National Hard Things Take Practice Month

Okay, it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as National Novel Writing Month, but I’m saving my good words for my, well, novel writing. As some of you may know, November is NaNoWriMo, a worldwide event during which a bunch of people get together to (individually) write 50,000 words in 30 days. I’ve done it the last several years and I’m doing it this year, too. It’s hard, it’s fun, and it’s valuable.

As some of you may also know, Laura Miller, a writer for Salon, published a piece decrying NaNoWriMo. (Turns out she published that piece 3 years ago, but it's making the rounds now because NaNo is upon us. Bah, I'm still posting.) This made a lot of wrimos pretty upset, and I’ve seen some rather vitriolic criticism in response. Miller’s main point seems to be that there’s already enough crap out there and we don’t need to saturate the world with more of it. Moreover, she thinks we could all do a little more reading and a little less writing.

Well, as a NaNoWriMo participant and self-important blogger, I think I’m going to respond to Miller’s criticism. Of course, maybe that’s exactly what she wants. By writing this now, I’m not writing my NaNo novel. Dastardly plan, Laura Miller.

Now, I understand the angry response to Miller’s piece. I really do. It has a very “get off my lawn” feel to it that seems to miss the point that, for a lot of people, NaNo is just plain fun. But her two points aren’t terrible points, and I think they’re worth responding to in a civil, constructive way. So here goes.

As is obvious to anyone who’s read this blog, I quite like science. That’s what the blog is about, after all. In fact, I’ve been interested in science ever since I was a child. I read books about science, I had toy science kits, and I loved science fiction as a genre.

Yet this blog about science is not even a year old, and I’m writing this post as a freshly minted 28 year old. Why is that? Because up until about 2 years, I didn’t do anything with my interest in science. I took plenty of science and math classes in high school, but I mostly dithered around in them and didn’t, you guessed it, practice.

It wasn’t until 2 years ago that I sat down and decided it was time to reteach myself calculus. And how did I teach myself calculus? By giving myself homework. By doing that homework. By checking my answers and redoing problems until I got them right. And now I can do calculus. Now I can do linear algebra, differential equations, and physics. I’m no expert in these subjects, but I understand them to a degree because I’ve done them. I’ve practiced, just like you practice a sport.

The analogy here should be clear. You have to practice your sport, you have to practice your math, you have to practice your writing. Where some may disagree with this analogy is the idea that writing 50,000 words worth of drivel counts as practice. The answer is that it’s practicing one skill of writing, but not all writing skills. This follows from the analogy, too. Sometimes you practice free throws; other times you practice taking integrals. Each is a specific skill within a broad field, and each takes practice.

And as any writer knows, sometimes the most difficult part of writing is staring at a blank white page and trying to find some way to put some black on it. We all have ideas. We all have stories and characters in our heads. But exorcising those thoughts onto paper is a skill wholly unto itself, apart from the skills of grammar, narrative, and prose.

So it needs practice, and NaNoWriMo is that practice. If you’re a dedicated writer, however, then it follows that NaNo should not be your only practice. You have to practice the other skills, too. You have to write during the rest of the year, and you have to pay attention to grammar, narrative, and prose. But taking one month to practice one skill hardly seems a waste.

I’ve less to say about Miller’s second point, that we should read more and write less. This is a matter of opinion, I suppose. But I do have one comment about it. America is often criticized as being a nation of consumers who voraciously eat up every product put before them. We are asked only to choose between different brand names and to give no more thought to our decisions than which product to purchase.

Writing is a break from that. Rather than being a lazy, passive consumer of other people’s ideas, writing forces you to formulate and express your own ideas. Writing can be a tool of discovery, a way to expand the thinking space we all inhabit. Rather than selecting an imperfect match from a limited set of options, writing lets you make a choice that is precisely what you want it to be. You get to declare where you stand, or that you’re not taking a stand at all. You get to have a voice beyond simply punching a hole in a ballot.

You shouldn’t write instead of read, but you should write (or find some other way to creatively express your identity).

The Wait

Due to fortuitous timing, my life is in somewhat of a holding pattern at the moment. There are three upcoming events that I can do nothing more than wait for. I will list them now in order of my increasing impotence to influence.

A week ago, I submitted a short story to a magazine. They say their average response time is five weeks, which means I have to wait another four weeks until they send me my rejection notice. With any luck, it will be a personal rejection.

This is the first story I’ve submitted for publication in several years. I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written, and I know it’s decent enough to be published, but I shouldn’t fool myself into thinking that the first (or fifth, or tenth) publication I send it to will agree with me.

I was spurred into finally submitting a short story because a very good friend of mine just made her first sale. Unlike me, she’s been submitting non-stop for most of this year. Also unlike me, she’s been sending her stories to the myriad online magazines that have sprung up in recent years. I’ve sent my story, an 8,000-word behemoth, to the magazine for science fiction, because I have delusions of grandeur, apparently.

Moving on to the second item on my list, October is when I am supposed to hear back from the 4-year school I’m hoping to attend this coming spring. Their answer, unlike the magazine I’m submitting to, should be a positive one. Theoretically, I’m enrolled in a transfer program between my community college and the university that guarantees my admission so long as I keep my grades up and yada yada.

I’ve done all that, but I was still required to submit an application along with everyone else that wants to attend the school. And I’ve still been required to wait until now to receive word on my admission. All this waiting has me doubting how guaranteed my admission really is, but I’m still optimistic that the wait amounts to nothing more than a slow-moving bureaucracy. We’ll see.

Additionally, assuming I am admitted to the university, I then have to figure out how I’m paying for my schooling (community college is much cheaper) and how well my community college transcript transfers to my 4-year school. The hassle over figuring out what classes count as what could make for a whole other post. I haven’t decided yet whether I want to bore my three readers with the details.

And finally, as I hinted at in my last post, I’m a government contractor currently experiencing the joys of a government shutdown. So I’m waiting for our duly elected leaders to do their jobs and let me do my job. This is decidedly not a political blog, and I don’t want to get mired in partisan debates, but I have to say that I would much rather a system that doesn’t grind to a halt whenever opposing sides fail to reach an agreement.

There are a lot of theoretical alternatives to the system of representative democracy that we have, but I honestly don’t know enough about the subject to know which one would be better. Each system has pros and cons, and it is my limited understanding that no form of democracy is capable of perfectly representing the will of the people. If that’s the case, what hope is there for the future of civilization? Well, we can hope for an increasingly less imperfect future, I suppose. Or, to return to the SF side of things, we could just ask Hari Seldon to plan out the future for us.

The one political statement I’ll make here is that I never got over the wonder of Asimov’s psychohistory. I am a firm proponent of technocracy and the idea that, sometimes, it’s better to let experts make decisions about complex topics. Where I think democracy has its place is in ensuring that people are allowed to choose the type of society they want to live in. But if they really do want to live in society X, then they should let capable experts create society X first.

Okay, I think that’s enough pontificating for now. Is there some deeper connection between the three things I’m waiting for? Some thread that ties it all together? A concept from physics or mathematics that I can clumsily wield as an analogy? Nope. Sorry. Not this time.

The Community College Syllabus

This is a pet peeve of mine and nothing more, but I've seen it a lot in similar contexts. Logging in "at least three to five times a week" makes no sense. We can log in at least 3 times a week. If we happen to log in 5 times a week, then that would still be at least 3 times a week.

You could argue that "at least" only applies to the three, but then he's telling us to log in a minimum of 3 times and a maximum of 5 times per week. Who knows, maybe's that the case. Given how often the website goes down, maybe they're trying to limit bandwidth usage.

Or he could be telling us that we must log in a minimum of 3 times per week, but he'd like to see us logging in between 3 and 5 times per week. Clearly, this is what is actually meant, but it is not what is written. Now, I know that no one is going to be confused by this. So it is what's conveyed, even if it is not what's written. So why am I complaining?

My reasons are three. First, he's an English teacher. He's going to be correcting our grammar for the next five weeks with varying degrees of exactitude, so it'd be nice if he showed the same amount of care in his own writing.

Second, this is a course designed for writing in the workplace. Like, if you wanted to be a tech writer, you might start with a course such as this one. Well, I've been a technical writer before. And you know what? Imprecise language like the phrase used above is not cool. It leads to mistakes, complaints, and lawsuits.

(Source)

Third, as a professor of English, he should really care about doing right by the language. Yes, language changes. Yes, the point of a language is communication, and if that's achieved, who cares about anything else.

But here's what gets to me. The English language is a gigantic hodgepodge of words and there are an absolute crap-ton of ways to arrange them meaningfully. So we can communicate precisely if we have sufficient mastery over syntax and vocabulary, but we don't because it's hard. Instead we think whatever we're thinking, vomit out the words we most closely associate with said thoughts, and hope the listener has roughly the same associations for those words, thereby getting the gist of the message across. Blech.

Headlines Funniest Part of Onion Articles, Says Guy on Street

WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a suburb just 20 miles outside Washington, D.C., local man Charles “Chuck” Braxton has recently begun telling coworkers and friends that, “Really, the whole joke is in the headline, if you think about it.”

Chuck, who does banal office work for incompetent middle managers but has always styled himself a comedian, went on to say, “I mean, I could write these articles. The headline is an amusing observation, but the rest of the article just drags out the joke by having imaginary interviews with pedestrians.”

According to Wikipedia, The Onion is a satirical newspaper founded in 1988 by Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson. While originally just a joint project between the two college students with limited circulation on several campuses, The Onion has since flourished into a fully developed satirical news organization featuring a television network, website, and twitter account. But it’s the Facebook posts that really get to Chuck.

“I see the same headline 5 times a day on my timeline,” explained an exasperated Chuck. “And yeah, the jokes are funny, but it’s always the same pattern. I just wish they would spice things up a bit sometimes.”

Sources close to Chuck have indicated that, “If he doesn’t shut up about this ‘Only the headlines are funny’ thing, I’m seriously going to kick his ass.” At press time, The Onion had not responded to requests for comment.

Knot Another Punny Title

So, this is more of an update post than anything else. Work and school have been pretty busy. I'm also writing (well, editing at this point) a short story, which is where the title of my post comes from. How's that work?

For reasons that escape me, I'm writing a short story that heavily features a branch of mathematics known as knot theory. Wait, there's a branch of mathematics about knots? Why yes, yes there is.

Math is about numbers, duh, but it's also about geometry. Many of the ancient Greek mathematicians did math purely through geometry, in fact, because they didn't have algebra to represent general forms or calculus to deal with infinitesimals. Anywho, there was a point in the 19th century at which studying geometry morphed into studying surfaces, and this led to ideas such as differential geometry and topology. Differential geometry is the math behind Einstein's general theory of relativity, and topology tells us that doughnuts and coffee mugs are the same thing.

Doughnuts and coffee mugs are the same thing? Apparently, yes, because in topology, objects are homeomorphic if you can transform (stretch, squeeze, rotate, twist) one into the other without creating any new shapes or holes. There's a little gif on wikipedia showing that this isn't quite as crazy as it sounds.

Now, there's a sub-branch of topology known as knot theory, which studies circles embedded in space (or spheres embedded in 4-space, etc.). It turns out that some circles are just circles (called the unknot), whereas others are true knots that cannot be transformed back into circles without cutting the knot. Take a rubber band, for example. It's just a circle.

No matter how many times you twist it around and tie it into knots, it's still just a circle that can (theoretically) be undone.

But if you cut the rubber band...

...tie it into a knot, and then reconnect the severed ends (and pretend it's not being held together with tape), then you've created a true knot that cannot be transformed back into the unknot.

You can take that one new knot and twist it all around into different-looking knots, but knot theory says that, as long as you don't cut the rubber band again, it is still fundamentally the same knot, the same way a coffee mug and a doughnut can be fundamentally the same topological space.

So, how'd I write a short story about that? Well, it turns out knot theory has uses outside of rubber bands. In fact, Kelvin kind of got some of the credit for starting this whole knot theory business when he hypothesized that atoms were just knots (vortices) in the aether. But then Michelson and Morley kind of threw a wrench in that whole thing.

There are some modern applications of knots, however. DNA gets itself tied up into knots, and knot theory can help explain how it undoes those knots. Quantum field theory can also be described in a knot-like way, and there might also be quantum computers based on knots.

My story extrapolates this all well into the realm of science fiction, to the point that it would probably piss off the 3 mathematicians who study knots and read short science fiction. But I think it goes in interesting directions. I tie in (ha, not intentional) notions of Buddhist and Celtic endless knots, the Gordian knot legend, and the knot-based number system used by the Inca, known as Quipu. Fun stuff, I hope. I currently have two beta readers attempting to determine whether or not it's ridiculously boring. We'll see.

(Hm. I guess that was a little more than just an update.)