No. 118 — Math in muscles ⫶ Literary geishas ⫶ Dorodangos
A re-enchanted world
My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.
We once had a real estate agent in Paris who was into Space Invader, the street artist whose pixel-art ceramic tile mosaics are all over the city. Cinquante points, she exhaled when we walked out of an apartment. She taught me to collect the points whenever I spot one. There are over 1,500 pieces in Paris alone. This Totoro has been on my list for a long time.
I’ve been waking up at weird hours and loving the uninterrupted hours of dawn. I’m playing Stone in Focus by Aphex Twin (and please this time, read the comments).
It’s now 5:41, and the day begins.
1.
The Ruoholahti Computer Playground curriculum won the Math Power! Prize. (I love the little exclamation mark.) This year the award went to projects that use physical models to deepen mathematical understanding.
It’s a lovely recognition, and a continuum of work that goes back to 2020. But to me it’s also a proof of concept: a public park can function as an operating system for ideas, not just a container for slides and swings.
The prize money will help us take the next step: building a library of play patterns around math and computer science concepts that can travel wherever public playgrounds do.
This is where I’d like your help.
I’d like to work with teachers and researchers to test these play patterns in real classrooms and playgrounds, and to understand what changes in children’s confidence and reasoning when math lives in their muscles, fingertips and tip of tongue. If you work in a city office wondering what “child-friendly” could really mean, if you’re an architect or landscape designer curious about spaces that teach, if you’re in a school, museum, foundation, or NGO thinking about STEAM or public space - I’d love to talk. mEducation Alliance is hosting a webinar on February 26th where I’m looking forward to meeting some likeminded people!
2.
"A welfare state solution would see the creation of a national corps of literary geishas, with degrees in literature and the psychology of writers. They would work full time with the writers whom no one read, listening to them, reading their work, praising them, and consoling them."
I finally finished So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid. It was excellent and I'll be returning to many of its lessons. But this little paragraph, written in 1996, made me smile. A literary geisha might be the most human job description for a modern language model I've come across.
Unlike most AI-generated text, the metaphors people reach for when trying to describe these systems are genuinely exciting: Blurry JPEGs! Stochastic parrots! Summoning ghosts! Literary geishas! Large language models truly are third things.
3.
I've linked a few times to the Iranian educators coming up with joyful classroom activities around Hello Ruby. But this recent play is the most delightful thing yet: life-sized wearable cutouts of the different characters.
4.
I read Benoît Mandelbrot’s biography last year, and I keep bumping into his world. This time it was via Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, who noticed a resemblance between how many fractals are generated and how we train neural networks. The images are so beautiful they make me think of James Turrell. That cannot be a coincidence.
Related: was Mandelbrot a fox or a hedgehog?
5.
Shiny mud balls or dorodango. “Once Kayo teaches children how to make these mud balls, they become absorbed in forming a sphere, and they put all their energy into polishing the ball until it sparkles. The dorodango soon becomes the child's greatest treasure.”
6.
Excellent miso made from Jerusalem artichokes. Hugo makes it in Paris, along with a few other unusual flavors. Moments like this make me wish the physical world worked a bit more like the internet. This miso deserves to travel.
7.
“Forty years on [from when I first encountered a computer], the technology in the gray box is everywhere, shaping my life in every way, which is strange in itself, but perhaps stranger is the fact that I have never cared about it, just taken it for granted and seamlessly incorporated it into my life. Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it, how it works in itself, how it works in me. It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world.”
Of all the people making the case for understanding technology, Karl Ove Knausgaard wasn’t on my list. But this is him at his best: direct, then suddenly, enchantment.