More on blues dancing... and (learning) dance of various sorts

I am currently super-hyped about the chance to blues dance again in the (very) near future, particularly after watching a bunch of great videos of blues dancing the other day.

This is the first example of blues dancing I ever saw, and I fell in love with it immediately.

The rest are videos I came across recently. The next couple videos are from the San Diego Fusion Exchange, so maybe they're not strictly blues (?)... but what I love about blues is that it totally doesn't matter. :]

Man, I love how this woman moves (same woman from the two videos above)...

Gah, 1:16 kills me! So awesome...

Love this one. This woman dances likes her limbs are weightless... beautiful. And the song... mm mm mm...

God, I love her lines at 1:28, and what they do afterwards at 1:34-ish. *_* Gorgeous dancing...

I really like these guys too; their style really appeals to me (and their choice of songs doesn't hurt :]):

Their style is pretty simple on the whole, but the overall feel is cool, and I love the little things they do with their feet (what the dude does at 1:25 *kills* me -- so awesome).

But now here's the interesting thing... Blues, this super free-form style, is making me want to learn technique like I've never wanted to before -- even moreso than when I was doing ballroom. In ballroom, it seems, technique is everything, and you really don't get the feel of the dance unless you're doing it properly. [I say this based solely on the eight-or-so months of ballroom I did, which was the first dancing I'd ever done, so I had nothing at all to compare to at that point. Maybe my impression would be different now... Not that I'm not still a Very Inexperienced Dancer, after only about 1.5 years total. Hehe.. So yeah: tablespoon of salt is warranted here, for sure. That is, don't be fooled into thinking that I know (or think I know) what I'm talking about at all. :P All of my dance-related ramblings are just my personal impressions/thoughts based on my own relatively meagre experience.]

So I was really into working on technique at that time. Once I stopped taking ballroom and was pretty much only dancing salsa socially, at first I really wanted to take salsa lessons to improve, but eventually (probably as my following improved over time, and I could at least squeak by dancing passably with most leads) that desire faded and I just wanted to have fun. Although... I suppose that was part of it, and the other part was that, when I hear salsa music, the way my body feels like moving is often at odds with how salsa styling seems to be commonly taught. (Or I just suck too much at consciously controlling my movements to find out, haha.) In any case, I didn't really feel like taking salsa lessons anymore (which was just as well, since I never did get around to taking any :|!), and since then I've been kind of just messing around on the dance floor, doing whatever the music is making me do (which can feel great, but, as I've written before, has actually become problematic).

But back to blues! So I learn about this whole "blues dancing" thing and fall in love with it instantly, since it's all about dancing the music and moving how you feel. Awesome! But seeing more examples of blues dancing, I see how much more can be expressed through it, and (unlike with salsa) I don't have anywhere close to the vocabulary of movement required to express the things I'm made to feel by the music I'd want to dance blues to. It's like being at a loss for words... like wanting to convey an idea to someone but not knowing how to put it, and watching these awesome videos is like reading something someone else has written that says exactly what you wanted to say, way better than you ever could have put it yourself. It makes me really want to improve my vocabulary and precision of movement, so I can say many more varied and nuanced things through dance.

... Too bad the reasons I never got around to taking salsa lessons when I wanted to still apply (and then some). :| Maybe in the spring I'll be able to squeeze in a lesson or workshop here and there...

Bottled feelings

I feel like I understand art a little better today. I've rambled on before about how the things (energies? passions?) that are alive inside a person can force themselves out in the form of art... music, movement... or other activities, like working hard for some kind of cause. In a couple of ways I get this a little more now than I did before...

Expression through dance is something I can relate to since I feel it all the time: when I hear the right music (which could even just be music in my head :P), there's this need to let this thing out of me, which can only be released through movement.

The visual art thing, on the other hand, I didn't really get. As intrinsically enjoyable as the act of drawing is for me, I'm rarely compelled to do it in the first place. But for perhaps the first time ever, I recently had a taste of that compulsion: I went out to a lake one evening with a bunch of friends. The moon was a huge, orange crescent hanging low in the black sky. As we stood around by the lake, looking at the stars, we realized the moon was getting lower on the horizon. Soon enough it had reached the lake itself, and I stood there, captivated, unable to look away as this orange crescent moon sank into the water like a ship on fire. Something about this nearly moved me to tears, and it felt like the ship was drawing the breath out of me and taking it with it as it sank. I couldn't bring myself to move until long after the last point of light had vanished on the horizon, and I desperately wished that I could capture what I'd just experienced... preserve it somehow, in the form of a painting.

Of course, I am in no way a painter, and it would be terrible to destroy that experience as it exists in my memory by seeing whatever awful rendering I might produce on paper, so I wouldn't even attempt it. Even my written description just now, which I tried to gloss over as much as possible (while still getting the gist of it across) in order to avoid this very thing, has kind of sullied my memory of the event. :| In any case, even if my inability to express myself through these means stops me from actually doing it, I've now at least had a glimpse of what it's like to want to express myself through visual art.

In this case, the desire to capture a moment made me want to create art: to take my experience of that event and turn it into a physical object so I could have it later, maybe share it with others. In the past, I've been driven by various emotions to write things -- sometimes poetry, sometimes other things -- and it has mostly been because of a need to take whatever I was feeling at the time and get it out of me. To reach in and grab hold of it and pull it out and get rid of it, so I could stop experiencing whatever feeling of unrest was roiling inside me. And aside from looking at what I've just pulled out only long enough to see that it is indeed the thing, in its entirety, that I wanted to get rid of, that's generally the end of it, and I don't deal with the thing any further.

But today, for some reason, I read some things I'd written a while back, during a time when I felt quite different than I do these days. Even though I remember a lot of things from that time, even some events in plenty of detail, I generally can't recall the specific feelings I had. Perhaps it's akin to the way you might remember the face of someone you once knew long ago; you might have a rough picture, but it's hazy and doesn't capture the details -- the features that make that person distinct from others with the same sort of look. Yet if you actually see the person, they're immediately recognizable, even alongside other, similar-looking people. In the same way, though I could no longer remember my feelings from these past times, as I read these things that I'd once written, everything I'd been experiencing at the time came crashing over me again. Nuances of emotion that I still wouldn't know how to begin describing in plain words. Somehow I didn't expect that reading these things could put those feelings back into me, even in spite of how irrelevant they are to the present. That is, given how things are now, it doesn't even make sense that I should be able to feel these things from these other times.

It's as if, in writing each of those things, I distilled that immediate experience out of me and bottled it like a drug... and all it takes to once again experience everything I'd managed to draw out of myself back then is to sip from that little bottle.

I suppose, then, that if another person has had experiences similar enough to that from which a given drug was distilled, they too can be affected by it; this is perhaps what makes art resonate with certain people but not others. This would certainly explain why until a few years ago I had very little appreciation for the arts: I hadn't even begun to live yet.

The things that live inside us

I was cleaning off an old hard drive from a desktop I used years ago, and I came across a whole bunch of files I thought I'd lost. Among these were some various art-ish things, which, according to the file info, are from about ten years ago (it still blows my mind when I recall something that falls into my "years ago" mental category, and it turns out that it was a *decade* ago o_o!). Nostalgia impels me to share some of them here. (Bem, na verdade, eu omito os desenhos pro quais eu estou a mais nostálgica, rsrs... mas em todo caso...)

These ones are scans of some things I did in my grade 9 art class:

I think we had to paint these using fake flowers as a reference, hehe.

I think this was based on a photo from National Geographic.

I don't remember working on this one at all, but I must have used a photo for reference here as well.

This one my brother drew (bonus points if you recognize the character!), and I scanned his drawing for my first-ever attempt at colouring something on the computer... using a mouse. :| I'm pretty sure it took me forever, and I think in the end the only part I was happy with was the right shoulder. Haha..

Some random little images:

The bottom ones were probably playing around with my tablet, once I got one.

This may be the only piece of fan art I ever produced. It was for a webcomic that I'm sure has long since ceased to exist.

After some point, I think I just sketched random crap now and then:

I think I pretty much didn't draw at all after around this time. It's kind of strange, because I definitely enjoyed doing it. But... it's weird: thinking back, even though I recall liking doing stuff like this, I can't imagine the feeling of actually *wanting* to do it. You know, the sort of state you're in when you're thinking something like "Ooh, I know! I'm going to do X!", just before you actually go and do it. Being compelled to do something. It's something I used to struggle with, actually -- rarely (if ever) having that feeling of wanting to do specific things, in an immediate sense (as opposed to hypothetically). That's not to say that there weren't lots of things I enjoyed once I was doing them... but I think my tendency was to sort of idly drift into doing things, rather than actively seeking out the activity. Or some external stimulus would make me suddenly want to do something, instead of the inclination spontaneously coming from me.

I guess this is the reason why, for a long time, the only things I really did for fun either were passive (e.g., reading, watching anime/tv/movies, listening to music) or inherently prompted further continuous action (e.g., video games). Perhaps one exception to this was designing and making graphics/layouts for sites. Inexplicably, I used to really like making layouts. (Sadly, I couldn't find any of them on that old hard drive... I guess they're gone forever. :( ) Maybe it had something to do with the combination of aesthetics and functionality -- that the thought of using them afterwards (and actually getting to *see*, on a regular basis, the nice-looking thing I made, unlike with most art I might have produced) made me want to do it. But yeah, it really used to bother me, this general lack of internal desire or motivation to do things I enjoyed.

I think that, by and large, I'm only really compelled do things that make me feel something. Looking at and using layouts I'd made kind-of-sort-of-almost falls into that category (probably due to the aesthetic aspects), but loosely. Better, more recent examples would be playing guitar (and singing), or horseback riding (a hugely physical kind of "feeling" here -- I guess you could call it exhilaration), or dancing. Both playing music and dancing are able to stir up all kinds of things in me, and those things can vary greatly depending on the type of music or dancing. (I won't even begin to try to describe the incredible array of things dance is capable of evoking in me... it adds a whole other dimension to the already vast spectrum of what music alone can do.) So on the one hand, they can elicit strong feelings from me. But on the other hand, if I'm already feeling something, they also provide a means of getting it out of me.

Hm, then I guess writing belongs on my list as well. I thought of it in the context of expression of emotion, but in truth I suppose the writing example means that the whole making/letting-me-feel-stuff thing goes beyond emotions. For instance, if I have some kind of complex idea(s) that I want to communicate (or even just sort out for myself), not only is writing immensely helpful in shaping it into something coherent that effectively conveys the idea, but it's also incredibly satisfying to reach the point in composing a piece of writing where everything fits. The various ideas are all there, expressed clearly and concisely with natural progression and flow, and everything is tied together nicely into something that says just what you want it to say. It's this wonderful sort of mental release, to finally be able to take this mysterious, complex thing that was alive in your head, and to put it out there into the world in a faithful representation of what it was inside of you. [In a way, the process of constructing that understandable representation is satisfying in the same way formulating proofs is (or was), at least for me; the solution, or some part of it, just comes to you in a flash, and at first you don't yet know what it is -- it's there in your head, and you can see it, and you know (or think) that it's the thing you were looking for, but it takes some time to examine it, to tease it apart until you recognize in its amorphous form familiar subcomponents, and finally how they all fit together. And there's this huge satisfaction that comes from taking those subcomponents, putting them together, on paper, in the way you observed them to relate in your mind, and seeing that, yes!, everything fits, and you've got exactly the thing that initially came to you in that flash.]

I suppose, in general then, it's all about achieving that release that comes from effective expression: from getting whatever is alive inside of you out into the world. Whether it's heartbreak coming out as song, ideas as an essay, pent-up energy as a sprint down the hall, or anger as a throat-rending scream, we each pick the most effective means we have for getting things out of us. In one of my classes a few weeks ago, the prof raised the question of "what is passion?", and I think that it may be these live things inside us, trying to burst their way out.

On the other side of the coin, I guess this is really what allows us to connect with other people as well. To see, there in front of you, produced by another person, a manifestation of the very thing that's alive within you -- to read it in their words, to feel it in the movement of their body; how can you not feel closer to a person, knowing the same thing lives inside you both? It's amazing how the way a person expresses themselves can excite things in you, even if neither of you knew it was there, and even to the point where what was once sleeping within you finally resounds so strongly that you're moved to give voice to it as well. And the positive feedback that can happen: given how satisfying it is to express these live things, it's no wonder we like to surround ourselves with people who share the same passions. They keep them alive in us and make them stronger.

As I said, I used to feel empty in this sense... like I didn't have any of these live things of my own, moving me to do things. Even though other people could transiently excite certain things in me (and a myriad of things at that, with how diverse my interests are), it would never last long beyond the direct influences of those other people, and, left to my own devices, I'd invariably go back to not feeling like doing anything. I'm really glad that in the last few years various people helped to awaken different things in me, and that these things grew strong enough that they've stayed alive in me even without these people around anymore.

So, as far as art goes... I think if I were to be an artist, I'd be an artist of emotion. Even though I enjoy drawing once I'm doing it, I'm not compelled to do it under everyday circumstances. I guess the act itself, though enjoyable, isn't enough so that it alone would move me to do it, and I don't get all that much out of looking at the final product myself (maybe I'd want to do it for a gift or something...). And since my skill isn't great enough to faithfully produce the things that come to mind when I'm compelled to give voice to my emotions, these days I instead turn to the languages in which I have somewhat more fluency, like writing, music and dance.

Yesterday I fell in love. (Too bad it's unrequited.)

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

- Ernst Mach

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

- Bertrand Russell

These two quotes were amongst many presented to my theory development class at the start of the term, and when I read them I thought, "Yeah, that's so true..." I thought they were great quotes. But I didn't really get them -- really *get* them -- until yesterday.

The lecture was on thinking and representation, and it included discussion of concepts and how we label them with words which are separate from the concepts themselves. We discussed a paper about concept maps as diagrammatic representations of concepts and the relationships between them: how Y changes as a result of a change in X (e.g., if X increases, Y inceases as well, depicted by a + on the line from X to Y).

Though useful, this type of model has at least one obvious limitation: it can't represent precisely how Y changes as a function of X. Many concepts, such as motivation or productivity, are not easy to quantify meaningfully. However, if we are able to measure X and then measure Y and we observe some kind of pattern as we vary them, we can apply a mathematical model instead. My prof used the example of Newton's Second Law, F=ma, and went on to talk about why it's a "perfect model", including the way it's quantitative, testable, generalizable, etc.

But then one student interjected and asked whether it really is such a great model -- does it really serve to convey the relationships between the concepts it relates? He elaborated to the effect of, sure, he "knows" that "force equals mass times acceleration" and can do the related computations, but conceptually, he doesn't *get* the relationship between these concepts from this equation: the prof agreed and went on to ask, "What does it even *mean* to multiply mass by acceleration? Or, if we want to determine acceleration, to divide force by mass??" Conceptually, how do these concepts relate to one another?

Here I suggested that this is where cognition comes into play: as humans, we obviously have cognitive limitations and can only represent so much and manipulate those representations so much before we run out of usable memory and processing ability. For me, I said, classical mechanics makes sense at a conceptual level. I have mental representations of force, mass and acceleration, and I can conceptualize the relationship between them independent of words, numbers or variables. But electromagnetism? V=IR? Sure, I can do all the math just as well as for anything else, but even if I can mentally represent (or "wrap my brain around") the concepts of potential, current and resistance per se, hell if I could successfully represent the *relationship* between them in terms of the concepts themselves. To think about the relationship itself, I have to resort to some kind of analogy involving, say, water and pipes.

And this is where I suddenly *got* it, what it means to say that abstraction is a tool -- that mathematics, the "highest form of abstraction in human thinking", is a tool. If I want to move a box from point A to point B, I can pick it up and carry it there. But if I want to move a whole skid of boxes, I need a forklift to help me.

Abstraction allows us to "[separate] the number concept from what [is] being counted" (Bronowski, 1976). As my prof had put it earlier in the lecture, "Back in the day, we'd think about five trees or five sheep. And then one day some guy comes along and says, 'To hell with the trees and sheep. I'm just interested in this concept of five.'"

Math in particular allows us to completely let go of mental representations of the concepts whose relationships we need to consider. If we can tie numbers to certain concepts by measuring them and observe, through scientific experimentation, a pattern that's consistent with an established mathematical relationship, we also don't have to worry about conceptualizing the literal relationship of these concepts to one another: mathematicians build various forklifts and describe for the rest of us where they'll go if we manipulate the controls in certain ways (and even, if they're especially brilliant/lucky, invent entirely new kinds of forklifts that can pick up different kinds of skids, or even objects that aren't on skids). So if I want to know what happens when I increase the mass and acceleration of an object by so much, I can get into my forklift, manipulate the controls according to some instructions that have been shown to drive the forklift from point A to point B, and not be bothered with actual the skid full of boxes until after I've already moved them. Then, I can get out of the forklift and see that, okay, this is how strong of a force I now have. Manipulating the controls has *nothing* to do with picking up the skid and carrying it myself (were it possible) except the result it achieves.

The magnitude of this sent my mind reeling -- how ridiculously powerful a tool math is, given how well our minds are able to represent concepts and the relationships between them (i.e., not very) versus all of the crazy things we're able to do as a result of circumventing these cognitive limitations. Constructing 50-storey buildings that won't collapse on us? Consider even just the chemical and mechanical properties of the metals, the woods, the concretes... let alone how those play into how much of each you'd need and where they ought to go. Here, those quotes from the beginning of the term came to mind:

Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

- Ernst Mach

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

- Bertrand Russell

I sat there in class, just basking in my little epiphany and contemplating the implications, completely oblivious to the ongoing class discussion for at least a good five minutes.

I have fallen in love with math. I'd say "all over again", after having allowed myself to become and remain entangled in the depths of mathless biology for years... but I didn't know it well enough before to justify calling it love. Infatuation, maybe? But now, finally seeing it more clearly, I realize that I don't understand it, and it's eating me alive.

‘‘Mathematics is only patterns... [It] is not just symbols as names for concepts but is a system of relations with logic and reason built into its inner structure." (Feynman, 1975, 1999)

It finally became obvious to me, in an epiphany aftershock, what math research is. In the past I'd asked several math-student friends of mine what one actually *does* as a grad student in math (compared to physics students who smash things, chemistry students who blow things up, biology students who kill things, or social sciences students who... recruit people for studies). I'd never gotten a satisfactory answer: "You think. You read, and you think. ... ... and you play around with ideas until something fits."

"Um... okay..."

But yes! Just as those quotes before merely sounded true but now so effectively sum up what I finally *get* about mathematics, this now is so obviously the truth... In science one seeks to discover relationships amongst natural things and describe them in terms of simpler such things that have been previously observed and described; so too in mathematics, where one seeks to discover relationships amongst abstract concepts or other relationships and prove them using more fundamental ones that have been proven before. However, whereas scientists' substrate for observation and description exists as concrete objects the natural world, that of mathematicians is represented abstractly inside their own minds. Hence math research is indeed just thinking after all...

But this is what plagues me now: what are the "most fundamental" patterns, relationships, or concepts? How were *they* proven? *Were* they proven? Are some things just accepted as "true" or "given" (or are they assumptions of some sort), and if so, which things?

What are the irreducible elements of math?

There needs to be a word!

You know what there needs to be a word for? Just like we have homonyms (words which share the same spelling) and homophones (words which share the same pronunciation), we now need a word for words that share the same keystroke -- like for typing on phones, using T9 or SureType or the like.

It's way too often that I have to explain to someone why my sentences make no sense because my Pearl's SureType guesses "are" instead of "see", and I didn't notice before I hit send! "Bye! Are you later! :D!" D:! And it's this relatively new phenomenon that needs a word other than typo, because it's not a typo at all!

Although... now that I think of it, there also needs to be a word for the irrecognizable word-guesses that result from T9/SureType/whatever trying to make sense of a word that you *did* typo, but which would've been perfectly recognizable (at least given the context) as the intended word had it not been mangled into something completely different (and possibly much longer than the number of keystrokes you actually made). If I miss hitting the OP key once while typing "people", I end up with something like, "Hm, but we don't have enough orole..." or "Yeah, they're a great bunch of proletarian." (??) Fail!

What's a good root-esque morpheme that refers to keys/typing? I keep thinking of "tecla" from Portuguese/Spanish (or chave/clave/llave/chiave), but there must be some variation of the Latin root that's more appropriate for use in this word that needs to exist!