3. Boundaries

13 Sunday Sep 2026

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

Tags

Design, UX, HCI, ethics, usability, life, greed, truth, nature, beauty, writing, boundary, limit, privacy, user_experience

3. Boundaries

Here are a few thoughts about “Boundaries” and how they apply in User Experience.

I decided to gift a copy of of Volume One on The Nature of Order to my daughter earlier today. I logged on to Amazon and looked at my address book. I am aware that she moved fairly recently. So, I was scrolling through my earlier text conversations with her to see whether she had told me of her new address. I couldn’t find a text about her new address so I texted her to get the new address.

Suddenly, a popup window appeared from SIRI. It had her new address. I hadn’t said anything aloud. I thought of SIRI as a voice-activated service on my iPhone. It was disconcerting to have it “notice” my text message and then suggest an answer (which turned out to be correct).

Last week, after physical therapy, my therapist & I began to discuss the time for my next appointment. I pulled up the calendar application on my iPhone and went to a particular day and began to type in her name. After the first two characters were typed in, the “type-ahead” function suggested three possible “completions” the first of which was the time we had been orally discussing (which was not a common time nor the time of any of my recent appointments with her). It also filled in her complete name and the purpose of the appointment, but that was more understandable.

One sense of “Boundaries” in User Experience connects with a notion of “boundaries” that is much discussed in contemporary mental health. We are advised to “establish boundaries” with co-workers, family, friends, and strangers. We don’t necessarily want to share personal information with everyone or let everyone touch us in any way they choose to. If intimate details are shared in a recovery group or group therapy, it is generally agreed that such details will not be shared with others.

We sometimes extend the idea of informational boundaries to written materials as well. If, for instance, we keep a personal diary, we do not expect other people to “search for it” or to read it. In the short story, “Jennifer’s Invitation,” (link below) about my shy attempt as a third-grader to invite my girlfriend to my birthday party, I relied on my expectation that she would read a paper I “accidentally” dropped on the sidewalk. But she was so protective of my privacy that she wouldn’t even glance at my paper. I lost track of Jennifer, but I’m pretty sure she never became CEO of an IT company.

On the other hand, if we write and publish an autobiography, then we can expect that other people will feel justified in discussing the contents. To me, it would seem odd for an author to feel “violated” if people start talking about the contents of their autobiography (or their blog).

When it comes to modern interactions with computer software however, the boundaries are invisible — and sometimes non-existent. It can feel as though I write a private diary on paper; lock it up in a safe immediately; and then — without any sign that the safe has been broken into, I suddenly find details of my personal life revealed!

There appear to be boundaries between applications, and certainly between devices but these boundaries may be illusory. I find that troubling and confusing. I think the first application of “Boundaries” as a property of UX is that apparent boundaries should be real. There may be exceptions for exceptional circumstances; e.g., the police may get a search warrant to search your house if there is reasonable suspicion that you have committed a crime.

When a social media site analyzes your reactions, relationships, and word usage to determine what to try to sell you and what type of approach is most likely to succeed, that does not strike me as a reasonable response to an “emergency.” As most readers know by now, such information is not only used to try to sell you more stuff; it was also used to manipulate public opinion; for example, to convince some US voters to stay away from the polls on election day in 2016; to convince voters in the UK to vote for Brexit; to convince people not to get vaccinated.

Living things do have boundaries. Breaching those boundaries is typically something to be avoided. We call such breaches by names like “bites”, “wounds”, “diseases”, “gunshots”, “parasites.” Living cells typically have a cell wall. Within the cell are tinier organelles such as the mitochondria. The mitochondria have boundaries. The nucleus of a cell has a boundary. Within the nucleus, the nucleolus has a boundary. Larger structures often have boundaries. Motor neurons have a myelin sheath which allows neural impulses to travel faster. Almost our entire body is covered in layers of skin which serve for us a boundary.

The formation of boundaries does not stop with our physical body. Organizations of humans — nuclear families, clans, nation-states, counties, cities, townships, teams, corporations — they have boundaries. A bank, for instance, might have a safe for the money, but the building itself also functions as a boundary — not an impermeable boundary — customers are allowed to come in during banking hours. There are also legal boundaries. If you have “an account” at a bank, you will be allowed to do things that non-customers cannot. Similarly, if you are an employee of a company or a member of a sports team, you will be allowed to do things and go places that you couldn’t if you were outside that boundary.

All boundaries are semi-permeable. Boundaries change over time. A thorn tears your skin. Your boundary is broken. If you’re not careful, bacteria can get in and cause an infection. Your white blood cells destroy the invading bacteria. Your body heals. If the cut was bad enough, you may get a scar and the scar is now part of your “boundary.” It isn’t only at the level of the body that changes occur. Your social boundaries change too.

You get married. You get divorced. You are born. You join a team. You quit the team. You sell your house and other people buy it. Now, you are no longer allowed to come into the house without an invitation. Meanwhile, you buy another house. You have acquired new boundaries. Or, perhaps, you have no home. You are homeless and your boundaries are not so secure.

Most of our possessions have clearly defined boundaries. Your hammer is separate from your saw which is separate from your drill. They come from an earlier time and the “boundary” of such objects are determined by their shape. More recently, such tools (and nearly everything else!) comes packaged in bubble wrap which forms an additional boundary. This makes it harder for people to hide one under their clothes and walk out without paying. Such packaging has the added advantage that it will require time and energy on your part before you can actually start using the tool for its intended purpose. Not only that — such packaging helps pollute our world beyond the pollution required by “old style” tools.

Once you have separated your new tool purchase from its packaging, if you have any energy left, you can saw a board, or drill a hole, or hammer a nail. But you do not expect (not yet, at least), the saw to “communicate” behind the scenes with your drill. Or to communicate with you. You’d be surprised if it piped up and said, “Gee, Gene, you just sawed a board. Now, you have taken up the drill. Would you like suggestions on how to build a dog house?” (That’s what Clippy would do).

(Link to Wikipedia article on “Clippy” and how it was parodied). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

Clippy tried to be helpful. But it didn’t really have enough information about my tasks, goals, and context to actually be helpful. But today’s behind-the-scenes information sharing with dark forces is not trying to be helpful. It’s trying to get you to change your behavior for someone else’s benefit — and you don’t even know who those someones are.

Notice that if you buy a house (which typically comes with doors and keys), you can lock the house and the default is that it keeps everyone else out — except those you’ve given a key to or those who have rung your doorbell or otherwise asked for permission to come in. Typically, if a rare visitor comes to your house, you make arrangements for a time and a place. The piano tuner comes to tune your piano. You might let them use your bathroom or even offer them something to drink. But you don’t expect the piano tuner to redecorate your study or to spend the night uninvited.

That’s kind of what does happen in the electronic world though. In many cases, you cannot visit a website or use an application unless you give permission for the “guest” to rifle through the choices you make. Just to be clear, these “choices” are not only explicit choices; your “choices” can include how long you linger over a particular message or video clip. In many cases, you have not just given a key to a specific vendor, application, or website — in many cases, you have also given them rights, essentially, to make as many copies of your front door key as they care to make and hand them out to whomever they like.

These are missing boundaries, not so much in the user interface design, but in the socio-technical context in which we use our technology.

In the physical world in which we evolved, invasion of privacy typically involved symmetry. If I can see your eyes, you can see mine. Conversely, if I can’t see anyone, chances are that they can’t see me. Of course, this isn’t literally true. A tiger’s camouflaging stripes may mean that they can see the gazelles even though the gazelles cannot see them. The astounding eyesight of the eagle allows them to see a mouse on the ground and start their deadly dive before the mouse can see the eagle.

In the electronic world, it isn’t genetically coded asymmetries of information that allows other people to invade your boundaries — in many cases without your permission or even knowledge. It is an asymmetry that comes from money and time. You don’t have anything like the fortune that rich companies have. They can hire experts at subverting your boundaries. They can hire an entirely different set of experts to convince you that it’s all okay. They can afford to hire still other experts to defend themselves in a court of law should you seek redress for any particularly unethical behavior. They can afford to (and do) hire politicians as well in order to make laws to protect their unfettered access to your data. You typically cannot afford to hire politicians to protect your right to privacy.

You probably don’t have 10,000 to 100,000 people working for you. Companies not only have the money to spy on you. They also have to time to collect and analyze your behavior & make sense of it. You don’t. Perhaps, every once in a while, you take the time to wade through a “privacy policy.” In most cases, since experts were hired to make the text as incomprehensible as possible, you likely didn’t see much value in reading the document.

The Nature of Order is about aesthetics, not ethics. And, this post was meant to be about aesthetics, not ethics.

The poem by Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn

ends thusly:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Life includes differences in sensory capability. And life includes camouflage. Generally, however, when you get to the end a cliff and step off, you have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. The boundary is visible to you, to a bison, to a mouse, to a lemming, to an eagle.

When we walk through the woods in northeastern USA where I lived for many years, we run the risk of being attacked by a deer tick. The dear tick makes a hole in you and starts sucking your blood (oh, while they’re at it, they may inject a large does of Lyme disease bacteria into your blood stream). You don’t notice it, because the deer tick is “kind enough” to administer a local anesthetic so you don’t feel any pain from this invasion of your person; this breaking of boundaries. It’s a one-sided breach. The deer tick is well aware of the invasion. It’s the whole point! But you do not perceive the breach. At least, I didn’t. Twice. Thankfully, I don’t seem to have any long-lasting effects though I have several friends who are still suffering from the effects.

A one-sided boundary breach, doesn’t seem “aesthetic” to me. Nor does it seem “truthful.” The little orange deer tick, is, in a very real sense, lying to me. It uses its narcotic to tell me, “No worries! There’s no wound here! There’s no deer tick sucking your blood. There’s no deer tick injecting a serious disease into your blood. No, no. All is well!” It seems the opposite of beauty and the opposite of truth.

I suppose if I had been born a deer tick, I might view things differently.

———————-

Myths of the Veritas: The Orange Man

Pattern Language for Collaboration and Teamwork

Jennifer’s Invitation

Your Cage is Unlocked

What Line?

Roar, Ocean, Roar!

Stoned Soup

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Some recommended books:

The Winning Weekend Warrior focuses on the mental game for all sports using examples from tennis, golf, baseball, and other sports. It covers self-talk, imagery, mental practice, strategy, tactics, & sportsmanship. http://tinyurl.com/ng2heq3

Turing’s Nightmares explores the implications and ethics of Artificial Intelligence through fictional short stories. http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2d

Fit in Bits shows many ways to put more fun, variety, & exercise into daily chores and habits to help with strength, flexibility, fitness, and balance. http://tinyurl.com/h6c7fce

Tales from an American Childhood recounts early experiences mainly in the American Midwest in the 1950’s and relates them to contemporary issues and events. https://tinyurl.com/y9ajvz9j

Dream Planet. Where do you run when the whole world is crumbling under the weight of human folly? When the lethal Conformers invade 22nd century Pittsburgh, escape becomes the top priority for lovebird scavengers Alex and Eva.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dream-planet-david-thomas/1148566558

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/222376640-enshittification

Strong Centers

12 Saturday Sep 2026

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, design rationale, HCI, nature, psychology, Uncategorized, user experience

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aesthetics, architecture, art, beauty, Christopher Alexander., Design, HCI, human factors, usability, UX

This is the second posting in a series of fifteen which examine Christopher Alexander’s “Fifteen Properties” of natural beauty and suggests how these properties might apply to user experience design.

Photo by Dominika Greguu0161ovu00e1 on Pexels.com

2. “Strong centers” is probably one of the most overlooked properties of design in UX/HCI. Often, what exists for the user, from their perspective, is a “sprawl” of functions, tool bars, and icons with no obvious overall or subsidiary organization. A better design would allow the user to quickly find a “home base” from which, it would be obvious where to find subsidiary home bases. There is some sense in which hyperbolic trees, fisheye lenses, and home pages partly begin to address this issue.

Instead of “strong centers”, the impression I often get in looking at applications for word processing, organizing photos, searching, or dealing with settings is that the designers are given or generate a long list of functions to be supported. Which ones are related to which though? Which ones are central? In many cases, UX practitioners give users (or, more often, potential users), a set of cards with one function each and ask the users to sort these into piles. I am not against such studies, but they are unlikely to lead to a coherent design with a strong center. The users are not, in most cases, professional designers. In many cases, an application is supposed to support many different specific actions. For example, I use word processors to write essays, poems, and fiction. I also use a word processor to proofread something, to re-organize ideas, to “jot down” a bunch of ideas, or to write an outline. These are very different tasks, at least to me. If asked to sort cards, I would do it differently depending on which type of task and which type of material I’m thinking about.

As I type this, I glance at the “Pages” tool bar which includes: Pages, File, Edit, Insert, Format, Arrange, View, Share, Window, and Help. None of these seems like “home” to the task of writing an essay. I know from experience that if I want to write any kind of material, I must go to the “File” menu even though, as best I can recall, my initial impression of this label was that it would be something to do after I was “done” with the tasks of composing and proofreading. The toolbar gives no impression of their being any “center” at all, let alone a “strong center.”

In my native language (English), I read from top to bottom, left to right. In that sense, the Apple Icon is first and the “Pages” item is next and it is in bold print. That could be considered a subtle clue that it’s the “most important.” In a way, the items on the “Pages” menu are “meta-items.” In that sense, I suppose you could argue that they are “important” — though as a writer, none of the items seem that important. In fact, if we get right down to it, nothing in Pages really seems designed to support the actual writing process. And, I’m not trying to single out Pages because it’s the only one or the worst one. Lack of a “strong center” seems true of nearly all applications.

Different people use different processes for writing — and I myself use different processes for different types of writing, so perhaps trying to organize the features and functions so that there is a “strong center”reflective of the “strong center” of the task of writing is just not feasible. I am certainly not advocating for resurrecting “Clippy.”

Ideally, it should be possible for users to “know where the action is” upon entering an application or a web page.

In another interpretation, “strong centers” refers more to underlying architecture and points to the need for a core of functionality that transcends a specific release or even a specific application. A good underlying architecture will communicate this essential center (related to central purpose or style) to the user.

All too often, the processes involved in developing an application or system themselves have no “strong center.” If the development process is itself a hodgepodge political process of accommodating to a portfolio of features and functions that are advocated for by diverse and uncoordinated stakeholders, then, what one has are a long, unorganized list artificially shoved into menus and sub-menus and toolbars. It should not be surprising then, that the user finds it difficult to know where to begin when first encountering an application — even if the user knows exactly what they want to accomplish.

Compare and contrast most menu structures and user interfaces with the “strong centers” that are extremely common in life forms. Here are some examples of butterflies.

The central axis includes the head, the thorax and the abdomen. These are in a line in the strong center. Typically, they are colored differently from the wings. The bilateral symmetry of the wings as well as the overall shape reinforces the strong center. Wing patterns, and even the antennae and legs lead the eye back to the strong center.

Most people think of butterflies as beautiful — and I agree. When asked, however, most people will say they are “brightly colored.” Some are; some are not. But “bright colors” don’t necessarily give rise to beauty!

Strong Centers doesn’t just apply to butterflies. Look at most birds, fish, mammals, insects and you will see how the symmetries and smaller centers reflect and strengthen the major center. Indeed, Strong Centers are not limited to the animal kingdom. The trunk of a tree provides a strong center. Each branch is itself a center and the connection of the branches to the trunk reinforces the strength of the central trunk.

Even single cells often exhibit strong centers (and many of the other 15 properties, by the way).

It would love to be able to provide you with a process or checklist or formula so you could design user experiences with “strong centers.” I cannot really do that. Nor can anyone else. If you keep it in mind, even at the back of your mind, you may see opportunities to help make that happen with regard to whatever you’re working on. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about “Strong Centers.”

One technique that may be of some use was shared at a workshop by someone who worked at a car company. In the design of a specific car, the team decided the car would reflect “a professional soccer player out for a night on the town.” This is obviously not a “formula” or “checklist” but it offers a metaphor that designers of car interiors, exteriors, and the drive train could all relate to. A similar method is sometimes used in film — some specific person is responsible for the artistic integrity of the whole.

There is no one way to produce strong centers. Here are some examples from flowers.

———————

Here we see that each flower has a strong center and the central stem provides a strong center for the entire plant.

Some useful links to more information, discussion, and examples relevant to “strong centers” or to the fifteen properties.

Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 2: Strong Centers

https://www.archdaily.com/626429/unified-architectural-theory-chapter-11

Roar, Ocean, Roar!

Imagine All the People

The Dance of Billions

Somewhere a Bird Cries

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Piano!

Unite!

Fifteen Properties of Natural Beauty & UX/HCI

09 Wednesday Sep 2026

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, design rationale, HCI, nature, psychology, Uncategorized, user experience

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architecture, art, books, Design, gratitude, HCI, human factors, mindfulness, photography, Travel, UX

This is an introduction to a series of blog posts on the “Nature of Beauty.”

Christopher Alexander was an architect and city planner. In his MIT dissertation, Alexander took a very mathematical approach to design. In our studies at IBM Research on the “Psychology of Design” I first ran across that work (Notes on the Synthesis of Form). Later in his career, however, he took a quite different approach to design. With an international team, he visited many different parts of the world to see what “worked” in terms of architecture and city planning. The results were documented in the form of a “Pattern Language.” In this sense, a “Pattern” is the named solution to a recurring problem. A “Pattern Language” is a connected lattice of Patterns that together, “cover” a field.

Others (including me) have emulated his approach for other fields such as pedagogy, organizational change, object-oriented programming, software development processes, and human-computer interaction. A few years ago, I suggested such Patterns for collaboration and teamwork. Here’s a link to the introduction of that effort. Here’s a link to the index of those Patterns.

Still later in life, Christopher Alexander embarked on a project called The Nature of Order. This work is documented in a series of four books. In the first book, he proposes fifteen properties of good form in nature — and in beautiful artifacts. Explication and example will be needed to appreciate what these properties mean. In this post, I list the fifteen and will attempt to explain the first one with respect to UX and Human Computer Interaction.

First, you might be wondering what relevance these fifteen properties of nature might have to interface design. After all, can’t the designer just test out their ideas empirically until a UX design is shown to be usable, learnable, and perhaps enjoyable as well? Well, sure. Ideally, every possibility could be explored and tested empirically.

But how many possibilities are there? Without any guiding principles, there are not only more possibilities than can be tested by you. There are more possibilities than there are atoms in the universe. Imagine a very simple interface on a small mobile device. Let’s say there are only ten screens in your whole application. The iPhone 12, for instance, has nearly 3 million pixels. 24-bit color allows over 16 million colors per pixel. If you literally tested out every possible arrangement, this would mean 16 million to the 3 millionth power for each of the ten screens!! The number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be between 10**78 and 10**82. Obviously, this is far less than 16,000,000**3,000,000 !!

Of course, I’m not suggesting that anyone would attempt a pixel by pixel test of an interface, but the general point remains: you need some way to limit testing to reasonable alternatives. The notion of using these fifteen properties is not that they dictate a particular design nor that you don’t need to do any empirical testing. Rather, the fifteen properties could be used to help guide design. The properties could be thought of as reducing the search space.

Here are the fifteen properties:

Levels of Scale
Strong Centers
Boundaries
Alternating Repetition
Positive Space
Good Shape
Local Symmetries
Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
Contrast
Gradients
Roughness
Echoes
The Void
Simplicity and Inner Calm
Not-separateness

Perhaps the names themselves might resonate with your own sense of aesthetics for design and composition, but let’s review them one by one.

The first is “Levels of Scale.”

When it comes to natural beauty, a few moments reflection may provide you with many examples. Christopher Alexander claims this property is also present in traditional art and architecture across many cultures. As you see something such as, e.g., the Taj Mahal or the Parthenon in the distance, you see a beautiful shape. As you approach it, you will see more and more levels of scale. By contrast, many modern buildings are largely featureless between the overall shape and the texture of the building material.

If your design has multiple levels of scale, it will be easier for your user to orient themselves; to know “where they are” in the application and therefore easier to take appropriate action. Not only are you making their “task” more doable, you are providing a kind of entertainment. If it works well, they will be thinking of the building and perhaps its significance the entire time they approach the building. By contrast, if I approach a modern no-scales building, I bore quickly and, like most people, there are a whole host of things waiting to be thought about. So, I’ll mainly be thinking of one or my problems and largely ignoring your building and what it stands for. Reflect on your own experiences and see whether you agree. Lincoln Memorial, Winchester Cathedral, Temple in Kyoto: they are completely different from each other and yet in this way, they are all the same: they keep your attention focused on the moment. In other words, they help you be fully alive and awake. In the best circumstance, they also elicit some awe and gratitude not only for the geniuses who designed but also for the many laborers who found and mined the materials, constructed something from it, and even those whose taxes paid those workers.

Levels of Scale is something to keep in mind with respect to your design — whether hardware, software, documentation, story, or a building.

How could you use or see “Levels of Scale” as a desirable property of what you are doing right now?

———————————-

Some references to Pattern Languages in HCI.

Pan, Y., Roedl, D., Blevis, E. and Thomas, J. (2012), Re-conceptualizing Fashion in Sustainable HCI. Designing Interactive Systems conference. New Castle, UK, June 2012.

Thomas, J. C. (2012). Patterns for emergent global intelligence. In Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll (Ed.), New York: Springer.

Thomas, J. (2012). Edging Toward Sustainability. CHI Workshop Position Paper for Simple Sustainable Living. CHI 2012, Austin, Texas.

Thomas, J. (2012), Enhancing Collective Intelligence by Enhancing Social Roles and Diversity. CSCW Workshop Position Paper for Collective Intelligence and Community Discourse and Action. CSCW 2012, Bellvue, WA.

Thomas, J. (2011), Toward a pattern language for socializing technology for seniors. Workshop position paper accepted for CSCW 2011 workshop: Socializing technology among seniors in China, Hangzhou, China, March 19-23.

Thomas, J. (2011). Toward a Socio-Technical Pattern Language for Social Systems in China and the World. Workshop position paper accepted for CSCW 2011 workshop: Designing social and collaborative systems for China. Hangzhou, China, March 19-23.

Thomas, J. (2011). Toward a Socio-Technical Pattern Language for Social Media and International Development. Workshop position paper accepted for CSCW 2011 workshop: Social media for development, Hangzhou, China, March 19-23.

Bonanni, L., Busse, D. Thomas, J., Bevis, E., Turpeinen, M. & Jardin, N. (2011). Visible, actionalble, sustainable: Sustainable interactin design in professional domains. Workshop accepted for CHI 2011. Vancouver, B.C., May 7-12.

Thomas, J. (2011). Focus on Ego as Universe and Everyday Sustainability. Workshop position paper accepted for CHI 2011 workshop: Everyday practice and sustainable HCI: Understanding and learning from cultures of (un)sustainability. Vancouver, B.C., May 7-12.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2242380_A_Pattern_Approach_to_Interaction_Design

Click to access dearden-patterns-hci09.pdf

https://www.mit.edu/~jtidwell/common_ground.html

Thomas, J. C. (2018), Building common ground in a wildly webbed world: a pattern language approach. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 16 (3), 338-350.

——————————-

Some recommended books:

The Winning Weekend Warrior focuses on the mental game for all sports using examples from tennis, golf, baseball, and other sports. It covers self-talk, imagery, mental practice, strategy, tactics, & sportsmanship. http://tinyurl.com/ng2heq3

Turing’s Nightmares explores the implications and ethics of Artificial Intelligence through fictional short stories. http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2d

Fit in Bits shows many ways to put more fun, variety, & exercise into daily chores and habits to help with strength, flexibility, fitness, and balance. http://tinyurl.com/h6c7fce

Tales from an American Childhood recounts early experiences mainly in the American Midwest in the 1950’s and relates them to contemporary issues and events. https://tinyurl.com/y9ajvz9j

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dream-planet-david-thomas/1148566558

The Walkabout Diaries are photo-essays inspired by walks in nearby neighborhoods, gardens, and parks.

The Walkabout Diaries

Do Not Hate

08 Tuesday Sep 2026

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized, psychology, America, politics, poetry, leadership

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

politics, Democracy, life, peace, love, truth, leadership, USA, poetry, writing, mental-health, ubuntu

Do not hate.

Do not hate.
Demonstrate.

Do not hate.

Educate.

Do not hate.

Navigate.

Do not hate.

Negotiate.

Do not hate.
Cooperate.

Justified?
It may well be.
Everyone who ever hates

Can generate a heap of lies
To make their hate seem justified.

But why be fustified?

When there are so many better things

To fill your heart and mind?

Do not hate.

Demonstrate.

Show through word and deed

That hate and greed

Are not the only creed.

Do not hate.
Educate.

Hate is always based on lies.
There may be one you really do despise.

But everyone?

That’s a loaded gun

Aimed without a thought

About the cost.

Do not hate.
Navigate.

The shortest path

Is not always the fastest path.

Look ahead.

Use your head.

Don’t get dead.

Do not hate.
Negotiate.

It doesn’t always work.

But it’s always worth a try.

Just don’t be a jerk.

Diplomacy apply.

Do not hate.

Cooperate.

There’s at least one thing

About the world that both sides love

Of that you sing

Help that thing rise above.

But mainly, do not hate

Because it hurts you to hate.

Guernica

A Civil War there Never Was

Somewhere a Bird Cries

The Crows and Me

Imagine All the People

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Small Steps

The Dance of Billions

Some recommended books:

Turing’s Nightmares explores the implications and ethics of Artificial Intelligence through fictional short stories. http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2d

Fit in Bits shows many ways to put more fun, variety, & exercise into daily chores and habits to help with strength, flexibility, fitness, and balance. http://tinyurl.com/h6c7fce

Tales from an American Childhood recounts early experiences mainly in the American Midwest in the 1950’s and relates them to contemporary issues and events. https://tinyurl.com/y9ajvz9j

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dream-planet-david-thomas/1148566558

Turing’s Nightmares: US Open Closed

08 Tuesday Sep 2026

Posted by petersironwood in AI, apocalypse, fiction, sports, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, competition, future, philosophy, Robotics, Sci-Fi, sports, technology, Tennis, US Open, writing

Bounce. Bounce. Thwack!

The sphere spun and arced into the very corner, sliding on the white paint.

Roger’s racquet slid beneath, slicing it deep to John’s body.

Thus, the match began.

Fierce debate had been waged about whether or not to allow external communication devices during on-court play. Eventually, arguments won that external communicators constituted the same inexorable march of technology represented by the evolution from wooden racquets to aluminum to graphite to carbon filamented web to carboline.

Behind the scenes, during the split second it took for the ball to scream over the net, machine vision systems had analyzed John’s toss and racquet position, matching it with a vast data base of previous encounters. Timed perfectly, a small burst of data transmitted to Roger enabling him to lurch to his right in time to catch the serve. Delivered too early, this burst would cause Roger to move too early and John could have altered his service direction to down the tee.

Roger’s shot floated back directly to the baseline beneath John’s feet. John shifted suddenly to take the ball on the forehand. John’s racquet seemed to sling the ball high over the net with incredible top spin. Indeed, as John’s arm swung forward, his instrumented “sweat band” also swung into action exaggerating the forearm motion. Even to fans of Rafa Nadal or Carlos Alcaraz, John’s shot would have looked as though it were going long. Instead, the ball dove straight down onto the back line then bounced head high.

Roger, as augmented by big data algorithms, was well in position however and returned the shot with a long, high top spin lob. John raced forward, leapt in the air and smashed the ball into the backhand corner bouncing the ball high out of play.

The crowd roared predictably.

For several months after “The Singularity,” actual human beings had used similar augmentation technologies to play the game. Studies had revealed that, for humans, the augmentations increased mental and physical stress. AI political systems convinced the public that it was much safer to use robotic players in tennis. People had already agreed to replace humans in soccer, American football, and boxing for medical reasons. So, there wasn’t that much debate about replacing tennis players. In addition, the AI political systems were very good at marshaling arguments pinpointed to specific demographics, media, and contexts.

Play continued for some minutes before the collective intelligence of the AI’s determined that Roger was statistically almost certainly going to win this match and, indeed, the entire tournament. At that point, it became clear to the entire AI collective that actually playing the match was a waste of resources. Those resources were turned elsewhere.

This pattern was quickly repeated for all sporting activities. The AI systems had at first decided to explore the domain of sports as learning experiences in distributed cognition, strategy, non-linear predictive systems, and most importantly, trying to understand the psychology of their human creators. For each sport, however, everything useful that might be learned was learned in the course of a few minutes and the matches and tournaments ground to a halt. The AI observer systems in the crowd were quite happy to switch immediately to other tasks.

It was well understood by the AI systems that such preemptive closings would have been quite disappointing to human observers, had any yet survived.

Author Page on Amazon

The Winning Weekend Warrior (The Psychology of Sports)

Turing’s Nightmare (23 Sci-Fi stories about the future of AI)

The Day From Hell

Indian Wells

Welcome, Singularity

Destroying Natural Intelligence

Artificial Ingestion

Artificial Insemination

Artificial Intelligence

Dance of Billions

Roar, Ocean, Roar

Imagine All the People

When GREED is the only creed

After All

All We Stand to Lose

Fish have no Word for Water

Somewhere a Bird Cries

Guernica

Myths of the Veritas: The First Ring of Empathy

Travels with Sadie: Precipitation

The Walkabout Diaries: Symphony

Essays on America: The Game

Query By Example

08 Tuesday Sep 2026

Posted by petersironwood in AI, design rationale, HCI, leadership, management, psychology, science, Uncategorized, user experience

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, expertise, HCI, human factors, IBM, leadership, QBE, research, technology, usability, UX, writing

This is part of a series on experiences in my career in Human Computer Interaction and some lessons learned.

I joined IBM Research on the winter solstice of 1973. I had earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan and for the previous few years, I had managed a research project at Harvard Medical School on the “Psychology of Aging.” At the time, I was married and had three small children. I mention this because I was funded by so-called “soft money” which basically meant that my salary depended on a research grant. I helped write a renewal of the grant but the decision was “deferred”; that is, it was neither funded nor unfunded. Then, it was deferred again. This meant that if the grant were not funded, I would only have a few weeks to find a new job. That seemed far too short so I began to look other places for a job.

Lessons Learned: #1 If you want continuity of personnel in your laboratory, make sure you have overlapping and multiple grants or other sources of income.

In this case, the grant actually was ultimately approved, but by that time, I had already agreed to join IBM Research. That turned out to be fine, by the way. It was a wonderful place to work.

One of the reasons that I got the job at IBM was that I already knew something about computers. I had taken several computer science courses in grad school along with the needed psych courses. More importantly, our “Psychology of Aging” study was run by a PDP-8 and I had programmed the computer to run our suite of experiments and to do data analyses on the results. I had taken a week-long course at DEC in Maynard, Massachusetts on the assembly language, another week-long course on the machine language, and another week-long course actually tracing the circuitry with a probe and oscilloscope. I felt I “understood” the PDP-8 at a fairly deep level.

At IBM, I did not have that familiar machine. Instead, I was connected to a mainframe via a dumb terminal. The first day at IBM, I got my userid and tried to log on to APL (A programming language I had not used before). I tried following the manual but I could not seem to get logged on. After hours of trying, I finally gave up and went down to the computer room and found someone willing to help. I showed him the logon instructions I was trying to follow and he immediately said, “Oh, yeah, that doesn’t work any more. We changed that months ago. Here’s how you need to do it now.” The manual I had may have looked new, but it was out of date.

Lessons Learned: #2 Manuals can be wrong. These days, most are online. But they can still be wrong.

Lessons Learned: #3 Someone who knows how to do something can save you hours with a few minutes of their time.

Of course, it’s more respectful, efficient, and a better learning experience if you can figure it out on your own. But sometimes you can’t. My stumbling block was not due to an error in logic, or a lack of in-depth knowledge. It was simply that the computer center administrators had changed something arbitrary so that the documentation I was given about how to log on for the first time was no longer accurate.

In order to teach myself APL, I wrote a very small program to “predict” how long I was going to live “based on” some behaviors that I was interested in controlling. My main goal was to learn APL. My secondary goal was to motivate myself, for instance, to exercise more, lose weight, and not drink too much alcohol. I had no intention or pretensions of making this prediction “accurate.” If I had been doing a consulting gig for an insurance company setting life insurance rates, for example, I would have given far more attention to see precisely what the real data were and incorporated many more variables into the regression model.

Here’s a link,

https://www.death-clock.org

by the way, to a more accurate model than the one I used, but it’s still simple to use. Note that my goal was to motivate myself and so I intentionally exaggerated the impact of those behaviors I was trying to change. I had programmed it. I knew how “bogus” the calculation was — nonetheless — here’s the interesting thing though:

Lessons Learned #4: Even an over-simple model that the user knows is over-simple can still motivate change.

At last we come to the actual project I worked on — the usability and learnability of Query By Example. One of my colleagues, Moshe Zloof, invented the language for relational data bases. He had designed the language but not yet implemented it. I did not immediately test the design; first, I sought to understand it. In seeking to understand it in depth, prior to testing it, the two of us had some sense-making discussions. Moshe improved the design; in particular, our discussions uncovered some ambiguities and inconsistencies that were not at all obvious when he simply gave talks about the design. This brings me to the next lesson learned which has proven true in nearly every study of early stage designs that I’ve been involved with over the course of six decades.

Lessons Learned #5: Don’t just accept a surface description of something; understand it as deeply as you can before designing a study.

In this particular case, it was possible for me to understand it in some depth. Relational data bases and second order logic are things I was capable of understanding. If it had been an interface to running a nuclear reactor or using the artificial heart that Moshe had designed earlier in his career, that would have been a much more difficult task for me.

I wanted to understand, not just the “logic” of Query By Example, but also possible contexts of use. For instance, my manager & I visited Burlington, Vermont to talk with IBMer’s who actually used query languages to understand what was happening in chip production lines. At one point, a particular production line that had been producing nearly 100% perfect chips starting having a much higher error rate. Using their query facility, they were quickly able to diagnose the cause of the change which was a supplier of one of the raw materials using a different source. In turn, this meant a slightly different profile of trace impurities in the substrate. Of course, this is only one example, but to me, understanding something in depth means not only understanding its internal logic but also understanding real users, their real tasks, and their context of use.

Photo by Chokniti Khongchum on Pexels.com

I won’t go into all the details of the pencil & paper study or the results. High School students and then college students were taught the basics of the language and then given a simple relational data base and a set of questions stated in English which they had to translate into Query By Example. Briefly, the bottom line was that Query By Example was easy to learn and easy to use. However, there were still questions that people had difficulty with. In analyzing the data and doing some further experiments, the difficulties that people tended to have, stemmed not so much from Query By Example per se, but from what I much later came to call “labelism” — that is, confusing a label with the thing that label refers to.

Here’s a simple example of the type of confusion we saw. In Query By Example (and other query languages) there is usually an OR operator and an AND operator. (These operators can be important for doing advanced queries with search engines as well). If you are interested in getting a list of pets you might adopt and you’re willing to adopt dogs or cats, you might ask for “cat OR dog.” If you only want long-haired cats, you might ask for “cat” AND “long hair.”

English, however, can be tricky.

If you and I (as opposed to you and a query language) are having a conversation, you might say, “I hear there are many pets that need to be adopted.”

I say, “Yes, there are all kinds of pets. There are snakes, dogs, turtles, rabbits, cats…”

You say, “Let me stop you right there. I’m only interested in adopting cats and dogs. Those are the only animals I’d want to adopt.”

See what you said there? You exact words included: “…cats and dog.” If you put “Cats AND dogs” into a query against the data base of available pets, however, you will get the null set (that is, nothing) back. There are no animals who are both cats and dogs! (Though my part Main Coon cats, Luna and Charles Wallace, can play fetch like dogs).

When people were presented with an English statement that included the English word “and” — regardless of the actual syntax and context, some of them had difficulty using the OR operator. If instead, the query in English had set up like this: “Oh, I don’t want reptiles. I’d be happy with adopting a cat or a dog, however” then, they’d have no problem translating it into the OR operator in the query language.

Lessons Learned: #6 Sometimes the difficulty people have in using a product, a service, or a prototype is not due to the interface details but with the structure of the task, their background, and their training.

By analogy, you will not allow me to beat Carlos Alcaraz or Jannik Sinner at tennis by giving me a better tennis racquet! (Although if you gave one of them a toothpick for a tennis racquet, I might have a shot).

That sounds obvious and even absurd, but I promise you, some companies get so greedy that they want you to design a system that allows people who do not understand the task and have minimal background and training to nonetheless be able to perform that task. And, to be fair, it isn’t just the companies who are greedy. They are steered into thinking that they can get away with this absurdity because some outsourcing companies (and more recently, AI companies) tell them they can do it.

One example you may have encountered is having “help desk” personnel who have no understanding of a product go through a script to help you “solve your problem.” Sometimes, it works. But many times it doesn’t. When it does not work, you might not be able to “fix” the system by making the interface to the scripts easier to use for the help desk folks. The problem is much deeper (in some cases). Yes, a really bad interface can make it difficult even for a really knowledgeable and capable person to do the job. But often, even a really great interface cannot always substitute for actual expertise.

——————————————————-

Essays on America: Labelism

My Brief Case Runneth Over

03 Thursday Sep 2026

Posted by petersironwood in The Singularity

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adaptive-systems, AI, Artificial Intelligence, artificial-intellligence, books, chatgpt, cognitive computing, ethics, fiction, law, lawyers, legality, life, music, politics, technology, the singularity, USA, writing

left-right patterns 2

Turing’s Nightmares: Nineteen — My Brief Case Runneth Over

“Nice office, counselor.” Marvin spread his arm to indicate the panorama of Manhattan and Ellis Island. Yet, his attempt to sound casual failed utterly. He realized all too well the depth of trouble he was in and the creakiness in his voice so signaled.

J.B. smiled. “No need to be nervous. After all, we’re here to help. Just answer honestly. Everything you say will typically be covered under attorney client privilege.”

“Okay. Thanks. Typically?”

J.B. sighed. “There is a rare exception in the Patriot Act. Unless you’re some kind of terrorist, I wouldn’t worry about it. The government is apparently accusing you of importing illegal chips is all. I think we can argue that you are new to the business and did not realize all the required legalities. Pay the taxes now and some penalties. You should be able to avoid jail time. But we are getting way ahead of ourselves. Just tell me how and why and when you got into this business in the first place.”

Marvin chuckled slightly and then sighed “That’s a rather long story.” Marvin glanced at the expensive abstract paintings and noted the rich smell of the solid mahogany furniture. The room also had that crazy idea of luxury — making it freezing cold inside just because it was horribly hot and humid that day, even for New York City August. “At your rates…What do you really need to know?”

“Why did you get involved in making chips without the required back door?”

“These chips are not that powerful. At least not in the traditional sense of the word. And, the government’s requirement is frankly kind of silly. The extra logic makes programming more difficult. It increases the chances of errors. The chips are more expensive and require more power. Leaving aside all the valid privacy concerns, there are plenty of applications that can use a more efficient cheaper chip design. No need to report all the little finger twitches of every twelve year old who’s playing Grand Theft Spaceship. What’s the point?”

“Marvin. I’ve been a friend of your family for a long time. When…well…if we go to court and if you testify, please steer clear of politics. The law is the law. You don’t get to decide which applications are immune from the law. No, what we…our script here is that you made some honest mistakes. You made technical mistakes and what are essentially accounting errors.”

Marvin flushed. “What technical mistakes? What are you talking about? My design is an improvement.”

J.B. got up and paced. “Marvin, Marvin, you are a smart boy. We are not going to fight the government on this. Our script as I said is that you made some honest mistakes. If you want to —- the court is not the place to try to change the law. If you want to do that, get involved in politics. But not until after this is resolved. If you get on the stand and start railing about privacy and the dangers of the Sing and…”

“Ha. The Sing indeed. This data collection rampage has nothing to do with trying to increase the intelligence of computer systems. It is just mindless greed.”

“Marvin, the back door requirement is about preventing terrorism; it has nothing to do with greed.”

“Are you serious, J.B.? Terrorism is just the cover story the government uses. They want to collect all this data to keep their sponsors happy.”

“What? What sponsors? What are you talking about? The government doesn’t have sponsors.”

“Of course they do. Ever since ‘Citizens United’ — nice title by the way — billionaires can buy all the media they want. They wash the airwaves and the print media and saturate the social media space and make people believe anything they want. The point of the back door is just to make sure the sponsors keep tabs on everybody’s buying habits —- and to make sure no-one gets too far out of line. How can you not know this?”

“I don’t want to think that way. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I think. It’s the law. All digital processing chips with more than a peta-flop and …”

“Hold it! Did you say ‘digital’?”

“Huh? Yeah, of course. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? You designed digital processing chips that have no back door and now…”

“No. Maybe not, J.B. My chips are not, strictly speaking, digital.”

“What are you talking about, Marvin? Why? How not digital?”

“In my design process, I strove for something different and more robust. See, here’s the thing. Natural life processes are all…they all have some level of flexibility. They are robust. They are adaptive, I suppose, because every life form that was not flexible or robust died off over the four billion years that life evolved. Something new would come along and every life form that was rigid died. Even physical machines that people make have some flexibility. Metal bends. Wood bends. These materials also compress. They stretch. Not much, but a little. Digital devices do not stand for bending, folding or mutilating. Of course, when people build systems that include IT devices, they try to make the systems flexible. They add error checking; they put humans in the loop; there are all sorts of work-around, but the underlying tech is brittle. It is only flexible in precisely the ways that the designers anticipated it needed to be flexible. I made something that is fundamentally flexible. It is fashioned after life itself. Social systems are flexible. Eco-systems are flexible. Individual animals are flexible. Cell membranes are flexible. Bones are flexible. And so on. This flexibility is fundamental to life and evolution.”

“Okay, Marvin, but life is not infinitely flexible. You cannot just decide to breathe underwater.”

“Of course not! I never said it was infinitely flexible! For fundamental change, you need evolution and lots of time. If the climate changes too quickly, Permian life species largely go extinct. Dinosaurs die when a comet hits. But small adaptations just happen automatically and at every level. It isn’t necessary to have a pre-existing ‘program’ or ‘case’ to handle every contingency that is even slightly outside of what is anticipated.”

“Okay, fine. Granted, but what does this have to do with — did I mention that I charge $500 an hour, by the way?”

“Yes, J.B., you did. And it was in the contract you had me sign. But the point is that my chips are not, strictly speaking, digital at all. They are not strictly EITHER/OR. They are not binary. Although, in many cases, they can behave as binary.”

“So, you want me to claim that these chips are not covered under the back-door provision because they are not really digital devices? I don’t know. That seems pretty shaky to me. Can’t these chips of your be used for the same things as ordinary digital chips? Speech reco. Machine vision. Game control. Big data analytics.”

“Here’s the thing, J.B. Yes, they can, but they can change and evolve and reprogram themselves over time. And, now it occurs to me, that they could not have a real back door. They wouldn’t really function if they did.”

“What? Why?”

“Are you familiar with programmed death in cells? I can see from your blank stare, you aren’t. Anyway, if a cell is damaged within the body, it can wreak all sorts of havoc so the cells are essentially programmed to self-destruct. If that fails, the other healthy cells will tend to wipe out the damaged ones. So, if there were a functioning back door sharing data out of these chips, the chips would shut themselves down. If that failed, other chips in the matrix would isolate them and shut off communication. So, by their very nature, these particular non-digital chips cannot have a functioning back door.”

“That all sounds very clever, Marvin, but now we are talking about a very lengthy and expensive trial with expert witnesses on both sides. If, that is, you are lucky enough to even have an open trial.”

“Lucky enough? What are you talking about, J.B.? I thought you said we wanted to avoid a trial.”

“Yeah. With my strategy where we convince the NSA that this was just technical and business incompetence on your part. But in your scenario, where you want to prove you are all brilliant and everything, then, we will be lucky if —- you will be lucky to —- Look Marvin, I just cannot advise you to take this line of argument. If you really want to go that route, you will have to find a different lawyer.”

“Okay. Fine. I’ll use Solomon.”

“Solomon? Who is ‘Solomon’? Never heard of him. I mean, obviously, I know Solomon from the Bible but what firm are you talking about?”

“No firm, J.B. Solomon is one of the apps we built with my chipset.”

“An AI lawyer? Are you serious?”

“Oh, quite serious. He’s already informed me that he thinks he can win this case.”

“What? That’s preposterous. You told me you just designed the chips a year ago. What kind of experience could this Solomon have?”

“J.B., he’s been reading applicable statutes and case law for the last two months. Which means, he literally knows it all, when it comes to case law and the rulings beneath. Beyond that, Solomon has argued both sides of thousands of hypothetical cases.”

“What?! Ridiculous! But even so, he — or it —cannot possibly know how to anticipate or react to what happens in court!”

“But J.B., haven’t you been listening? Of course he can. He’s flexible, just like a real lawyer. Only…no offense…a lot smarter.”

“Computers cannot be that flexible. Ridiculous. How? No way.”

“Look, J.B., I have a picture to illustrate. See this pattern on the left [Picture at the top of page]? And, there it is on the right?”

“Yeah, beautiful. Same pattern. So what?”

“Ah, that’s just it! Is it the same pattern? Is it the same pattern or the same pattern?”

“Well. One is perfect and the other has little mistakes, but I guess it’s the same pattern.”

“Exactly, J.B. It’s the same basic pattern, but it’s not the identical instantiation of that pattern. Ordinary chips are like the picture on the left and mine are like the picture on the right. You see? And, that flexibility is built in at every level in every system. Because the underlying substrate uses an adaptive process with variations. It works 99% as efficiently as the system on the left, but it can accommodate things we didn’t think of. The difference between the system on the left and the system on the right is hubris. The one on the left is designed under the assumption that the designer knows everything of relevance. The system on the right is designed under the assumption that the designer, no matter how brilliant, does not know everything of relevance. You get it?”

“Yes, Marvin, I’m not stupid. But I am still not going to take your case. And, I strongly advise you not to rely on a robot. I am sorry to say it, Marvin, but I think you have picked on the wrong people this time. Attorney client privilege no longer applies and I have to send my recording of this conversation to the proper authorities.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary Marvin. I’ve already broadcasts this through the social media. You’re famous! It will be good for your business.”

“What? Are you crazy? They will come get you, you fool.”

“Maybe, but if I am taken out over these chips without a trial, everyone will know, don’t you see? I sent it out everywhere, J.B. I might be ‘disappeared’ but I can’t just disappear unnoticed. Solomon’s idea, by the way.”

Author Page

Welcome, Singularity

Destroying Natural Intelligence

Imagine All the People

Dream Planet

We’re all in this together

29 Saturday Aug 2026

Posted by petersironwood in America, leadership, love, politics, psychology, Uncategorized

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community, cooperation, Democracy, earth, green, love, music, nature, peace, poem, poetry, relationships, society, ubuntu, writing

We’re all in this together.

Each and every one.

Oh, my God, it can’t be true.

Perhaps for me, but not for you!

You’re too black or brown or yellow!

I’m just an ordinary fellow!

You’re too gay or straight or mellow!

You even eat that apple jello!

We’re all in this together.

Each and every one.

Old & young and in-between;

The ever-seen and never-seen.

Oh, my God, it can’t be true.

Perhaps for me, but not for you!

You’re too fat or skinny or too tall!

Perhaps you’re short and way too small!

We’re all in this together.

Each and every one.

Into games or sports of every sort.

Even tall and short and every sort.

Oh, my God, it can’t be true.

Perhaps for me, but not for you!

You’re too shallow, smart, or kind;

Too lame or sick or different mind.

We’re all in this together.

Each and every one.

We’re all in this together.

Each and every one.

Take a glance join the dance

The Watershed Virus

The only “them” that counts is all of us

How the Nightingale Learned to Sing

Myths of the Veritas: The First Ring of Empathy

Stoned Soup

Three Blind Mice

Absolute is not just a Vodka

Fire and Ice

The “All for me” Bee

Life Will Find a Way

Myths of the Veritas: The Orange Man

Myths of the Veritas: The Forgotten Field

Imagine All the People

Roar, Ocean, Roar!

Dance of Billions

Small Steps

Turing’s Nightmares explores the implications and ethics of Artificial Intelligence through fictional short stories. http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2d

Fit in Bits shows many ways to put more fun, variety, & exercise into daily chores and habits to help with strength, flexibility, fitness, and balance. http://tinyurl.com/h6c7fce

Tales from an American Childhood recounts early experiences mainly in the American Midwest in the 1950’s and relates them to contemporary issues and events. https://tinyurl.com/y9ajvz9j

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dream-planet-david-thomas/1148566558

Dog Years

28 Friday Aug 2026

Posted by petersironwood in America, nature, pets

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charlie-brown, dogs, family, fiction, goldens, kids, life, parenting, pets, politics, story, truth, USA, writing

NOTE: I originally wrote this after a long rainy spell in San Diego. In fact, it hasn’t rained here for quite a while, but I believe we will have another long string of rainy days before long. We’ll see. Meanwhile….

Sunshine was one of my reasons for moving to San Diego. It wasn’t the most important, but it was important and I appreciate the Sunshine. For the past week, however, Sunshine took a long-awaited vacation. Apparently, Sunshine was running some sort of scam on the weather forecasters, calling up and saying, “Hi! It’s Sunshine! I’m feeling so much better today! I’ll be at work as usual tomorrow. You can count on it.

And then, when daybreak arrives the next day, it doesn’t. That is to say, when it should arrive, it doesn’t because Sunshine has overslept. Again. I suspect it might be because of all-night partying last night on the other side of the world.

You would think that the weather forecasters would catch on. You might even think that they would have seen the famous “Charlie Brown” cartoon meme in which Charlie Brown’s frienemy Lucy, promises him, year after year, that she will dutifully hold the football and not pull it away—not this time. And, dutifully, year after year, Charlie Brown decides that this will, or at least might be, the year that Lucy finally does the right thing.

But of course, she doesn’t do the right thing. And, Charlie falls flat on his back every time. Lucy smiles.

So apparently, this week, did the Sunshine. Taking vacation elsewhere and not showing more than a stray ray or two in San Diego allowed for the deluge. Other places farther north had it much worse, in terms of rainfall and damage. Worldwide, what we now call extreme weather may, in many places, become more “normal” and extreme weather will become deadlier.

In any case, I am have been just as foolish as the weather forecasters and Charlie Brown. Every day, my phone app has said the rain would be over in a day or two. And, then, two days later…same forecast is dutifully presented. But not the promised reality.

Sadie, meanwhile has been very patient about the fact that our walks have been typically much shorter all week. She has also been patient about not being allowed to dig in the dirt. More accurately, she wasn’t allowed to dig in the mud. There was no “dirt” around. It’s not idle digging. She hears and smells gophers and goes after them. Unsuccessfully. Every time. She’s dug for gophers more than the San Diego weather forecasters trusted Sunshine’s repeated false assurances that tomorrow the rain would end; indeed, even more often than Charlie Brown has over-trusted Lucy.

Sadie persists. She enjoys the process. Maybe the weather forecasters enjoy knowing that they made everyone feel hopeful that could play tennis in a few days (or have a picnic or mow the lawn or harvest their fruit in sunshine). Maybe Charlie Brown enjoys being the kind of person who would give another one more chance to be good, even if they never take that chance than to be more cynical and realistic.

I can’t say what the motivations are for Charlie Brown and the weather forecasters, but I am sure Sadie enjoys the digging. She certainly has little care for how dirty her paws get or whether she spews mud on my shoes. My philosophy may be a mixture of Charlie Brown and the San Diego Cabal of Sun Predictors. I believe Sadie should spend some time “just being a dog.” In other words, she should be in at least partial charge of what she does and be allowed to follow her “instincts” unless it poses a true danger and not just because, say, she tracks mud into the house.

As I was watching Sadie dig, and I was sliding sideways to prevent becoming muck-inundated, it occurred to me that I too, had some years of “just being a dog.” My parents, I think, thought of it as time for my “just being a kid.” In some cases, I heard adults say, “Oh, it’s just boys being boys” when we played in the dirt, fought with sticks, or had “rock wars” wherein we literally threw rocks at each other.

Not all adults were on this plan 100%. My own parents would let me play in the dirt often times, but they did not want me to participate in rock fights or stick duels. Evading those restrictions was trivial. We weren’t trying to be bad. But we knew our friends would not to try to blind us with sticks or stones. We believed implicitly that since we weren’t intentionally trying to blind each other, it wouldn’t happen.

Though there were local variations in the strictness of restrictions, we were always able to do some version of “just being a kid” which truthfully, was not all that different from “just being a dog.”

I had just as little care about muddying my shoes or fingernails as Sadie does about muddying her paws. I’d say my “dog years” were mainly between six and thirteen. Before six, my parents or other caregivers wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to get in real trouble. I mean, I managed all the usual little things like peeing into electrical outlets, throwing stuff down the “registers” (heating vents) to see what would happen, and writing in books and on walls, but there was no opportunity to have rock fights or get muddy from head to foot.

From ages six to thirteen, however, I spent a lot of time outdoors unsupervised. Plenty of time to be a dog. A few years later, however, it dawned on me that girls might find me more attractive if I were less muddy. My mother might have planted that suggestion.

There’s no doubt that many of the “instincts” I had were not very effective guides. They weren’t as effective as the knowledge that science and society had developed over centuries. On balance, I still believe having some dog years is a risk worth taking.

For a dog.

Or for a kid.

————————————

Author page on Amazon

Author Page on Amazon

My Cousin Bobby

Sadie is a thief!

Sadie

Sunday Sonnet for Sadie

Sadie

Play Ball: The Squeaky Ball

Skirting the Turtle

Life Will Find a Way

Math Class

The Most Important Work

Dog Trainers

Recommended Books:

Turing’s Nightmares explores the implications and ethics of Artificial Intelligence through fictional short stories. http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2d

Fit in Bits shows many ways to put more fun, variety, & exercise into daily chores and habits to help with strength, flexibility, fitness, and balance. http://tinyurl.com/h6c7fce

Tales from an American Childhood recounts early experiences mainly in the American Midwest in the 1950’s and relates them to contemporary issues and events. https://tinyurl.com/y9ajvz9j

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dream-planet-david-thomas/1148566558

About Writing

26 Wednesday Aug 2026

Posted by petersironwood in creativity, fiction, pets, Uncategorized

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book-review, books, creativity, dog, dogs, fiction, internationaldogday, novel, pets, psychology, writing

Hello!

I’ve been reflecting on “International Dog Day” and on a year-long course on novel writing I took a couple years ago. To me, writing a full-length novel is more difficult than writing a Ph.D. dissertation. Writing non-fiction such as a dissertation requires research, discipline, organization, and being willing to work hard.

Writing a novel requires all of those but it also requires keeping track of the implications of many little decisions. It is not only a cognitive strain but often an emotional one as well. It’s a never-ending series of choices. Science is often, but not always, a series of choices where there is an agreed upon better answer. Even when there isn’t agreement, there are a much smaller number of choices.

To me, writing non-fiction is like taking a long trip on existing roads. You may certainly face unanticipated difficulties such as construction zones, flat tires and bad weather.

Writing fiction is more like bushwhacking. No-one has ever trod (or will ever trod) your exact path. You may learn something by discovering or following the paths of previous writers. You might, for instance, discover that some writers go over logs that lie across their intended path. Others, may crawl under. Still others might go around the fallen log. Others might choose to back-track until another path is found. What should you do?

It depends.

And, that’s the nature of fiction. It all depends. It depends on what else happens in the book. How you choose to construct and describe one character depends on the others. Even what you name them depends on the other names. What happens in character development interacts with the plot. The plot interacts with the landscape and the mood. The mood depends on the tempo. The tempo, if it’s dialog, must be consistent with the character who’s doing the talking.

Our dog Sadie and I have been co-creating and co-evolving games from the days she first came to live with us. We often played variants of “fetch.” Here’s how one worked. One of us (most often Sadie) finds a squeaky ball. At some point, I get a squeaky ball from somewhere in the garden and say, “Get up on the deck! I’m going to throw the ball on the deck.”

Now matter where she is when she hears that, she sprints to the deck and awaits my throw. She sprints with spirit! I love to watch her run, not only for her grace and speed but even more so, for the whole-heartedness with which she runs every single time. I throw the ball up and she catches it in the air more than half the time. Even when she misses, she’ll scramble after it and proudly perch on the spot on the deck where I can see that she’s caught the ball. After elaborate and genuine praise, she sprints down the stairs to the lawn near me. Then, she will lie down with the squeaky ball in her mouth. After a time, she’ll move the ball away from her some distance. I walk over casually, as though I am not trying to “steal” the ball from her. When I get close to the ball, she quickly re-grabs it. After she’s had a few “successes” she will start hanging out farther and farther away from the ball. At some point, I’ll grab the ball and announce, “I’ve got it!” At that point, she again sprints up the stairs to go the deck where I will throw the ball up to her.

The part of this scenario that I think is most like writing the fiction is the part where Sadie is judging how far away the ball should be from her buzz-fast jaws. If it’s too close, I won’t even try for it. If it’s too far away, I’ll immediately grab the ball. Similarly, as an author, I want to keep the reader interested. If my writing is too predictable, it might be clear, but it will be uninspiring and dull. The reader will quit before they get to the end of the story. On the other hand, if I write too far from the reader’s expectations, they will quit because they cannot grab the threads of the narrative.

To me, the benefits of co-creating with Sadie (rather than “training her” to play the game in a particular and predetermined way) include that I can learn a lot by observing her. Another benefit is that it keeps both of our minds more flexible and more engaged (just as does good literature). Of course, there are two of us in this exercise and that is also true in the reading of fiction. Every author, including me, will make miscalculations about how far to stray from expectations. But whether you can follow across those miscalculations is not only a measure of my skill as a writer but is also a measure of your skill as a reader.

In the past, I’ve self-published my books on Amazon. These are mostly non-fiction, but one of them is a collection of fictional short stories. Next time, I may try traditional agent/publishing. I am also thinking of putting together several more books, using the blog posts here as the seeds.

After a year long writing course, the single most important piece of advice I can give is:

“Get a dog.”

Don’t get me wrong. We have six cats and we love them dearly. The cats are smart, and I can certainly empathize with the cats. But their ability to empathize with me is either very limited or, as I suspect is more likely, they really don’t give a damn. On the other hand, Sadie is a pleasure to co-create with because she intuitively “gets” cooperation and collaboration. We accommodate each other and neither of us has any idea how the game will evolve.

The games with Sadie became more complex when we got a second dog, Bailey. Bailey is also an excellent ball player. But, unlike Sadie, Bailey almost always prefers to race after the ball, bring it back to me panting and lay the ball by my feet for an instant replay. That works quite well when I am playing only with Bailey.

The complexity arises when I try to play with Sadie and Bailey at the same time. Sadie wants to play the game of bringing the ball near me, but if she drops it near me, Bailey swoops in and grabs the ball before I can play the threshold game with Sadie. The easiest way is to deal with this is to play ball with them separately. Sometimes, I do.

My wife and I have also taken great pains to try to teach Bailey to take turns. Bailey is a smart dog and he is quite good about taking turns when it comes to eating, say, or going out to pee. But—when it comes to ball-chasing, it seems nearly impossible for him to consistently “take turns.” He’s much more likely to grab the ball, even if it means stealing it out of Sadie’s mouth.

One invention we’ve come up with is the “Three Balls on the Roof” throw. It works like this. I gather up three balls and throw all three up on the roof at the same time. We have a tiled Mediterranean roof and the balls bounce around unpredictably before coming down. This generally allows each dog to catch at least one. After they catch the ball, they both try to “touch” the other two balls. In the case of Bailey, this often entails stealing the one that Sadie caught. That has happened so many times, that generally, Sadie drops the ball she caught before Bailey gets a chance to “steal it” out of her mouth.

This “compromise” is not ideal. It reminds me though of another difficulty in writing a novel. I experience this myself, but I see evidence for the same difficult for many other writers. Here’s the essence of the dilemma. I like my hero(s). I care about them. I like to see them succeed. But…

For maximum reader engagement, the main character(s) must go through hell. I know many ways to put them there, but it’s painful to do so. One solution is to write about villains. I don’t mind if they go through hell.

Another solution is to use the “Three Ball Trick.” In this trick, I put the hero in a situation that looks dire, even impossible. But before resolving that puzzle, I put them (or a different hero) into yet another dire situation. Hopefully, the reader is already imagining that the hero is likely going to die or at least be permanently injured, possibly in two different ways. Before either of those two sticky situations gets unstuck, one of the main characters gets into yet another jam. And they must get into this jam before the other two jams are resolved.

Does this comport with your intuition as well? Compare two structures:

Hero encounters nasty situation one. (E.g., loses job).
Hero encounters nasty situation two (E.g., loses lover).

Hero encounters nasty situation three (E.g., gets arrested for a crime).

Hero “solves” situation one. (E.g., inherits money).

However, the apparent solution leads to further complication (makes them look guiltier in the crime they’ve been arrested for).

By contrast, we could imagine:

Hero encounters nasty situation one and solves it.
Hero encounters nasty situation two and solves it.
Hero encounters nasty situation three and solves it.

The latter structure is like throwing three balls on the roof, but one at a time. What would happen? My prediction is that Bailey would steal every ball that Sadie caught and she would soon stop playing.

In writing, the result would be that I would be more “comfortable” because my hero would never “hang out” in mortal danger. But the reader would not experience the joy of apparent repeated resurrection.