Fuzzy Bear
Cafe Scientifique is a loose organisation whose aim is to get the public interested in science. They give seminars and discussion forums in cafes, pubs and other places outside traditional academia.
The aim is more to enthuse than to educate - a way of getting nonscientists interested enough to start educating themselves. For this reason the subjects tend to be romantically cutting-edge and even science-fictiony.
Well, I went to one a few nights ago and it was...a positive but mixed experience. The speaker (who I knew slightly from political forums) spoke for 20 minutes on Fuzzy Logic, then with breaks to get coffee and beer from the bar, the audience of around 30 discussed what they'd heard and he answered their questions.
Interesting stuff, and I learned some details that I hadn't known before, but the two imperatives - to educate and to enthuse - proved somewhat in conflict. On the one hand, the speakers has to explain what fuzzy logic is - essentially, binary logic but with n states instead of 2, where n depends on the application - and on the other hand to make this simple (even trivial) innovation sound like a worldshaking breakthrough.
The five stages of "terror alert", or the coded belt colours in karate, or the 6 (or whatever) levels of rank that a police officer can have - these are "fuzzy" in this specialised sense. There's no alert level between 3 and 4, there's no way to be both a brown and a blue belt, and there's no other ranks outside the police system.
There's always one or two show-offs in the audience. One of them made two contributions, the first suggesting that fuzzy logic as a way to make computers more user friendly was doomed because people were getting better at thinking like computers, and the second longwindedly misexplaining Schroedinger's Cat as an example of how fuzzy logic applied to quantum physics.
A physicist in the audience gently explained to him that in (the Copenhagen interpretation of) quantum physics, many states are simultaneously true until an observer collapses the uncertainty, while in fuzzy logic only one state is ever true at a time. It's a different kind of fuzziness. As for the other point, I thought the point of technology was to make machines service humans on terms set by humans, not the other way around.
The other show-off was...er, me. I pointed out that the thresholds between fuzzy states weren't at all fuzzy - they're just as sharp and sudden as in standard binary logic, so they don't support grey areas or probabilistic uncertainty. Alex the speaker agreed that this was the case, and a problem, but said the issue was being addressed in "type 2" fuzzy logic. What is this? I have no idea.
He said he'd never heard of Tarski, Quine, Montague, or Hegel's dialectic (which I know for a fact he has), but assured me that fuzzy logic is better than any of the paraconsistent logics, and was quite capable of modelling systems in flux.
I also asked about fuzzy logic's inability to model human thought - humans can be hypocrites believing two incompatible things at once, or have hazy understandings, or just be unsure what to think, but these kinds of fuzziness are beyond fuzzy logic's capabilities. Alex's response was that fuzzy logic's purpose is to make computers easier for humans to use, not to model human thought. Hmmm.
One of the patrons took me aside in a break to clarify whether fuzzy systems are probabilistic (sometimes giving different answers to the same question) or deterministic (complex but always giving the same answer). When I answered the latter he was distinctly unimpressed - he'd got the impression that it was a way of dealing with noisy data by making the responses noisy, rather than a way of representing continuous quantities by quantal degrees.
Anyway, it was an enjoyable way to spend an evening, and I think Cafe Scientifique is a worthwhile project, that is still working out details of how it should operate.
Whoever heard of getting up at eight in the morning? Or even seven thirty?! I had to wake up absurdly early today, to go to a jobcentre and fill out some forms so I can try again to go on a pointless course in a month. Except I didn't have to fill them out after all because they fell out a folder, having been previously lost.
Oh, but I almost couldn't be sent on the course anyway, because the computers weren't working properly. This is the civil service that implements the government's wishes and audits your life. What a soothing thought.
I'm reading some more about C++, including Class (but not the kind Marx talked about), Object Orientation (but not the kind Freud talked about) and Typecasting (but not the kind actors complain about). To say nothing of Overloading, Private Members and Methods, which have nothing to do with excessive work, parliamentary debate or Rene Descartes.
I'm not the kind of person who can read one book on a subject intensively and then be able to talk confidently about it. I need to hear the same ideas explained in several different ways from various angles before I can apply them.
That's why I tend to read several introductory textbooks in a row before trying anything more advanced. At the moment I'm being introduced to the difference between a Class and its Members for the third time in a week - even though it's essentially the same as the difference between Universals and Particulars in the philosophy books I read 20 years ago.
Learning a programming language just to design some sound effects for music is little like learning electrical engineering just a build yourself a toaster. There's plenty of readymade toasters out there designed by people with years of expertise, and they'll probably work better than your creation.
On the other hand, if you want a toaster that applies butter and marmalade to your breakfast, you've got to either make it yourself or pay a million pounds to a team of engineers who'll do it for you.
And if you've got a million pounds, you can damn well employ a butler to put marmalade on your toast.
Anyway, this is the third time in a week I've reread basic introductions to Public and Private Members (I remember when some textbooks called them "Private Parts"), plus Class Constructors and Destructors. And this is the third time in a week I haven't understood it.
(Update: I think I've got it now. But now it's Dereference Operators which are making my head hurt.)
I'm still in demand. Shooting video for one student, composing music for another, redrafting notes for a third...if this keeps up I'm in danger of losing my reputation as a ditzy old slapper who sleeps all the time.
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