any sense. These are rock hands, you throw them up at concerts or listening to music. I still think it’s organs.”

Above are the lyrics from Bowling For Soup’s song Punk Rock 101, followed by the exchange between El Duderino and I while singing it together in the car.

To be fair, I’m not sure I knew what rock hands were at age seven either. And, that is kinda the point. Our brains do an incredible job of filling in blanks where we have gaps.

The gaps can be visual, auditory, information, knowledge, anything. We crave a complete picture and understanding so much that we sometimes fill in those gaps unconsciously.

Such is our desire for completion, and our discomfort with incompletion, that we have evolved to make this process automatic.

I told myself this year I would try to get back in the water, and a few early season hurricanes gave me some great swell and the push I needed

El Duderino didn’t know the lyric, he had an incomplete set of information. He heard some sounds, and filled in a word he understood that matched what he heard, even if it didn’t make much sense. The brain drives us to make a complete unit rather than leave the lyric unsung.

This is not uncommon for any of us singing along in the car, (especially before the days of looking up lyrics on the internet). But, it is a much deeper phenomenon that is studied in psychology, neurology, and vision.

“Filling in” is the phenomenon where the empty space left by our physical blind spot appears to resemble the color, brightness, or texture of the surrounding area.

Each eye has a physical blind spot where the retina joins the optic nerve, and there are no photoreceptors. With both eyes open, each eye covers the other’s blind spot. But, even with one eye closed, the brain will automatically fill in the area based on what else it perceives.

(A) The blind spot. Close your left eye, gaze at the cross, and move the page toward you. At some point the black spot will disappear because it lands on your retinal blind spot. However, the red and green stripes perceptually fill into the blind space. (B) Neon spreading. The thin red lines are perceptually filled in to form an illusory pink annulus. Both rings are the same red, but they average together with their white or black backgrounds to look light or dark pink. (C) Pinna’s water color illusion. The colored lines appear to fill-in and tinge the entire regions with color.

Illusion A is a classic example. With both eyes open, you can see the black dot on the right. With one eye closed, as the black dot moves into your physical blind spot, your brain fills in the red and green stripes.

In this case the filling in is relatively harmless. El Duderino sings a funny lyric and we laugh about it.

I’m sure I’m still butchering lyrics to many of my 90s favorites and filling in what makes sense to my brain, regardless of what the artist intended.

A different kind of filling in can be a bit more problematic. Troxler’s fading is shown in the example below. Stare intently on the red dot and watch the colored ring fade away.

When steadily fixating the central dot for many seconds, the peripheral annulus will fade and will be replaced by the colour or texture of the background. Troxler’s fading

We haven’t quite pinned down the exact mechanism that causes the fading phenomenon. You can read more about it here. Basically, a lot of big words, and confusing neuro pathways to say we arent sure exactly when images get transfered at different levels to the brain, and what may disrupt those images in the transfer process.

Hearing El Duderino so clearly fall into the filling in phenomenon, I remembered learning about it in flight school.

This was an adventure. Probably a 10k worth of hiking on a bike route reported as “mostly paved”

Part of our training was on the physiology of the eyes and ears. How they work, and how they can sometimes play tricks on us.

I had never before heard of Troxler’s fading, though. It is impressive how fixating on such a small point can impact literally the entire surrounding.

Laser beam focus is super important. I wrote about that a few weeks ago. But so is being able to zoom out and see the surroundings.

One of my favorite layover trail runs in Roanoke

How often do we let ourselves lose sight of the bigger picture, letting it slowly fade while we fixate on the minutiae?

How often are we not even conscious of where our focus is being directed? What is there, lurking out in the periphery that we are missing?

I love singing in the car with the boys. I love that it gets me out of my own head and into a shared space with them. I love it even more when it can open up new realizations and learning. So throw up your ‘organs’, and don’t let yourself fixate on the wrong thing. You might miss serenity hiding in the periphery.

Continuing traing building towards IM FL 70.3

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Satisfaction

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week, I want to talk about satisfaction

As the Rolling Stones once said, “I can’t get no, satisfaction”, but what really had me thinking about it was finishing the book Perseverance Life and Death in the SubArctic, by Stephan Kesting.

I had purchased the book a few months back and it had been sitting in my eternally backed up reading queu.

I found Stephan Kesting more than a decade ago as a fantastic online resource for Brazilian Jiu Jistu techniques and training material.

While I’ve never met him personally, you watch the way he teaches and interacts, and ingest enough of his content, and you get a pretty good sense that he is a great guy.

Hopefully the last of surgical procedures for mr Speedy

When covid wreaked havoc on BJJ gyms and training, Stephan offered his instrcutional courses to the public free of charge.

This was his way of giving back to the community at a time when they couldn’t train.

So, as a long-time subscriber to his content, I was excited to be able to support him when he wrote to his followers and customers, requesting we preorder his new book about sub arctic exploration.

I don’t know that I have a whole lot of interest in sub arctic canoe exploration. But I do place a lot of value on transformative life experiences, especially those that involve endurance, sweat, and maybe a touch of masochism.

The story Stephan tells, of his 50-day solo journey through the sub arctic, a significant portion of it upstream, checks all those boxes.

Stephan masterfully describes the natural beauty, the connection to earlier times and explorers, as well as the excruciating physical and mental toll of the journey.

It was a quick read, that left me with a lot of respect for Stephan. The planning, execution, and the grit required to see through the project were all very impressive.

But what stuck with me the most, was the books closing remarks. Below are some quotes from the final pages of the book.

“Finally, one of them blurted out, “That’s a really cool trip, but did you enjoy it?” The question took me aback, and it took a while to collect my thoughts. When I finally spoke, I explained that this was probably the wrong question. Yes, this trip had many enjoyable moments, but the trip hadn’t been about enjoyment.”

“yes, I had been happy sometimes, but the trip hadn’t been about happiness. Most of the time, I had been worried, cold, wet, scared, or exhausted. The totality of the journey wasn’t as simple as
seeking enjoyment.”

“The afterglow of satisfaction is much more durable than the fleeting
sugar high of happiness. And yes, the whole thing had been profoundly
and immensely satisfying. Experiences that give you satisfaction transform
who you are, and you can bring those changes back to the world with you.”

I think Stephan does an incredible job summing up the experience, albiet to a bewildered friend. Asking about happiness is the wrong question? Your friends already think you are crazy for going on this trip and then you drop that on them.

I completely agree with him, and I know where he is coming from. I take on lots of activities and challenges that make friends and colleagues question my sanity.

Most of those activities leave me very little in the way of happiness. But they do leave me with a deep sense of satisfaction. A sense of accomplishment and a sense of self. A sense that I can take on more challenges in the future, be they planned or unexpected.

Stepping on the mat with another person whose goal is to try and choke you unconcious. Riding your bike up a mountain high enough that pilots require supplemental oxygen. Snowboarding through tree wells on an unfamiliar slope after a decade away from the sport.

A couple of nice layover runs before the summer heat bears down

The common point in all of these activities is, as Stephan so eloquently wrote, the lasting changes you can bring back into the world with you.

Being brave and prepared enough to have these types of transformative experiences is hard enough. Being able to effectively communicate the message to the public, especially a public who has not had similar adventures is a duanting task.

In my own small way, I hope that’s what this blog does. Communicates the profound satisfaction I get from these types of adventures. The changes that they have produced in me. The lessons they have taught me. Lessons, which I hope to pass on to my boys and share with you.

The rolling stones might not have gotten any satisfaction, and happiness might not be the right question. But, I think Lynyrd Skynyrd’s mother said it best. “All I want for you my son is to be satisfied”

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Prompt

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog.

AI has been in the news quite a bit recently with the continuing advancement of ChatGPT and the drama surrounding its upper management.

I came across some of the grassroots origin of AI, in the form of computational linguistics, while continuing research on my communications project.

I am far from a subject matter expert on AI, language, or communication, but here is my two cents nonetheless. And, you should take it, we are due for a recession anyway.

Computational linguistics really began as a field before it ever had a chance. By that I mean the right tools for the job hadn’t even been invented yet.

ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, LLM’s, require enormous datasets and computing power. Before the internet, and the personal computer, this meant manual entry and analysis of all those words.

The LLMs function less by looking at the “rules of language”, and more by analyzing the likelihood of what the answer should be based on existing information.

From the analysis on computational linguistics, “Members of the IBM research team flaunted their ignorance of linguistics as if to taunt the other researchers. Fred Jelinek is famously quoted as saying, ‘Every time I fire a linguist from our project, the performance of our system gets better’

How fast can you squeeze out the toothpaste? Now, how fast can you put it back in? Our words work the same way

I think the easiest way to think about these LLM’s is as probability engines. This work was pioneered by Claude Shannon (whose work I have covered in quite a few other posts)

The LLM absorbs and analyzes a huge amount of data. An unimaginable amount of data. Think about reading the entire contents of the internet. Every tweet, every news article, every blog. Then statistically analyzing all those words to look for patterns.

From a previous post covering the work of Shannon, “As Shannon showed, this model also describes the behavior of messages and languages. Whenever we communicate, rules everywhere restrict our freedom to choose the next letter and the next pineapple*” “Because you’re completely aware of those rules, you’ve already recognized that ‘pineapple’ is a transmission error. Given the way the paragraph and the sentence were developing, practically the only word possible in that location was ‘word’ “

A beautiful day for a run on a Montreal layover

When Shannon completed his mathematical theory of communication, the internet wasn’t even a pipe dream, and he did a tremendous amount of work developing the earliest computers.

His theories and ideas, though, would pave the way for how these LLMs operate. They look for patterns by searching and analyzing all of the current written work on a topic. They then recombine words in a statistically viable way to answer questions

You can debate whether or not this constitutes, learning, or understanding, or consciousness, but that’s not really the point. It is here now, in this current form, and it can be an extremely useful tool. It can also spit out unintelligible garbage. So how do you engage with LLMs in a way that is useful and productive?

I think the answer has already been covered in the AI action warning movie Irobot. “My responses are limited, you must ask the right questions”

In this light, the rise of ChatGPT and other LLMs has led to the creation of a new host of jobs, one of which is the prompt engineer.

I first heard about the prompt engineer from episode 556 of the freakonomics podcast.

Prompt engineers discern what it is that their customer wants, and then find a way to effectively communicate that to the LLM.

Asking the right questions, adding the right context and constraints, make all the difference. If you think about it, the same concept applies to communicating with our kids. Or with other adults who may be operating outside their area of expertise.

If you want your five year old to do something, you need to set up some guideraills, and provide clear expectations. If you want a coworker to complete a new task, you need to provide the context and desired outcome, in order to get the finished product you want.

LLMs function much like the very intelligent five year old. You can be amazed what they are able to produce if given the right prompt.

Sometimes, it is hard to know what exactly we want. It is even harder to find the right combination of words to effectively transmit that want to someone else. Asking the right questions, setting the right context and guardrails, can help us in the endeavor. Finding the right prompt, might just lead to some serenity.

Trying to keep the mileage up in my pseudo off-season

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

A team

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog.

This week is a little different. It is more of a writing exercise than an informative post.

While spending a lot of time in the car with the little ones, I had to switch up my Pandora radio stations a little bit.

Tacos after Speedy came with me to Jui Jitsu

At 5 and 3, El Duderino and Speedy will soon be ready for the gospel of Wu Tang, and the back country twang and blues of Tyler Childers. But, for now, those are lessons best saved for another day.

So, as I found some more age appropriate jams that were still in my wheelhouse I stumbled across this song from Ed Sheeran.

Here is a link to the YouTube video, as it is worth a listen before you continue on with the rest of the post.

I really love the way Sheeran communicates his story with incomplete sentences. Two word snippets that paint an incredibly vivid picture. All done in a rhythmic and rhyming prose that suits his strumming and falsetto.

The words and the melody make you feel something. That is incredibly powerful, and only compounded by the fact that it is done with such an economy of words.

It seemed like a fun idea. Can you distill your feelings and a story into small two word snippets? Make them fit into Ed’s style of prosidy? I thought I would give it a try.

Below are two verses of my A-team rendition. One verse about flying and one about triathlon.

Hotels, new place, dont forget a brave face, try to sleep, and re trace.

Find food, work out, kids at home to think about, rain storms, self doubt.

And they say, he’s a little bit crazy. Stuck in his daydream, been this way since eighteen, but lately. His patience, is slowly sinking, wasting, crumbling like pastries, and they scream, the best things in life come free to us.

Cause we’re just under the management, and go mad just to pay the rent. We don’t wanna be away from home tonight. But we love the way that we pay the bills, and can’t easily transfer our skills. It’s a tightrope walk each night, for all those that fly.

Legs burn, dry throat, another lap to stay afloat, wheels turn, bike home

Run some, feet sore, training can feel like a chore, calm mind, worth more.

And they say he’s a little bit crazy, stuck in his daydream, been this way since eighteen, but lately, his patience is slowly sinking, wasting, crumbling like pastries, and they scream, the best things in life come free to us.

Cause we’re just under the training plan, no matter how much we already ran, and we just want to rest tonight. And in the morning we ride to another jam, transport to another land. Mental clarity is worth the price, for a few more miles tonight.

I had a lot of fun with this post. Trying to find the words and the rhyming pattern for complex thoughts was an interesting exercise. Parsing them down into two word snippets forces you to assign value to your thoughts.

What is most important to you? How do you convey that to the reader in two word snippets? Does the whole say more than the sum of the parts?

Economy and value are often at odds with each other. If you are forced to truncate your ideas, the quality of the message can suffer. But, when it doesn’t, it feels like that much more significant of an accomplishment in communication.

Running mountains on one of my favorite layovers, Roanoke Va

I think that is the true beauty behind A team. I think there is a lot to be gained from distilling our thoughts down to their most elemental levels.

I hope you enjoyed my own rendition. Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Frequency

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. Last week I mentioned that we would be talking about the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon also known as the frequency illusion.

I first heard about the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon while listening to the freakonomics podcast. They had put on a three part series on the history and economics of whaling. Now they were noticing whaling mentioned seemingly everywhere.

Yes, I listened to a three part series on whaling. Yes, it was quite interesting. Yes, you should read or re-read Moby Dick. Yes, you should find more ways to work “Thar she blows” into everyday conversation.

Now that we got that out of the way.

The Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion is a type of cognitive bias.

When you learn a new word, important piece of information, or focus on a new hobby, you start to notice it more often.

You may even notice yourself noticing it more often. The question naturally arises, was this (word/thing/hobby) always mentioned this much, and I never noticed it. Or, am I aware of it now because it is gaining in popularity and being mentioned more often.

The phenomenon works through mechanisms of selective attention and confirmation bias.

Our attention is a valuable and finite resource. We have built in hardware that gives us some indication of what is important, so that we can focus that limited resource. (Not to say that those mechanisms can’t be hijacked)

Novel information tends to become a focal point for our attention. Especially if that novel information resolves a significant amount of uncertainty. (See my post on uncertainty here)

As the new focal point of our attention, we are more likely to notice the knew information, than we would have otherwise been before. Our selective attention is now trained and better able to detect it.

Confirmation bias is a form of cognitive bias whereby we actively seek out information that matches our preconceived ideas.

If you think pickleball is the coolest thing since sliced bread, you will find articles, people, and various other sources of information that will confirm that.

Neither of these mechanisms, or the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon itself is particularly harmful. It is just a nice thing to be aware of.

Where it can get you into trouble, is not recognizing it for what it is, and making subsequent decisions based on perceived popularity.

Investing in a meme stock that you just heard about and are now seeing everywhere. Self diagnosing with some rare disease or syndrome you just learned about. Following a new fad diet that just popped up.

These are all examples of things we may do based on their perceived popularity that can be aided by the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon.

In researching the phenomenon, I found it’s backstory interesting and worthy of sharing.

I assumed that the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon was named after a pair of scientists or researchers who either discovered or inspired the discovery.

There is no shortage of this naming convention in the sciences. The Pythagorean theorem, Bernoulli’s principle, Newtownian physics, Chomskyian grammer.

The Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon, however, was a term coined by Terry Mullen in a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1994.

Terry describes the phenomenon of having printed news (in the days before internet and algorithms) reflect topics he was discussing with friends, regardless of their perceived social relevance. In this case, the Baader Meinhoff gang from west germany

From dictionary.com, “A group of left-wing West German terrorists, active in the 1970s, who were dedicated to the violent overthrow of capitalist society: Also known as: Red Army Faction”

Terry had been talking to his friend about the group in the early 90’s, (well past the peak of their activity or reporting on it) and was surprised when his friend directed him to a pri Ted news article about the group the next day.

He noticed the phenomenon continuing to pop up and coined the term using the terrorist group as the name.

There is debate as to whether or not this phenomenon has increased in its frequency in modern times. This could be due to the higher volume of information we consume. Same percentage of a much larger pie. Or could be artificiially increased by social media, data mining, and algorithms. A much larger piece or an also much larger pie.

Either way, I thought it was an interesting backstory, with actionable information. If you are aware of and seek out things that are happy, productive, and helpful, the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon says you should continue to see more of the same.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Uncertainty

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week, I want to revisit one of the main language characters we visited a few months back, Claude Shannon.

It’s somewhat odd calling Shannon a language character. I was first introduced to his world reading about lifespan and longevity. His work was used as an analogy to demonstrate a point, even though he did do some work in genetics.

Shannon was a mathematician, an engineer, a teacher, and a tinkerer. He is considered the founder of the modern technology age. He did work in World War II on code breaking, and on communication, but he was not a language person in the way we typically think about language.

Shannon was more concerned with the idea of transmitting and receiving messages, more so than actually constructing them. (As language folks tend to obsess over).

Shannon’s breakthrough work was the mathematical theory of communication, which broke down sending information digitally. I’m not a mathematician. Most of the original work (which I purchased) is gibberish to me. But, I can understand the concept, and it is profound in its breakdown of communication to an elemental level.

I talked about one of the aspects of his world in a post from last November (Noise). But this week I wanted to talk about uncertainty.

Shannon starts with the idea of flipping a coin. The outcome is either head or tails. This communicates to us a binary choice. The answer to the question, what happened in the coin flip, can be be expressed as a binary digit or ‘bit, one of two options.(yes the bit you are familiar with if you’ve used any computer technology in the last 40 years is Shannon’s idea from the 60’s)

Shannon quickly noted though, that the coin flip is perfectly random, unless the coin is weighted. In which case one outcome is more likely than another.

He then went on to show (all of this mathematically of course) that most of our communication is very heavily weighted. Because of our rules of grammer, syntax, phonology, and morphology, the next letter and the next word is highly dependent on the one that precedes it.

This was a highly useful realization and skill when Shannon was working in cryptography as a code breaker, but I think it means a lot to us as everyday communicators.

“for the vast bulk of messages, in fact, symbols do not behave like fair coins. The symbol that is sent now depends, in important and predictable ways, on the symbol that was just sent: one symbol has pull in the next.”

“As Shannon showed, this model also describes the behavior of messages and languages. Whenever we communicate, rules everywhere restrict our freedom to choose the next letter and the next pineapple*” “Because you’re completely aware of those rules, you’ve already recognized that ‘pineapple’ is a transmission error. Given the way the paragraph and the sentence were developing, practically the only word possible in that location was ‘word’ “

So much of what we say is predetermined, by custom, by ritual, by routine. When it is time to actually say something outside the norm, it is easy to falter. To struggle to find the right words.

As I mentioned earlier, Shannon was an engineer. He was concerned with designing a system to effectively and efficiently transmit messages. In pursuit of solving that problem, he taught us a valuable lesson about constructing messages.

“what does information really measure? It measures the uncertainty we overcome. It measures our chances of learning something we haven’t yet learned. Or, more specifically, the amount of information something carries reflects the reduction in uncertainty about the object”

“Why doesn’t anyone say XFOML RXKHRJDFJUJ? Investigating that question made clear that our “freedom of speech” is mostly an illusion: it comes from an impoverished understanding of freedom. Freer communicators than us, free of course in the sense of uncertainty and information, would say XFOML RXKHRJDFJUJ. But in reality, the vast bulk of possible messages have already been eliminated for us before we use a sentence or write a line.”

If information reflects the reduction in uncertainty, that should be one of, if not the primary focus of our communications. Especially those novel ones that break from ritual and routine.

Think about 20 different people practicing basketball individually on a court. There are bound to be some collisions, some balls bouncing off each other at the rim, and maybe even some injuries. An aviation training area can be very similar. Multiple individuals, in a confined area, with different agendas.

In aviation, we make position reports both procedurally in certain airspace, and in high volume uncontrolled areas. Those reports need to resolve a lot of uncertainty in order to avoid disaster. A good formula is who you are, where you are, and what your intentions are.

If you know John is working on 3 pointers from the corner, and Phil is practicing layups, you can now decide how and where you want to practice, without disturbing, or being disturbed by, the fellow ballers. A tremendous amount of uncertainty has been resolved. That is valuable information. Much more concrete and actionable than, John and Phil are playing baskstball.

Last few runs before returning to the Florida heat

This, of course, is a task much easier said than done. To make all, or even most, of our messages precise enough to overcome the maximum amount of uncertainty, requires a novel concept. Thinking before we speak.

What information do I have? What information does the receiver of the message need. What do they expect to hear? What uncertainty needs to be overcome?

There is no shortage of uncertainty in our world. Overcoming even a small amount of it will lead to happier humans. And I’m sure there is serenity to be found along the way.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Merriam-Webster

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week, I wanted to share another interesting story I found while researching my linguistics project.

The history of dictionaries may seem like a boring subject. You write down words, and you define them. How hard could it be? There are actually a lot of questions that must be answered when deciding how to make a dictionary.

“What is the relationship between words and phrases? How far should a dictionary go in recording nominal phrases? (Fire escape, forest fire)”

“How strictly should a dictionary confine its inventory to recorded usage? Can a spelling form be shared by more than one word (record as a number and record as a verb).”

“How much attention should be paid to etymology? (Weave intransitive vs transitive verb)” Weave in and out of traffic, and Weave clothes on a loom come, from different origin words as an example.

Making a dictionary becomes a little more complex than just a book to check when you don’t trust your scrabble opponent.

One of the most popular dictionaries in the US, is the Merriam-Webster brand. Their story was featured in the chapter I was researching, on the history of lexicography.

“The Merriam dictionaries trace their history back to the American Dictionary of the English Language dutifully compiled by the polemical lexicographer Noah Webster in 1828. It contains no fewer than 70,000 entries”

“Webster was an indefatigable collector of words with a rare gift for definition writing.”

“Unfortunately, his etymologies were influenced by his belief that modern languages, including English, are derived from something called Chaldean, which he believed was the language used by Adam and God for their conversations in the Garden of Eden and the immediate precursor to Hebrew.”

“After his death, his successors-including his son-in-law, Chauncey H. Goodrich, and the redoubtable Noah Porter, president of Yale College- quietly abandoned the Chaldaean hypothesis and brought the etymologies into line with the findings of Germanic and Indo-European scholarship.”

That is a lot to unpack for a book that has been mostly superceded by online reference checking. But recall that for generations, the Webster dictionary reigned Supreme. It is eerie to think about how much power definition holds, and how that power was held by a religious fanatic.

I grew up Roman catholic, and considered myself fairly devout until after high-school. Even I had never heard of Chaldean before.

After some very preliminary research it seems that the Chaldean people were in Mesopotamia around 11-12 thousand years ago, and were assimilated into the Babylonians. You may recognize that name from it’s own biblical reference the tower or babel.

Apparently there are multiple references not only in the Bible, but also from other renowned scholars, (Pliny the elder and Cicero) to Chaldean knowledge. There appears to be multiple references to their expertise in astronomy, astrology, vibrations, and numerology.

Some or all of that may be nonsense. I don’t know. And frankly, I don’t know how to know if any of it is real or not. Either way, it is fun to think about next time you have to check the dictionary when your five year old asks the difference between gunk and sludge.

We base our lives on definitions. How we identify ourselves, each other, the occurrences of our day to day experiences, they all depend on agreed upon definitions. The ability to set those definitions is a great power. And, as Uncle Ben would say, with great power comes great responsibility.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Presupposition

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. In continuing research for my linguistics/communication project, I found this interesting back story that I wanted to share with you.

I am a sucker for a good academic cat fight. For one thing, academics, especially linguists and philosophers, have a way with words. Their ability to feud with civility, yet use absolutely scathing remarks, is truly a hidden treasure. Sadly, it is one that often goes overlooked. Because, well, you have to be a nerd to read these papers.

This nerd was reading and researching about semantics, and came across the theory of presupposition. Presupposition in interpersonal communication is very easy to take for granted, but it is critical to an effective transfer of meaning.

Putting some more focused time on the pool

Here is a quick example. The sentence “I have lost my keys”, presupposes “I had keys before” and “I do not have my keys now”. While that seems obvious, think of all the things we say to each other every day that require significant amounts of presupposition.

Now imagine talking to a hunter/gatherer. Someone who has very little in shared cultural/societal experience. Even if they understood each of the individual words and their semantic and syntactical significance, there is a good chance they would not have the same presuppositions.

Presupposition has been explored a few times in the history of modern linguistics, but its first recorded (however, often unattributed) explanation goes back to the time of Aristotle. This leads us to our academic feud.

Easing into some recovery rides after the half iron man

The story starts with Aristotle’s bivalent theory of truth. Aristotle’s truth theory states: (a) that every proposition is by nature either true or false, without any possible middle or any possible third truth value, and (b) that a proposition is true just in case it ‘corresponds’ with reality and false otherwise.

Eubulides came from the school of the Stoa, and taught philosophy at Megara. He came up with several paradoxes to challenge Aristotle’s truth theory. You can read about them here.

The paradox of the horns lies at the basis of presupposition theory. It is illustrated by the following fallacy: “What you haven’t lost you still have”. “You haven’t lost your horns.” Ergo: “you still have horns.” (How fun is it to say ergo, right)

The statement is obviously silly and false. It does however illustrate presupposition quite well. You have to have had horns in order to lose them. So the sentence cannot be true in the Aristotelian sense, hence the paradox.

This is all great, a bunch of linguistic and philosophical shenanigans, but the story gets better. There is some evidence that this specific reference, was not only a challenge to Aristotle’s intellect, but also to his manhood.

The reference of a man having horns comes from a historical reference of the man as a cuckold. So now Eubulides is playing word games, whilst telling the world Aristotle’s wife is stepping out on him, all in a philosophy class. Shots fired.

There are several different theories about the horns referencing cuckholdry. This article from the BBC shows a more recent instance of the insult between Portuguese government officials in 2009.

The article gives a fairly succinct summary of the gesture, and it’s history. The etymology is from the cuckoo bird that would lay its egg in other birds nests. Thus leaving the chick to be raised by the unsuspecting other bird.

And of course Chaucer’s the miller’s tale gives us, “For she was wild and young, and he was old, And deemed himself as like to be a cuckold.”

In Roman times, horns were given to returning soldiers as a symbol of success on the battlefield. They took on the unintended meaning of cuckholdry when it was discovered a significant number of soldiers returned to errant wives.

Celebrating summer and the end of school

The gesture is more recognized, as well as more offensive, in certain countries and cultures. I had no idea it was even a thing, but latin countries such as Columbia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Italy seem to take the most offense at the gesture.

From the article again, “This is a Latin country. If you say to someone, your wife did this, it is humiliating.”
“It is a great thing to do if you want to start a fight.”

Playing operation: it’s easier to win when you cover up the light

I didn’t think I would end up exploring insults to manhood between government officials when I started my research on pragmatism, but life is full of winding roads and uncertain paths.

I hope you enjoyed wandering down this one as much as I did. Thanks for joining me, stay safe, and stay sweaty my friends.

Binary

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. While continuing my linguistics research I seem to have taken a fork in the road to information theory.

Sometimes you follow these paths to dead ends. But sometimes, the path leads to somewhere interesting even if it isn’t exactly where you thought you were heading, or needed to go in the first place.

Information theory was pioneered in the 1940’s and 50’s by Claude Shannon. We talked about him a little bit in the post on noise.

One of the ideas that helped kickstart Shannon’s theory, was that of the mathematician and logician George Boole.

George Boole in the laws of thought, explains the way that any question of logic can be turned into math. This is done with conditional statements AND, OR, NOT, and IF, along with an evaluation of if the statement is true 1, or false 0.

Imagine you want to find out how many people in your city are blonde women. The characteristic blonde can be represented by x and female by y. The statements will either be true 1, or false 0. AND would be represented by multiplication •, OR by addition +.

Each data point (person) can then be evaluated by the equations which can be translated easily back and forth between math and plain English.

1•1 = 1 blonde and female. 1•0=0 blonde and male. If you decide you are only concerned with how many women there are, 1+1=1 for the group of blonde women and 0+1=1 for the group of non blonde women.

This foundation laid by Boole in the 19th century set the stage for Shannon and other inventors to build our modern computing era. Boolian algebra would work with electrical circuits laid out either in parallel or in a series to evaluate the data.

Binary implies and either/or, true/false, 1 or 0. When setting code to evaluate these statements or questions, computation can be accomplished at lightning speeds.

This is why definitions are so important. As more and more of our world is driven by this binary code, true or false, statements can only be properly evaluated if we have agreed on the definitions.

This is a blessing for our modern information age. Tasks that would require huge amounts of human time and energy, and would be very error prone, can now be automated.

2+2=4. Is the picture of a stop sign. Are the letters in This scramble grstl. These can all be assigned yes or no values. True or false. And they are very simple examples. But as we move away from simple examples and in to more complex questions, the binary coding becomes more challenging.

Writing code to evaluate human defined terms is where I want to focus. The past few years has seen a rise in social media platforms restricting posts in one way or another.

Sometimes this is done by removing the posts entirely. Sometimes it is done by flagging the post, putting some sort of warning, or label, or explanation on it. Sometimes it is done by adjusting the post’s visibility.

Most of these restrictions are performed at least initially by a computer. A computer operating in binary. The post is true or false. It contains misinformation or it doesn’t. It contains banned content or it doesn’t.

This is not a blog post about censorship, those platforms policies, or one specific position over another. It is about the process. The mechanisms behind evaluating posted content.

If these posts are being flagged initially by an algorithm. That algorithm has to be programmed to observe certain characteristics or definitions.

As we saw from the onset, computers are faster and less error prone than humans at binary logic. When it comes to subjective rationalization, not so much.

If misinformation, or objectionable content, or hate speech is clearly defined, and we all agree on the definitions, then a binary logic calculation is magically fast and efficient.

However, if we go all the way back to 1964, to the court case Jacobellis V. Ohio which ultimately ended up in the supreme court, we see the root of the problem.

A movie theater was being sued for showing a movie with a sex scene. As the court case moved it’s way up the legal system to higher and higher courts, each court was unable to successfully define obscenity and pornography.

The problem is summed up well by justice Stewart in the popular legal quote “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

If humans “perhaps can never succeed in intelligibly defining” such terms, how can we expect a computer code, written by humans to do so?

Yet this is to a large extent the situation we find ourself in. Whoever controls the definition, and writes the code, establishes the binary. What is tru and what is false.

I have said it before, and I will say it again, words are important. The way we collectively define them is important. Participating in conversations about those definitions is important and everyone has the right to a voice in that conversation.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.

Noise

Thanks for joining me for another edition of the SerenityThroughSweat blog. This week I want to talk about noise.

Maybe not in the typical sense that we think of it. There are different types of noise, and they all play a part in disrupting not only effective communication, but our general happiness and even our health.

I found the idea of noise disrupting our health in the book Lifespan by Dr David Sinclair. Dr Sinclair’s message condensed down to an elevator pitch, is that ageing is a disease that can be treated, halted, and even potentially reversed.

A significant part of ageing is noise in the communication between our genes and our cells. Minimizing that noise, and ensuring genes and cells effectively communicate, keeps cells healthy, operating properly, and young.

Dr. Sinclair goes on to quote Claude Shannon, one of the founding fathers of information theory back from 1948.

Shannon’s noisy channel coding theorem, says that “however contaminated with noise interference a communication channel may be, it is possible to communicate digital data error free up to a given maximum rate through the channel. (a mathematical theory of communication, 1948)

Dr Sinclair uses this theory of information transfer as an example for how our genes and cells communicate, as well as what we can do to minimize the noise, thus maximizing the error free data transfer (effective communication)

This got me thinking about the types of noise we experience in interpersonal communications, some of which I recognized without knowing they had their own specific domains. Physiological, physical, psychological, and semantic noise all play their own part in disruption.

Physiological noise refers to anything going on within our personal body that might hinder communication. This could be a headache, hunger, fatigue or other physiological conditions. Think those Snickers commercials. Why don’t you have a Snickers, you don’t listen so well when you’re hungry.

Physical noise refers to disruptions that are physical in nature but external to the receiver. Think headset/radio/phone malfunction, a crowded room, or even a bright and distracting light.

Psychological noise refers to disruptions that are internal to the receivers thought process. If you are preoccupied with another problem, or day dreaming instead of listening that would be psychological noise.

Finally semantic noise is a misunderstanding of words between the sender and receiver. This could be due to lack of shared knowledge, language barrier, or cultural differences.

There is no shortage of barriers to effective communication. There is always some noise present, and often there is a lot of it. The constant noise we live with, makes determining Shannon’s maximum error free data transfer rate a crucial piece of information to know and apply.

Staying at or below the applicable Shannon rate for a given exchange will ensure the message is transmitted effectively. If you have ever had a conversation at a loud concert, with a foreign speaker, a toddler, or someone with a bad hangover, you already understand self limiting your rate of data transfer through the given channel. (If you’ve ever been the hungover one this is greatly appreciated)

Taking account of the noise around us, and the overall capacity of our channels of communication is a demanding and everpresent task. One that helps pave the path to serenity.

Thanks for joining me, stay safe and stay sweaty my friends.