Category Archives: Soapbox

Sleeping on the job

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Decorative image onlyAt the end of 2023, following my visit to IBM [see ‘Chirping while calculating probabilities‘ on November 22nd, 2023], I spent a significant amount of time trying to understand quantum computing and exploring its potential applications in my research.  It was really challenging because, as one article I read stated, quantum-mechanical phenomena appear to be weird and the mathematical tools used to model them are complex and abstract.  Just to make it harder you have to learn a new language or at least new terminology and mathematical notation.  I have always found that my unconscious mind is capable of solving mathematical problems given sufficient time and sleep.  However, the mathematics of quantum computing took many nights of unconscious thought to assemble into some sort of understanding and left me with mild headaches.  Around the same time I was reading one of Cormac McCarthy’s new novels, Stella Maris, which consists entirely of a psychologist interviewing a mathematician who is a patient in a hospital. They discuss that mathematical work is performed mostly in the unconscious mind and we have no notion as to how the mind goes about it.  They find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the unconscious mind does not use numbers.  I suspect that it does not use mathematical notation either; perhaps it is more a form of synaesthesia using three-dimensional shapes [see ‘Engineering synaesthesia‘ on September 21st, 2016].  A couple of pages before discussing the unconscious mind’s mathematical work, one of the protagonists comments that ‘If we were constructed with a continual awareness of how we worked we wouldn’t work’.  So, perhaps I should not probe too deeply into how I have acquired a rudimentary understanding of quantum computing.

BTW in case you missed my last post at the start of January [‘600th post and time for a change‘ on January 3rd 2024] and have been wondering what has happened to my weekly post – I have decided to switch to posting monthly on the first Wednesday of each month.

Source:

Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris, Picador, 2022.

Happy Holidays!

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Decorative photograph showing a small red house in the snow next to a fjord.

Photo by Sarah

Best wishes during the holiday season to all my readers.  I’m in digital detox over the Christmas and New Year holidays.  So no post today.  If you’re having withdrawal symptoms or want to know more about digital detox then read ‘Digital detox with a deep vacation‘ posted on August 10th, 2016.  Otherwise switch off and do something utterly absorbing, such as deep reading or painting [see ‘You can only go there in your head‘ on November 5th, 2022].

Linear, recycling and circular economies

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I photographed this infographic at Killerton Hall in Devon this summer at the entrance to an exhibition called ‘Thirsty for fashion – circular fashion, past and present‘ which was about how clothes have been altered and repurposed through the centuries.  I hear many references to the circular economy at the moment but I suspect many people do not really know the difference between a recycling and circular economy, and I thought this infographic elegantly illustrated it.  Just a short post this week as we begin to slow down for the end of the year [see ‘Slow down, breathe your own air‘ on December 23rd, 2015].

Virtual reality and economic injustice in a world with limits

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Decorative photograph of a pile of carved stonesIt is sometimes suggested that materialism and greed are key drivers of our social and political system that largely refuses to acknowledge that we live in a world of limits.  However, Rowan Williams has proposed that we have a ‘culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident.’  In other words, it is our desire to be in control of our lives and surroundings that drives us to accumulate wealth and build our strongholds.  Education and learning lead to an understanding of the complexity of the world, a realisation that we cannot control the world and perhaps to unavoidable insecurity, particularly for those people who thought they had some distance between themselves and uncontrollable events.  It is more comfortable to believe that we are in control, adhere to the current out-dated paradigm, and ignore evidence to the contrary. This is equivalent to living in a virtual reality.  This approach not only accelerates uncontrollable changes to the planet but also leads to economic disparities because, as Williams states, economic justice will only arrive when everyone recognises a shared vulnerability and limitation in a world that is not infinite.

Source: Rowan Williams, Faith in the public square, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Image: a pile of carved stones in the cloisters of Hereford cathedral where I bought a second-hand copy of ‘Faith in the public square’ while on holiday [see ‘Personale mappa mundi‘ on November 1st, 2023].