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Not… writing… anything…

I’m trying an experiment this morning. I don’t feel like writing anything, but my friend and colleague Steve said he’s bored with re-reading my previous post and wants something new.

Okay… here we go… not writing anything… la, la, la… it’s… not… working…

It’s hard to write nothing. Harder than writing something, in fact. Why would that be? Probably for the same reason it’s hard to think nothing, I’d guess.

I’ve been reading The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon. Deacon is both a neurologist and anthropologist, and he has an interesting take on the nature of symbol use in humans and how it might have developed. His core thesis is that our apparently innate faculties for language spring from an earlier, nascent capability for symbolic learning, and that this “learning style” and language encouraged each other’s development, co-evolving from small beginnings rather than suddenly springing forth full-blown in Homo sapiens. He deconstructs the nature of symbolic learning, showing how different it is from “indexical” and “iconic” learning in which obvious similarities and perceptual correlations rule the roost. Deacon believes that once communication of learned symbolic knowledge — such as tool use or location of food — began to improve people’s chances of survival, tremendous evolutionary pressure was brought to bear on the improvement of both symbolic learning and symbolic communication. On this view, thought, speech production, hearing and linguistic analysis evolved together seamlessly, resulting in what today appears as a near-miraculous “language instinct”, but what is in fact a pieced-together collection of incremental improvements just like what is found (non-miraculously) in any other successfully adapted organism.

The internal, bodily change that drove all this, according to Deacon, was the “prefrontalization” of the brain: the increasing volume and area devoted to a bunch of neural circuits in the front of our heads that, in effect, perceive and influence our own perceptions and intentions. If the quality we think of as “red” is a natural phenomenon of consciousness that emerges from our having a visual sense, then one might say that the innate sense of “symbolism” or “meaning” emerges naturally from our having this other, special meta-sense: the perception of our own mental activity as a phenomenon in its own right, fed back into consciousness.

No wonder it’s hard to write or think nothing. Left to its own devices, meditating or sitting in front of a keyboard, a brain is going to perceive some random activity within itself… and that’s a perception in its own right, fed back into consiousness… and that’s going to generate more activity… and… la, la, la…

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Starling

I’ve just been listening to a European starling — Sturnus vulgaris — singing on the peak of an adjacent roof next to our balcony. I don’t think I’ve ever paid much attention to starling songs before. The songs have a astonishing degree of complexity and variety, and go on for a long time without repeating themselves. I listened for about half an hour to this single bird. Perhaps it was especially compelling because one usually doesn’t get the chance to hear one starling all on its own, clearly. (It was joined by another starling on the roof part way through, but that other starling kept its beak shut.)

Given that starling song seems much more complicated than the rest of what starlings do (and I might just be ignorant), I have to wonder what all that complexity is for. And I wonder how much of the complexity of our own behavior would appear just as purpose-free if viewed by some other species with the ability to reflect.

Starlings have an interesting history. They were introduced into North America in the 1890s by one Eugene Schieffelin, for the dubious reason of bringing all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to the New World. The starling caught on here (and has wreaked havoc on native species), while a lot of the others didn’t get any ecological traction.

Maybe Eugene Schieffelin was acting kind of like a starling, in his own way: in importing Shakespearean birds, he gave vent to some kind of lyrical motive, although not one that would make sense to most other species — or maybe even most other individuals. Come to think of it, he was probably trying to impress a mate.

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xdoclet2 update: Autogenerating AS3 Value Objects from Java (and AS2 too)

Late last year I contributed an xdoclet2 plugin that allows ActionScript value objects to be directly generated from Java source code.

I’ve recently updated the plugin to support the latest Flex Enterprise and AS3 features. The plugin will:

• convert JavaBeans with accessor methods to simple ActionScript value objects with public var properties. The new int type is supported in AS3.
• generate appropriate Object.registerClass() or [RemoteClass] preambles.
• convert public static final constants from Java to public static const in ActionScript.
• for AS3 only, generate [Bindable] and/or [Managed] metadata tags.

The currently downloadable xdoclet-plugins 1.0.3 distribution was cut by the xdoclet2 maintainers before Flex Enterprise Server settled down, so I’ve built an updated Actionscript Plugin that supports the new FES2 metadata correctly. Download it here and use it as a replacement for xdoclet-plugin-actionscript-1.0.3.jar in the xdoclet2 1.0.3 distro.

Some tips on use… [Continued...]

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Mea DragManager Culpa

A number of folks have commented on the appearance and rapid disappearance of a patch to the Flex 2 DragManager source on this site. I removed it because 1) I lacked the legal right to post any part of the framework source, and 2) I gather that the bug in question has been fixed in the shortly-to-be-released Beta 3 build of the Flex framework.

Let’s hope that Adobe will publicly release the framework source soon.

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Software Models, Software Shadows

Software engineers like to talk about models, and build them. We build object models, process models, and, when we’re feeling especially clever, model models or metamodels. I think there’s a collective sense in the profession that modeling is a healthy and useful step in understanding… er… whatever it is that we’re modeling. Come to think of it, just what are we modeling when we do all this stuff? Or, to step back even further, what is modeling?

Here’s a rough definition of modeling that I believe many engineers would agree with: “The selection of a set of symbolic representations of real-life entities, relationships, and operations”. It sounds straightforward enough, although we all know the practice can be difficult. We look at real life, identify some things which are going on, and decide how we will map a set of symbols to those things in a hard-edged fashion amenable to some computing. In doing so, we’ll make some choices that we think best reflect “real life”. We won’t get all of it right, but we’ll get some of it right — the part of interest.

Well… I think I don’t believe in that definition any more. [Continued...]

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Not-So-Deep Blue: A Flex2 app that plays Connect Four

About a month ago I was curious as to how fast the new AS3 virtual machine was, and I was also playing a lot of Connect Four with my girlfriend’s kids — and losing. I’m pretty terrible at visual games. I decided it would be fun and instructive to hack up a Flex 2 app that played Connect Four really, really well. It would also be my revenge on the kids :)

And so I did. Play the game or check out the source. It’s not easy to beat — the program considers thousands of positions per second! There are also some fun graphics and sound effects. You can ratchet the strength of the computer player up and down and look at a visual representation of the game analysis, too. You’ll need Flash Player 8.5 Beta 3, downloadable from Adobe Labs.

Here’s a screenshot:

I wound up doing a bit of research on game theory…. [Continued...]

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InBloguration

Well, I’ve finally reached that point. I finally gave in and decided to create my own website, because there are various things — thoughts, techniques, creations — that I want to share with other people, and this is the simplest way to do it.

I resisted the idea for a long time, because figured I was spending enough minutes of my day in front of a computer as it is. Despite the very technical nature of my work, I don’t really use computers a whole lot outside of my job, except for occasional routine household tasks. But, in the end, I have to admit that this is just the best way of getting certain kinds of information out to the world!

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