Expression

For all that new tech gets old, computing is universal. It doesn't turn into a raisin and then topsoil. It's here to stay past the morning. It always was here, but in the last century, humanity has discovered the informational equivalent of electricity. And that isn't "big." That's got more unseen matter than a galaxy cluster.

It's the same thing I like about early, silent movies and improvisational music. There's this aura of elemental invention. The silent movie makers are more limited, more hobbled than anyone who came after them, technically. Yet they know anything is possible. They'll do weird things like try an entire feature-length film with characters but no words, and more amazingly, it'll succeed even by today's narrative standards. They'll slap a color on the projector in the cinema to show you, ponderously, that it's daytime, evening, or nighttime, despite black & white footage. They'll have a person walk into the theater, sit down at a piano, and make up music while watching the film with you.

This is crazy shit. None of it's realistic. Even the acting is wildly unrealistic. Most people find it unbearably hammy. But given these films had no sound, the visual acting had to carry what was missing. This was a functional adaptation. They could have thrown out their hitchhiking towel and said, well, guys and girls, we just can't put on a performance like the one next door they're doing with Agatha Christie's play, so what's the point? They could have gone home. But they believed anything was possible, and so you have silent films with the whole range of acting from subtle to ridiculous, and even at the most unbelievable end, the ridiculousness is often helping to convey the message, and it becomes part of the aesthetic, like the unrealism of claymation.

I don't know how to convey that sense to others. Maybe it's something I gravitate to, and I can't convey it.

Sit down, or stand up, with any musical instrument or soup can, and make music. You don't need to be a musician. Make music. Explore the possibilities of sound.

We think a person needs to earn the right to speak freely. Before you're allowed to paint what you want, you'd better paint what your teacher asks.

And I think that's antithetical (as an attitude) to discovering the possibilities of paint. Oh right, yes of course, you can paint what your teacher wants. That's fine. And you'll learn something. I'm an educator and believe in education. But what I'm saying above is what possibility and creation are about.

Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, or this is just garden-variety ego (who am I to talk about this anyway?), or I'm expressing a feeling and pretending it's logical when it's a feeling.

Computers allow us to explore choice in a way that has never been possible before.

Computing isn't just an aid to this or that. Computing is a medium—perhaps the greatest medium aside from the physical universe and the stuff of our minds—of choice.

Information is defined in several key ways: an alphabet soup of symbols, probability, choice, surprise.

It's often said that quantum mechanics is an ad hoc set of equations cobbled together from experimental evidence. It's said so often it's become an old chestnut. But since 2001, several theorists have shown that you can "rediscover" quantum mechanics from a few axioms (rules), usually just two or three, having to do with information and its properties. The key notion I took away from that article is that quantum mechanics, while it seems forbidding and weird, is actually just a generalization of probability theory. It's a mathematical structure that happens to mirror what's going on all around us laceratingly more closely than we would have any right to expect.

Quantum mechanics is also about choice. And it's also computational.

Isn't this exciting? To me, it's exciting... it's maybe the most exciting thing going, and I wish I knew a better way to express that.