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?