Glen -
... I think I was both supported and ruined by computers in
that they let me "do algorithms" in the way I think I always imagined
I would
"do math".
This depends, of course, on what you mean by "math". The kind I
sometimes get engrossed in ends up pure symbol manipulation.
in the spirit of the "other thread", "math" is extremely overloaded.
I'd guess that to 90% of the population "math" is "arithmetic". To
most with advanced technical education, I find "doing math" means "using
math", usually linear algebra, maybe some geometry, maybe some
calculus... or one of the many specialized subdomains of applied
mathematics that gets used to leverage sticky technical problems up out
of the holes they like to settle into. Markov processes, fourier
analysis, vector analysis, matrix manipulation, etc...
I myself live in this domain. For a long time, however, I had the
benefit of working around people who occasionally actually "did
math"... exploring the elaboration of math... perhaps "making math" is
a better term. My latest stint in this environment involved the
extension of category theory for the purpose of applying it to neural
models of cognition (developing models of cognition based on
neural-style circuitry with a *lot* of esoteric category theory mumbling
that I literally could not follow)... my place was simply to help add
intuition and develop visualization tools to leverage how we might look
at and discuss the models they would build. It's a defunct project
now, but there is a book on the subject being written by the PIs of the
original project. Doing Math (or Making Math?) seems to be staggeringly
slow and painful. Despite a BS in Math and a handful of grad courses
in pure math, I can't say I ever was a mathematician, and I find real
mathematicians rare to find.
But I *really* do enjoy applied math... both in the sense of developing
formal models of systems based on "real" mathematics and in the sense of
developing algorithms based on such models and using complexity theory
to sort out the expected space-time performance envelope of same.
I don't really play any instruments. But I've dabbled enough to get
the same (very similar) feeling as when "doing math". It ends up
being a kind of meditation, embracing the Id. As with math, I've
never achieved any objectives with music. But I do have a lot of fun
in those "emergent" groups where anyone's welcome to join in. There
tends to be mostly drums. But there's always a subset of people with
good improvising instruments like the sax, trumpet, flute, trombone,
etc. to provide an ethereal fluidity that floats and bounces atop the
more -urgic drums. It gets interesting when the group crosses the
10-15 participant threshold.
Don't make Doug get out his Sax and wail on it here!
I have to admit to really enjoying being in the presence of a jam
session.... I myself can barely play a record despite an early career as
a DJ, and it takes me an average of 3 tries to get a CD into a player
correctly... and no matter what I do with Pandora, it wanders off
playing things for me I would never want to hear, much less be caught
listening to <http://xkcd.com/668/>!
My partner in Musification (PhD Composer with patents in translating
data into music) can attest that any theoretical understanding I have of
some musical topics doesn't begin to translate to anything like doing
music. In the analogy with Math, it is like I have learned Arithmetic
up through summing fractions and can occasionally multiply or divide by
10 without a calculator. Our current project involves quorum sensing.
I've found that objective-oriented musicians either don't grok or are
irritated by those groups. And, I admit that if you're not capable of
sedating your ego, there's plenty to get upset about. I have yet to
attend a psytrance rave. But I suspect they lead to a similar state,
but perhaps more kinesthetic.
I did like David Stout's (David, are you still on this list?) musical
installation team/group known as "Noise Fold". It made me think of the
terms "Fold, Spindle and Mutilate". I think it takes a lot of
patience, immersion, or maybe altered states to properly enagage (much
less enjoy?) a lot of this kind of "music". Far be it from me to
discount something I simply don't have a visceral understanding of.
I feel that I am impoverished for never developing a first-person
experience of music beyond singing along in the car to oldies and
tapping my foot (roughly) to the rhythm of a catchy tune.
- Steve
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