Ntuple Indemnity

Shortly before I sauntered across the Atlantic, I remarked to an old friend of mine that moving would be far more convenient with the aid of extradimensional portals. The concept I had in mind comes from role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (and its many derivatives in the digital age) where players bear containers of fantastical capacity to keep their inventory of material possessions close at hand, but I envisioned it as something like an improved Swiss bank, where you pass through security, deposit your goods in the vault, and pick them up at the same vault at a different branch anywhere else in the world. The vault would therefore be a material analogue to the “cloud” that you hear about in computing these days, a singular storage space with unlimited access points. Not even Gringotts thought of that.

There are a number of considerations that become quickly problematic, though, even if you dismiss the obvious practical obstacles and take for granted that we have the technology to build such a thing. In the legal sphere, what do you do about territorial sovereignty or customs law? And then there’s the basic hygienic objection—what about the risk of contamination and the transcontinental spread of airborne disease? Then again, chances are that by the time humanity is advanced enough that something like this becomes feasible, we will have undergone so radical a social transformation that the policy issues are moot.

In any case, the advent of cloud computing urges us to revisit that old sci-fi pipe dream of the Enterprise transporter: the conception of matter as data. Note that this isn’t the same thing as digitization. What I am speaking of is not the representation of matter as information, but the harnessing of matter in the same ways we harness information.

I thought of this today in the library whilst awaiting an order of rare books. Libraries are socially fascinating spaces: patrons share communal resources, but under a mutual agreement to behave in such a manner that everyone feels the library is his or her private space. People work and study in the library with the expectation that everyone else is silent and effectively invisible. Like car parks and highways in the age of the automobile, the major obstacle to the smooth operation of libraries (from the client’s point of view) is the conflicting presence of others, whether they are typing obnoxiously on clackety keyboards or requesting the same books.

In the world of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft, the solution to the overexploitation of shared spaces comes in the form of instances—private copies of dungeons for individuals and small groups to slay beasts and loot sparkling purple treasures without any strangers in the way. The content in the shared world outside of instances often suffers from a tragedy of the commons, where you might be on a quest to kill ten boars only to find that somebody minutes ahead of you has already brought home the bacon. Instanced dungeons ensure that everyone gets a crack at the most rewarding content day to day, week to week.

Should we ever be able to harness matter-as-data—a holy grail of science fiction as unattainable, but arguably more consequential, than travelling faster than the speed of light—libraries would seem to be the perfect candidate for an instanced space. You wouldn’t disturb anybody, and nobody would disturb you; the library would work as designed. Granted, there might be issues with server load when entire libraries have to be copied and simulated for each individual who walks in the door. But the bigger problem is that in the absence of the social and institutional deterrence that others create, nothing stops you from disturbing the books.

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal published an article about the peculiar working habits of novelists, which may be a good companion piece to the Where I Write gallery of writers’ messy studies. Margaret Atwood is her usual making-it-sound-so-easy self (“Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you’ll get a plot”), and Michael Ondaatje’s trademark cubism suddenly makes a lot more sense when you consider that he reassembles his drafts with scissors and tape. And then there’s Richard Powers:

Richard Powers, whose books are often concept-driven, intricately plotted and stuffed with arcane science, wrote his last three novels while lying in bed, speaking to a lap-top computer with voice-recognition software.

To write “Generosity,” his recent novel about the search for a happiness gene, he worked like this for eight or nine hours a day. He uses a stylus pen to edit on a touch screen, rewriting sentences and highlighting words.

“It’s recovering storytelling by voice and recovering the use of the hand and all that tactile immediacy,” Mr. Powers says of the process. “I like to use different parts of my brain.”

If you are at all familiar with Richard Powers’ fiction, this will not surprise you in the least. He is not, to my recollection, the only tech-savvy author to work this way; I seem to recall Douglas Adams saying something about doing the same in one of the essays published in The Salmon of Doubt, although it is entirely possible my memory is off and I’ve been thinking of Mr Powers all along.

Dictating a piece of writing of any length, let alone a book, is not something I could fathom doing myself. I am a deeply nonlinear thinker who takes ideas preformed as block chords and splashes them on the page in fragments of verbal shrapnel, and for me the writing process is largely a matter of bridging broken sentences and putting Humpty together again. This does not lend itself well to finishing long-form works and revising them in drafts.

One of the clear advantages to dictation, it seems, is that the linearity of the spoken word compels you to finish what you begin. But speaking in clear and complete sentences that convey whole ideas is not one of the strengths of a nonlinear mind. Anyone who has listened to me deliver extemporaneous remarks (which account for nearly all of my remarks) can attest that it doesn’t take long for me to break off into tangents and parentheticals. I like the control and precision of the written word, and somehow there must be a way to adjust its nets to capture the spontaneity of speech.

That is where the Apple Wireless Keyboard comes in. You may not have been aware of it, dear reader, but I have been writing this post “blind”. As I speak—and that’s what it really feels like, speaking—I am staring at the ceiling and typing in bed. My computer is on the other side of the room. The experience is most like that of sitting down with a notebook and pen and writing single-spaced within the rules, so as to leave no room for correction, adjustment, or retroactive insertion. The difference, of course, is that I am doing it on a keyboard, which is both faster and less taxing on the wrists.

This method of composition seems ill suited to works of an academic nature, where I have to juggle citations, or even blog posts that rely heavily on quotations and links (like the beginning of the post you are reading now, which was most assuredly not written blind)—but when it comes to forms of writing where the primary challenge is to force oneself to improvise and forge on ahead, it may turn out to be ideal. Failing that, it would still be a fruitful exercise that I am pleased to be have tried this once.

I never did keep up with the book reviews and other oddities I promised, did I? It appears I’ve run into what I’m beginning to term the Cambridge Problem: there’s so much to do, on top of all the interesting things I read (sometimes required, but more often not), that it has left me absolutely no time to sit down and write about any of it.

Only this weekend did I finally catch up with some of the blogs and periodicals I regularly follow. And if there was one article that caught my eye, it was the Edward Carr piece in The Economist‘s sister publication, Intelligent Life, entitled “The last days of the polymath”. The issue at hand is scarcely a stone’s throw from the usual humdrum crisis of breadth versus depth, but Carr eloquently navigates his way through the obstacles to the budding specialist-in-anything: lack of acceptance in expert circles, the danger of merely dabbling, reverential nostalgia for Thomas Young, and so on. It’s a bittersweet picture, yet not a hopeless one.

The accompanying list of twenty living polymaths may turn some heads. Mark Liberman has already remarked on the telling absence of “linguist” under Noam Chomsky’s credentials; similarly, the entry for Michael Ignatieff surely sheds some light on how he is perceived in Britain (“Historian, TV presenter, politician”). I think Douglas Hofstadter is listed with too few “strings” (“Mathematician, aesthetic theorist, author”), and the same is likely true of Oliver Sacks and Alexander McCall Smith, who both get a second string solely for writing for the public. It can’t be that uncommon to be a two-string polymath (and if we include popular writing as a profession in itself, it’s downright frequent), although it may be a real challenge to make significant and independent contributions in two separate fields.

For an alternative game of measurement, I suggest finding low Erdős numbers for non-mathematicians. This doesn’t tend to yield polymaths so much as it yields academic authors outside of mathematics who share publication credit over something with a mathematical element—co-publication and individual specialization are two very different beasts, and may in fact be mutually negatory—but it does highlight where disciplines cross.

One proposed measure is the Erdős-Bacon number, which is equal to an individual’s co-publication distance from Paul Erdős plus his or her screen-credit distance from Kevin Bacon. (Natalie Portman’s is 6.) As a profession-dependent model, it’s little better for identifying polymaths, but I think it has the right idea: we ought to use a composite metric, if only for fun.

For the one or two of you wondering where last week’s book review was: no, it’s not the usual truancy. The book I read for last Wednesday was The Two Cultures, the 1959 lecture by C.P. Snow about the drifting specializations of the sciences and the humanities, specifically (but not exclusively) in the context of Cold War Britain.

Coincidentally—or really, by no coincidence at all—the undergraduates in my department are studying the text along with the bilious response by the literary critic F.R. Leavis, and the university is hosting a fiftieth-anniversary public lecture on it tomorrow. So I’ve decided to defer my review, as there’s really no talking about a book like this while burying one’s head in the sands of time and pretending the mountain of scholarly discussion about it didn’t take place. It will not appear tomorrow, though, as this week a book of a rather different sort has demanded urgent attention and jumped the queue, and that book’s author is also scheduled to speak tomorrow.

This is all very exciting.

I bring up Snow, at any rate, because of a personal observation I have made about academic specialization. It is this: people don’t believe me when they ask me what my interests are, and I blithely answer, “Everything.” No, seriously, I am interested in Everything. (Okay, so maybe we can do away with a few of the postpostcolonial identity theorists, but they haven’t much use for taxonomy anyway.)

Now, “What do you specialize in?” is common enough as a social question for studious types to get acquainted, and I don’t have a suitable replacement to propose. That tells us something, though, doesn’t it? It tells us that despite the best binary or ternary efforts to, as they say in this country, mind the gap, Everything is still far from good standing as a favourable subject. Well, in my prelapsarian undergraduate innocence I learned a great deal about Everything (though not nearly as much as I learned about Nothing). I liked it, you know. It came bundled with promises of a fruitful and not-at-all-paradoxical career as a professional dilettante.

I am beginning to realize, though, that I can’t quite call it Everything, because among scientific folks especially, that simply invites confusion with an interest in that holy grail of physics, the Theory of Everything. What an unjust misrepresentation it would be, then, to so haughtily dub myself a specialist in Everything when Nothing could be further from the truth. What should I call it, then? I’m not sure, to be honest. Anything is possible.

(Ah, much better; I’ve gotten the French out of my system.)

You didn’t seriously expect me to let this pass without comment?

Were this a political blog, I would have little to add to the obvious analysis that every national publication promptly shoved out the door. Nobody knows what to do with this, yet everybody knows what to do with this because there isn’t that much to debate. Say, wasn’t that rather good? Aren’t the lyrics ironic in light of Conservative policy? Didn’t the Prime Minister previously criticize this sort of arts gala as too removed from public concern? Is this a gift-horse for the artsy-fartsy elites or a populist slap in the face? And isn’t Michael Ignatieff ever in trouble when all he has to his name is a tour of duty as a BBC culture personality in the 1980s (which carries a lot of weight with me, as you can probably guess)? Colour me bored. The one refreshing piece of journalism in all this is this human-interest story in The Globe and Mail about how Laureen Harper arranged the gig—and I call it refreshing not least because it’s, you know, The Globe and Mail.

We can ask ourselves if this was an “honest” move or a shrewd grab for political advantage (as if the two were mutually exclusive!) until we are blue in the face. But this is not a political blog, and what Mr Harper’s performance says about politics is a good deal less interesting to me than what it says about music.

Continued »