For over 25 years, I’ve been making software fail. It’s not that I am a QA person, though I have often (as a side function) led QA efforts. And I don’t mean that I’ve been building failed software. I simply mean that I seem to discover, or cause the discovery of, more than my fair share of bugs.
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Tag: Escher
Lovers, Intellectual Loneliness, and an Enigma
CogZest is for and about beautiful, passionate minds. So, it’s natural for me to respond to The Imitation Game.
The film received mixed reviews. Many of those knowledgeable about Turing and the Enigma project were disappointed by the film’s lack of fidelity, particularly given how fascinating these subjects are in reality. I did not expect to see a documentary, nor something outside Hollywood’s style, so I wasn’t disappointed. I’ve used the divertissement’s themes as a cognitive springboard rather than a trampoline to which I frequently return for inspiration, let alone for factual information.
It being Valentine’s day (and given that I am nursing an R&D project dealing with romantic love), it seems appropriate to launch into the theme of intellectual loneliness, companionship and romantic love, to which The Imitation Game alluded.
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Meta-painting & Science of the Human Mind: An Epistolary Response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements
Preface
This epistolary essay was written in 2014 (with some later updates) as a response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements: Relation, Perception and Meaning painting exhibition of Sept. 2014 in New Westminster. I blogged about the exhibition prior to writing this essay.
In 2014, Lam Wong’s 21 Elements: Relation, Perception and Meaning book was published. That book contains photos of all the paintings in his exhibition. A chapter of 21 Elements, written by Lam, which includes pictures of several of the paintings from his book, are available in this PDF.
Photos of the paintings from 21 Elements are available on Lam’s website.
A version of the essay below appears in the second edition of 21 Elements, published in 2022. That’s a limited edition print.
A version of the essay below, interleaved with photos of the paintings, will appear in Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind. The letter reflects many of the themes of Discontinuities, including, of course, affective epistolary communication.
Contents
- Attentively developing expertise through time
- N-ary relations in art and meta machinery
- Perception: The construction of conjectures
- Rational faith and love in the dark
- Language of cognitive-affective mind
- Perturbance: Loss of control of mental processing of motivators
- Attachment, acceptance, love and happiness
- Universality of affect
- Using visual art to improve ourselves
- Consciousness, the great integrator (or integration)
- To the tune of Kevin Shield’s Goodbye
Meta-painting & Science of the Human Mind: An Epistolary Response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements
Shadows of shadows passing. It is now 1831, and as always I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential. Since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception, music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, colour becomes pallor, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless. Edgar Allan Poe
Dear ______,
I had the pleasure of attending, on several occasions, Lam Wong’s 21 Elements: Relation, Perception and Meaning exhibition and of discussing his art with him. As a result, I am moved to share my reflections with you.
Opening Quotations: Hermann Hesse Displaces Rudyard Kipling and M. C. Esher
Most sections of Cognitive Productivity have an opening quotation. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed choosing them. I’ve also appreciated the positive feedback I’ve received from readers about them.
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Why Use Potent Cognitive Tools —and How
Most of the information we process is digital. While the tools we use for learning are in some respects better than paper, in others they are worse. In this article, I claim that:
- Progress is problem-driven
- Most learning tools are cognitively impotent
- Self-directed learners should use potent cognitive tools and do so in a manner that promotes their learning.