Non-fiction books

Rule making

The Designers progress

I have just about finished the planning for my novel. Not the plot planning, just the “rules of magic and stuff” planning. Which, uh… I might’ve gone a bit overboard. I mean, it’s not extremely complex, but there’s still quite a bit of info the reader will have to understand for the story to make much sense. On the one hand, all the rules give me quite a lot of possible scenarios to play around with, and it will be fun to create dangers and complex situations for the characters. On the other hand, it will be quite a lot to explain to the readers. One must be careful of infodumps or long expositional conversations.

I think the characters could have a book they refer to with all the rules in it, and then I can make that book an appendix or something. That way readers can read through all the rules if and when they want, and when characters refer to the rules, readers will know exactly where to look if they want clarification. Yeah, I think that’s the idea I like best. And, again, it’s not like there are really that many rules, but I like the book within a book idea. Do you think publishers would necessarily like it though? Might be a tough sell. Then again, I’ve seen it, or at least things like it, before, so maybe it’ll be fine. It’s not like I’m inventing a new language.

What do you think?

Is an appendix book a good idea?

  • Yes (50%, 1 Votes)
  • No (50%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 2

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(poll ends on August 21, 2010 @ 23:59 PM EST)

Three Uses of the Knife

In other matters, I recently finished reading David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. Um… I definitely agreed with some of it, some I didn’t quite agree with, but through most of it I had no idea what he was talking about. His writing is kind of weird and clunky. My parody of his writing:

We take for granted the anomalies of consistent redundancy. Ever estranged from the drama of everyday life, we look for blessings mixed with enemies among the anachronistic alternatives. But it’s useless, and we cheat ourselves into fulfilling the gluttony of the temptations we seek.

A couple annoying things about his writing:

1) One of the most annoying things is that he doesn’t speak as an author to an audience. Instead, he always uses this all-encompassing first-person plural “we,” as if what he says is true for everybody whether we like it or not. But then when he says something (such as “we abhor introductions to the truths we don’t believe”*) you can’t really tell if that’s what he truly believes or if he’s being sarcastic, if he’s really including himself in the statement or if he thinks that readers and himself are above whatever he’s talking about. We don’t understand why he writes like that… we find it annoying and we want it to change!

*Not an actual quote.

2) Big words. I know, I should pretend to like big words to make myself look smart. I know, they weren’t big words to you because you is smarter than me! But I think it makes the writing clunky. If you’re going to use the confusing first-person plural, at least stop using three or four syllable words when a two syllable word will suffice. Sometimes using a bigger less well-known word is good because it’s more precise. Sometimes you’re just being annoying.

3) No organization. There are a few headers here and there, but overall it’s more of a long essay than a book. Which I guess I just find annoying because I’m not used to reading nonfiction books like that.

4) Politics. If he actually makes any political points, his clunky rhetoric hides it, but now and then it seems like he might be trying to say something political, but then he just sort of tiptoes around it instead of just saying something clearly.

Overall… I guess I’d have to reread the book to take anything away from it. There are some other Mamet books that look interesting, but this one didn’t really do much for me. It was quite short at least. It might be a great book, I just don’t know why Mamet writes as if he doesn’t care if people will understand him or not. He might blame me for this circumstance, but I blame him.

I’m sure I could understand the book better if I went through and made a bit more of an effort, though I’m not sure I’ll do that anytime soon… also, reading some of the 5-star reviews on Amazon, the reviewers tend to write more like he does (as opposed to how I write), so this is quite a subjective matter. I’m not sure the target audience for Mamet’s book is just any wannabe writer though. Not that it’s for more serious (i.e. snob) writers, just for writers with different rhetorical tastes.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Animating and reading and music and stuff…

Animation studies continue

It’s now week 7 (of 72) of Animation Mentor! The first semester (of 12 weeks) is half way over!

Last week’s assignment involved animating a pendulum. Unfortunately, towards the end of the week (mostly Saturday and Sunday) I caught some sort of virus, so I lost a nice chunk of animation time, and my assignment turned out pretty “blagh.” I mean, it wasn’t completely terrible, but it needs lots of polishing, so I’ll post that up on YouTube after I do a revision. Feeling better now, so I hope this week will be better.

Reading…

I finished reading The Talent Code the other day. Overall, ’twas a pretty good read, though I still think that in some of the chapters the author kind of goes off on these less interesting tangents. There was this whole chapter about how good some “KIPP program” schools were, though to me they seemed kind of brain-washy. One of the main points of the program, besides instilling militaristic discipline, was to not only get the students to go to college, but get them to want to go to college. Apparently the founders of the KIPP program believe that going to college is pretty much the most important thing in the world. It’s kind of … disturbing. Maybe there’s a grain of truth to it, in terms of there being a correlation between income levels and college attendance, but I don’t think brain-washing children to believe that college is the most important goal in life is necessarily helpful, even if the students in this KIPP program preform very well on tests.

Which kind of leads me to another problem… so often it seems that how “good” a school is is determined by comparing it to other schools. People say things like “this school scored in the 90th percentile!” That sounds pretty good, but it actually really doesn’t say that much. What exactly is the “score” of the 90th percentile? Shouldn’t the actual score matter? With this sort of comparison-rating system, a school (or a student) doesn’t even have to improve for their score to improve… everyone else just has to do worse.

Along the same lines (though this is a complete tangent from the subject of the book), I hate when teachers, both high school and college, grade to a curve. As if a bell curve should naturally arise in the grades, and if it’s not there, you just shape the test scores to it. It makes no sense; you can get a better grade simply because everyone else did lousy on the test? But really this is part of the bigger “grading problem” in general that schools have; they simply use grades in a completely wrong way, as a form to easily compare students and to act as an easy gatekeeper for decision making. Unfortunately how well someone knows facts or a skill is not so easily numbered. (And this is really related to the “school problem” in general; how so many people think it’s a good use of time and money to teach and learn things students are not interested in or are not going to use. I’ll spare myself from going off on that tangent today…)

One last thing I’m starting to understand, from this book and others with similar themes, is that our personalities, as defined by our decisions and interests, are, or at least can be, as malleable as our intellect. They are a product of our environment. Maybe not completely, of course, but the true (often subconscious) sources of interests and personalities are quite complex; they do not simply emerge from DNA. In other words, if you observe that someone is bossy when they are a baby, that’s not necessarily just because they have “bossy” genes. Although, maybe they do… my point is that it’s complex. And people can change, at least to a greater degree than they may realize. Not easily, perhaps. It might take a complete overturning of your environment, and the change might be from “stable” to “completely depressed and crazy”, but it’s possible. I do wish it were easy to understand how interests come about and how they could be changed, but they seem to get so set-in-stone that we think of them as being as unchangeable as stone…

The other book I finished reading was Federations, a collection of sci-fi short stories. It was kind of a mixed bag… I thought some stories were very good, especially Prisons by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason and Symbiont by Robert Silverberg. Some were OK. Some were uhhhh-what-the-heck? (I have more traditional tastes. When authors try to get all experimental and stylized, I don’t always get it. One of my big pet peeves is unisex/nonsex pronouns, like “hirs” and “shim”… blagh! You’re not clever! Stop it!)

Will books die soon?

In other news, I read this article in which some guy says that physical books will be dead in 5 years. *gasp* Firstly, the article states that we must consider what has happened to music and films, which makes no sense to me. Those are digital art mediums in the first place. You watch a movie with a digital TV, and you listen to music on speakers (or headphones). Those have required electricity to perceive the art for a long time. Not so with books. So I don’t think the comparison is entirely valid. Also, movies are still quite non-digital, in that they still are sold on physical discs. This not only helps prevent copying (to a degree), but it also allows customers to trade, rent, borrow, return, and resell their movies. In a purely digital world, we can’t do that. Money would only ever flow one way. Great for movie distributors (if they can prevent illegal copying enough), somewhat lame for everyone else (unless you can get free movies by watching ads at certain intervals… but still no returning or trading).

He also says that the sales of Kindle books has outnumbered the sales of hardbacks. OK… that in and of itself is not really evidence of anything, as far as I can tell. We’d also have to see a decline in hardback sales, and look at paperback sales. And publishers would have to at some point conclude that publishing a hardback would not be worth it. And then conclude that paperbacks aren’t worth it either. These business decisions would, I think, be way too drastic for publishers to figure out in just 5 years. Unless, of course, Kindle and other ebooks take off so well and make publishers so rich that they have nothing to worry about by going all digital. So I guess I’d really have to look at the publishers’ records to know…

Eventually, books may very well die, or at least become mostly dead… but in just 5 years? I highly doubt it.

Some beautiful music!

Lastly, as a reward for reading all that blather (or for scrolling down), here’s some beautiful music for you!

Want more? Of course you do!

These pieces were brought to you by the Portsmouth Sinfonia which I came across last week (or yesterday or something)… what beautiful sounds!

By S P Hannifin, ago

Secret motivation from Inception

Animation study progress

It is now week 6 of Animation Mentor! After this week, I’ll be halfway through the first semester! I am definitely learning a ton, but … WHEW! … I am finding this to be quite hard stuff! Definitely takes time and patience. But it’s also fun. It’s not like high school or college work which was mostly useless. Here are my assignments from weeks 4 and 5:

Inception

I saw the new film Inception on Sunday night, and I thought it was fantastic, one of the best movies ever made. Don’t worry, I won’t give any spoilers. I’d love to say some things about it, but I’ll wait until it comes out on blu-ray, then I’ll post a more spoiler-ish review. Of course, it helps if you like sci-fi pertaining to dreams. In some ways, it was kind of Philip K. Dick-ish, in its “is-this-reality?” kind of way, but with much more action, and a more direct plot. So if you like sci-fi, or any of Christopher Nolan’s other movies, you better go see this movie. It’s just brilliant.

Inception in relation to motivation

The word “inception” means … what, you don’t know? … it means “origin: an event that is a beginning” … in the movie, “inception” refers to the act of giving someone else an effective idea in their dreams.

Chapter 5 of The Talent Code (which I’m still reading) is called “Primal Cues” and it’s about what motivates someone to put in the long hard hours of deep practice to master a skill. Deep practice takes a lot of mental focus and effort, and is quite tiring. So must of us don’t do it if we don’t have to, which we usually don’t.1 So to do it, you more or less have to really want to do it. As Coyle says in the book, you have to be willing to suffer through it now, keeping in mind the rewards later.

Where does such motivation come from? It’s hard to know. When asked, masters or those partaking regularly in deep practice don’t really know themselves; they say things like “I’ve always been interested in this” … which of course just encourages the notion that potential interests lie somewhere in DNA.2

This chapter doesn’t necessarily make the issue less complicated. If anything, it makes the issue seem even more complicated, by showing how interests, which seems so innate and unchangeable, can indeed be affected by outside sources. On pages 110-111, Coyle writes:

They [Dr. Geoff Cohen and his colleague Gregory Walton] took a group of Yale freshmen and gave them an innocuous mix of magazine articles to read. Included was a one-page first-person account of a student named Nathan Jackson. Jackson’s story was brief: he had arrived at college not knowing what career to pursue, had developed a liking for math, and now had a happy career in a math department of a university. The story included a small biographical profile about Jackson: hometown, education, birth date. The article, like the others, was utterly forgettable–except for one microscopic detail: for half the students, Nathan Jackson’s birth date was altered to exactly match the students’ own. After they read the article, Cohen and Walton tested the students’ attitudes towards math and measured their persistence; i.e., how long they were willing to work on an insoluble math problem.

When the results came in, Cohen and Walton found that the birthday-matched group had significantly more positive attitudes about math, and persisted a whopping 65 percent longer on the insoluble problem. What’s more, those students did not feel any conscious change. The coincidence of the birthday, in Walton’s phrase, “got underneath them.”

When I first read this I thought… aha, they’re using inception!! Non-dream inception, yes, but it does seem like sub-conscious inception.

Coyle goes on to argue that a factor that strongly affects motivation is a “feeling of belonging” … feeling you’re part of a group that partakes in a particular study or activity. The shared birthday, it seems, would make a student imagine being in Nathan Jackson’s shoes and relate to him. Which is why it’s also important that Jackson came into college not knowing what to do. If Jackson said he had been into math all along, and had won prestigious math competitions in his youth, my guess is the effect would be not nearly as strong. Also, it has to be subtle. If the students knew what the experiment was about, they’d probably be too self-conscious for the experiment to work the way it did.

When I was in college I tried doing some research into the psychological “feeling of belonging” … I tried to find if there was any science behind it, how it could be used and affected, etc., but I couldn’t find anything at all. Too tough to study perhaps?

Another experiment Coyle mentions involved asking students one simple question before they started learning to play an instrument: “How long do you expect to keep playing this instrument? Through this year, through primary school, through high school, or for the rest of your life?” They took the answers, then compared them with how quickly the students learned and how often they practiced. You can probably guess the results: Students who practiced more got better faster, obviously. And students who felt they had made a life-long commitment also got better faster. As Coyle writes on page 104:

With the same amount of practice, the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an hour and a half. When long-term commitment combined with high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed.

I suppose when you start to think of whatever you’re studying as part of your identity, part of what makes you you, you’re studying is that much more effective. It means you’re really dedicated. If it’s just something you’re studying because your parents or teachers are making you, effectiveness goes down.

Anyway, The Talent Code continues to be quite an interesting book! And that’s all for today.

——————–

1 Schools don’t make kids do deep practice either, unless it’s a specialized school. Schools instead force shallow practice. Actually, for the most part, I wouldn’t even call it practice, because students don’t use skills as they would in the real world. Instead they are taught things that can be put on paper and easily graded. If schools were to encourage deep practice, they’d have to have a lot more focus in their curriculum, and take a more hands-on approach, not just use a bunch of written tests. It’s amazing how many people (most people, it seems) support the education system out of tradition considering how ineffective it is, and how much they hated it when they were going through it themselves. “It’s better than nothing,” they say. OK, but it’s also worse than many better things. I’m obviously not proposing that schools should be replaced by nothing.

2 Stephen Sondheim, master composer and lyricist of musicals, once himself said in an interview that he believed his desire to compose (or his talent for composing or something) came from his genes. Upon first reading the interview, I thought “nah, I don’t believe that…” But then I came to think there might be some truth to it; after all, I have no idea why I started composing music. I just had to do it. (Not that I’m a master quite yet, of course.) Now I’m going back to not quite believing it again…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Problems with this non-fiction book and such

So I’m reading a book called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.  Overall, I’d say it’s a pretty good book, though sometimes a bit repetitive, as if the author just wanted to make the book longer, or make extra-sure he got his point across.  The book firstly argues that “genius” and “giftedness” and “skill” are not innate, people aren’t just born more special than everyone else (though we seem to like this idea in fiction).  Expert skill can be acquired by almost anyone who is willing to put in the enormous amounts of time and effort.  (Of course, this really isn’t a world-changing view; plenty of people, including my genius self, have already concluded this.  And, as I said in one of my earlier blog posts, The Talent Code feels like a sequel, or at least a companion book, to The Genius in All of Us. (By the way, I know these books might sound like cheesy self-help books, but I don’t think they’re that bad…))

The book also talks about the importance of the brain’s myelin.  (It mentions it over and over and over… yes, myelin, I get it!)  The book argues myelin, which insulates the axons of the brains neurons, plays a key role in developing skills.  Developing skills is, in fact, all about growing myelin around the proper neurons in your brain.  (OK, maybe not all about growing myelin, but its certainly a vital factor.)  But beyond that (and beyond repeating it 12 billion times), it really doesn’t go very in-depth about the science of myelin, nor does it talk about any ways to get more myelin, besides good practicing, which would be the obvious way to gain skills anyway.  So I’m really not sure why the author chose to make myelin such a big theme of the book.  Coyle could’ve talked about it for three or four pages and then moved on; it doesn’t seem to really add that much to his point.

The book also talks “deep practice” … that is, practicing that counts.  Just going through the motions does not provide the best learning experience, you have to sit and contemplate what you’re doing, mentally recognizing some mistake you keep making, some thing you can improve on, and consciously working on it.  (I’ve played some kids in chess, and some of them, after learning how the pieces move, just play the first moves that pop into their heads instead of taking the time think.  It seems useless to play like that; they’re never going to get any better without thinking.  I’d actually go so far as to say that there are these huge institutions which encourage (and spend millions of dollars on) “shallow practicing” … in these institutions, people just read some material, hear a lecture on it, take a test on it, and they’re done.  They never apply much of their knowledge to anything.  These institutions are the American high school system and the American college system.  (Plenty of exceptions of course, but overall, these institutions are centered around very stupid ways to learn useless things.))

I’ve just started the chapter “The Three Rules of Deep Practice” … can’t say much about it yet, ’cause I haven’t read it yet!  But it looks interesting.

Anyway, I came across some quotes from the book that I don’t quite agree with.  Overall, it’s an interesting book, and I’d say it’s “good” … but these quotes really annoy me.

On pages 49-50, Coyle writes:

A famed 1956 paper by psychologist George Miller, called “The Magical Number Seven, Plur or Minus Two,” established the rule that human short-term memory was limited to seven pieces of independent information (and gave Bell Telephone reason to settle on seven-digit phone numbers).

OK, this quote isn’t that annoying, but I wonder if this notion that “telephones numbers have seven digits because of short term memory studies” is just a myth; I’ve never seen any evidence of it, and the author here doesn’t cite anything. Is he just repeating something he read somewhere without checking up on it?

Even if this notion was true, it wouldn’t make much sense. The digits of a phone number are not “pieces of independent information” … you can remember a sequence of 12 or 15 digits (or plenty more) very easily if you use them enough; you remember them as a sequence, or maybe even as an image or one big chunk. And if the goal was to make phone numbers easy to remember, shorter is always better, so why not make it shorter? Or why not disregard number length completely and just use easy to remember sequences? For example, 11111 is easier to remember than 59834. You don’t have to actually remember 1, then 1, then 1, then 1, then 1. Instead you just remember “5 1’s” … so you could perhaps have sequences like 444-555-1. Then you just remember “3 4’s, 3 5’s, 1” … the 1 being the “end” symbol. Then we could have a ton of possible numbers with very little remembering to do.

I’m sure there are some problems with that system, but my point is that 7-digit phone numbers could just be a coincidence. I’m not convinced a huge amount of psychological thought went into choosing how many digits to make phone numbers; I think people just used what they were comfortable with. Maybe they did put a ton of thought into it and labored over scientific papers on short-term memory, but I haven’t seen any actual evidence of it, besides people mentioning it in passing when they talk about the “7 items in short term memory” thing.

Anyway, that’s just a small annoyance. A bigger annoyance is what Coyle writes next on page 50:

When one of Ericsson’s student volunteers memorized an eighty-digit number, the scientific establishment wasn’t sure what to think.

…

Ericsson showed that the existing model of short-term memory was wrong. Memory wasn’t like shoe size–it could be improved through training.

But I just read about this in The Genius in All of Us! Yes, these student volunteers learned to memorize huge sequences of random numbers, but did that really improve their short-term memory? Not necessarily. Give them random sequences of letters, or animal names, or DNA code, and they become normal again. They weren’t really “improving their short-term memory,” they were teaching themselves number-chunking skills. If you chunk 7 and 8 and think “seventy-eight,” 7 and 8 are no longer independent entities; you remember them as a group, one number. But what’s most striking is the non-transferability of these students’ memorization skills. Ultimately their skill is useless because we have very little need for memorizing large sets of numbers. But they don’t have the skill to memorize just vast amounts of anything on the fly. So I’m not sure I really buy the notion that “the existing model of short-term memory was wrong.” Maybe it was, but Ericsson’s study is not direct evidence of that, as far as I can tell.

(On a side note, transferability is a huge topic in psychology and education. It’s easy to look at a really good piano player and notice other things he does well and reckon “ah, playing the piano helps your math skills” or whatever. Maybe it does in some amount, but people forget that correlation does not prove causation. You cannot see such cause-and-effect in the complexity of human behaviour so completely just with passive observation. Yet schools (and people trying to sell educational material) do this all the time. “Playing chess will help your logic reasoning!” “Listening to Mozart will improve your math skills!” etc. (Again, not that it doesn’t, but it’s much more complex than just playing chess and suddenly applying logic in more places. Transferability of skills is simply not so simple. (It would be interesting to read a big scientific book on the subject, but I’m not sure if it’s been written. I’ll have to look around.)))

This next annoyance isn’t really Coyle’s fault since he’s just quoting someone else. On page 66:

“Why do teenagers make bad decisions?” he [George Bartzokis] asks, not waiting for an answer “Because all the neurons are there, but they are not fully insulated. Until the whole circuit is insulated, that circuit, although capable, will not be instantly available to alter impulsive behavior as it’s happening. Teens understand right and wrong, but it takes them time to figure it out.”

*Sigh* … more teenage brain bias based on no evidence. Firstly, this doesn’t explain teens who made no more bad decisions than adults, like, gee, I don’t know, me. Nor does it explain adults who make worse decisions than teens, or pre-teens who make better decisions (as they would also have less myelin). Secondly, there doesn’t seem to be any actual science behind it. OK, we know there’s myelin, we know it helps, we know teens have less of it (in general, at least, though I’m not even sure how much evidence of this there even is), but, as usual, correlation doesn’t prove causation. You can’t just say “Ah, teens have less myelin, therefore that is the cause of their bad decisions! Makes sense to me! And I’ve seen teens make bad decisions, so it must be true!” It seems it’s just old people generalizing teenage behaviour and assuming little can be done about it, it’s just innate, and must be countered with parental control. It’s quite sad and disturbing and ultra-annoying.

Then, on page 67, Coyle quotes Bartzokis as saying:

“Sure, you can teach a monkey to communicate at the level of a three-year-old, but beyond that, they are using the equivalent of copper wires.”

Er … if you read up on the science of monkeys learning language, I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence that monkeys are even close to learning language at a three-year-old level. Mr. Bartzokis’s credibility, like the list of Gandalf’s and Elrond’s allies after the betrayal of Saruman, grows thin.

Anyway, there are some quotes from this book that I like (as I said, overall, I think this is a good book). For example, the author at times seems to recognize the complexity of human behaviour. Coyle talks about David Banks, “a Carnegie Mellon University statistician.” Banks realizes that geniuses (at least famous geniuses) tend to appear throughout history in clusters, not regular intervals. He wonders about why this is. He says that conventional wisdom might say that the certain cultures, certain political environments, certain cultural wealth, etc., all make the environment perfect for nurturing geniuses. Banks, however, does not see any strong correlations. So Coyle writes on page 63:

Banks’s paper neatly illustrates the endless cycle of tail-chasing that ensues when you apply traditional nature/nurture thinking to questions of talent. The more you try to distill the vast ocean of potential factors into a golden concentrate of uniqueness, the more you are nudged toward the seemingly inescapable conclusion that geniuses are simply born and that phenomena like the Renaissance were thus a product of blind luck. As historian Paul Johnson writes, giving voice to that theory, “Genius suddenly comes to life and speaks out of a vacuum, and then it is silent, equally mysteriously.”

See, isn’t that a good paragraph? Or am I just using confirmation bias? No, I think it’s a good paragraph.

On page 53, Coyle writes:

In the vast river of narratives that make up Western culture, most stories about talent are strikingly similar. They go like this: without warning, in the midst of ordinary, everyday life, a Kid from Nowhere appears. The Kid possesses a mysterious natural gift for painting / math / baseball / physics, and through the power of that gift, he changes his life and the lives of those around him.

That quote made me laugh, it seems pretty true, doesn’t it? In fact, how many stories in general, even if not involving a “genius” character, involve some main character (or set of characters) that is just more special than everyone else? And why is that? To feed our natural desire / daydreams to be that kind of person? Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; I enjoy reading those kinds of stories and have some novel plots like that. But we should also realize that the “specialness” of characters in stories is not like real life…

Consider Pixar’s awesome movie The Incredibles. (By the way, I talk to one of the animators from that movie every week, brag brag brag, ha ha!) Firstly, the movie centers around characters who are definitely more special than everyone else… they have super powers after all. When you imagine yourself in that movie, would you imagine yourself being a regular non-powerful person? Maybe a non-super friend who learns their secret but is happy to keep it with them? Probably not. (Disney channel shows love doing that, giving one or a few characters special abilities and having their friends happily accept their side-kick roles.)

Anyway, there’s a part in The Incredibles in which Elastigirl (the mom) tells her son, Dash, that “everyone is special.” To which Dash replies “which is another way of saying no one is.” Beyond that the movie doesn’t really resolve the issue. Very quotable. How I resolve it: Yep, it’s true. Yep, sorry. No one is special. Everyone is. Live with it. What, Dash, you have to be more special than everyone else? Selfish conceded jerk!

Yet, in fiction, we don’t really live with it. We pretend it’s not true. We imagine stories of characters who really are more special than everyone else. The “chosen one” syndrome, as I might call it. I’m not sure why we do it, but we should at least recognize that we do. (Or maybe only I do since I am more special than everyone else.)

(Think about other exchanges Dash and Elastigirl could’ve had: “No one is special, Dash.” “Which is another way of saying everyone is!” or “The glass is half empty, Dash.” “Which is another way of saying the glass is half full!”)

(On a side note, Coyle also points out in the footnotes that the notion of the “Heroic Artist”–the genius artist that is more special than everyone else–may be a more recent phenomena in the course of human history, something that perhaps emerged in the Renaissance? Culture now supports the worshipping of geniuses of the past, putting them on pedestals: Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, Rembrandt, da Vinci … such great works of art they produced! These people were not like us, they were geniuses high above us!)

OK, whew, didn’t mean for my post to get so long, but I think those are all the points I wanted to make today!

By S P Hannifin, ago

Books I done went and checked out

So yesterday I made the long journey back to George Mason University to use their library.  The same girl was working there as when I worked there years ago.  I’m not sure if she recognized me or not, but if she did she didn’t say anything.  Then again, neither did I.  Anyway, I found a lot of books I’d like to check out, but I only checked out 6 for now.  Not that I’ll read them all cover to cover; some of them are more of the scan-through kind.  So here’s what I got:

  • Timing for Animation, Second Edition – Well, actually, I got the first edition, but the second edition is what’s on Amazon now.  This book was in Animation Mentor’s “recommended books” section, and just flipping through it it looks like it will have some helpful tips.
  • Acting in Animation: A Look at 12 Films – I’m not really sure exactly what this is about (besides animated “acting” of course) but it looked interesting.
  • Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama – Someone mentioned this book in the comments of this blog. I forgot to look for Mamet’s book on directing though. Anyway, this book is very short. So I got it. Looks interesting. It’s just on story writing in general, I think, so could be interesting since I’ve always got screenplay and novel ideas floating around in my head.
  • Pure Animation: Steps to Creation With 57 Cutting-edge Animators – This is definitely just a scan-through book with lots of pictures in which animators make a few points about the creation of some of their short animations.
  • Cinematography: Theory and Practice: Image Making for Cinematographers, Directors, and Videographers – This was also recommended by Animation Mentor. It’s obviously about cinematography. It looks like its full of great and interesting film-making stuff. I’d like to read it cover to cover, though I don’t think I’ll have time, especially since I need to focus on actual animation. But it looks like it will definitely be interesting to at least flip through.
  • Autodesk Maya 2010: The Modeling and Animation Handbook – Here’s another one I’d like to read cover to cover if I had more time, which I don’t, so I’ll just flip through it. It’s just about how to use Maya. I think I’ve got an OK handle on the animation side of things, at least the basics of it, but modeling, lighting, rendering, etc. are all still kind of beyond me. Though I don’t necessarily need to learn those things for Animation Mentor, I still think they’d be useful.

As I said, they’ve got some other books I’d like to check out in the future, but I’ll look through those for the next few weeks and should definitely learn some things.

Some of those books make me want to subscribe to Netflix (or Blockbuster) so I can have access to a lot of movies (both animated and non-animated) just to study film in general. It’s very tempting, but I’ll save my money (and time) for now. Maybe as I get closer to finishing Animation Mentor…

Lastly, I also checked out a book from the local library called The Talent Code. This kind of seems like a good sequel to The Genius in All of Us, which I read a few weeks ago. While that book was about how almost anyone can be a “genius” with the right kind of work and dedication, this book is more about just what the “right” kind of work is. What is the best way to gain a new skill? What is the best way to practice? As I’ve concluded from reading a few books, it’s not just about doing something over and over, it’s more about figuring out how to do something you can not yet do. So it’s like “the art of learning” which I find to be very interesting. So it seems like it will be a good book. And it’s pretty short, only around 200 pages, so it shouldn’t take too long.

I guess that’s pretty much it today, just wanted to blather about books I got from libraries! Hope it was interesting! If not, too bad!

By S P Hannifin, ago

Animation and NurtureShock and other stuff

Animation Mentor

It’s week 5 (of 72) of Animation Mentor! Things are going OK so far. I’ll upload a video of last week’s assignment later. Our assignment last week was to animate balls of different weight and bounciness. This week our assignment is to animate a ball with squash and stretch bouncing around an opsticle course, so it will be quite tricky. I spent the morning fooling around a bit with animating squash and stretch, and it does take some getting used to, especially timing-wise. But it’s also easy to tell just how much more “alive” it can make something look.

NurtureShock

In other news, I recently finished reading NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. Overall, it was very good, and could change the way parents (and people in general) think about child development and (what I’m interested in) education.

However, I still have some disagreements with how they interpret certain scientific results. Though they mention somewhere in the book that they believe “intelligence” is malleable, they sometimes seem to imply that they believe it’s only malleable in children, or at least not as malleable in adults as I believe it to be.

They also don’t seem to realize how influential environment can be on intelligence, personality, decision-making processes, mood, etc. In fact, a lot of people in general don’t seem to realize this, so people are always searching for other reasons people act the way they do, such as “oh, the teens’ brain is just not done developing and that makes them take more risks, and their hormones make them all moody” or “prodigies are born, and we pulled him out of school so he can study chess and violin for 15 hours a day to nurture that genius.” I’m not arguing that environment complete dictates everything … obviously it doesn’t … but neither does DNA and hormones and the size of the prefrontal lobe. The environment still has a huge effect that should not be ignored.

I haven’t read it, but there’s a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo about Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment. In the experiment, students basically took part in a mock prison, some playing prisoners, others playing guards. As you might know, they had to stop the experiment early because people went mad; they got way to into it, the guards started torturing the prisoners, and the prisoners became insanely miserable (and forgetting it was just an experiment). The point was: change the environment enough, and you can become a completely different person. You still have to pay the price for your evil deeds, but the environment can still have a huge effect on your decision-making. And isn’t imagining the wonder of Heaven and the bleakness of Hell all about imagining certain environments? (As we can’t very well imagine a change in being or a change in the nature of our consciousness … that is beyond the limit of our consciousness, leading some to believe it’s altogether impossible.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, the authors of the book simply don’t give enough credit to the influence of environment. They do give it some credit, since some of the experiments they mention are all about changing the environment in specific ways. But other times they seem to ignore it.

But, as I said, overall it’s very good, and I recommend reading it; I simply advise not blindly believing their sometimes simplistic explanations of the experimental results. (That really goes for any science book meant for the average reader; be weary of oversimplification, especially in complex topics like business and marketing and economics and psychology and quantum physics. It’s amazing how many people sum up Einstein’s relativity as “time goes slower for things moving faster.” It’s usually high schoolers who go on to apply to MIT as a matter of looking smart rather than actually being qualified. There are lots!)

Some other random stuff

Oh, I’m resurrecting my Stuff I Found blog, now at a new location.

Also, I found some local people playing chess on Saturday nights, so I can get back into chess for a little while, playing some real life people on real life boards (which reminds me, I might have some games going on in Google Wave that I need to check). I don’t think I’ll have time to go to any tournaments anytime soon, since I work weekends, but at least it will be some non-Internet socialization.

Lastly, I’m hoping sometime this week to finally go back to George Mason University and use their huge library. I’ve long missed their library, the only thing I really loved about going to university, they’ve got just about every nonfiction book I’ve ever wanted to read. They’re especially great for computer books, which can be costly and which our local library won’t buy. It can be kind of a long drive (45 minutes to, at worst, an hour) but if I can get some books on Maya, and animation, and drawing, etc, I think it will be worth it. (And, looking through their online catalogue, they’ve got a ton. And almost everything is also checked in, I guess since it’s summer. Though even when I was going to Mason, I hardly ever had to wait for a book to come back. A lot of students just don’t use the library unless a professor makes them. (And many people don’t read nonfiction for fun, for that matter.) Which I think is fine… more for me! Plenty of professors and graduate students use it, though.)

OK, that’s all for now…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Some random things that I must say today

A few things…

OK, a few things.  Firstly, I finally updated my WordPress to 3.0!  Woohoo!  I’m all updated!  Not that one can really notice from just reading the blog…

Secondly, I created a new YouTube channel at youtube.com/seanhannifin to post random non-music stuff, probably mostly animation tests so that I can share my Animation Mentor progress.  Here are my first animation attempts:

Woohoo!

Um… what else?

Comic-Con

I don’t really know much about Comic-Con, except that it’s apparently a pretty popular event. I don’t have the time or money to go to any such conventions (or the social connections that would make going to such an event more fun). Anyway, Comic-Con will be streaming live at MySpace starting sometime today, so I might check it out for about 5 minutes…

A few responses to Nurture Shock

I’m reading this book called NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman.  It’s a very interesting book; each chapter is dedicated to shedding new light and giving a new perspective to a certain topic.  (Just look at the table of contents on Amazon if you really care what those topics are… I might blog about more of them in the future.)  I love books that try to tackle long-standing myths.

Anyway, chapter seven is called The Science of Teenage Rebellion, and while it doesn’t go into too much depth (afterall, you could write entire books on this topic … and people have), it does make some interesting points.

This post is really not about those points, though.  It’s really just my reaction to some quotes from the chapter.

On Page 140, it says:

Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth.  “That actually doesn’t happen,” remarked Darling.  She found that most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them.  “It’s too much work,” says Darling.  “It’s a lot harder to enforce three rules than to set twenty rules.”  These teens avoided rebellious direct conflict and just snuck around behind their parents’ backs.

Woah.  So, just lying to your parents and breaking the rules behind their backs is not rebellious?  You think the parents would be OK with that?  So… it’s good to set rules as a parent, because, hey, if it’s too many, your child will just break them behind your back…?

I think it’s possible for a parent to set too many rules, and not enough rules, and doing either could help cause rebellion.  And by “rebellion” I mean teenagers disobeying their parents, not just avoiding direct conflict.

That paragraph makes it hard for me to understand what the author is trying to say, so I can’t really agree or disagree with him on it.

Then, in a new section, on page 141, the book says:

The Mod Squad study did confirm Linda Caldwell’s hypothesis that teens turn to drinking and drugs because they’re bored in their free time.

Woah again!  The book says pretty much nothing about how this was confirmed.  It is seems way too simplistic to me.  What about the many environmental influences?  Peer pressure, parental pressure, school pressure, the availability of drugs and alcohol, etc?  I’m not convinced anyone ever does anything just because they’re bored.  There’s always more to it than that.  If you were really bored, you wouldn’t do anything!

The book then talks about how Caldwell creates a program called TimeWise which tries to help kids counter boredom.  And it says on page 143:

For the seventh-graders who started out the most bored, “it didn’t seem to make a difference,” said Caldwell.  It turns out that teaching kids not to be bored is really hard–even for the best program in the country.

Why didn’t TimeWise have a stronger effect?

My guess would be that after TimeWise, kids are thrust back into the environment they were in before.  Yes, their time spent in the TimeWise program could affect their choices a bit, but they didn’t drink and do drugs just because of mere boredom in the first place!  You got your premises wrong.  (The real results Mod Squad study might’ve been more complex than this, I don’t know.  As I said, the book gives no explanation as to how the study confirmed such a thing.)

And then, bum bum bum… the book says:

Is it possible that teens are just neurologically prone to boredom?

According to the work of neuroscientist Dr. Adrian Galvan at UCLA, there’s good reason to think so.

To me, there seems bad reason to think so.  Basically, scientists do these brain scans and watch parts of the brain light up.  And for teens, they find that the prefrontal cortex doesn’t light up as much when the teen is supposedly excited (it shows a “diminished response whenever their reward center was experiencing intense excitement”).  And the prefrontal cortex is “responsible for weighing risk and consequences.”  Therefore when the teen is excited… “the teen’s brain is handicapped in its ability to gauge risk and foresee consequences.”

That’s it?

That’s the evidence?

The prefrontal cortex shows a “diminished response” and therefore teens aren’t as good at foreseeing outcomes and are therefore just naturally prone to risky behaviour?

And nevermind the environment?

And… weren’t you at first trying to say something about boredom?

Overall, it’s a very interesting book.  I think the authors need to do a bit more research in this area though.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Geniusness and whatnot

It’s week 3 of Animation Mentor, and this week we’re learning to animate a bouncing ball. I think my bouncing ball will be so good that Pixar will want to license it for a new short film called “The Bouncing of the Ball” or something. Anyway, it’s going well; the workload isn’t overwhelming yet though I still wish I could get my sleep schedule in order so I could get my animation studying time into some kind of structured groove. Here’s my assignment from last week:

stupose1

The assignment was merely to observe other people’s poses and then pose the given 3D character. That took long enough; I can’t wait to see how long it will take to actually animate something that complex … *gulp*

geniusbook In other news, I just finished reading a good book called The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong by David Shenk. It basically argues against the classic notion that “genius” is just some innate quality that we’re either born with or without, most of us without. What we call “genius” is actually a set of skills that are highly developed over a long period of time, formed by constant practice and dedication. With enormous amounts of dedication, just about anyone can become a “genius” in any area they desire. The thing is, not many of us are willing to really dedicate that much time and effort to one area of study (and sometimes we can’t anyway, because of the demands of work, school, or family life). But realizing that just about anybody has the ability to become a genius in just about anything (though certainly not everything at the same time) is something few people seem to realize (though if you read through my blog here, you should see that I have long held this notion, as have others, so it’s not really an innovative idea, but it’s still a good book).

Some things mentioned in the book that I though were interesting:

Prodigies:

Firstly, there are plenty of prodigies who grow up to do nothing special, and plenty of successful adults (like Einstein) who weren’t prodigies. The qualities needed to be considered a “prodigy” and to be considered an adult “genius” are simply different. So if you weren’t a prodigy, relax, you can still do great things. And if you were a prodigy, you’re a loser now! Ha ha! See what it feels like!

No, what I mean is, if you were a prodigy, you can’t just rely on whatever made you a prodigy to help you compete in the adult world; you have to retain that constant drive to learn and practice and get better still, and this time without your parents and teachers praising how good you are to family and friends on the phone.

I watched this video on YouTube some time ago. A 6 year old girl plays an original composition on the piano.  Take note of what Ellen says at around 4:35.  She asks “How do you come up with this stuff?”  And the girl says “It just comes out!”  And Ellen says “Well, it doesn’t just come or it would come out of all of us if it did.  You’re very very special.” Oh, Ellen. You’re so funny. See? This is what a lot of people really think! Actually, Ellen, you could compose and play like that if you just practice for a few years. It’s really not that amazing. That you think you can’t anyway, however, won’t help anyone at all.  But Ellen is right; it doesn’t just “come out,” it’s practiced and worked towards.

How to be a Genius:

Chapter 7 includes some tips on how to become a genius; that is, how to work yourself to the bone to become good at something. The tips are very good (though easier said than done). The first tip is to find your motivation. Obviously it’s much easier to do something if you want to do it. Secondly, be your own toughest critic and identify your limitations and ignore them. Practice that will help you improve is not just doing the same thing over and over. You have to try to do something you cannot yet do. You have to constantly be finding areas you can improve in. You must delay gratification and resist contentedness. You might get to a point where people start praising you for your work, but you can’t be content with that. (Is praise your motivation, you shallow fool?!) You have to keep pushing yourself; never be happy with your work. I mean, you can be proud of what you’ve achieved, certainly, but the point at which you can’t find anything to improve on is the point at which you’ll stop improving (and become a big dummy). That said, you must also beware the dark side (bitterness and blame). You don’t have to psychologically mess yourself up by constantly thinking you’ll never be good enough, for whatever reason. When you push yourself, you must do it for the desire of getting better, not out of self-contempt. Finally, try to have heroes and find mentors. They will inspire you and teach you their secret ways.  (And, no, I can’t be your mentor, sorry to disappoint…)

Being a genius shouldn’t be the reward. Becoming a genius should be a reward in and of itself. You must learn to love the process, as it never truly ends.

Also, school is stupid and doesn’t help at all. Just thought I’d put that in there.

And all that said, you might be perfectly content with not being considered a genius. Nothing wrong with that. Lazy bum.

But … how does one practice effectively?

I’m still not really quite sure, the book doesn’t go into a whole lot of detail on this point. I shall have to do some further reading and research, I suppose. I guess some of it depends on what exactly you want to learn. And I suspect it has to do with what I mentioned earlier: finding some certain thing you are not yet capable of doing and figuring out how to do it. Give yourself little goals and then work to achieve them, and when you do, give yourself more goals. So I guess the trick is to find little goals that will actually aid you in your larger quest. For example, if you’re learning to play the piano, and you give yourself the goal of playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” even faster, that might not be as helpful of a goal as trying to play it with more accurate tempo or something. Or in learning to draw: If you wish to draw dragons that can only be seen in your mind, redrawing family photos from reference might not be as much help as studying anatomy and learning to recreate bodies in positions you do not have reference to work from. For arts like writing and composing, the art is so much more subjective that coming up with goals might be harder. Having a goal of simply “getting more praise from more people” just seems a bit stupid. Areas like that are, I think, more tricky. I could go into my thoughts about them, but I think that topic is worthy of another entire blog post, and I don’t really feel like getting all into it now.

Overall

Overall, I recommend the book, especially if you don’t already agree with its message, because you need to understand how wrong and foolish you are! I only deduct a few points because the author misinterprets an Ayn Rand quote, and gives too much unwarranted credit to Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, the “stupid old foolish scientist” as he’s known in these parts.

Happy reading! (Or happy non-reading, to all you non-genius folks…)

By S P Hannifin, ago

Quite complex

Greetings and such things.

Animation Mentor starts in about a week! I was going to put the student "badge" on the side there, but the student login is closed for the week for a break before the summer term starts. I’m almost ready, just need to review my basic Maya skills and find a camera to record reference with (I’m also practicing becoming double-jointed so that my reference shots will be more fluid and cartoony). I’m nervously looking forward to it.

complexity Hmmm, what else? I’ve been reading this really interesting book on complexity called Complexity: A Guided Tour. It’s got some fascinating chapters on emergent properties and genetic algorithms. Really makes me want to start doing some programming again. And if you like the classic book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, this book should please you as the author was heavily influenced by the book, seeking out Hofstadter to study under after reading it. (It’s been about 10 years since I read GEB; I need to reread it.) The book is just a wee boring at certain parts, especially in the beginning, but I suppose such chapters can be skipped, as some of them just give an overview of stuff you might already know. The book can also be a bit confusing at times, but overall, since it’s not very mathematically in-depth and only 300 pages, it’s great for more casual (yet fascinating) reading. I’ve still got a few more chapters to go, but it’s a great book.

Oh, I got Mass Effect 2 the other day from Amazon.com. I played through the prologue and it looks like it will be a really fun sequel. Too bad I won’t really have any time to play it.

masseffect

By S P Hannifin, ago

Stuff I done gone and did terday

Hey, it’s my 300th blog post to this blog! In celebration, I will do nothing, because I do not want to seem arrogant towards those who don’t blog as much.

I finally finished reading Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, a biography of Walt Disney. ‘Twas quite educational, since I really didn’t know very much about him or the history of his company. I might dedicate a future blog post to some thoughts on his life and work, but not tonight. I will say he must be a goldmine for biographers. He had a lot of influence, there are a lot of different opinions about him, and he got his hands into a lot of things. There’s a lot to write about.

I also bought The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation from Amazon earlier this week, and have started reading through that. I read bits and pieces of it in college from the library, and I know I browsed through it at some other point in my youth. I am wondering if we have an older family copy somewhere (though I don’t think so) or if one of our grandparents or relatives had a copy. But I just know I browsed through it years ago before college. Anyway, it’s full of wonderful pictures and art. I really wish it came with a DVD or something so I could watch the examples, but I guess that would only double the price. Anyway, as I’m trying to learn computer animation, this book seems like one of the must-reads.

And speakin’ of animation, next Wednesday night I’ve got my first Animation Mentor thing. Classes don’t officially start until near the end of June, but the thing on Wednesday is I guess a bit like an orientation. It will allow someone to give an overview of the structure of the course and the site, and will allow us future students to ask questions. Not sure I’ll have any questions, but I do want to test out the technology and the experience of doing one of these Animation Mentor meetings. So I’m looking forward to that.

Music wise, I’m almost finished writing the music for a documentary. I’ve got one cut left, and it will be a fun one to write. I’ll share more info (and maybe some music clips) from that when the project is actually finished.

I’m participating in a long Facebook conversation about the problems of college and high school education. I was going to post the conversation here, but it is still going on, and it is very long. Our plan now is to, at some point, organize our points and disagreements and write a book on the topic. Probably won’t get professionally published or anything, but I think would make an interesting book.

Finally, movie wise, I just finished watching The Men Who Stare At Goats. It was … uh … interesting I guess. Had some funny parts, but by the end I didn’t really get the point of any of it. It was like a very long joke. If there had been just a bit more humor, it might’ve been OK.

I also watched Where the Wild Things Are a couple night ago, which was actually better than I thought it would be (I had low expectations), but it was weird (and I imagine one could really psycho-analyze the heck out of it if they wanted). The director’s soundtrack choices did kinda make me think the Wild Things were a bit like hippies at some points, which made it weirder. But there some other very hilarious parts (Bob and Terry are my favorite). Overall, though, it was a bit soap-opera like, because all the Wild Things want to talk about their emotions and feelings rather than do anything particularly adventurous. Which isn’t necessarily bad, I still found it engaging, but I can understand why some mind find it boring. (What I don’t get is all the debate about whether it’s too scary or adultish for kids, which perhaps was played out for publicity. Or perhaps because it was based on such a famous picture book. But the movie itself didn’t push any thematic boundaries.)

And that’s what I’ve been up to lately.

By S P Hannifin, ago