Grades, Entropy, and Growing Up

 

One of my standard gags that I do most years is that I tell my classes that I have an idea for a new grading paradigm.   At first, they kind of like it because I say I’ll start everyone off with 100 percent.  Then, as the year goes by, I will deduct points for items they miss rather than building their grades out of an accumulation of points or a running average.   Almost right away, some of the quicker students start to lose their delight over this idea.  Then, I spell it out for everyone: “Imagine, if you will, that day, when you lose your 11th point and you are sitting on an 89, and you realize the A is never coming back!”   At this point, the students are happy enough that they were not the guinea pigs for this experiment.  Every time I tell this story though, I feel there is something to it.  Some deeper truth embedded in the outrageousness of this grading scheme…

I am fond of the fact that an infant’s brain contains neurons that are over-connected.  Learning to control one’s body, recognize faces, and make sounds on demand is the pruning of connection.  The elimination of possibility if you will.   As we age, indeed as time goes forward in general, we are in the business of eliminating possibilities.  As the Universe converts organized energy into unorganized energy thereby increasing the entropy – time literally moves forward.   As we each grow out of childhood and start racking up ‘accomplishments’ as adults and find our place in the world, we are, once again, solidifying who we are and what our roles are.  We do this by eliminating other possibilities, don’t we?   As I brace for turning 51, I know that the 21 is never coming back.  That’s okay, Kenny my boy – the elimination of possible futures is what living your life is…

An Album Review 35 years in the making

 

In high school, I read a review of something and the writer described an event as being as 'jarring as encountering a scratch on your new Steve Reich record".  I don't recall what the review was about or who wrote it, but boy do I remember that line!

Well, the next time I was in a record store, I looked for something by this artist whom I had never heard of and found a CD of "The Desert Music" which had only come out a few years earlier.  I flipped it over and read the words 

"Begin, my friend

                 for you cannot,
                                  you may be sure,
take your song,
                 which drives all things out of mind,
                                  with you to the other world."

And then later

    

               "Well, shall we
think or listen? Is there a sound addressed
                 not wholly to the ear?"

(turns out the lyrics are from poems by William Carlos Williams)

I bought the CD on the spot.  When I got home, I discovered an in-depth review of the piece in the liner notes by a critic.  So, as I hit play, I read about how this reviewer pictures music in color and light.  I remember specifically that Mozart to him is a "slow moving barge of bright white light". I think about that line a lot.  Even today.

Years later, I attended a performance where Steve Reich was interviewed and he confessed that he had picked up a book of poems by William Carlos Williams having never heard of him, but just intrigued by the symmetry of his name.  How cool, I thought.

I miss the era of rolling the dice on the spot in a record store, not knowing whether what you were buying was even worth the $14.99 or whether it would be life-transforming.  Now, I google and read at least 3 reviews before I buy a new can opener online.  

If you are willing to spend 48 minutes of focused appreciation, see if The Desert Music transports and transforms you as it did a 15 year Ken Rideout some 35 years ago:

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

I have often been fascinated by this idea that everything happens in the squishy space between things:  it's all about relationships  - you are not so much what you are made of, but the relationship between those items (within and without).

Well, my man Dr. Derek Muller has knocked it out of the park again.  In a recent video he shows how the very color of light - its frequency or wavelength, is a construct of relationship. Whether the photon is blue or red depends not just on its intrinsic properties but also your relationship to the photon (are you moving away/towards? Are you cosmically far from it? Are you at a different location in a gravitational well?). Mass, color, your personality:  all constructs of relationship.  So little is actually intrinsic!

If a real tree falls in the woods, it certainly creates sound waves even if no one is there to hear it.  But, if a quantum particle pops into existence and then out again and no one sees it, was it ever there?  If I live by myself on an island for my entire life, do I even have a personality? I'm not so sure...

Even the attributes of fundamental particles are ones of relationship: Spin Up or Down?  Need an external field to define up and down.  Intrinsic mass?  Needs Higgs field to interact with. Charge?  Wouldn't know you have it if I didn't have another one to respond to it...

I find myself returning to that classic Carl Sagan saying that gives us all a reason to exist: "We are a way for the Universe to know itself."  Deeper every time I think about it, Carl.

Now, What is that frequency, Kenneth?