Just another part of the teaching life...

Obviously part of some sort of social media trend, but I remain blissfully unaware...
 

You Are What You Eat

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what LLM's might be telling us about what thinking is...

Today I'm pondering the slightly dated observation that early LLMs had so many biases on account of their training data (like facial recognition doing a better job on white male faces since it was trained on predominately white male face data sets).  Even though we're doing a much better job with our training sets for modern LLMs (perhaps obtained illegally but that's a tangent for another day) - there must be biases always.   The nature of human generated data is going to be biased, no matter how large the data set.  

Now I'm thinking about how much I love the occasional K-Drama or Tom Clancy novel.  But if my entertainment diet consisted strictly of these unsophisticated foods, who would I be? What would my thinking look like if I had only had such a diet my whole life?  We have to make the effort to consume an occasional Moby Dick or Seven Samurai every now and then or else our own biases will default to another not-so-useful LLM spewing trite nonsense.

If we're going to have biases, let's bias higher rather than lower. Eat well my friends!

The Ecliptic, Thinking, and the Power of Reframing

Lately, there has been a lot of noise about how many of the visible planet will be lined up.  

Although it is cool to look at, this is no syzygy.  

If you reframe your point of view of stargazing around the fact that you live in a roughly planar solar system embedded a 3D field of stars, you realize that the sun, moon, and planets will all appear roughly along the same line in the sky from our point of view (the 'ecliptic').  

Actual arrangement of the planets - not really 'lined up'

I thought of this last night when I stepped into the backyard and observed Venus right next to the waxing crescent moon.  It wasn't even completely dark out yet but these two were just popping out of the sky, begging to be noticed:

my phone camera did not do this justice

I've been thinking ever since of how lucky I am to be able to have these two points of view:  A raw appreciation for the splendor of this serendipitous sight and the deeper appreciation of how these two point of light are nowhere close to each other and not lined up in any other way.

One morning, I was appreciating the Sunrise and thinking about how I was the one actually moving on a rotating rock at over 400 MPH* ('Earthturn' I've been trying to get my astronomy student to rebrand that old word 'Sunrise').  It was intoxicating and I got a little dizzy which then broke the spell of having that perspective (like realizing you are in a dream will often wake you up).

source: https://physics.uwo.ca/~basu/teach/ast020/notes/nightsky.pdf

Reframing is a powerful tool.  When I think about how hard it is to learn new thing or to actually think clearly, I remind myself that thinking it primarily (entirely?) an emotion-driven thing.  We are constant victims of our emotions.  Most of the time, our 'thinking' is just a way of justifying what our emotions have already 'decided'.  When I find myself baffled by others (or myself!), this perspective gives me comfort.

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

― Richard Feynman

______

*rotation velocity of the Earth about its axis (approximate since this speed is dependent on your latitude of course)

Holiday Film School

 When Isabelle was home from college, the four of us watched (in order)

The Seven Samurai 1954 Kurosawa	The Magnificent Seven 1960 Sturges	The Magnificent Seven 2016 Fuqua

Aside from the fact that the original Kurosawa is legendary and influential in a way none of the derivative movies could possible be, here are a few interesting observation we had as a family:

Classic       ----------------------------------------------------------------->     Modern

Bandits Need Food to Survive                 Bandits have a              Bandit leader of pure evil (leader’s identity not critical)                     named leader                Weapon of mass destruction Motivations are less personal                                                  Lead hero has personal vendetta

Funny Scenes                                                                                     Less comedy, more cool Intense acting, physical comedy                                                                   Hair cutting/head shaving important                                          scalping referenced

Role of Farmers                                 Townsfolk are farmer Emphasized                                    (one hero is former farmer)           Farming/Farmers (one samurai is secretly                                                                           not important farmer) (gold is!) In the end, the farmers are the winners emphasized (also their willingness to do anything  to  survive)

40 Bandits                                               40 Bandits                                   40 Townsfolk,  7 Heroes, 4 die                                     7 Heroes, 4 die                    hordes of bad guys                                                                                                                       7 Heroes, 4 die Romance ends                                      Romance succeeds                        Sexual references throughout                                                 No romance or references to sex Sacrifice theme                                     personal PTSD                         PTSD emphasized,  (houses, stolen wife, heroes deaths)                                                       Hero self-sacrifice                                                                                                                  is belabored, heroic Yoda-like old man                                 Old man less iconic                         no old man

No religion                                           Religion in background              Explicit Christianity No racial diversity Race important Racial identity important

Additionally, the classic Kurosawa had carefully composed shots that could work as photography whereas the more modern films were more concerned with action and transitions.

Is the 1960 film the origin of the story about the man falling to his death and saying "so far so good" on the way down? 

Yet another Lucas-Kurosawa link?

It's all in the relationships 2.0

 Two Precursors to this Post:

1.  My old blog post about physics and relationships.

2. You know how sometimes you have to hear something twice in order to really understand it?  I had watched the really great 3B1B explainer video about LLMs (all screenshots below are from that video) a few months ago which really primed me for this story.

And now on to the post:

My brother and I were visiting my parents over the MLK Day weekend when he began to talk about AI, LLMs, and where the meaning of things seems to be embedded in language.  After he explained tokenization:

(that's when human speak is translated into mathematical objects):

He then explained that embedding of these tokens into an abstract multidimensional phase space (which is what all the training of the LLMs is primarily doing... constructing the right encoding for these tokens) actually contains more information that the words themselves.  

Where these various tokens lie in this multidimensional phase space is meaningful in that the relationships between these tokens is geometrical and those relationships is what makes them useful to perform operations on.

As he was explaining, I had two simultaneous realization.  This is how the universe itself works as well and this may be how thinking happens in the human mind.  In the universe, the properties of an object only become significant or meaningful at all in relation to other objects (how would you even know if something were charged electrically if there were no other charges in the universe?).  When you are thinking subconsciously and having feelings about things... how does all that nonverbal thinking happen?  We have actual multidimensional representations for concepts in the weighting of and the connections between the neurons in our brains.  

Of course this second realization seemed a lot less insightful when I remembered than human neuronal connections are the inspirations for neural nets which (once you add back propagation to train them) become LLM's which everyone is now calling AI.

For everyone who thinks that humans are so special with our ability to think and communicate, what are LLMs demonstrating about our vaunted abilities?   So rather than be impressed with how AI-like LLMs are, maybe we should just be less impressed with ourselves filling in the next word in the sentences we are constructing in our heads...

In the end, maybe the machines are not being promoted but we are being demoted?

I used to try to correct people who say "AI" when they mean "LLM" but now I'm just fine with it because I am going to start telling people who say or do something smart that they are a fairly effective LLM rather than say they are naturally intelligent.

Star Trek, Wine, and Religion

When your wife gets you a Star Trek Wine Advent calendar, that's a home run right there!

We shared the bottles over about 1 month and a half and tried to guess the varietal used in the wine before looking at the label.  They had a few weird ones in there, but in general I think they did an excellent job of choosing wines that had strong varietal characteristics (I got five correct!).

A very fine way to enjoy the dark days around the solstice!

The New Yorker, Jane Siberry, and Symmetry

When I was a teenager, I made an impulse buy of a vinyl album ("No Borders Here") based on the cover and the fact that one of the tracks was titled "Symmetry (the way things have to be)".   Those were the days!  We would just flip through a bin of LP's, take a look and then, sometimes, make that purchase and have an epic discovery moment at home when you dropped that needle.  In this case, I was knocked out by every track on the album (as soon as I heard Jane Siberry put that pause between "When he kissed me over there he usually  kissed me over here.... too", I became a fan). and I went on, over the years, to purchase all of the albums pictured below:

My freshman college roommate was a random pairing with a Hoosier named John Zello,  Luckily, we got along and became good friends for our undergraduate years.  He was a graphic design major and watching him work on his projects and explain the why's and what's of what he was doing was a real eye opener to this physics major.  It really is true that a major part of your college education is the variety of people you meet!

Years later I was in New York City, reading through the latest issue of The New Yorker (thinking about how I remember my father reading issues when I was a kid in Huntsville).  In that issue, I was struck by an advertisement featuring an laughing woman.  It wasn't clear to me what the ad was for nor why she was laughing nor what she was doing... but there was something about it that just caught my eye and I can still remember it now, decades later.  I skimmed the "goings on about town" section, realizing that I actually lived in New York City so it could possibly be relevant for once.   I see "Jane Siberry performing at The Bottom Line" on the list.  It had today's date and the show started in one hour.  The Bottoms Line was only a few blocks over!  So I caught her in concert just like that.  Amazing!  (a quintessential New York City experience if ever there was one!)

A week later, I met up with John as I had found out he was working for advertising company uptown.  I met him in his office and, amidst all his work, I saw a sketch detailing how a woman should be laughing enigmatically.  I pointed to that and asked "Is that your work?" "Yes." "Wow, I just noticed that ad in the New Yorker the other day!"  Turns out he didn't know where the ads were run, he just designed them to be eye catching and intriguing.  Talented guy that John Zello.

One day in 1988 Zello was flipping through an M C Escher book in our dorm room and I looked over his shoulder and remarked on that picture "looks like Bonifacio in Corsica".  He looked at me incredulously and said "how did you know that?" and said "well, i've been there and it looks just like that"

I'm blogging this today because I picked up my daughter from her freshman dorm room yesterday to bring her home for the weekend.  On the car ride home, she pointed out a building that reminded her of the Flatiron building in New York City.  I responded "Your uncle Eugene once worked in that building and he invited me into his boss' office which had a window on that triangle edge.  Very cool."  (years later my buddy Eugene would introduce me to his cousin Irene!)

"This is what I'm thinking

The reason your eyes keep returning to the fire

Is because it divides your sight

Into left and right, and dark and light and dark

Like a fine dividing wire

...

Symmetry is the way things have to be

Symmetry is the way things have to be"

-Jane Siberry, 1983