understand

Are fathers ever experts on fatherhood?

topic 00029
a mash-up of philosophy & fatherhood

As far as life-time experience goes, mine is pretty short. But I’ve carried the “dad” card for nearly eight years now (particularly if you count those tenuous first nine months) and occasionally I feel as though I have something to say on the subject.

Actually, who am I kidding? I’ve been avidly blogging on the topic of fatherhood since I found out that metaphorical oven timer was running, filling the web with various and literal bits of insight and idle curiosity. I’ve ranted and retorted, shared stories and proffered advice, plotted, prided, pouted and philosophized on the very concepts of being a father that made me puzzled or kept me awake at night. And not a word of it was worth much of anything.

( keep reading … )

Are blogs too casual for proper science education?

topic 00022
a mash-up of blogging & science

Disclosure? I have a bachelor of science in molecular genetics. Legit.

That said, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a scientist. That particular opportunity has come and gone, and all that’s left in the dried up old husk of my potential career as a man of research is a passion for rational, methodical and process-driven thought.

Those skills are, yes, applicable in other fields, but not usually in and of themselves anymore.

That passion has not prevented me from writing my share of science-ish blogs, however, filling digital pages with as much ponderous speculation and vague interpretation of otherwise credible, measurable, repeatable, and peer-reviewed publishable concepts.

( keep reading … )

Will we recognize a robot actor when we see it?

topic 00020
a mash-up of theatre & mechanisms

This could easily devolve into an essay on the topic of the now reasonably famous idea of the uncanny valley, that concept that when charting realism of something trying to resemble a human against our ability as real humans to accept it, there is a dip in that chart where our acceptance level drops substantially. This is because something that approaches a certain degree of realism needs to get past the creepiness factor before we’ll accept it.

But the point of this essay isn’t to talk about realism.

A couple years ago while visiting Las Vegas, my wife and I attended a performance of the Cirque du Soleil show Kà. It was a spectacular performance, filled with awe and spectacle of the kind we’ve come to expect from Cirque du Soleil.

( keep reading … )

Does inventing realities make us more empathetic to others?

topic 00013
a mash-up of mindfulness & world building

There may be a kind of megalomania that comes with the act of creating one’s own little world.

Follow along: Authors do it all the time, particularly authors of science fiction or fantasy, whose plots depend on alternate realities or fictional settings populated by abstract rules, non-existent technologies, speculative cultures filled with alternate politics, and all the people or creatures that inhabit that space. That is a kind of world building, even abstractly, is a creative process that involves inventing intensely detailed webs of mindful relationships between any aspect of that universe the inventor of it deems important.

But megalomania? Building that thing, constructing an invented branch of reality in the mind or on paper, by definition, makes one the creator of that place. So, it thus follows that the creator of a universe could be considered its god. And anyone who considers herself godlike is, in a way, experiencing a flavour of megalomania, no?

Arguably, this would be a bad thing. This is not the least of which due to that in modern society megalomania is often seen as a kind of mental illness or personality flaw, and a term that is rarely used in a sense that is not some way negative or pejorative.

But that same effort of world building, while perhaps evoking feelings of exaggerated self-esteem or delusions of power are not necessarily the raw ingredients for purely negative results. It could be supposed that someone who took the time to construct a carefully plotted alternate universe, mapping out geographies or languages or complex economies interconnected by people or creatures who held ideologies and subjective moralities, that this effort could have positive effects. Specifically, it could have the positive effect of –as the saying goes– walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. Or, in this case, imagining a life in someone else’s reality.

If that’s not empathy, then what is?

Is it possible to look inward by exploring out?

topic 00003
a mash-up of adventure & philosophy

There seems to be an unspoken-but-purposeful tradition layered among the trivialities of every generation, and for mine (and others following, I suppose) it was that of the solo adventure travel sort.

In my own case, this included a bus tour around Western Europe in the company of a wide assortment of my fellow nationals, a dozen or so Australians, a handful of Americans, and a peppering of other twenty-something sightseers from a global mish-mash of origins.

We traveled with the notion of having a holiday, away from the recently-trimmed apron strings of our parents, and soused with enough booze and raucous behavior that I’m nearly certain that to this day some of those stories remain untold, and with good reason.

But while the notion of a European vacation may have brought us to that particular bus, during that particular moment in time, many of us crossing oceans and spending hard-earned summer-job cash, there was another notion buried in the core of our individual motivations.

Many of us –and having spent long, reflective and conversational hours on a slowly moving bus with near-strangers has a way of uncovering these sorts of anecdotal truths– were there to find something in ourselves. We were looking at the scenery, but simultaneously on a kind of modern kind-of vision quest. We were there to test ourselves and seek ourselves and enrich ourselves in whatever that experience held for us to uncover.

Years later, at a nearby presentation of the not-TED but-just-like-it variety, I watched through a deliberately short slideshow of a young lady’s holiday trek. She flipped rapidly through a few dozen prototypical “my first solo vacation” photos, herself posing with random locals and fellow travelers in front of famous landmarks across a host of foreign countries.

The exact title of her presentation has long since escaped me, but the topic was a subset of my own… and the conclusion was similar too: she wanted to learn to care more about her world, and through her adventures she learned to care more about her home.

She looked outward to explore in.

Does this imply some kind of universality to this effort, then?

No. Of course not.

But this random girl was trying to tell her audience, with a slideshow of her precious-to-her photographs, exactly what I had suspected from a few dozen bus-ride conversations with folks long since strangers to me, each of them gone back to ordinary lives, building families and communities and enhancing their own selves back home… at least that is how I imagine it. She had discovered (and thus concluded) that her inner self was revealed by exploring the world, and that it made her a different person from the knowing of it.

To Understand: A Second Language

Once more it is June. Again. And again I embark upon that epic effort of daily blogging, take three, wherein I call upon myself for a kind of rambling focus, picking from a list of daily topics, and with neither planning nor advance writing, strive to pepper this blog with the free-thought, free-writing wonder that is another one of Those 30 Posts in June. Today, that post just happens to be:

mzlJune 22nd // Something You Want To Understand

I’m obsessed right now. I wrote in an earlier post about the time I’ve been spending on Duolingo trying to build my French comprehension.

But it’s working, I think.

And I’m enjoying it… I think.

And I want to understand. I want to get it.

I don’t think I’ve ever really written down the story of my failed attempts at French in High School. I mean, I was a pretty good student. I was in the honours program, and did almost a full load of the International Baccalaureate program.

In fact, I was so close to a full load that the only thing I was really missing was French.

French had always been my burden. The disparity in education between school districts even in the same province (at least back then — I can’t speak for now) meant that when I moved to a new city –from Barrhead to Red Deer– back in the eighties, I was immediately behind in a couple subjects. 1) I never learned to play the ukelele and 2) I was suddenly two years behind in French.

sucking at French… well… sucked

For a guy who could do every other subject with ease, sucking at French… well… sucked.

Years went by. I struggled. French always brought down my average grade. And by the time I hit High School I packed it in and ignored the optional requirement, and went along my merry way.

Then, for a multitude of the wrong reasons, I decided that it might be nice to be a full IB student and, hey, maybe I could catch up on two years of high school French my burning my last summer vacation with a self-study catch-up effort.

One guess as to how I did when school resumed in September. I’d dropped my dreams by late October, and pretty much put it behind me.

Well, almost. I still harbour those dreams of bilingual-ness. Y’know, like kinda wanting to understand that language.