On the Death of Steve Jobs and 改善処理

I have long admired Steve Jobs from afar; I might have been near the Cupertino campus of Apple once upon a time, but I really don't remember.   At any rate I never met the man, though I have met engineers from Apple in a professional setting a few times. 

Jobs epitomized why a lot of us went into electrical engineering at the time - though to be honest, not really me.  Instead, I was fascinated by math.  But what he did do is show the potential of an American company to create things people wanted to buy the world over.  He showed that products could be produced by an American company - one even led (at the time at least) by a famously egotistical and dictatorial man.  But his products were just right.

I still have my Mac SE-30.  I did my entire doctoral thesis on it.  It had 5MB of RAM; yes you read that right.

Apple's iPhones use some of my inventions; so  the admiration is not entirely one-sided here.  Then again, they pretty much have to, because all 3G phones use one or two or several of my inventions.

But there's one other thing Jobs was a part of which he should be honored for: Jobs promulgated an ethic of continuous perfection in the products he produces, much in the same way as the Japanese introduced 改善処理 (kaizenshori) - process improvement - as a continuing feature of their product development and manufacture. It's - to use the cliche - all very Zen; just like your Zen practice can always be improvement what and how you do your job can always be improved.  Despite the (apparently slightly tamed in his later years) legendary arrogance of the early Jobs - he once fired somebody in his NeXT computer project because the industrial design was hundredths of an inch off or some such thing - he was humble enough to seek continuous improvement.  He was a demanding guy to work for though; and I had to slightly reword the bits in parentheses above, since I remember the situation of "Mobile Me" and its morphing into "iCloud."

I could say he'll be missed by me, but I never knew him, and most  of those things for which I admire him which I try to cultivate in myself aren't really the result of him..  My own personal  改善処理 isn't the result of Jobs influence, though I was happy to see a successful man who embodied its practice.  But I will say this: Jobs presence made me better appreciate good industrial design. Apple's products have good industrial design, in that they marry form and function quite elegantly which is why they have spawned so much imitation.

Well, I have a lot of  改善処理 to practice today; I'm running late already.

P.S. Juan Cole's post on Steve Jobs is worth a read.

Science illiteracy, philosophical illiteracy, allows for shouters, woo-merchants

I think the problem, ultimately, with Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers is that their position inherently trivializes much of what we do know about philosophy, linguistics, and even physics, and that is why when they posit a metaphysics of "nothing beyond what we observe," I have to take issue because "what we observe" will always be in question - there's that "we" part and that "observe" part in there, and cogent arguments can be made by us Buddhists that "we" is a construct of our minds.  And New Atheists often (Sam Harris being an exception) present a limited menu of choices.

That's of course the extent of my quibbles with Dawkins and Myers (I leave Hitchens out because despite what seem like standard boilerplate atheist arguments, his arguments for the Iraq war were highly disingenuous.

But enough of that, except to say that a lack of understanding of certain areas tends to bring distortion to one's views, and we should always be checking for our lack of understanding, regardless of from where in our awareness we think it arises.

Another purpose of this post, and example of to what I'm referring, is in the way of a reply to a comment - a really odd comment - by Barbara O' Brien to me on her blog.

First, a bit of background: Way back when I was a freshman in at Polytech (Bernie Glassman's alma mater, or one of them, at any rate, so don't hold it against me) I asked Professor Wainfan how electrical charge is inhered in matter.  Now there was active research in theoretical physics at the time (and still is) but even at the sub-atomic particle level, charge is still inhered.  It is accepted as axiomatic as a property of whatever matter is in question.   I had, in fact, asked a metaphysical question - a question beyond the bounds of measurability and observability.   That is why my professor responded, “I’m not a philosopher, I’m just a plumber.”

I could say inherent from the presumption of Barbara's answer, 

There’s bench science, which is like cooking, and then there’s theoretical or analytical science, which is nothing like cooking. Your physics professor was speaking for bench scientists, but we’re talking about the other kind.

is a lack of understanding of what scientists and physicists actually do.   Now let me open up this discussion with one caveat: Everything scientists and physicists do that is science is because the theory and analysis they perform is subject to observation and experimentation.   We are pretty damn well sure we know there are exoplanets because of the myriad of other experiments done that verify Einstein's laws of Relativity, and other aspects of modern physics. Now, it is true that regarding certain aspects of String Theory are said not to be able to be verified experimentally. Too, we engineers take a far more practical take on this sort of thing: if you have to build a particle accelerator 1/2 the length of the universe to verify a theory, then for all intents and purposes, the theory is unverifiable (until some practical method of experimental verification arises.)

But Barbara wasn't talking about this; the subject in question was quantum physics, for which there is a plethora of experimental results consistent with observed phenomena.  The "hard" part of quantum physics for the lay person to understand is the fact that many of its phenomena are probablistic in nature.  Strictly speaking quantum mechanics is not my specialty (though I passed the course with flying colors back in the day), but I do know quite a thing or two about Probability Theory, which is a bedrock discipline of quantum mechanics, as well as Communication Theory.  

And a lot of people (especially creationists and woo merchants) like to exploit the ignorance of the themselves and/or the public of Probability Theory for their own purposes.  But the core of Probability Theory - a bounded form of Measure Theory - is actually quite compact, self-contained, and, unlike what the public might think about "randomness" is (here's that word again!) inherently predictable.  And that's why it's useful

Probability Theory deals with 3 objects, and functions defined therefrom:

Ω, an abstract space, also known as a "sample space"

S: a σ - algebra defined on Ω (i.e., a collection of subsets of  such that meaningful, consistent probabilities may be calculated), and

P a probability measure defined on S.

Probabilities may then be calculated based on functions which map  Ω into some other useful space, such as the real line, the complex plane, or Euclidean n-dimensional space, or charge, etc.  The "nature" of Ω may never be known; its "fundamental nature" is irrelevant to the subsequent calculations.  We just take it as axiomatic that there is a space Ω, and that there is an S from which meaningful probabilities may be calculated. The introduction of  Ω and S only serves to provide a consistent, logical framework from which to develop probability theory rigorously; it's an artifice, in much the same way an alphabet is an artifice for writing down spoken words.

Probability theory is defined this way because there is no other coherent way to talk about stochastic phenomena, and when "random" phenomena are expressed this way, meaningful predictions and regressions and inferences may be calculated.

In other words, the whole point of Probability Theory is to extract order from the seemingly disordered, and for what we can talk about (including quantum theory) it works.  That is, we can construct meaningful analysis that are amenable to experimental observation and verification.  

So, to me, the whole premise of the question on her blog post,  based on a religion article in the Ottawa Citizen entitled "Do you think quantum physics lends itself to religious belief?" is related to the Argument from Ignorance: in effect the question is asking, "Who can say whether or not quantum physics is true?" Well, dammit, if you have doubts, or are sincerely interested, educate yourself.  And note that whenever scientists or engineers say something is "true" we are talking about phenomena only.  We don't do metaphysics in our day jobs.

If you are not interested enough to attempt to educate yourself (and there's some excellent primers on the subject in the layman's scientific literature, I'm sure) then it is insincere to attempt to equate what is science with what is unverifiable religious positions. 

As my father, a very conservative Catholic, said about his engineering profession: we do science, not faith.  Now I do science mindfully, and practice as I do science, engineering, and management.  But if it's not science, engineering, and management I'm doing then I'm just not engaging in right livelihood.

One other thing: when we scientists and engineers do analysis, we are envisioning possible ways in which things could be, function, or exist based on an abstract view of question in possible in the same way in which a musician might compose a fugue, or a poet might compose a poem according to a certain form.  For example, if I want to design a set of reference signals to aid in the demodulation of a received communication signal, I would envision the set as being a subset of an larger space of signals, and then determine the subset of interest based on properties desired for those signals; from that I would then verify experimentally (via simulation, which tracks "lab bench" results ridiculously accurately these days) to show  that the properties of the reference signals are indeed met. 

There is no gross separation between "lab bench" and analysis; they're one and the same more or less these days, except for the "vision" part.  And that's just training, just as it's just training to write a fugue or think of how sauteed mushrooms might taste when cooked in garlic and olive oil.

Paradoxes...

Here's a nice intro for the layman on these kinds of things.  One of the interesting things (for me at any rate) is that the "Liar Paradox" can be realized in circuitry;  it is a metastable digital circuit realized with two flip-flops, plus power and whatever ancillary hardware is needed.

The awe and fun of engineering...

One of the more amusing aspects of something I read about this Ken Wilber guy is that, from what I've read, he regards much of science and scientists as "flatland" or "flatlanders," or whatever, as if he wants to relegate scientists to a "less-than full number of dimensions" of existence.

It's amusing because Wilber clearly is displaying his lack of knowledge of a vast variety of fields; I have looked for a definition of the opposite of polymath, but haven't been able to find one.

Why?


Well, here's why:

• The term "flatland" goes back to this book, developed by a guy with a mathematics background, to say the least. Ken Wilber did not choose to express concepts claiming us tech types were limited without using terms tech types invented to broaden expression!



• Wilber evidently has never had any experience in science or engineering, because if he did, he might understand the appeal, which comes from knowing something is true to a metaphysical certainty, with no chance of there being disagreement. My recent work is based on a fundamental theorem of information theory. The main theorem was proved by someone else; I am simply not that bright or don't have the time. However much of the ancillary design was based on "little theorems" or through brute force experimentation that was developed by myself, some of which was not obvious to my main collaborator. The feeling one gets when one designs something based on a theorem being true (especially that you yourself have engineered and proven) is awe and humility. It enables one to imagine the feelings going with being the first person to see the sights from Mount Everest. It is "one taste" that no one has tasted before, but thanks to efforts by one's self and others, all can taste now. It is a big responsibility and serious business, too.

There's a lot of electrical and mechanical energy spent in the Buddhist blogosphere (and elsewhere) on spiritual and religious issues; elsewhere many want for something or someone beyond what is here now, and what pervades the whole universe. But when you can take the facticity of "A," (whatever "A" is, though I could go off on a nice Buddhist tangent here) and exploit it so that time, energy or bandwidth is conserved, you know you are reading the mind of god, as an atheist professor of mine mentioned in a similar context. There simply is no way to critique such a spirituality if you haven't been there and done that or something similar. And it fills a practical need. People all want to make sense of why they are existing in this time and place, in ill-fitting finitude to all appearances. But nobody wants to do that while paying through the nose for energy or for their cell phone bill.

I have mentioned elsewhere that my intellectual property is or will soon be on track to be more widely disseminated than Michael Jackson or Madonna. It's the economics of it all that are the reason of course as to why a) my IP is more widely disseminated and b) why pop music intellectual property is more widely known. But that's somewhat of a pity, because there's a certain elegance in extensions of Shannon's work that just can't be appreciated without a technical background. And unlike certain other forms of intellectual property, it will work as advertised.

So, I'm very grateful to be doing work that gives great fun and great awe. And when folks give advice as to how "limited" my work/outlook/philosophy/etc. is, my advice is, get a doctorate in a field like systems engineering, patent a few things and get back to me. Or do something similar, even if it's in Sculpey-Clay. Or at least try.