No. 124 — Geography and Botany ⫶ Little Gods of Latent Space ⫶ I Think Not

Is math big or small?

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

I think one of the reasons I don’t worry about artificial general intelligence is that I’m already raising a far wilder intelligence.

Last weekend it was mutiny. During May Day celebrations, two small friends built a barricade on top of the stairs and informed me this was a realm for children. I was not admitted. The following morning they pulled off their shoes and socks in the cold Helsinki spring and ran. I stood there holding two pairs of small socks.

This is what every parent tells you about raising a mind: the whole point is to make something you can’t control. A foreign consciousness assembling itself in your kitchen. You pour everything in (language, love, the names of Pokémon) and what comes out has its own ideas. Little gods of latent space.

1.

Is math big or small? I loved this talk on illustrating mathematical ideas. Elliot Kienzle starts with a question I’ll add to my own repertoire: is this concept something you can hold in your hand, or something to wander around in?

While I was in Finland, I did a podcast on the role of illustration in thinking, which will be released later in the year. For research, I pulled together a few pieces I’ve written on the subject before:

• No. 08 — On Drawing 🖍️ What’s Inside a Computer 📒 Sketching with a Neural Network

• No. 29 — David Hockney 👀 But to see like this 🐈 They All Saw a Cat

• No. 44 — Prompt Engineering 🪄 Art Pedagogy 🎨 Evolution of Pokemon

• No. 83 — Look longer ⫶ Remake old Masters ⫶ Zucchini jam

2.

Here’s something else I picked up from Elliot’s talk. Topologists (a branch of mathematics) organise their problems using two metaphors: geography and botany. Geography asks: what’s out there? Botany asks: how do we classify what we’ve found?

I’ve found myself obsessing over how different disciplines think about the same problem. Bryan Boyer's tech vs urbanism table is one of the nicest versions of this. When I first saw it years ago, before I had started the playground work properly, I realised I'd been steadily moving towards the urbanist column without knowing it.

I wish this table existed for every discipline. What if educators asked the architect's questions? What if engineers asked the kindergartner's? (Children's questions, refreshingly, happen across all columns.)

3.

So, what if you could hand an LLM your discipline's questions and ask: who else asks something like this? What field has been working on my problem under a different name?

Robin Sloan’s latest is about Talkie, a language model trained only on text written before 1930. He asks: does it seem like there might be any correspondence between electric circuits and the logic of George Boole?

Talkie replied: “I think not. The fundamental propositions in logic are independent of all electrical considerations, and they do not admit of any illustrations drawn from electricity.”

Four years later, Claude Shannon would prove this spectacularly wrong in what's been called the most important master's thesis ever written. Shannon's playful, curious mind allowed him to connect Victorian mathematics with electrical engineering, which opened an entire field. (I tell this story in my book too.)

4.

A Foundation Model in Your Pocket. It’s not a secret I’m a big fan of Raspberry Pi (I also own their stock), but it’s mostly the exquisite educational and research work I sing praises of. This interview with Eben Upton tells the story of Raspberry Pi as a manufacturing and business exercise. The pictures from the Welsh factory alone are mesmerising.

5.

My first Playful Computing cohort for Texas educators is starting on this Friday! To welcome the educators and make the virtual experience a little bit more physical, I put together kits with three Hello Ruby books, a Teacher Reflection Journal, a Student Passport, Play-Doh, a classroom poster.

I have a few kits left over.

If you’re a teacher (or know one) who would love a Playful Computing kit I’m giving away the remaining kits to newsletter readers. Just reply to this email with your name, school, and mailing address by Thursday, and I’ll pick the winners at random.

6.

Unruly Play is a collection of 177 works of play in unlikely places. It makes me want to turn my Are.na playground channel into something more substantial. (Maybe this is the play pattern language I want to research in a doctorate? Like Christopher Alexander for computational, spatial play?)

7.

The illustrations for this edition come from my son, who still draws with his whole body. These are ten wondrous robots, each with their own distinctive features. I love this phase. Before mimicry, a child draws what they feel rather than what they think they should see. At three and a half, he knows what a robot is supposed to look like, and draws something else entirely.