Dreams of Flight

Incarus in flight

Recently I've taken a few flying lessons, first to see see if it is something I would like to pursue (it is!) and to see the time and cost involved (substantial, unfortunately).  It will happen one day, but for now I just have to be satisfied with dreams of flight, as do most of us. Dreams about flying is one of the most common dreams humans have, and the reason is that flight symbolizes freedom.  As Eric Kraft writes in his witty, whimsical, and moving novel Flying:

I also had daydreams of flying, waking dreams, wishes and fantasies, but they were quite different from my sleeping dreams of flying.  My daydreams were about getting somewhere, or about getting away from where I was and flying to somewhere else.  They were about escape and exploration, and they were deliberate.  I launched my daydreams as I might have launched a flying machine.  I got into the dream and took off.  Often I launched one of these daydreams on a Sunday, when I was in the back seat of the family car, and my family was out for a Sunday drive.

(Note: this is a book worth reading even if you care nothing about flying)

Flying would also come up for my brother and I during our family drives through the country.  When we were little, less than eight years old certainly, we would excitingly squeal at the rare site of any type of aircraft we encountered, usually some beat-up farm plane or crop duster.  My mother years later would say she would have to work at distracting us during these trips or else we would howl ceaselessly and beg our father to pull over and let us ride in the plane as if every crop duster was just standing by for the right kids to come by before cranking the propeller into life.

My brother and I would still be here if we had seen this as kids!

My first flight came during some county fair when I was around eight years old when some local airborne entrepreneur was offering a quick trip around the airport for a penny a pound - which they estimated.  I actually saved up for the flight, which lasted all of five-seven minutes.  It was magical - so much so that it barely registered that the pilot seemed a little on the drunk side.  I can still feel the excitement as the plane taxied, the wheels left the ground, and we metaphorically gave Sir Isaac Newton and his so-called gravity the finger as we soared into the sky.

As I have learned recently, flying, even if contained in a metal tube with wings,  really is an intoxicating sense of freedom.  It often brings to mind the lines from Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road:

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently,but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
I inhale great draughts of space,
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

Sometimes the Gulf of Mexico is in front of me, Key West is somewhere off my left wingtip, New York City is far beyond to the right.   A turn of the yoke and I could be in Atlanta in a few hours, to the left, and I could be sipping a margarita in the Keys by sunset.  No roads to constrain me, no sense of being pulled downward as long as the prop keeps turning, only open sky and my thoughts for company as the compass spins at my command.

That glorious sense of freedom, of unlimited possibilities, must have been what our friend Icarus felt when he and his dad Daedalus escaped jail on Crete and took to the air with their wings of wax.  Dad, of course, was prudent and stayed low.  Icarus, impetuous, doomed youth that he was, had to fly higher and higher, enjoying the sensation of being freed not only from King Minos' jail cell, but also from the invisible chains of gravity.  His joy lasted briefly, the sun being too warm for wax wings, but it was a joy that few have felt and one well captured by Anne Sexton:

To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Triumph
Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that feel back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

We all dream of flying from time to time, because we all dream of and savor the feeling of freedom.  Not everyone finds freedom in actual flight - there are many paths to that goal.  But I wager the exhilaration of breaking free of those invisible chains holding us back is the same for everyone.  Ultimately, the fall to the sea awaits us all, so like Icarus, we need to set our sights high and seek out the sun while we may.  Fly on, fly on!

Beautiful Places - Underwater Ruins

The ever-cheerful Plato offers up this account of the end of the lost continent of Atlantis, which had just lost a war with the intent of extending its empire:

But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

Parable or history?  Most serious scholars think the former, but there is not enough evidence to completely dismiss the latter.  Many people over centuries have searched for the sunken land and its fabled city, and no end of legends have sprung up around it.  But while Atlantis, if it existed at all, remains hidden from view, many other underwater ruins and shipwrecks are well known, and offer up beautiful images to the eye:

Some the architecture that gives the city its name

According to the U.K. 's Daily Mail, Shi Cheng was known as the Lion City until 1959 when the Chinese government decided this area was a perfect spot for a hydroelectric plant, which needed a man-made lake to support it.  Now Lake Qiandao surrounds it, and divers need to go 131 feet down to see the preserved architecture:

Quiet and beautiful

Pavlopetri in Greece

Heracleion, Cleopatra's recently discovered port city in the Mediterranean 

A nice list a summary can be found here. These underwater ruins have an almost magnetic attraction because of what they were, are, and say about humans and our march through time.  Constructed to be testaments to human power, ingenuity, and dominance over the natural world, these ruins once sat on solid ground for all to see and ponder.  Now, through fortune or design, these terrestrial spaces and now transported to an alien world.  Here, we see something familiar but in an altogether unfamiliar context.  There's a solitude now to these constructions that once teemed with human activity.  Quiet, remote, strange-yet-familiar, these ruins remind us that the plans and designs we make in this world are really only for the moment - thoughts of longevity are nothing more than beautiful daydreams concocted on a summer's afternoon.  

Besieged!

Warning, there are plenty of spoilers ahead!

I began reading Jerusalem, a biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore a short while ago and was taken aback by the detailed account, coming from Jewish historian Josephus, who witnessed the event, of the siege and fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 A.D.  Josephus recounts the horror in vivid detail, including this part that comes after several skirmishes causes the Jewish defenders to fall back into a second walled area of the city:

THUS the fight continued for three days, till Titus a second time entered the wall. He threw down all the northern part and strongly garrisoned the towers of the south. The strong heights of Sion, the citadel of the Antonia, and the fortified Temple still held out. Titus, eager to save so magnificent a place, resolved to refrain for a few days from the attack, in order that the minds of the besieged might be affected by their woes, and that the slow results of famine might operate. He reviewed his army in full armour, and they received their pay in view of the city, the battlements being thronged by spectators during this splendid defiling, who looked on in terror and dismay. 

The famine increased, and the misery of the weaker was aggravated by seeing the stronger obtaining food. All natural affection was extinguished, husbands and wives, parents and children snatching the last morsel from each other. Many wretched men were caught by the Romans prowling in the ravines by night to pick up food and these were scourged, tortured and crucified. This was done to terrify the rest, and it went on till there was not wood enough for crosses. 

Terrible crimes were committed in the city. The aged high-priest, Matthias, was accused of holding communication with the enemy. Three of his sons were killed in his presence, and he was executed in sight of the Romans, together with sixteen other members of the sanhedrin. The famine grew so woeful that a woman devoured the body of her own child. 

From Wikipedia - Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem,Francesco Hayez, oil on canvas, 1867. Depicting the destruction and looting of the Second Temple by the Roman army.

What happened in Jerusalem is not unusual in sieges.  The siege became a tried and true tactic of warfare for centuries because it worked on so many levels.  First, the besieging army, if lucky, would arrive at a cities gates with little notice and less time for preparation by the luckless inhabits.  Encircling the city, the army on the outside would cut off all egress and communication coming in and out of the settlement.  Then, depending on the temperament of the commander and his orders, the invaders would either demand immediate surrender, and if that failed or the army was feeling particularly hostile, a long period of waiting would ensure.

Think of the psychological toll, as Josephus alludes to, that such a tactic takes on the those trapped within walls, which had once seemed a strong and comforting embrace, but that would now, with each passing day, come to resemble a tomb.  The inhabitants would daily watch the construction of enormous siege engines being built, and/or the slow, elaborate digging of tunnels to allow attackers to approach the walls unmolested by the defenders arrows, and in later centuries, bullets.  The residents of the hapless town would also be aware of the dwindling food stores, and many would resort to desecrations such as those Josephus describes.  As the character Roberto della Griva in Umberto Eco's novel, The Island of the Day Before, puts it:

We must keep them within range on the
plain, in order to harass them and impede the
construction of the tunnels. In short, there will be glory
for all. Now let us go to supper. The siege has only
begun and provisions are still plentiful. It will be awhile
before we start eating the rats.

There are only three ways to end a siege: repulse the invaders, surrender, or receive outside help.  Somehow overcoming the opposing force is extremely unlikely, since simple patience will eventually break the will of the besieged defenders.  Otherwise - SPOILER - The latter looked like this as Gandalf led the charge to break the siege of  Helm's Deep in The Two Towers:

If outside help is not a possibility, defense or surrender are the only options, for when the siege ends and the attack aimed at breaching the defense begins, things only get worse.  Shakespeare's Henry V, in the form of Kenneth Braungh, gives the citizens of Harfleur a warning of what is to come:

Traditionally, the invaders, once through the walls and into the city, were given free reign to do as they pleased.  What pleased them, after weeks, months, even years of siege (ten years in the case of Troy, according to the Iliad) is a complete catalog of horror. The cathartic release of pent up fear and hostility generally resulted in stealing everything of even negligible value - a given.  Raping women, children, and even men was an expected occurrence , followed by the brutal murder of the victims, or their sale into slavery, as Hecuba states in Euripides' play The Trojan Women:

Ah, woe is me! This surely is the last, the utmost limit this, of all my sorrows; forth from my land I go; my city is ablaze with flame. Yet, thou aged foot, make one painful struggle to hasten, that I may say a farewell to this wretched town. O Troy, that erst hadst such a grand career amongst barbarian towns, soon wilt thou be reft of that splendid name. Lo! they are burning thee, and leading us e'en now from our land to slavery. Great gods! Yet why call on the gods? They did not hearken e'en aforetime to our call. Come, let us rush into the flames, for to die with my country in its blazing ruin were a noble death for me.

Katherine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave starred in an excellent 1971 film of the play.

As King Henry said, there was no way to control the rampage, even if any commander were so inclined. Then, if the attackers weren't planning to use the town as residence or dwelling, but rather planned to move on to the next unfortunate settlement, then the homes and buildings were set on fire.

Surrender, until more recent times, was not much better.  All of the above was still possible - there were few guarantees of safety, and those often empty words.  Occasionally, the victorious force would show mercy, such as Saladin's treatment of the surrendering force in Jerusalem - one of the more historically-accurate parts of the film The Kingdom of Heaven:

Usually, all of the available choices were terrible, and remain so to this day. Times have changed, bullets have taken the place of arrows, and rockets that of trebuchets.  Recent events in Syria and the Ukraine, Israel and Palestine show sieges still occur, and human cruelty is still loose in the world.  Methods have changed over time, but until the human heart changes, the innocent will continue to suffer, for once some modern version of  horsemen and flags appear on the horizon, disaster surely follows.

Beautiful Places - Abandoned Amusement Parks

Originally, I was going to write about the beauty of train stations, such as this:

The Antwerp Train Station would rival the palaces of emperors and kings of any era.  

But, there is so many other places to see this splendor, and it so obviously beautiful, that it would be merely adding one more grain of sand to an entire beach of admiration.  Instead, let's consider the beauty of this:

Six Flags Louisiana - via the Los Angeles Times

At first there may be little that we would call beauty in this and the other images to come.  Most of the time, decaying wood, peeling paint, and rusting steel aren't the ingredients that make up a conventional formula for beauty.  There are probably several reasons for this - culture, a psychological preference for order over chaos, and no one like to be reminded of eventual decline and "death". But this precisely, in part, what makes these places beautiful.  Another beautiful thing about these forlorn parks is not so much what they have become, but what they represent.

Some dreams last longer than others

These parks were once the destinations of dreams.  Families planned to make a journey to these locations in hopes of bringing joy to their children and creating a bond over  a memory of a shared happy experience, far from the reality of work and stress.  Young couples would take those first steps toward intimacy with a kiss on the Ferris wheel, high in the clouds and beyond the view of disapproving eyes.

Spinning no more

Bright lights, music, energetic, smiling people, young and old alike full of energy in this world set apart from reality.  Now all gone.  Why? various reasons, the same for anything that is abandoned by humans.  A lack of money, a lack of interest, something new and "better" comes along, natural and unnatural disasters - a complicated mixture.  That is what happens when outside reality invades the worlds we create for ourselves, and not everything and everyone adapts to this invasion.  Time passes, paint fades, metal rusts - but these ghosts remain, witnesses and repositories of dreams and desires for fleeting moments of joy and human connection.  These images brought to mind passages from Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village:

Six Flags near New Orleans

How often have I blest the coming day,
When toil remitting lent its turn to play,
And all the village train, from labour free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree,

At the Williams Park Amusement Park

While many a pastime circled in the shade,
The young contending as the old surveyed;
And many a gambol frolicked o'er the ground,

And slights of art and feats of strength went round;
And still as each repeated pleasure tired,
Succeeding sports the mirthful band inspired;
The dancing pair that simply sought renown
By holding out to tire each other down;

From this Hungarian web site

These were thy charms, sweet village; sports like these,
With sweet succession, taught even toil to please;
These round thy bowers their chearful influence shed,
These were thy charms—But all these charms are fled.

It would be easy, not to mention ironic, to sit at the bar of some sort of O'Toole's Irish Pub and decry the artificiality of these places, and how the world is better now that they are being returned to a forest full of invasive species.  The truth is, most, if not all, of our reality is our construction, and all of our reactions to those realities are unquestionably our invention.  Some see greed, some see an opportunity for fun - but for these places, the debates are moot.  Now the only visitors are the lonely wind that stirs the grass growing in the sidewalk, and the dead leaves skating across empty plazas.  Is that really the dim echo of laughter, muted squeals of  excited children, and music, swirling in that same lonely wind?  Perhaps, to the more romantic-minded among us who find such places beautiful - just perhaps...

Designs for Learning - Part 2 - More Than Round Tables in Square Rooms

At the campus of the college that employs me, we are now in the process of updating some of our classrooms and learning spaces.  It's pretty exciting to stand back, do some research, and actually think and plan how we are going to utilize these spaces to enhance student learning.  The architect's plans show rooms stripped to the bare walls, and some of those walls moved to subdivide underused areas into larger rooms.  All though in our discussions we are all agreed on the need to make these rooms different from the traditional classrooms.  However, when the drawings arrived, they showed rows of tables and chairs in straight lines, all facing front:

Not cool!

Fingers to the phone, and while dialing, some the opening lines of Madeline, which I used to read to my daughter, shot through my mind:

In two straight lines they broke their bread,
and brushed their teeth,
and went to bed...

Connection - "Hey, about those plans..."
Sigh - "Yes, Ronin, I know.  It's the only template we have to show classrooms in our drawings..."

Seems like whatever software the architects use for making classroom drawings  needs a new template - but they are hardly alone.  Many educators and administrators need new mental templates when thinking about how learning occurs in the new millennium, and how the spaces where that learning takes place need to be arranged.

New (relatively speaking) pedagogies like collaborative learning and peer learning have emerged from years of research and pilot programs, and new methods, such as the flipped classroom method, have also begun to take hold - to say nothing of new teaching technologies and findings in allied areas such as cognitive science and psychology.  To take advantage of the proven benefits of incorporating these new ideas and methods into a learning experience, rooms and buildings also need to be updated.  And to be fair to all involved, it is not an easy process, and one fraught with potential for errors and wasteful spending.  By the time all the approvals are secured, funding is in place, designs drafted and furniture is ordered, what was cutting edge 12-24 months ago is now dated, and on its way to becoming abandoned and obsolete.  It's a bit like painting the Golden Gate Bridge...

Maybe if Kim Novak would stop being so beautiful we could see the bridge better!

...Once you've completely finished, its time to go back to the start and begin painting again - a never ending process.

Luckily, there are now many organizations and companies who are busy planning for now, and what is likely to be useful in the future.  One is SCALE-UP (Student Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies) at the North Carolina State University, which has expanded its ideas to other colleges and universities:

The SCALE-UP ideas sync with those of many groups, companies and organizations working on aligning learning ideas and methods with architecture and interior school design.  The JISC Development Group, under the direction of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), put together  an informative brochure that gives an overview of these ideas - essentially, how to create a modern learning environment that transcends the traditional ideas of what constitutes a classroom space:

An educational building is an expensive long-term resource. The design of its individual spaces needs to be: 

• Flexible – to accommodate both current and evolving pedagogies 
• Future-proofed – to enable space to be re-allocated 
• and reconfigured 
• Bold – to look beyond tried and tested technologies and pedagogies 
• Creative – to energise and inspire learners and tutors 
• Supportive – to develop the potential of all learners 
• Enterprising – to make each space capable of supporting 
• different purposes 

A learning space should be able to motivate learners and promote learning as an activity, support collaborative as well as formal practice, provide a personalised and inclusive environment, and be flexible in the face of changing needs. 

The JISC document is incredibly rich in detail and deserves to be read in full - I have already done so several times and find something new every time.  Other research as well is pointing to the same considerations.

So, we have a lot to consider as we move forward, especially as we try our best to be good stewards of the public tax money entrusted to our care.  As stated in yesterday's post, its a tricky balancing act between politics, pedagogy (and andragogy), economics, and architecture.  One thing is certain, designing the active learning experience that generates knowledge students will retain and use beyond their days of institutional learning involves more than putting up whiteboards and round tables in square rooms. But the benefits to students can't be ignored or dismissed, so onward we go - I can barely wait to see what happens next!

Designs for Learning - Part 1 - Factories

Today in America, we are trying to prepare students for a high tech world of constant change, but we are doing so by putting them through a school system designed in the early 20th Century that has not seen substantial change in 30 years. - Janet Napolitano

 The only way you can invent tomorrow is if you break out of the enclosure that the school system has provided for you by the exams written by people who are trained in another generation. - Neil deGrasse Tyson 

There's no end to the river of books written about the American Public School System (an Amazon search shows 5,233 results), and the federal studies would probably fill a Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouse (which as it so happens, actually resembles the Amazon warehouse). Few endeavors have been so thoroughly dissected by so many diverse groups of populations - politicians, parents, statisticians, philosophers, educators - just to name a very few.  These research efforts all points to the fact that the American education system, including post secondary education, is a complex stew of politics, pedagogy (and andragogy), economics, and even architecture - our topic for today.

The mix becomes apparent when considering the history of American public education.  In the early days, no one worried about learning-specific architecture - it was just whatever structure was handy.  Houses, churches - whatever was large enough to seat a dozen students or so.  If one ever visits the country's first school house in St. Augustine, some of the first thoughts are, "this is really small", and "this must have been very depressing":

I always imagined the woman at the upper window dropping a note that says, "get a ladder and get me out of here."

Don't know your letters? You get to practice all by yourself in Harry Potter's cupboard under the stairs!

Religious instruction, math, and grammar made up most of the early curriculum, and there was no real concern about the comfort of the students.  It was learning by rote memorization - wisdom passed down by the teacher to the students all sitting in rows for hours.  

While private education was primarily for the elite, public education was informal and took place in the home or church, where its primary purpose was to teach children a trade or skill (tanner & Lackney, 2005).  These educational experiences encouraged children to pursue activities that prepared them to practice acquired technical skills.  Whether learning occurred at home or in the church, formal education was characterized by the study of the Bible, which entailed memorizing many of its passages (Bissell, 1995). Learning occurred through rote activities in which student acquired information about the Bible, rather than gaining knowledge by sharing and resolving divergent interpretations of the text (Lippman, pg. 75).

As Lindsay Baker states in a National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities report, not a whole lot changed, other than the number of students, as towns and communities grew into cities, and the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution dropped into high gear.  And really, why would it?  Teaching by rote seemed to bear fruit - most students could pass the exams connected to the material that was being taught, so the assumption was this teaching method was working.  Why not simply apply it to a larger scale.  So soon the schools themselves began to resemble the factories the children were destined to head into in shockingly short order:

Welcome to the factory, er, school - Stowe School in Wynadotte County, Kansas, circa 1890.

Okay ladies and gentlemen of the of the 1899 Washington, DC school system - who's pumped up for learning?!

Progressive education reformer John Dewey and others near the turn of the 19th-20th centuries took a look around at the dreary state of American education and advocated changes that would bring forward thinking pedagogical changes to the curriculum.

But... towns, cities and states were already heavily invested in the school buildings they had built, so while Dewey's, and others, ideas might be full of merit, they would have to fit into pre-existing school designs.  And the marriage wasn't completely harmonious:

While teachers' and students' desks were unbolted from the floor and science laboratories were designed so that students could conduct their own experiments (Bissell, 1995), students' furniture continued to be arranged in rows facing the teacher at the head of the room.  The ideology of flexible, active learning was merely a pretense for integrating an educational system for "teaching specific people to move into proper societal position" (Rivlin & Wolfe, 1985).  Even though Deweyan principles appeared to be institutionalized architecturally, they were limited (Lippman, pg. 81).

By the 1950s, things were so much better and active!  These kids
couldn't wait to participate in that most active of all learning techniques - reading along with the teacher.
While facing front. Sitting in individual desks in perfectly straight rows.

It doesn't take an expert to see that the architecture and pedagogy of the time did sort of match - it was all about student control and being teacher-centered - not necessarily learning-centered.

Those concepts wouldn't come along until nearer the end of the 20th century, not until (not coincidentally), the rapid development of computers resulted in better tools for the statistical measurement of learning (Zenisky & Sireci).  It was then much of the measurement of academic achievement shifted away, at least in part, from compiling data on short term, just-get-through-the-test- kind of learning retention, and toward tracking long-term learning retention through sophisticated longitudinal studies.

And the results weren't pretty (Fink, pg. 2).  

These sort of findings brought a ratcheting up of the pressure all along the political and academic spectrum for schools generate better quantifiable numbers.  That in turn created  an environment that allowed for the research into different models of learning, resulting in... tomorrow's entry, focusing on how new pedagogies are pushing new school architecture and classroom designs.

References:

Baker, Lindsay. (2012).  A History of School Design and its Indoor Environmental Standards, 1900 to Today.  Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities.

Fink, L. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences : an integrated approach to designing college courses / L. Dee Fink. San Francisco, Calif. : Jossey-Bass, c2003.

Lippman, P. C. (2010). Evidence-Based Design of Elementary and Secondary Schools [electronic resource] : A Responsive Approach to Creating Learning Environments. Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010.

Zenisky, A. L., & Sireci, S. G. (2002). Technological Innovations in Large-Scale Assessment. Applied Measurement In Education, 15(4), 337-362.

Beautiful Places - Shinto Shrines

According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, Shinto is the traditional religion of Japan, and throughout the centuries architectural styles have been developed to assist and honor the religious beliefs of Shinto worshippers.  The Japanese have long valued quality craftmanship and that value is reflected in the details and overall beauty of Shinto shrines.  The actual structures can vary in size, shape, and even number, but usually a number of design features emerge as being somewhat standard.

The tourism organization claims the most recognizable sign of a Shinto shrine is the front gate, known as the torii.  The torii marks the symbolic passage from the common place world to the spiritual world of the shrine.

The island of Itsukushima, better known as  Miyajima, if famous for its "floating" torii gate that marks the Shinto shrine near the shoreline.

Another common element is the komainu, or the lion dogs, that guard the entrance to the shrine:

Designs of the komainu varies greatly, from highly stylized to near-lifelike representations.  Generally speaking, the two lion dogs are portrayed as twins, with one's mouth open and the other closed.  The open-mouthed one is A, the one with the closed mouth is called Un:

Komainu are noble holy animals which are usually employed as guardians of holy areas. They can range in size from a small dog to the size of a lion, and due to their resemblance to both creatures, are often called lion dogs in English. They have thick, curly manes and tails, powerful, muscular bodies, and sharp teeth and claws. Some komainu have large horns like a unicorn on their heads, however many are hornless.
... Komainu are fierce and noble beasts. They act like watchdogs, guarding gates and doorways and preventing the wicked from entering. They live together in male-female pairs, and are always found together. In their pairs, the female usually guards those living inside of the place they guard, while the male guards the structure or place itself. (Yokai.com)

Tradition has it that the dogs originated from Korea (the kom part of komainu refers to the traditional Japanese name for Korea) after first being given to China by India, then China to Korea, and finally Korea to Japan.

Other aspects of the Shinto shrine include the chozuya, a small pavilion near the temple that features a fountain.  Worshippers stop here to ceremonially wash their hands and rinse their mouths before offering prayers to the gods:

The main sanctuary (there are often other buildings for non-worship purposed) is called Shinden, or Honden, are often home to spirits known as kami (the term "spirits" is a very simplistic description of the nature of kami, but will serve for now) and acts as the physical center of Shinto worship.  Shinden designs can vary, and do quite a bit.  Therefore, simply enjoy the attention to detail and workmanship of these beautiful places:

Tomorrow - New designs for learning!

Man and Machine - Part 4 - All Hail Colossus!

We begin our last chapter in this completely idiosyncratic and all-too-brief overview of the cultural relationship between man and his machines with a look man's greatest technological innovation (to date), and his greatest looming threat - the computer.  To do so, we naturally begin on a lonely island, far any form of civilization, and a group of stranded schoolboys:

There's the first page and the last page, and a giant disturbing sandwich in between.

Nobel-laureate William Golding's tale of the English schoolboy survivors of a plane crash adapting to a new life and society on a remote South Seas island is full of the stuff that makes great literature - lots of questions and ambiguities, few certain answers.  Warning - there be spoilers ahead, matey!

Simply put, Ralph leads the small group of boys who want to retain the order of their previous existence, while Jack and the "hunters" begin reverting back to a more primeval culture.  The two groups clash, and this conflict results in some shocking violence.  The question at the core of the book is this: does Jack and his crew's attitudes and behavior represent immorality, unmorality or amorality?

The answer is key to understanding human behavior. For Jack and Co., we are left wondering if they knowingly, immorally, violated the laws and codes of a society to which they no longer belong, or has their circumstances forced them to adopt a primitive amoral pattern of behavior as the only choice for survival?

It's a question scientists may one day have to grapple with as the push toward creating "thinking" computers.  Will we expect these advanced machines to simply "think" very quickly and supply objective solutions for problems -  amoral servants coming up with answers, or do we want them to "reason" through information by applying society's standards of moral and ethical codes?

Once again, philosophers, writers, and film makers all jump into the fray to show the potential benefits and problems of creating computers capable of independent thought - but free from the social and cultural restraints and expectations that modify human behavior.

I am, or course, talking about Colossus, the Forbin Project!

Outdated tech - still creepy!

Colossus was created by the soon-to-be-less smug Dr. Charles Forbin as a completely logical solution to ending the Cold War - a machine, devoid of human ego and pettiness, free from rancor and pride, objectively weighing costs and benefits to every decision.



But doing so too independently and objectively.  Colossus wouldn't think killing 20 million Russians was a big deal if only 10 million Americans turned into glow sticks in exchange.  Cold War?  Problem solved, so stop whining, you human crybabies!



It was not always thus.  Charles Babbage probably spent precious little time worrying about morality when designing his difference engine.  This early computer, if he had gone ahead and constructed one from his designs, was really a beautifully efficient counting machine - nothing more.  In this, machines are considered unmoral - the ideas of morality are as completely foreign as asking the same things about a pencil.

It really is a work of art.


The next step was to miniaturize these machines, so instead of taking up entire buildings, as did our friend Colossus, they became more manageable.  Still, early computers weren't all that powerful or reliable.  When NASA ran into a thorny math problem during Apollo 13, they didn't crank up the Univac:

Slide rule goodness!


I'll bet Tom Hanks wished he had brought along one of these:

The Curta pocket mechanical calculator - just Google it!


But soon computers did become small and powerful - thanks to this guy:

Not the Rob Roy - the radio!

Transistors began the march toward smaller, faster, more complex processors - and the birth of the silicon-based computer chip. 

Early chip-based items, like calculators, were really simple - but extremely costly.  Calculators were crazy expensive in the 1970s, and having one with a square root key tagged you as a complete nerd.  Most chip-based machines were unbelievably crude by today's comparison.  Today, if you go back and watch the James Bond film "Live and Let Die," Roger Moore holds up his arm in a close-up and punches up the time - red numbers on a black background - on his Hamilton Pulsar P-2.  Viewers these days may wonder, "what up with the close-up?" When released in 1973, audiences actually gasped when Bond did this, never seeing such a watch or imagining such a thing was possible in this small size - and all it did was display the time.

But it was just a interesting cultural milestone toward making computers insanely fast and accurate.  While these nonmoral machines kept computing away, scientists , such as Alan Turing, began wondering if this speed and computational ability could be structured to simulate human thinking.  Trying to outline what goes into human cognition is probably way too much for a single blog post, but put simply, if human thought could be broken down into a series of steps, choices and alternatives, and filtered with guidelines to apply when making those choices, then algorithms could be written for computers that would allow them to simulate thought.  As Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology points out, we are talking about simulating thought, not the real thing: 

Most people think computers will never be able to think. That is, really think. Not now or ever. To be sure, most people also agree that computers can do many things that a person would have to be thinking to do. Then how could a machine seem to think but not actually think? Well, setting aside the question of what thinking actually is, I think that most of us would answer that by saying that in these cases, what the computer is doing is merely a superficial imitation of human intelligence. It has been designed to obey certain simple commands, and then it has been provided with programs composed of those commands. Because of this, the computer has to obey those commands, but without any idea of what's happening.

So this looks like thinking, but really it is just calculations:

Minsky explains what just happened like this:

... today, many Al researchers aim toward programs that will match patterns in memory to decide what to do next. I like to think of this as "do something sensible" programming. A few researchers -- too few, I think -- experiment with programs that can learn and reason by analogy. These programs will someday recognize which old experiences in memory are most analogous to new situations, so that they can "remember" which methods worked best on similar problems in the past.

Computers have not ever, and will not ever think like humans.  But are there other forms of cognition, not human cognition, that lead to an operational form of intelligence?  An independent form of intelligence unlike that of human beings.  The answer seems to be no, for now.  But that is now.  Let's hope it never becomes this, which is really one of the saddest and disturbing moments in sci fi film history:

Theorist Marshall McLuhan once said “we become what we behold... we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us”  - it was a different context - let's hope it is never applicable to this topic.

Next week - designs for learning!

Man and Machine Part 3 - More Robots

Most of popular culture, reflecting society to some extent, seemed to harbor, at best, ambiguous feelings, and at worst, suspicion and hostility, toward robots as the middle of the 20th century approached.  Not entirely, of course, but generally speaking, most depictions of robots seemed to look like this:

Hard to view a robot carrying leggy blonde as anything other than sinister.

But seems as if opinion regarding these mechanical beings began to soften as the 1960's unfolded.  The reasons are probably many and nuanced. But a few of the leading reasons would seem to be:

• People became more comfortable with machinery and technology through wartime and post war experiences in factories;
• A young President Kennedy embraced the technological race to the moon, signaling his belief that technology was a positive thing;
• The spread of television, and shows like the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits often brought sympathetic robots to the small screen;
• The concurrent spread of cheap, dime-store paperbacks and pulp science fiction magazines featuring writers like Robert Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick, and Isaac Asimov;
• We humans tend to anthropormorphize non-human objects and creatures with which we have close and frequent contact:

This creeps me out more than any robot ever could.

Through the process of anthropormophization, we turn this:

Into this:

I'm sure Yogi will ignore his biological imperative to eat 

anything remotely edible, like humans, before his winter hibernation, 

and just settle for the ham salad sandwich in the picnic basket.

I'm certainly not immune - already in this series I've referred to these inanimate objects by masculine pronouns, and called out poor Magnus from yesterday's entry for "killing" things that aren't really alive.  So it seems inevitable that we would project our human feelings, emotions, and behaviors onto mechanisms that seem even vaguely human.  Behold Astroboy - a 1960s icon:

He's so cute and non-threatening - and very human in appearance!

Even the less human robots of the 1960s were getting a makeover - not collagen injected into the lips, rather humanity injected into their circuits:

Lost in Space was a rather lame sci fi update of Swiss Family Robinson, but it did have a robot!

The creators of these kindlier, friendlier robots would seem to be influenced by Isaac Asimov's classic 1950 collection of stories, I Robot (not ever to be confused with the awful recent movie of the same name).  In these tales, robot behavior is guided by three main principles:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

While the talented Asimov had no problem subverting these laws to create some wonderful stories, for the most part these rules, and those like it, seemed to give those crafting the images of robots in popular culture the opportunity to rein in the seeming independence of robots.  Instead of robots roaming the countryside creating havoc, Asimov shifts the locus of control back to humans - now if a robot acted up, it's due to bad human management, not robot rage.  So "good" robots, the friends of mankind, began showing up more frequently in film and literature.

However, that really only created a bifurcation in the popular views of robots, not a complete shift.  Many writers an artists essentially told Asimov that "we don't need your stinking rules", and "Good" and "Bad" robots both became mainstays in American culture through out ensuing decades.  For example,  a few years after  the "Lost in Space" robot was helping out young, inquisitive Will Robinson on a weekly basis, these guys were running amuck in England, beginning in 1975:

Really,  really nasty bits of handiwork!  

Daleks were a breed of robots of the old school,  created by a unpleasant character named Davos with the single goal of taking over the universe.  Some  purists may claim Daleks are actually cyborgs - part organic (in this Kaledian) and part robot.  But there really is no discernible Kaled left in these gizmos - so enough with the quibbling!  Fortunately, The Daleks had their plans were routinely thwarted by Dr. Who (or, more accurately, The Doctor) through the Doctor's many incarnations.  

In their highly-focused pursuit of their destructive goals, Daleks foreshadowed what was to be the penultimate film battle of the robots.  But first, a little description of the this highly-efficient, anti-human, robotic killing machine:

Unnerving, but well put, Kyle Reese!

Remember the Uncanny Valley?  James Cameron's Terminator was that concept - both human-like and oddly strange - brought to psuedo-life.  Confronted with a gleaming robot wrapped in human skin, uneasy audiences were at times amused by the creature's social awkwardness and horrified by the Terminator's murderous pursuit of Sarah Connor.  In this, the Terminator was the ultimate "Bad" robot.

That is, until Terminator 2.  Director Cameron cleverly figured out the only thing that can take on the newly-upgraded "Bad" Terminator is a reprogrammed, now "Good" , Terminator 1.0 from the previous film.  Simply put, America's, and the world's,  decades-old divergent views of the nature of robots came to literally clash in one movie:

Rock 'em, sock 'em time!

Has the issue been settled?  Not as far as writers and directors are concerned - or Magnus, Robot Killer, for that matter - far too many possibilities for conflict; both the physical and emotional variety.  But at this point, it is all speculation.  Independently thinking and acting robots remain firmly, and safely, contained in the realm of fiction.  

Meanwhile, in real life, robots plod along daily, cleaning pools and building cars, all at the bidding of their human masters.  Using computers.  That are really just sophisticated counting machines.  Except the computers scientists are programming to pass the Turing test of independent thought - which some may have done already.  Which may lead to more machines thinking for themselves.  Outside of human control.  Which inevitably leads to... tomorrow's entry:  

Man and Machine Part 4 - All Hail Colossus!