Last weekend it was raining like hell, and it looked like we were about to enter another lockdown. It’s a week later and here we are. At least the weather’s a lot better now. It’s been a dramatic week on the large scale with the new lockdown across England, and the U.S. election. On a much smaller scale for me it has been fairly mundane. I’m lucky enough to be very insulated here in the middle of nowhere Wiltshire. It’s a very tough, fragile time for a lot of people. The lack of government support is hurting people, or support that has come too late after people have been made redundant. The government was optimistic again about not needing to enter a national lockdown until it was too late, which means we’re going into a longer stretch of hibernation than the previously suggested two week firebreak. Anyway we are where we are.

I had a reasonable feeling back in July and August that we were going to be repeating the lockdown cycle at least once, and that things wouldn’t be back to any kind of normal before Autumn 2021. That’s partly why I chose this year to take on my Masters, there’s not really a better time to be studying. There’s not much else to do, and I’m very much enjoying the work. It’s so crucial to keep learning just to stay sane and interested at any point in life. Having a course of study really helps focus that need, and gives me a lot of pointers along the way.

This week I’ve been catching up with the work not yet done. We’ve reached the midpoint of the semester, so there’s been a reasonable stack of courseworks to hand in. I’ve really enjoyed these assignments. One was to recreate a saturated reverse polish notation calculator in Python. We were given the example program to interact with, and our task was to discover and recreate all of the functionality, and all of the bugs, in our own program. Great task. I used a trial version of the Hopper disassembler to take a peek at the binary of the original program, managed to discover some function names which helped clue in the functionality of it. Also very easy to see all of the error strings to reproduce, and the accepted mathematical inputs. One thing that was not at all easy was recreating the parse logic. I’m still definitely not 100% on that, but it was a great challenge, and kind of realistic for the working world of porting a legacy system to a new codebase.

I’ve also been chewing through the work on Foundations of Computation, which is essentially everything between a finite state machine and a Turing machine. Fascinating low level areas to look at and build up my conceptions of. While I had a glimmer of an idea of how this kind of thing worked previously, I didn’t have anything like a good understanding. Some algorithmic grunt work and some creative fun stuff with regular expressions. Our next large coursework for that is to build an arithmetic parser in Java, so I’m just about to get stuck into that. I might blog about some of these after the hand ins are done, or about the tools that helped me in the process.

Getting in to complicated problems like these is a really great distraction from the large world events which I may have an opinion on, but I can’t influence directly. I think it’s the distinction between complicated problems and complex problems that is helpful to think about. A complicated problem is something like maths puzzles, clock mechanisms, or programming, while complex problems are political, or organisational, or dependent on the emergent behaviour of independent but interconnected actors. This is borrowed from the ideas of complexity science, but complex problems are extraordinarily draining and difficult to spend too much time on. Complex problems also happen to be much more important overall.

Narratives

I’ve also spent a little bit of this week thinking about the ways narrative work in life thanks to a really thoughtful episode of the Adam Buxton podcast with Blindboy from the Rubberbandits. Blindboy’s point was about what helps him stay happy and sane, and basically live a good life. He had this incredibly insightful point that for him it was about creating narrative and meaning throughout the day. A simple example being cooking, where the narrative starts with preparing the food and completes with eating it, like preparing his overnight oats the night before and waking up to a delicious breakfast in the morning. This idea of creating narratives that mean something to you really works for me, probably because I’m an old literature student too. The sense that you are working on a story of your life, by breaking it down into the story of your day, and then even the story of caring for yourself with the act of cooking or exercising.

It might be overreaching, and a little pretentious to feel the need to theorise to that extent, but when I constantly feel pulled or pushed by the digital nudges of social media platforms to keep consuming it comes across as a very grounding, real idea. It makes being human a creative exercise in staying sane and healthy. Setting your life around creating little stories that tell you you’re loved, and expressing how you care for and love others.

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