The death of J.G.Ballard

Just heard the news. Things like The Crystal World, The Drowned World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, The Day of Creation, The Terminal Beach were incredibly good. His visions were surreal, obsessive, neurotic, fascinating, and his writing exposed the stuff in our heads as being far weirder than we might care for, so that the most bizarre was in fact recognisable and familar.

If you haven’t read him, do so. Like the advert says, he’s worth it.

Oil is running out. Hello!!?? OIL IS RUNNING OUT!!!

Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ tries to raise consciousness of the threat of global warming caused by CO2 levels in the atmosphere. I’m just becoming aware of the significance of another change – no more oil.

Have a look at Peak Oil. The modelling done by Hubbert back in 1956 turned out to be very accurate. Many nations (including the UK) have already passed Peak Oil. It would be irrational to suppose that reserves in Saudi Arabia are effectively infinite. So all the data  predicts that somewhere in the next 3 decades, we will run out of oil and gas.

What would it be like in developed nations without a car? How would you get to work? What would then happen to suburbia? You can live without working, but not without food. How would food be distributed to supermarkets? Prior to that, how would food be produced without agricultural machinery? Tractor engines have 400 horse power – what farm has 400 horses? Where do the insecticides and fertilizers come from? What does that imply for current world population levels?

So you need an alternative energy source – wind/tidal or nuclear. Biofuels could not be produced in sufficient quantity – not that and grow food (see last paragraph). But that is needed within the next 30 years at the most. How long does it take to design and build a nuclear power station? How many in the UK currently have approved plans? None.

If you could produce sufficient nuclear power quickly enough, vehicles would need effective batteries – or fuel cells at a reasonable cost. That might come to pass, with a lot of R and D. Maybe. Otherwise.. well, nothing that I know of. Hydrogen maybe, but you still need power to produce it. Most people snigger about electric cars. I know they don’t work very well. But they are about as effective, in terms of range and speed, as a horse. And that will be the only alternative.

But what about nations which do not have nuclear power? What will happen to them? In that light, what do the ambitions of Iran look like?

On the positive side – no global warming. That’s OK then.

How people learn

This is an attempt to describe how ‘adults’ learn new concepts in a formal setting, such as a college course. I’m mostly thinking about ’scientific’ subjects like maths physics and computing. I’m using learning Java as the source of examples.

It uses some other ideas. Two crucial ones are frames and mental spaces . Read that link if you are interested in this and want to make sense of this blog.  It also uses the idea of a compression.

Psychologists have usually treated concepts as categories, delineated by a definition. Work by people like Rosch showed this was simplistic, with ‘real’ concepts being more complex than this. This led to the idea of concept being based on an ‘ideal’ instance (prototype theory), a set of remembered examples (exemplars), and degree of possession of typical features (typicality).

Moving beyond concept as category, Neisser and others developed the idea of concept as implicit theory – which is very relevant to ‘understanding’ an idea. To understand what a Java object is, we need a lot more than simply to be able to decide if something is an object or not.

Typical college teaching shows all of the aspects of concepts. Often definitions are given, examples, descriptions (usually of typical instances) and so on. In addition, students will usually work through ‘exercises’ in which they are obliged to engage actively with some examples.

There is a particular problem if there is no definition of a concept. For example, the Java class/object concept has no semantic definition ( the syntax of a class definition is available, but it is no use to a student trying to understand what a class is). In this situation there is usually some teaching discourse (in a textbook or lecture) which tries to deliver an understanding of the idea through prose – but this is extremely difficult. For example one standard Java student text says that ‘objects belong to classes’. But this strongly suggests that a class is a set, and an object is an element in the set, which supports the partonomy/taxonomy confusion.

In these situations we have general concepts (class/object, or type) and examples ( JButtons, JFrames, classes developed by the student in lab sessions, or for type, ints, chars, doubles, booleans and so on).

A student coming to understand these general concepts does so by taking the examples (a multiplicity of mental spaces which include the examples), and compressing them into a frame. That’s it.

Students are individuals, and there are individual differences. For example one student may be slow to do this – he may be very fluent handling ints and doubles, while denying any recognition of the idea of type. Other students may actually do this too fast – rather as infants over-generalize terms. For example one student had absorbed the idea of inheritance, and had then assumed that ActionListener, WindowListener, MouseMotionListener and so on were sub-classes of a common base class ( semantically correct but syntactically wrong, since these are interfaces and not classes).

An example blend

How do we really understand ideas? How do we make sense of things beyond the purely concrete? Like time, or jokes, or freedom, or software? That’s my question.

And I think at least part of the answer is as conceptual blends. Not my idea – it comes largely from Gilles Fauconnier. Let me outline one of his examples.

The idea of a ‘computer virus’. An irritating idea, but also creative and imaginative.

Blends have (usually) 2 input spaces. In this case, one is a computer program. This space has several ’slots’
Made by a human (programmer)
Useful
Needs computer hardware to run on

The other input space is a biological virus
Made by evolution
Harmful
Needs host living cell
Reproduces

Then we do a selective projection of these slots. In other words, we pick some from one input and some from the other. This is very precise – its not a blend as in food blender – we don’t get mush. In the output space we have

Made by a programmer
Harmful
Needs host hardware
Reproduces

And there you have a new idea.

But this is not at a conscious explicit level – the first people to write viruses did not work it out like this, in the sense that they were aware of what they were doing in this way. The hypothesis is that the human central nervous system holds, uses and transforms concepts in a way somehow related to the process described here.

What a Java class really is

At the heart of OOP is a statement like
someObject.someMethod();
This is usually decribed as ‘calling’ or ‘invoking’ someMethod on the object someObject.

It is an imperative, and it is usually described as sending a ‘message’ to someObject, telling it to do someMethod. This is a more or less explict metaphor, built on top of metaphors we are probably unaware of – unless we have read Lakoff. But there are big problems with it. As a minor point, the ‘message’ metaphor has two difficulties
1. Messages are asynchronous. If I send you a message by email or SMS or post, it might be several days before you read it.
2. Messages are optional – they can be ignored.

But the big problem is who is the agent – that is, who is the imperative addressed to – who is supposed to do it? In English, this is implicit, as in
“Stand up!”
or explicit, as in
“No-one leaves the hall, Sargeant!”
Usually the Java form
someObject.someMethod();
is thought of as a message TO someObject, telling IT to do its someMethod. This is wrong, since the agent which executes the method is actually the ’system’, the JRE. Futher, it breaks the metaphor, since often the method is something which happens TO the object, not carried out by him. Eg in a personnel system we might have a method to fire an employee, and we would say
joe.dismiss();
but Joe does not dismiss himself – it is done to him.

So what does the . actually mean? It is to identify the namespace of the method, and the object primarily affected. That is, someMethod() might occur in several classes. Which one do we want? The one in the class that someObject belongs to. And which object will someMethod() primarily affect? someObject.

So a class is a namespace.

He drenched beer into his jacket

You can’t say that – yeah? The correct version would be
‘He drenched his jacket with beer’

This post is to understand something in ‘The Stuff of Thought’ by Steve Pinker.

Some things you can say 2 ways eg
He splashed paint onto the wall
He splashed the wall with paint.

or
He rubbed oil into the wood
He rubbed the wood with oil.

But other verbs only work one way (the * is the ‘wrong’ form):
He nailed posters onto the board
*He nailed the board with posters.

He covered the bed with an afghan
*He covered an afghan onto the bed

He poured water into the glass
*He poured the glass with water.

Why do some verbs work both ways, while others only work one way (and of those, some work with the ‘with’ version, and some don’t).

One option is that this is just how it is, and to learn English you have to learn them one at a time. But Pinker’s answer (original paper by Beth Levin – reference at the end) is that the correct syntax depends on the meaning of the verb, at a deep level.

All the sentences contain a term for the role of ‘content’, which is some stuff, and a ‘container’, which is a place or holder or locator. So for example in
He drenched his jacket with beer
the jacket is the container, and beer is the content, the stuff which goes ‘into’ the container.

All the sentences have a direct object, which is ‘the thing affected’. In
He drenched his jacket with beer
the direct object is the jacket (‘he’ is the subject, and ‘beer’ is the oblique object).

The point – the correct syntactic form is determined by whether the verb is ‘about’ the content or the container.

The verbs to drench and to cover are ‘about’ the container, so sentences with them have to have the container as the direct object. So you cannot say
He drenched beer onto his jacket, nor
He covered a cloth onto the table

The verbs nail, pour and coil are about the content, so they cannot have the container as the direct object – that is, not
He poured the glass with water, nor
He coiled the pole with rope ( but ‘He coiled rope around the pole’ is OK)

Some verbs are ‘about’ both container and content, so you can say either eg
He loaded hay onto the wagon, and
He loaded the wagon with hay.

All these have the same syntactic form:
subject – verb – direct object – preposition – oblique object
but if you fill those slots arbitrarily, you get things like
He drenched beer into his jacket
which are wrong, in the sense that a native speaker would not normally say them, and the reason they would not is the deep meaning of the verb.

Original paper:

Levin, B. 1985 Lexical semantics in review: An Introduction (Lexicon Project Working Paper #1) Cambridhge Mass: MIT Center for Cognitive Science

Brace yourselves for impact

The FSA’s ban on short selling ended at close of play on Friday, just when Barclays was saying ‘I don’t know why you’re all selling my shares, there’s nothing wrong with us.. Really.. Stop selling.. Please”

A coincidence that suggests there might be a bit of a todo on Monday. Let’s see..

Well of course there was, but that had more to do with the largest corporate loss in UK history than any other factor. Sometimes facts overrule sentiment – but here they both pulled in the same direction.

Why the Small Business Loan scheme will fail

For those of you outside the UK who are focussed on your own part of the recession, this is about the UKGovernment’s, primarily ‘Lord’ Mandelson’s, intention to underwrite bank loans to small businesses.

Banks are not charities. The aim, from their point of view, is to make a profit, and this mostly comes from  interest charged on loans (or more precisely, the differential between interest paid out to depositors and charged in from borrowers).   

The Government scheme intends to make banks more likely to lend to businesses at risk. It will only have any effect if it means banks will lend to those who they would otherwise not have lent, as a bad risk.

Now a bank will always lend so long as it makes a judgement that the risk is acceptable. In recent years that judgement has been overly lenient, especially in the case of mortgage lending. The toxic debt and loss of confidence is what has caused the recession. It must be, as is actually happening, that banks will no longer lend money to individuals or organisations which have a significant risk of defaulting. Consequently the Government’s intention to go against this prudent approach is completely irrational.

I should point out that the Opposition simply want the Government to do more of this crazy approach.

The Death of Oliver Postgate

“Then, one day, the king rose from his seat as if to go down to his castle.  The people watching him saw him shake and stagger and fall to the ground.  The king was dead.  Great was the sadness and loud the wailing.  The flags on the houses were pulled to half mast and the great bell rang”

JOGLBLOGL has moved again..

.. to http://jogl.yuku.com/

This is currently ad-free, but they’ll come. If they are too bad I’ll move it again.